Do Dead People Walk Their Dogs? (9 page)

It just does.
It’s just truth. Physicists can tell you the why of everything else in the world—from why the ocean is blue to why there’s a sun in the sky. But no one can say the why of God. God just is.

Generally, our soul’s
purpose is to learn how to become more God-like. (What makes each of us individual is our unique way of doing this—the spin we put on the ball.) Becoming God-like is everybody’s destiny, but as in everything else, we have a choice. The gift from God is that each of us can become as joyous, successful, and satisfied as we choose. God gave us the power; we have the right. You might ask, but
how
we become more God-like? Just substitute the word “love” for the word “God” and use that as your guide. When you choose love you choose God, and when you make a loving choice you are more God-like than when you make an unloving choice. With every choice you make, choose love. In any conflict or challenge, ask, “What would love do in this situation?” The loving resolution is the God-like resolution. Becoming God-like is a tall order. We shouldn’t be hard on ourselves if it doesn’t happen overnight. We need to realize it takes time to learn our lessons. We can’t be in a great hurry.

On the Other
Side, a perfect paradise waits for each of us, so long as we don’t deliberately take a life while we are here. The big secret is that we can have a near-paradise of our own making while we are here. I say near-paradise because nothing on this side will ever be perfection. On this side of the veil, it’s all about the choices we make. The law of the universe is that what we send out is what comes back. People who send out positive energy will see good things coming back to them. But it’s not like a yo-yo—throw it out and it comes immediately back in. Sometimes we have to be a little patient because the good thing coming to us requires a certain timing. There can be the same lag time with seeing the results of negativity, too, so people who are sending out negative energy often take a long time to realize it. When it comes back to them, they may not even connect negative things that are happening to them with the negative things they’ve done. They might even wonder why terrible things are happening to them. From what I have been shown, and also from things I’ve read, I believe that all negativity in the world is distorted and improper thinking, which leads to distorted and improper actions. God has given His full power to every one of us. What we do with it is our free will. We can make our lives a near-paradise or a living hell. Always keep in mind that God does not think evil is a good thing. You don’t get any prizes for that.

Yes, everyone has
past lives; some of us have been back more often than others. This has to do with whatever our unique soul’s purpose is, and also our free will, when we are on the Other Side, to choose to come back again. Glimmers of your past lives may show up in your personality, for example, how “deep” a person you are. You can have a wonderful sense of humor, but also have a lot of wisdom and a deep understanding and compassion for others if you’ve lived numerous lifetimes and have absorbed many lessons. You won’t even be aware of why you know certain things; you think, “That’s just how I am,” but this is the reason. A person who acts out a lot and has little regard for others may just be a baby in soul terms—a very young soul with not very many lessons under her or his belt.

Past lives might also be indicated if you feel a strong connection with a certain place—especially if you’ve never been to that place in this lifetime. Maybe it’s somewhere you’ve always wanted to visit, and if you do go there, you may even recognize parts of the place or get a strong sense of déjà vu. This actually happened to me. The first time I ever traveled to Europe was in 1999, when I made a visit to France. But some years earlier, I think it was all the way back in the 1980s, when I knew nothing about Europe, I “saw” myself walking down an old cobblestone street. I was out of my body and I was so consumed with knowing that I wasn’t dreaming. The houses I saw were of an unfamiliar kind. I was walking, and I turned down a very narrow street. It was claustrophobic and filthy. I was thinking to myself: “Where am I? Do I know where I am?” Having the whole conversation, I even answered: “Yes. I
live
here.” I turned into a doorway.

Years later in 2007, here I was in Rothenburg, Germany (also called Rothenburg ob der Tauber, as it overlooks the Tauber River). We took the famous—and truly fabulous—night watchman’s tour, and lo and behold, I found myself on that very same street! Walking with John, I saw it just as it had been in my vision—though now much cleaner. Knowing I had once lived here, I was naturally curious to learn more about this place. It was a medieval walled city (thirty-foot stone walls surround the oldest, original part of the city), and during the Holy Roman Empire it was one of the twenty largest cities, with a population just under 6000 within its walls. Much of the town is still intact when nearly everything around it was leveled during the Second World War and rebuilt. The story of why Rothenburg survived is really interesting. During the war, the city was occupied by Nazi forces. The day before Easter 1945, nearly 40 percent of the old town was destroyed in air raids. But then the U.S. Assistant Secretary of War, John J. McCloy, got into the act. The story we were told was that McCloy’s parents had honeymooned in Rothenburg. They’d shown him photos of their honeymoon so he’d always known about the town, its beauty and historical importance. Circumstances of fate being what they often are, it was this young man who was to give the order to destroy the city. He couldn’t bear to destroy this place his parents remembered so fondly as where their marriage began, so he took it upon himself to instruct the U.S. Army General Jacob Devers to offer the Nazi command a chance to surrender rather than have the walls destroyed around them with artillery fire. While the German general rejected the offer, the local commander decided to accept, and the historic buildings were saved. To this day, John J. McCloy is remembered as Honorable Protectorate of Rothenburg.

From the website of the German embassy I learned another fascinating fact about Rothenburg, which we didn’t hear while we were there: Its Christmas market (called the
Reiterlesmarkt
—there is the most incredible Christmas store there!) was named “after a local Teutonic legend, which began during pre-Christian times as the story of a horrid rider who carried the souls of the Dead. As Christianity swept through Europe, the figure developed from a wild man into a loving, gentle man who gave gifts to all people on earth.” That’s the kind of change I appreciate—anything negative that becomes a positive is A-okay in my book.

We all have our memories—they’re all part of our soul. My own soul drifts back from time to time, and I know that what I’m seeing a small sliver of is a memory of a past life, not a dream.

Most of us
have not had past lives as the Queen of the Nile or Rudy Valentino. And unfortunately, I was born just a little too soon to claim that I was once Marilyn Monroe. Most of us were and will be, lifetime to lifetime, “ordinary people.” I put that in quotes because, what, after all, is
ordinary
about being born and living a human life? Each life simply explodes with potential—we can accomplish pretty much anything we put mind and material effort to. Each life is a miracle. Who were we before? I can only say what I’ve said before—look for the clues. What do you resonate with? A type of architecture or furniture from a particular period? A way of dressing? Are you drawn to the popular culture of a certain period (music, for instance)? Or movies or literature set at a particular time? What do you dream about? Do you have memories that don’t seem to be your own—at least not from this present life? There are a good number of books that have been written by or about people who have had very strong experiences like this. Just one example is Jenny Cockell, a woman living in England who kept having disturbing recurring dreams about her own death. (Her book is called
Across Time and Death.
) In her dreams, she was very upset but she knew it was not because she was dying. Over the course of months and years, her dreams eventually provided more details and led her to discover that she had been a mother in Ireland, leaving ten children when she died, with an unreliable husband. She’d known that her children would be split up after she was gone and so could not die in peace. Likely it was this strong worry for her children that made her wish to reincarnate so soon after she had died. She eventually was able to go to Ireland, discover the setting of all her dreams, find all her children, and reunite them. An amazing story—yet, this is the reality of each of us—we cross to the Other Side, and in due time, we come back again.

I’ve certainly noticed
this—and I’m far from the first to say it; there have been whole studies done on this phenomenon. Children frequently will know quite a bit about their past lives. They are still connected to another time or place. There have even been cases where a kid will speak a foreign language that he never heard in his family, at least not this lifetime. One time a woman came to see me and she told me that her family had just celebrated her little granddaughter’s fourth birthday. The child was blowing out the candles and the grandmother had said to her, joking, “Just remember, I’m always going to be older than you!” The little girl gave her a look and said, “But the
last
time, I was older than you!” There was just something about the way she’d said it and the way she’d looked at her grandmother that this woman knew that she was referring to another life they’d shared together. She told me, “I felt bad because I knew she wanted me to say, ‘I remember.’”

In their younger years children still are somehow connected and still remember this stuff. It could be something really small, like remembering a little piece of their old daily routine, or something special that made an impression on them then. For instance, a woman who has come to see me a couple of times has a little seven-year-old boy. When he was about five or six years old, she told me, she and her husband were taking him to see the movie
Bambi
. On the way, the boy began talking about the movie, what he remembered about it. My client and her husband were puzzled and amused. “What are you talking about?” his father asked him. “You’ve never seen this movie before.” But the boy persisted and really seemed to know some details of the film, which surprised his parents, and they weren’t sure how he could have known so much about the movie. “How’d you know about that, when you’ve never seen it before?” they asked him. “But I did see it,” he said. “It was when I lived in that big green house and my name was Walter!” He’d seen
Bambi
last time he was here.

At that point,
we are a spirit master; we are leaders, reporting directly to God, and at the same time are one with God, like the right hand reporting to the head. However, just because we are no longer required to reincarnate for lessons, it doesn’t mean we
can’t
come back to earth. A spirit master might choose to return—it would be what we think of as a sacrifice—in order to fulfill some higher good at a particular point in time.

We come in
touch with those who for destiny purposes are in our lives to support us and to help us grow.

Sometimes we meet people who we might feel have no reason to love us. We’re not really related, we might have completely different backgrounds, but there’s a connection there. There’s something about them that we just adore, something that is enriching to us, something you just can’t put your finger on. They love us, and we love them back. I don’t have children of my own, but there are some people in my life now who are just as dear to me as if they were my very own child. My son-in-law is not part of my biological family. He’s married to John’s daughter. But he is very dear to me, like my own son. And I know he feels the same. He wrote the most amazing poem for me, framed and everything, about how he feels about me. It is such a special present, and I totally love him for that and for just who he is.

There is no such thing as just friends. Anyone you are friends with has a long-standing connection with you over many lifetimes. But there are also people who don’t even really touch our family circle but whose presence in our lives is meaningful and supportive. You may have known them in another life, but on the periphery. Let’s say you lived on the same street for twenty-five years, and you always got your bread from the same bakery, week in, week out. Whenever there’s a wedding you get your cake there, and when there’s a funeral in the family, the people who own the bakery send a box of cookies with their condolences. They aren’t family, they aren’t even really friends in the closest sense, but they are a pillar of your neighborhood, people you see over a period of time, familiar, friendly, caring. Next lifetime, will you be married to one of them? Probably not. But they might be on your bowling team—cheering for your strikes, groaning at your gutter balls, sharing a beer. We forget about these relationships, and they are extremely important, very therapeutic in ways we never really stop to consider. Every single one of these individuals is in our life for a reason.