Authority based on past lives

Question: Question about a man who claimed to be the reincarnated spirit of a young man who was raised from the dead by Jesus and had a spiritual movement in Estonia until 1995 when he died.


Answer from the Ascended Master Jesus through Kim Michaels. This answer was given at a conference in Estonia in 2017.

My beloved, we generally do not wish to comment on specific people, specific teachers, their past embodiments and so on. And this has again to do with the equation of free will. But what I will say is about past lifetimes and you can find many people who claim that they have had revealed to them all of their past lives or some of their past lives. But here’s where you have to be a little bit more discerning, a little bit more sophisticated.

You can see a certain tendency that there are some people that want to set themselves up as some kind of spiritual teacher or some kind of psychic medium or whatever you have. And they will then claim that they have a certain authority because they have had this or that past embodiment. And they might be firmly convinced about this but it may not always be the case.

In some cases people can of course get to know their past lives and they know and it is a correct knowledge they have. But in general, people who make a public statement about it usually have some kind of impure motivation and therefore they may not in many cases be able to see this exactly and accurately. And so the real issue here is that you need to ask yourself, do I really need to know my past lives? Because what is the purpose? And this ties in with the teaching we have given about these selves you have created in response to your birth trauma where you actually can create a separate self that desires to have some special authority on earth so that people will listen to you.

And so as just one way of seeking this authority you can have a desire to have been a famous person in a past life and you might even feel that this has been revealed to you through some kind of spiritual process or by a spiritual master. But it may not be the case especially if you have that kind of intention. You can of course also go to mental institutions and find two people who both think they were Napoleon in a past life. And so from an Aristotelian viewpoint you would say that they couldn’t both be right.

You could also say that maybe none of them are right. Or maybe you can take a different view. We have hinted at before that there are many people in the past who have become known people in history who formed what we might call a certain archetype — a certain archetype for how people with a certain psychology will act in practical situations. And so we actually have examples of people who in various ways have come to the understanding that I was this person in a past life.

And it is not that they actually were that person. But it is that in order to resolve something in their psychology they need to believe that they were that person because this gives them an impetus to actually or at least it gives them the opportunity to look more closely at the psychology of that person, see what they still have in their own psychology in this lifetime and then work on it.

And so what I would say in these cases is that the impression people have gotten is constructive even if it isn’t in a strict sense correct that they were embodied as that person. You can look for example, if you look at history and you can see that there has only been a limited number of people who are important or known people in history and there are of course many more people in embodiment so you couldn’t all have had many famous embodiments and it is likely that many of you have had no famous embodiments.

And so really where we want our students to get to is that you recognize of course you have had past lives because this is important for you to know so that you can realise that your psychology is very complex and you could have traumas that are very deep and therefore need some special work to overcome. But other than that you are not really worried about who you were and who you were not. I realize there are some ascended master students that feel that ascended masters have revealed to them their previous lifetimes, but in many cases this simply was not from the ascended realm.

These people had such a strong desire to know some embodiments that they had an experience that was not genuine and they are convinced about it. And so again, does it really matter who you were? I can assure you that if you really need to know, then you will find a way to know but this will very rarely happen to people to have some desire whatever the desire may be to have been a specific person or even to have an important person in a past life. I would say that as a spiritual teacher the highest level of a spiritual teacher will not claim any authority based on whether it is past lives, or this or that but will be willing to simply let the teaching stand on its own. And so generally speaking those teachers who claim some kind of authority some kind of specialness compared to others are teachers where you might be a little bit careful and examine their intentions very closely.

 

Copyright © 2017 Kim Michaels