WALKING IN THE GARDEN OF SOULS

George Anderson

Imagine your life. Imagine your life not as it is now and not how it used to be, but imagine the way love songs, fairy tales and bedtime stories told you it was going to be. Imagine waking up one fine morning from a soft bed into luminous sunlight, beginning each day feeling warm, well fed, well loved and well cared for. Imagining moving effortlessly through your day, surrounded by the people you love, working at a job that brings you a sense of such joy and accomplishment that you love being in service to others.

Imagine returning home at the end of your lovely day to a beautiful warm house filled with the smiling faces of those you truly love, where there are good things to eat and evenings are spent by a glorious fire, laughing with careless abandon. Imagine drifting outside and walking under a star-filled sky where fire flies dance in the warm breeze.

Imagine walking in a beautiful garden-just over a hill of constant torment, past the rocks of hurt and anger; over the brook of constant worry, past the weeds of intolerance and hatred, to a place of such perfect peace that even the ground feels soft and receptive beneath your feet. The fire of true love can be rekindled there by a carpet of heather, and reconciliation with the past can happen in an open field of understanding, lit by a golden sun of forgiveness. Turmoil and anguish disappear  under a shady tree. Trouble never lived here and peace will never leave. No one ever grows old, no one ever becomes ill and no one ever dies. Welcome to the world of the hereafter-welcome to the Garden of Souls.

There is a Garden of Souls…It is a place where we once lived and it is also where we will return…The Garden waits for all of us who have the courage to travel the bumpy and crooked roads of the earth until they eventually broaden, smooth out, and lead us there.

It is a place of unusual beauty and peace, where the love and understanding that somehow eluded us on earth can be found as abundant as the oxygen we breathe…

Even though we have no conscious recollection of it now, we were once born of this world and we understood it well…but living on earth we have become so easily disarmed by the circumstances of life here and the struggles we have to endure, that our disappointments and despair have eroded the memory of that place and diminished in our hearts the wonderful light from the Garden…We forget that we are on the earth to learn strength in our adversity, to learn peace in our struggle, to learn joy in our sorrow. This is the understanding that leads us to knowledge and our knowledge that leads us back to the Garden.

We are all human, and in our humanness we tend to regard any trouble that comes our way as a personal attack against us. We work and work, trying to be the people we think will win us a place in the here-after, but our work is done more out of fear rather than the actual understanding of why we must face struggle. Life tears on, we watch loved ones, opportunities, and happiness slip like sand through our fingers, and we become disillusioned-we begin wandering aimlessly through perhaps the most important learning experiences of our lives.

Our fall from our purpose here has not escaped the notice of the souls in the hereafter, who by their very caring nature are concerned for our spiritual lives. They know very well that the difficulties we endure while we are on the earth-and how we cope with and overcome them-will be perhaps the toughest test of our faith and spirit. They also know that these trials are a necessary part of our lives in order to fulfill the goals we had set for ourselves when we last left the garden.

The souls know and they understand,, because they themselves were once part of the challenge of life on earth. They remember from their own experiences here that hope, understanding and acceptance are lessons that may take a lifetime to learn. Now that they have entered the Garden, and their struggles have paid off so handsomely, they want to help us keep to our purpose here, so that we can share in the reward of returning to the Garden when it is our time to return.

We are living at the dawn of the most spiritual age the earth has seen. In my own lifetime I have noticed significant changes to people everywhere, in both heart and mind.  Some of the seeds from the Garden have fallen in our path, and we are beginning to allow them to take root within us. Whether it is because we want to, we are changing and reckoning, with the possibility that there may very well be a happy ending to the story of our life on earth.

Whether or not we had intended it to be this way is of no consequence-we now have nowhere else to walk but forward, toward the light of hope. How pleased the souls must be-they have been watching us from a distant garden, and know we are beginning to listen with our hearts. Ideas in religion, belief in life hereafter, and first hand accounts from people who have seen the garden of Souls with their own eyes are not laughed at. More people want to believe than scoff, and it has been estimated that now nearly one third of the population of this planet believes without question in the existence of life hereafter. Never in any time in my life have I seen such a strong need for spiritual fulfillment as in the past few years. Maybe we have lost the arrogance that tells us we are the center of the universe, or maybe it is the admission that surviving without hope and peace is not surviving at all.  

Excerpt from FREE YOURSELF by Michael Newton

...The soul has such majesty that it is beyond description. I tend to think of souls as intelligent light forms of energy. Right after death, souls suddenly feel different because they are no longer encumbered by a temporary host body with a brain and a central nervous system. Some take longer to adjust than others.

'Same Soul, Many bodies' by Dr Brian Weiss...

Some interesting information to ponder about:
...Also a few patients have told me that souls can split and have simultaneous experiences...
...Reincarnation was written in the New Testament until the time of Constantine, when the Romans censored it. Jesus himself may have believed in it, for he asked the apostles if they recognized John the Baptist as Elijah returned; Elijah had lived nine hundred years before John...

I have often wondered why the 'children' should have to suffer for the fault of the 'fathers'
And then I read this:
...The old testament says that the sins of the father are visited on the children into the third and fourth generation, that we are being affected negatively by what our fathers did before us. But WE are our fathers, just as we will be our children. The sins of our own past will haunt our presents until we can understand them and earn absolution. The sins of this lifetime will darken our futures, but as we acted wisely in the past, so our present is made lighter. If we act humanely now, we will bring our future selves closer to the One.
Same Soul Many bodies by Dr Brian Weiss