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At the moment of death, our soul rises out of its host body. If the soul is older and has experience from many former lives, it knows immediately it has been set free and is going home. These advanced souls need no one to greet them. However, most souls I work with are met by guides just outside Earth's astral plane. A young soul, or a child who has died, may be a little disoriented until someone comes closer to ground level for them. There are souls who choose to remain at the scene of their death for a while. Most wish to leave at once. Time has no meaning in the spirit world. Discarnates who choose to comfort someone who is grieving, or have other reasons to stay near the place of their death for a while, experience no sense of time loss. This becomes "now" time for the soul as opposed to linear time.

As they move further away from Earth, souls experience an increasingly brilliant light around them. Some will briefly see a grayish darkness and will sense passing through a tunnel or portal. The differences between these two phenomena depends upon the exit speed of the soul, which in turn relates to their experience. The pulling sensation from our guides may be gentle or forceful depending upon the soul's maturity and capacity for rapid change. In the early stages of their exit, all souls encounter a "wispy cloudiness" around them that soon becomes clear, enabling them to look off into a vast distance. This is the moment when the average soul sees a ghostly form of energy coming toward them. This figure may be a loving soulmate or two, but more often than not it is our guide.

In circumstances where we are met by a spouse or friend who has passed on before us, our guide is also close by so they can take over the transition process. In all my years of research, I have never had a single subject who was met by a major religious figure such as Jesus or Buddha. Still, the loving essence of the great teachers from Earth is within the personal guides who are assigned to us.

By the time souls become reoriented again to the place they call home, their earthliness has changed. They are no longer quite human in the way we think of a human being with a particular emotional, temperamental, and physical makeup. For instance, they don't grieve about their recent physical death in the way their loved ones will. It is our souls that make us human on Earth, but without our bodies we are no longer Homo Sapiens. 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 central nervous system. Some take longer to adjust than others.

The energy of the soul is able to divide into identical parts, similar to a hologram. It may live parallel lives in other bodies although this is much less common than we read about. However, because of the dual capability of all souls, part of our light energy always remains behind in the spirit world. Thus, it is possible to see your mother upon returning from a life even though she may have died thirty Earth years before and reincarnated again.

Orientation periods with our guides, which take place before joining our cluster group, vary between souls and between different lives for the same soul. This is a quiet time for counseling, with the opportunity to vent any frustrations we have about the life just ended. Orientation is intended to be an initial debriefing session with gentle probing by perceptive, caring teacher-guides.

The meeting may be long or short depending upon the circumstances of what we did or did not accomplish with regard to our life contract. Special karmic issues are also reviewed, although they will be discussed later in minute detail within our soul cluster group. The returning energy of some souls will not be sent back into their soul group right away. These are the souls who were contaminated by their physical bodies and became involved with evil acts. There is a difference between wrongdoing with no premeditated desire to hurt someone and intentional evil. The degrees of harm to others from mischief to malevolence are carefully evaluated.

Those souls who have been associated with evil are taken to special centers which some clients call "intensive care units". Here, I am told, their energy is remodeled to make it whole again. Depending upon the nature of their transgressions, these souls could be rather quickly returned to Earth. They might well choose to serve as the victims of other's evil acts in the next life. Still, if their actions were prolonged and especially cruel over a number of lives, this would denote a pattern of wrongful behavior. Such souls could spend a long while in a solitary spiritual existence, possibly over a thousand Earth years. A guiding principle in the spirit world is that wrongdoing, intentional or unintentional, on the part of all souls will need to be redressed in some form in a future life. This is not considered punishment or even penance as much as an opportunity for karmic growth. There is no hell for souls, except perhaps on Earth.

Some lives are so difficult that the soul arrives home very tired. Despite the energy rejuvenation process initiated by our guides who combine their energy with ours at the gateway, we may still have a depleted energy flow. In these cases, more rest and solitude may be called for rather than celebrations. Indeed, many souls who desire rest receive it before reunification with their groups. Our soul groups may be boisterous or subdued, but they are respectful of what we have gone through during an incarnation. All groups welcome back their friends in their own way with deep love and camaraderie.

Homecoming is a joyous interlude, especially following a physical life where there might not have been much karmic contact with our intimate soulmates. Most of my subjects tell me they are welcomed back with hugs, laughter, and much humor, which I find to be a hallmark of life in the spirit world. The really effusive groups who have planned elaborate celebrations for the returning soul may suspend all their other activities. One subject of mine had this to say about his homecoming welcome:

After my last life, my group organized one hell of a party with music, wine, dancing, and singing. They arranged everything to look like a classical Roman festival with marble halls, togas, and all the exotic furnishings prevalent in our many lives together in the ancient world. Melissa (a primary soulmate) was waiting for me right up front, re-creating the age that I remember her best and looking as radiant as ever.

Soul groups range between three and twenty-five members, with the average having about fifteen. There are times when souls from nearby cluster groups may want to connect with each other. Often this activity involves older souls who have made many friends from other groups with whom they have been associated over hundreds of past lives. Some ten million viewers in the U.S. saw the TV show Sightings, produced by Paramount in 1995, which aired a segment about my work. Those who watched this show about life after death may remember one of my clients, by the name of Colleen, who spoke about a session we had together. She described returning to the spirit world after a former life to find a spectacular seventeenth-century full dress ball in progress. My subject saw over a hundred people who came to celebrate her return. A time and place she had loved was lavishly reproduced so Colleen could begin the process of renewal in style.

This article was excerpted with permission from the book:

Destiny of Souls
by Michael Newton.

©2000, published by Llewellyn Publications, http://www.llewellyn.com.

Info/Order book.

About The Author

MICHAEL NEWTON, Ph.D. holds a doctorate in Counseling Psychology, is a certified Master Hypnotherapist and a member of the American Counseling Association. He is considered to be a pioneer in uncovering the mysteries about our life in the spirit world, first reported in his best-selling book Journey of Souls (1994), which has been translated into ten languages. Michael Newton is a historian, amateur astronomer, and world traveler.

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