Psychic - The Truth about Past Lives

Excerpted from
Past Lives, Future Healing: A Psychic Reveals the Secrets to Good Health and Great Relationships
By Sylvia Browne

I want you to know-not just believe, but know, to the core of your spirit where the truth lives-that you are eternal. The life you're living right now is just a tiny step in the never ending journey of the unique, cherished soul God created for no one else but you, a step of your own design toward your own greatest potential. Your current lifetime won't end in death. It will end with your spirit simply freeing itself from your body and returning Home to the perfect higher dimension it came from called The Other Side.

The miraculous gift of eternity means that the singular essence that is you will always, always exist. I'm not talking about your turning into some philosophical, imaginary nonentity when you're through with this body. I'm promising that you will forever be the very real, living, breathing being you are now, who thinks and feels and laughs and grows and changes and learns and loves and is loved by God every moment of your endless life. And just as eternity means you will always, always exist, it also means you have always, always existed.

That's a fact. You have been alive since the beginning of time, in a gorgeous unbroken continuum, moving back and forth between earth and The Other Side many times. You have lived on earth in many different bodies, during many different eras in many different parts of the world under many different circumstances for your own carefully chosen purpose, depending on the goals and needs of your spirit's progress. Please don't let the term "past lives" mislead you into thinking you've arrived this time around as a separate person from who you've been before, alive, then dead, then alive again. No, what you're living right now is simply the current phase of one life, the same eternal life your spirit has been living and will go on living forever.

If that seems confusing, or hard to imagine, you don't have to look any further than your present lifetime to help you picture it. No matter how much or how little you consciously remember, it's safe to say that since you were born, you've been an infant weighing no more than a few pounds, unable to walk or talk or care for yourself; a toddler taking its first awkward steps and trying to learn what a toilet is used for; a five-year-old, seared or excited or confused or eager on its first day of school: a thirteen-year-old starting to experience the heightened chaos of adolescence; a twenty-year-old, emerging into adulthood with more bravado than wisdom. In other words, in this one lifetime you've taken many physical forms, gone through many levels of physical and emotional maturity, and learned many lessons. Those forms and levels and lessons don't just happen and then vanish as if they never occurred. That infant, that toddler, that five- or thirteen- or twenty-year-old you used to be didn't appear and then cease to exist. No, through it all, you've always been you, a rare, complex, sacred work in progress unlike any other spirit ever created. At the moment you're reading this, and at the moment I'm writing it, you and I are nothing more and nothing less than the sum total of every instant we've experienced, no matter how dramatic or how trivial, and we'll keep right on changing and evolving, learning and growing with every instant we experience from this moment on.

Now take a giant step back in your mind until you can sense some inner, thrilling glimpse of the most endless, star-filled horizon you can imagine, one rush of this infinite universe you're part of. And in that step back, look at your life, with all its forms and phases, and understand that it's nothing but a smaller version of the eternal life you're living as God designed it. Whatever you've looked like in previous centuries, whatever stages of learning and growing you've struggled through, whatever lessons and changes lie ahead, they're simply strides along your path toward the most exquisite, enlightened, perfect you that you can be-God's beloved child with every infinite breath you take. Your past lives, here and at Home, are no different than the stages of this life, pieces of the same puzzle, parts of the same whole and, like every other moment of your past, affecting your life today in more ways than you might imagine.

My Introduction to Past Lives

As MANY OF YOU KNOW, I was born psychic, into a family with a

three-hundred-year psychic legacy. Unfortunately, while I was endowed by God with more than my share of psychic gifts, I wasn't especially endowed with more than my share of spiritual insight. I could easily see and hear spirits and ghosts, so I never had to wonder about the existence of The Other Side and the fact that our souls transcend death. But when my Grandma Ada, who was my closest friend, mentor, confidante and inspiration, started talking to me about past lives, I didn't disbelieve her; I just frankly couldn't imagine why I should care. For one thing, I misunderstood at first and thought that "past lives" meant I had been several different people, which didn't make much sense to me-what would be the earthly point of that in the grand, cosmic scheme of things? For another thing, if I had been a pioneer, or a French courtesan, or even Cleopatra in a past life (I wasn't, by the way), so what? I still had chores and homework and a horrible mother to deal with, and more psychic skills than I knew what to do with, no matter who I'd been, so if there was no practical purpose to this past life noise, why bother learning about it? Instead, I focused my energies on handling being psychic, building a relationship with my sometimes bothersome Spirit Guide Francine, pushing my luck with the nuns at the Catholic school I attended, and trying unsuccessfully to just fit in and be "normal," whatever that is.

I've written at length in my books The Other Side and Back and Life on The Other Side about my college years, studying religion, English literature, and psychology toward my passionate interest in becoming a teacher. I also described the intensive hypnosis courses I found so fascinating that I became a certified master hypnotherapist and began using hypnosis during psychic readings. In those same books I discussed the client who came to me about a weight problem and, under hypnosis, began telling me in the present tense about building pyramids and then lapsed into such a long stream of nonsense syllables that I thought I was witnessing a full-blown psychotic meltdown. Curious to a fault, I sent a tape of that session to a professor friend at Stanford for his objective opinion, and I was shocked when he called three days later to inform me that those "nonsense syllables" were really a fluent monologue in an ancient Assyrian dialect perfectly appropriate to the pyramid builders in Egypt many centuries ago.

Grandma Ada had talked to me extensively about past lives. Francine, my Spirit Guide, had talked to me extensively about past lives. Spiritually, philosophically, and psychically, I already knew that our souls are eternal, which is certainly consistent with the idea of past lives. But not until that gray afternoon twenty-five years ago, when I saw that shy, plainspoken man spontaneously relive a life in seventh century B.C., did I become passionate about the subject of reincarnation and committed to exhaustively researching it. I read everything about it that I could get my hands on, and studied with hypnotherapists experienced in the area of past-life regressions, determined to never again just sit there saying "huh?" if and when a client took the opportunity of hypnosis to travel back to another time. I learned to safely guide my clients into the immense wealth buried in their own history, while making sure that one hundred percent of the information revealed came from them, not from me. And to my amazement, I quickly discovered that the information they unearthed was both fascinating and incredibly accurate.