I dreamed that life was joy. I woke to find that life is service. I discovered that service is joy.

OLD SOULS

On deep inner levels, Old Souls perceive the interrelatedness existing
among all people. Intuitively they sense they are part of an integral
whole.

Grasping this big picture, Old Souls then do their best to live by it
and to not harm or judge others. There is a strong urge to be impeccable
and to maintain personal integrity in all transactions. They detach from
the emotional intensities of the Mature Soul period and get more
objective about the ups and downs of life.

Having dozens of lifetimes in varieties of cultures and classes
thoroughly blended into their essences, it is much more difficult for
Old Souls to get embroiled in the right-and-wrong, us-and-them games
people and countries both play. Seeing the whole picture in this way
makes Old Souls calmer, more peaceful and centered. It can also make
them appear passive or weak to the other soul ages.

While Old Souls do not tend to grow into their full soul perceptivity
until about age thirty-five or so, they will, even before then, be
accused of stepping to the beat of a different drummer. They are
unusual--two steps away from the norm--in this Young Soul culture.
Because they are inclined to individualistically follow their inner
perceptions and desires, they may be seen as eccentric, though usually
harmlessly so.

While there is great motivation for spiritual growth, motivation tends
to be lacking when it comes to developing political or material punch.
Seldom doing anything they don't want to and preferring their own
unconventional pursuits, they often seek the path of least resistance as
far as work, so that all energy can be poured into spiritual
development. Because of the essence's richness gathered over many
lifetimes, Old Souls tend to be extremely competent in a wide range of
things--which often aren't pursued. They will try to find work that
supports their personal growth: counseling, teaching, bodywork,
gardening and carpentry being some favorites.

Many are magnetized by philosophy and art. If higher education proves
necessary in order to teach, less orthodox schools allowing more
opportunities for inner exploration will be favored.

A fancy house or car, or impressive clothes and jewelry aren't often too
high on an Old Soul's real priority list. Neither is a nine-to-five job.
Plain laziness on the physical plane sometimes creates difficulty paying
the bills, but the material game just isn't what it used to be. However,
Old Souls do have one advantage with the material world: as they begin
to seek, understand and use the laws of the physical universe, goals can
be attained with less effort. Thus, there is an outer, as well as an
inner draw to understand the universal laws distilled in astrology,
metaphysics, tarot and other ancient teachings.

Old Souls may explore many religions and teachings, being most drawn to
those emphasizing love and to those they've resonated with closely in
past lives.

But being rule-bound or as orthodox as some disciplines require does not
usually last long. Unique, personal spiritual practices, like an
oceanside ritual to mark a birthday, are often developed and used.

Old Souls are very capable of agape or unconditional love, and many
consciously work on not ever judging other people. For this very reason,
some Old Souls appear to be annoyingly remote. This is usually an
essence who has previously handled many emotional issues and comes to
the planet intent on examining intellectual, philosophical and spiritual
issues, period.

In the television rendition of Shirley MacLaine's Out on a Limb, the
character, David, who took her to Peru and never stopped playing pedant,
was noticeably lacking in warmth. David appeared to function well with
minimal feeling; he didn't seem to mind instructing and mentoring all
the time. However, some people get uncomfortable once they are here with
their aridity and lack of emotional warmth and set out to make up for
what their personality seems to lack. But, the force of essence--which,
in this case, is committed only to comprehending spiritual lessons--will
not be behind creating the change. This does not mean the change can't
be made, just that it is trickier to pull off because you and your
essence agreed to work on spiritual lessons.

A similar situation arises after a person has had materially successful
lifetimes. The essence has completed the lessons to be gained from
having riches and does not have much impetus to recreate those
situations except as it might peripherally help with other lessons. Your
essence may be willing to let you be dirt poor for the duration of your
lifetimes as long as it is gaining the desired spiritual and philosophic
lessons. Sometimes an essence actually interferes with a person gaining
money when it's clear that riches would distract attention from the real
inner work.

Remember, you are your essence while you are astral; it is you who
decides not to give yourself the wealthy Young Soul parents or the drive
and ambition to go out and get powerfully rich. The problem is, of
course, that when you arrive on the physical plane, the personality goes
a little crazy without material goodies in a material world. The
personality may push to make a comfortable living, and pull it off, but
again without the added impetus of your essence insisting, "Make a
bundle! You have got to be successful." As long as the essence is being
fed what it really wants--philosophical and spiritual food--it won't
hamper your goals of making money or creating warm emotional connections
with people. But your essence still won't be giving you its added push
toward prosperity or emotionally nourishing relationships.

A major challenge of the Old Soul period is mastering self-esteem. No
one is complete until there is self-forgiveness and self-love.
Self-esteem can be elusive when living in a Young Soul society which
doesn't acknowledge the work or innate value of most older souls. And on
top of that, Old Souls truly see what a small part they play in this
grand, infinite universe. For this reason, working this issue through is
often a very big deal, with lots of self-deprecation being used along
the way.

Another major item on the Old Soul school-days agenda is loving being in
a body, manifesting sufficient mastery that you have enough of what you
want to make it pleasurably exciting to be on the planet. It is never
your last life until you like it here; essence would never let you off
the hook before then.

In order to even out your past life choices, as an Old Soul you are
often in the body of the sex you least prefer. But having had both male
and female bodies so many times before, you do begin to blend the
different energies and may not be greatly identified with being either
male or female. It becomes hard to work up a lather about someone's
homosexuality or "lack of masculinity" or "femininity". Bisexual
feelings are not uncommon; whether acted upon or not, they are allowed
to rise to the surface, sometimes. Sex which takes on a cosmic feeling
by blending all chakras becomes possible--and sought after.

Seeing an Old Soul as a baby is telling, for while the child is still
acting the demanding infant or growing baby, another quality may be
sensed. Because the soul has done all of this so many times, the child
has a peace, ease, and wisdom about it--at least in its quieter
moments--that can be sensed by the adults around it.

Many fewer Old Souls than Mature or Young ones become famous, and when
they do it is usually to teach, for the Old Soul level is the teaching
level.

None of us allow ourselves to complete the physical plane experience
until everything we've learned is shared with at least one other person.
Some musicians typifying this Old Soul need to teach are Joan Baez, John
Lennon and Yoko Ono, Sting, Judy Collins, Jerry Garcia, Bob Marley and
children's hero and folksinger, Raffi. Paul Winter, George Winston,
Kitaro and a burgeoning band of Old Soul, New Age musicians are intent
on moving us into gorgeous inner spaces with their music.

Mark Twain, John Muir, and Albert Einstein were all Old Souls with a
mission, as was Dr. Edward Bach. John Robbins is busy changing the way
America looks at food and food production. Film director John Boorman
(Emerald Forest, Hope and Glory), author Alice Walker (The Color
Purple), goddess researcher Jean Shinoda Bolen, Shirley MacLaine, Robert
Redford and Phil Donahue are some pretty active Old Souls currently
doing work on our culture. Directly on the spiritual front we find Don
Juan Matus, Nostradamus, Gurdjieff, Guru Mayi, Carl Jung, Werner Erhard,
Rajneesh, Ram Dass, Matthew Fox, the Dalai Lama, Sun Bear, Swamis
Satchidananda and Muktananda and transpersonal psychologists, Christina
and Stanislav Grof. Jesse Jackson, Jerry Brown, Abraham Lincoln, Anwar
Sadat, Iceland's president, Vigdis Finnbogadottir, and Brazil's Chico
Mendes are six very affecting Old Souls who put their energy into the
political arena. You'll notice these individuals teach from their being
or essence in a unique fashion. Countries currently conta ining
predominantly Old Souls (but not always Old Soul leadership) are
Iceland, Holland, and Czechoslovakia. Old Soul nations prefer neutrality
in international conflicts, and when that's impossible, they prefer
subjugation to violence and bloodshed. Being aware that freedom is first
an inner experience, they teach their captors a great deal about harmony
and humanity. Historically we see this in Alexander the Great's conquest
of (then Old Soul) Persia and parts of what is now modern India. Old
Souls are everywhere, at least sprinkled thinly. Burma has many Old
Souls, as do New Zealand, Finland and Norway. Most U.S. cities have Old
Soul groupings in them whether coastal like Vancouver, Miami, Laguna and
Boston or inland like Minneapolis, Chicago and Atlanta. However, the
deepest United States pockets of Old Souls are so far primarily in
Oregon, Washington, and Northern California. The Keys of Florida and
Orcas Island, Washington are both magnets for Old Souls. Certain other
cities, like Santa Fe and Taos, New Mexico, and Boulder, Colorado have
taken on a comfortable Old Soul flavor. Russia also has large scale Old
Soul pockets, the major one was, for a time, Siberia. Michael said that
these Old Souls incarnated in the U.S.S.R. to help push that country
forward. They did not expect to end up in gulags, nor would they have
chosen that way to work. Soviet Armenia was bulging with both Old and
Mature Souls: even the best laid astral plans don't always pan out
perfectly.

Many individual Old Souls are scattered about, resting in comfortable
island places like Tahiti, or conversely, working spiritedly in places
like Africa to help bring a country or continent forward. Old Souls
incarnate in Infant Soul areas like the Amazon in order to protect,
assist, foster, nourish and guide those that need it.

There is a tendency for older souls to have a greater understanding of
what the younger soul perceptivities are like than vice-versa. Knowing
about soul age perceptivity is exceedingly helpful in understanding the
way other people think, the way they look at life and in understanding
something about their life tasks.

Each soul age is trying to experience as much as possible within that
particular level of perceptivity. It's absolutely to the point for an
Infant Soul to be fearfully concerned about basic survival and for a
Baby Soul to be requesting law and order. A Young Soul is appropriate
when striving for great material wealth, power and acclaim, and a Mature
Soul when beginning to feel intensely emotional and ask those deeper
questions. It's appropriate for an Old Soul to not meet societal norms,
to look and act mildly eccentric and to be teaching others, even when
his own personal or material life isn't together.

To expect your Old Soul child to make a successful climb up a corporate
ladder is unrealistic. Likewise, it's in error to count upon an
aggressive Young Soul attorney turning her attention towards saving the
environment, or to believe a Mature Soul embroiled in a major emotional
drama would be able to calm down because you showed him the "big picture".

An Old Soul starts each lifetime being born as an infant who experiences
Infant Soul consciousness and gradually grows into prior levels of
consciousness. A baby is often perceiving through Baby Soul
consciousness; think about a two year old shrieking because a parent
offended her sense of right and wrong. People vary, but generally reach
their competitive Young Soul consciousness sometime in grade school
years. Mature Soul consciousness arrives for many during junior high
school and is what your up-and-down, full-of-drama, teenager is
experiencing.

Individuals don't come close to obtaining their true soul perceptivity
roughly one-third of the time. They get stuck. They get lazy. Or the
essence finds it easier to complete certain karmas at earlier more
ambitious or more emotional soul levels. While most Old Souls (Mature
Souls too) will be doing the intense Mature phase in their teens and
early twenties, an Old Soul is often not consistently acting out of Old
Soul awareness until about age thirty-five, and even then it may be only
in some areas of life and not in others. When security buttons get
pushed, for instance, it is often difficult to remain completely
centered in your Old Soul consciousness. Old Souls will be able to
successfully drop out some of the Baby Soul discipline, Young Soul
ambition, and Mature Soul emotionality only if those qualities are
integrated sufficiently into their personality so that they have access
to them when necessary. It does not work to stick your nose in the air
(or your head in the sand) in an attempt to avoid lessons and gifts from
the other soul ages.

People who come into the Michael teaching are usually relieved to find
out why they are different from mainstream society; they knew they
marched to a different drummer anyway. Michael's explanation is useful,
making it easier to understand why humans come in such varieties and why
it is that some share global perspectives and others, no matter how
intelligent and cultured, just aren't interested.

The purpose of the teaching is agape, not creating yourself to be one up.

Younger souls are not less intelligent, less appropriate or wrong. Their
lessons are about survival, structure, ambition and success, while your
lessons are about emotional and universal connections. Younger souls are
a natural part of that whole you know is all connected, right? So, if
you're indulging yourself by feeling superior, aim for mild tolerance as
a way to begin clearing up that attitude, which ultimately is a painful,
separatist one to carry around.

SEVEN LEVELS WITHIN EACH SOUL AGE

As mentioned, each soul age has seven distinct stages, so that an
individual can be referred to as a fourth level Old Soul or a seventh
level Young Soul. Every level gives a distinct flavor to the lifetimes
spent within its arena. Except for the sixth, which takes more, each
level takes about three lifetimes to complete, though some essences
speed through faster, while the solid types enjoy a more thorough,
leisurely pace.

A description of each level is given below along with examples of people
in that level. You can see how each level influences a lifetime's
behavior. The reason there are so many more people listed in some of the
levels is because those are the places that lend themselves more easily
to comfort with a fair amount of public attention.

The first level is a tentative exploration of the new soul age, kind of
a feeler or probe. There is a sense of uneasiness, and people at this
level will usually spend about 70% of their time back in the comfortably
familiar level just completed. The first level is ordinarily enough of a
trial balloon that it does not give itself to center stage behaviors.
Mike Tyson, catapulted into the media spotlight by his divorce, is, at
first level Baby, a bit awkward with so much attention. While both Jim
and Tammy Bakker are first level Young, emotionally they still relate
primarily to Baby Souls. They opted for the spotlight in order to
enhance their wealth and power. Sylvester Stallone has apparently moved
away from the complacent qualities of seventh Young. That he's become
more interested in relationships and more self-reflective indicates he's
now exploring first level Mature. And for idealizing Warrior-ness as
much as he has, he seems quite graceful with this change

The second level, though cozier, still has much push-pull. People begin
to realize they can function best by forging ahead into the new
consciousness, that the former perceptivity keeps them frustrated; yet
they aren't sure of their footing within the new level at all. Nobel
peace prize winner, Oscar Arias, is, at second Mature, an example of
this. His strong outer task of bringing peace to Central America helps
him pull his own consciousness to that (Mature) place within himself
where relationships and unity are more important than ambition, power or
material advantage. Jesse Jackson is an example of this phenomenon too,
but at the Old Soul level.

Prince Charles is second level Mature, though held back by much Baby
Soul imprinting which his (Mature) wife is pushing to eliminate so that
their lives can be more fun. Ronald Reagan is another example of second
Mature, but with a wife who would prefer to keep him functioning at her
soul age, Young. Salman Rushdie is second Mature and in a push/pull
battle within himself. He vacillates from an elbowing, ridiculing power
stance to seeing that people, foibles and all, are very connected.

Alice Walker, who wrote The Color Purple, is second level Old as is
Actor Dustin Hoffman. California's former governor, Jerry Brown, a Roman
Catholic, who's both spent time with Mother Teresa in India and time
studying Zen in Japan, seems determined to grow himself into his full
soul perceptivity, second Old. He's really wrestling with his Mature
Soul behaviors to do this. These people display strong desires to push
forward in their understanding of life.

The third level person begins to gain the full perceptivity of the new
soul age internally, but has difficulty manifesting it in the world.
This person becomes extremely introverted and intellectually
introspective while trying to integrate the new awareness into
day-to-day life.

A person at this level, like Michael Jackson, who's allowed himself to
bring in some fame is going to feel stress about it. Public television's
financial show host, Louis Rukeyser, is another person functioning at
third level Mature. With his Wall Street Week television show he is more
"out there" than most at this level. Both his goal of growth and chief
feature of arrogance [see chapter on "Overleaves"] give him a push that
is clearly somewhat uncomfortable to his essentially introspective,
third level nature.

Ralph Nader is another third level Mature person who allows his goals
and principles to push him into the limelight despite his personal
desire for quiet introversion. J.D. Salinger, who's spent most of his 69
years ducking the sort of publicity some authors pay to create, is a
reclusive third level Mature Artisan. Jeremy Irons, an actor, again
third Mature, is cautious about interviews. He does not like to reveal
information about himself and admitted to feeling an interview was akin
to rape. Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Romanenko got nearly a year to himself
with his record-breaking 326 day mission aboard an orbiting space
station. He had plenty of private time to look both back and forward at
his life and did a superb job with the isolation.

Third level people do best when they give themselves the space and time
to stay home and be alone as much as they want. Respecting their own
proclivities and loving themselves just the way they are always smooths
the way for more enjoyment of self and life.

Fourth level, bingo. Integrated and consolidated, the perceptivity is
now both inner and outer. Comfortable and feeling assured while pushing
out into the world, fourth level lifetimes are spent in full swing,
doing and achieving any number of things - perhaps forming bits of karma
along the way. Singer/Poet Bob Dylan moves between third and fourth
levels. Pope John Paul II, Fidel Castro, Corazon Aquino, Jane Fonda, and
Terry Cole-Whittaker are all fourth level Mature, while Imelda and
Ferdinand Marcos, Panama's General Noriega and Syria's President Assad
are fourth Young. Queen Elizabeth is fourth Baby and doing excellent job
being in such a spotlight at a very early soul age. Phil Donahue and
Kevin Ryerson are both busy, fourth level Old Souls.

Fifth level people start pushing on the limits of their reassuring
fourth level existences. Believe it or not, humans don't stick with
comfort long, especially when it starts impinging on growth. Leaving the
beaten path, like Old Soul Carl Jung, for exploration, experimentation
and the unorthodox, this level stretches every point and often shows up
as pretty eccentric in the process. Mikhail Gorbachev is now manifesting
his full soul age, fifth Mature, in precisely this way. The unusual
birthmark sitting on his forehead should have been one clue to his
ultimate destination. How perfect for a fifth level person to be leading
Russia out of its tiresome stodginess. Another fifth Mature person,
Robert Bly, is leading American men from their stuckness. Fifth Old
feminist witch and author, Zsuzanna Budapest, is leading women towards
the blessings of nature and the goddess. Zsa Zsa Gabor cultivated her
fifth Young eccentricities and power needs with charm - for the most
part. Joan Quigley pushed her need for eccentricity and power with
astrology, quite an unconventional Young Soul pursuit.

At fifth level a person may feel out of his element, odd and off-balance
socially, and may be seen as less mature than his more secure fourth
level friends. Divine, the fat, quite fabulous drag queen star of Female
Trouble and Hairspray, obviously wrote his/her own rules but didn't find
much balance in life. The enigmatic Andy Warhol didn't find much
personal balance either. Neither does PeeWee Herman, whose
eccentricities give him little rest. Gary Larson, the creator of the
extremely bizarre and wonderfulThe Far Side is fifth Old and reclusive.

Madonna maintains stability by by sheer force of personality and by
hopping from a very unconventional fifth level to a solid, businesslike
fourth. Lyndon Johnson, also fifth Mature, was full of personal
eccentricities (Remember him pulling those beagles up by their ears or
showing off the new scar on his abdomen to photographers and news
reporters?) but could manage business and the presidency with ease.

Sixth level lifetimes are about karma. In Infant, Baby and Young
lifetimes, you are usually busier creating karmas than paying them back.
Every essence plunges in during these early phases and forms the karmas
which cause shudders when you sense, from the perspective of later
lifetimes, what took place and what troubles you caused. Usually, once
these karmas have come back in your face, you know you would never act
like that again, ever, because you understand all too well what it felt
like.

Richard Ramirez and Charles Manson, both at sixth level Infant,
obviously created large amounts of karma for themselves. So did Joel
Steinberg, who was responsible for severe wife abuse as well as the
death of his adopted daughter.

Jesse Helms, fundamentalist Oral Roberts and Evan Mecham, the impeached,
ultra-conservative ex-governor of Arizona, have all enjoyed stirring up
controversy and are sixth Baby. A Young Soul at sixth level may do
something as inspirational as John Kennedy or quirky as Robert Bork's
aborted run for the Supreme Court - where he itched to form interesting
karmas with just about every minority in this country.

In Mature and Old sixth level lifetimes, you piece together the
experiences of the prior levels and start handling obligations incurred
along the way. This means accumulated karmic debts get paid back through
numerous, intense, nearly overfilled sixth level lives. A person will
likely have trouble after hard luck and be at wits end from all the
calamitous action coming her way. These sixth level catch-up lives are a
difficult and demanding group, usually taking longer to complete than
any other level. As an Old Soul, these lives are truly the last chance
for all karmic completions, some of which have been avoided for dozens
upon dozens of lifetimes.

Think about what's been jammed into these sixth level lives: Elizabeth
Taylor, Timothy Leary, Norman Mailer, Rajneesh, Jeremy Rifkin, Deng
Xiaoping and Patti Davis. Joe Kennedy II, who now holds an elective
office, is a Mature sixth level Sage likely to have a lot of news-making
incidents occurring in his life. While Old Soul Chico Mendes paid with
his life this time, Ram Dass and Yogi Bhajan appear to have completed
the last of their sixth level karmas, enabling them to move on to the
comfort of seventh level.

Whew, seventh level! The karma's paid; it's time for some well earned
poise, rest and complacency. Not too many obstructions or impeding
subplots here; seventh level lives usually unfold rather gracefully.
Having freshly understood the lessons themselves, individuals are in a
good position to teach others - especially those of the soul age just
completed. For Mature and Old Souls particularly, there is an urgency to
share their perceptivity and ways of being with others. Think of how
fired up Roseanne Arnold and Robin Williams are, for example, to share
their perceptions with us, or George Lucas and Martin Luther King.

Moamar Khadafy, at seventh level Baby, and Israel's Prime Minister
Shamir, seventh Young, don't have lives that flow as easily as some but
are tenacious enough with their beliefs, even under fire, to display
that seventh level self-satisfaction which can feel maddeningly smug to
those who happen to disagree. Ayn Rand is another seventh Young person
who was quite self-contained regarding her belief structure.

Seventh-level lives often have a comfort and flow to them. Pat Sajak,
for a time a late night-talk show host, formerly a disk jockey, TV
weatherman, and sidekick to Vanna White on Wheel of Fortune, is
ambitious, at ease, and seventh Young. Actors Alec Guinness and Danny
DeVito, singer Bruce Springsteen, author Frank Herbert and sexologist
Ruth Westheimer are all seventh Mature. Spiritual teachers Swami
Muktananda and Swami Satchidananda both manifested at seventh level Old,
as did the politician who bridged more than a few gaps in the Middle
East, Anwar Sadat, and the one who insisted on ending slavery in the
U.S., Abraham Lincoln.

TRANSCENDENTAL AND INFINITE SOULS

(This section is an addition Joya Pope wrote for this web-page, it is
not in World According to Michael.)

There are two other levels of soul con There are two other levels of
soul consciousness which may take human bodies, but are vastly beyond
the sometimes all-too-human levels of Infant to Old just described. They
are the Transcendental Soul and the Infinite Soul.

A transcendental soul is a representative from an entity that has
completely recombined, meaning all the fragments or souls in the entity
have completed all lifetimes on earth and have merged into full
consciousness of each other, into oneness. The entity, which may be on
the Astral, Causal, Mental, Messianic or Buddhaic plane, may decide for
teaching purposes to send a representative to the planet. Every entity
does this at least once. Because of the consciousness levels obtained by
the entity, the representative, the transcendental soul, shows up on the
planet as a buoyant, balanced being with easy access to higher centers
and states of consciousness. The teaching of the transcendental soul,
whether verbal, by example, or by leading action, is centered on the
greater connectivity of the universe.

There are always some transcendental souls on the planet; in a time of
change like the present there are many. Some, like Sai Baba, Meher Baba,
Yogananda, Babaji, Rumi, St. Francis, Pope John XXIII, or Ghandi, obtain
wide recognition for their teachings while others are monumental
influences on their communities, but do not receive global recognition.
These souls are not totally self-aware. They may fall into maya, that is
illusion, believing perhaps that they are "A Perfect Master" or an
ultimate authority of some sort. They may forget in their teaching about
"All That Is" that they are teaching from one perspective only. They can
become attached to attention, love, adulation. But mostly, transendental
souls stay amazingly clear, centered and conscious.

Infinite souls are the manifestation of All-That-Is, of the Tao. The
entire universe is consciously encompassed in the one body of the
Infinite soul. The Infinite soul is self-aware and does have superhuman
abilities. This soul usually enters, by prior agreement, into a person
who is seventh level Old or Transcendental. The energy of the Infinite
soul is so great that were they to be born into a human body and dwell
consistently in it, the body would not last long. The Infinite soul may
enter later in life as for Jesus and Buddha or come in and out as it did
for Krishna and Lao Tsu. These souls are always noticed, always teach
oneness and love. Earth is set to be visited by four or five of these
incredible souls over the next 20 years. They will have the same
message: love one another and the Earth, and will represent different
races and both sexes.

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More on the Soul Ages by Shepherd Hoodwin
http://michaelteachings.com/soul-ages.html
http://michaelteachings.com/soul-ages2.html