8 February 2005: The Wheel of Samsara on Fast Forward

One classically Aspie habit that my father and I share is that when we acquire a new album of music, we tend to listen to it over and over for a while, the way small children sometimes want the same book read to them over and over. I have been doing this with the 100 Years of Solitude compilation that my father sent me (see the later part of my previous entry). This has resulted in the following insight, which might be an interesting angle from which to approach the next round of past life work:

Many people who end up seeming rather spiritually advanced start out by having especially troubled, painful lives in childhood and adolesence, and sometimes well into their twenties. Obviously the early difficulties provide learning experiences that contribute to the later wisdom, but, just as obviously, this is not a fully adequate explanation, because most troubled childhoods just produce troubled and damaged adults; the ones who end up wise are rare, and their styles of dealing with the miseries of childhood look different from the very beginning.

My explanation is that the early years of a person's life recapitulates that person's past lives in the same way that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny. The more the soul has learned in the past, the more rapid-fire lessons and high-speed psychic turbulence must be crammed into each successive lifetime's opening Fast Forward.