
Instead I paused and spluttered, “Umm – maybe middle-aged?” Now I haven’t heard from her in a while.
Oops!
And anyway, who am I to judge?
Some spiritual teachers say that all souls are exactly the same age – that there cannot be older and younger souls. That the Creator, perhaps at the literal moment of the so-called Big Bang, spontaneously created a vast number of souls who learn and grow via a cycle of death and rebirth on Earth.
Other informants say the question has no inner logic because the concept of time, and therefore age, does not exist outside of our three-dimensional world.
How about you? Do you think Old Souls should be defined by a chronological metric? Or should we all be defined by how much we have learned and grown, how evolved we are?
And how do you tell who’s an old soul, anyway?
Once upon a time, I would have looked to Mother Theresa or Gandhi for my definition of an Old Soul. There is no doubt in my mind they have both earned the title “evolved.”
But as it turns out, restricting ourselves to spiritual leaders of that ilk is a limited vision of a soul’s evolution. For example, my late husband could barely read, couldn’t write at all, and drove a truck his entire life, yet he always seemed like quite an old soul to me.
How about the famous seer Edgar Cayce? Sure, he came across as extraordinarily evolved, but just a few decades before his birth as Cayce, he lived a life as a drunken bum who was massacred by Indians.
In The Afterlife of Billy Fingers, Annie Kagan writes of communicating with the spirit of her older brother Billy, who died a down-and-out, drug-addicted criminal. It quickly becomes clear (although Annie never really weighs in on this point) that Billy is in fact a very highly-evolved soul who consciously and deliberately chose a life of addiction because….well, because it was there. The physicality of it was something he had never done before, and it was deemed necessary that he experience the physical high of indulging in drugs and alcohol in order to continue evolving. It was simply another necessary experience on his particular path.
Think about the implications of that!
Society has rules layered upon expectations piled upon perceptions. This is “good,” that’s “bad,” something else is “immoral” – but where do we get off, really, making such judgments, even of ourselves?
I don’t know about you, but I kind of like the idea that whatever my failings might be, I am simply following my own personal grand plan. Hopefully I will be ruled by love as I execute the plan, but if I mess up, well then, that’s okay too, since that is how we all learn.
How simple! How elegant! Is it possible that it could be that easy?
I believe it is. My days are as stressful as the next person’s. I have myriad expectations I place upon myself. In the back of my mind, I love the fact that all the woes in which I wallow are just a set up – a stage play arranged for my own benefit, a maze concocted for my own edification, challenges that can be neither won nor lost, but simply experienced.
I suggest we all just chill, okay?