Earthly Cycles: How Past Lives, Karma, and Your Higher Self Shape Your Life

The collected teachings of Alexander contain the most accessible explanations of the mechanics of health, illness and life on this planet that I have yet encountered. The processes and techniques he first described 20 years ago are now being validated by modern scientific research, and suggest that he has presented a blueprint for ‘How it works’ that can be utilized by all of us.

Eric Leskowitz, M.D.

Department of Psychiatry, Harvard Medical School

Over the decades of reading hundreds, probably thousands, of different examples of channeled material, I find Alexander's work to be among the very finest I have ever come across. I am struck by the exceptional clarity, integrity, and meaningfulness of these communications.

Jon Klimo, Ph.D., author of Channeling: Investigations on Receiving Information from Paranormal Sources

Alexander gives fresh insights into what is probably the oldest, most basic set of questions we mortals struggle with.

Robert F. Butts

Husband of Jane Roberts, author of the Seth Material

EARTHLY CYCLES

How Past Lives, Karma, and

Your Higher Self Shape Your Life

An Alexander Book

Ramon Stevens

Smashwords Edition

copyright 2011 Ramon Stevens

Cover design by Andy Hughes

This book is available in print at most online retailers.

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Table of Contents

Foreword by Robert F. Butts

Preface by Ramon Stevens

Introduction by Alexander

Part One: Origin of the Species

Chapter 1: The Camouflage System

Chapter 2: Spiritual Guardians and Material Keepers of Earth

Chapter 3: The Human Quadrangle

Chapter 4: Ages of the Soul

Chapter 5: The Higher Self

Chapter 6: Families of Consciousness

Chapter 7: The Human Energy Fields

Chapter 8: Sexual Orientation

Chapter 9: Life Themes

Chapter 10: Mother, Flag, and Faith

Part Two: The Human Journey

Chapter 11: The Life Hypothesis

Chapter 12: The Dance of Relationship

Chapter 13: Life Cycles

Chapter 14: Behavioral Loops

Chapter 15: Karmic Braids

Chapter 16: Releasing Karma

Chapter 17: Reincarnational Cycles

Part Three: Realm of the Spirit

Chapter 18: Beyond Death's Door

Chapter 19: Lifetime Planning

Part Four: Releasing Earthly Cycles

Chapter 20: Staying Out of Debt—The Karma-Free Life

Chapter 21: Healing Karma

Chapter 22: Healing the World

Chapter 23: Angels, Guides, and Mentors

About the Author/Other Alexander Books

Foreword

It has certainly been a pleasure for me to see how Ramón Stevens’s work with Alexander keeps growing throughout the body of their work together. Now here in Earthly Cycles I see additional growth as Alexander explores many down-to-earth experiences and concepts having to do with reincarnation, religion, time, sexuality, karmic braids, families of consciousness, and a host of other topics I have no room to mention in this brief space. I wish I did have the room! Alexander’s subject matter is just too penetrating for any casual summation, but I can note, for instance, that from a number of perspectives he takes us on a very rich, in-depth exploration of the ancient yet always new and challenging reincarnational process.

Especially do I like Alexander’s declaration: Each day offers fresh potential for new growth... Deceptively simple, that statement, for in actuality its loaded with the possibilities of a lifetime—and not for just one lifetime, either, but for a series of them for each of us. I can only recommend that the reader study this book again and again for the many insights, the feeling knowledge that it contains. For Alexander gives fresh insights into what is probably the oldest, most basic set of questions we mortals struggle with: Who are we? Where did we come from? What purpose is there in our lives? Why do we even live?

Consciousness is unceasingly creative, no matter what its casual, ordinary aspects. We may have our answers to these questions, feeble as they may be sometimes, and in their own ways those answers may serve their purposes for us this time around. I’m suggesting, however, that Alexander’s material can greatly enrich our individual beliefs, and that this is a potent accomplishment. We can try on his material for psychic, emotional, and creative size. He offers us hope for something more—an emotional knowing. And by considering Alexander’s material, letting it penetrate, we in turn can add to that knowing qualities from our personal unique consciousness. Then, I think, these grand new syntheses that we bring into being can ripple throughout our physical and nonphysical lives. Indeed, ultimately they can journey throughout this reality we’re all creating individually and jointly, with all that that implies on so many levels of being.

This to me is the greatest value of Alexander’s work, that we have all of the psychic, psychological and physical room we need to search for and develop our own answers, in whatever terms. Or to simply let them come to us, in a variety of ways, if that’s the course some of us choose.

We do, then, have that precious freedom of choice, of being utterly ourselves while also being linked to a great ineluctable quality of life that is more than large enough to embrace the process and experience of reincarnation. The belief in multiple lives, the very living of them, is one of the ways through which we delve into the great mystery of our beings. A very valid way, to my way of thinking, as we seek to penetrate that mystery that surrounds us on our globe like a fine creative halo, a teeming restless consciousness that’s both invisible and visible at the same time. What great adventures we’re always involved in, basically spanning the centuries in a wink!

Alexander shows us, then, illuminates, the fantastic variety of experience and accomplishment we humans are capable of, qualities that unite us all in very often unexpected yet very creative ways, even while we still have that freedom of choice that we value so highly—that we simply must have.

Truly, we are steeped in our earthly cycles.

Nice going in your excellent book, Alexander!

Robert F. Butts

(Husband of Jane Roberts, author of the Seth Material)

Preface

I took a year’s sabbatical from civilization and moved to the fringes of a small town deep in California’s northern forests. I lived in an old cabin perched on a bluff overlooking the Trinity River, bordered by fields, an orchard and garden, and thick carpets of trees climbing the surrounding mountains. The night I moved in a homeless cat sauntered up, helped herself to my dinner, and settled in for good.

As autumn faded to winter I found myself with abundant time on my hands; one can chop only so much wood. Four years had passed since Alexander, the spirit teacher I channel, had dictated his book Conscious Life: Creating Your Reality; since its completion, occasional snatches of his next work had been bleeding into awareness. When I asked if the next one was ready, he replied, The material has been prepared since we finished dictation for Conscious Life, but give us a few days to revitalize it. It’s like taking an old manuscript out of a dusty trunk; we have to blow off the cobwebs and dust to prepare it for delivery.

Four days later Alexander began dictation of a text he called Earthly Cycles. Over the course of the next five months I went to work almost every weekday morning, sitting in trance at the computer and taking dictation until lunch. Come afternoon I would review the day’s material and note any ambiguous passages; these Alexander would review and rephrase in our next session, editing on the fly as the book gradually took shape.

As if to encourage our efforts, this was the winter Mother Nature finally broke California’s interminable drought, and with a vengeance. Most mornings I woke to a soggy, fog-shrouded dawn heralding another day of gray drizzle. I’d fire up the wood stove, make myself a cup of tea, and settle before the computer for another round of dictation. By late spring, with the rains finally subsiding and the long-parched earth bursting to exultant life, Earthly Cycles was complete.

Ramón Stevens

Introduction

Since the dawn of time humanity has puzzled over the deep mysteries of its existence. Who are you, where do you come from, what lies beyond your senses’ reach, what is the meaning and purpose of life—every generation grapples with these profound questions. From time to time a great teacher appears to offer a new vision of humanity’s origin and meaning, and the spiritual laws through which life is best lived. These great teachers must couch their wisdom in language familiar to their cultures, must express their truth through parable and story, the better to speak to the hearts of their followers.

All spiritual traditions born of deep wisdom include the understanding that an immortal soul transcends the death of its physical body. Some traditions maintain that a soul enjoys only one human journey, while others propose a cycle of continual death and rebirth gradually leading toward the soul’s perfection. The western spiritual tradition, carried in Judaism and Christianity, holds to the soul’s single life journey; while eastern spiritual traditions include reincarnation and karma within their teaching. As a result, westerners intrigued by the concept of reincarnation must look outside their native culture for wisdom on the subject, or must content themselves with past life accounts gleaned through dreams and hypnosis, while lacking a deep spiritual tradition illuminating these reports.

As time rolls forward, humanity rides on ever-rising waves of intellectual, spiritual, and technological sophistication. Each generation reaches higher into the race’s banks of potential and fashions a deeper, clearer, purer understanding than its forebears could achieve, stretching the mind’s reach ever higher. The healthiest culture constantly reinvents itself, discarding old forms and ideas and eagerly embracing the fruits of ripening intellect and deepening wisdom. Spiritual truths must constantly evolve with their culture lest they ossify into cold dogma devoid of spiritual fire.

Because western culture’s spiritual tradition is rooted in teachings appropriate for the age of their original emergence, some thousands of years past, and because that tradition denies reincarnation and karma as elements of the soul’s journey, western culture is bereft of a modern understanding of some of the most powerful and universal influences on human life. Our purpose in writing this book is to offer insight into these deep and enigmatic processes, couched in language and at a level of sophistication appropriate for your age.

Ours is not the first text to discuss reincarnation and karma, nor will it be the last. It is our intent, however, that these deep mysteries be explained to you through words and ideas which respect your intellectual and spiritual maturation, freeing you from digging through the artifacts of cultures past and struggling to make them come alive in terms consonant with modern understanding. If you will, this book is a revised version of a body of ancient, indeed eternal, knowledge, offered to illuminate the deeper influences on your life, the better to help you navigate the crests and troughs of your journey through the earthly cycles.

Alexander

Part One: ORIGIN OF THE SPECIES

Chapter 1: The Camouflage System

What is the ultimate source of life? What great thrust of energy and consciousness do you and your fellow species ride to sustain the unfathomably complex web of earthly life?

Attempts to explain the ultimate source of life always sink into fragment and symbol, for it transcends the limits of your waking mind to comprehend the hidden realms from which you spring. Every culture has its pantheon of gods, or a single God, as a symbolic image of the unknowable ultimate Source Of All Being. These images are most often painted in human terms, in form and behavior, the better to make them comfortably familiar. Yet the Source is not human in form or thought, even while It contains all human experience within the totality of Its being.

A common element of many spiritual traditions is to paint the relationship between creator and humanity in terms of spatial distance: God or gods are projected upward—into heaven, Mount Olympus, in volcanoes, the wind, and clouds—while humanity remains below, rooted to earth, apart from its divine source.

This symbolic picture is valid in that it reflects the slowing of energy which occurs as consciousness springs from the Source and decelerates to animate earthly life. As energy approaches the physical plane, and as consciousness anchors to flesh, it must slow its vibrational frequency to a level compatible with matter. In purely vibrational terms, then, the ultimate Source is above you—its energetic pulsations whirling at a frequency beyond your comprehension—and this energy must gradually slow to blend and harmonize with earthly life.

The flaw in the heaven above, us below image is that it builds separation into the relationship between you and your Source. You feel yourselves cut off from your divine origins, wallowing in your earthly swamp and raising your eyes skyward for guidance and inspiration. This image has suited the religious bureaucracies which inevitably arise to encrust every avatar’s divine insight, for holy authorities can then muscle into the picture as intermediaries between the Source and the common people; besmocked toll collectors on the road to heaven.

Let us offer an alternate view of the relationship between you and your Source, one which expels clerical middlemen and affirms your intrinsic divinity. Rather than envisioning a heaven of pure perfection above you, while you languish below on your globe of ice and mud, picture the relationship as your home planet embedded within an enormously larger sphere, the totality of all creation, the Source. In this image, you no longer stand apart from and below the Source, but are cocooned within It, floating securely in Its warm embrace and forever nourished by Its loving intent.

Or perhaps the image of a child growing in the womb appeals: here again, the child floats serenely embedded in its fluid home, effortlessly sustained by the nourishment and loving intent of its mother, its creator.

The ultimate Source Of All Being is a body of consciousness whose dimensions and complexity are far greater than your mind can fathom, for It carries you, your life, your species, your world, as but one tiny facet of Its totality. It creates and sustains your world as one unique and precious crucible of activity through which It fulfills Its unquenchable passion for learning and growth. It delights in the mask It wears when you gaze upon yourself in a mirror. It buoys your every step with Its intent to drink in earthly life through the unique filter of your thoughts and experience.

You are one filament of consciousness, one unique strand of divine potential, nestled within the Source. The Source holds you, sustains you, cushions you, for through your experience It comes to know Itself. You are the Source, a fragment of consciousness embedded within Its unfathomable totality, playing out the drama of earthly and human life as a unique expression of the Source’s infinite potential.

~ ~ ~

The narrowing of consciousness from the immense totality of the Source to your own is not achieved in one gigantic leap. Myriad gradations of consciousness, of increasingly fine focus, emanate from the Source, gradually narrowing into discrete realms of experience.

The physical system is one such realm of activity, created by the Source for its unique quality of wedding consciousness to matter. Unlike other dimensions, where consciousness in and of itself is the medium of growth, in physical systems consciousness must feed itself through matter—vibrational patterns of greater density than pure consciousness—and translate thought into form and action.

The physical system is a venue for consciousness to express itself in a rather dense medium, harmonizing with the slower vibrational frequencies of matter and pressing ideas into form. Spiritual principles—love, honesty, integrity, altruism—can be played out both in their pure form and in their opposites, the better to learn their validity: the senses readily confirm that a world built on peace and love is a happier, more productive and fulfilling place than one founded on war and enmity. Playing out these potentials in physical form offers a solidity of experience, a densely vibrant feedback, that simply pondering such principles while floating in ether could never offer.

Thus, the physical system is ideal for bodies of consciousness seeking to play with the powers and potentials of consciousness with an exuberant, almost childlike delight. Just as children plopped into a sandbox with a few simple tools can create entire worlds, so does consciousness feeding into the material system fashion cultures of astonishing diversity, the better to play out the race’s potentials in as rich a variety as your vibrant imaginations can conjure up.

~ ~ ~

The physical system is divided into two main branches: direct and camouflage. In a direct physical system, consciousness has total perception of the vibratory patterns in its environs; objects do not appear as they do to your senses, but as pulsating bodies of vibration. Thoughts are not reduced to symbolic speech or the written word, but transmit instantly from one mind to others.

The emphasis in such a system is on communal activity, building gestalts of consciousness through shared intent and manipulating the denser fields of matter by projecting this communal consciousness outward. The delight, the reward of this system lies in the diversity of consciousness gestalts that individuals can join to create, and in projecting them outward to manipulate fields of matter.

A camouflage system, by contrast, is one in which most of the vibrational patterns swarming throughout the system are hidden from awareness, and the senses capture only a few slender vibrational bands. Each species is molded to perceive certain strands of vibration, weaving a picture of reality starkly different from other species’ perception. A species’ higher purpose determines which bands of frequency, at what intensity, will be absorbed by the senses and serve as its essential feedback.

A species dancing in the predator-prey ballet will carry sharp eyesight and an especially keen sense of smell, given the need to perceive the presence of other animals. Bats detect prey not by eyesight but by bouncing sonar rays off them, a highly sophisticated system which allows precise measurement of distance between bat and prey, superior to the eyes’ rough estimation of distance. Slugs, snails, and worms can detect minute wisps of vitality emanating from food sources, as if nutrients themselves call out to creatures seeking their nourishment.

The primary purpose of a camouflage system is to uphold the supremacy of the individual. If most of the vibrational swarm is hidden from your senses, if you communicate with others only through symbolic speech, if you know yourself far better than any loved one, then your consciousness is staking its claim to you, your body and its journey through life, as its primary medium of learning and growth. Of course you join with others to build relationships and social groupings, but you do not find your consciousness melting into the group’s such that your individuality is lost. Your body’s journey through life is the premier concern of your waking consciousness, with all else serving as background.

Above all, because thought waves are blocked from telepathic transmission, mind to mind, to communicate you must reduce your thoughts to symbols—words, gestures, art. This ensures your privacy in that it requires your conscious decision to share your thoughts with others, and even allows you to offer messages which mask or falsify your true feelings.

Thus, while your privacy is ensured, your power to fully express the richness of your inner life is diminished—for what words can express the joy you take in a loved one’s caress, the sun-dappled verdure of a summer meadow, the worshipful love of a child?

This is the trade-off, then: in exchange for supremacy of the individual and privacy of thought, your ideas and feelings must be stepped down to symbol, losing richness and fidelity in the translation. Being human means being a prisoner of your skull, in the sense that your inner life can never be fully shared with others. The reward of the camouflage system is the fiery richness of consciousness wedded to symbol and physicality, the flowing rivers of private thought, the challenge of channeling those deep rivers into eloquence and artistry, touching other souls with symbolic fragments of your fertile inner life.

Chapter 2: Spiritual Guardians and Material Keepers of Earth

Because the purpose of a camouflage physical system is to stress the supremacy of the individual and to filter experience through a diverse stew of life potential, the bodies of consciousness animating organismic life in such systems work to build a framework of virtually infinite diversity. They achieve this by dividing into increasingly fine focuses of intent and purpose, weaving and blending their disparate strands in a tapestry of unimaginable complexity. Like the variety of foods prepared from a few simple ingredients, the diversity of earthly life derives from several major divisions of consciousness which can be blended into an infinitude of individual experience.

Each species has a host consciousness, a pool of consciousness existing outside the space-time framework and sending shoots of intent into fleshly form. When you consider the staggering diversity of each species in its multitudinous forms and attributes, you glimpse the intent of each species’ host consciousness to experience earthly life in the broadest variety allowed by its genetic structure and life purpose.

In the human species, the form remains relatively constant— for racial differences are, literally, only skin deep—while the focuses of consciousness vary immensely. That is, the blueprint behind the human body, which reflects its deeper purpose in the overall earthly scheme, remains relatively stable and consistent while human consciousness displays a richness of variety not found in other species. Human potential is expressed more through diversity of consciousness than diversity of form.

Consider, then, that in the host human consciousness, the vast pool of intent from which all human experience springs, there is one basic intent, one essential purpose, underlying all human life. Your consciousness is starkly different from your fellow creatures’, for they are largely bound—by genetics, instinct, and environment—to play out their lives deeply rooted to the earth in unquestioning acceptance of their life conditions. Human experience stands apart, founded on the unique qualities of reason, symbol, and manipulation.

Reason, symbol, and manipulation. Your rational minds allow you to rise above the animals’ simple acceptance of their life conditions; reason frees you to alter your environment and shape its gifts according to your needs, building shelter, stitching clothing, growing food, and so on. Alone of the species you communicate through symbols—art, music, everyday speech—reducing the products of consciousness to physical form. Your skill at reducing thought to symbol derives from the power of manipulation, principally through vocalization and the exquisitely subtle powers of your hands and fingers.

Perhaps no other creature is as physically unfit for earthly life as the human species. Hairless, you are scorched by the sun, drenched by the rain, chilled by the wind. Walking upright, you lack speed to chase game or escape predators. With no claws to sink into game or fangs to rend its flesh, you cannot feed yourself without cunning and skill. Your children are helpless and dependent longer than any other species. How could such a maladapted species even survive, let alone thrive?

Through its consciousness. The human body is designed precisely to require the use of reason, symbol, and manipulation, if you are to enjoy anything beyond a rudimentary and primitive existence. You can clothe your naked body, build shelter against