Soul Mates: Memoria
As with all the other mystical and spiritual themes, there was a stage between childhood and adult experiences where I switched gears. (See: Compmartmentalization and Adult Experiences.)
Childhood
First Wave
I had visions, dreams and recall of past lives from the age of 3 to the age of 12. (See: Reincarnation.) My family were skeptical at first but came to have an open mind. The philosophy they adopted was that it was being shown to me directly from the 'hand of God' and not to them, therefore - it was my 'truth' to hold and not for them to hold in their minds the way I held it in my mind. They suggested I find others with 'like-minded' ideas or experiences so we could relate to one another. At the age of 12, it happened spontaneously and without effort when my family moved to a new city and I transferred to a new school district. I met a classmate and there was an 'uncanny' and eerie familiarity about him. I felt I had met him in the past at another city we had lived in. I couldn't explain it to myself any other way. When we started talking to one another he described the same uncanny feeling and eerie familiarity. Then it happened without prompting of any sort of conscious effort. Memories of one another started pouring into our conscious minds at the same time. He could recall the same 'memories' I had sight of in my own mind. We verified them with one another. During the process of this sort of recall together, we uncovered what has been called 'pre-birth' memories of us (as spirits) making plans to meet one another at a certain time and place in the world. We both dropped our jaws at this revelation. He said,
"I didn't know we were looking for one another on one hand and on the other hand, we have been planning on this before we were even born. HOW can that BE?"
I had no answers for it myself. Neither of us had any doubts in our mind that we were destined to meet at that particular moment and that particular location and have the exact same conversation we were having. It was like we were a 'shadow' of a conversation that had exist prior to us being incarnated into the physical world. We referred to that 'recall' as the rehearsal and our meeting as the play on stage. I briefly spoke about it with someone else and they mentioned the words 'soul mate.' A friend to one's soul long before they are born into the physical realm. He went around the schoolyard telling our classmates about the 'reincarnation' story between us. I didn't know the classmates as well as he did. I was expecting a negative reaction because of my parents conditioning of my mind. I felt I was going to by lynched or ran off the schoolyard after being 'tar and feathered.' Suprisingly, I had many a classmate come up to me in private and tell me they had also been wresting with past life recall and spurring controversy from their parents as well. That led me to believe that it was a 'kid thing' and not an adult thing.
It came in 'threes.' Shortly afterwards, I encountered another classmate and felt there was a 'past life' connection between us. I was digging for the 'recall' of the connection when he stopped me. He put it to me in a parable. He felt we were both sitting on the side of reflective pool staring at the reflections of our faces shining back at us from the sunlight. He felt that underneath the surface of the pool there were 'masks' hidden which were the persona's we as souls or spirits had worn in the past. He told me that it was giving him an eerie feeling and he knew that if we stuck our hands beneath the surface of the reflection to pull of the 'masks' hidden underneath - we would start recalling events as I had done with the other friend he had heard about. He said he had time to think about how he would react if he was in that sort of situation and didn't want to know too much about the truth of it due to his family's religion. He wanted to 'firmly believe' there was a past life between us but wanted to keep an element of doubt in place....just in case.
The third time it happened to me was when after the summer when we started Junior High. A new classmate had that same familiar buzz of invisible electricity that was pulling us together. With him, I wouldn't acknowledge or deny the feeling of us having a past life together. I felt I had too much on my plate dealing with two friends and that sort of deep mystical bond. I put him on hold and wouldn't discuss the subject of reincarnation or past life with him even through we both knew it through silence.
Second Wave
Two years later, my family moved again and it happened all over again in 'three's' and I once again studied a familiar pattern. There was the first encounter that was 'pre-destined' that we would share private and confidental conversations about the persona's and roles we had played with one another in a past life. Wwe both confirmed the reality of it to one another through our joint testimony. The other two - I put my hand out and kept them at bay. It was hard enough to handle the two 'intimate' encounters and have my mind bombarded with images, thoughts as well as emotions from another relationship that existed in ancient history years ago. My other two friends (soul mates) were upset that I wouldn't take the time to confirm their memories and recall. We knew there was a past life hidden between us but I wouldn't dig down below the surface and pull up the 'masks' that carried those hidden memories. In a three year period, I studied the pattern of six reincarnated 'soul mate' encounters to interpret a subtle approach to understanding a 'soul connection' and kinship in spirit. A thrid wave started up and caught me off guard (mentally) when I was 17 years of age when the first 'twin spirit' showed up in a set of six that were to follow up in a fourth, fifth and sixth wave in the future.