Affinity

You may not have conscious memories of your past lives, but you will experience a definite affinity with many people and places along your path. You'll meet and interact with hundreds of people throughout your lifetime, but occasionally you'll meet someone new and recognize immediately another soul who has travelled closely with you in other lives. Sometimes it's a lover, sometimes a true friend, sometimes an enemy, but whichever the case, you know it instinctively at the gut level as soon as you meet.

The same is true of places, times and events. These memories are contained deep within your psyche and can't be explained by current life events. For instance, it's common to dream repeatedly about places you've never been in your current physical life. Perhaps there's a house or a city that forms the back-drop for many of your dreams, but in waking life you have no idea where it is. I once had a very good friend with whom I shared many similarities, however we had very different views of religion. She was a very traditional Baptist and we got along fine as long as we didn't discuss reincarnation or anything that smacked of non-traditional Christian beliefs.

She and her husband, who was in the Canadian military, were posted to a base in Germany in the late 1980s. They weren't thrilled to be sent off to Europe, but they made the most of it by travelling every chance they got. Although my husband was also in the military, we weren't so fortunate to be posted to Europe, but we did take the opportunity to visit our friends in Germany in fall of 1988. One evening not long after we'd arrived, as my friend and I shared a glass of wine, she asked me to tell her more about reincarnation. I wasn't just surprised, I was astounded. In the not too distant past, she had made it very clear that the subject of reincarnation was taboo, now suddenly she was asking me to tell her more. "What is it you want to know?" I asked, "has something happened?"

She nodded and said "There's a house that's been in my dreams as long as I can remember." I told her that wasn't uncommon and she shouldn't worry about it unless the dreams made her uneasy or unhappy.

As it turned out, she hadn't really ever given the house much thought at all. It was simply a location that turned up in her dreams now and then, sort of like a movie set or a sound stage, just a place for dreams to happen, but that all changed when she and her husband were touring in Spain. They had travelled some distance when they realized the map didn't seem to be helping and they were in a rural area far from the main highway. In an attempt to get them back the way they had come, my friend directed her husband to turn around in the next driveway they came too. As he pulled their big Chevy van into a narrow dirt driveway, my friend was astonished to come face to face with the house in her dreams. "It was THE house!" she told me in almost a whisper. "The EXACT house I've dreamed about all my life, right there in a little village in Spain." While she was visibly upset, not only by the discovery of the house, but because of the implications to her carefully structered religious belief system, she was also quite thrilled to have discovered the house was real. There was little I could do but assure her that it was actually a wonderful thing that she had found the house and now knew where it was located. I hoped she would be content to simply think of it as a happy place from another time that just for a moment, she was allowed to return to.

Oddly enough, she was able to direct her husband right back to the highway from there along a totally different route than the one that led them there without once referring to the map...