Future Lives – A Literary trail

I have been fascinated by the concept of Future Lives for over twenty years, and as I am about to go on a new adventure of discovery in that regard, I feel now is the time to review my journey so far.

When I first came to Astrology in 1970, I felt that it was a tool for creating your own future, and it slotted in with my idea that we create our own lives.  That is a commonplace new age idiom now, but at the time it emerged for me as I learned to work with Astrology.

Helen Wambach (1925-1986) was the first person I heard of in connection with future lives.  She was an American hypnotherapist who tended to work in large groups, and assess the data statistically.  She worked with past lives, and then wrote a groundbreaking book “Life Before Lives” about our preparation for coming into incarnation.  This work preceded that of Michael Newton who specializes in life between lives, which he calls spiritual regression, but that is another subject.  What would characterize the chart of one who works in this area?  I have not looked into this, but Helen has a close conjunction of the Sun, Neptune and her Ascendant, with several planets in Leo.  I have a much dog-eared copy of “Life Before Life” which I read several times in 1979 and several times since.  What was enthralling about this book was about the scope of the choices we make before we come into incarnation.

She did not actually write a book of Future Lives, that task being left to her successor Chet Snow who met and worked with her shortly before she died, and was the author of an equally groundbreaking work “Mass Dreams of the Future”.  I casually selected this one from a bookstore in 1991, not knowing what I was opening up to.  I had read about future earth changes in books by Ruth Montgomery, but the visions which Chet Snow had produced while working on his future with Helen Wambach were graphic and terrifying, apocalyptic views of 1998.  This work opened up many areas of work in connection with earth healing for Chet Snow, who told that he had undertaken this task as a result of having done the opposite in Atlantis – he had denied there were problems when he could have helped people to see what was going on at the time.  He now lives in Arizona, where he saw himself from the mid-1980s looking at 1998.  You might find all this time-hopping confusing, or alternatively enjoyable as I do.  That the specific earth changes he foresaw did not happen in 1998 he sees in terms of the spiritual work done by people like him.  He also put out a video a few years ago saying that there had been a reprieve, and hinting that the end of the Mayan calendar (circa 2012) would be a marker for such changes.  Please note, I am not wishing to fan the flames of conjecture of what would or would not happen at that time.  Suffice it to say that Chet Snow woke me up to what we need to do now in terms of looking after planetary resources, though I still feel I am lagging behind what is needed.

In his statistics of groups he has taken through mass future progression, Chet identified 4 possible human groupings in different social environments, possibly co-existing:

1. Space Stations
2. Small New-Age style communities
3. Hi-Tech Cities
4. Simple rural lives in isolated villages

(you choose)

Chet has a much more sober karmic mission from his chart than Helen, with the North Node conjunct his Sun and Saturn, showing a serious responsibility.

We (my friends and I) did follow the trail of Chet for a few years, using his future life tape, and attending a couple of his workshops.  In one of my future life scenarios, I was a grandmother in a crater in Germany, looking sprightly, in the company of some of my present-life friends.  In this lifetime I am currently enjoying grandmotherhood, but am not as sprightly as I could be, so perhaps I will make progress next time round.  Certainly, the experience of becoming a grandmother has opened up my future vision.

In 1993 we were treated to a TV documentary and book tie-in (“Yesterday’s Children”) of the story of Jenny Cockell who died as Mary Sutton in Ireland in 1932, leaving behind several children.  In her present incarnation (as a Cancerian) she had recurring dreams about these children she had left suddenly through ill health, and eventually traced them and met them.  She wrote subsequent books “Past Lives, Future Lives” (1996) and “Journeys through Time” (2008) detailing her efforts to trace her future lives, which make fascinating reading.  I did write to her and obtained her birth time, which showed interesting correlations between the life of Mary Sutton and Jenny Cockell.  Subsequently I went to a lecture she gave, and introduced myself.

Brian Weiss, an American psychiatrist, has produced a number of enthralling books on the subject of past life regression, such as “Only Love is Real” describing various cases in his practice, and what can be learned about life through them.  In 2004 he published a book of Future Life therapy entitled “Same Soul, Many Bodies”.  He developed a method of surveying the results of present choices through three possible future paths, which seems to have been very effective.  Often one path stands out as being brighter than the rest, but depends on present negativity being worked through.  Of the glimpses into the future which are shown in these samples, there are a variety of scenarios, including many hi-tech or scientifically advanced examples.

So far, the authors and books described have been in chronological order, but around four years ago I discovered (and devoured) the books of Bruce Goldberg, whose books on futuristic subjects date much further back.  Like Jenny Cockell, he also wrote a book entitled “Past Lives, Future Lives”, but dated 1982.  Here he gives examples of future progressions he conducted, with some quite detailed pictures of the future.  He too gives some examples of hi-tech living, and some clinical scientific types.  He also portrays some more detached forms of human relationship, which I find unsettling – hopefully there is still variation and choice in that matter.  An unusual feature of his work, is the connection between our future selves and our present selves, for which he gives graphic examples and exercises in his many books.

Future Life work then (in my narrative at least) leaps forward with the advent of Anne Jirsch’s book of 2007 entitled “The Future is Yours”.  Anne Jirsch was a psychic who worked with past lives and then was suddenly brought into future life scenarios, in working with her group of friends.  She then realized the creative potential of this work in many applications, and her book takes us through many exercises both relating to the future in this lifetime, and future lifetimes.  I attended her workshop at the Festival of Mind-Body-Spirit in London in May (regular readers may remember) and was sufficiently impressed to put my name down for a future practitioner course.

In my own practice, given my interest in the subject for many years, future scenarios do come through from time to time, and are always very revealing, and empowering for the individual.  Working with future lives is more malleable than working with past lives, and karmic considerations need to be catered for, but it can take us forward in unusual ways – out of the box, out of the comfort zone, and left field!