Personality & Spirituality

Those undergoing the second stage of reincarnation are known as “baby” souls. Lessons during this stage are to do with adapting to the rules and customs of life in an orderly, civilized society.

Order! Order!

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Lessons of the second stage

In the second level of soul development, the focus of human life is no longer on day-to-day physical survival but on participating in a social structure that provides order, security and a sense of belonging.

The major lessons revolve around reconciling one’s immediate personal will  with the greater collective will — often making sacrifices so as to create a  more stable and organised way of living than that at the more primitive infant  stage.

This stage emphasizes self-control, restraint and compliance, taming one’s personal, short-term impulses for the benefit of long-term  stability and security. There is a  sense of playing a meaningful role, doing something of value, and  belonging to something that is greater than oneself. Life in society is a system of give and take, and here the  emphasis is on learning to give, thereby supporting the greater good.

In Freudian terms, it’s about having a superego to tame the id. The ego is not yet in focus.

Perceptions

It is natural for us to seek order in life’s apparent chaos. And at this level of consciousness, we impose order. An order that is simple and absolute.

A baby soul adopts fixed, permanent structures such as strict rules, enforced law and  order, and rigidly defined roles, including gender roles. All things perceived must be consistent with this rigid framework. If the facts appear to challenge one’s beliefs, the facts must be wrong since the belief system is always “right”. If the Bible says the world was created in seven days, that is The Truth and any evidence to the contrary must be the work of Satan.

All actions, too, must be consistent with a clearly defined set of rules. As a result,  baby souls tend think of behaviour in  terms of simple dualisms: good  vs. bad, right vs. wrong, us vs. them.  For example, if  being clean is better than being dirty, then cleanliness is absolutely good while dirtiness is absolutely wicked. There are no sliding scales or  grey areas.

Us versus them

At the previous stage (as an infant soul), the environment was perceived in terms of beings that either help or hinder one’s survival. For the baby soul, however, the world is divided into the uncivilised physical environment versus civilised society. And society consists of good or bad “actors” — human beings who deliberately act in either a good way or a bad way.

And so the world at large now consists of two kinds of people: “us” versus “them”,  we who do it right versus those who don’t. We, the decent law-abiding people, versus “the  rest”.

In psychological terms, the baby soul’s sense of self is culturally embedded — ”I am one of us” — where “us” means others who think and act like me.

The sense of personal identity is  also predefined by one’s role in society (e.g., “I am the farmer’s wife”).

Similarly, beliefs are predefined by the culture, and actions are predefined by the laws and rules of society. Baby souls do not, as yet, focus on setting their own perspectives, motives or agenda. (That all comes at stage 3.)

Lifestyles

Whereas the infant soul flourishes in some sort of “Garden of Eden” environment, the baby soul likes to be very civilised, finding its feet in a perfectly ordered, rule-bound society. Think of anything from the American Deep South to the Taleban.

The various lives undertaken at this stage will generally focus on  law and order, morality, organized religion, ethnic tradition, and being  in a close-knit community.

Childhood will typically include  indoctrination into a set of well-defined rules, beliefs and values. Education will tend to be marked by dogmatism, discipline, and a sense of propriety.

That said, the soul learns by experiencing both sides of any issue, so there are likely to be incarnations at this stage as criminals and outlaws as well as law abiding citizens, particularly in the early levels.

Baby soul behaviour is heavily coloured by a sense of what is correct or acceptable. There is only one right way to do  anything, so let’s do it right or not at all.

As  individuals, they are primarily interested in doing what is  deemed  right come what may. Their sense of rightness is largely dictated by their background and upbringing, and may be extremely conservative, hardline and xenophobic. A baby soul could, for example, work as a professional torturer and do so with a great sense of righteousness.

Because of their rigid beliefs and values, baby souls risk feeling unbearable lifelong shame should  they ever do   something which they believe to be wrong, such as blaspheming or dishonoring the family name.

For some, this absolute rigidity and inflexibility creates considerable inner tension and conflict (potentially  leading to mental illness). Baby souls can be prone to rage at and excessively punish others who transgress the law, just as a way to take the heat off their own conflicts.

Generally, baby souls prefer to stick to their own ethnic  kind within small, quiet towns. They can get by in the modern world, though much of it is not  to their liking. They are not so comfortable in the big  city with all its complexities, ambiguous rules and sinful temptations.

Ideally, baby souls would probably like to live together in a sort of  ”Pleasantville” town where life is completely safe and orderly and where there are no troublesome outsiders or free-spirited types breaking the rules.

In some ways, baby souls represent the pinnacle of civilisation. Indeed, the rules and laws that underpin modern society stem from the baby soul impulse to organise community life. But with their fixation on rules, hygiene, and upright moral behaviour, they can come across to older souls as distinctly old-fashioned, “uncool”, and “anal”.

As a mark of their civilized nature, baby souls like to keep their  homes and themselves especially clean and germ-free, to a degree which  others might regard as obsessive or paranoid.

They also tend to dress the same as their fellow community members, as tradition dictates, rather than display any individualism. The whole point is to fit in, not stand out.

Because their own ethnic beliefs and traditions are assumed without question to be the only true and right way, baby souls tend to distrust other cultures. In the USA, for example, they make up much of the Christian Right and the “Moral Majority”.

How do baby souls get on with souls at other levels? Not very comfortably.

Infant souls represent the “uncivilized” aspect of human nature which baby souls are trying to get away from.

Young souls are difficult because of their insistence on progress and change, which challenges the baby soul’s desire for stability, permanence and continuity. In addition, young souls are often fixated on ego gratification and personal advancement, which baby souls tend to regard as distasteful and unGodly.

And to baby souls, mature and old souls with their complex and liberal ways are simply incomprehensible — the Devil’s spawn.

Religion

With their need for a sense of cosmic order, baby souls are often highly religious. They are usually God-fearing in the most literal sense, both absolutist and fundamentalist. They tend to personify God as the ultimate authority figure who doles out punishments to sinners.

Baby souls will tend to regard their religious leaders as infallible and their scriptures as the literal word of God. The religion into which they are born is assumed without question to be the one true religion (even though in each lifetime they might be born into a completely different religion).

Because of their overriding sense of order, baby souls like to do everything right and by-the-book — literally, in the sense of the Bible, the Koran and so on. But, rather like toddlers, they are also prone to enraged tantrums when their rigidly defined expectations are not met, such as when their concept of morality is violated or their religious beliefs are attacked.

Some famous baby souls

Baby souls tend to shun the temptations of fame and fortune so beloved of Young souls, so there are not that many Baby souls who could be classed as “celebrities”. One example, though, is the American singer Pat Boone (b. 1934), a Baby Artisan.

There are, however, numerous well-known historical figures. Most notorious was Adolf Hitler, a Baby Priest who acted out his toddler rage across Europe, declaring it was Germany’s duty to rid the land of “filthy” Jews and other “unclean” human beings.

Some other high-ranking baby souls of recent history include US President Richard Nixon and Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran.

Sarah Palin is a Baby King soul who appears to feel a calling to high office.

Not surprisingly, conventional religion abounds with baby souls, and many have made a name for themselves as outstanding preachers. Their teachings tend to have a paranoid, fire-and-brimstone flavour and often portray life as an apocalyptic battleground between Good and Evil, Light and Dark, God and Satan.

A good example is the fundamentalist Protestant evangelist Billy James Hargis (1925-2004), who was a forerunner of the Christian Right in the USA. In the 1950s and 1960s, his Christian Crusade ministry was broadcast on more than 500 radio stations and 250 television stations. Hargis portrayed national and world events as part of a cosmic struggle between Christ, represented by America, and Satan, represented by Communism. Typical of many Baby souls, he saw the purity of his religion under constant threat from various forms of evil. His motto was “All I want to do is preach Jesus and save America.”

Ken Ham is an example of a baby soul who has attracted a lot of attention for taking on the scientific establishment in what is actually an exercise in sticking defiantly to the script. His “mission” is to defend the Biblical account of Creation from the onslaught of scientific evidence against it. He maintains that there were dinosaurs on Noah’s Ark, for example.

 

 

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The Five Stages of Reincarnation

Stage 1	Stage 2	Stage 3	Stage 4	Stage 5
Infant Soul	Baby Soul	Young Soul	Mature Soul	Old Soul

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