The contrast between the world we leave when we take on human form and this world we arrive in is very great. Mostly we have dealt with it by forgetting where we came from and getting on with the life we found for ourselves here on Earth.

I believe it is less easy now for children to use this strategy. Children now, not all by any means, but perhaps more than we tend to assume, are arriving here with strong, clear memories of other, expanded and naturally joyful states of consciousness. They may not be able to articulate this (or perhaps may not choose to) either to others or even to themselves, but the feelings such recollections generate can be very powerful.

These feelings can be immensely uplifting, and a child can be sustained by them through childhood. Nurturing them on into adulthood, he or she is provided with a wellspring that quenches a spiritual thirst, that need for a ‘beyond’, which was perhaps stirred into wakefulness by the recollections themselves.

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting: The Soul that rises in us, our life’s Star, Hath had elsewhere its setting, And cometh from afar: Not in entire forgetfulness, And not in utter nakedness, But trailing clouds of glory do we come From God who is our home: Heaven lies about us in our infancy!

from Intimations of Immortality by William Wordsworth, 1807

But such memories can also be very difficult to integrate into the life a child finds her or himself living. The contrast may feel savagely painful. Then the child may work hard to bury or deny such memories. If successful, energy has been lost in the effort of suppression, and some of the underlying meaning of life may be lost too. The child, teenager or young adult may feel without direction, rudderless in a rough sea. If the suppression is less successful, there can be a sense of living in constant pain, sometimes low-level, a distant inner howl, sometimes right up close – a yell that must be acted out.

How has this change come about? Certainly not by accident. Our world is transforming, and one of the primary engines of that process is the waves of light that have been pulsing through our reality with increasing strength for a generation or more. With this increase of light come new possibilities. Soul groups adopt new strategies to harness the light with maximum effectiveness.

I give an examples of such strategies in this Visions of the Future: soul groups, devoting much love, attention, intention and wisdom in preparation for their incarnation here on Earth, can maximise the amount of individual soul light each can hold sustainedly in their human energy field.

This means they experience a greater awareness of themselves as spiritual beings and often with it an increased capacity to remember a broader range of their soul’s experiences and a quicker sense of knowingness, so that they can recognise each other and communicate with one another at more profound levels and in some instances telepathically too.

In this way such soul groups can reach across entrenched borders dividing humanity from itself and bring, within a remarkably short space of time, healing and transformation, perhaps way beyond what we have succumbed collectively to believing possible.

This is just one type of soul strategy currently being developed: the group who form a network of love, light and truth that transcends the divisions we have allowed to come between us. It’s a strategy I’m seeing again and again as I visit the soul planes to connect with those preparing for incarnation. In one way there is nothing new about this. We all incarnate as members of numerous overlapping soul groups. What is new is the level of conscious awareness these souls see as being possible now.

But it can still be very challenging for them to deal with the contrast between where they have come from and where they arrive. The Bulgarian master Peter Deunov spoke of it (during the Second World War, but I think it still relates to our world today) this way, ‘At present, we are in a transient time between involution and evolution. [He defines involution as turning away from Source, and evolution as the returning to Source.] Because descent is followed by ascent, at the border between the two epochs—that is, in the transient period—there exists the greatest resistance, the greatest suffering. This is the reason why there are so many delays and obstacles at present. Yet once the evolutionary process begins, the forces will be directed upwards. Then obstacles will not exist.’

So even with these evolved strategies and the planned mutual support of a large soul group, once here they may still welcome help to keep alive the awareness of higher purpose and the divine love which is constantly available to all beings. This is where we can make a great difference, even though the souls we are helping may be very evolved.

We can join in the creation of bridges of light between the soul planes and the Earth plane. These bridges smooth the transition for incoming souls. They can help awaken our awareness to the true nature of the beings who come to join us, and in doing so, we may come to appreciate ourselves more fully for the wonderful beings we are.

Such bridges of light help children to orient themselves once here. They make it easier for them to find their highest path and life purpose. They ease the communication of the blueprint for humanity and facilitate the co-ordination of the individual purposes that we have as members of the human race.

Even those children who may feel to themselves in some way lost or struggling in the world can be helped, for these bridges are not fixed in time. Once established they expand into the future and back into the past. They give grounds for the saying, ‘It’s never to late to have a happy childhood’. For as we connect with the light of these bridges so we discover layers of experience, within our blissful core which is always serene and joyful, which merge with, transform, and ultimately dissolve, the remembered and forgotten pains we may carry as part of our idea of ourselves.

For these bridges of light also relate to internal bridges, the bridge of the spine which holds us upright and carries to and fro the messages of the spinal cord, and the core of light or pranic tube at the centre of our being. As we develop them we also develop a greater fluency of connection between our souls and our human, personality selves.

As ever, it is really not possible to reach out and help others without helping ourselves. If the children we are welcoming into our world are bringing with them wonderful gifts, those gifts turn out to be for us all.