As mentioned, each soul age has seven distinct stages, so that an individual can be referred to as a fourth level Old Soul or a seventh level Young Soul.
Every soul age level gives a distinct flavor to the lifetimes spent within its arena. Except for the sixth, which takes more, each level takes about three lifetimes to complete, though some essences speed through faster, while the solid types enjoy a more thorough, leisurely pace.
A description of each level is given below along with examples of people in that level. You can see how each level influences a lifetime’s behavior. The reason there are so many more people listed in some of the levels is because those are the places that lend themselves more easily to comfort with a fair amount of public attention.
First Level
The first level is a tentative exploration of the new soul age, kind of a feeler or probe. There is a sense of uneasiness, and people at this level will usually spend about 70% of their time back in the comfortably familiar level just completed. The first level is ordinarily enough of a trial balloon that it does not give itself to center stage behaviors. Mike Tyson, catapulted into the media spotlight by his divorce, is, at first level Baby, a bit awkward with so much attention.
While both Jim and Tammy Bakker are first level Young, emotionally they still relate primarily to Baby Souls. They opted for the spotlight in order to enhance their wealth and power. Sylvester Stallone has apparently moved away from the complacent qualities of seventh Young. That he’s become more interested in relationships and more self-reflective indicates he’s now exploring first level Mature. And for idealizing Warrior-ness as much as he has, he seems quite graceful with this change.
Second Level
The second level, though cozier, still has much push-pull. People begin to realize they can function best by forging ahead into the new consciousness, that the former perceptivity keeps them frustrated; yet they aren’t sure of their footing within the new level at all. Nobel peace prize winner, Oscar Arias, is, at second Mature, an example of this. His strong outer task of bringing peace to Central America helps him pull his own consciousness to that (Mature) place within himself where relationships and unity are more important than ambition, power or material advantage. Jesse Jackson is an example of this phenomenon too, but at the Old Soul level.
Prince Charles is second level Mature, though held back by much Baby Soul imprinting which his (Mature) wife is pushing to eliminate so that their lives can be more fun. Ronald Reagan is another example of second Mature, but with a wife who would prefer to keep him functioning at her soul age, Young. Salman Rushdie is second Mature and in a push/pull battle within himself. He vacillates from an elbowing, ridiculing power stance to seeing that people, foibles and all, are very connected.
Alice Walker, who wrote The Color Purple, is second level Old as is Actor Dustin Hoffman. California’s former governor, Jerry Brown, a Roman Catholic, who’s both spent time with Mother Teresa in India and time studying Zen in Japan, seems determined to grow himself into his full soul perceptivity, second Old. He’s really wrestling with his Mature Soul behaviors to do this. These people display strong desires to push forward in their understanding of life.
Third Level
The third level person begins to gain the full perceptivity of the new soul age internally, but has difficulty manifesting it in the world. This person becomes extremely introverted and intellectually introspective while trying to integrate the new awareness into day-to-day life.
A person at this level, like Michael Jackson, who’s allowed himself to bring in some fame is going to feel stress about it. Public television’s financial show host, Louis Rukeyser, is another person functioning at third level Mature. With his Wall Street Week television show he is more “out there” than most at this level. Both his goal of growth and chief feature of arrogance [see chapter on “Overleaves”] give him a push that is clearly somewhat uncomfortable to his essentially introspective, third level nature.
Ralph Nader is another third level Mature person who allows his goals and principles to push him into the limelight despite his personal desire for quiet introversion. J.D. Salinger, who’s spent most of his 69 years ducking the sort of publicity some authors pay to create, is a reclusive third level Mature Artisan. Jeremy Irons, an actor, again third Mature, is cautious about interviews. He does not like to reveal information about himself and admitted to feeling an interview was akin to rape. Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Romanenko got nearly a year to himself with his record-breaking 326 day mission aboard an orbiting space station. He had plenty of private time to look both back and forward at his life and did a superb job with the isolation.
Third level people do best when they give themselves the space and time to stay home and be alone as much as they want. Respecting their own proclivities and loving themselves just the way they are always smooths the way for more enjoyment of self and life.
Fourth Level
Fourth level, bingo. Integrated and consolidated, the perceptivity is now both inner and outer. Comfortable and feeling assured while pushing out into the world, fourth level lifetimes are spent in full swing, doing and achieving any number of things – perhaps forming bits of karma along the way.
Singer/Poet Bob Dylan moves between third and fourth levels. Pope John Paul II, Fidel Castro, Corazon Aquino, Jane Fonda, and Terry Cole-Whittaker are all fourth level Mature, while Imelda and Ferdinand Marcos, Panama’s General Noriega and Syria’s President Assad are fourth Young. Queen Elizabeth is fourth Baby and doing excellent job being in such a spotlight at a very early soul age. Phil Donahue and Kevin Ryerson are both busy, fourth level Old Souls.
Fifth Level
Fifth level people start pushing on the limits of their reassuring fourth level existences. Believe it or not, humans don’t stick with comfort long, especially when it starts impinging on growth. Leaving the beaten path, like Old Soul Carl Jung, for exploration, experimentation and the unorthodox, this level stretches every point and often shows up as pretty eccentric in the process.
Mikhail Gorbachev is now manifesting his full soul age, fifth Mature, in precisely this way. The unusual birthmark sitting on his forehead should have been one clue to his ultimate destination. How perfect for a fifth level person to be leading Russia out of its tiresome stodginess.
Another fifth Mature person, Robert Bly, is leading American men from their stuckness. Fifth Old feminist witch and author, Zsuzanna Budapest, is leading women towards the blessings of nature and the goddess. Zsa Zsa Gabor cultivated her fifth Young eccentricities and power needs with charm – for the most part. Joan Quigley pushed her need for eccentricity and power with astrology, quite an unconventional Young Soul pursuit.
At fifth level a person may feel out of his element, odd and off-balance socially, and may be seen as less mature than his more secure fourth level friends. Divine, the fat, quite fabulous drag queen star of Female Trouble and Hairspray, obviously wrote his/her own rules but didn’t find much balance in life. The enigmatic Andy Warhol didn’t find much personal balance either. Neither does PeeWee Herman, whose eccentricities give him little rest. Gary Larson, the creator of the extremely bizarre and wonderful “The Far Side” is fifth Old and reclusive.
Madonna maintains stability by by sheer force of personality and by hopping from a very unconventional fifth level to a solid, businesslike fourth. Lyndon Johnson, also fifth Mature, was full of personal eccentricities (Remember him pulling those beagles up by their ears or showing off the new scar on his abdomen to photographers and news reporters?) but could manage business and the presidency with ease.
Sixth Level
Sixth level lifetimes are about karma. In Infant, Baby and Young lifetimes, you are usually busier creating karmas than paying them back. Every essence plunges in during these early phases and forms the karmas which cause shudders when you sense, from the perspective of later lifetimes, what took place and what troubles you caused. Usually, once these karmas have come back in your face, you know you would never act like that again, ever, because you understand all too well what it felt like.
Richard Ramirez and Charles Manson, both at sixth level Infant, obviously created large amounts of karma for themselves. So did Joel Steinberg, who was responsible for severe wife abuse as well as the death of his adopted daughter.
Jesse Helms, fundamentalist Oral Roberts and Evan Mecham, the impeached, ultra-conservative ex-governor of Arizona, have all enjoyed stirring up controversy and are sixth Baby. A Young Soul at sixth level may do something as inspirational as John Kennedy or quirky as Robert Bork’s aborted run for the Supreme Court – where he itched to form interesting karmas with just about every minority in this country.
In Mature and Old sixth level lifetimes, you piece together the experiences of the prior levels and start handling obligations incurred along the way. This means accumulated karmic debts get paid back through numerous, intense, nearly overfilled sixth level lives. A person will likely have trouble after hard luck and be at wits end from all the calamitous action coming her way.
These sixth level catch-up lives are a difficult and demanding group, usually taking longer to complete than any other level. As an Old Soul, these lives are truly the last chance for all karmic completions, some of which have been avoided for dozens upon dozens of lifetimes.
Think about what’s been jammed into these sixth level lives: Elizabeth Taylor, Timothy Leary, Norman Mailer, Rajneesh, Jeremy Rifkin, Deng Xiaoping and Patti Davis. Joe Kennedy II, who now holds an elective office, is a Mature sixth level Sage likely to have a lot of news-making incidents occurring in his life. While Old Soul Chico Mendes paid with his life this time, Ram Dass and Yogi Bhajan appear to have completed the last of their sixth level karmas, enabling them to move on to the comfort of seventh level.
Seventh Level
Whew, seventh level! The karma’s paid; it’s time for some well earned poise, rest and complacency. Not too many obstructions or impeding subplots here; seventh level lives usually unfold rather gracefully. Having freshly understood the lessons themselves, individuals are in a good position to teach others – especially those of the soul age just completed. For Mature and Old Souls particularly, there is an urgency to share their perceptivity and ways of being with others. Think of how fired up Roseanne Arnold and Robin Williams are, for example, to share their perceptions with us, or George Lucas and Martin Luther King.
Moamar Khadafy, at seventh level Baby, and Israel’s Prime Minister Shamir, seventh Young, don’t have lives that flow as easily as some but are tenacious enough with their beliefs, even under fire, to display that seventh level self-satisfaction which can feel maddeningly smug to those who happen to disagree. Ayn Rand is another seventh Young person who was quite self-contained regarding her belief structure.
Seventh-level lives often have a comfort and flow to them. Pat Sajak, for a time a late night-talk show host, formerly a disk jockey, TV weatherman, and sidekick to Vanna White on Wheel of Fortune, is ambitious, at ease, and seventh Young. Actors Alec Guinness and Danny DeVito, singer Bruce Springsteen, author Frank Herbert and sexologist Ruth Westheimer are all seventh Mature.
Spiritual teachers Swami Muktananda and Swami Satchidananda both manifested at seventh level Old, as did the politician who bridged more than a few gaps in the Middle East, Anwar Sadat, and the one who insisted on ending slavery in the U.S., Abraham Lincoln.
TRANSCENDENTAL AND INFINITE SOULS
There are two other levels of soul consciousness which may take human bodies, but are vastly beyond the sometimes all-too-human levels of Infant to Old just described. They are the Transcendental Soul and the Infinite Soul.
A transcendental soul is a representative from an entity that has completely recombined, meaning all the fragments or souls in the entity have completed all lifetimes on earth and have merged into full consciousness of each other, into oneness. The entity, which may be on the Astral, Causal, Mental, Messianic or Buddhaic plane, may decide for teaching purposes to send a representative to the planet.
Every entity does this at least once. Because of the consciousness levels obtained by the entity, the representative, the transcendental soul, shows up on the planet as a buoyant, balanced being with easy access to higher centers and states of consciousness. The teaching of the transcendental soul, whether verbal, by example, or by leading action, is centered on the greater connectivity of the universe.
There are always some transcendental souls on the planet; in a time of change like the present there are many. Some, like Sai Baba, Meher Baba, Yogananda, Babaji, Rumi, St. Francis, Pope John XXIII, or Ghandi, obtain wide recognition for their teachings while others are monumental influences on their communities, but do not receive global recognition. These souls are not totally self-aware.
They may fall into maya, that is illusion, believing perhaps that they are “A Perfect Master” or an ultimate authority of some sort. They may forget in their teaching about “All That Is” that they are teaching from one perspective only. They can become attached to attention, love, adulation. But mostly, transcendental souls stay amazingly clear, centered and conscious.
Infinite souls are the manifestation of All-That-Is, of the Tao. The entire universe is consciously encompassed in the one body of the Infinite soul. The Infinite soul is self-aware and does have superhuman abilities. This soul usually enters, by prior agreement, into a person who is seventh level Old or Transcendental. The energy of the Infinite soul is so great that were they to be born into a human body and dwell consistently in it, the body would not last long.
The Infinite soul may enter later in life as for Jesus and Buddha or come in and out as it did for Krishna and Lao Tsu. These souls are always noticed, always teach oneness and love. Earth is set to be visited by four or five of these incredible souls over the next 20 years. They will have the same message: love one another and the Earth, and will represent different races and both sexes.
by: JOYA POPE
PARADIGM SHYFT 