-- Excerpts from Chapter 5, Living with Soul by Tony Stubbs
Suppose, as a soul busy with your soul plane research on emotional states, you've taken theory to its limit and need to test something out. You-the-soul have realized that you need an Earth life.
With the help of your spirit guides and soul plane colleagues, you identify your goals, such as to study the balance between arrogance and humility, or how to create a concert symphony.

Then the two big things you will need are:
The situation that will best support you in achieving your goals, which includes choosing the most appropriate physical body. Remember, that body will be conceived and born, regardless of which soul chooses it. The soul for whom that body will best serve gets to "appropriate" it. (If you hadn't chosen your current body, some other soul would now be living there instead of you.)

The personality structures that will allow you-the-soul to operate in that situation and hopefully achieve your goals. (Accepting that you created your personality allows you to change it. You created it so you can recreate a new one at any time.)

What's all this talk about goals? Are we not just born and left to figure out what life is about? Absolutely not. Your reasons for incarnating are carefully planned during earth life preparation, although ego-personality is kept in the dark until it returns the soul plane for debriefing … unless you can figure it out while still here. And that puts you in the driver's seat.

When a soul decides to incarnate, it begins a planning process that involves countless spirit guides and counselors, and the souls of everyone who will be involved in the Earth life, such as parents, siblings, mates, children and significant co-workers. You also use a time-travel "technology" that cannot be described in our language to preview how the life you're planning will turn out.

Each time a soul incarnates, it transmits a characteristic vibration, a fragment of its energy, plus the template for the personality it has designed, across the veil-the boundary between the soul and physical planes-and "attaches" to the fetus that will be its focal point for that incarnation. As we will see, when the incarnation is over, that soul vibration or fragment, along with the levels of mind and the etheric body (your higher frequency double that looks to other souls just like your physical body), all return to the soul plane to continue development, growth and learning.

After a few thousand years, possibly several hundred of these fragments (all part of the same soul) exist, work and play on the soul plane and are aware of each other as "soul siblings" in the same soul family.
When the soul plans a new incarnation during earth life preparation, these soul siblings all have their say in the goals and challenges that the incarnation will take on, because they know the gaps in their soul's collective experience and understanding that must be closed.

For example, suppose the soul siblings have shown a tendency towards arrogance while incarnate. The soul may plan a few lifetimes that explore humility, which would move the aggregate soul energy more into balance. If on its return to the soul plane, the soul fragment successfully led a lifetime of humility, that helps the other siblings, who can tap into that energy and moderate their arrogant streak. Therefore, each returning soul fragment helps and supports all the other fragments, past and future, in its soul family by pooling what it has learned and achieved.

This also means that while you are incarnate here on Earth, the knowledge and achievements of all the other fragments of your soul are available to you, but you must ask. Even as a soul fragment yourself, you are a sovereign entity and no other part of your soul can force anything on you, not even wisdom and understanding. However, what a resource once you know about it!

All the people who will be in your new life are "supporting actors" drawn from your soul's soul group, a band of maybe a thousand or so other souls who hang together for eternity. After 40 or 50 lifetimes, you all know each other very well and count on them to incarnate with you and put on a good performance. Of course, you have your smaller group favorites, or family, and turn to them for the intense interactions, such as becoming your mate or even murdering you if your soul needs that experience.

First, however, you define your intent for the upcoming lifetime. What facet of the Creator's experience do you wish to explore in your own way? Creativity, humility, courage, humor, nurturing, being nurtured? Or a talent such as music, art or mathematics.

Once you've pinned that down, you-the-soul chooses the circumstances that will best help you, such as gender, location, socio-economic class, and timeframe in history. (Because the entire timeline is available to the soul plane, you could drop into any period you wished, so the "next" lifetime could actually be lived an ancient Greece if that culture best supports your goals.)

You also need to find other souls who want to explore that era with you and agree to co-incarnate with you. To study courage, for example, you may choose to incarnate into a country planning a war in 20 years, when you will be a young man. To study culture, you may choose to incarnate in Italy during the Renaissance, as did Michelangelo. Or Leonardo da Vinci, who studied everything.

Pinning all this down could take the equivalent of many Earth years and involve consultation with a council of wise elders, and countless meetings with the other souls whose lives will be intertwined with yours. You also use the holographic "time machine" to preview possible lifetime scenarios. (This may sound complex but it's as much fun to souls as planning a vacation is to us, as we decide what countries and landmarks we want to visit and where we will stay.)

During earth life preparation, what if two souls are interested in attaching to the same yet-to-be-born fetus because, say, it will be born to wealthy parents or even royalty? The higher selves of the souls involved sort it out because, at that level, we are infinitely wise and can see the larger ramifications of the choice.

Knowing that the most soul growth comes from overcoming the most challenge, souls deliberately build some adversity into the life plan … and how the incarnation deals with it is what the Earth plane is all about. From the common perspective down here, someone leading a charmed life of opulence, luxury, and an easy, painless death may seem fortunate.

But from the soul perspective, however, that is a wasted life, for nothing is learned and no growth occurs. Of course, it may be a "vacation life" after a particular grueling lifetime of torture, rape, extreme pain and a grisly death that caused such disturbance in the soul's energy that an easy lifetime is needed to compensate. Therefore, no one can or should judge any incarnation's circumstances because no one has all the information.

The down-and-out wino lying drunk in the gutter may be a soul studying advanced sociology on the soul plane, looking at compassion during this lifetime.

Who Shall I Be?
The next major group of decisions concerns the personality for the upcoming incarnation. Personality does not "just happen" but is carefully crafted beforehand. Two facets that soul cannot change are its basic nature and the overall Earth experience it has mustered from previous incarnations. These constitute "soul-level personality."

Discussing how a soul crafts a personality needs a model of personality, and a soul entity that goes by the name Michael has given us one. The Michael entity is a soul group of 1,040 souls that speak with one voice. Through a number of mediums, the group has given us what are called The Michael Teachings (see Resources), which present a model for learning and understanding.

However, the entity stresses that this is a model only, presented as a rudimentary teaching tool, and that the truth is far more complex. (The following has been synthesized from many sources, including live channeling of the Michael entity and some of the sources in the Resources section.)

According to the Michael Teachings, souls close to the Earth plane tend to fall into seven types of energy, or Roles, and souls operate consistently within Role across the entire Earth cycle of incarnations.
Michael Teachings: The Optional Qualities

In addition to the two unchangeable qualities of Role and Soul Age, Michael identifies three variable personality components that can be chosen for each incarnation during earth life preparation: Goal, Mode and Attitude.

Goal
Goal is the primary motivation in an incarnation, and soul sets up situations to facilitate goal achievement. Failure leaves you feeling blocked and frustrated; things flow smoothly when you're on track as helpers appear and events unfold with a sense of inevitability.

Mode
Michael identifies the next quality of personality the soul chooses as Mode, or the primary form of expression and the approach taken to achieve the Goal. It is "how you do things" behind "what you do," and how other people see you.

Attitude
Attitude is the third quality, and the primary perspective with which we look at the world, which determines what things we take into account and how we interpret them when deciding what to do and what position to take on issues. Attitude determines how we see the world and through this, we then use our Mode to go about achieving our Goal.

Challenges
Finally, souls take on one or more Challenges as a stumbling block designed to neutralize our attempts to achieve the Goal. But why do we need such a handicap?
Without obstacles, life would be a breeze, we would meet no opposition and achieve little growth, so we build in Challenges to push us to a higher level. Coming to know your Challenge explains much about your reactions and allows you to overcome the "first strike" mode. You become more understanding and therefore tolerant of the behavior of self and others.

Challenge varies greatly in intensity and degree, and is usually selected by adulthood but may change many times. Old Souls may not manifest one at all. Some Challenges can be self karmic, holding you back, leading to self blocking, self destruction, self deprecation and martyrdom. Others may lead you to be outgoing and self serving in terms of greed, arrogance and impatience.

Who or What Actually Incarnates?
Usually, when a new incarnation begins, a fragment of soul splits off, forms a personality, inhabits a body, develops an ego, lives a life and returns to the soul plane. Then it does something extremely clever-it merges back into its soul, while retaining the same focal point of consciousness that it had on the Earth plane. So, if you visit a medium, your great-grandmother who crossed over 50 years ago can still come through even though she long ago merged with her main soul entity. (Those on the other side say that this feat cannot be explained in words.)

Now, when the soul decides to form a new incarnation, it "borrows" skills, understanding, wisdom and memories gleaned during the lifetimes of whichever of its incarnated fragments are needed. (This pool of wisdom determines soul age rather than the actual number of lives lived.) This "borrowing" gives it a jump-start on personality-building. But the new soul fragment is still a sovereign first-timer, never before having incarnated.

However, the soul may include significant portions of fragments that have already incarnated, especially if there is "unfinished business," as in the case of suicides. But those fragments that have returned to the soul plane do not, themselves, incarnate again, instead continuing their development on the soul plane.

The degree of "borrowed" memories that a new fragment takes on could result in an "I've been here before" sensation, even though that fragment per se has not been there before. It only has the borrowed memory of having been there. The original fragment that had been there is still alive and kicking on the other side, waiting for its loved ones to join it.

The Human Chakra System
One of the trickiest things the incoming soul manages during earth life preparation, apart from working with the three levels of mind, is to master the body's chakra system. The chakras are a series of energy centers that transform and distribute soul energy and life force energy within the physical body. There are seven located within the body and seven outside. Knowledge of the function and maintenance of at least the seven in-body chakras is essential for health and well-being.

"Earth Life Preparation" is excerpted from "Living with Soul" by Tony Stubbs. http://www.amazon.com/Living-Soul-Vol-Tony-Stubbs/dp/1893302857/ref...

Source: http://livingwithsoul.com/earth-life-preparation.htm