- Children know that the law of reincarnation is a fact of life!

by Ursula Seiler  

Is there anything more distressing than the death of a child? Many people who had always believed in a Creator begin to have doubts when death, that great dark unknown, snatches a little one. But oddly enough, what causes us adults to become distraught is quite natural to the children themselves.

So let us hear what these children have to say. Children who acted as teachers and comforters to adults shortly before their deaths. Children who stand in the midst of life and know that death does not exist—because to them, the law of reincarnation is a fact of life.

Children are still quite close to the other, real world. They have not yet built up a protective carapace of fears and opinions. Sometimes, they even tell us what the world beyond death looks like. The only problem is that hardly anyone listens to them. Elfriede Volkhart is one who does. She is a paediatric nurse and has frequently worked with dying children since 1965. At first she could not always make sense of what they were saying. Today she knows the truth of the matter.

“Dying children often say that they will be going into the light, where it is much more beautiful. Where there are flowerstrewn meadows. One of them told me of a pretty cottage in the woods in front of which grandma and granddad sat, and granddad smoked his pipe. In fact, they had already died. ‘There are wonderful toys there’ said the child in joyous anticipation. Another child said he would cross the ocean on a huge liner. I said: ‘But there’s no ocean over there.’ ‘You just have no idea. It’s really great at sea’, insisted the child. ‘Have you already been there’, I asked. ‘No, but I know it’, was the reply. ‘Maybe you got it from TV?’ ‘No, you don’t see things like that on TV. That’s something else you don’t know.’

“A six-year old boy knew that not everything in a person ends in the grave. He drew a grave with his granddad floating in the air horizontally above it. ‘When granddad is dead, I will lay flowers on his grave.’ – ‘But if you give him them now, you will see what pleasure he has in them’, his mother advised him. ‘Haha! Do you really think that he won’t see them? His body may be laid to rest in the ground, but everything else hovers above. That part can still see the flowers that I place there.’ Was the reply.”

Elfriede Volkhart noticed that children often see more than adults when she worked in a large German city. When she visited a man at home who was dying of cancer, his small son suddenly piped up: “I can see angels around daddy.” He also saw his father’s body-of-light in which he looked wonderful, healthy and happy.
“He just told me that he would always look after me.” The child gained a lot of comfort from this vision and was able to cope well with his father’s death.

A seven-year old boy also told of life in the other world. He had obviously lived ‘there’ in the children’s sphere. “We drank from a spring and ate fruit from the trees. We had little tree-houses. There was only sun, sun, sun. The fruit was surrounded by light, in wonderful colours. Music emanated from everywhere, we hovered around colours. Little angels played with us. Everyone was kind, no-one was nasty.
All around us was a very fine substance, woven of light. You have a face but you don’t know what kind of face. You also have a body, but you don’t know what it really looks like. It’s so very different to here. You have to take care of everything, not break anything. Then an angel appears and gives you a precious stone.
When someone joins us from earth, a big party is held. The buildings are made of light. You can see them but they are not there, they are transparent, you can only feel them. “There are about 32,000 spheres. There is no time, because it is faster than time. When someone does something good, he rises a level. At the very highest level you are with God. You are also given lessons. You learn what happens to human beings. “You will never get bored there. Everything that you can get is of the best. Here on earth it is also fine, but we just don’t know any better. Our real world is there. “When you die again, you are collected and called and recount the latest happenings on earth. When we were there, we traveled around the earth. We floated through space. People could not see us. We even traveled to the moon along the colours of the rainbow. We had so much fun. God came and took a look. He was wearing a coat of light. ‘You ought to go to earth’, he said. ‘We don’t want to’, we said. ‘But it’s better that you do’, said God. A child said: ‘There are such pretty flowers here.’ ‘But the earth also has its roses, shrubs, woods and houses.’ Mother Mary said: ‘On earth it’s beautiful too. After all, you can come back here when you grow old.’ “The other children went to Spain. I came here. I came down like a bolt of lightning. Then I was in mummy’s tummy. I also saw the other children. I looked out, where the navel is, through the small window (the solar plexus).”

Children seek out their parents. It’s never a matter of chance as to which child comes to which parents. The children accept a mission with their parents just as the parents recognize the task of bringing up their children. Anyone with children knows that the learning process works both ways. Elfriede Volkhart: “A seven-year old girl mentioned that she had sought out her family specially because in a previous life she had quarrelled constantly with her mother, who had then been her sister. They had left each other at daggers drawn. The sister then died, and they were unable to be reconciled. Even on her deathbed, she had sent malicious thoughts out to her sister. “She had now sought this person out as her mother in order to learn how to cope with tough situations. I then asked her why she had to depart this life so early. She was seven years old and suffered from a brain tumour. She replied: ‘Well, I’ve done my job now. I gave my mother the love that I had to give her, and she knows that too.’ She knows it too? ‘Yes, she knows it. I have given my mother everything that I could. She also told all her neighbours and everyone what a good child I am. It was sometimes very very hard. But I managed it.’ She then added that she had been a very temperamental child who had even thrown cups and plates around. During these outbursts she had then suddenly recalled, but only in the form of a command, that she should be good. Only shortly before her death did her former life dawn on her. Her mother confirmed that the girl was previously very easily roused to anger. Then she had suddenly changed. She even felt it was at the moment when the child noticed that she was sick.”

Another child, who was merely in hospital for appendicitis, also had an instant recognition of an earlier life, noted Elfriede Volkhart. “A three year old girl, blonde with blue eyes, with many dolls on her bed. She had had a serious argument with her mother and behaved in a very stubborn and mulish way. Her mother then threatened her by saying: ‘If you don’t behave, there really will be trouble!’ Then the child screamed at her:
‘You have no right at all to tell me anything, after all I sought you out. You used to be my servant, and you will now serve me in the same way again!’ The mother was quite gobsmacked and left without a word. A short while afterwards the girl recalled nothing of her outburst.”

Reincarnation is a fact. Children know it. A five-year old girl said: “Do you know what happens to people who die? They go back into mummies and become a baby again.” A three-year old said: “When we get old, we die, go to heaven and become a baby again.”

Why should we be unable to do what a tulip bulb does every springtime without fail? How could there be a God of justice if he granted us only a single life – as a beggar in one case and a king in another? Those who believe in the Bible should know that it also acknowledged the fact of reincarnation until the relevant references were removed from it at the Fifth Council of Constantinople in 553 AD. A couple of places were overlooked, however. They still clearly indicate that reincarnation was a generally recognized fact in the time of Jesus. How would Jesus otherwise have spoken of John the Baptist as the Elias who is come again?

Previously, when I was big…” is a phrase that is often heard from young children. Elfriede Volkhart heard it for the first time many years ago. “The parents usually tell the child: ‘now listen, you have never been big, you have always been as you are now.’” But a five-year old boy stuck to his conviction. She asked him how he got the idea. “Well”, he replied, “I used to be big before and lived in a great big house with many children. I had my problems with all those children. And then I died. I got really sick. I had a thick lump in my chest, and then I could no longer get any air and died.” For children, the rhythm of coming-into being and passing away is as natural as breathing in and out. They still know instinctively that life is no more than a process of being breathed out and ‘death’ no more than being breathed in again by a higher world, the world of reality. It is like a wave that is cast onto the shore and then returns to the infinite sea. Suns breathe planets in and out again, planets breathe human beings in and out, human beings breathe electrons in and out. “Later, when we are big, you are small, and when you are big again, we are small” said a young child.“Daddy, when I was big and you were small, you always sat on my lap. When I was daddy, you were still a child. I have sought out a good mummy, haven’t I?” said a three-year old boy, and a five-year old girl made the following unusual declaration of love: “Nana, I love you so, when I come back I will be your father.”

Many children are not at all pleased when their parents try to convince them that they had not yet existed before their birth. Many begin to cry, become angry or correct their parents. They know that they have always existed, even before they appeared on their family photos. “I saw you long ago from the air and wanted to be with you”, said a two-year old. Another child of the same age put it like this: “At that time I hovered around you, Mummy.” Another child saw his mother’s wedding dress and said: “I was there. I stood at the window.” The child, who was born nine months after the wedding, was deeply hurt that people simply laughed at his words.

In their book Children that time forgot Peter and Mary Anderson tell the following story: Mandy, a young girl, had never been told by her parents that she had actually had a sister who had died before she was born. As they passed the graveyard, she called out: “Look, Mummy, that’s where you put me in the ground. You almost fell on top of me.” Her mother remembered at that moment that she had almost slipped on the wet ground. “Why did you cry so much when I died? You surely know that when I was very small I was very weak and simply could not live long. Now I have come back. I am Mandy the second.” She also mentioned a silver bracelet and a yellow ball that had been laid in the grave. Another time she said: “Do you remember the big star the evening of my death?” The mother thought back and recalled that as she was drawing the curtains she saw a remarkable large star, bigger than all the others. “That was my star, a sign that I would return. I felt that I already knew mummy and daddy.” “I once asked a four-year old boy with whom I had already had many long talks about dying whether he wasn’t sad that he had to die now”, says Elfriede Volkhart. “He merely looked at me with big eyes.”

Don’t you know that nothing lasts for ever?’ I was quite taken aback. ‘Where did you read that?’ I asked him. ‘But you know that I can’t read’, he pointed out. I said that it sounded quite as if he had got it from somewhere. We then spoke a little about lasting for ever, and he said: ‘Look, it’s like with a tree. A tree loses its leaves. It loses most of them in the autumn. But it also loses a couple in spring. And I shall be going in the spring.’ I then said: ‘So, oh, but that’s a great comfort to me’, and he felt that I ought not take it so tragically. I joked: ‘You know, if you were already an old codger, but as a four-year old…’ – and he said simply, ‘I don’t want to become an old codger. I have done what I came to do.’ I was quite amazed. ‘What did a young lad like you come to do?’ – ‘Well, I told my friend that he was a dummy. I told my sister that she ought to be nicer to daddy. And I taught my mummy by the way in which I – um – was not always very nice, that she would have to pull herself together. Yes indeed, she is always so uncontrolled. It’s not at all good the way she treats my sister.’”

Isn’t it amazing how even very small children can be so aware of a task that’s been entrusted to them? They feel – or know – that they enter a schoolroom through birth, a place where more intensive learning is on the agenda.

A seven-year old boy told with great enthusiasm of where he had lived before coming to the earth, and how it had felt. He claimed to come from another planet: “I flew around a curve. Then I entered my mother. I could see it so clearly. You simply jump in. I simply flew to earth. There on the other earth it was warm and not cold. Inside and all around was light everywhere.

“I had wanted us to be three children, and that’s how it was. There were many angels around me. A man was there too, whom I didn’t know at all. This man was himself an angel, and I did not know him. Then I met a woman, who was also an angel. She said to me: ‘You will be born on the earth, and not on the planet where you are now.’ Now I have really been born here. She showed me the way.

“Where a rope has been tied, that’s where you can fly to. Whizz, that’s how I came. Mother was here in bed. I simply followed the rope. Whizz. But it didn’t make any sense yet. I returned to the planet to see what everything looked like.

“At the very last moment I came. I knew that I had been born. I slipped out. I didn’t really want to be born. I had no name. When I was zero years old, I had just come down from heaven, I had no wish to come to earth.
Up there everything is bright, only white coats and no houses and suchlike.” The young boy speaks of the silver cord, an endlessly extendable thread of energy that was the connection between his higher eternal self and the small baby body that was forming in mummy’s tummy. There, where the rope had been tied, is where he had to incarnate.

It’s all merely a question of our point of view. What we regard as the joyful event of birth is, for the arriving life stream, only too often a painful departure (a kind of ‘death’) from a lofty and much more pleasant world down to the classroom of earth, where the task is to learn and grow spiritually. So it’s not really surprising that some life streams will always find it hard to truly live this physical life, with all the difficulties that await them.

There is no question for Elfriede Volkhart that the muchfeared sudden infant death syndrome where babies are suddenly found dead in their cots in the first year of life without any obvious physical reason, is often simply an expression of the difficulties encountered by the little being in accepting and living this life. They simply steal away from it. During sleep they make their way back to the higher worlds in any case, and when they decide one day to no longer return to their small body, the silver cord is cut and the baby dies.

“I have seen many dead babies on the intensive-care unit that doctors had tried to resuscitate, mostly without success. In many cases, these children had been born prematurely, i.e. the life stream had to come to the world too early and failed to cope with the situation. Sometimes, their bodies were deformed, frequently there were babies with a weakened immune system.” In other cases, conditions had changed so much between the moment of conception and birth, that the life stream felt that it would be unable to fulfil its divine plan for this life. For instance, if the parents had separated or it was apparent that they would do so. Or if the parents harboured strong feelings of rejection against the child or thought only of their careers and wanted the child only for reasons of prestige or to keep them company after work.

Sometimes, when children suffer terribly from not being accepted they choose the path of sickness in order to finish with this life. Suicide is the most frequent cause of death among children after accidents. And that does not include all those cases in which the child chooses a sickness in order to depart this life.

“A five and a half year old girl had bone cancer”, recalls Elfriede Volkhart, “that was already at an advanced stage. Even before anyone even suspected it, she had said that a black animal was growing inside her, in her lower back. One day I asked her whether it hurt. ‘No, it doesn’t hurt, but it’s always there, and it sees to it that I must soon go.’ That was at a time that it was not yet certain that the child would die. ‘Why do you say that you have to go so soon?’ I asked. ‘It’s hard to say, I don’t know exactly, but I have the feeling that the animal will finally gain the upper hand.’” Elfriede Volkhart asked her whether both of them together could fight the beast and muzzle it so that it could no longer devour her? “No, you’re not strong enough for that”, was the reply. And she really didn’t want to defeat the beast at all. Why, Elfriede Volkhart wanted to know. “My mummy can’t give me what would keep me in life.” Asked what this might be, the five-year old replied: “First of all, she would have to love me and keep me and bring me up the whole time.” So didn’t she feel that her mother loved her? “No, she much prefers the others.”

Elfriede Volkhart then learnt that the girl had been adopted against her mother’s wishes in a house where there were also natural children. She may have been her father’s child born out of wedlock, and the ‘betrayed’ mother was unable to love this child too. “If I am no use to anyone in the world, it’s better that I go”, she said to the nurse.

Children choose the illness, but not consciously. It’s often a result of psychological influences, sadness and stress. Elfriede Volkhart also saw a number of cases where children had tried to bring arguing or separating parents back together through their illness. “Many children say outright that they got sick to prevent their parents from divorcing.” She tells of the little intimidated boy with tonsillitis who painted all his drawings exclusively with black crayons despite having a full range of coloured crayons in his box. His parents rarely visited him, and if they did, then separately. His aunt finally told him that his parents were in process of divorcing, both went out with new partners and the boy feared being sent away to an orphanage.

Some children are even aware of using sickness as a solution to their problems. A 14-year old girl suffered a tenfold bone fracture from what seemed a harmless fall from a ladder. No-one could explain how it had come about. The girl then confided to Sister Elfriede that she was terribly afraid of failing at school, and that she had to make herself seriously ill in order to work through everything she had missed. The pressure to perform was too great and to simply admit everything would have meant a major loss of prestige. During the months in the hospital, she worked through everything in peace – and ultimately passed the test that she had feared.

Another boy suffering from cancer already told Elfriede Volkhart in their first talk that, “I can no longer stay at home.” Gradually the ten-year old explained that he did not see the slightest chance of changing anything at home. “No-one listens to me, in any case I just get trampled on. If my parents could do something positive for once. Be it only through my death.” The doctors, who by that time knew that such statements by children are to be taken seriously, arranged a talk with the parents. With no success. The parents pretended that everything was just fine, that the boy was lying, was merely jealous of his brother and rebelled inwardly. “I told you from the beginning there’s nothing more to be done”, he then said. And when Elfriede Volkhart wanted to cheer him up—“Come, we can surely find other solutions”—he remained obdurate: “It’s not my job to find other solutions. I can only get them to reflect on things in this way.” The boy died shortly afterwards.

Up to the age of about nine, children usually know at the beginning of a sickness that something is happening in their bodies. ‘Something is gnawing in me’, they might say, or mention before an accident—‘I knew it, it had to happen, because I was so stupid in my head’. They also know—like every living being incidentally—that they must die when their time comes. For these children it is extremely trying to have to keep up appearances in front of their parents of something that they know does not accord with the truth. To have to act as if there was nothing wrong, as if they were healthy, especially in front of mummy and daddy, makes a child very lonely.

“Children always make it known when they are seriously ill. I have never known a case in which they had failed to announce this in an encoded way. A girl suddenly began to clear up all her toys and to tell her mother where everything could be found, as there was such a mess in her room that her mother would surely no longer find anything when she herself was no longer there. Her mother then told her not to talk such nonsense. Six months later the girl was dead. Other children paint graves all the time, or have death play a part in their games.”

Obviously we cannot expect a child to open up and speak more clearly if we had not previously listened to him and had lied to him. “It is also important to use appropriate language when talking to him, i.e. not to say: ‘You’ve got a tumour in your head and you will be dead the day after tomorrow’. We can also ask them how they think the illness will resolve itself.”

A great problem for terminally sick children is their parents’ sadness. “A boy once said: ‘If only they were not so sad. What makes us so sad for the grownups is not that we have to die, but that they do not live’.”
That the grownups don’t actually know how to deal with life. The nine-year old boy said to his mother. “I want you to enjoy the wonders of the world afterwards too, just like you are now doing with me, to continue your life and enjoy each day.” And he added: “You must be brave, but not only when I’m dead, but so you can live during the time still left to me and enjoy each day.” She ought to show courage now. Afterwards, he would no longer benefit from it.

The boy was fully aware of how adults see the matter: that it’s easier for them to mourn than to be joyful. That they say: ‘Oh, if only it could already be over’—instead of feeling joy in every precious moment that is still left to them.

A mother whose baby had died was distraught for so long that her marriage collapsed and she needed psychiatric care. She then went on to have another child with her boyfriend. When the child was about two years old, she lay down in the living room for an afternoon nap. Suddenly the door opened and she heard—patter, patter, patter— how soft steps approached her and something grasped her hand. It felt like the small soft hand of a child. But there was no child to be seen! She could clearly feel the hand, although it was not physical. She felt a wave of comfort flooding over her. Patter, patter, patter, she heard the steps again, and the living-room door closed quietly. “The same thing was repeated several times”, she later told Elfriede Volkhart. “I think that my dead child came back to tell me that all is well. That I have mourned enough and ought to start enjoying life again.”

After the funeral of a child, the parents ought to turn back to face life—even though this might seem hard. If they fail to do so, they hold their deceased child back with their mourning And make it difficult for him to enjoy the happiness of the other world and to go on to learn. It may be a comfort to them that death does not exist as the end, a great black abyss, and that their child is certainly happy and well looked after in its new abode. And on top of that: by letting go, we allow the same life stream to return. Perhaps back to our own family, but perhaps also—if the child has accomplished his mission there, somewhere else. No child belongs to us. If we really think of his well-being, we ought not be sad for an entire lifetime! After all, there is more life in death than death in life.


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Reproduced with kind permission – Zeiten Schrift, Nov 2008.