What do our talents reveal about our past lives?
We are all born with a lot of talents and the mainstream narrative tells us that we inherit our talents from our parents and that the talents are based in the genes.
But this is, according to Martinus, not the whole story, and it is easy to see why it cannot be the whole story, because we all have talents that none of our parents (or grandparents) have.
When that is the case, then science is completely silent. They do not have an answer and not even a theory. So this is a case where we need spiritual science to come up with an answer.
We inherit our talents from ourselves
Spiritual science answers like this: we do not inherit our talents from our parents but from ourselves, so to speak. A talent is the result of practice. We all know that there is only one way to become good at anything: practice. We know that if we want to be good at playing golf, then we have to spend hours on the practice field. If we want to become good at speaking a foreign language, then we must study and practice.
Practice lies at the foundation of everything we are good at, be it cooking, playing a musical instrument, using the computer, singing, dancing, whistling, playing football, playing chess, seducing women, making money etc. etc. Everything we are good at is based on practice.
Our talents are a result of practice
When we are born with a talent that we did not practice in this life, well, then we must have been in a place before where we had time to practice the talent. And where can that place be other than a former life?
This means that when we look at our talents, we get a good indication of what we did in a former life. Our talents are reflections of our former activities, of what interests we had, of what we liked to do etc.
One very clear example of a person born with a huge talent is the Russian piano soloist Evgeny Kissin. He was born in Moscow in October 1971 and began to play by ear and improvise on the piano at the age of two. At six years old, he entered a special school for gifted children, and at the age of ten he made his concerto debut playing Mozart’s Piano Concerto K. 466. He gave his first solo recital in Moscow one year later. He came to international attention in March 1984 when he, at the age of twelve, performed Chopin’s Piano Concertos 1 and 2 in the Great Hall of the Moscow Conservatory with the Moscow State Philharmonic.
To see one short amazing performance, please click here.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hh_B4_fxC2E
According to Martinus, it takes 3-4 incarnations of daily practice to reach this level of perfection on an instrument. It is obvious that Kissin could not have learned to play already at the age of two and that he had to have been able to play before – and that can only be in a former life. But there is nothing unusual about this, because this is valid for all of us: we take our talents with us into our next incarnation.
Our talent kernels
What happens is this: when we start practicing something, a small talent kernel is formed in our supra-consciousness. The talent kernel is like a small seed that is planted, and with practice it grows. Martinus explains that there are three stages of learning.
The first stage is the beginner’s stage, the theoretical stage, when the person is not very good at something. This stage Martinus calls the A stage. At the A stage we have to receive instruction and concentrate hard to do what we are trying to learn. Let us say that we are trying to learn to play the piano. At the A stage we are clumsy and disorientated and every tune takes a lot of concentration. We are very uncertain about how to play and each step of progress requires a lot of hard work.
At the next stage, the intermediate or B stage, we have reached a point where the process is better controlled and we no longer have to concentrate all that hard. We can play the piano with a fair amount of ease. We feel more comfortable about playing and we slowly start to enjoy it.
The C stage is reached only after a lot of practice. At the C or final stage we master the playing of the piano to a degree of perfection. We have become virtuosos and we really enjoy playing. We do not even have to think about what we are doing, the playing just flows automatically through our fingers. Playing the piano has become an automatic function. We do not consciously know what we are doing; the playing just flows through us on its own accord. When we have reached the C stage, the things we do are felt to be so easy that we cannot understand how they could ever have felt difficult.
A talent becomes an automatic function
The talent kernel is formed as soon as we start practicing a certain skill, and the more we practice, the bigger the talent kernel gets. In the end, when our perfection has reached the C stage, the talent kernel takes over the whole process of performing the act at hand, and the thing we are good at has become an automatic function. We do not have to think about it, the ability just flows from us. We can say that with practice the talent kernel has developed into a beautiful flowering plant. All our automatic bodily functions such as our liver function, bowel movements, our breathing, heartbeat, menstruation cycle etc. have become automatic functions in exactly the same way.
Evgeny Kissin playing the piano is a good example of an automatic function in action. He never performs with a score – everything he has to play is already known to him and he just has to download it from the talent kernel – in this case not just a kernel but a huge tree. He plays mostly with his eyes shut, so he doesn´t even look at the keys. His virtuosity is, in my humble opinion, unsurpassed. Please look at the link below and watch him play Rachmaninov’s second piano concert, one of my favourites.
The law of attraction
When we are born to parents that have talents that are similar to our own, then it is the law of attraction that has made us incarnate with parents that have a match in talent mass. Nobody gets a talent for free via inheritance. Everything we are good at is our own merit. Nobody has given it to us – we worked, struggled, sweated and fought for it ourselves.
So, do you want to know what you did in a past life? Look at what talents you were born with and you will have a very good indication. Our talents are in fact the best existing evidence for reincarnation, and having lived before is the only plausible reason why we have talents that none of our parents have.
Else Byskov is an authority on the groundbreaking work of Martinus (1890-1981), the Danish philosopher, visionary and mystic.
Thank you, thank you, thank you for this post! I have been thinking about this so much. None of my parents are artists (in the traditional sense), but when I was a little girl I was painting, writing, singing, dancing, and some other things, I was talented at any artistic creative activity. School has left me drained and I stopped doing most of these things, but I resumed painting and people say I’m very talented at it. I have a deep desire to do a lot of artistic things, like the ones I was doing when I was a child and a lot more. But of course, the society encourages and appreciates specialists rather than multi-talentedness, and learning a lot of things means evolving slower, which means it would take longer to start “making a living” with something I love. But no matter how many times I vowed to stick to just one thing, I can’t stop the desire to do all those things…
A lot of questions arose in me. Learning many things, I might not master a certain art, wouldn’t be able to achieve the C stage talent you described… Which is not the problem. I don’t do art for the praise, I do it because I feel that it’s the single most amazing and monumental feeling to express my Soul, and actually the perfection of God through art. But I wondered, what if I can’t reach the point in my lifetime where I’m able to let this creativity flow through me, and then am I going to lose all of this learning, and when I reincarnate would I have to learn it all over again? Then how would I ever have enough time to be able to express myself through all these mediums?
And you answered my question. Spending my life mastering anything would not be lost, I’d reincarnate in circumstances where I’d be able to do all these things for example from an earlier age without the money issues. I know what I’m saying is oversimplified, but I hope you understand what I mean.
The other question is, why do I have such a deep desire to do all of these things? I envy so much the people who have only one passion. I feel like choosing one thing I love would be as if someone asked me which finger I want to keep and they’d cut down all of the others. What does this mean? Did I do all these things in my previous lives, but maybe I only got to the A stage with them? Or what other explanations could there be?
Sorry for this long message, and thank you for reading it, and also thank you for your writing, I’m very glad I found your blog. ❤
Hi Kami, thanks for your comment. I am very happy that you found answers. We all have multiple talents and they simply reflect what we practiced in former lives. If we have one overwhelming interest in life, then we may dedicate almost all our time in later lives perfecting this one interest and we will then reach a stage of CCC. I am here thinking of Evgeny Kissin, the Russian piano virtuoso. His mastery of playing the piano is beyond comprehension, and it takes, according to Martinus, 3-4 lifetimes of daily practice to reach this level!!! But most of us will have practiced different things and will still practice them all, over several lifetimes. It is only when we completely stop practicing a specific activity that it will degenerate. Things that are not used will wither and die. So, keep doing whatever your heart tells you, and if you have one interest above the others, then focus on that and you will be even better at it in your next life.