We forget because the wish of everything that comes into physical reality is to learn how to be separate. That’s the simple answer.

In soul reality everything is much more connected. When we’re there, I don’t think we can say that a wish belongs to just one soul. Wishes and every other part of what the soul does are shared pretty freely with all the other beings that are there. There may be some limit to the sharing based on connections, but every being is connected to lots of others.

When we are so connected with others, we can’t learn about the aspects of our soul (wishes, feelings, thoughts, etc.). So we decided to run an experiment. And here we are — in physical reality — separate from everyone else.

Many people say that only a part of us comes to earth to be in our body. I don’t agree. This body thing is so hard that I can’t imagine doing it with anything less than every bit of soul I have. Beyond that, leaving a part of the soul behind is the exact opposite of what I think the goal is. If we want to learn to be separate, we can’t leave most of ourselves connected.

Still the people who say that most of our soul stays in soul reality are making an observation we need to explain. We don’t throw away observations, but we are allowed to question interpretations.

Let me propose this. In soul reality we are closely connected with many, many souls around us. The connections are so close that a single soul really can’t be sure which is me and which is you. So we separate. All of one soul comes here in one body. When we start to reestablish our connections to soul reality, we find the group we were part of. It’s no surprise to me that a soul will feel like that group is more of the soul on earth. Before separation, that’s what it was like.

So I suggest that a soul group leaves most of itself in soul reality when it sends all of a single soul to earth. But the single soul is complete in itself and all of it is on earth, alone, separate, and learning what it wished to learn.

Does it matter? I think so. Sovereignty is a vital part of the lesson. We aren’t sovereign in the way I understand it if part of us is in physical reality and another part is in soul reality. I don’t think we learn the lesson of separateness until we know that what we have here is all of us. And those things that feel like part of us are really just the group we used to be in.

The plan for taking on bodies was, I believe, to start with no connections. The I-Am cuts us apart from others. Then we were to establish connections as we wished. In fact, one of the lessons was supposed to be learning to make connections. The connections might be to others in physical reality or to beings in soul reality. I think we were supposed to learn both.

Somewhere along the way, some human cultures made a bad decision. They decided that only their priests or gurus could connect to soul reality. When the priests turned out to be corrupt, those cultures decided that there was no soul reality to connect to. Our Western culture is one of those cultures.

Here’s a story to illustrate the problems our lack of effective rituals can cause. Rionagh Na Ard was a Sidhe who came into a human body and reincarnated in body after body for hundreds of years.

Rionagh’s original wish was to help the Sidhe learn more about humans with the goal of bringing humans and Sidhe closer together again. She was supposed to hop into a human body for a short time and come back with a report. It didn’t work out that way. You can find her book and read more about her on her website [http://www.ravensidhe.com].

She wonders why she was stuck in human form for so many lifetimes. I suggest two ideas.

One is that she didn’t fulfill her wish to understand humans until she had gone through all of the lifetimes. She hoped for a quick in and out, but that wasn’t the wish. The wish was to understand. Wishes are powerful and, done properly, give us what we wish for. She and her companions wished well and now have what they wished for. It just took a long time. We have to be careful what we wish.

The other is that the call of the physical is so strong that it really does rip our connections to other souls. It may even rip our soul apart. In that case we need initiations to remake the connections. Unfortunately our culture lost those initiations a long time ago. Rionagh, working with her Sidhe companions, had to set up a series of initiations for this lifetime. These worked, so now she can go back.

In the West we’ve thrown out most of our rituals or made them ineffective. Here are some examples. We’ve kept marriage, sort of, which is a deep connection between two people. We’ve thrown out the idea of a vision quest or dismemberment in a shaman ritual. The Christian rituals, such as baptism, have a hint of soul. But they have been turned into more of a connection with a particular sect and less with the greater soul reality behind religion.

Rionagh and her Sidhe family had to figure out a way to set up the required rituals because they weren’t available for her as a Sidhe. Non-Western cultures still have many of these rituals of growing up that will work for humans. The rituals help people in those cultures connect, both to each other and to soul reality. We can recover the rituals if we choose to.

So the answer to the question of why we forget is that we wish to. That’s half of our wish. Unfortunately we’ve lost the ways to get back the memories we need for the other half of our wish.

The good news is that the rituals aren’t completely lost. By recovering them we can learn about our souls while we experience our separateness in physical bodies. Realizing we have souls that wish to be connected as well as separate is a good place to start. There are many soul practices that will let us continue, if we are willing to do the work.