What is a Final Focus?

by Anet Paulina

People who believe in reincarnation or otherwise acknowledge that the human soul or essence manifests in more than one lifetime no doubt are familiar with the idea of a last or “final” lifetime. The channeled personality Elias calls each life a focus, because it is a focus of the attention of the soul or essence. Hence, the “last” lifetime is the final focus.

Those with reincarnation beliefs typically view a soul’s lifetimes as chronologically linear and progressive, with each life building upon knowledge and awareness gained in the previous one. In this belief system, the final lifetime would have the most wisdom and experience and therefore would be considered more “enlightened” than the previous ones.

The term past lives is a misleading because all lives actually are occurring simultaneously ‐ there is no “time” outside of our perceptual framework. This can be a difficult concept to comprehend. A helpful metaphor is to view a soul as a mansion with hundreds (or even thousands) of rooms. In each room a different life is being lived, in its own time period. In one room the soul is manifest as a male Native American in the 1800s; in another, it is a female slave in ancient Egypt. In yet another the soul is expressing itself as a Scottish nobleman in the 1400s. Each of these lives, along with scores of others, is occurring at the same time.

If the lives are simultaneous, an obvious question is: how can there be a final one? Why would it even be necessary?

In fact there is a final focus, but not in terms of chronological time, or even accrual of wisdom. To use another metaphor, a soul’s manifestation on earth can be compared to a trip to a large shopping center with a tremendous variety of shops, restaurants, movies, and other activities. When the soul first arrives (in the “initiating” focus), it is excited and perhaps bewildered by all the possibilities and potential experiences. The soul manifests more lives to experience all the things it is drawn to, visiting some types of shops repeatedly, as it has a preference for those types of experiences.

Eventually, as with all shopping trips, the soul has experienced everything it is drawn to, and the time has come to leave the mall. But someone — one of the soul’s focuses — needs to make that choice! That “someone” is the final focus.

If, as Elias says, the final focus is not based on chronological time, what is it based on? As a final focus myself, I would like to think the designation means I’m more advanced in wisdom, knowledge, and awareness than my other focuses — that I have somehow reached the “top of my class” and am ready to graduate.

Perhaps sadly (from the ego’s perspective), I have realized that this is not the case. A final focus is no more enlightened than any other focus. The designation of final focus is determined by one characteristic only: strength of the desire to leave this system of reality. The final focus is, quite simply, the one who makes the choice to leave the mall.