Walk-in

For the comic series, see Walk-In (comics). For the type of closet, see Walk-in closet.

A walk-in is a new-age concept of a person whose original soul has departed his or her body and has been replaced with a new, generally more advanced, soul.[1][2][3][4][5] Ruth Montgomery popularized the concept in her 1979 book, Strangers Among Us.[1][2][3][4][5]

Believers maintain that it is possible for the original soul of a human to leave a person's body and for another soul to "walk in". Souls are said to "walk-in" during a period of intense personal problems on the part of the departing soul, or during or because of an accident or trauma. The individual retains the memories of the original personality, but their personality and abilities change and become oriented towards helping humanity. Incarnating into a fully grown body allows the more advanced soul to carry out its mission without having to go through the two decades of maturation that humans need to reach adulthood.[6][1][5]

In popular culture

The film Heaven Can Wait portrays one soul replacing a recently deceased man's soul and reviving and inhabiting his body.

The Hawkgirl comics, the K-PAX series of books and film, and the Twilight Zone episode "The Last Rites of Jeff Myrtlebank" have all featured situations similar or identical to walk-in experiences, although the term "walk-in" is not used.

In the Death of Superman story cycle, a handful of new superheroes appeared, among them John Henry Irons, who called himself the "Man of Steel". He never claimed to be the real Superman, but Lois Lane speculated that if Superman were really dead, perhaps his soul had moved into Irons' body as a walk-in, and she used that word.[7]

The X-Files episode "Red Museum" discusses walk-ins, described by Mulder as enlightened spirits who have taken possession of the bodies of people who have lost hope and who want to leave their life. The concept is returned to in the episode "Closure".

In the TV series Ghost Whisperer, the season 4 episode "Threshold" used the term "step-in" when the soul of one of the series' main characters, who had died in the previous episode, enters the body of a man who dies in an unrelated accident.

See also

References

  1. 1 2 3 Lewis, James R. The Encyclopedia of Cults, Sects, and New Religions. Prometheus Books, 2002. p. 382.
  2. 1 2 Lewis, James R. Legitimating New Religions. Rutgers University Press, 2003. pp. 130–131.
  3. 1 2 York, Michael. The Emerging Network: A Sociology of the New Age and Neo-pagan Movements. Rowman & Littlefield, 1995. p. 72.
  4. 1 2 McClelland, Norman C. Encyclopedia of Reincarnation and Karma. McFarland, 2010. p. 276.
  5. 1 2 3 Bjorling, Joel. Reincarnation: A Bibliography. Taylor & Francis, 1996. pp. 141–142.
  6. ↑ Partridge, Christopher. UFO Religions. Routledge, 2012. pp. 114–115.
  7. ↑ Stern, Roger. The Death and Life of Superman (novelization of the Death of Superman storyline). Random House Publishing Group, 1994. p. 365. "I knew all along that Superman would return, and now he has. Not necessarily in the form people might have expected, but it was him. Listen, have you ever heard of a walk-in spirit? When a body has been abandoned by one spirit but is not yet uninhabitable, then another spirit can move in. Anyway, whatever he is, the cards tell me for sure that the man who saved me today is definitely the Man of Steel. For sure."
This article is issued from Wikipedia - version of the 11/22/2016. The text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share Alike but additional terms may apply for the media files.