Book excerpt: Your Spiritual Lineage: Researching the Genealogy of Your Soul -Pioneering a New Understanding of the Origins of Personality Development- Traditional psychology proposes that personality development begins at birth. Instead this new study proposes that each of us has subconscious memories of past lives that form a much earlier origin. A child prodigy may be selectively "remembering" talents, skills, and accomplishments from a previous lifetime that he is building on early in this one. We are drawn to professions we are familiar with because we've done them before, and may choose places to live, visit or vacation because they are pleasant and familiar to us from a past life-walking on our own faded footprints without realizing it. When one of his students, in conversation, began quoting poetry of Arthur Rimbaud without knowing it, author William E. Bray, began exploring the possibility that his student might have been Rimbaud in a past lifetime. Subsequent research led him to develop a lineage chart showing that the spiritual lineage of Rimbaud stretched back through Andre Breton, Virgil and Alexander the Great. He shows how the adventures of Aeneas would have been based on Virgil's subconscious memories of his own exploits when he would have been Alcibiades in a past life. Each chapter leads the reader through an exciting search to discover the past lives of some of the world's most important figures. The book is also written as a guide to help the reader learn how to research his own past lives.