Instructions Before Visiting Earth- A Poem For The Soul’s Journey by James McCrae
Creative Alchemy
by James McCrae
Instructions Before Visiting Earth by James McCrae
In the event that you wake up
and find your soul separated from source
and manifest into material form, don’t panic.
Your condition is only temporary.
You have been selected for the opportunity
of human incarnation.
This 3D simulation is designed
to break up the monotony of eternity
by giving you a fully immersive experience
as a distinct ego identity.
Your body will serve
as your physical avatar
as you navigate a dense and dramatic reality.
There will be many distractions
causing you to forget your true nature and origin.
You will experience a range of emotions
from joy to loneliness to despair.
But remember – no matter
what trials and traumas you encounter,
your soul remains perfectly safe.
At times you may feel lost or afraid.
This is totally normal.
If you ever need guidance,
simply slow down your busy mind
and bring your awareness
to the quiet place
inside yourself.
On this planet, nothing is permanent.
People and things will come and go.
You will fall in love and form sentimental attachments
only to lose everything you hold dear.
So cling to nothing too tightly, even yourself,
and when it’s time to let go, let go with grace,
for nothing is owned, only borrowed.
As you walk among
the people on the planet,
try to be a good guest.
Tread lightly. Remember
that you are only visiting.
Don’t make a mess.
Listen more than you speak.
Give more than you take.
Don’t keep your soft heart
locked inside a glass cage,
protected from wear and tear.
You’ll never make it out alive
and time passes quickly.
So come back with some battle scars
and good stories to tell.
Written By James McCrae
There are certain pieces of writing that do more than resonate—they recognize you. When I read Instructions Before Visiting Earth, it felt less like discovering a poem and more like remembering something I had always known.
For as long as I can recall, I have sensed that being human is a temporary assignment rather than a permanent identity. Life feels less like ownership and more like stewardship—of time, of relationships, of experiences that pass through our hands like water. The people we love, the homes we build, the roles we play—none of them truly belong to us. They are entrusted to us for a while, and then they move on.
This perspective quietly shapes how I move through the world. When painful things happen, I rarely see them as evidence that life is cruel or unfair. Instead, I tend to see them as part of the terrain of this strange and beautiful experience we call being human. The joy, the loss, the love, the separation—all of it seems designed to stretch the soul in ways eternity never could.
McCrae’s words captured something I have long felt but rarely seen articulated so clearly: that we are visitors here. Temporary participants in a dense, emotional, sometimes chaotic simulation where forgetting who we truly are is part of the design.
And yet, even with all the noise and distraction of this world, there remains a quiet place within each of us that remembers.
That place—steady, calm, and untouched by circumstance—is what I have come to trust as intuition.
It is the part of us that knows we are more than the roles we play, more than the mistakes we make, and more than the pain we experience. It reminds us that while this life may be temporary, the awareness moving through it is not.
Perhaps that is the real instruction before visiting Earth:
not to avoid the heartbreak or the battle scars—but to experience them fully, while never forgetting the quiet truth inside us that says,
You are only passing through…
Special thank you to Sir James McCrae for allowing me to share your poem here on The Cultivated Intuit granted February 28, 2026.
Reference https://open.substack.com/pub/jamesmccrae/p/instructions-before-visiting-earth?r=7rcq3i&utm_medium=ios