NOTE: I have been quiet for a while, I have been busy with building projects and doing work on the studio for improvements to make things work better. Everything is working great, and I am eager to re-christen my studio business after having let it law fallow for a number of years. I would not have been able to allow myself to go as far “out” as I did in my inner work had it not been for being able to allow the incredible focus required in my business to go by the wayside for a time. That time is now past and I am revving the engines of my new studio practice that will have new elements that will allow me to work with the community in new and beneficial ways. It has been a busy but very exciting time. So with that, a story about reincarnation follows….
It’s hard for many Westerners to wrap their heads around the notion of reincarnation sometimes. We are taught from an early age that this is a belief that verges on superstition, unsupported by science, that it is not within the confines of true Christian though, or of just about any thought outside of Buddhism. There is an incredible resistance in many people’s minds about this subject. I know that in my own experience, everyone that I know who is a skeptic is someone who themselves do not have a past life experience or memory. I think its perfectly fine to be skeptical, but at a certain point skepticism becomes demagogery. This is where belief sets in because the very nature of belief is that you are not accepting of something based on factual data, but on no proof whatsoever. That is a tall order, don’t you think, to accept something without really knowing for sure whether it is true? On the one hand, this is crucial for being able to explore new ideas or possibilities, but it can also result in swallowing a tall tale hook line and stinker! In researching our history in Christianity, one can trace where the concept of reincarnation was weeded out by Roman emperors. It is a fascinating story, and for years I had always heard that it was Emperor Constantine’s wife who was responsible for striking the concept of reincarnation from the Biblical accounts. In fact, it wasn’t Constantine’s wife, but a later wife of an emperor named Justinian. That story was recounted in a previous post on the subject on this blog a few years ago. It is worth reading and worth getting up on the subject if you are at all interested in how Christianity was shaped, changed, and finally forged into a version of itself now known as the Orthodox view. It is not, however, the focus of this blog entry today, though. If you really want to dig into the subject you can read about the history here: https://wordpress.com/post/wakingtheinfinite.wordpress.com/1350
For whatever reason, I have had numerous past lives that have emerged over time to be known by me. In most every case, the recollection was part of some lesson being integrated into my heart and mind at the time and which also bore on something that had happened similarly in the past. What is so interesting is that this is exactly what Tibetan monks and other Rinpoche’s have said reincarnation happens in your memory. That seems reasonable, right? As one Rinpoche has said, if you want to know your past life, look at the conditions of your life right now and you will see everything that was in that past life. These past life recollections were very often part of some pattern shared with events happening today. In one case, I saw three lifetimes briefly, but which each showed me how I had explored the nature of possessing wealth. In one life I was born as a king into it, in another, I was a grave robber of many of the surrounding tombs where I had lived and reigned as that king. In yet another, I was a woman who was part of a large cache of wealth being transported in the hull of a small ship with several other women who I thought of as my sisters. In this lifetime, I WAS the wealth; I was a possession. I was part of a harem.
In other instances, I have had past life memories bearing on events in my life today, such as a life as a native American man, a freed slave in the post-civil war south, and as a leader of a group of Polynesians who lived on islands in the Pacific during a migration. This memory came up as I lay on the therapy table with my body worker who does deep tissue and energy work. Hers was called Kahuna medicine and it honors both sides of our energetic potential; the masculine and feminine forces of Chi or life force energy. I was lying there as she removed a blocked piece of energy and I found myself jarred back into a very old memory that involved me looking at my feet as a small child of three, suddenly and completely aware of where I was and what was happening. I was standing on the beach along the Gulf of Mexico in Florida just before being hauled out into the waves to clean the sand off of me after our outing there. Because I was afraid of the waves, this was a terrorizing event that left me crying all the way home. Odd reaction, you might think, and maybe so unless you were there with me as I slipped from childhood memory to yet another memory further back in time when I was living on an island in the Pacific with a tribe of dark-skinned people who traveled from island to island in our quest to find our own paradise. In that memory I had called for us to head out across the ocean only to run into a storm so violent, every single person in our group was completely wiped out. The waves crashing down were unbelievably large and the guilt that lay around my neck was deep and heavy. It took lifetimes to get to a place where I would be able to release both the guilt but also the fear I had of water that was mirrored in my childhood experience but whose genesis for that fear was farther back in time. The point being that these two memories were tied together in a way that made them relevant.
I am mentioning this because there was a time when I ever wondered if I would ever have recall of a lifetime. It seemed that for years growing up that things were…well…normal. And then things began to happen once I moved away from home. I just began to wake up more and more. As that happened, more and more things rose to the surface. Over time, I found that my own dreams at night often carried past life material in them. So far, I have two languages to my credit that are no longer being spoken from two distinct cultures that I had lifetimes in. In each case, hearing the language spoken in the memory led me to the culture. I say this because somewhere you might have traveled to some faraway location and felt it was so familiar, you might have met someone who seemed as though you had known them before and that you simply picked up where you had left off in some seemingly unknown past. Maybe you have friends who wonder over your ability to do something better than most people. They call you gifted, but maybe it comes from having done it before, having had lifetimes of practice. An event might have triggered recall, or you might have had dreams about them. I am of the mind that we need to know who we really are in order that we might perfect ourselves so that we might be able to open our minds more and know how the world really works. The Easterners call this pulling back the veil of illusion. Me, I just consider it being able to more accurately perceive the world as it is, instead of as we are.
Well what happens when your teacher dies and you are tasked with finding the new reincarnation of your teacher? This has already happened and the story of its happening was recorded and is available for you to see on Gaiam tv and Amazon Prime Video. The story I am writing about is that of a Tibetan monk who recently went on a journey to find his teacher’s reincarnation in a process of discovery that is nothing short of remarkable and should leave those who have been stolid disbelievers with a twinkle of possibility concerning the reality of reincarnation. I have always felt that we need to record instances like these in as clear and unbiased way as we can because helping people to know their true selves, their fuller being in this world is what spiritual liberation is all about. Jesus taught it, Dogen taught it, Buddha taught it, and all of the other great teachers down through time have taught it. While their methods might have all been a little different, their concepts are not that different from one another. Jesus spoke of the “life” or the “water of life” while Zen Buddhists described it as the golden flower, the bloom which bring imperishabillity.
The unmistaken child is a contemporary story about the reincarnation of a Rinpoche, an enlightened being who has come to earth to assist others in overcoming the veil of illusion that keeps souls caught in a cycle of both suffering and reincarnation. It is quite a lovely story, worth seeing if you get the chance.
“If you want to know your future life, know your present actions.”
-Padasabhava, 8th Century
Waking The Infinite 