A couple of years ago I wrote a post about a very unusual discovery that took place involving a documentary released in 2020, a conversation with a guide in 2008 and a past life memory that emerged as a result of the confluence of these events.
In 2020 I saw a documentary entitled The Hunt For Transylvanian Gold. It was streaming on Prime, and had made the rounds on Netflix too. In one very short scene there was shown the ruins of a ceremonial center in present day Romania that had images of a large stone disc that my guide was talking to me about in 2008. It looked exactly like it. It was the same size, same thickness, and had lines cut into it.
I know how that sounds…weird, right? Well, at that time in my life, my awakening had just turned a corner of sorts and I was getting a lot of inner activity with a guide who had seemed to make a return after first emerging back in 1985. As he explained to me, it wasn’t that he was ever absent, but that I wasn’t always able to tune into the range where I could hear him. All of a sudden, I was hearing him loud and clear after my awakening intensified in the wake of questioning what people were saying about aspects of the experience. I always thought that need brought him back, but no, it was the other way around. I had shut down and my ability to hear him seemed to go completely away.
Among the things he was telling me that early April during a walk to the waterfalls near my home here, was an object he made sure to show me. It was a large stone disc, about twenty feet in diameter, that had lines cut into the surface so that it looked like a giant pizza. There were something like 8 to twelve triangular sections. I wasn’t sure of the exact number, but it was easily in that range. My guide was telling me about how this stone had to do with union and that this was related to the work I would be doing in my life. I was walking along deep in thought trying to understand what was being told to me. It seemed that what my guide was showing me was how a group of people had merged and had become part of this stone disc. Huh??
I struggled to understand that one. What was the reason, the point? It was like my guide was trying to explain something to me, and try as I might, I wasn’t getting all of it. I wrote about this in a blog post in 2019 or 2020 when I saw the documentary. In it they showed an image of a disc that was part of a large ceremonial complex. It was uncanny.
The large divided disc in the ceremonial center
It is easy I think to try to make something you have seen fit into a random story line that seems to be a fit, but there is a curious second element which I never connected with this part of Europe that bears mentioning.
Many years ago I read the epic tale by Marion Bradley entitled The Mists Of Avalon. The story is an effort to give the Arthurian legend a more pagan and thus gaian twist, which means Druids and priestesses to whom the Druid priests answered to. In one notable scene, the main character, Morgan, is remembering a past life that involved her warching as Atlantis burned and then sank beneath the waves. That memory was trigerred by being with a man in the story. She could see tattoos of serpents around people’s wrists in blue woad, telling her that this man was a follower of the goddess and the hirned god. The thing that was curious about this was I never saw them as tatoos as I read the book. Instead, I saw them as golden serpents that wrapped around their arms. These serpents “burned” as Bradley wrote, because the serpent power, which was kundalini, was the sacred fire, the grace that inspired people no matter their belief system or their epoch. While Bradley’s story was historical fiction it always felt like she got more right about those days than she may have realized. It is a small detail but it is another one that supports the possibility that I was once with these people called the Dacians. The height of their civilization when these ruins were built was 100 BC to 100 AD.
When I saw the documentary, though, the whole story had me shaking my head in disbelief. There were those gold serpents some 30 years later! Still…maybe I was jumping the gun. Maybe it was all just coincidental. I considered that even as my gut screamed I was on to something from my past.
The Dacian gold serpents
So who were these people? To learn that, I went digging in the Romanian archives.
“The Dacian bracelets were created during a period of great flourishing of the Dacian culture, known in history as the “classical Dacian era” (1st century BC – 1st century AD), in which significant transformations took place at all levels: political, economic, religious and cultural. This fortunate context was greatly influenced by the fact that in the 1st century BC, for a short period of time, King Burebista united under his reign most of the regions inhabited by the Getae and the Dacians into a “great dominion” with borders reaching as far as the geographical area of today’s Slovakia.
“The last great king of Dacia was Decebalus, during whose reign the kingdom became a political, economic and military power again. Located on the border of the Roman Empire, which it had successfully faced in the past, Dacia had become too much of a threat to Rome. Thus, Emperor Trajan decided to eliminate this danger and, following the wars of 101-102 and 105-106, Dacia was conquered and transformed into a Roman province. This is how the “classical Dacian era” ended.“
Statues of Dacians on the Arch of Constantine in Rome
Above: Representations of Dacians on Trajan’s Column. The nobles, the military chieftains, are the ones with their head covered. They were known as tarabostes or pileati. The others, commoners, without head covers, were known as comati. The images are engravings from Pietro Bartoldi’s 17th Century album.
“The political and religious center of Dacia was the great fortress Sarmizegetusa Regia, on Grădiștea Muncelului (almost in the center of today’s Romania), with numerous houses, workshops, warehouses, but also with water supply systems. Near this fortress were several shrines and altars, which formed an impressive Sacred Zone, with walls, stairs, paved roads, canals and other stone arrangements, as we find in the Greek world. In Dacia there were many other cities (called dava), which permanently housed a large population, and which were important centers of craftsmanship and trade, but at the same time central places of political and religious life.
“The royal polyspiral gold bracelets are the most original creations of the Dacian artisans that survived through ages. They were made of Transylvanian gold, beaten in cold and then punched and engraved. The utensils used were wooden and metal hammers, covered with leather, wooden anvils, as well as sets of iron chisels and bronze punches.“
Between 1996 and 2001, the entire Sarmizegetusa Regia area, the last capital of the Dacian Kingdom (inscribed on the list of monuments of humanity in 1999) was targeted by the activities of organized crime groups, which practiced archaeological poaching on a large scale. An exceptionally large number of gold and silver objects were exported illegally. 14 of the 24 bracelets that had originally been spirited out of the country were returned.
A hilltop site belonging to the Dacian culture
The bracelets as they are called, were buried in a number of different locations as caches, we suspect, to keep them safe from an invading army of Romans. With enough leaders lost in battle against Rome it is possible that the gold was forgotten or the location was only known to a few. An article in National Geographic on the subject said that these bracelets were offerings to the gods. I felt myself stiffen when I read that. These pieces were buried in numerous locations away from ceremonial complexes. If, as those at National Geographic insist, that theae were somehow offerings, where is the surrounding supporting structure that ought to exist?
My take is different. They were ceremonial, so they were used. They were power objects in the sense that everyone who used them were focused on the same energetics.
We also have the possibility that the culture practiced ritual union in a ceremonial context and this union was used to help strengthen the culture and to provide meaning for their spiritual practice.
It is also likely that they had developed their spiritual understanding to a significant degree. All of this was prior to the influence of Orthodox Christianity which would seek to convert everyone it could, wiping away any memory of the forces alive in earth and all of life that was tied to recreation, healing, and fertility.
My sense is that these people knew about the interplay of opposites and how awakening played into this. It is also quite likely that these people weren’t as shut down and didn’t suffer from the results of that condition to the degree others did, with less of a “veil” needing to be pulled away. This would make them appear intimidating to the “civilized” Christianized people who came into contact with them because such a state roots you in a very different reality concerning your creaturehood.
This Christianization wouldn’t happen until a few centuries after the Roman soldiers had invaded and took control over the region, though, because it wasn’t until the third and fourth Centuries AD that Christianity was legitimized or made legal (and the state sponsored religion) by Rome. Their conversion would have happened more gradually, first by Rome, then by Christianity. This would be repeated numerous times all over the world. It would happen in South America with the Spanish instead of Rome providing the civillian force to bend the culture when it would appear unseemly for the monks to do so. It would repeat in North America with the empire-in-waiting that began as a confederation of colonies and evolved into a nation that would later act like a new Roman empire (as it does today). It is curious how this pattern developed. Regardless, my sense was that these people, of which so little appears to be known about their spiritual lives, did what all people who live close to the earth do: they brought earth into the equation spiritually and that naturally included the concept of the family unit of the creative duo of feminine and masculine as an engine for creation seen in all things.
The Taoist concept of yin and yang, for instance, naturally gave room for the masculine and feminine together. Christianity did not: it had a god who behaved like a vengeful emperor as any notion of the humanizing effects of the family unit didn’t exist in this later model (present in Judaism but now being adopted by Christianity around this time period). Once seen in the earth as a force, it would be seen in all of life, and might even be seen in the forces that move air and push the earth through space in its travel around the sun.
People like this tended to be aware of the cycles created by the revolution of earth around the sun, even if they didn’t know its true nature in the larger scheme, they did know that the days and years had a specific repeatability to them as the erected standing stones in France and other regions reveal (a stone that is centered so it frames the sun on the winter solstice for instance).
The documentary raises the specter of the gold bracelets as being cursed because so many people experienced negative outcomes while hunting for and seeking to spirit away, the gold out of the country. I am not superstitious, but objects that are used communally can have energy associated with them that appears to have effects on people later who unearth them. In the documentary, which was more about buried treasure and the theft of priceless artworks in gold, the documentary uncovered how one of the discoverers of the location of the gold wound up dying a mysterious death later. The documentary suggested that the objects had a powerful aura about them.
As all of this was shown in the documentary, I found myself bothered, upset even, with images that were emerging spontaneously in my mind. When these happen in this way, my ears prick up. It felt as though I was picking up on another age, a time that came from our legends having to do with a time when there were dwarves and fairy folk….except there were no fairy folk or elves, but there was a time out in the expanse of forest where a people lived who were pagan and who lived close to the earth. And following me around was the pattern that has been present not in all of my lives but many of them: the inner union within consciousness that liberates a bio-psychic energy that reflected that union in the physical world. As many would use their consciousness in a lopsided way, often, I found myself wanting to scratch beneath the surface to this more luminous state I have sensed was there, could be there…..must be there.
An overview of the ceremonial grounds
I have seen a life in Babylon where the leaders of the country participated in ritual fertility rites of heiros gamos. Enough details flooded in that I found myself being able to identify the leader. If you happen to have a life or two that was known to history, being able to identify details from memory that later check out is a pinch-me kind of moment. When I was researching the region where I had lived as a Miwok in California in the 1800’s I found an Army memo describing a raid on their fort by the Indians who lived in and around Yosemite. That memo described a memory I had twenty years earlier to a “T.” There were no other attacks on a fort in that area that were written about in the record. What are the chances?
So it was an unusual pinch-me moment when I met someone who I knew from this life in Romania. It’s easy to secobd guess and doubt, but one thing I have learned is that when you really feel something is right from another life, it probably is. We just think getting to those memories are hard work. They seem that way, but in reality aren’t. If you are like me, you might get a small cluster of memories or impressions but precious little else. Why? Sometimes the bridge to that self isn’t as strong as it could be, some material would prejudice you in regards to a lesson you keep trying to learn and you need “radio silence” in order to solidify the lesson. Sometimes. Some lessons, once learned, are done with. Other lesons are like a seven course meal that is digested in parts.
It all happened effortlessly where I could feel the tug, the pull, the flow of that edge of bliss as I held off going any further. I knew exactly where we had met. Union, and heiros gamos again, a pattern showing that for my higher self, this work is some of the most important I can think of. While the stream of energy is powerful, we have decided to collaborate on a book on the subject of union and awakening. There is a lot out there that seeks to cast this experience as something closer to myth than anything else, and I think it is time someone gives a new perspective. I am not even going to say the “twin” experience isn’t real, but I will instead show how it is related to awakening and the sacred. It’s an exciting prospect especially since the book will be illustrated, which should help to emphasize and enliven the work in peoples’ minds.
Memory of past lives isn’t that hard, but you don’t get there via the rational mind. The feeling side is much more constructive and doesn’t throttle down the intuitive flow. Many things you are interested in now are experienced in other lives. Twice in two lives as a leader I embarked on building projects that included pretty amazing adornment and decoration. Today, I am an artist who makes objects to decorate the home. I am not a king. I also have a strong interest in leadership and good governance. But what I am saying here is your lifetimes often share a lot in common with where you are now…and the best way to explore is to playfully imagine. It wont seem like anything serious, but for this reason you can often find some gems. The position is one of feeling. Don’t let ego, pride, or ypur rational mind get in the way…feel it out. Oh, and if you tell me you were Cleopatra, I am going to have to say it wasn’t likely since so many in the past say they thought they were someone famous like Cleopatra. But who knows, someone out there might have been her actually!
What happens when you begin to develop a capacity to recall past lives? In my case, when I had enough details from some lifetimes, I began to see patterns from one life to another. Normally, the lives I have lived are of people unknown to history. Over the last few years I have had clear enough recall to be able to pinpoint two lives known to history. I include this post for those of you with an interest in this type of inquiry. It is possible, with some research, to sometimes find lives that have been known through historical accounts.
A few years ago, after having a conversation with someone who I didn’t know in this life but who I had had a dream about, someone who I had correspondence with, I later experienced seeing a scene emerge that I knew was from a very ancient lifetime that involved this person. What was interesting about this experience was how clear and crisp the images were. I was able, by feeling into it, to tease out details that I “just knew” about but didn’t know how or why I knew them. This experience was a lot like putting together a puzzle. Instead of trying to “push the river” on digging stuff up, and risking possibly making something up in the process, I found myself just feeling into it and then letting myself being led into the experience.
When I say I was “feeling into it” I will explain that this is a particular form of “thinking” that requires me to be (1) very honest with myself and (2) careful that I am truly feeling instead of fabricating something. This isn’t about using emotion though. Instead it is based on the awareness that our capacity to feel can lead to realization. I think many people might have a hard time with this because most tend to discount their feeling side, or think it is inconsequential. It isn’t. Also, the more clearing work that you do, the more you open up this side of your preceptual awareness in order to better see just what is there. That said, on to what I first began to see.
I stood in a room that was a bedroom chamber. The room was made of stone with hewn timbers in the roof. Near the head of the bed there was a window. I looked out with wooden shutters which were pulled to the side that opened to the bright warmth of the day. Looking into a courtyard I saw flowers and shrubs below. This was, though, desert country. I knew those plants were there because water was fed to them. They would not have survived without daily care, not in that sun, not in this dry land. Looking out that window, I saw I was at least two stories up from the ground. I knew that this building belonged to someone who was of high status because the homes for most people were single-story buildings, made of brick or stone.
As I stood in this space, I was immediately aware of a woman who was my wife. She was tall and willowy. Her hair was kept and fell around her shoulders in tight curls. When I saw her I recognized her as the person who I had had a series of conversations with previously. She wore what looked like a dress, but this dress went from shoulder to foot and it highlighted her height. Me, on the other hand, was another story. While she was refined and well kept, I was stocky, short even, with dark curly hair and beard. The word “bull” came into my mind. I was, I knew, much like a bull. I was strong, stocky….and as I saw myself, a clear realization came into my mind: I was a general who served a king. I was aware of my “office” which was a hive of activity. It was located a ways off from where I stood. A general….but who?
I thought about how this man looked. He wasn’t Egyptian. Not Greek. Not Jewish. Not Arab or Turk. Not Persian. I kept going through my mental rollodex and ended at Babylonian. Over and over it kept coming back to that. Babylonian? Huh….
Fast forward a couple of years, and as a result of having had an experience that emerged in the wake of my having had a regression this past Summer which I wrote about several months ago, I had an unexpected outcome afterwards. This gets a bit unusual, but hang on for a bit. In this experience, I was having a conversation with an ET who I had a dream about in the early 1990’s. In this case, the ET was unlike any ET I have heard any description of. It wasn’t the typical “grey” or any other ET race I have read about people describing. While the being was the “five-point star” configuration of two arms, feet and a head (humanoid), her skin was not at all like ours, but had the look of burnt marshmallow. Her eyes were golden and the pupils were of different shape. Her head had a curious extrusion-effect along the forehead that made her head like that of a hammerhead shark (but nowhere near as much as a hammerhead). We had been talking and she was sitting in my living room, pointing to the sky explaining that she had to return from where she had come. I was hoping to get into this dream during my regression this past Summer, but it turned out we were only able to cover one early dream during that first session. As a result, my mind thought about this encounter because I wondered what the source of that dream might have been. Having read a few books on the abduction phenomenon I was aware that many abductees first had dreams as a clue that something larger was happening in their lives.
It was a curious time because not long after this dream encounter, I awoke one morning to find that my feet looked like I had been taken out of the house at night. My feet were visibly scratched like I had been dragged through a gravel parking lot. I had grass stains on the sides of my feet. The stains were fresh. The nails on my toes had also been scratched. I sat on the edge of the bed, my heart racing, wondering what on earth had happened. There was no memory of what had transpired. I searched my memory and knew that I had not been out the day before or even weeks before barefoot. I had showered the night before. Seeing this was one of those very odd things that didn’t fit and that odd puzzle piece kept screaming at me as if it didn’t belong. It was also one of the chief reasons why I decided to see a trained hypnotherapist. There was no blood and I wouldn’t say it looked like a struggle. I began to attempt contact not long ago in my present day to see if doing so might yield some answers. It was a bit of an experiment, but I considered that in all of the ET lore, beings who have become interstellar all seem to communicate through telepathy. This was a very easy way to get around the issue of different languages and since telepathy has shown to not be held to the same laws that a radio signal has (going at the speed of light and taking tens or hundreds of thousands of years to reach its target), I considered that this was worth a try at least to see if anything came of it.
It was quite the surprise when I tried this, because I was immediately in a space with that being again and what took place was…bizarre. Instead of it being a case of a cagey alien keeping its cards close to its chest, this being was incredibly forthcoming. She immediately recognized me when I reached out to attempt contact, and as I found myself suddenly in her space, which looked like a giant hangar, she did this thing where she looked down at the ground, stopping dead in her tracks, and took in a deep breath and then looked straight at me. It was just like how you might expect someone to react who hadn’t seen you in over twenty years. The reason why I am mentioning this encounter is that this being said during our conversation that she had a counterpart alive on earth and she said that I even knew this person. Now I had a moment where I did a double-take. “On earth?” I asked. “Yes…” and she brought up the image of this person and it this was the person who I had been in contact with about two years ago and who I had remembered I had had a life in Babylon with. While our exchange was not pertinent to the Babylonian life, what the being told me I passed on to my friend later, contacting her after a few years of having been out of contact. This was the bizarre part….The being explained that she was a “commander” of a small fleet of ships and did a number of different things that involved trade and shipping, essentially. When I told my friend about this she said that she had a memory of having been an ET in another life who was a “commander” in just the way that the ET had described. So it seems once you go down that rabbit hole, it gets a bit unusual.
Time had passed, two years, and since then I have had a number of releases take place. I think as a result, one night not long ago when I walked into the studio, I found the same scene of that bedroom rise up around me, probably because of our conversation two weeks earlier. This time, as I looked at that same window and the bed nearby, I heard clearly….”He was a general….who became king.” A flurry of thoughts played through my mind at this point. I realized or knew that whoever this man was, his being crowned king after being a general made the events surrounding his ascendancy to a throne a rare one….because when have you heard of generals becoming king in any culture? Most cultures with kings meant you had to be in the family. This man wasn’t. Now, two years later, a whole new wrinkle emerged that wasn’t available to me previously. I mention this because it may help you to see how “doing the work” can have other ramifications, like better recall.
I had several more details stream in in the wake of this new realization. I saw a wrought iron “keeper” that was used to hold the shutters open. This detail was in the shape of what I recognized was the seed of anise. Additionally I knew that we were involved in a practice known as Heiros Gamos, the union of God and Goddess. This practice was understood by the people to be tied to our own creative energy and when this union took place the opposites merging resulted in powerful and potent forms of manifesting. In this culture, they used this for good crops. It was desert country. These people understood creative visualization taken to a high level, essentially. I saw just how ancient all of this was. While this may have been what the kings and queens engaged in, this was part of our own individual personal power. Back then it was about the authorities doing this for the good of all the people. This was a way, if you were successful, of holding onto power. Your ability to bring good things to all of the people was what cemented your rule and position with the people. All power comes from the people even if the kings would be the last to admit it. After all, I knew that this man was able to come to power because of the backing of the people. How this happened, I was not entirely clear on. I realized that it might be possible to find out who this person was because it was very likely that his rise to power was a unique event and might be mentioned in history.
During preparing this post I did more research into the details that I saw and I found some curious things. The wrought iron detail that I saw on the wall that held the shutters open, this star-like wrought iron form I thought originally there might be no way to know for sure whether it was correct or not. What was the chance of finding a wrought iron detail in an archeological dig of the same object to show that it had indeed been used at all? In watching a video of historical accounts related to Babylon I found that the older friezes and bas reliefs found in museums showed that many of the rulers had a floral design both on their headdresses and on wrist-bands. This same design shows up on the Ishtar Gate, which was built at about the same time. While this design looked similar to the anise design, I knew that it was not a direct hit. But while watching a video of images in the natural history museum in Iraq, I saw another image that was also in some of the images, and this image showed up a number of times, and it was a six-sided star form that has the same look as star anise. While this is itself probably not strong enough evidence and it could not hold up in a court of law, it is itself a tantalizing clue that I will continue to follow to see if archeologists have ever unearthed wrought iron forms or “keepers” for shutters, for example. Could it have just been the shape for a star and not anise? Yes, it is possible. At this point in the digging I have done, it can also possibly be anise as well. I wont know until I dig further to see if I can find more details related to this. But it is a clue and when you go looking into the past, it is details like these that you have to look for to see if history offers anything tangible or directly related to your search. The fact that I saw so clearly this design in the way I did deserves a second look. If I do dig something more up I will include it here in future edits of this post. Images of what I saw are included in the images below…
What I saw was very similar to this, but there were too many “petals.” So I looked further.
Here you can see the same floret, but look to the left and another image appears…
This is a closeup…
And there is another…
This is anise. It is described as having 6-10 points depending on the variety and development of the plant. A star? Or a plant that looked like a star? Perhaps they were used interchangeably…it was grown in the region.
While I regarded this scene again, feelings flooded in that filled in some of the spaces. I had known this person before and in a myriad of ways. I felt the love, the care, the admiration this man had for this woman. I felt how something would rise up within me, that ancient knowing of how we were whenever we came into each others’ presence. It was because of other pasts that this unspeakable familiarity came. I felt the rush of feeling, I felt how unapologetic I was about who I was…how direct and how utterly unashamed I was of how I felt because of its depth and vividness. Something in her brought something out in me. It is true that some people will do that to you. For me now, it was about the creative power within the opposites as one. And yet, this was simple in so many ways, effortless even. I stopped contact with this person initially because it was often too clear, too strong, and vivid. But this recent conversation, as unlikely as it was, with an ET millions of light years away, brought it all back, nudging an orbit back onto an ancient path….With all of this and the new disclosure that this man was not just a general to a king but a king himself, I took to the internet to see what might be there.
I didn’t have to look very far. When I entered “Babylonian general who became king” the result was a singular one. There was only one general of the Babylonian army who rose to be crowned king. His name was Nabopollaser and he reigned beginning in 628 B.C. His son was Nebuchadnezzar II.
Most of the lives I have lived have been of regular folks, many who were anonymous to history. This man, though, was able to rise to power, replacing the Assyrian king Ashurbanipal not long after his death, when there was a power vacuum involving his sons who clearly were having a struggle with holding onto power and even deciding who was going to succeed him. It was a coup, but one that involved wresting power back to the Babylonians, something that the people were behind him on. That, and he had an army who would fight for him if it came to that. I was aware that here was a man of Babylon who had served under an invading king who had been part of a dynasty that had been an occupying force in the country. In a way you could say it was not unlike what is happening right now with the U.S. as an occupying force in Iraq. He chafed under this rule, but he also was offered a better life by serving this king. His own loyalty to his own people won out, and along with his tenacity and courage, he took advantage of a situation that he saw develop after Ashur’s death. Also, years ago I awoke from dream with this very strange name in my head: Ashurbanapal. I didn’t know what it meant back then, didn’t even know that it was even a name. Where had that come from? I looked it up and saw it was the name of an old Babylonian king. It went no further than that. there was no memory back then, no sense of being on to something. It was like a curve ball from out of left field.
Here is where things get interesting. This life mirrored another life that I had with numerous memories from that took place in the Yucatan in Palenque. This was itself as much of a rabbit hole as the Babylonian life because of how many details that I recalled that wound up being in line with what we know about the ruler there in South America. In both cases, these men were involved in major building projects. Now you might think, “But a king would be building stuff, right?” But if you look at the history, some leaders undertook building projects and others did not. For example, Ashurbanipal allowed his kingdom to go into ruin to a great extent. Buildings were falling apart and he just let it go. Nabopollaser came along and began shoring up the old buildings and then began building new ones. When we look at the Yucatan in 600 A.D., it was one king and his son who were largely responsible for not just building projects of significant scope, but an attention to art and decoration for those buildings. This also happened in Babylon—his son built the Ishtar Gate and while it is “just a gate” into the city, it is considered by many historians to be one of the great wonders of the world for how beautiful it was. Both used nationalistic pride to get the cooperation of their people behind these construction projects. It took time and money, man and woman power, to get it all done. Stone had to be quarried, laid, and carved for decoration. Tiles were fired in bright colors, paintings were done on temple walls and bas relief which stood the test of time even as the murals have faded were part of both lives One was alive in 600 B.C. and the other almost exactly one century later in 600 A.D.
Both built water works. In Babylon, this makes sense because of how dry it was, but in a rain forest country like Palenque, the waterworks that were built were underground and archeologists are to this day still scratching their heads to understand what the purpose of that extensive building project was even about. Both built ziggurat-like buildings (ziggurat and step pyramids). Both had sons who followed them in their reign and in their building projects. Both leaders would not have ordinarily risen to power on their own merits or based on their lineage. In the case of Nabopollasser, he filled a power vacuum after an Assyrian king died by having the army in case he needed to use them, but more by having the backing of his own people who were eager to also throw off the influences of a foreign dominating power (the Assyrians). Once crowned, he pushed out the Assyrians (an invading force that also happened in the case of our king in Palenque). In the case of our jungle king, his mother essentially created a narrative that placed him within the royal line of kings even though this narrative really didn’t exist. Both led their people to a new zenith in their culture. Both were fierce in war. Pacal fought alongside his army to push out invaders from other areas and Nabopolassar pushed out the Assyrians, both in the early parts of their reigns. What I saw in Palenque was they literally scared the poop out of the invading forces. He explained that they had to appear as savages so that it would cement in the minds of the invaders that no one should even bother setting foot into their territory again. “Don’t mess with them, they are animals, they will eat your ears off!” As a result, there was peace during his lifetime. Both were involved in using spiritual energy to help bring abundance to the people. With the Babylonian king it was through the ritual of Heiros Gamos and with Pacal, it was his sacred blood which he shed ritually. In Mayan culture the king shed blood from his penis. Patterns, anyone?
So what happens when there is so much information through recall on crossing lifetimes from such disparate times and places? Does it forge the basis for a “new” way for us to be, based on the work done in other lives? What I know is that now I am not interested in the least with looking to authorities for the source of power. Instead, the next new wrinkle is the realization that we all have this inner authority and that we each have this gift, this ability to reach into the numinous. The keys to this realization were kept away from the common people for a very long time. Even in India and in other areas, the priestly caste kept the knowledge away from people because they knew that if not trained properly, it could lead to madness (which may have been legitimate to a certain degree but they also perpetuated a kind of infancy state in humanity at the same time not realizing how important it is that we experience what awakening is).
What I see as the biggest hurdle for us now has to do with our tendency to fall for the victim meme, which is all about the past. There is no power in the past, only in the present. We can learn things from it and in terms of reincarnation you can feel into what one person was able to feel back then that might help you with how to feel into your own issues facing you today, which can be helpful. If you are unable to see how this victim energy emerges, which is the connection between how you choose to react to outward events, events that are beyond your control, and how you then choose to make those events a problem….. is a very disempowering place to be. Trust me, I know. I had to dig myself out of that trap. It was one reason why once I awoke, my marriage came to an end because I could no longer play along with what I knew was a dysfunctional way of relating with another person.
What is so interesting, though, is this man knew power….but the way he wielded it was done in a singular way and not for everyone. Likewise, Pacal was also looked to as the source of divine power to his people. It is now time for us to grow up. Our channels for creative power exists just as powerfully in every person. One of these channels is our sexuality. Everyone says that kundalini is sexual energy. I don’t observe that this is the case, not completely, and it misses a critically important point. It isn’t just sexual energy, it is that our creative energy is not divided out into discrete streams but is felt in its truest way as uncompounded and undivided. It has long been seen and known as a path to God or the Source of All Life. When we reach that level of spiritual bliss our consciousness opens like a blooming lotus and as this happens the numinous emerges and union with the higher powers naturally rises up all around such a person. Here words fail, but you wind up in a place within yourself that shows there is this capacity to know realms that your physical senses will never show you. By letting this energy in and wash through you, your own inner lotus will bloom and so much of the past junk will naturally fall away. Nearly every tradition on earth has something to add to this understanding, and as a result it is not something that is an article of faith or belief, but can be understood as any other phenomenon is understood. Those wedded to a religious belief may not like this, but in my experience it is just another reason why we should begin the process of not allowing the limits of belief to limit our experience any longer. Central to each of these traditions is a release of that which limits us. In Christianity, we speak of baptism as a ritual for washing away sin, the blocked material from our past. In the Hindu tradition they describe this as the cleansing of the nadi channels in the body where it is now shown that the body stores this repressed emotional material from the past. In the Taoist tradition ego is superceded by a larger awareness that serves to heal false beliefs. The Tibetans have much the same practices all done through their own cultural lenses. The Native Americans have the “inipi” or sweat lodge where fasting and prayer go together to clear a person of the ghosts of the past.
In some cases, to do this work, you might need certain techniques to help the cleansing along because of how hard you are holding onto it. It is one reason why some people who have awakened can still remain blocked. I was like that at one time, and I had someone more aware than I was to set me straight. It represented a turning point in my awakening process. There is way more there if you can be humble enough to be led (by the cosmic mind or higher self) or to admit that you still have a lot of shit rattling around inside of you. In every single case, instead of a rational step by step formula meted out by some teacher from centuries ago (or from now even), the most immediate one is learning to surrender and to allow yourself to feel deeper and deeper into yourself. Using this very simple way of working, you can go deeper and deeper to pull up the whole place by its roots. Feeling. But many people still think that you do this by way of the rational. The problem is, you didn’t get there by feeling rational. You got there through feeling, but broken feeling. Still, people want techniques as if those things will magically transport them out of their problems. Sometimes those things can serve to be way of keeping people walking like an ox at a mill wheel who walks all day, getting nowhere. That is because many techniques are used to get you to feel a certain way….and it worked for one person in time and everyone else followed it. This is why so many people who do yoga or meditation will sit just as the Buddha was sitting when he had his awakening. There is no magic involved in sitting like that. I awakened without doing this and while I have used it, I have found no particular benefit from it (although I will say that the “mudras” do move energy through certain parts of the body that are beneficial). If you can learn that it is all about how you choose to use your consciousness through feeling, you really have a large part of it wrapped up. All techniques, save those that manipulate the meridian system manually, are based in getting you to a certain state of feeling and thus realization. The rational mind is entirely outclassed by the quantum leap that is cosmic consciousness and can only serve as a servant and not the master.
What I have observed, too, is how we can miss past life recall. I think how we do this is critical in order to ferret out accurate details. I was able to come to it to greater and greater degrees not by seeking it but by allowing enough barriers to perception to fall, and this took a good bit of time to do. Sometimes with each release, I can often have a new memory that was tied to that block emerge and sometimes it can have its roots in another life (and in this one too).
I once knew someone who tried to claim that she had known me in a past life, which she went on to describe in some detail. What she didn’t know was that the time period that she was claiming that this life took place in was already accounted for. I had at that time a growing level of recall of my past lives. I was living in Tibet during the end of this supposed time frame she was mentioning, and before that (in the earlier portion of this time period), I had one of my first detailed recalls living as a native American living in California. This life in my past simply didn’t exist as she had described. I did consider that I might have somehow missed it, but further investigation never brought it up. It also didn’t fit me, didn’t fit how I felt about family or the other aspects which she described, and if this post is any indication, patterns can reign supreme in this work. Having that life was like a curve ball, something that did not fit in my growing landscape of past lives whose patterns could be seen in my present life. I came to see that this was about telling a truth for her, but more in a mythical way. Instead, I began to see how the details, which didn’t fit any of my past life (and present life) patterns, were instead her own. It also revealed to me the issues that remained for her to clean up in her own life, some of which dog her to this day. A quick scan is enough to know what is up on that account. As a result, we get people who believe that they were Cleopatra, or some other figure in history who is well known. It turns out that thousands have claimed having been Cleopatra in a past life.
Truth be told, we live much more significant lives spiritually often when we are just the regular person on the street. But once in a great while we wind up in a drama that is recounted in our history. With this woman, the only life I had where she showed up was in a life in Spain during the period when the Inquisition was taking place. I was a magistrate and I had to pass sentence on a host of people who had gotten snagged by the Church. In it, this person came before me doing what she wound up doing in her present life. It won her no support to my mind. Yelling in court, she (as a he) had been caught defaming people and defrauding them. My karma was that I showed little mercy when I could have spared him (her). Just from that one forty-minute exchange we wound up with this pretty difficult karma that played out in this life. It didn’t take much, really. It wasn’t life after life after life, constantly seeking and not finding, but still trying. No, it wasn’t like that at all. I think it was that way for her, though, because clearly she believed she had known me many times before. But that “many times” was really about how invested she was in her own shame and hurt, which she had created as one of the most difficult emotional traps I could think of. I ultimately had to do what I could to let her think what she was going to think because that would wind up serving to distance her from me, and it did. It wasn’t the most honest thing to my mind at the time, but correcting her own narrative was not going to happen. She was dug in. And a lot of people are dug in in just this same way. Perhaps you have been much like this, caught up in things that you believe rather than truly know about yourself. I was. I hid out for decades, hiding the true me for fear that I might be held up for ridicule. And in the end, it happened anyway, and in letting it happen I learned that how those people act is their karma and how I react is mine. I had to simply exit that burning world. And when I did, I moved into a place of peace…..my own peace….on my own terms…and this led to a much better life for me. It allowed me to get back to square one and then reorient myself to my own inner truth and not the “truth” someone else was seeking to insert into my life simply because it felt so familiar to them even though it was a broken picture of their own work that remained to be done. Projection anyone?
Delores Canon, who spent decades doing regression hypnosis into past lives, found that the details that she uncovered during thousands of sessions could be cross referenced with other regression subjects who had been regressed to the same time periods and cultures to reveal a remarkably consistent story line that tended to agree with one another. When she took people back to the building of the pyramids for example, different people would describe the same things, some of which were quite unusual and not easy to just guess. As a result, it is important to have ways I think to cross-reference your details in cases where there are historical accounts available. I was able to find an account that was identical to a memory that I had as a Californian native American man that lined up perfectly with a written account in an old Army report in a case where the natives had tried to steal horses from an Army fort in the area. This case aligned with the same time frame as my memory (which I was lucky enough to be able to place on a specific time line based on what we also have in the historical record of these people) and involved details as to the number of people in our party as well as the number of people who were wounded (I was one of two who had been fatally wounded). This kind of historical evidence and detail isn’t always possible, though. In such a case, remaining open to more details coming through can sometimes help to flesh out more details. This can take time. It took me two years before I got enough information that I was able to locate myself in history where our Babylonian king was concerned. It may not be the kind of evidence that would hold up in a court of law, but it can provide important clues in helping to lead you to a fuller understanding of what was taking place and how this applies to your own spiritual development over time.
In my case, two years went by with releases of what are called “knots” or repressed stored emotion. Once you have gone through this enough times, it gets easier and more common. A full flow of prana or chi does help, but there are methods that can assist and many involve physical movement that unlocks emotional armoring locked into the body as well as manipulating the energy centers throughout the body. All are pretty simple methods. TRE, which I have written about before, is one very effective method along with body work involving acupressure with a practitioner who understands energy. Chi Gong is another very useful modality that when applied consistently over a period of time can result in significant releases of material, especially at the earlier (first two to three years) stages of awakening (although it could also help later as well). Sometimes even reiki can help. As the energy body clears, awareness also becomes more clear. A deeper understanding can result and a better understanding of your truer nature emerges to the degree that there is a greater awareness of the unity of all things and this translates to behavior changes that are permanent. Until that happens, these states are more like places that you can visit for periods of time as a kind of taste of what lies ahead. Until embodiment takes a greater hold, you can use these visits as a way to draw you forward. Things get easier, the self trusts in its ability to more consciously co-create with the universe.
Sound woo-woo? Well, that was what the ancients were doing, and tantra does just this, a tantra that isn’t rooted in just sex. Tantra is the direct path through, not around, problems. The only problem is the trouble that you have within yourself. This is what I have found. Any problem that you seem to have with the world has its root in you. That doesn’t mean, though, that you don’t seek to help bring change to those things that appear to be bad for people in the world. But the path to real change means being clear-eyed and honest about how the change needs to happen. Then you have to help with that change.
For me, the great interest facing me in coming back again in my next incarnation is in how differently I will be creating. In personal relationships, the way that a couple creates together is limited by the karmic threads that bind them. What is their character? What I know from experience is that as a couple become parents, the karma that those two hold together attracts the consciousness of other lives entering our reality, hopefully as the very means of working through that karma. But what happens when a couple creates without the kind of karmic load as that of a generation before? Does a new kind of person begin to make itself be known? What we each are doing in our own lives, waking up, has very concrete effects on the future of the planet even if you live your life in a solitary way.
No longer do we need the kings or priests. What they did, we can do. And in the Gospel of Philip, he explains that Jesus was teaching people how to BE Christs. How could Orthodoxy manage to have gotten this so wrong? This is the danger of this old way of thinking which is that only the kings and queens can do it, or the priests and priestesses or a church or government or an “outside” institution. We literally give up our power and give the institution our power by being a follower or adherent (and it also includes our money as well). It is less doing as allowing, a very feminine trait in all of our consciousness.
I know that I have made deals and resisted the hardest of blocks. I also know that as they go, I find greater and greater peace. There is this marvelous understanding of what these blocks do that was written in the Gospel of Philip from the Nag Hammadi Library which I include here:
That is why the word says, “Already the ax is laid at the root of the trees.” (Mt 3:10). It will not merely cut – what is cut sprouts again – but the ax penetrates deeply until it brings up the root. Jesus pulled out the root of the whole place, while others did it only partially. As for ourselves, let each of us dig down after the root of evil which is within one, and let one pluck it out of one’s heart from the root. It will be plucked out if we recognize it. But if we are ignorant of it, it takes root in us and produces its fruit in our heart. It masters us. We are its slaves. It takes us captive, to make us do what we do [not] want; and what we do want we do [not] do. It is powerful because we have not recognized it. While [it exists] it is active.
The more private teachings of Jesus and the ones which were hidden away for at least 1600 years and recovered in 1945 show a sophisticated understanding of how important it is to do release work. We might call it suppressed emotion today and they might have called it “evil” back then, but it is clearly the same thing. They saw this work as leading to “life” instead of “death.” I can tell you that when you do this work that your perceptions change simply because your beliefs that you hold that are part of the blocked emotion limit your perception and understanding of many things in the world, you see through a distorted lens, which then falls away (and “everything” about what that belief did to you changes). I have known people entirely caught up in their own inner story which had little to no relationship to the outside world. I was one of them, too. For myself, I see that all of this was a doing based on limited understanding, a growth through lifetimes, chapters in a larger book of life. Then later in time, there came a life that was made to open it all up. If you are awakened, then you are this life, made perfect for this work, so don’t doubt yourself. Step back and let that master within you show you what can be.
If you thought this was an interesting dive into reincarnation, you might find an associated post about how to navigate the professional victim worth a look..
Have you ever been to a place, felt a shudder,or had an emotion move through you that made you feel as thought maybe there was something special about the place, or that maybe you had been there before? Have you ever found yourself reaching into that feeling and finding yourself tumbling down the rabbit hole? Have you had that deja vu moment, a sense you have been there before?
Waikiki, Hawai
I recently had an experience on the island of Maui that shook some of the things I thought I understood about myself and the origin of experiences I had as a very young boy. I wound up seeing things that I had seen in visions and out of body experiences some 50 years ago that were now on the island of Maui in the Hawaiian island chain. Was an old circle being completed?
I had gone to these islands as a result of an invitation from a friend who had a timeshare on the island. It was my birthday and my good friend wanted to help me celebrate. I had been planning on beginning to visit locations such as Hawaii in order to get photo documentation of fish for a sculpture project that has been in the works, possibly a new business, I have had in the works. I just didn’t think I would be able to go so soon.
While we were there, my friend suggested we go to the other islands. I had read about the snorkling in Maui and I knew I wanted to go there to film and photograph fish. When my friend mentioned Kaua’i I said that island felt too emotional for me, I didn’t know why. I went first to Maui after landing in Oahu.
It turned out that Kaua’i was the calm one and Maui was the emotional one. I hustled over to Maui to get the opportunity to shoot some fish and I was not ten miles from the airport when I began to get waves of emotion along with a growing perception of a man, another version of me, who had lived there some time in the past.
In what wound up being a very quick and efficient clearing of past material within me, I found myself cleansing not only a past life but my life as well of the particular quality of stuck energy that this self had in him. And boy was this guy stuck! He was like a rock. He must have been in some leadership role because of how monolithic he felt. Maybe not, but goodness sakes, he sure did dig a hole for himself!
Years before this experience the same friend who invited me here had been telling me about Ho’oponopono. This is a pretty amazing healing modality based on the concept of radical forgiveness of self by asking forgiveness from the universe while knowing simultaneously that we make up a part of the universe energetically and physically. I had not been able to use this method in all the years of having known about it, though. I sensed I just wasn’t there yet with Ho’oponopono. I knew I had to be in the right “space” in order to be in the grace necessary for it to work for me.
This was the breakthrough moment for me. I already was aware of a life as a Polynesian a number of years ago, I just…..couldn’t connect into Ho’oponopono like I felt like I should. I needed this moment to reach that place. So much of this isn’t mental, rational, head or book learning. It is more about a capacity to feel, to include, to encompass, to wake up to. It sounds grandiose, it really isn’t. This isn’t a problem we solve, it is something we let go in order to feel or focus on what lies hidden behind the stuff we are dropping or letting go. Big difference.
As I drove, I was being coaxed to do something. I was feeling this aspect of myself, unsure if it was me or a past self, or a bit of both, being pulked into something. I don’t always know what is about to happen, so I go into witness mode and observe. As I felt this personality my inner guidance kicked in. It said,
You are the doctor. You chose this time to heal all the other parts of you. You can do this now by filling this man with what you have. Help him, help yourself.
That was what it was telling me. I felt how closed he was. I felt him lying on the beach at night in the firelight, listening to the waves, and watching the flickering firelight and feeling like shit. He was so stuck. I had a little “Wait…what?” happening. Do you know what I mean?
Okay, here is a little more of my thought process, ” You are lying in a hammock under the stars, listening to the waves on the sexiest beach on earth, the fire feels fantastic, and you are feeling like shit?! Are you kidding me?”
That boi. He must have been raised the wrong way. Maybe he raised himself the wrong way. Maybe he felt a man has to be hard, strong, unmovable, unemotional, ya think? Basically these are all the things we teach boys to do that we later decry as “toxic masculinity.” Is it any wonder?? Poor guy. Living in paradise and suffering in hell.
So he had no way out. I, however, had a way in, and I was NOT stuck at all, not in the way he was. Okay, I could feel his stuckness in me, but I had enough mobility to slip into his moment there on the beach. I hated how he felt, but boy did I enjoy lying there with him next to that fire listening to those waves! Okay, about three seconds worth, but I had to soak that in! Time to work, to invoke an extra juicy form of grace…
I could feel something in me sinking down into him. Me, sinking into another version of me. I was like a germ that his spiritual immune system had no defense for. In this case, what I am doing is “infecting” his pride and rigidity emotionally. I was able to feel the fluidity, the forgiveness, the softer more mobile form of consciousness and adapted it to him. I infected him with me. I could do this because he was another me.
“Wait. You said this was about forgiveness! Right? This doesn’t sound like forgiveness, not really.”
If you have felt what happens during a radical form of self-forgiveness, you might have caught how forgiveness involves a giving, which is much like giving something away which then leaves an empty space where something else can then fill it, something from the true foundation of you, that kind of substratum where the soul is accessible. In this case, what fills the empty space is a ressonant field that is at once your awareness and the energy of the universe. The hard feeling is given up as this healing feeling is given on my end to the man on that island. A pure moment of being able to feel, and in feeling just a bit more, that sense just obliterates that stuckness. What an angry kind of guy. He’d be a 60’s biker in So Cal and he’d be no one to mess with. So fuck that, right? I’m pretty sure all the yogi’s and yogini’s secretly want to say that very thing, but aren’t allowed to because, well….fuck.
I am driving on my way to a special bay known for turtles. As I drove, tears in my eyes, I feel like I really want to clear this spot out as much as I can. I realize that as this is all happening, I am sinking myself into that same space necessary for me to “get” Ho’oponopono. Yes, there is this deep humility and reverence needed for me. I need that reverence, I don’t know about anyone else. I realize that the way to create the circuitry necessary for this to work in my own consciousness, I seem to need reverence. In that moment I could feel my mind reaching out into that vibrant field that is the All and it was responding. “I am sorry. Forgive me. I love you. Thank-you!” I just hadn’t been able to do Ho’oponopono before, not effectively. Not until this very moment. The capacity filled me, bloomed, or emerged in me at that moment. I’m not sure exactly how it happened, or by what route, only that it did. Something clicked, which is how all of these hundreds of healings have happened over the last decade and some change…
All of this went so quickly, so smoothly. I think that is how these events go for me, so quick, so efficient. I make a turn in mind and it is like the ju-ju grabs hold. I really mean it. I think it is a hallmark of the higher self being given space to work. This only seems to work, for me, through surrendering my control. Then, as those parts of the brain are shut down, nonlocal consciousness can step forward. Thank-you small self for letting in the larger.
The juju was starting as I was boarding the plane to go over from Oahu before I had even departed to go to Maui. I kept seeing these Polynesians in the airport. I hadn’t sern them like this before. They only spoke Hawaiian. They were older, people who looked like I looked in that lifetime, except I hadn’t had the experience yet. It is easy to second-guess myself in this moments. Maybe I was just taking the visual material around me and crrtating a fanciful narrative. Thing is, it is always the other way around. I am seeing these things because an event of importance is about to take place. How I felt. Maybe not so stuck. I kept running into them, hearing their soft language slipping into that place within me that has that powerfully charged sense, the emotion, like where volcanos always start, in a blistering moment that leads to creation. Strong raw creative. Better be careful. Respect that force in nature, maybe in you, too.
The energy I am moving clears out that spot in the man. This feels like a warp in time. Did I just go back in time and fix this guy? It feels and looks like a warp. Did I create a new time line? Or, by intervening, did I alter his own actions in his own timeline. If that is so, I did what time travelers aren’t supposed to do without generation new timelines or time branches. Changing his line alters mine and it by extension altered his physical line in an ancestral way. His great great great grandchildren are different now, but in a small way. A small burden is lifted, however inconsequential. Ripples spread outward. I have waited my whole life for this moment to arrive at this time. I catalyze it by being ready for it. Only then do I have the means to reach back through time. Let me emphasize, this is fundamentally different from most every release or cleansing that has taken place thus far.
I feel like I sank into him by way of using this location, Maui, as the means of connecting in to this man’s life. As this began to happen, I could feel him feeling me moving into him. It felt like a moment of inspiration where something of himself, maybe a more developed self, a future self, was present and was there with a heart full of love-no judgment at all. Here is that liberation you were looking for my brother…
The fire crackled, the waves crashed in the moonlight, and his eyes filled with tears as this simple thing happened. With no effort on his part, this burdened mind softens, shifts, and is relieved. No rituals, no method, no bullshit.
He looks up into the night sky and he says something, a thank you to ancestors or a god or goddess. I don’t know. What I do get is his intent. I understand that about as clearly as a maidenst knowing smile.
Copyright, the author
I was still only halfway to my first stop. I relaxed and sank into the trip. Once I reach the first bay, surrounded by black volcanic rock, I see almost no fish, but lots of really nice coral. For over an hour, things were kind of….meh. I began to make my way back when I get up in shallow water near the rocks and suddenly come across a moray eel, it feels like a sign. I get on the rocks, and as I sit there a turtle comes right up to me. Very well; I will follow you, miss turtle. I get some pretty good photos. I head to shore and while standing in thigh-deep water a turtle comes right next to me. So I just follow along and am able to get a series of excellent photos for my work. Right after, it begins to rain. Perfect. Everything on this day trip is happening like clock work. I feel this voice that says what to do next. It is halfway my wish mixed with this “Okay, you need to move on to the next step for the next event to happen.” If I had gone too quickly or too slowly the things that happened would not have happened as they did. That is, the last part, which is what makes this post so long.
Photo Copyright, Author
It is lunch and I drive to the next location. Again, great snorkling, and I am able to get scores of excellent photos of fish for the project. I think how nice it would be to be on the island and make work for galleries on the islands. How nice would that be, right? Everything is beautiful, and everyone just seems to be enjoying themselves so much.
And Then Things Get A Little Weird…
Once I am done, I realize I need to get on the road so I can make my flight back to Oahu. I am going to go back in a direction I hadn’t been through before. As I drive, I am going out into the most rural parts of the island. I come across these cliffs that look so similar to cliffs I had seen in an out of body experience as a child. The color of the earth was surprisingly similar to the cliffs I saw as a child. It is looking like a match. It’s been 50 years but the color of those cliffs in my experience as a child look for the life of me to be right here along the road on Maui. These were the cliffs I saw over and over in my oobe as a child.
I feel a little nuts, questioning whether this is a thing or not. “It’s just really similar” says that part of me. But I know if its for real, synchonicity will squash that part of me, leaving no doubt. The thing to appreciate is I hadn’t seen a cliff face that looked like that cliff face from my childhood until this moment. Not only this, but the cliff face could have been completely missed had it not been for the rain which caused me to go a different way. I couldn’t see these cliffs headed in the direction I was going originally. I had to turn around to see them.
I keep driving and wind up on a single-lane road. It is raining harder and harder. I get to a bridge that has close to two feet of water rushing over it. I turn around and go back after I stop and walk across the bridge to test depth and flow speed. Yep, no safe way to cross, not in that little car of mine. But here is the weird part: only by going back in the other direction do I see a cliff face that is eerily identical to what I saw as a child. Only by going in the oppositedirection. By doubling back, I was concerned about making my flight on time. I do make my flight and I get to my gate just as boarding began.
So what is the deal with this early childhood experience?
I have written about this before.
At the age of about four, I began having a series of identical experiences that would take place while I was awake. I might be outside playing and I would get this feeling that would come over me. I would feel incredibly heavy but incredibly light all at the same time. I realized my body felt incredibly dense as a new awareness cane on line and….cleaved itself from my body. I later learned that I was experiencing sleep paralysis except I wasn’t asleep.
I would go to this location that for the life of me looked like a giant cliff face. This cliff face had these striations in it that put my young mind in mind of pot roast. Yes, funny, I know, but this cliff face didn’t look like anything I had seen before. I had nothing to compare it to. It was this deep iron red. It looked like flesh. I thought of it as part of the flesh world. The carnal (meat) world.
At the same time, I also would see these forms which looked a lot like dandelion fluff floating down from the top of the cliff face. They would float downward, all so very much like Mary Poppins. I understood I was witnessing the souls of people who were going into the bodies of babies. Just floating down into matter, into our world.
I knew that souls entered bodies like this. It wasn’t a big mystery. It wouldn’t be until several years later that anyone would say anything to me remotely similar about spirit in flesh. These episodes would just happen. Each one was the same. I had a handful of them before the phenomenon stopped, emerging years later as real dreams in another level of consciousness, helping people who had died to cross over completely to that nonphysical world, effectively returning from whence they came. In a way, I guess I got to see both sides of the cycle complete. Here I am, all these years later having spent the better part of my time here now thinking about the next big adventure that is beyond this one life.
What’s next is the interesting bit. I am telling my friend about all of this and she explains to me that in the Polynesian mythos there are locations on the island where this very thing actually happens, and it happens from the top of a mountain where souls come down into our reality, our world. The story sounds like a creation story. But inside of it lies the shadow, too. Well now, given what took place on Maui as well as Oahu and Kaua’i, I am finding myself reconfiguring my past a bit to allow for the possibility that this idea has its origins in that other life. Was I experiencing the living myth of creation using my knowledge about the Polynesian tradition as a frame for that OOBE?
I had always thought that my “location” was a nonphysical one, more like a visionary image. Instead, through a series of unlikely events, it appears as if I am being confronted with this that is connecting me to those islands by way of an actual location that looks exactly like the location in my OOBE from 50 years prior. In addition, I find myself in an encounter with a self from the past needing help from me, something that has at the same time made instant change in me as well.
Turtle on Maui, photo by the author
I think what I want to get across with this experience is to follow your instincts. I was going to go to Kaua’i first, but I kept going back to Maui in my mind. I ultimately went alone to the island, something that probably opened the door for these events to happen just as they did. With additional people, we could have wound up somewhere else, or I may not have been quiet enough inwardly to feel this building pressure inside. I might have pushed it away or tried to ignore it.
Sometimes when things seem like they are going wrong, it may mean they are just getting underway the right way. By holding a state of surrender, it is easier to reach the state necessary for processing these things with awareness. I say all of this to show you what can he done, to take heart, to turn your own corner over and over. It gets better and better, I promise.
So that is the crazy long story, a caution for others that you too might have one of these waiting for you. The result I notive most is my root energy feels strongee. My creative energy is flowing very strongly as my sexual eneegy has also increased. What is interesting is how this isn’t leading to any obsession or overt attachment. Being a tantric at heart, I don’t see these things as a problem, only how we respond or relate to what is. That is my postmortem on the experience. If you have thoughts, I would love to hear them.
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.”
This Thanksgiving I spent time making new friends and working on developing a Youtube series with my friend and gifted intuitive Alison on her island home off the coast of California.
One thing is for certain; you never know what will happen when Ali is in the mix. I mean this in the best of ways. It all winds up feeling so perfect. So real. And so it was near the end of my visit that some friends came over for dinner and as the dinner seemed to be winding down, one of our guests made mention about how she didn’t know so much about the spiritual, not that she was afraid, she just felt like she didn’t have a third eye. One of the guests mentioned how she had done a series of past life regressions with Ali and how wonderfully healing it had been. Before you knew it, we were in the living room wrapping this lady up in blankets as Ali guided her down into the depths for an encounter with a past self. Easy, but it’s easy when you have someone who has the gifts Ali has to help guide and nudge when its necessary.
One thing that has become clear to me and that came up when we were watching a video that same weekend of an interview with a woman who has done countless regressions was that doing regression therapy is not that hard. Our memories are all there, but resting deeper down inside of us, a place where we most often do not go so we rarely, if ever, encounter them on a conscious level. With a little guided imagery and some deep relaxation, those memories begin to bubble up to the surface of awareness.
And so it was with our guest who lay quiet and still, breathing deeply and following Ali’s lead. After only a few minutes, an image formed of a woman in a doorway. This woman was the woman in a previous lifetime, and she stood continually at a door, neither here or there. It turned out that she had a self who was stuck between lifetimes. Ali guided the woman to begin to approach the woman, and as she did, she felt like she could not move. She couldn’t move because both aspects of who she was as the woman in the door and as herself now we’re BOTH stuck, or seemed to be. Seems she only needed to decide not to be stuck in order to not be. Then, as she continued to try to approach the woman, she saw a spot begin to appear, which was a portal off to one side which had begun to open as she tried to help this woman, to find out why she was there in this room in a house. Over a period of minutes the woman in the doorway moved into the tunnel and was taken into the light. Immediately the woman felt great relief and began to see the funerary arrangements, the meal and the home of the woman she had been. She sat up saying she felt 100 lbs lighter!
This encounter was one that helps a person to become “unstuck” both as the person they were as well as the person they are today in their current life since some aspects of that feeling of being stuck often haunts them in their present life. Being able to do this work frees a person up and helps them to move on. This process is called soul retrieval. Some years ago Ali helped me with an aspect of this in one of our many talks together. It turned out that there was a part of me that had become stuck when I was about ten years old. The process was much the same in the after effects of feeling suddenly clearer and more integrated. It was experiences like this along with the removal of emotional blocks through the cleansing effect of strong pranic flow (kundalini) that has had such a significant impact on my life as an agent of transformation.
The experience also showed me that I had a natural healing ability that I have always sought to sideline or put on hold because I felt that I needed to be as healed as possible before working with other people in a healing modality. With my hands on our guest’s head, I felt energy flowing through me in such an easy way. I identified that this was the same sort of energy that we use as healers for helping to bring about the changes that are healing moments. My role was simply as support, but it was curious to me to see how as the woman began to describe that her past self had gone through the tunnel that the flow of energy through my hands had begun to wane moments before she described what was taking place as she looked on at the event unfolding before her. It was one indicator to me that had a way of coming up over the course of the visit.
Soul retrieval is claiming what is yours, a part of you that may have seemed inaccessible before the process began. By returning you to yourself, it is like a short circuit in your cosmic wiring is fixed so that an easier and more complete flow takes place. When we retrieve those lost parts, we allow them also to heal whatever it was that had them feeling stuck. But since they are us, we attain something that they become. Past life regression lets the self help unstick it’s other selves…and sometimes when we encounter angels in other lives, it is sometimes an aspect of ourselves moving outside the confines of time and space to help bring change.
Kundalini, or strong prana, has had this effect for those who awaken. If you are going through this, you know how it stirs, helps you to feel those stuck places and as if by magic, and heal them. There are many pathways or means of doing this type of integration work that leaves us feeling more whole. I think it can also aid you even when awakening is stirring you.
Sometimes we can get stuck in awakening, I have seen it happen often enough, and past life work is most often where the “source” of those stuck places we feel in us now that often make so little sense (because they aren’t from this lifetime), helping to release us, freeing us to move forward in a slightly more improved version of us. The bigger the healing, the bigger the leap into the higher self.
People who have had this experience often exclaim how the irrational fear they had went away when they realized that it was coming from another lifetime, or that one reason they are so good at something is because they have been at it for a number of lifetimes. A botanist in one life, a farmer in another, both with a keen interest in how to help plants grow. A slip off a cliff in one life might mean a powerful fear of heights (that might just go away once the memory is fully recognized). So what do you think is your super power? Your achilles heel? What if I told you that regression therapy could help you integrate both while being able to emphasize the super parts while getting over the Achilles part?
As I have been writing this post, I noticed that Ali is embracing her talent for helping people with past life regression work more and more (funny how that works!). She has done hundreds of these journies over the years, and her method came to her naturally in her intuitive work as a way to resolve patterns that were snagging her clients over the years. But recently she has begun to do more of this type of work, and it’s prompting me to go ahead and publish this now so that if you want to explore this aspect of yourself, you can get in early. The great thing is, she helps to make it easy. When you work with an intuitive like Alison, its like having someone who is one step ahead, guiding you even as the waters might seem uncertain. Its a great way to do this work.
To learn more, contact Ali at avaloncmaiden@yahoo.com or speak with her at The Spa At Catalina at 310-510-9255 and let her know I sent you.
Beneath the world of experience most are accustomed to, lies a deeper substratum of great knowing. It is a vast untapped river of life that can shed a great deal of light on why things are the way they are in your life now. Lying in this river are all of the lives you have ever lived and the many dramas that have unfolded in them.
Tapping into past lives is not hard to do, but it seems hard because our focus has been so narrowly held within the physical senses to the exclusion of most everything else.
I was honored to have been witness to a past life regression recently that happened at the end of a dinner party at the house of a friend. By using simple relaxation techniques I was able to see how my friend was able to help our curious and willing guest to tap into details about her past. I was able to see also how we can thwart ourselves by thinking that the details as they come could not be true, that maybe we are just making them up. I think that we think this way because the details are not in normal memory and might seem somehow arbitrary because of how easily the images come to us. We aren’t always taught to trust our feelings or heed what inwardly focused consciousness is telling us.
In the case of the regression I was a part of, I was able to see how clearing up a problem from a past life helped to change how the subject felt when she returned to normal consciousness. She described feeling 100 pounds lighter. In the case of the woman, a part of herself had gotten stuck between lives, not realizing that she had died. It took her going back to her past self to help that past aspect to move on. The result of this “soul retrieval”on the woman in her present life was immediate.
Sometimes we can do this kind of work, freeing ourselves from decades of feeling stuck inside. Other times we can see how recursive our patterns can be from one life to the next. They can also help us to face a problem that has been lifetimes in the making.
It occurred to me today that one reason why past life recall is important for us is because of the short lives we live as humans. I know how strange this will sound, but the length of our lives compared to other intelligent life forms in the universe (other non terrestrial biological entities) is very short. We are like the dogs of the universe. Instead of living for hundreds of years, we are lucky if we live just under a century, a mere fraction of the time many beings have. And once we do transition, we come back into bodies built by a world from the ground up that is incredibly narrow in its focus to the degree that it seems that all prior memory is hidden behind some veil or other. I am here telling you that you can access your past lives and they can shed light on the patterns that you need most to dissolve for your authentic self to shine forth. These patterns are the weeds that obscure the realm of light that is within you.
It is for this reason why I sense that it is actually important for human beings to develop recall of past lives in order to dredge the experience we have from other lifetimes in order to provide us with the insight needed to be wiser and more understanding beings facing a changing future that will very soon involve face to face contact with non-terrestrial sentient beings. And while this is not THE reason for doing this, such contact is emblematic of a race that is caught in the grip of great change. I ask you; will you listen to the insane voices on the t.v., all of whom are owned by corporations that only want you to consume and make them even wealthier, or will you listen to the perennial voice within which carries the only compass that has ever mattered in any of the lives you have lived? Only then can you be free to face the larger truth of what you are and what inhabits our universe as others not unlike ourselves, but awakened to the fullness of who they are. Anything less renders you a dangerous unpredictable being in their eyes. But many wait eagerly to welcome new races to this new level of knowing and realization.
One thing that past life recall can do is it can broaden our horizons by showing us how we have each been both male and female. It will help us to see that we have been rich and poor, and that, finally, all of life here in the human arena is far more similar to everyone else than we might have ever imagined. It would then be a much easier leap into a world that includes nonhuman beings who feel, surprise, not so different from us humans on the inside.
Concepts such as class and racial divides would also soften and fall away as people so awakened would realize that we are all following our path. This sometimes means living simple quiet lives farming or living close to Gaia and family, while other lives might require very different ingredients. All of these things help to bring to the higher self the pieces that help bring about completion. We would also know that no matter our station in life, each of us is born of noble blood which is the great light that moves through everything, and of which we are a part.
I think that these details could stand us in good stead in the two decades hence which will reveal an acceleration toward Contact. The other side to this is that many of us here have lived as nonterrestrial life forms in other regions of the cosmos before. Here we are now being involved in one of the biggest steps human kind will make, which is making open contact with civilizations that will help us to further evolve much more quickly.
All of this is taking time, so the process has been one that will be in the preparation stage for about 100 years. Along with this has been the issue of awakening which many advanced civilizations possess naturally. We are being coaxed gently in this direction. This step will also show us that not all advanced intelligences work for our benefit but have in fact used and are being used by certain elements within governments here for their own gain.
It isn’t that we are waking up FOR Contact, but that humans must evolve if we are to survive this next developmental advancement.
The change will come when each of us changes and seeds the culture with that change. Our leaders will not do it because they have become a front for a gigantic secret that has been kept since our military, or secret elements within it, began backward engineering advanced technology that would revolutionize our energy industry overnight and make it possible to travel the stars.
But that wonderful outcome has yet to pass, so WE must be the change in the hopes that we murder secrecy by weeding it out of all of our lives.
As the tide within us rises, others will likewise change. Already this change is being felt. Who will be likely to keep the secret going?
Already this era has shown a surge in whistleblowers on the topic of Contact and Disclosure as well as issues involving the conduct of governments in “secret” and “covert” programs within intelligence and military. With an administration who has clearly lied about the source of the hacked emails during the U.S. election coming from Russia (despite no evidence for it forthcoming as well as Assange explaining that the leaks did not come from Russian government actors).
People are waking up to the reality that news media lies and our leaders also lie. It is up to us to continue driving the shadow into light, you see….
We will meet beings whose lives span many hundreds of years, a length that allows for a different kind of evolutionary spiral to take place. Great thinkers in civilizations such as these work not for thirty years on, say, mathematical theorems, but are able to remain focused for hundreds of years. And while their candle might not burn as brightly, it sustains something we do not, as yet, have.
Even now the way to alter DNA in order to lengthen our lifespans is being addressed, something that could lead to exponential changes taking place in our future, which would not be all that different from those civilizations out there that cracked their own codes and were able to lengthen their own lives. The trick is in keeping what makes us human when the change comes. I am not a proponent of transhumanism. I do think that when we can see the big picture, we will know better about how one change in a gene can have ripple effects on others, thus enabling us to hopefully make better choices for ourselves.
I know how funny it might seem to be tying reincarnation with contact. It isn’t that knowing your past lives is so crucial to human development now because the patterns you see today are the same patterns that have played out for thousands of years as we each have gone from lifetime to lifetime. It’s more that we have reached a point where what happened in the past (and what will happen in the future) are becoming relevant for revealing to us a fuller view, a bigger picture at a time when big picture thinking will be needed in the leap we are faced with today.
It isn’t just reincarnation that will do it. All forms of inclusive big picture thinking that include our place in the Order of life here and the cosmos will be just as important. This is, though, one tool in our toolbox for navigating this time that will see great change. The more we know about ourselves, the more we will also know about the larger cosmos that is beckoning.
There are a number of ways to tap into past lives. One common method is through regression hypnosis. This method was accidentally discovered when a hypnotist regressed a patient past their childhood and into a previous life. Since it’s discovery in the 1800’s, regression therapy has been used as a tool for understanding the self and the soul.
There are many regression therapists who practice out there. One woman describes how she does her regressions over Skype. She explains that the memories aren’t as deeply buried as many might think, which makes conducting her sessions with clients possible. While traditional regression therapy as a form of hypnosis is popular, this is by no means the only way to get at these memories. My friend Ali who regressed our dinner party guest explained she doesnt even us traditional hypnosis in her work (she developed this method herself).
Hypnosis in many ways is a Westernized form of meditation when you get right down to it, so in meditation it is possible to learn how to freeassociate to allow images lift to the surface.
I was able to see how my friend Ali was able to field questions from my daughter a few years ago about reincarnation, and my daughter wound up being able, in ordinary consciousness, to identify a life as a botanist who worked with her father or uncle in classifying plant species. She was able to recall how she had been bitten by a poisonous spider and later died in that life.
As a gifted psychic, Ali was able to confirm that the hunches my daughter had were very much on the mark. But sometimes it just seems tooeasy, which is why we often second guess ourselves.T his is something you should guard against. The place that lifts these memories up is a playful and imaginative one. Don’t worry; imagination is necessary so it can slip in the details you know, but just don’t realize that you know. This is different from how Westerners have been taught to think about all of this: it all must be very hard and this it can’t be a simple matter! But it is. Try free association. You might be surprised the wealth of details it supplies.
Dreams are also another important avenue where past life memory comes through. The only challenge is that unless you are recalling a memory as it happened, you might be dealing with reincarnational material without realizing it was something from the past (or future).
Our minds are so creative in dreaming that reincarnational data might show up as a flaming zebra running in front of us, a strange image on the one hand, but not so strange when the image is looked at more closely for the association’s it has within memory. By packing in so much emotional material in a symbolic way, the means of understanding it most often is a blend of intuition, feeling, and a dash of rational analysis. Because reincarnational material feels so similar to where we are now, it often passes for the content in our lives today even as it touches on so many others.
Our dinner guest was stuck and didn’t realize it; she came into this lufe that way so she didn’t know things could be any different. It wasn’t that her stuck life played havoc in her life. Not at all. But deeper down, something was somehow….on hold maybe.
As I write this I know another person whose soul is hung in the nether world between the physical and spiritual. I see how this person has had this as a pattern that has resulted in a deeply imbedded inability to surrender and to move forward. These glitches hold up our own spiritual development and keeps us from being able to embrace the higher self with a broader picture view of what we are.When we can get through the thicket of this material, we will be much more competent candidates for Contact.
This was supposed to be quick so I will end it here but also encourage you to lean into your past in the hopes of changing what you want to change now.
Nemasté
This Thanksgiving I spent time making new friends and working on developing a Youtube series with my friend and gifted intuitive Alison on her island home off the coast of California.
One thing is for certain; you never know what will happen when Ali is in the mix. I mean this in the best of ways. It all winds up feeling so perfect. So real. And so it was near the end of my visit that some friends came over for dinner and as the dinner seemed to be winding down, one of our guests made mention about how she didn’t know so much about the spiritual, not that she was afraid, she just felt like she didn’t have a third eye. One of the guests mentioned how she had done a series of past life regressions with Ali and how wonderfully healing it had been. Before you knew it, we were in the living room wrapping this lady up in blankets as Ali guided her down into the depths for an encounter with a past self. Easy, but it’s easy when you have someone who has the gifts Ali has to help guide and nudge when its necessary.
One thing that has become clear to me and that came up when we were watching a video that same weekend of an interview with a woman who has done countless regressions was that doing regression therapy is not that hard. Our memories are all there, but resting deeper down inside of us, a place where we most often do not go so we rarely, if ever, encounter them on a conscious level. With a little guided imagery and some deep relaxation, those memories begin to bubble up to the surface of awareness.
And so it was with our guest who lay quiet and still, breathing deeply and following Ali’s lead. After only a few minutes, an image formed of a woman in a doorway. This woman was the woman in a previous lifetime, and she stood continually at a door, neither here or there. It turned out that she had a self who was stuck between lifetimes. Ali guided the woman to begin to approach the woman, and as she did, she felt like she could not move. She couldn’t move because both aspects of who she was as the woman in the door and as herself now we’re BOTH stuck, or seemed to be. Seems she only needed to decide not to be stuck in order to not be. Then, as she continued to try to approach the woman, she saw a spot begin to appear, which was a portal off to one side which had begun to open as she tried to help this woman, to find out why she was there in this room in a house. Over a period of minutes the woman in the doorway moved into the tunnel and was taken into the light. Immediately the woman felt great relief and began to see the funerary arrangements, the meal and the home of the woman she had been. She sat up saying she felt 100 lbs lighter!
This encounter was one that helps a person to become “unstuck” both as the person they were as well as the person they are today in their current life since some aspects of that feeling of being stuck often haunts them in their present life. Being able to do this work frees a person up and helps them to move on. This process is called soul retrieval. Some years ago Ali helped me with an aspect of this in one of our many talks together. It turned out that there was a part of me that had become stuck when I was about ten years old. The process was much the same in the after effects of feeling suddenly clearer and more integrated. It was experiences like this along with the removal of emotional blocks through the cleansing effect of strong pranic flow (kundalini) that has had such a significant impact on my life as an agent of transformation.
The experience also showed me that I had a natural healing ability that I have always sought to sideline or put on hold because I felt that I needed to be as healed as possible before working with other people in a healing modality. With my hands on our guest’s head, I felt energy flowing through me in such an easy way. I identified that this was the same sort of energy that we use as healers for helping to bring about the changes that are healing moments. My role was simply as support, but it was curious to me to see how as the woman began to describe that her past self had gone through the tunnel that the flow of energy through my hands had begun to wane moments before she described what was taking place as she looked on at the event unfolding before her. It was one indicator to me that had a curious way of coming up over the course of the visit. During a reading with a gifted healer that Ali gifted me with during my stay by a man in Arizona, this gift came up as part of the core of his suggestions to me for forging a new direction in my spiritual and professional life. All of this, neatly woven into earlier events that had already taken place.
Soul retrieval is claiming what is yours, a part of you that may have seemed inaccessible before the process began. By returning you to yourself, it is like a short circuit in your cosmic wiring is fixed so that an easier and more complete flow takes place. When we retrieve those lost parts, we allow them also to heal whatever it was that had them feeling stuck. But since they are us, we attain something that they become. Past life regression let’s the self help unstick it’s other selves…and sometimes when we encounter angels in other lives, it is sometimes an aspect of ourselves moving outside the confines of time and space to help bring change.
Kundalini, or strong prana has had this effect for those who awaken. If you are going through this, you know how it stirs, helps you to feel those stuck places and as if by magic, heal them. There are many pathways or means of doing this type of integration work that leaves us feeling more whole. I think it can also aid you even when awakening is stirring you. Sometimes we can get stuck in awakening, I have seen it happen often enough, and past life work is most often where the “source” of those stuck places we feel in us now that often make so little sense (because they aren’t from this lifetime).
As I have been writing this post, I noticed that Ali is embracing her talent for helping people with past life regression work more and more (funny how that works!). She has done hundreds of these journies over the years, and her method came to her naturally in her intuitive work as a way to resolve patterns that were snagging her clients over the years. But recently she has begun to do more of this type of work, and it’s prompting me to go ahead and publish this now so that if you want to explore this aspect of yourself, you can get in early.
To learn more, contact Ali at avaloncmaiden@yahoo.com or speak with her at The Spa At Catalina at 310-510-9255 and let her know I sent you.
Merry soulful journies!
As promised, the second part to my earlier post is included here.
Part II – If Reincarnation Is Real Why Can’t I Remember My Past Lives?
The argument against reincarnation is that if this is something real, then why don’t we remember our past lives? Its a common query, and a good one.
I can tell you from my own experience what I think is at play here based on having recall of over a dozen different lifetimes. Before I do, though, it is important to note here that in two memories I had recall of languages that were part of nonexistant cultures, or languages that were no longer being used. I also had memories of spaces that I had never seen previously but wound up seeing them after the memory came into full awareness (one was a Mayan temple). I have also a memory from Egypt that was part of an initiatory rite…one that was unlike anything I had EVER read. I always considered it strange, but was able to find an account of an individual who was describing an initiatory rite that involved the exact same details as in my experience in what was a hypnotic regression.
Now while it may be technically possible for me to have come across the languages that I encountered, I know that prior to my experiences, I had no opportunity to do so. In one memory I was able to discern correctly the name of the masculine form of energy that was considered to be part of the life force also called prana in the Hindu tradition, and was able to see its use in proper context in the situation being described in the memory. In another, I heard many minutes of the language of a now-extinct people and heard enough language to be able to identify the name of the people and locate where they had inhabited. I also was able to look into government accounts (Army) of a situation with my people as they came into conflict with the posted military in the region that was an identical situation that unfolded also within my own memory some years previously (a daring raid on an army outpost where horses were stolen and several of my comrades were shot–myself included). I can also tell you that I have recall of my choosing my parents, which took place before my conception or very near it. This might seem unusual or even strange to some, but it is a memory that is as clear as any other I have had and stands as the earliest memory I have ever had in this life and has me floating up among the pine boughs of Northern Florida watching the people who would become my parents in a way that I can only describe as a warm affection.
I can also say that it was in a recent therapy session with a Kahuna masseuse, I was able to release enough past trauma locked in my body that it freed up the pre-life memory of chosing this life even as I knew that my father would die before my second birthday and that my mother would remarry a man who would serve to marginalize me in my family and early life (which was extremely difficult for me).
I can tell you that I highly suspect that there is an intelligence at work within us, “above” us that orders all of this for us. The higher self? I think so. I do. I can recall feeling vividly how I had CHOSEN all of this stuff, this terrible scenario, to be born into. Coming away from it, I know in my heart that while my early life conditions were not the best from a rational perspective, it was the very thing that I need in order to develop. The only thing that suffering ever achieves for us is when we learn to no longer suffer. None of this might make any sense to us rationally, though, but our development is not always a rational one.
Sometimes I think we need those things that will help to flush out our most difficult issues. Essentially, we come here to face our demons. Which is to say that we come here to find a place of direct honesty about the core of our problems in our soul in order to heal and pull them from their roots. But there is a problem with remembering some of this material from other lives before we are ready.
Consider how our past looks. Our past is full of murder and intrigue. Armies have been raised to bludgeon other leaders to submission in order to conquer land, people, and treasure. And our past has been one hell of a difficult slog. You might want to think that you were the one person who was untouched by all of this horror, but I think you would be wrong. To overcome our past, we face what it means for us here now. We don’t even need to look into the past to know the terrible things there, we need only feel into what is here inside of us. For most, what is within us is submerged into the depths that psychologists call the subconscious. But there is a way to make the subconscious more conscious, and as this happens, more of the self comes into unity. The effect? Greater awareness about who we are begins to emerge. Our place as beings in this world and in other worlds also begins to emerge. The illusion that this is the one place and the only place that we will be quickly begins to dissolve as the self reaches into an emergent depth of self where even more mysteries of who and what we are begin to emerge. This work is not for the feint of heart, but it is real. Part of it can also be about what has taken place in past lives.
The reason why we forget or do not remember our past lives is manifold. There is something about our brain development that does it; I can remember things as an infant that were not within reach until much later in my life. Also, there is a kind of veil that we all talk about that most people agree is present within us that keeps us from dipping into other lifetimes and their memories. This veil is a cognitive one that has to do with how we are focused here and also how we are each in our own way divided within our larger brain and consciousness functioning. When these centers in the brain are activated, they also appear to trigger the ability to tap into relevant memories, memories that our bodies do not have, but that our consciousness has the ability to tap into in much the same way that we can remotely view an event or tap into the internet, but one in which the connection is how we are related to this past (or even future) self.
But forgetting is in some ways a godsend for us. It helps to create a buffer for us when we are stuck in a rut spiritually. Consider what it might be like for you if you were to remember the last six lives you have lived and found out that you wound up being murdered each and every time, or worse, that YOU murdered people in every life for the last six. It would probably be a reality that is too hard to face, right? I can tell you that when it has come to the most recent memories I have had, these have been presented in a very limited fashion to me. I was only given or only remembered a small flash, just enough to clue me in on what the memory was all about, but I got little else. It seems that for my higher self, there is no interest in just dredging the past up for the sake of it. When something is relevant, it comes up, but the memory is highly specific to what it is that I am learning.
I rarely get a random memory of something from a past life just because. The memory most often links directly into something that I am learning that links back through time. In a way, the memory is sometimes a kind of bonus or reward for working through some kind of material that is here and now but that also touches on other lifetimes. This most often happens in the midst of what I call “release work” which involves releasing negative karmic threads, cords, or knots in the self, knots that follow us lifetime to lifetime until we clear them up.
The longer we carry some cords from one life to another, the more we “pull” a cord down through time. And when the cord is released, you can sometimes feel a very real release like how a rope might feel when its pulled tightly across a physical chasm, except its a chasm in the self. If you pay attention you can feel the cord as it loosens from the present moment all the way back through the lifetimes that the cord touches. For me, there is a moment of rapid recognition that takes place that sometimes is lightening fast.
The first step in remembering your lifetimes is to be open to the possibility that they exist. Then be aware of elements in your dreams that point to historical elements. But more than that, sometimes reincarnational material can come through in very normal ways, too. DO you ever experience “versions” of people or even yourself in dreams? Sometimes this can point to reincarnational material (not always, sometimes this “version” is just that….an experience with other selves not even in the physical yet or in this reality). One way of delving into reincarnational material is to examine how you feel about other people, absent any memory of them. While you may not always get precise information, you will get some aspects close.
One method for remembering past lives is to use regression therapy, a type of hypnosis that is intended to take the subject back to a certain time period in their lives. This method was accidentally discovered as useful for past lives when the therapist using it accidentally allowed the person to go further back than intended and found that the person was not describing events from childhood, but from a past-life adulthood instead.
One very good way to know who you were like before is to look at who you are today. Look at all the things that interest you…and its possible that you have experienced many different iterations of these interests. For example, I have been very interested in art, psychology, religion, and politics. I know that I have studied in monestaries in both Tibet and in Europe. I have made a study of world religions it would seem, and my interest in the arts has come in in a variety of ways. I have been both a solo artist, an artist on teams, I have been involved in glass houses in Europe, and I have been a leader who oversaw artists who helped to adorn temples. I have been interested in the hidden force in life known as prana in a myriad of ways….as a Native American, a Polynesian, Egyptian, Buddhist, and early Christian, and as myself in this life today (working as an artist and educator).
There was a time when reincarnation was understood to be a part of life in the early Christian church, beginning with Jesus himself who mentions it in various ways and at various points in books that escaped the noted heresy hunters of the early church. To understand this story and how a central teaching could have been stricken so completely from the dogma of a religion, it helps to know some history surrounding the change. So come with me on a quick tour of the past as I bring to you the documents of the time as they come alive with the mystique of a conspiracy to quell or silence something basic as the root of our becoming as spiritual beings. It is a story that will have the power to leave billions without the awareness of who they are deeper down and what they are capable of as sovereign beings here on the earth. It is about, I think, about the true seat of power which has remained unclaimed by easily 95% of every person who has inhabited the earth for the last two-to three thousand years.
Stirring Up Differences For Gain
At least in part, the storm surrounding reincarnation has to do with Jesus himself and an idea that had little to nothing to do with reincarnation, but everything about who Jesus was. This is what I call the “scattershot effect” of unintended consequences that we see through history: a ruler outlaws one thing while something unrelated gets pulled into the scope at the same time and “taken out.” Its sad to see and it happens a lot (and I assume this is what happened in the case of our story here—there may be still yet more to the story than I am uncovering!). In this case, there were two schools of thought that raged not long after the church was founded under Constantine. One were people like Nestorius, the Abbot of Antioch (in Turkey), who said that Mary should be the mother of Jesus, not of God. Nestorius explained that Mary birthed a man, not a God. Along with Nestor is also Origen and a few others who were writing about much more mystical and subtle takes on the teachings of Jesus. But it is this second view that I describe and the people surrounding it, that came under attack in the church. The subtext here with the view of these people is that we can all work and ascend to the same height as Jesus did (John 14-12). This, though, amounts to heresy within the church today. This form of thinking came under direct attack from a group of thinkers called the monophysitics who held that Jesus was not a man but was merely God. End of story. It is the Christological position that Jesus had only a single “nature” which was either divine or a synthesis of divine and human. Monophysitism was at loggerheads with dyophysitism (or dia-, dio-, or duophysitism) which maintains that Christ had two natures, with one being divine while the other was human after the incarnation. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monophysitism)
The journey of awakening that I am experiencing shows clearly that we have the means within to reach to a broader awareness of who we are, an awareness that can shatter and destroy our previous preconceptions of who we think we are. It wasn’t always this way, though, as the history on the issue shows. When I went looking to try and find some understanding or a common voice on the matter of my awakening, I came across the Gnostic works of the Nag Hammadi and found page by page that they were describing the experience of nonduality and the awakening from which this experience so commonly springs. And really, this is so uncommon an experience that you can’t fake or mistake it too often when reading someone else who is “under the influence” of having been awakened. You are dealing with a hyperdimensional phenomenon probably not too unlike some of the things that Terrance Mckenna describes in his DMT trips. So unique are these that its hard to mistake them for anything else on the planet. So the same was with my experience and the people who were saying “Here we are, we know what you are going through!” were people who had long since left the planet. Clearly, a lot had been weeded out over the generations. Even if its been done by an agency as holy and sacred as the church, I feel that we each have a responsibility to place the truth back where it belongs even if that truth has suffered or has been misplaced…by a pope, even. And so it is that I write about these clashing factions because in some way the discussion is not yet over in regards to what happened. Perhaps once we know and we can reconcile it so that its mystery no longer captures us, we can then move on to bigger and better things.
The effect, though, is powerful. In documents that the church puts forward, the issue of reincarnation is not even mentioned. It does not mention how, by the way, the Council did away with the ideas of reincarnation while dispensing with the question that was very much open at the time about Jesus as God or man. I mean, it really was an issue that people argued over at one time. It was a new thing, and that was why people batted the idea around. Okay, they didn’t bat it around; they contested, and argued. It was obviously a hot button issue for some people. It was, for some, a terribly important issue, and it was one that the Orthodox folks wanted to make sure got said right for all time: Jesus was God. Period. End of argument! And if you try to argue it anymore, we have some nice folks who will come and take your head away from your body or other such things. It is as though the reincarnation bit just didn’t even exist. On an orthodox historical sight, there is not a peep about any of this whatsoever. And this is how knowledge is rewritten or remade. It is also how history is rewritten. It is done just as Napoleon stated; by the victors. But how do you strike something from the hearts and souls of all men and women? You brin in a ruler who simply makes it so. They call in people who will destroy records, or who will label someone “anathema” and have them banished from polite society (remember John the Baptist? Well, that guy was out in the desert because he was a troublemaker—he dared speak the truth and for that he was marginalized, physically, from the rest of society).
To understand all of this, its helpful to delve into the arguments being made about what people actually thought back in the day. A way of thinking back then was that Jesus was all-God and not a man who achieved godly status, explained by way of the fact that he just merely “came around” (with some help from John the Baptist) to who he was, which was unmistakable and something he could not escape. This way of thinking was called monophysitism. These were two VERY different ways of thinking about Jesus. One way suggested that we each could become like Christ (see Gospel of Phillip who asserts that his master was actually making the disciples Christs themselves). The suggestion in this view was that we had to take on Christ by allowing him into our hearts and lives as our personal savior who also happened to have paid an ultimate sacrificial debt. This was itself a very different matter from what Phillip proposed and which many others in the newly-discovered Nag Hammadi codices have also asserted. It is what I have noted as one of the most basic misunderstandings about ourselves as spiritual beings and will either assist us or limit us depending on which path you accept as a belief. And yet, here we are today, with the debt that Jesus paid as being so incredibly central to belief. In fact, the way to take on Christ Consciousness today is by accepting his sacrifice….while what I consider to have been the original teaching of his reaching for the highest heights in order to help others to follow, to, in the words of Phillip in his gospel, teach others to be Christs. What Phillip knew and what every authentic enlightened human will know is that you have got to get right with God within yourself and no one else can do it for you. Kingdom of God being within you and all of that, right? I know you are wondering what this might have to do with reincarnation, so hang on…I will need to paint a picture for you about what was taking place in the early church.
These were the two divergent themes that were working against each other, right along with the political aspirations of both the emperors and other rulers under the main emperor. Imagine a world and a time when the church power and the state power were intermingled as a result of the Church’s rise of influence among the people a century earlier. This was Rome. It had decided to make an alliance with one of the most popular religions of the time. But what exactly was Rome doing?
This church, along with its followers, were a rag-tag band of people who were the only individuals in the empire who were willing to die for their beliefs. The Christians back then were like the death martyrs of the Muslim extremist of today who walks into a crowd, willing to give his or her life in order to take out the unbelievers. I know how hard it might be for Christians to accept this comparison, but in terms of just how ardently the early Christians believed, then yes, it is a fair comparison in terms of fervor and willingness to become a martyr (many did, and of course most of Jesus’s disciples were killed at one point or another for daring to bring the good news). This was the condition of early Christianity decades prior to its being instituted as a state-accepted religion. Pagan (Roman) statues were being toppled in highly public ways by these people, and they saw being nailed to a cross as an honor. These people believed that a better kingdom was at hand and they were ready and willing to see the old kingdom (as they understood it) to be toppled so that the great peaceful world of their king Jesus could be installed. This was at about three to four hundred years after the death of Jesus where they believed that when he said a new kingdom would come, that this was literal truth. There was also the Revelation of John in which he describes a rather brutal take-down of the bloody harlot that most scholars agree was Rome. The kingdom was at hand and Christians were ready to help tease it into existence. Jesus had even said the Kingdom was at hand, didn’t he? And I ask, given how brutal life was back then, why wouldn’t you yearn for a new Way, provided by a more peaceful leader, a Christ? Given how people were choosing to understand the doctrine that Jesus laid out several centuries before, this became a rallying cry to those who would follow him. Christianity was not going away, this much was clear.
There was a split that had to do with teachings that were largely scoured from the early church, but whose memory of them still remained in pockets within the church. It was this divide, believe it or not, that would lead to the Inquisition centuries later. It was partly due to a Gnostic-leaning Cathar sect in the church that threatened the established power structure of the church as authoritarian and paternalistic that the Inquisition even began (and turned into the bloodbath this it is now known for). That, though, is for another post. Back to the 5th and 6th century A.D……
It was in this environment that there were many people with many different divergent ideas about who Jesus was and what his teachings were all about. In fact, there was an “Old Rome” and “New Rome” split that was slowly taking place after the Council of Nicea which placed Christianity in its place of power where it would grow and eventually find a place at the table with every European government or colony of them that followed. The split I am talking about was one that had to do not just with a church but also a State (Rome). So when you say Rome or Christianity, you are saying the the same thing, even though the two were different entities, they both aided the other in sharing power. And this was no small insignificant earthly power! But this was a power that had an inner division, and it had everything to do with religion. Christian religion.
The two Romes that were splitting were doing so due to resentments having to do with the theology (not Roman law) of this new religion. The Eastern Roman Empire centered in Constantinople and the Western Roman Empire located in Rome experienced a split initially due to Constantine seeking to name himself a ‘Proto-Apostolos’ meaning ‘first of the apostles’, and placed his tomb in the middle of the cenotaph of the Twelve Apostles in Constantinople. (nestorian.org)
People both in and out of power were furious with Constantine’s efforts to write himself into the history books in this way, and it led to some bitter divisions. The result was that those within the church who were divergent along these lines found themselves in disputes between two divisions in the church. This led to infighting between the more literal-thinkers and the mystic-thinkers in the church and was most likely the reason for a lot of the early finger-pointing and labeling people anathema and heretics. I suspect that the diversity in the church up to this time may have been much more tolerated simply because the differences were not pressed upon or tested so much until Constantine got greedy and dishonest with trying to make himself seem chummy with the Apostle by being buried among them. The biggest divisions had already been worked out of the church, hadn’t they? Hadn’t the heretics and their deadly books been dispensed with through hanging or burning (both the people as well as the scrolls they claimed were important to understanding Christianity) a generation before at the instituting of the church in the 5th century A.D.?
When you point out the differences in another of your own kind, you can reveal division where a moment before there was none. You can CREATE division. It is through division that support, power, and riches, are all commonly taken either through force or by way of theft. It is also how you take down an opponent politically at the knees. If I show how different you really are from the average person, I can easily gain more support for my cause or side. Whether in politics or religion, the effect is the same. Identify how they are different. Boom. All you need are enough people behind you and you can steer change within the government or church in the way that you want. You can ardently believe in your cause or you can not believe a word of it. It does not matter. The strategy works either way. Remember, when we talk about history, we aren’t always talking about the high water marks of truth and justice, but in what people took to be right at the time….for whatever reason they did so. Knowing what is true and being in power were themselves often mutually exclusive.
A Difference In Gnosis
Against this background there is a rich history of early church fathers who wrote about the pre-existance of the soul and about reincarnation. This had been in place for centuries before the 400-550 A.D. period which became so contentious where it was related to religion. Origen was one such early writer who wrote about the soul existing prior to birth as well as what would become controversial thinking about such things as final reconciliation of all creatures, including perhaps even the devil (the apokatastasis). (wikipedia.org) Nestorius and others like him were early writers who all either hinted or pointed directly at pre-existance as an accepted fact of early church teachings. It would be through various councils that these kinds of writings would be considered anathema and heretical. They would have no place in the church.
The way that this most directly happened within the church was that a woman named Theodora, who rose from humble beginnings to be the chosen concubine of emperor Justinian. Later as his wife, she was instrumental in making the changes in the church doctrine that made reincarnation an outsider once and for all. The question is who is this Theodora and how did she wield such power?
Theodora was born the daughter of a bear-keeper of Constantinople’s hippodrome in about AD500. Her father who died when she was young, led her mother to bring her daughters into the theater in order to make a living, which was again at the Hippodrome, a large 30,000 seat facility where major performances were viewed by the people of the day. Thus, Theodora was an early actress. (Duffy, The Guardian)
Some of what we know about Theodora comes from a searingly critical account of her and her husband’s lives that was so controversial that it was ordered to be printed AFTER the author’s life. This book, Procopius’s Secret History, is no doubt part fiction mixed with fact. Whenever you have a critic that is as harsh as this author is, you cannot escape such a reality. The problem though is that these kinds of accounts are mixed with what is true and what is not true. Procopious was assigned to the same military leader that was called upon to depose a pope later on in our historical jaunt through time.
There is one school of thought that seeks to raise Theodora to the level of saint (which she is in the church) and another which does the exact opposite. What we do know is that she had a child before meeting up with Justinian. We also know that she sought to be mistress to Hecebolus who was then-governor of Persipolos, which is located in what is now known as Lybia (northern Africa). She may have been a prostitute. She was said to have so abused her position with Hecebolus that he had her stripped of her riches (which he bestowed upon her) and cast her out with nothing but the clothes on her back. This was all at the insistence of the people being governed, who seemed to so despise this woman that they demanded such actions be taken. (Seiler, facts-are-facts.com) Its hard to know precisely what are facts from the book written by Procopius, but one thing is clear; Theodora set up a home for women who had been prostitutes in order to care for them and provide them a means out of their former life.She is said to have “rounded up” about 500 prostitutes and forced them into a convent. Was it forced, or was she doing them a favor? Was she thinking back on her own life when she was a prostitute also? I am not here judging the woman. Every saint has a past and every sinner has a future as far as I am concerned.
Theodora worked her way back to the circles of power in Alexandria after this fall, and along the way she was taken in by a hermit named Eutyches who was forced into exile by Rome for his doctrine of monophystism, which held that Jesus was all-God and not a man who rose to become godly, which was what Origen and Nestorius along with many other before them had written and taught about. Theodora remembered the kindness bestowed to her and sought to press for the monophystic view as an accepted part of church dogma when she rose back through the ranks again in Rome and was able to catch Justinian’s eye and marry him. Theodora was thus an important, central, even, character, in helping to bring the monophysitists back to the church (realize, the monophystics had been banished up until this time by the powers within Rome–this is the point where the church and state intermingled).
What happened in the early church was that when someone had an idea that they wanted to put forward, they did so in a public forum, hoping to gain populist support for it. If this opinion was popular enough, it had a chance of making its way into the canon. These meetings were called “synods” and numerous groups within the church would call them. If there was a show of support for the ideas presented in the synod, those at the forefront of these meetings would press for an Ecumenical Council be called so that an important decision could be made about what was being presented or discussed. Synods were called both for and against this concept related to the nature of Jesus as both man and god.
It was in 451 that the 4th Ecumenical Council was called. This was also referred to as the Council of Chalcedon and it was used to formerly condemn monophy. Theodora later pressed Patriarch Mennas to convene the synod of the Eastern Church of Constantinople in 543, which sought to revoke the condemnation of monophystism as well as the affirmation of reincarnation (yes, folks, you read that right; the church had at one time affirmed reincarnation) which was codified in the church law or doctrine in 451. And so it was that one Council affirmed reincarnation while another just a few years reverses its position. And you know what happened? Everyone who were followers began believing what the church told them to believe. It just happened. And it spread like wildfire, apparently.
Now remember how I said that there was an Eastern and Western split in the church? In order to gain the kind of support that Theodora needed for this action, she had to also bring the Western Roman Empire under her control. How to do this? Theodora was cunning in her efforts. Belisarius was commanded by Theodora to depose the reigning Pope Silverius who had been installed by the Goths. This Pope was the former subdeacon Silverius, the son of Pope Hormisdas (Wikipedia, Belisarius). In this way, Theodora was able to aggregate power both for her and her husband’s empire while also getting the support of a larger church under her wing to lend more power to her efforts to unify the church around the concept of a monophysite Jesus.
Some have argued that Theodora did not like the concept of reincarnation because it had the power to wipe away her ability to ascend to the level of a worshiped goddess. By having one life, she would be judged based on those deed, not those of other lifetimes, and it was Theodora who wanted to be worshiped in the way that the ancient emperors and empresses were worshiped from the time of the Caesars.
it was reincarnation, though, that helped to explain why one person would be born into great riches, while another would be born into poverty, or why one person would have a club foot while another would have what would have been considered a beautiful body at the time. Reincarnation may have opened a huge can of worms that would also help to explain so much about why our world was the way it was. It was this view, however, that was rejected in the 6th century and has remained the reigning view ever since.
The books or codices that were dug up from the desert near the town of Nag Hammadi reveals Jesus speaking to his disciples and other followers about souls being “sown” back into new bodies, explaining why some people come into a life with advantages and others with disadvantages. It was all because of what had happened in another lifetime. The journey-work of perfecting ourselves, it seems, requires a very long period of study over lifetimes in order to get to a place where we move into “heaven.” Instead of a place, this is a state of being. I will also point out that what has sparked awakening of the divine within has all been the same regardless of religious affiliation: it has been an encounter with a brilliant pure white light. Those who have had awakenings have described these flashes of bright white light and those who have have Near Death Experiences (NDE’s) have also described the same encounter with a white light. Both return from their experiences changed. Many often begin work that seeks to serve humankind. Some become healers, some teachers. All feel driven to make a change in the world. It was also a description within the Nag Hammadi codices that identify that this white light encounter is something that unites us with the part within that knows heaven and can learn to anchor this state of being to earth. The experience is universal in the sense that anyone being so touched by this light will experience a range of symptoms that are the same. The Hindu describe this as the activation of kundalini. The Christians describe this as the Holy Ghost, and the Pacific Islanders call this Kah. The Egyptians also called this force as Ka, and was the part of us that left the body upon death.
Next up:
Part II – If Reincarnation Is Real Why Can’t I Remember My Past Lives?
There is a lot of talk about the shift that is happening. You may not know it, but these things have been at the core of some old prophecies amongst such people are the Hopi and other aboriginal cultures such as the Plains Tribes and other tribes across the North American Continent. When you look closely at some of the enigmatic things these prophecies offer up, there are some important facts that can elude first notice.
Not long ago the Hopi elders released more of their prophecy because they felt it was time a wider audience knew about it. When this information was released the line was simple. It said that humankind would soon discover “Time as Direction.” When this was released it served to bring up an old memory that went back to when I was 18, a memory that was part of a past life that had its roots in a time period of about 1850. Over the course of the last few years a lot has come through about this memory. It has served as a cornerstone event in my life, but has remained in large chunks, a bit of a mystery for me to untangle. When I experienced my awakening, and when I just let go of needing to figure it all out, the details came through effortlessly about a lot about this memory. A big part of the memory had to do with time as being a dimension. For a long time I didn’t know how to explain this, and really, who would believe me if I told them? I have been edging closer and closer to this being a likely truth….based on my experiences thus far….which have been a bit of a quantum rabbit hole.
The content of the memory isn’t that important now except that in that past life as a native man living in Yosemite Valley, I was shown directly in that vision that the Thunder Beings, which I learned are an aspect of my own higher self, operated within a dimension of time that is like space to us here in our 3-D world. Looking out through my eyes back then, but also through the eyes of the Thunder Being in the vision, I saw concretely how it was that this being could look out across time and see that I would be alive as a new person in a new body (today). For this being, it wasn’t hard. In fact, it spoke authoritatively about this “day in the future” when I would be “reborn as a new person.” It said that I should not doubt its words because, for this being, it had already happened! This “being” was living in the dimension of All-Time, no doubt about it (unless you doubt that I didn’t somehow make this all up in my head somehow). And what might this All Time be?
Living in All Time is what most who have near-death experiences relate as being in a place where all time expands outward. Jane Roberts, a medium for the trance personality called Seth described this “time” as the Spacious Present. Seth also explained that our concept or experience of time is limited by our beliefs and ability to see it as it is. To see it as it is, I am convinced, requires an acceleration of consciousness in order to glimpse it. Awakening certainly did this for me, but these same kinds of states were being experienced during “peak” experiences, albeit in a less consistent way previous to my awakening. It is, however, within each of our reach. This is, I feel, is nothing short of what we are all talking about this fabled entry into the 5th world that the Hopi have largely been involved in creating awareness about. This is, as the Hopi have described, is the Time as Direction.
It might seem that something is going to happen in which all are suddenly changed, in a “twinkling” as some religious circles suggest. The Rapture is tied up in all of this, too, but it is poorly understood. If you can get what Jesus said about this you will perhaps understand that this is not like some wave that comes through that changes some and not others. We are simply at that point on the evolutionary scale where people will begin to wake up to this new vibration that is our consciousness. It isn’t some reward from some benefactor-god, but what we are each capable of in our own personal evolution. I sense that the details were misconstrued by people who didn’t quite “get” what was being explained. And its hard, because afterall, such a shift or change in awareness amounts to shifting from a concept of living on a flat earth to something like living on a sphere hurtling through space! I mean, who would have been able to imagine that when everything appeared to contradict that observation?
Part of this awareness is in sensing and experiencing time differently. I have certainly had pre-awakening phenomenon where time was slipping and speeding up and even slowing down. Post awakening I found that I experienced time with another person near and dear that verged on….freaky. In a good way! I just could not believe how time moved by! What is important to realize is that you will always have your present awareness of time as a physical being in space. You have to. But your consciousness, however, the part of you that HAS no mass, is simply not limited. With no mass, it can indeed travel through time. No rules are broken here! It can also experience BIG slips in time, too, which is the forward edge of all of this. If you have experienced this, observe your mental state when these events happen in this way. It has a lot more to do with your perception inwardly than you might realize because…..time moves differently based on how we are engaged with it. Change the terms of that engagement enough and you will see much bigger changes. But most people will simply believe that its just an artifact of their minds….which it is….but not always for the reasons that we might think.Without mass, your consciousness is actually far more mobile than you might realize. People who have had luck at out of body states have often experienced moving through time. Again; no mass! No rules broken here! It was perhaps Robert Monroe who did work with UVA in their psi program that some of these time movements were first officially noticed. But there are many others. Monroe was the one person who helped to bring this phenomenon to popular attention. He has three main books and a body of work that is worth a look for those interested.
This is one reason why growing up I was able to see the future in so many precognitive dreams. Up until the Bush presidency, I was able to accurately dream of each president that was elected since Reagan. I was able to see world events that would unfold weeks before they happened such as Chernobyl, Waco, Earthquakes in Mexico, as well as deaths and births within my local community with great accuracy. I was able to do this because by using my consciousness, I could travel to the location that was most likely to happen. In a real sense, I had been doing this since forever since my higher self had come on that afternoon when I sat on that high mountain knoll praying for a vision in my past life as this Native American man. I was also looking back into time, too, just as my past self was able, I have learned, was able to peek into my life, today, too! And really, its not so hard to do. When it comes to dream work, intent is the operative word. By bringing intent and desire to experience something in the dream world, you can create favorable conditions where you might just get your wish eventually. Look up information on lucid dreaming, for instance. This can sometimes help.
This kind of travel, though, requires, I have observed, that you release all sense of expectation and result. You have to have your ego disengaged in this practice. It is not surprise that people like Edgar Cayce, who did very similar types of seeing, described it much the same way. The sense that let him see a person from a distance was also the thing that allowed him to travel through time. Most of my time travels have involved the dream state, but as I was able to do last year, I was able to tell myself that I would go into my own present life past and visit myself in the dream state. This was an experiment that worked better than I had imagined it would and had lasting, positive results, for the simple reason that I took a positive intent into the dream and followed through. I could have told my younger self all about what trends to follow or stocks to pick or people to avoid. Instead, I took that brief moment to speak about all that really mattered: love.
Time as a dimensional element can totally change how you see the world. We here think of time as linear. However, what if you were able to lift yourself above the flow of time just as you might fly above a river and see the whole river from space? You could see where it emerged and where it landed, in the ocean. In the same way, events in your life now could turn from seemingly random unimportant events to those cornerstone events that actually serve to be life changing. Think about it. Instead of a life where cause and effect take place, a whole new order of events begin to emerge outward through your life in a completely different way. These coincidences and synchronicities are part of the forward edge of this awareness. The more you can shift this awareness and understand the rules of the “game” of time, the more you can see your own life change. You can begin to learn to trust that there is something higher at work. And just what IS that something higher, do you think? I am asking you to break out of your old three-dimensional thinking. It might “seem” that I am asking you to just have faith, but in truth I am simply asking you to expand and accelerate your awareness, your consciousness. When this happens, you naturally begin to take in a larger view. This larger view is what this blog is all about. This does, however, explode the notion of cause and effect. And yet, so much about my experience in my awakening has caused one brush against this after another. Over and over events happened in such a way that events were not being caused by anything else except will or intent and/or thought. How can that be? And how is it that it can happen instantaneously? Further, how is it that the perfect set of events comes along that allows something from the past to happen within minutes of it being considered at some level? The events of my 18 year old self were being informed by events happening the last few years of my life now. I have traveled back through time, and I have also found very odd connections with events from my present with those of my past as well as the future. These have all been tied together, connected, but not in the same causal way that events normally are thought to be tied (A happens before B in order to cause C to happen, for example).
What is so interesting is that this idea is filtering into popular culture. In a movie I have not yet seen, but heard an interview with the producers, I found out that this was one concept contained in the movie Intergalactic. It was actually really nice to see this idea being considered in just the way that they described it because I observe based on my own experience that they are on the mark. As they also said, it might be impossible for someone living in seemingly linear time to be able to observe how all events might be happening at once where you can move down through time like one might travel over a landscape. If time and space are relative, what does this mean for us as we accelerate our consciousness to meet up with just such an awareness?
So welcome to the 5th world, earthling! It is right here for you, should you be interested in finding out more. It is not laden with myth or dogma, none of this needs to be part of any belief of any kind. You simply need intent and an open mind that is critical and questioning and you will most likely get there. Within this process will be a part of yourself that you have up until this time not used as much as you have in the past. This part of you will seem like utter revelation when you let it in. It is the subject of a lot of talk concerning the “kundalini shakti” which is the more fluid part of your being. It is not a thing or an “it” for “it” is something that resides within the molecules and in the energy that supports your consciousness. All you need to do is allow yourself to FEEL yourself authentically deeper and deeper. I will tell you that this route is life changing, a Dante-esque travel through heaven and hell in order to set things right within. When you do, though, your being becomes a clear lens for seeing things perhaps for the first time ever, clearly. It is just such a journey that we must leave behind the rational, just as Dante explained in his book.
And that is the tidbit for today! I hope you have time to look into it!
Waking The Infinite 