Monday, January 22, 2018

My Own Flashbacks of a Former Life

“the Soul is immortal and the body a boat to ferry us across to this realization.”


Siddhanath, Yogiraj Satgurunath. Wings to Freedom: Mystic Revelations From Babaji & The Himalayan Yogis (Page 9). Alight Publications. Kindle Edition.

Originally I had intended to present my experiences chronologically but I have taken a detour. I hope to fill in some of that missing material at a later date. 

When I first started meditating I had some shocking experiences that caused me to almost give up on meditation completely. During the first one I heard a woman screaming and saw a black boot kicking someone. I stopped meditating right away and didn’t want to go back to it. When I finally picked up the courage to meditate again I suddenly began talking in a language I didn’t know. I was complaining bitterly to a blond-haired man. I looked down and saw my meditation shawl in my lap as a dead infant. I went on and on and really wished I could stop. Even as I was complaining I felt I had said enough and I should let some of this go. When it was over I had no way of comprehending what had happened. At that time, I did not believe in reincarnation. Later I connected the two meditation events and saw that someone had kicked me in the belly when I was pregnant, and the baby was aborted. I was slowly coming around to accepting reincarnation. 

Then a friend gave me a book about art therapy at Terezin concentration camp. I hid it away and didn’t look at it for a year. When I did, I first saw the back cover, which had a picture of a group of children. I heard myself say “I know him” about one of the little boys. Finally, I turned the book over and on the cover was a portrait of a woman. I said, “That looks like me.” I opened the book and began reading about the woman on the cover. She was Friedl Dicker-Brandeis an artist who pioneered the use of art therapy with children. In this life I have been an artist my whole life and had a master’s degree in art therapy. Whether I was actually Fiedl in another life I do not know but what I am absolutely positive of is that I lost an infant in another life and the strong desire to have a child carried me into this life. 

When things are left undone, or there has been no closure or forgiveness of past grievances incarnation follows to address those specific issues. This is born out by several stories recounted in Michael Newton’s books. If a life is cut short, as by accident or killing, there is a good chance of a hasty reincarnation because of strong desires to fulfill thwarted goals. It is also interesting to note as Rabbi Yonassan Gershom points out in his book “Beyond the Ashes: cases of reincarnation from the Holocaust” that some victims of the Holocaust chose to reincarnate in non-Jewish families because they were terrified of being identified as being Jewish. Some Holocaust reincarnates feel the urge to visit specific places that turn out to trigger past life memories. I on the other hand have felt a strong aversion to visiting certain places such as Austria, Germany and the Czech Republic due to past associations. Rabbi Gershom also lists several other characteristics of people he has interviewed that died in the Holocaust. One of these is being a baby-boomer (which I am), another is recurring nightmares involving Nazis (which I had as a child), and another is physical symptoms relating to past life “memories”. Michael Newton also describes several cases where people reincarnate with birthmarks or congenital physical conditions that are carryovers from trauma in a past life. 

Monday, January 1, 2018

Time-Coulisse

Poet’s Cosmology

I’ll never know how it was I came to have a memory before time began.
Was there an irregularity in the singularity,
a hair in the ointment of the Big Bang?

That fiery night I felt each exquisite desire embody as a point of light.
Like drops of dew they appeared from nowhere
and spun off like tops to bifurcate and bifurcate again.

Time’s birth cry rocketed through the chambers of the universe
but it changed not
the rose petals of Love on the altar of the heart.

This inner compass, the longing for return, sailed through
the field of Becoming like a lark
heading towards Home.




Although this poem of mine seems fanciful and maybe even a little humorous I am quite serious about its content. If indeed there really was a Big Bang then there must have been some irregularity, some tiny difference in the initial conditions that allowed the bang to blow up and blossom into the wildly diverse universe we inhabit. This tiny fluctuation of initial conditions can be seen as a memory of what had come before the Big Crunch and it preceded the advent of time.
          The screens (coulisses) in the wings of a theater are the settings for various parts of a play. The shifting of these coulisses moves the story of the plot forward. Likewise the shuffling of time fragments in our mind streams is a time-coulisse. These fragments jostle one another moving from recent past to future to distant past in any number of variations in a time fluid mess. You will be quite familiar with this if you have ever attempted meditation. So although our logical mind tells us that time flows in only one direction the mind’s own activity tells a different story. This mix-up of time flow in our own minds surely opens the door to the possibility of memory before time.
          The possibility of backflow in time sequence makes an impact on storytelling and in understanding our own lives. Our lives apparently begin at birth. But what if they didn’t? What if reincarnation really exists? Then like the Big Crunch almost all memory of past lives is crunched out, forgotten. We begin anew with only a hidden fragment of a desire that propelled us into birth. This hidden desire will be guiding our steps and shaping our lives. This is a time-coulisse revealing the deeper hidden causes unapparent in our lives.
Causes are not just learned behaviors as psychology teaches us. They are that, yes, but the cause of causes is desire. Desire weaves the fabric of our lives, the stories we tell ourselves and others. Desire is a power of infinite strength spinning out stories endlessly. At last tired by the round of storytelling, I loosened my grasp on time, desire fell away and I found myself in the eternal present, a blissful state of timelessness where desire has never arisen.
This is the journey I have been on in this life.