Re-Incarnation or what?

My friend K commented (on The Cold Soul):

I hate the thought of reincarnation, though more and more things nudge me to admit that it's a strong possibility, for this very reason. You might be living your life as best you can, thinking you are a relatively good person, but in actuality, you aren't and you weren't and you're going to have to deal with something nasty "you" did thousands of years ago. Except you don't remember any of it, so you can't react in a way that provides long-term (across lifetimes) benefit because you have no idea what the hell is going on.

I totally know what you mean!! I wanted to respond but wanted to make it something larger than a comment.

*

My own relationship to this concept was an odd way coming. I thought that it began in adulthood, when I started intellectually struggling with the details and how I felt about them. But now I see that it pinged me off and on through my life. I have several of the moments written down so I will put them here as a sort of linear overview.

Around age 12 ... I had gone with my older sister to the beach. I was swimming in the ocean, where the waves were delightfully ferocious on occasion. All us children and teenagers in the water shouted gleefully at the biggest waves, and we would dive underneath them to avoid their breaking on us.

This went on for some time, and after awhile the waves had grown calmer. I was looking toward shore to see my sister when I heard my water-mates shout "MONSTER WAVE!" I turned, realized a gigantic wave was about to crash right on me, took as deep a breath as I could and quickly dove deeply under the water to escape.

The sound of several tons of water crashing down on you is loud, even from underwater. I hadn't dived nearly soon enough. The wave abruptly got me, but this time it was different than when this sometimes happened. Suddenly, one second the sound and force was just unbelievable --

-- and the next micro-second, the vast crashing-roaring sound had totally vanished. Everything was absolutely still; absolutely peaceful; and I felt an absolute calm. I don't think I had ever in my life experienced such a *complete* lack of sound or physical sensories. I was just "there," in a there-ness that seemed to have no sound, no motion, and no time. I was distantly aware that my body was a few feet over to the left of where "I" was.

Into my mind came the clearest thought and understanding, the most calm realization I had ever had, an accepted recognition. I said:

Oh. I'm dead again.

I vaguely remembered having been "dead" many times, over what seemed like an impossible measure of time. This was just another time. They all seemed the same to me in some way. Natural and unremarkable. My life was as interesting but as temporal, as transitional, and as fleeting as a book I had just finished reading.

Perhaps half a second later, I "shifted back into" my body. There was this incredibly distant sound, as if it were millions of miles away yet I could hear a whisper of it. The sound "rushed toward me" at an indescribable speed, getting louder and nearer and seemingly larger until suddenly WOW! -- it was all around me and I was twirling underwater, realizing I was in my body and the worst part of the wave had passed. My feet scrambled to find the ocean bottom and I pushed to the surface of the water.

Coughing a bit from the water, I looked around. Everything was as it should be. Children and teenagers laughing and calling in the swells. I could see my sister sunbathing on the beach. Nothing seemed different on the outside. And yet, I felt markedly different. The profound sense of knowing was so much "fuller" than anything I had ever experienced. A kind of knowing that no intellectual assumption about the word can begin to describe. I understood that I was "I" -- and that "I" was a lot more than I seemed, or could even describe.

I was moved to silence. I quietly swam to shore and curled up on a towel in the sun until my sister decided we'd go home.

I didn't tell anybody about it. It was personal in a way nothing had ever been to me. I didn't really even think about it. It was such a given that I felt no wonder, no curiosity, no confusion about it. I understood. That's just the way things were.

(Small note of humor: A movie some years ago had the interesting title, "Dead Again." It was about reincarnation. Since then I have wondered if others have had the same "realization" I did, and if that's where that title came from.)

Despite that experience, I didn't "think about it." I didn't accept it intellectually; I didn't even review it intellectually. I think it was almost like a dream-understanding that you keep under the surface.

Like when I was nine, I dreamed one morning shortly before getting up for school that my mother had died, and she came and talked to me about it, and it was ok. And it was "present but in the back of my head." I had the feeling that something should come up related to her that day or night, but it didn't. Nor the next day. But the next night, I went grocery shopping with my father, who detoured to a drive up on this tall hill in our city that had a lighted cross. And he told my mother had died the morning before. I felt so calm about it, like I had known that of course, and it was ok. Except the minute dad told me, he broke down sobbing. I cried because he cried and because it seemed like I should. But I had an odd sense of calm knowing about it. (I more than made up for the tears with my grief since that day, that's for sure.)

I think that experience was like that. Present in me but in the back of my head, never pulled forward for thinking about. My official religious beliefs at age 12 involved heaven/hell which had no place for that, obviously.

When I was 15, we were studying WWI in the best history class I ever had. I had a rather unusual lunch period one day.

I was running. I was running so hard, so fast, until my chest ached. My feet felt heavy and I could feel my heart pounding like it weighed 10 pounds and was going to burst out of my chest. I was carrying a large gun, running through trees, it was very hot and I wasn't wearing a shirt, and I wasn't thinking about anything except my very intense focus on getting away. I knew I was in the rear of "my" guys running but I didn't see any others.

Finally I felt I'd likely run far enough; I didn't hear anybody pursuing me. I knew I had to stop and rest. I looked around, and backed up against a tree; I stood with my shoulders back against it, the thinnest profile I could make, my gun high against my body, ready to shoot at the slightest motion. I breathed hard but as quietly as I could. And then this -- this feeling at my throat -- cold and yet hot at the same time, and my peripheral vision in that moment registered an arm had just come around the tree and sliced a knife across my throat.

I looked down as if at my throat but I saw the ground, and I think I might have taken a step forward; thoughts ran through my head so quickly... I was going to die... I couldn't possibly die, no, I couldn't believe it... this should hurt terribly or will soon... and as I saw the ground coming toward me, the overriding feeling was mostly one of pure astonishment.

That was it. One minute you're dying in a jungle or forest and the next minute the school bell rings. Talk about a reality shift.

It was such an odd experience I didn't even process it for quite some time. I knew I was a young man, in the experience... there is a lot of information that is "known" in these, like some kind of electromagnetic cloud of information one exists within, that you don't have to think of consciously yet still somehow you are aware of without being consciously-aware of it. It is difficult to explain... I just have to say that such experiences, for me, have been very "conceptual".

It was weeks, at least, before I gave it conscious thought. I understood I had been a soldier in a war and had died. Wildly guessing, I figured Korea or Vietnam, given the landscape.I have always been unusually drawn to and sympathetic to soldiers, if that relates at all.

The problem was, though I wasn't religious, I went to a Baptist church, and there wasn't really any space in that model for having lived another life. Allegedly, I lived this life, and either I did not belong to the appropriate church and would burn tormented in hell forever, or my church was indeed the "right" one, and I would go into some endless bliss with God. There wasn't any middle ground.

Though I had actually realized earlier that I was sort of open to this (multiple lives) idea, that wasn't the same as experiencing it: I really hadn't thought about it consciously much, and hadn't at that time really been exposed to religions and philosophies that include "multiples lives" as a concept. Having no idea how to think about this reasonably, I just didn't. I couldn't process it, so I just forgot for some time.

It was the same history class that seemed to later spark another of that kind of experience:

I found myself looking at a group of people. I knew we were in a small room and they were "my" people and we were in a terrible situation. We were all so thin... we were so miserable there are just no words for the degree of it. I knew we were all going to die. Maybe that day. Maybe in 10 minutes. Maybe tomorrow. But soon. It seemed inevitable, the way the sun going down seems inevitable, and as horrible as it was, some part of me fought to just accept it, for my own sanity... in a way, hope hurt on a moment-to-moment basis.

A door opened and I turned to look -- I know there was a man there but I don't remember what he looked like -- I just remember thinking so powerfully then that it seemed to burst in my chest and black out vision: now was the time we would die. It was just such a terrible feeling of grief. Not even fear anymore. Just such profound grief for the whole horrible inevitable situation.

As I recorded it previously: Then it was past. It hadn't been as "intense" in physical-feeling as the first experience had been; I hadn't felt much with "my body"; but I had more than made up for it by the degree of emotion.

It was a few weeks later when we got to the first pictures and films of the Jews (and others) in concentration camps. I knew the minute I saw the first film that this was what my weird "reliving-memory" had been about. That I had been there... that I remembered. I remember sitting in class watching this grainy, black and white movie, sort of in a state of shock... yet acceptance. Oddly enough, the black and white films seemed closer to the feeling I'd had in the experience than color would have: my whole existence had seemed so bleak and colorless that the grainy movies were almost an appropriate confirmation to the experience.

*

Later, studying hypnosis, I was introduced to the idea of 'past life regressions'. I was a medical-model skeptic to match that of the official school I eventually went to for that. It was considered a projection; a "doctor, my friend has this problem..." kind of thing. People who could not handle their emotions or issues in the current framework, would invent another one that allowed them to act out those feelings. That seemed reasonable to me. And as I watched hundreds of PLRs on videotape as well as many in person, it became clear why they believed this; it really did seem to be so.

Except. Except the few. There was always just that one, here and there, that was different. The trance was so deep the session was boring as dirt, long delays and brief responses. The person never seemed to have an interesting life; they would be some nobody peasant in the 1500s who died in the snow or something. I had the mocking scoffer attitude that "everyone is cleopatra" but this cured me of that. The thing was, you could FEEL inside you that something was different about these sessions.

I couldn't put my finger on it but I realized it consciously and watched some of them several times on video, trying to figure it out. Why did that one seem utterly convincing while another didn't? Especially when there was far less data and fluency in the one that "got you inside." And after the session, the subjects were different. The more people talked, the more it was 'imaginal'. (And you know I validate imaginal stuff now, haha! But that is not the same as revivification.) Those sessions that really "felt real," the subjects could hardly speak at all afterward. They were too blown away by it, a shell-shock of the soul.

This profoundly trashes fundamental belief systems and should never be done outside a therapy context and even then with careful consideration of the person's base. Bringing people in off the street to do these for fun (as my school actually did!), I am totally against that as irresponsible and sometimes damaging. You can f--k up a Christian for life with one of these that really causes them to revivify something.

I only genuinely "revivified" something one time. It was a spontaneous memory when I was just sitting calmly one day in the early 90's. This was right around the time I had a kundalini experience and was doing a lot of energy work, so it might have been sparked by that.

I had always sworn I would never had children, had zero interest in them, and was terrified of childbirth. But one day I just slid into this memory... but reLIVED as opposed to reMEMBERED... I knew it was just a mental-thing at the time, I mean I knew I was also sitting in my chair, but the revivification was very intense.

I had just given birth to a child. It was my second child, and I was marveling over how much easier it had been giving birth the second time, than the first one I'd had (in my memory-inside-the-memory of my earlier life). I was in a small, narrow bed close to the floor that had some kind of dark metal-type thing as a headboard, and I was alone.

My lower back ached so intensely I couldn't believe it. I came out of the re-lived-memory, my eyes wide and my back aching. I had to get on the floor and do slow stretching for about 15 minutes to make the ache go away.

But it had a profound effect on me. It was like both my reluctance and my fear of childbirth was washed away. I felt like it was a 'known' in my psychology now: I had already done it. To this day I wonder if I would have the child I now do, had it not been for that experience.

Sometimes I've had dreams that involve "other lives." This is common with the Four. When the female and I are together, one of us is "dominant" in the body and the other is like... "equally there but acting as an extension or guide". Sorta. This is one from the Bewilderness era:

I had such a vivid dream that I -- another aspect of I (not this I, but the tall dark haired female aspect of I), was a daughter of someone in power in some Russian-type country, like old, old Russia, or maybe one of the regions near there. We (father and his men and servants and I/her) had traveled, I had the impression Westward, for some official occasion. While there, I/she met a man who I recognized, in the dream, as being my brother (in this life). He was passionately in love with her. But he was a poor nobody, and a foreigner to boot, there was simply no chance.

They determined to meet anyway. Somehow our father found out about it. She and the man (my brother) were to meet at this place secretly. I (somehow) was both part of her and yet actually wandering outside to keep an eye out for our father. And he came. He came storming toward me, he was bald but strong, muscled like a sword-fighting soldier, and the look on his face was grim and very bad news. He didn't see me and walked right through me. Then I woke up.

Huh. I don't know about all this. How come she gets to be a princess and I get to be a proletarian?

I thought it was so WEIRD how I just recognized as "of course" that someone in the other life was someone in this one.

Sometimes I still have little "flashes of other lives" even when I am wide awake and going about my daily life. These are usually super brief, like two seconds long or so.

I was working on my computer, my monitor actually hung from a wall mount a couple feet above my desk. At one point, I was looking at something on my desk, and then I looked up at my monitor -- but as I looked up, I was in a room, there was a desk in front of a window to the right where a man of rank sat, and the door was to the left behind me, and another German Officer of higher rank than I had just come into the room toward where I was facing. (I didn't consciously think of it but knew from context I was in Germany just prior to or during the second World War.)

I admired this man a good deal, and considered him a friend. An intriguing aspect of this was, as I looked up "here", I was just lifting my head and looking up at him "there", like the exact same motion in tandem in two worlds. 'There', I lifted and clicked my heels together and saluted in a fluid motion totally comfortable to me.

Now here's the odd part... I "knew" -- I clearly recognized him although he was a completely different person in a different time -- that this man was a man who I know now, in 'this' world -- a brilliant scientist who is, coincidentally yet ironically, Jewish. The vision or perception vanished and I was looking at my computer screen in astonishment thinking, "Holy moley! That was HIM! We were THERE!"

And I couldn't decide which seemed more strange -- that my Jewish friend had been a German officer, or that I had so clearly 'recognized' someone who was 'here' in some 'other life'. It also seemed interesting to me that we had a vaguely similar relationship: in both situations, he was a man I admired a good deal and saw as somewhat more skilled or educated ('superior' -- I looked up to him) although he was much closer to my own age in the 'vision'.

Notice anything odd about this so far? Well, how could I be a guy in a concentration camp and also be a WWI-era Nazi officer? That kind of blows the linear "reborn/reincarnation" theories all to hell, doesn't it.

I gradually came up with a theory (on my own initially) that perhaps living a life "left an energy imprint" of some kind in our physics- and metaphysics universe. Something that people could "tune into" -- like a library book or something. Maybe that didn't mean it was them. Maybe it had some "resonance" with them, so they were drawn to it. Or, in a more Christian context, maybe that's just what God chose for you to experience for his own reasons, to help you learn something. Who knows.

On occasion you find skeptics in any field who are caught between worlds: on one hand they find that they intuitively believe the experience. But they don't believe the standard reasoning especially since it's usually religious or woo-woo. Those people would say that PLR's were "genetic memory." This is impossible unfortunately--because most of the time, the first experience people tune into is a death experience. Pretty sure people are not having children after they are dead. So whatever the explanation is, it isn't that.

Ian Stevenson has some good books on this topic I am told. He was a legit psych guy who basically threw his career to the winds to study the topic, he found it so fascinating.

*

Later, I encountered Seth's works, and so far, I think his model fits my comfort best. This is because Seth's stuff is "a framework without doctrine" for the most part. His view on reincarnation was a little different.

First, he said time is perceptual not literal--it doesn't really exist. I believe that, especially thanks to psi and some anomalous experiences. So the idea of being born "into one life at a time in linear order" really makes no sense. It is "zero point" physics and metaphysics both: all space is here, all time is now. So... one is simultaneously everything.

This kills the concept of karma, which is one of the things people get stuck on about this model of multiple lives.

I believe the original concept of karma was borne in a valid spiritual truism: that we are composed of energy, that energy is ideas, those ideas are beliefs. That our "composition" attracts energy that "fits it" like a puzzle piece. So if we have a certain belief, such as in victimization, we will both act-out that pattern, and we will draw to us that pattern or its match. That is in line with Seth's ideas.

But the doctrine of karma has been horribly corrupted over time, as well as reduced to a spoon-fed sound-byte more apropo for five year olds. Best-case now, it is seen as something that "adjusts" you, not quite like "punishment" but serving a similar purpose. (I can't tell you how many people I've met in the 'metaphysical' field that are certain they were "very bad" in some past life and that this probably explains their present life.) Worst-case now, it says if you piss off a Hindu clergyman you're coming back as a cockroach or untouchable and you're screwed.

Emily Saliers of The Indigo Girls has two cool songs that involve reincarnation, on their "Rites of Passage" album. Some lyrics (excerpts specific to the topic):

from "Galileo"

...And as the bombshells of my daily fears explode
I try to trace them to my youth

And then you had to bring up reincarnation
Over a couple of beers the other night
And now I'm serving time for mistakes made by another
In another lifetime

How long till my soul gets it right
Can any human being ever reach that kind of light...

I think about my fear of motion
Which I never could explain
Some other fool across the ocean years ago
Must have crashed his little airplane

How long till my soul gets it right
Can any human being ever reach that kind of light...

I offer thanks to those before me that's all I've got to say
Cause maybe you squandered big bucks in your lifetime
Now I have to pay
But then again it feels like some sort of inspiration
To let the next life off the hook
Or she'll say
Look what I had to overcome from my last life
I think I'll write a book

That's a good song by the way, acoustic guitar and harmony. That one and this one:

from "Virginia Woolf"

They published your diary and that's how I got to know you
Key to the room of your own and a mind without end
And here's a young girl on a kind of a telephone line through time
And the voice at the other end comes like a long lost friend

So I know I'm all right life will come and life will go
Still I feel it's alright cause I just got a letter to my soul
When my whole life is on the tip of my tongue
Empty pages for the no longer young
The apathy of time laughs in my face
You said, "Each life has its place"

... If you need to know that you weathered the storm of cruel mortality
A hundred years later I'm sitting here living proof

So you know you're alright life will come and life will go
Still you feel it's alright someone'll get a letter to your soul...

...And so it was for you when the river eclipsed your life
And sent your soul like a message in a bottle to me and it was my rebirth

So we know we're alright
Though life will come and life will go
Still you'll feel it's alright
Someone'll get a letter to your soul
And you hear dry your eyes
And you know it's alright
Though life will come and life will go
Someone gets your soul
When my whole life is on the tip of my tongue
Empty pages for the no longer young
You said
Each life has it's place
It'll be alright

One day when I was in the midst of tons of upheaval, living in my van circa 1994, I was listening to this song while lying on my couch in there, and I just burst into tears, and sang it and cried, over and over. It was like all the sudden the "it's all right" that repeats at the end was like a lullaby, exactly what I needed to hear for some reason.

*

Seth's model of "other lives" is different in more ways than just the "time" issue (which as a side-effect kinda nullifies, in a way (sorta), the karma issue). My own experiences have led me to believe that this particular model is probably the most reasonable for me anyway:

Humans are composite, conglomerates of energy. Lots of it. We "source" from something larger that you could, for lack of a better term, call a "group-soul." It is NOT that we don't have individual souls, we do. It's that our individual souls are a lot larger than we think, and are in turn part of something larger still.

As an analogy, let's take Jane the Good Wife. There's more to Jane than that. It might turn out that she is a good piano player, a good judo fighter, a good executive, a good many things. All of those things are equally part of her. Maybe in some periods she lives out one or some of them; and others, not until or not after some other era in life. She is not any more or less Jane when she is being an executive versus a piano player. It's all part of her.

Well I think this is one way of modeling the 'larger soul' concept. Right now I am a certain [Seth's term] "focus personality." I am one particular collection and arrangement of energy from the whole. But there can be other collections and arrangements, and those have different "focus personalities." They are all equally me, my soul. I am no more or less me than any other "lifetime/personality".

So on one hand, one can say there are many lives (in this model), and they are not ordered by time. On the other hand, there is a detail here: there is no such thing as exactly the same person in multiple lives. SOME -- maybe even most -- of the energy in that soul might be the same energy as was used in another. But there is always at least *some* difference (and the body is always at least a bit different and as an integrated symbiote with the soul it is also a key part of any given focus-personality). So we do NOT actually 'live other lives' in entirety. I-as-me, this focus personality, is NOT living multiple lives. Much of the energy which composes me however, arranged in other personalities, is.

You might think of it like a song. I can play a song in A minor and that is one song; I can play another song which is also in A minor and might even just be "variations on the same theme". But it is a different song. If that song were sentient, it might "recognize or remember" the many notes/chords/sequence/timing of it that "is also in" another song. That would not make it the same song. That would simply make it "aware of parts of it which are also present in another song."

*

It's not quite the same thing. The "linear time-based karmic-based reincarnation model" is specific to organized religion. It is the alternative to heaven or hell and it is the "power play" of carrot vs. club that religious leaders have used for millennia to control the masses. You can be born as a princess or as an untouchable and, original sin and karma being what it is in those religions, it's all your fault either way. It's prejudice you might call "reincarnation-ism". If you're born with a clubfoot, you must have done something bad to deserve it. Personally I find this particular model childish and vile.

In my model (insert "in my opinion only" here so I don't have to caveat every sentence), which is based on Seth's model of creating-reality (obviously, that latter model has ancient roots), it's more a matter of the energy you hold:

One's larger soul is, you might say, a certain fractal or pattern. One explores all the things one is, and all the things one is not, within that pattern. A geometry; it's all binary, 0/1. A personality living in 1218 might be vastly more spiritually advanced than one living in 1992, there is no rule about that. It just depends on what the soul is exploring in any given focus-life. Because in this one it is being a piano player and in that one it is being an executive and they each have different challenges, lessons and opportunities.

Because the "source soul" is the same for the different personalities, there is 'shared energy'. If it's really a problem, any personality that happens to be sharing that particular energy will deal with it also. But the good news is any of them can resolve it, too. And when either happens, "different probabilities" are invoked for the lives sharing that energy, based on the changes. I guess another way of saying this is that one can redeem the energy for many lives, when they deal with a given issue in their NOW. Maybe that is truly evolution on a cosmic or planetary level.

So one could see that as karma -- sorta. But not about, "You screwed up X so now you suffer Y." More like, "You are dealing with energy X, which is causing consequences in every personality your soul is manifesting; in this one, it's causing Y." But it's not a punishment. That's ridiculous, that's the religion-as-a-bedtime-story superstition version I think, that is the common way of modeling it though.

*

The most important part of this deals with the "awareness of, and access to, the core energy, for fixing it." Traditional 'karma' models make people helpless children. You were ghengis khan over a century ago and now you're screwed! But Seth always insisted that everything that was part of us was available in us and to us, and none of it is totally hidden away so we were helpless. He insisted that all energy we were manifesting (in fact especially what we were manifesting in some obvious way, like problems) is based on energy plenty near the surface--that we have access to.

This makes sense, experientially and logically: the universe is holographic. Everything that is a pattern at one level is also showing up on myriad others. Figuring that out might be work, of course. Some patterns are just so close we don't even see them, or realize it's a pattern at all! But every time I have actually found one of the patterns of energy that was a problem for me, it has been like this: replicated through every area of my life; not hidden at all. Although until I understood it, it certainly seemed to be.

*

Anyway, I think this is a tough subject. It's a lot to wrap the brain around because it messes with several different core constructs including identity and karma on top of the "multiple lives" concept itself. Every person has to wade through it themselves and decide what works for them as a belief system. I've adapted mostly by adopting a belief system where on one hand, it validates "past life memories" totally, yet on the other hand, it does NOT actually mean that I-the-I-that-I-know-this-minute is living multiple lives--only part of my energy, not all of it--and that does not lock me into helpless victim of past life in a karmic sense, geez; and that actually offers an opportunity to see that 'improvement' in any problem can help all related lives.

Maybe I'm pollyanna or something, but this is the only variant of the idea I'm able to swallow!

PJ