I’d been listening to the audiobook of Dolores Cannon’s CONVOLUTED UNIVERSE  Book 2 on a road trip and heard a reference to the concept of Imprinting. Cannon (or rather the narrator) said it was a reference to something she’d covered in CONVERSATIONS WITH SPIRIT, which I had seen in a bookstore a few days ago in the same town I was visiting. So I went back to the store and found a signed copy of that book, subtitled BETWEEN DEATH AND LIFE. In Chapter 14 of that book, she describes a session with a client referred to as “S” who puzzled Cannon with his assertion that this is his first physical life on planet earth, although they had already examined four other lives. 

Cannon: Have you had very many lives on this planet Earth?

S: This is my first physical life, my first true incarnation on this planet. I have had imprints from many others and been assistant to others. However, this is my first true physical incarnation on Earth.

Dear Dolores admitted “This really threw me.” And me also for a bit. 

“S” describes the Imprinting process to Dolores:

D: Do you mean that when some souls come into a life, rather than having lived these exact past life experiences, they take…

S: They can withdraw information from the Akashic records and imprint this information into their soul, and it will then be their experience…If I am in an imprint, that imprint is as real as if I had actually experienced it. All the emotions, the memories, the feelings, virtually everything about that life is in that imprint. 

OK, I was as confused as Dolores claimed to be upon hearing this, but I may have had  a personal experience with this. I recently ran my Between Lives planning process for my present life, exploring when I agreed to work with a group of other souls as a musician, specifically a drummer. When I was 14, I sat down at a friend’s drum kit and immediately felt very comfortable. I was able to play basic rhythms and beats without having had any lessons, just watching other drummers at work, and within weeks had joined the band. With the wisdom of a 14 year old, I decided that this is what I wanted to do for the rest of my life. I pursued drumming and had a solidly middle class career as a drummer until retiring in my 60s. There was something about that feeling of comfort behind a drum set, as if I knew what to do, that surprised me when I started pursuing past lives. I expected to learn about this string of connected lives as a musician but only found 2 that matched. One was as a piano/harpsichord player in the 1700s, and the only life as a drummer was in a jungle setting, keeping the beat for dusk-till-dawn ceremonies. (That skill re-surfaced when I had the opportunity to drum for Gail Gulick’s weekly shamanic journeying gathering, another skill which seemed instantly comfortable.) The other complication was that the drum set that I felt so comfortable with is a 20th century invention. Previously individual performers played snare drum, bass drum, and cymbals until innovators came up with pedals to play bass drum and manipulate cymbals while playing the snare drum. I have intimate knowledge of my lives in the early 20th century and know that I was too busy trying not to be killed in World Wars One and Two to be pursuing music. Does this Imprinting Process explain my abilities? 

As “S” explains:

“The method of imprinting is beyond me... but the effect is to learn lessons from other peoples experiences. The lessons are shared. The experiences each of us are having in this lifetime now will be available at the end of these lifetimes to be imprinted for use by anyone who would have a use for them. It is simply borrowing books from the library if you would consider each life a book and reading and understanding it instantly.”

So, if “S” is correct, I “borrowed” the “How To Play the Drums, Book 1” manual from the Akashic library in order to fulfill my role in this musical life plan I chose to participate in. “S” confirmed to Dolores that “The imprints are chosen before the incarnation.” But this is not what has come to be known as a “download.” I spent decades training my body/mind and upgrading my skill set from a core set of abilities, with a body gifted with coordination and a brain that easily counted beats and then “felt” when tempos were consistent. But as a former drum teacher, I know what it's like to not have this natural ability and set of skills, and how difficult it can be to grasp these basic concepts without this preliminary step. 

Dolores Cannon got over her initial shock and saw its application in what she asked “S” about “Christ consciousness as the imprint of Jesus’ life” and how “awakening to this imprint…is perceived as being ‘born again.’” But then the dreaded Cleopatra argument arises: How many people claim to have “been” Cleopatra or Napoleon in a past life. I wrestled with this in a blog post after a Bashar webinar I attended. Bashar is talking about something very similar to Cannon’s Imprinting concept but positions it in the context of simultaneous time:

But this is the explanation when many people say, Oh I used to be Cleopatra or I used to be Julius Caesar, in one of MY incarnations.  That’s the perspective of the distortion caused by the Space/Time lens. But if you understand the simultaneity of everything, you can realize of course, any being can connect to any other being, and that’s why you can have 50 people, 100 people, a thousand people, all saying “I used to be Cleopatra.” Because it’s not that they used to be Cleopatra, because Cleopatra exists exactly at the same time you do. But a thousand people can make an energy connection to Cleopatra in the present, and thus download information that may, through the distortion of the physical space/time lens, make it seem as if that was you, because you’re assuming that the same soul is having these incarnations over and over and over again. 

Cannon doesn’t address the simultaneous aspect in this regard. This is Imprinting as making an energy connection to an experience or lifetime of experience and then downloading that information. There’s still a difference between saying “I used to be Cleopatra” and accessing Cleopatra’s lifetime as a basis for assuming a leadership role without having had that experience in a past life. 

Now we come to the flaws in Cannon’s practice. She was very fortunate to have developed a process where she only worked with clients who were able to access the deepest level of hypnosis, known as somnambulism, which is claimed to completely bypass the conscious mind. In the early days, Cannon worked extensively with one woman who opened her work to the deeper layers of past life regression and, when that client moved away and discontinued the work, was surprised when the work picked up where it left off with the next client. Decades later, she is working her unique vein of exploration with many different clients, of which “S” is only one. My research was complicated by another reference to Imprinting in a book released the same year, KEEPERS OF THE GARDEN. This entire book is based on her work with one client, Phil D. As the book jacket describes:

A young man wanting to explore past-life regression discovers this is his first lifetime on Earth. 

Sound familiar? I found a chapter also titled Imprinting in KEEPERS OF THE GARDEN, also published in 1993, which begins:

This talk of other dimensions was confusing to me and made questioning difficult. 

So KEEPERS version of Imprinting is obviously coming from a totally different direction. In CONVERSATIONS,  Cannon is wrestling with the implications of Imprinting on her own concept of reincarnation, as I was for the rest of my road trip, and “S” is doing his best to explain the process:

But the fact is you can also actually live many lives without ever having an imprint. Imprints are simply aids. They are not necessary for everyone.

In Keepers, the same paragraph appears with one addition:

Imprints are simply aids. They are not necessary for everyone but they are absolutely imperative for star-people.

In KEEPERS OF THE GARDEN, Cannon was exploring a unique case:

 All his other existences were on alien worlds and in other dimensions…(and) his association with extraterrestrials did not cease with these other lives.

Chapter 1 is titled “The Discovery of Starchild” and begins with:

Extraterrestrials are now living on Earth…This was revealed to me through a year’s intensive work with an actual star-person…I am a regressionist and I regularly take trips through time and space to visit Earth’s past and learn about history as it is being lived. But until my work with Phil D. began I had never visited other planets.

Cannon has based this entire book, KEEPERS OF THE GARDEN, on this investigation but then it seems she took the information specific to a “star-person” and applied it to the rest of humanity. Stating that “Imprints are simply aids. They are not necessary for everyone” but omitting “but they are absolutely imperative for star-people” puts this information in a different category and places the concept of Imprinting in a different light. A further clue is when Cannon herself says: 

I reminded myself, I must remember that I was not working with the common Earth-oriented energy.

Side by side comparison reveals differences in the answer to Cannon’s question — 

Cannon: What would be the reason? 

In KEEPERS, P(HIL D):

If one were to come to this planet from another planet or dimension without the aid of imprints, one would be totally lost. One would not understand customs, religions, politics, or how to act in a social environment. This is the necessity for imprint. In the case of star people coming to this planet, there is no previous earthly experience of human existence in their subconscious. In order for this person to feel comfortable and at ease, there must be something with which to draw on and compare those day to day experiences which one is encountering.  

In CONVERSATIONS, “S” replies:

If one has never experienced a life on Earth before, or if it has perhaps been a long time since the last incarnation, there would be no point of reference, nothing to fall back on or relate to. If one were to come to this planet without the aid of imprints, one would be totally lost. 

There seems to be a re-interpretation of information from that interview — answers that seem to be drawn from the same session yet the context is completely different - star-people versus “maybe it’s been a while since you incarnated.” The evidence is mounting that Cannon took a single account from a self-described star person and applied it to a larger sub-group of “return-ees.”   

The question becomes  - Does this even apply to non-star people? (A new take on “normies.”) I think that my experience of having access to what could be called an Akashic database of experience that helped me to prepare for my present Earthly incarnation, which I experienced as having a fascination with and ease of grasping the tools for playing the drums, is much more in line with most earthlings’ experience than the Star-person known as “S’s” version of:

…the ability to live thousands, hundreds of thousands of years on a planet and actually never have been there before.

For which I am glad and relieved. I had another uncomfortable period of reckoning when reading this, like I experienced after hearing Bashar’s take on the Cleopatra argument. I had to process my own take on it before I could decide whether I wanted to do past lives work anymore if it meant guiding clients through the lives of famous people. 

Unless of course dear Dolores is right again. She was the first person I heard talk of the Earth School as just one of the stops in the soul’s journey throughout the universe. My own personal sessions have taken me to the before and after of our human incarnations, but I don’t consider myself a star-person. Reading Dolores Cannon’s book as she progresses over 3+ decades means allowing her to present ideas and then expand and move on from them. Maybe this is one she had greater insight into in the numerous books she published in the next 21 years until her death in 2014.