I was listening to a podcast (Mysterious Universe, highly recommended) and they were doing an episode based on an old book of ghost stories. These are always interesting, and most of the good ghost stories point to the reality of a continuity of consciousness after death. They also usually occur because of some trauma that lead to death, sometimes in the physical area of the haunting, and sometimes both. But later when I was thinking about this, I realized that in my past life explorations, I never came across any ghostly activity nor has anyone I've ever worked with. That doesn't mean it doesn't exist, just that I haven't come across it in my work. Then, when I was reviewing my notes for this blog, I found something I'd written* after running a particularly traumatic death I'd experienced in combat in World War 1. I was on a mission, my assignment was to deliver a message on the battlefield. This was a trench warfare situation, we were dug in, literally, in these trenches and holding this ground from troops advancing on our position. I was ordered to take a message to the next set of trenches, which involved moving to the edge of our position, going up to surface level and over to the next set of trenches some distance away. I made it without drawing fire, but when I got to the next encampment, I found they had been breached and the enemy soldiers where waiting for me. (The strangest part of this was that I was a German soldier so the "bad"guys were American troops!) Before I could sound the alarm, I was knocked unconscious and then when they realized I couldn't be interrogated for the message I was carrying, I was shot and killed. As I transitioned out of the body, I was still aware of my soldier duties, and my fears that my failure to complete them would lead to my fellow soldiers being killed and the position that we were holding overrun. That, plus my awareness of the family I was leaving behind was emotionally devastating.
From my notes -
I looked down expecting a soldier’s uniform but saw a ghostly physical body.
That was my attempt to describe what I saw after I left the physical body, It was no longer the body I had inhabited for the last 20 years. That is where I had the revelation that inspired this post. Again, from my notes -
(I realized) that we all are ghosts temporarily when we have memory and awareness of our physical body but are no longer in that body.
Maybe some of us are stuck because of the shock in that moment of disconnection from our physical bodies. There was a separation from the pain that the physical body experienced when being shot, but the emotional pain of separation from duty and comrades and loves ones lingered (temporarily) into the between lives state. For one brief interlude, I experienced myself as a "ghost". Luckily, it passed and I accepted myself as no longer in a physical body. But I now have a new perspective of that ghostly experience, one that considers it as a semi-physical echo of a traumatic event. I can see the haunting as a formerly physical individual in need of comfort and guidance.
*This post shows how crucial it is to take the time to journal after a past life exploration. The information we access when still in what Swygard calls an "integrated" state, that is, still connected to our higher consciousness, tends to slip away, and writing down notes immediately after captures information that would otherwise be lost. Its like remembering a dream that is vivid on awakening, but disappears in the barrage of day to day details.