Why the Church Would Have Damned Me For This Post 1500 Years Ago

"Whosoever teaches the doctrine of a supposed pre-birth existence of the soul, and speaks of a monstrous restoration of this, is cursed."

A new book in German, Jenseits von Einstein by author Peter Andreas, claims that in 553 AD, the Emperor Justinius had teachings on reincarnation banned. (And looking into the politics it took to accomplish this, I may have found a past life for Senator Mitch McConnell.) According to this new book:

In the year 553, quite independently of the Pope, Justinius had the teachings of the church father Origen (185-253) banned by a synod. Origen had spoken out in unmistakable terms on the question of the repeated incarnations of the soul:

‘Each soul enters the world strengthened by the victories or weakened by the defects of its past lives. Its place in this world is determined by past virtues and shortcomings.’    

De Principalis.

(In an interesting sync, I started this blog with a different version of this quote from Origen.)

Apparently Emperor Justinius did an end run around the 5th Ecumenical Council and got Origen and his teachings banned. I don’t know if the author Andreas states this, but previous research had pointed out that the concept of reincarnation was in conflict with the teachings of eternal damnation. It was deemed easier to keep people in line and coming to church on Sundays (plus keeping the donations flowing) by threatening them with never ending hellfire as punishment for their “sins.” Andreas’ research points out that it wasn’t even the Church itself that took this massive shift away from its own ancient teachings:

"Thus it seems right to conclude that the ban on the teaching of reincarnation is based on historical misrepresentation and has no ecclesiastical authority. It was in fact a fait accompli, brought about by Justinius, which no-one within the Christian church has dared to challenge in the course of some 1500 years. What is worse is that the subject has been totally ignored, as a glance at any encyclopaedia will show." 

Interesting, the use of that phrase “has no ecclesiastical authority,” which may be why I feel empowered rather than cursed by my past lives work. This book shows that it was politics, and not religious philosophy, that removed reincarnation from established Church doctrine.

https://share-international.org/archives/AgelessWisdom/aw_bannned.htm

Hypnosis, Hellier, and Here We Go Again...

In my ongoing research and practice of past life explorations, I keep coming back to the subject of hypnosis, and I vacillate on whether it is a benevolent or manipulative process. My EFT teacher, the late Ted Robinson, was one of the most respected hypnosis teachers and practitioners in the country, so I have been reluctant to be critical of hypnosis in the big picture while having serious doubts about its effectiveness as a tool for accessing past lives. I am reading Michael Newton’s handbook for what he calls “Hypnotherapy of Spiritual Regression” and have been extremely distressed by his references to an “authoritarian” approach in conducting between lives sessions. And along comes the 2nd season of “Hellier” from the ghost hunting group headed by Greg and Dana Newkirk. In the show, which is available on Amazon Prime, the team takes a left turn from investigating the goblins that started their adventure, and veer in to a misadventure using a hypnotist to induce an alien abduction in a willing participant who is visibly traumatized by the procedure.

Greg Newkirk in an interview by Tim Binnall:

When we did this experiment, we were trying to get abducted by aliens. When we couldn’t get abducted by aliens the old-fashioned way, I called my friend Lonnie, who’s a hypnotist, and I said, “Hey, Do you think its possible to do the reverse of a regression hypnosis session, and plant an idea of an alien abduction in someone’s head.”

The filmmakers obviously knew this was controversial , because they included an interview with a researcher who is close to the case, Allen Greenfield, and he informs them on camera that this was “unethical”. This was discussed by Newkirk on the excellent “Binall of America” podcast* where host Tim Binnall refers to a guy in Twitter who calls them out for this ethical lapse. (That guy was me, and in a through the looking glass moment, I heard it while I was driving and listening to the podcast.) My dissatisfaction with their dismissal of this by saying the guy was a willing participant and wasn’t really hurt pales next to a much larger concern.

The facts are these: A certified professional hypnotist, Lonnie Scott**, who also bills himself as a “Trainer (This guy is training newbies?!) and occultist” is filmed hypnotizing a willing participant into believing AND EXPERIENCING an alien abduction which leaves him shaken and visibly distressed. The session was only 20 minutes but the participant believed he had 4 days of experiences. This event took place in 2012, and when he was interviewed by Newkirk years later:

…he didn’t remember anything about the experience at all …But not only did he have a lot of anxiety thinking about the experience, he believes 100% in extraterrestrials and that they might be visiting us, and he believes in hypnosis now. So it changed him, fundamentally…

My first reaction was that this was some seriously messed up MKUltra craziness. Newkirk explained that the hypnotist had reservations about the procedure but describes his thinking as:

“I think we can  illustrate a point about how easily these types of things are implanted in people’s heads AND WHY PEOPLE PROBABLY SHOULDN’T DO REGRESSION so let’s give it a shot. “ (emphasis mine)

The filmed event in Hellier is included in a 10 episode 2nd season of a show available to Amazon’s Prime Video audience, potentially seen by thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of people all over the world. Unintentionally, while starting their search for a Kentucky goblin, this 20-minute filmed session establishes that an unethical hypnotist can induce memories of an alien abduction in a willing subject, calling into question ALL of the data from hypnotic regression, the most commonly used method of memory retrieval in contact and abduction cases. Yes, there are researchers, including Rey Hernandez and Jaques Vallee, who questioned the use of hypnosis and avoid including this data. But in the vast majority of cases, including Betty and Barney Hill’s abduction which launched the modern contact era, the memories are recovered/uncovered via hypnosis. Even the excellent “Witness to Another World” documentary utilizes a hypnotic process to recover Juan Perez’s memories of his time aboard a spacecraft and retrieved Juan’s memories of his grandfather’s appearance.

What does this have to do with past life explorations? I avoid the term “past life regression” because that specifically refers to the hypnotic process of going backwards in time though this life and into a past life, but that is the public perception of this work and what clients most often ask about when contacting me. My work and over 200 sessions in the past 3 years have established that we no longer need hypnosis to access this information. William & Diane Swygard, Morris Netherton and Roger Woolger all accomplished their past lives work without hypnosis over the last 50 years. I am increasingly coming to the opinion that hypnosis is a powerful behavioral changing technology, but I question its validity as a device to retrieve memories from beneath the surface of the conscious mind. I am actively seeking an interview with an experienced, ethical hypnotist who can explain to me how this can be done effectively and without manipulation, emotional or psychic.

*http://www.binnallofamerica.com/boaa121519.html

**From his website -http://mattoonhypnosis.com, “Certified Professional Hypnotist affiliated with the International Certification Board of Clinical Hypnosis”

PS - Then this article from the Intercept found me, referencing actual MKUltra experiments with hypnosis going back to the 1950’s:

In 1956, West* reported back to the CIA that the experiments he’d begun in 1953 had at last come to fruition. In a 1956 paper titled “The Psychophysiological Studies of Hypnosis and Suggestibility,” he claimed to have achieved the impossible: He knew how to replace “true memories” with “false ones” in human beings without their knowledge. Without detailing specific incidents, he put it in layman’s terms: “It has been found to be feasible to take the memory of a definite event in the life of an individual and, through hypnotic suggestion, bring about the subsequent conscious recall to the effect that this event never actually took place, but that a different (fictional) event actually did occur.”

**Dr. Louis Jolyon West, the head of psychiatric services at Lackland Air Force Base in Texas

https://theintercept.com/2019/11/24/cia-mkultra-louis-jolyon-west/

As the current meme says, PROVE ME WRONG.

My Personal Paradigm Shift and a Video

I recently experienced an eye opening, paradigm shifting realization. I had seen Graham Hancock’s fascinating lecture at Contact in the Desert in May and was impressed with both his research and his presentation of the concept that there have been multiple civilizations that have risen and fallen on this planet before our current era. This is something I had felt to be true, and that the powers that be were actively ignoring and even suppressing this information made it seem even more likely. But I never made the leap to my own personal past lives work. That is one side of the equation.

The other is the experiences that my clients were reporting. Now the path to the most effective research is to follow the data. When Brian Weiss’ client was taken back to the source of her issues and went all the way back to ancient Egypt, he was probably stunned, confused, and had his belief systems shaken. The same with other researchers when first encountering the past lives connection. But following what their clients reported without judgment is what brings us to this next jumping off point. When my clients reported experiences in civilizations that did not reflect the current historical and archeological model, or reported technologies that are not in the fossil record, I accepted these experiences as pertinent to the client even as they challenged my own belief systems. But in following the data, what I was not acknowledging became obvious to me: Graham Hancock’s research indicates that there were previous civilizations inhabiting this planet. For whatever reason, these civilizations rose, prospered, fell into decline and reached their end, whether through internal (war, diseases, etc.) or external stresses (catastrophic climate change or a world wide event like a polar shift or meteor strike).

If there were previous civilizations living on this planet, there is a definite possibility that some of us now inhabiting the planet may have been incarnated in these previous civilizations.

Regardless of your opinion on climate change, it seems possible that the weird weather many of us are experiencing and the political instability we are all experiencing (AKA the Clown World that 2019 has been) could be triggering events from unfinished business or reviving traumas from past incarnations, and following the data means allowing this information, emotional and otherwise, to be brought to the surface for the purpose of being acknowledged and released.

Cue Randall Carlson and this video about previous civilizations lost to time:

“You just got to know what to look for and where to look for it. Once you begin to become aware of it, you begin to see it, you begin to realize that the cosmic fingerprints are everywhere about us. We are in fact living in, and upon, the wreckage of the former worlds. The rubble of these former worlds is all around us but we haven’t had the scale, the perspective, to see it.”

Now Carlson is referencing the desktop access to an almost cosmic point of view available through Google Earth, but since everything relates to past lives in my world view, what if our present day issues could be “the wreckage of the former worlds” we inhabited in different bodies, at a different and earlier time on this planet? With an expanded perspective, I will be following the data, this Spiritual Archeology, that my clients present. But that is only the first step. If we accept the possibility of past lives in previous civilizations on THIS planet, I also have to open my awareness to the possibility of previous incarnations in civilizations on OTHER planets, which my clients are also presenting. And this feels like the intersection of Science Fiction and Spirituality. More to come as I follow the data….

Michale Newton's "Life Between Lives - Hypnotherapy for Spiritual Regression"

A trip to the Asheville library’s downtown book sale yielded a treasure trove of goodies, including this 2005 book which I was not familiar with. Not as well known as his JOURNEY OF SOULS and its follow-up DESTINY OF SOULS, this is designed for practitioners. I’m always looking to add to my knowledge base and will be digging deeper into this book, but this from Newton’s introduction caught my eye:

While this text is designed to present the foundations of my research into the afterlife in a systematic fashion, it it not my intention that spiritual regressionists conform to a rigid sequence of hypnotic procedures. In fact, I recognize this material may be useful for those who wish to employ alternative methods to reach the spirit world. I know that each facilitator brings their own ideas, talents, and experience to the practice of LBL (Life Between Lives) therapy. The application of different approaches to the mind can only enhance our knowledge and perspective of our spiritual life.

My estimation of Michael Newton’s work skyrocketed reading this! I had been critical of the “checklist” approach to the between lives state, and noticed how the popularity of “Journey of Souls” influenced so many people’s expectations for their past and between lives explorations. Plus I noticed in “Destiny of Souls” a willingness to allow for each person to have their own unique experience. But here he is extending that to practitioners, and opening the door to those of us who use “alternative methods to reach the spirit world,” which I hope includes my own non-hypnotic induction methods. More to come as I dive in to this book…

Ads Promising Controlled Reincarnation in 1963?

Thanks to wearethemutants.com for this reminder of the “good old days” of 1963, when this ad appeared in Fate magazine promising “Controlled Reincarnation” by practicing Druidism. Talk about lost wisdom! Apparently, 56 years ago you could access the knowledge enabling you to choose your next incarnation, “how that body shall look, and how great shall be its mind,” something none of the more modern systems can promise. And it was (allegedly) free! I love the illustration of what appears to be Adam and Eve and the Golden Child superimposed over a sunrise (or set), and the hook, “Find Excitement, Prosperity, and Spiritual Vigor in This Life and the Next.” (Vigor is an underused word in my humble opinion.) Obviously this was an advertisement aimed at a much less sophisticated buying public, an indication that we have made progress, but alerting our modern selves to the early New Age movement from the 1960’s, and the birth of interest in past lives and esoteric wisdom from ancient traditions.

Interesting, a google search revealed that there is still an active Druid school in Wheatridge, Colorado, where this ad’s post office box was located, with an up-to-date website, ritualcravt.com. Coincidence, or a Druidism hot-spot?

https://wearethemutants.com/2019/03/05/i-shall-teach-thee-terrible-things-the-ads-and-articles-of-fate-magazine-1963/

(Don’t let the title scare you, this site has lots more interesting ads from Fate magazine, still in publication and based in Hendersonville, a mere 30 minutes from my fortress of solitude in Western North Carolina.)

Great Gordon White quotation

I’m a follower of Gordon White’s Rune Soup blog and podcast, even when I disagree with his politics or can’t follow his discussion about chaos magic. But this quotation resonated with me:

Wherever you are and whatever you are doing, make sure to find the others as soon as possible.

In his 9/25/19 blog post, he updated that to:

Finding the others is now a moral and cosmic obligation.

I acknowledge his sense of urgency. Who are these mysterious “Others?” You’ll now when you find them. They’re your tribe, and I agree, finding your tribe as soon as possible is the best possible course of action to survive, progress and share that progress (and your mis-steps also.)

Dick Sutphen Retirement Announcement and a Great Quotation

Dick Sutphen is the formerly Sedona-based author of many books including You Were Born to Be Together (from 1976!) and my favorite, Past Life Therapy in Action. He announced his retirement (and a return to painting) in the latest email to his followers. Sutphen left with this beautiful quotation I’d like to share:

Think of your Higher Self as an artist and your lower self as the picture you will paint. Your Higher Self is your karmically created character, and your lower self is your physical body—your traits, habits, and emotions. In each incarnation karma presents you, the artist, with an opportunity to paint your life picture. Do not confuse yourself with your picture. You are already a fully self-actualized, enlightened soul, who has only to project this awareness into your work.

We forget that we are the artists and not the painting, when we allow the painting to become our reality when we could be calling upon our buried talent to change the areas of the picture that are not working. We can erase portions of the picture and start again, painting a new image in bright, joyous colors.

As a life long drummer and musician, I appreciate that editing our own work, knowing what NOT to play, is sometimes the best approach to making art. And I applaud Sutphen’s pro-active approach to this past lives work; the artist’s metaphor depicts that perfectly. The power is with us to take these past life bleed-throughs and triggers, confront them in full consciousness, and experience the transformation that is possible when willing to look into all of our corners, whether light or dark. Sutphen was one of the pioneers in confronting our shadows, and he bravely did it in public and in a group setting! I regret not having the opportunity to train with him but appreciate his contribution to the field of past life explorations.

Feel it to heal it? Absolutely!

I just finished reading Barbara Pomar’s book “Confessions of a Regressionist” and was impressed with the depth and breadth of her research. She dove deeply into the quantum physics aspects of past lives and even tackled the time conundrum*, no small task without a large roll of duct tape to keep your brains from exploding out of your skull. Here is one of the quotations that I pulled regarding one of the major issues people have with their initial journeys into past lives:

“(P)sychologist W. P. Hull came to the conclusion that: If the patient has not had an experience, he/she cannot have a feeling. No amount of suggestion can cause feeling. We come into this world with the ability to feel, but we do not feel until or unless something happens. There is a big difference between feeling and imagination. We can imagine almost anything, but you cannot feel anything unless you have had an experience to cause it. "

I always stress to my clients that the emotions that arise are the key to healing; I guess this makes me a member of the “feel it to heal it” school of energy medicine. But this is absolutely true with past lives - it has to be an experience and the emotional aspect is what enables us to own it. In the group past life mini-dives that I do at workshops, the goal is to access a glimpse of one’s happiest, most joyful and fulfilled past life, even if it is just an episode in that life. This has multiple advantages: it feels GREAT, and it sets the pathway for emotions to be the avenue to connect with our previous personalities. I’m grateful that Pomar reminded me that:

“(Hans) TenDam suggests that in discerning a psychodrama from a past life, the regressionist needs to ask for emotions and bodily sensations.”

Which is what we do at my MeetUps and workshops: experiential dives into past lives. Even in a group setting, people are invited to feel the emotions and bodily sensations from a past life personality, almost always one that has a message for our present day self. And in a one-on-one session, we have 90 minutes to 2 hours to explore this in depth.

Pomar’s book is only $3.99 in the Amazon Kindle store:

https://www.amazon.com/Confessions-Regressionist-There-Other-Present-ebook/dp/B07957C4R9/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=Barbara+pomar&qid=1567454383&s=gateway&sr=8-1

*the time conundrum is an attempt to address the many faceted aspects of time: whether time and our various past lives are actually sequential, or whether everything is happening at once; whether time lines can overlap, or whether a consciousness can inhabit more than one physical body at the same time; or the idea that every decision splits off into a new timeline (the Many Worlds Theory). It’s a deep rabbit hole that I’ll be addressing in the future.

GIVE YOURSELF PERMISSION TO SUSPEND DISBELIEF - MARY LABAY

I’m an admirer of Mary LaBay’s past lives work, and in her latest email newsletter, she perfectly captures the best attitude to adopt when doing this work for the first time:

To suspend disbelief during a past life regression, simply give yourself permission to experience whatever thoughts, visions, experiences, or ideas come your way, without judgment or criticism. Once you let in all the information that wants to come your way, you can sift through it to hone the accuracy…When we don’t allow ourselves to believe in past lives long enough to allow the flow of memories, we will not be able to receive the valuable insights and lessons awaiting us.

My version of that advice was inspired by Gail Gulick, who’s shamanic journeying circle I have been attending (and drumming at) for 3 years:

Trust the first image.

Giving yourself permission, allowing, suspending disbelief, receiving; these are the concepts that allow us to open the door to these life changing experiences.

WORLD PEACE THROUGH PAST LIFE JOURNEYING?

While prepping for my last workshop, I had this thought to present this past life work, the deepest and most interesting part of it, as a solution to world peace. Not in a flippant way. The question becomes::

How can you be prejudiced against anyone else due to color, race, religion, class, sex or sexual identity, or even economics when you have likely already been someone of that race, religion, skin color, sex or economic class? When you’ve already been the opposite of what you are now? And having lived from that other side of the equation, we are now given the opportunity to experience how we treated others when we were privileged, or how we thought about the people who treated us badly?

Rich or poor; black, white, brown or yellow; upper or lower class. These are all just roles that we are playing, temporarily, in order to have an experience that teaches us a lesson. So skip ahead and acknowledge that we are all one and set your intention to make better choices from that awareness.

Here is Brian Weiss’ wisdom on this topic:

An understanding of past lives teaches us to end all bigotry and prejudice. Over our many lifetimes we have been all races, all religions, both sexes, and many nationalities. We have to learn from all sides. We are all the same. Karmic forces will pull you to any group you oppress if you do not learn this lesson.

Contact me for a session when you’re ready to get a past life perspective and explore the other side of the equation that you find yourself on in this present life,

Richard Feynman Mystery Quotation

I had a conversation with someone at a MeetUp and their philosophy, installed by their trusted guru, was “We are not supposed to know our past lives.” I have my own answer to that. Their guru’s advice was probably given in the 1960’s or ‘70’s, based on the best information available at that time, but that was 40-50 years ago. I trust that we have made significant progress since then and need to put that advice in the context of the era in which it is given. But the universe posing as the internet came up with a better answer to the question. It comes from Richard Feynman, an American theoretical physicist who is also a teacher, philosopher and (this made him near and dear to my heart) a DRUMMER.:

“It does not do harm to the mystery to know a little about it.”

Feynman was talking about science but I see it in a larger context of Mystery with a capital M. If we consider life (including our past lives) to be a mystery, then follow William Swygard’s advice and “Ask questions, questions, questions, questions.”

Here’s a link to the longer original quote on my blog:

https://thepastlivesguy.blogspot.com/2019/06/richard-feynman-mystery-quotation.html

Scott De Tamble & the 3D Chess Board Image

I heard an excellent interview with Scott De Tamble on the Past Lives Podcast out of the UK. De Tamble is a clinical hypnotherapist based in Southern California and was trained by Michael Newton in Life Between Lives. I like De Tamble's take on Newton's work; most “Newton-ians” adhere to the checklist of between lives stages- meeting spirit guide, life review, going before the council, etc. The people who are attracted to my working process have a much more individual experience and don’t feel cheated if they don’t hit all those checkpoints, and De Tamble acknowledges Newton’s need to organize as a trained hypnotherapist. De Tamble also cites Dick Sutphen as an influence and related this metaphor from Sutphen (for which I was unable to find a direct quote):

“I don’t know if you remember the original Star Trek, they had this 3D chess board that they would play… If you imagine a glass chess board that you could see through, and you put it up… at eye level, and then you had 1 piece on that chess board, say, you’re a King in this life, each chess board would be a life. Then you have a thousand other chess boards, below the next one, the next one below, below, below. So if you’re on top, looking down, you see all of these lives, all of these pieces moving around in this incredible dance of … existence. And so, if on chess board number 69 you’re a pawn and you move from this space to that space, it affects the entire game. And so its easy to think that a decision I make in this current life will affect my future lives, that’s sort of easy to understand. But with that concept, a decision I make in this life will also affect all of my past lives, because its like one big dance going on at once.”

Here’s one more quote from this interview (link below):

Its a testing ground, the earth and other physical spaces.

Welcome to the dance, y’all.

Scott De Tamble’s website is:

https://lightbetweenlives.com

http://www.pastliveshypnosis.co.uk/the-past-lives-podcast-ep67-scott-de-tamble/

Henry Ford Reincarnation Quotation: "GENIUS IS EXPERIENCE"

In an interview that appeared in the San Francisco Examiner on 26 August 1928, (Henry Ford) explained his belief:

I adopted the theory of Reincarnation when I was twenty six. Religion offered nothing to the point. Even work could not give me complete satisfaction. Work is futile if we cannot utilise [sic] the experience we collect in one life in the next. When I discovered Reincarnation it was as if I had found a universal plan I realised [sic] that there was a chance to work out my ideas. Time was no longer limited. I was no longer a slave to the hands of the clock. Genius is experience. Some seem to think that it is a gift or talent, but it is the fruit of long experience in many lives. Some are older souls than others, and so they know more. The discovery of Reincarnation put my mind at ease. If you preserve a record of this conversation, write it so that it puts men’s minds at ease. I would like to communicate to others the calmness that the long view of life gives to us.

Henry Ford Knew!

SUBARU = PLEIADIES? WHO NEW?

I Googled the Pleadies to determine the correct spelling for the previous blog post and found this (Its from Gaia so you know its true….)

Subaru is the Japanese word for “Pleiades,” and the company logo, an oval with six four-point stars, represents the Pleiades star cluster. The word also means “united,” apt, because the Subaru corporation was formed by the merger of five companies.

There is an interesting article on their site that accumulates a lot of esoteric information from disparate sources about the Pleadians:

https://www.gaia.com/article/who-are-the-pleiadians

Here’s the non-woo-woo version from Subaru.com.au:

The name Subaru is Japanese, meaning ‘unite’. It’s also a term for a cluster of six stars in the Taurus constellation, named 'Pleiades' by the ancient Greeks. According to Greek mythology, these stars were once Atlas’ daughters. The six-star cluster featured in the Subaru badge design is known in Japan as mutsuraboshi, meaning ‘six stars’.

Who knew? Especially since I am living in the mountains of Western North Carolina where the “official” vehicle seems to be the 4-wheel drive Subaru Outback.

"Past Life Bleed-through" article

I am not familiar with the work of Nora Herald and I usually prescribe extreme discernment when dealing with material downloaded from a Pleiadian source (remember, just because you’re from the Pleiadies doesn’t mean you’re smart!) But this was an interesting article I can recommend based on my own personal experiences. The “bleed through” is from a past life relationship with someone who enters our present life and, seemingly without effort, shakes us to our foundations. Nora describes an encounter with someone who activates long lost and deeply hidden feelings that are incredibly powerful (Been there.) In Nora’s case, the feelings were not reciprocated, leading to confusion and emotional turmoil (… done that.) Nora describes this feeling as “walking between worlds” which I have experienced. Nora explains her own technique of dealing with this bleed through; I advocate for deeper digging into the past life that triggered the previous life’s relationship. So often the person who has been wronged, dumped, or left behind has a previous entanglement that activated the energy that is still bouncing around causing present day upheaval. It is brave to look into the past life relationship of someone who arouses deep emotions in us. It is heroic to dig deeper into the past energies behind the past life affecting our current situation.

One of the core tenets of Energy Psychology is to find the core issue which is triggering our emotional discomfort, which is often far in the past. My experience has shown that most often, that core issue is in a past life. Now I am noticing that our past life issues have a core issue in a life even further in the past. This is the deep work that only the bravest of past lives explorers undertake.

(A longer version of this is available on my blog at:https://thepastlivesguy.blogspot.com)

https://www.noraherold.com/nora-s-blog/past-life-bleedthroughs-just-one-more-confusing-aspect-of-this-current-reality

Michael Talbot Quotation

“No single piece of information means anything. Pieces of information only start to mean something when they fit together into larger pictures.”

Michael Talbot is an author and researcher better known for his groundbreaking 1992 book “The Holographic Universe” but it was a pleasant surprise to learn that he was also an avid past lives researcher. He published “YOUR PAST LIVES- A REINCARNATION HANDBOOK” in 1987. (I reviewed it here in this blog in October 2018.) I love this quote; It is a reminder that we only get pieces of the puzzle in every past life journey, and it takes some time to amass the body of knowledge that allows us to see the larger picture. I was lucky to find a hardcover copy of “YOUR PAST LIVES” and I highly recommend it to anyone doing this work.

Elizabeth Krohn: Talking AfterLife Experiences w/Gordon White on Rune Soup

Fascinating interview with Elizabeth Krohn, co-author of “Changed in a Flash” (with Jeffrey Kripal) which is the story of her being struck by lightning, dying, and how her visit to the afterlife changed her life. As Elizabeth describes it:

It flipped some kind of switch for me that made it easy for me to receive information and interact … with another dimension.

Rune Soup is one of my favorite podcasts, and Gordon White describes this as one of his “favorite ever episodes.” After being struck by lightning, Elizabeth found herself above her body laying on the ground, trying to will it to get up. 

Elizabeth Krohn: Suddenly I realized I’m not getting up because I’m dead. And as soon as I realized that, I felt free to explore this other realm where I was… A light appeared to my right and up above me, and I knew that this light … wanted me to follow it, so  I thought, “I’ll go, I’ll see what this is”, and I followed this light and it lead me to … a garden. Except its not like any garden that would be here on earth. I happen to love gardens and I’ve been to a lot of them, and this was nothing like anything I’ve seen here…

The most overwhelming thing that I felt in the garden… was this unconditional love that was so overpowering and so unlike any love here on earth or in this dimension… I struggle to find the words to describe that feeling, to describe the beauty of this place. 

Somehow, I understood that I was in heaven and I did see other people there, in the distance. No one approached me but I saw other people, and I understood that they were also in heaven but that they were not seeing what I was seeing. Like heaven was tailored to each individual person, and it was whatever is going to put you personally at ease and make you happy is what you see. And for me that was a garden. And that was just something I understood while I was there. 

Comforting to know that whatever puts us at ease and makes us happy is what awaits us on the other side of the veil. And interesting because my favorite between lives “recovery area” is a perfectly beautiful garden. “Heavenly” would be the only way for words to attempt to describe it.

https://runesoup.com/2019/05/talking-afterlife-experiences-elizabeth-krohn

Ainslie Macleod quotation

I’ve often been asked why we don’t remember our past lives. I argue that we do. And that’s the problem with reincarnation. We remember our past lives, not consciously, but rather through fears, phobias, limiting beliefs and other blocks, which are most often held in our body. 

The key to getting over these memories of past incarnations is to remind your soul that “that was then, this is now.”

Ainslie Macleod

https://ainsliemacleod.com/that-was-then-this-is-now/

Re-reading this quotation, I noticed Macleod’s emphasis on the idea that these blocks are “most often held in our body.” Which implies that the path to releasing these blocks lies in working with the body’s energy systems. I feel like I am on the correct path when incorporating EFT tapping into my sessions to move and release any stuck energy that comes into awareness from this past lives work. And this is a reminder that past lives work is not just a cerebral exercise; its equally important to fully feel the emotions on our past life journey to express and release them. Lots more interesting ideas on Ainslie’s website at ainsliemacleod.com

Dr. Raymond Moody and "Nonsense"

The title isn’t a criticism. Dr. Raymond Moody, who originated the term “near death experience” in the 1970’s, did his doctoral dissertation on “the concept of unintelligibility, what makes something nonsensical.” In an interview on the excellent Past Lives Podcast*, he describes his work as :

Once we get the concepts (of what makes something nonsensical) down, then it becomes much easier to talk in a rational framework about the afterlife. And I knew beginning 30 years ago that eventually, somebody who’d been through my nonsense course or workshop would happen to have a near death experience. And when they did, I knew … that once you know the principles of how nonsense works, then when you have a near death experience, it puts it in a wholly new light and gives you a way to describe it and make it more intelligible.

Substitute a past life for the near death experience, and you have a fascinating way to approach that which defies logic and is outside of ordinary physical reality. I work regularly with a shamanic journeying group here in Asheville, and those journeys were my introduction to comprehending non-ordinary experiences that border on the nonsensical. I’ve done past life session with many people from this group and they have described some amazing experiences. The instructions given are the same in both shamanic journeying and my own group work:

Trust the first image.

After hearing Raymond Moody interviewed, I may have to add:

Especially if it makes no sense.

Later in the podcast, Dr. Moody says something surprising:

I am 74 years old; I am sick and tired of Raymond Moody. The idea that I would be this one person and personality for eternity is horrifying to me…That I have to bear this name Raymond Moody on and on until infinity, that’s just totally unacceptable to me. But as I gather, there’s some kind of developmental process that, after you’ve died, your mind, your identity, your soul…seems to transform into some other kind of state of consciousness or existence.

An interesting perspective from a man who’s been doing this deep consciousness work for over 50 years but only acknowledged the reality of reincarnation after both of his adopted children related “remembrances” from a past life. Check out the podcast:

*http://www.pastliveshypnosis.co.uk/past-lives-podcast-ep60-raymond-moody/

The Past Lives Podcast interview with Stephen H. Martin and a double Sync

There is an interesting podcast out of the UK called “The Past Lives Podcast*” with 57 episodes to date. The most recent podcast was an interview with Stephen H. Martin who has a new book compiling the wisdom of Edgar Cayce, who was known as the Sleeping Prophet for his ability to channel medical and spiritual wisdom. I talked about Cayce in an earlier blog post/review of Many Mansions, one of the earliest books about Cayce.

Martin had this to say about a topic that has come up in my MeetUps and from some of the experiences of people in the group explorations:

“What (Cayce) said was, we are spiritual beings, we are eternal, we are created by God… and we were created for companionship; to be co-creators with God. Now one of the things we were given was free will; we can decide to cooperate with God or not to cooperate with God, we decide… Whatever we want, whether its good or whether its bad, we have free will. And one of the things that we humans did is explore all of creation, which is multi-dimensional.… This Earth is only one of many different realms that if you’re a spiritual being you can explore. And apparently we humans… wanted to experience this 3 dimensional reality which was inhabited by… animals and trees and fish… and no humans. We really weren’t meant to be here, this was not created necessarily for us in the beginning, but we forced our way in. And the only was you can get in to this dimension is through a living being, not necessarily human but at first apparently we came in through the animal kingdom, and things like centaurs,… the minotaur. The… combination of animal and human beings was something that happened way way back. Eventually we arrived at the ape-like creature and began incarnating through that.”

I am not presenting this as fact; this is Martin speaking based on his research into Cayce. I have no verification of this concept from Cayce’s writings, and am not really interested in further research into Cayce. The religiosity of his “channeling” is suspicious, as is the astonishing coincidence that so many of the people whose past lives he accessed were described as being close to and associated with the historical Jesus. I resonate with the idea that we are created by God (or the Source) to be co-creators, but the idea that we “forced our way into” physicality as humans is radical, as is the idea of human/animal hybrids as being factual.

My only experience with this phenomena is that, when I do group mini-dives into the happiest previous experience, occasionally someone will come back and report having been an animal. Someone described a happy existence as a giraffe in last week’s MeetUp and previously someone reported being a dolphin, on both cases they were intensely positive experiences. I have not had this experience myself, so I can’t weigh in on this but there is some synchronicity in hearing Edgar Cayce referring to consciousnesses inhabiting animal “bodies” just after someone in my MeetUp reported that same experience.

There is a 2nd sync when Martin claims Cayce as the source of the quote I reconfigured in my last post. Talking about communicating with the dead, Martin says:

“People who communicate with the dead, and ask them questions, are fooling themselves if they think they’re always getting the right answers because they’re probably not. As Edgar Cayce said, ‘Just because your grandmother’s dead doesn’t mean that she knows more now than she did when she was alive.’ She’s still that same entity.”

Cursory internet searching was unable to provide verification of this as being Cayce’s original idea which I always attributed to Mary LaBay, but it is in the interview at approximately 46:00.

The book is “Edgar Cayce- The Meaning of Life and What To Do About It” by Stephen H. Martin

*http://www.pastliveshypnosis.co.uk/the-past-lives-podcast-ep57-stephen-h-martin/