MULTIVERSE MASHUP: NETFLIX’S “RUSSIAN DOLL" + MICHIO KAKU + BEAVIS & BUTT-HEAD
“Russian Doll” is an edgy take on the Groundhog Day conundrum - a woman who keeps dying on her birthday in spite of her best efforts to survive, instead of merely re-living the same day. I was watching with Closed Captioning and this quote jumped out. Unfortunately, taking a screen shot on my MacBook couldn’t grab the picture, just the quote. But the sentiment is worth sharing, even if I had to visually bleep out the language.
“Alan, the only reason to go into the past is to change s*#t, all right?”
Creator/writer/director and star Natasha Lyonne knows, as she navigates multiple timelines in Season 2! This syncs beautifully with a quote from a NY Times article by physicist Michio Kaku titled, “IN ANOTHER UNIVERSE, ANOTHER YOU”:
In the quest to meld two opposing perspectives of the universe, we’re left with a host of deeply unsettling questions. Might we also exist in multiple states? What might we be doing if we had chosen a different career? Married someone else? What if we could somehow change important episodes in our past? As Einstein once wrote, “The distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.”
Michio, the only reason to go into the past is to change s@#t, all right?
In an interview Creator Mike Judge weighs in on his new movie “Beavis and Butt-Head Do the Universe” where the eternal teenagers journey into the multiverse:
Without giving too much away, Judge teased that fans of the Beavis and Butt-Head universe will find some surprises in this new film. “There’s a [scene] where every version of you exists in an infinite universe and the smartest version of [Beavis and Butt-Head] comes into play and that was really fun to do, so was the middle-aged versions of them,” he explained.
AKASHIC RECORDS AS A COSMIC RESUME?
I’ve written previously about the similarities between the Awareness Techniques’ version of our cosmic origin story and how it aligns with Dolores Cannon’s take. I recently dove deeper into the written material from William and Diane Swygard and found this in “Awareness Techniques - Book 1”:
When the creator created the spirit of each man, he did it by releasing a part of himself – yes, a portion of himself was released or put out of his very being to become the highest consciousness of each man…When the creator releases a part of himself, he gives that part a name, and he advises it, "Go, and know my creation, and return it to me." This is done just as you would extend your arm and hand and say, "Go out, become aware of that within your grasp; change it, transmute it, create what you can. Then transmit to me what it is like through touch. Bring it into my other senses - sight, sound, smell, and taste."
Cannon’s version is:
God was this huge bright light, and … he was lonely, he wanted to create others. This is when he burst out - this is the “Big Bang Theory” - when he burst out into millions and billions of particles. Now when I take you back to what you really are, all you are is a tiny little spark of light; a tiny little spark, that’s all you are. So at that point they all shot out in all directions. Some of these little sparks became planets, some became galaxies, and many of them became individual souls.
I have many clients who ask “I want to know where I came from.” Well, we all came from the same place… They all came from God, from the Source, and when they shot out, it was like God said, “Go and learn, my children, learn everything you can and bring it back to me.”
Interesting congruence, and I have no idea if Cannon ever heard or read the Awareness Techniques material, or if they both tapped into the same Source material. But in both cases, the concept of knowing/experiencing/creating in Source’s Creation, and then returning/transmitting/bringing this experience back to Source completes the cycle, and possibly provides an answer to the question, “What is the purpose of our existence?”: To experience and create, and by our actions, we add to Source’s awareness of His/Her own Creation.
It was in reading this again that I recognized that, in this explanation of the Cosmic system, all of our experience and creations are recorded when we transmit them back to Source. This led to a reframe of the Akashic Records concept: Instead of it being “our” personal record of all our existences, it can be seen in a much larger context — a Cosmic Resume sent back to the ultimate home office, the Source of all Creation.
This syncs with some resume advice I was sent, thanks to greggy@WeedlordKrillin:
THE PRINTED MATERIAL REVISITED- PART 2
Full Disclosure: Some of the writings in the Awareness Technique printed materials are still beyond my comprehension even after years of working with the Technique, both through decades of personal sessions and running hundreds of clients. This does not take anything away from the power of this technique to expand consciousness and answer questions beyond any other method I have utilized, (and I have tried many.) But since the material is still available, both in the physical form of the original pamphlets on eBay and other platforms, and in pdf format available through Google searches, I felt the need to address them. I leave it to your personal shelf elves and their digital equivalent, plus your own desire for further information, to guide you into the written materials.
(The tl/dr is: The Original Instructions available from this link or on my website are a more accessible and practical way to utilize the work of Diane and William Swygard. )
After rereading this material, I have a different take: It seems that William and Diane Swygard were so far advanced by the time they published the first book in 1970 that they had moved on from mundane earthly concerns to examining the inner workings of the Universe and the Source of all Creation. For myself, even after decades of working with this material, I am still dealing with those mundane concerns of earthly physical existence - relationships, career, family, health, and spiritual practices - that need to be addressed before more cosmic questions can be explored, and these are the topics that clients find me seeking answers.
In a 2018 conversation with Diane Swygard Harper, she mentioned that she only had 6 past lives. With her late husband William guiding her, she would have been able to explore those lives and release any unfinished business very quickly, which allowed them easier access to the cosmic topics of Multi-Plane Consciousnesses and Perfecting the Spirit they cover in Books 2 and 3. Diane confirmed that I had 128 past lives, so I have many multiples of past life unfinished business to run and release than she did. Some people have hundreds and even thousands of past lives, compounding the work that is required and pointing to personal experience of past lives rather than the cosmic information in the books. So run many lives, finish up your unfinished business, then peruse the written materials with an integrated consciousness. The best advice is in a 4-word sentence in Book 1:
“Ask questions, questions, questions.”
But there is some powerful information that I’ve found in this re-reading. From AT Book 1:
I believe that man's difficulties on earth arise from the fact that he does not fully recognize that he is more than a physical being. The Masters, who considered the whole man and his problems, taught that increased awareness is the answer. Metaphysical writings of today attribute much to the Masters, and relegate man to the role of student, follower, or less. I hold that any man can find he is Master when he adds more levels of awareness to his being. I worked hard for many years to provide a simple technique for developing "Multi-Level Awareness," a direct method of adding a tremendous awareness to your present consciousness….With this method, one learns of his past lives - all of his experiences since he was born of the Creator. He learns astral (mental) awareness, etheric (energy) awareness, and celestial (concept) awareness while adding to his physical (detail) awareness. Ultimately, he becomes Master on twelve planes of awareness. All of this is done without trance or suggestion while the individual is wide awake.
The following technique is not to be taken lightly, because it is the beginning of a mental-spiritual experience that will allow YOU to KNOW YOURSELF. By this, it is meant that YOU, without the aid of a teacher or an assistant of any kind, (after a few preliminary exercises) can bring into your physical consciousness your entire past - your incarnations on this planet, your experiences before you came to this planet; in fact, you can see for yourself everything you have experienced since your spirit was released from the Creator.
Could you find yourself worrying whether a question could not be answered? Please do not be concerned whether this always works because your spirit cannot form a question about yourself unless the answer exists somewhere in your experiences or the record of those experiences, called your soul.
What “Multi-Level Awareness” is not: None of the Awareness Techniques are hypnosis. I have often been accused of spreading hypnosis beyond its presently known boundaries. The fact of the matter is, the Awareness Techniques are the opposite of hypnosis.
Hypnosis (mesmerism, animal magnetism) takes away consciousness, as well as energy from the life function. It is not a natural thing to transfer energy in this manner and should be avoided. The Awareness Techniques add to your awareness, and make available great quantities of energy to the life function.
(I remember reading this when I first encountered the Technique in the late 1970s. My 21st century take on this is that the Swygards were writing this in the late 1960s, and needs to be read in context of that era.)
Allow me to explain the function of Items 2, 3, and 4 in the paper, "Multi-Level Awareness." (The instructions)
Item 2 (stretching) is an exercise of introduction to what is sometimes called the Astral Body and Astral Consciousness. It is like saying to you, "Meet your friend, Astral. Astral is right with you all of the time (and always has been) and Astral wants to show you what he can do." It is an introduction.
Item 3 (turning lights on and off) is the same thing all over again. This time you are introduced to what is sometimes called Etheric Consciousness. Etheric has always been there. Time you got acquainted.
Item 4* (coming down into a past life) is Soul introduction. Soul is a complete record of everything you have accomplished since your Spirit was released from the Creator. This is a recording you have been introduced to. It takes three or more levels of integrated consciousness working at one time to be able to read your Soul (sometimes called Akashic) Record, and to bring this information into Physical Consciousness. "Multi- Level Awareness" is the only technique throughout 'the creation to teach this ability
* "Now, are you still high in the air?" The answer will be, "Yes." "Please keep the scene very bright. Come back to earth in another lifetime that you lived many years ago. Come down quickly as you go back in time; bring your feet down quickly and firmly, but gently, and stand on the ground. Tell me as soon as you are there."
Run a past life incident twenty-five or more times. Each time you run the incident, it will be the same. Just as you run a strip of motion picture film (a recording) through a projector, you will see the exact recurrence of action on the screen. So, as you view Soul (a recording) it will always be the same. Imagination cannot provide this stability.
KARMA AS UNFINISHED BUSINESS:
Most important of all, when you can realize the imperfectness and "unfinished business" (sometimes called karma) of your past incarnations, it is easy to "forgive and forget" these actions through self-realization on a mental-spiritual level, and absolve yourself of further action in that regard. This means that you will have completed any "unfinished business" through the highest level of awareness, and will not have to work it out on the slow, painful, unaware level of physical consciousness.
Motion, the basis of running:
"Running" is the term given to the use and manifestation of results gained from the Awareness Techniques.
Meditators are told to slow down the mind and concentrate. In dreaming, not enough third-plane consciousness is available to follow the action in detail, and it slips away. In hypnosis, the whole of consciousness is divided, and very little is known or understood by the hypnotist or by the "subject."
Practice of the Awareness Techniques begins with motion. Awareness is consciousness in motion. The common denominator of the Awareness Techniques is motion.
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What follows is not light reading, covering such topics as “This Creation, From the Beginning to Present,” and a “color code” relating to the actual opening words of the First Book of Moses (Genesis.) I still find this material challenging even after running dozens of my own personal past lives and guiding hundreds of people into their own past life journeys. But if called to reading the original pamphlets, it is available online. Here’s the 4 original pamphlets assembled in book form that I found locally:
THE AZTEC PRIEST
This session was part of a series when I was exploring the pendulum shifting back and forth between Victim and Perpetrator in my “Other” lives. I experienced a life as what I call the Aztec Priest - a personality that re-defined the phrase “high holy man.” As part of my training and research, The Aztec Priest was very familiar with consciousness altering substances centuries before the Haight-Ashbury scene introduced psychedelics to 20th century culture. I experienced almost every chapter of this personality through the lens of an altered state due to ingested substances, but sometimes the set and setting - burning incense, rhythmic chanting and torchlights - led to an expanded state of consciousness for anyone in attendance. The Victim/Perpetrator contrast was provided by this gruesome aspect of the job —To the slave being sacrificed, I could be seen as a murderer if they were not sufficiently indoctrinated to believe that this would guarantee them admission to our culture’s version of heaven. To the members of the hierarchy allowed to attend, I could be seen as the chosen one who’s intercession with the gods insured continuing abundance. It was only by digging deeper, and accessing the interior state of this priest, feeling into his/his heart, that I became aware of the burden he felt from both sides of this split.
One of my responsibilities was to perform the ceremony that the hierarchy believed guaranteed a fruitful harvest and the rain that made it possible. This involved sacrificing a slave during a full moon, removing their heart, and offering it to the gods after which it was enclosed in a container that was stored in a cave. This priest’s knowledge of herbs and potions was on display in two ways: I knew how to sedate the innocent victim so they would not be tortured and I knew how to sedate myself so that I was in a suitably altered state when performing this ritual. (My present-day self is aware of the vitamins, herbs and teas that fill my counters, possibly an echo of this expertise?) I had the guards do the dirty work of opening the chest cavity so I could access and remove the heart. This was a high ceremony in a consciousness altering environment of torches, incense, and possibly hallucinogens. But underneath this was the awareness that this was a circus; a spectacle to please the masses and the higher-ups. I knew in my heart that I was a showman, that I had no control over the crops or the weather. I also knew that someday bad weather and a failing crop would have me become the sacrifice and it would be my heart that would be added to the collection when I experienced his death. And it was in running this that I saw an image that staggered me. I saw a cave filled with hundreds of these containers filled with sacrificed hearts, the residuals from decades and possibly centuries of these ceremonies.
I’m always amazed at how cinematic these sessions are! The visuals (and the verbal prompts that guide me to them) are perfectly choreographed to provide me the details that tell the story of that personality in a condensed 45-90 minute package.
Click here for more on this and the picture that inspired it.
"RUNNING" A PAST LIFE
I have been referring to running as the practice of exploring past lives for so long that it feels uncomfortable to use any other term, so I am continuing the Swygard’s use of this “moving pictures” metaphor.
From Awareness Techniques Book 1:
“Motion, the basis of running: ‘Running’ is the term given to the use and manifestation of results gained from the Awareness Techniques.”
From “Waldara Answers - Book 1”:
“R-U-N, run. This is sort of a nickname for or description of the process. As we go back in time by reading the planetary records, a few people could, by great concentration heavily laced by desire, see occasional flashbacks of black and white still pictures of previous life experiences. Everything regarding planetary life is recorded there…There was no sound, ordor, taste, color or motion. It was virtually impossible to realize the relationships of individuals seen in this still picture that faded into darkness in a moment's time…(W)ith this new method, you can integrate your total consciousness and ask…(and)…into your consciousness comes moving, full awareness pictures…So it has been dubbed "running" as you can run up and down the time sequences and you do actually see moving pictures.”
I had been using the film strip metaphor of running a piece of film through a projector, with the ability to freeze and examine an individual frame, rewind or fast forward within the film. Discovering that William Swygard was in the film distribution business in Florida backed this up plus OI noted that he is using a reference to “moving pictures” in the quotation above.
One of the early students of the Awareness Techniques was Helen Hoag who wrote her own series of pamphlets, where I found this:
"You can "run" your past lives, as the process is called because it is like a motion picture ‘running’ through a projection machine..."
Helen Hoag, in “Technique of Past Lives Recall”, 1969*
*The publication date of 1969 is interesting. The Preface to Awareness Techniques Book 1 is dated “December 1968” although it wasn’t published until 1970, so Hoag as an early participant could have been aware of the Swygards’ writing even as she beat them to publication.
THE AWARENESS TECHNIQUES - THE PRINTED MATERIAL - PART 1
I’ve been re-visiting and re-reading the printed material written by William and Diane Swygard that introduced the Awareness techniques back in the 1970s. My personal copies of the complete set of 8 pamphlets were lost during my multiple cross-country moves so I am grateful for those who have scanned and preserved them, as an original set of just the 4 Techniques books was last seen on eBay for $185. (There were 4 books, Awareness Techniques 1 through 4, then 4 FAQ-type pamphlets, Waldara Answers Books 1-4.)
Here is what I have found, or what found me:
This is a 1979 compilation of the 4 Awareness Techniques books “by Diane and William Swygard” that I found in a Hendersonville NC bookstore. When I spoke to Diane Swygard in 2018, she said she didn’t have a copy of this and I’ve been looking for another since then. If anyone has a copy that they’d like to donate to Diane Swygard, please let me know and I’ll get it to her.
Diane sent me this interesting version - it complies both the Awareness Techniques and Waldara Answers Book 1 in a single edition with one quirk: Awareness Techniques Book 1 is the front cover, and Waldara Answers Book 1is upside down when the book is turned over, so you have to flip the book to read it.
Front and back cover (I have 2 copies) I love the tag — “The Only Book On This Planet That Can ILLUMINATE YOU!”
I have voluminous notes from my re-reading that I’ll be posting in the future.
DEEP THOUGHTS 05/22
KURT VONNEGUT, SLAUGHTERHOUSE-FIVE:
When a person dies, he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past…All moments, past, present and future, always have existed, always will exist. It is just an illusion we have here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone it is gone forever.
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VLADIMIR NABOKOV:
Time is but memory in the making.
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RAY CUMMINGS:
Time is what keeps everything from happening at once.
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GEORGE ORWELL, 1984
He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past.
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PETE TOWNSHEND of The Who on his late bandmate JOHN ENTWISTLE:
If it’s this good, if the life is this good and this much fun, then it’s gonna entangle you. That’s what the mystics say, isn’t it, that when we die we’re still entangled in life. So I hope he managed to get himself untangled….and go on to do whatever he’s gonna do next. I’m sure he’ll be as much fun as a female belly dancer in Taiwan….(or) whatever he’s gonna do next, as he was as my very, very good friend in this band.
HISTORIC PRECEDENT FOR EVENTS SEEN IN A PAST LIFE JOURNEY
This is one of the least gory illustrations that depict the Aztec ritual of human sacrifice. This captured my attention when I read this Big Think article on “The Mysterious Origins of Human Sacrifice.” Why am I interested in this subject? Because it reflects a historical precedent for an experience I had during a past life journey, and I always appreciate the synchronicity machine working behind the scenes when a reference to a historical event I’ve lived through in a past life turns out to be accurate, sometimes surprisingly accurate.
One of my strangest and most challenging sessions was when I encountered “The Aztec Priest.” I used that “nickname” as a placeholder so I don’t shift sides of my brain trying to determine a historical era for that lifetime, but in this case, placing it in the Aztec empire seems to be historically accurate. Most interesting was that this image showed the victim’s heart being removed through a slit in the stomach. I “ran” this and saw it first hand but my logical brain tried to intervene and say this was impossible, that the entire chest would have to be opened to access the heart, like in contemporary heart surgeries. The illustration, and many even gorier ones, back up my past life experience. I’ll be posting more of my personal sessions that illustrate this to demonstrate the process and how to handle intensely emotional events in a past or other life session.
On my recent desert drive-about I visited one of my favorite spots in the southwest- the Valley of Fire outside of Las Vegas in Nevada. It's an intense and beautiful place where I saw these natural caves in the rocks and was reminded of how many past lives I've seen personally that featured me either living in a cave or retreated to a mountain meditation grotto to do some deep inner work. These natural caves made me aware of how common they are in the desert landscape, that they formed naturally and didn't need much alteration to create a shelter from the elements and wildlife. I love these prompts and reminders from nature and our knowledge of the historical record that support the images I access on past lives work that are completely different from my city-born present life.
ANOTHER ANCIENT ORIGIN STORY FOR OUR UNIVERSE
16th-century Jewish mystic and Kabbalistic teacher, Rabbi Isaac Luria of Safed:
At the beginning of time, God’s presence filled the universe. When God decided to bring the world into being, to make room for creation, He contracted Himself by drawing in His breath, forming a dark mass. Then God said, Let there be light (Gen. 1:3) and ten holy vessels came forth, each filled with primordial light. God sent forth the ten vessels like a fleet of ships, each carrying its cargo of light. But the vessels—too fragile to contain such powerful Divine light—broke open, scattering the holy sparks everywhere. Had these vessels arrived intact, the world would have been perfect. Instead, God created people to seek out and gather the hidden sparks, wherever we can find them. Once this task is completed, the broken vessels will be restored and the world will be repaired.
I love how this compares favorably to the Swygard's and Dolores Cannon origin stories I’ve written about previously, all dealing with contraction and expansion fro a single Source. Beautiful ancient wisdom.
PENTIMENTO AND THE BETWEEN-LIVES PLANNING PROCESS
If this were a script to be read for a podcast, I’d have to get a good quality windscreen to keep from popping my Ps. According to the UK National Gallery:
Pentimento is a change made by the artist during the process of painting. These changes are usually hidden beneath a subsequent paint layer. In some instances they become visible because the paint layer above has become transparent with time.
I had an experience which made me consider how the concept of Pentimento might give some insight into the between lives planning process. I have been doing some Between Lives work assisted by John Till because, even though I recommend it to my clients, I realized I hadn’t done much of this work lately. I enlisted John to help me unpack the planning process for my present life which I followed up with another solo session digging deeper into the details. Previous between-life sessions had brought me the information that my guide offered/suggested a completely different plan for my present life that I declined, which made me aware
a) that our guides can offer suggestions for lives or even entire life plans, and
b) that we can accept or reject these suggestions. (This is an area that I am currently exploring further.)
Instead, my between-lives self became aware of a plan being put together by 2 souls that was much more interesting to me. This became the plan for this life: working with those 2 souls and others as musicians with great aspirations to bring about progress through art and music. (More information about my part in preparing for a musical career is found in a post about Imprinting.) I did in fact become a drummer and connect with these people and work in a band with them for 7 years, a journey that took me from Brooklyn to Dallas and back over many decades, only ending in 2018 when I retired.
But it’s with the renewed awareness of that declined plan that the Pentimento concept has illuminated. What I learned in my own follow-up session is that this declined plan is basically doing this past, between and future lives work based on the Awareness Techniques of William and Diane Swygard. I learned how to “run” past lives in Dallas while on the road with the band, a city that wasn’t in my awareness as a die-hard New Yorker who never wanted to live anywhere but “the city.” And this past lives work has been on a parallel track with me all through my musical career. When I moved to Asheville to reinvent myself in 2014, I immediately returned to this work which led to setting up the Past Lives Project, the MeetUp, and this blog.
If Pentimento in painting is “the presence or emergence of earlier images, forms, or strokes that have been changed and painted over” then in my life I see this “emergence” of an earlier plan that had been “changed or painted over.” There are details of that plan that are too personal to discuss but suffice it to say that there are elements of that declined plan that I’ve never been able to make happen now that I’m actively pursuing it. Possibly because the people that would have been involved in making that happen are no longer or never were in my life, or are in my present life in different roles, which makes it even more confusing. Trying to explain this reminds me of all the TV shows and films that attract my attention. I’ve written previously about all the Time Travel material. There are also a “parallel universe” shows like the excellent Fringe, 5 seasons of which I just inhaled; Counterparts which is set in Berlin; and The Man in the High Castle, based on a Phillip K. Dick story about the USA after the Nazis won WW2.
The other element of Pentimento, which functions more as a poetic metaphor rather than a direct comparison, is the Time element — how the brushstrokes “ become visible because the paint layer above has become transparent with time.” Over time, the plan for the painting that was left behind reveals itself, much like how the plan I didn’t choose came to the forefront after the chosen plan was completed. Previously if someone came to me dealing with a career choice or a relationship that defies manifestation, I would guide them to an “other” life— past, present, or future — to see if there were unfinished business, or vows/promises that can be felt and released. Now the area of between life plans can be explored to see if the planning process is affecting the present life, using my own experience as a guide. This, however, is next level work, requiring multiple sessions to access the core event behind the issue and become comfortable with the non-physical between lives state. For me, it was helpful to recognize this behind the scenes activity that gave me insight into my motivations and helped to adjust my work going forward.
DOLORES CANNON AND IMPRINTING
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.
SETH'S BRILLIANT METAPHOR FOR THE REINCARNATION CYCLE
I’ve been inspired to revisit the Seth material by Jane Roberts after hearing Seriah Azkath from the “Where Did the Road Go” podcast mention, more than once, that Seth was talking about simultaneous time way back in the 1960s. For those unfamiliar, Jane Roberts and her husband Robert Butts explored an interaction with a post-physical entity that referred to himself as Seth in a series of books that attracted a worldwide following that continues decades after her death in 1984. There’s a lot to unpack here, but here is Jane Roberts’ description from “The Seth Material”:
While he (Seth) sees reincarnation as a fact, he places it in an entirely different time context, and reconciles the theory with the idea of “simultaneous” time. Perhaps more important, he describes reincarnation as only a small part of our entire development. Other equally important existences occur in other non-physical dimensions.
My work in 2021 involved journeying to my personal “other equally important existences” and I’ll be posting when I arrive at a cohesive and coherent plateau. I’ve already grasped an entirely different time context and am applying it in my new TimeLine Journeying process.
Here’s the quotation that I heard in the audiobook version of “The Nature of Personal Reality”:
In some ways, the rhythm of birth and death is like a breath taken and exhaled. Feel your own breath as it comes and goes. You are not it, yet it comes into you and leaves you, and without its continuous flow you could not physically exist. Just so your lives go in and out of you — you and yet not you. And a portion of you, while letting them all go, remembers them and knows their journey.
Imagine where your breath goes when it leaves your body, how it escapes through an open window perhaps and becomes a part of the space outside, where you would never recognize it — and when it has left you it is no longer a part of what you are, for you are already different. So the lives you have lived are not you, while they are of you.
Close your eyes. Think of your breaths as lives, and you the entity through which they have passed and are passing. Then you will feel your state of grace, and all the artificial guilts will be meaningless.
No one atom of air is like another. Each in its own way is aware and capable of entering into greater transformations and organizations, filled with infinite potential. As your breath leaves you and becomes part of the world, free, so do your lives leave you and continue to exist in your terms. You cannot confine a personality that you "were" to a particular century that is finished and deny it other fulfillments, for even now it exists and has fresh experience. As your moment of reflection gave birth to consciousness as you think of it — for both really came together — so then can another phenomenon and kind of reflection give birth to at least some dim conscious awareness of the vast dimensions of your own reality.
First this quote— Seth, who is male but speaking through Jane, a female, captured the most succinct explanation of the reincarnation cycle I’ve ever heard. Not just the coming and going of our breaths and our lives, but tying this to how both breath and physical incarnations return to the greater whole upon completion.
Fascinating information from a “non-physical collaborator.” I’ve been forming 3 “piles” of Seth teachings:
1) WOW - like the above, mind bogglingly insightful intelligence
2) WHAT IF - material that is worthy of further examination, such as parallel lives and the other realms mentioned above. This is to distinguish it from
3) NAH - advice or insight that is suspect or possibly a muddled translation through Jane Roberts, who counterintuitively drank and smoked through her channeling sessions. Example - The Jesus conspiracy —that a substitute was crucified on the cross — this feels overly “infected” with the book “The Passover Plot” which was popular around the time of the Seth sessions.
Anyone exploring the Seth material has to confront the circumstances surrounding Jane Roberts’ later years, the illness that hospitalized her for most of the last 2 years of her life, and her early death at age 55. It’s challenging to find a context for chronic illness which doesn’t seem to fit with creating our own reality. Yet from her hospital bed in the last 2 years of Jane Roberts’ life, she continued to channel Seth and that material, her last, was compiled in “The Way Toward Health.” But its Seth’s take on Time that moved the goal posts for me personally. I’ll end with this:
Your idea of time is false. Time as you experience it is an illusion caused by your own physical senses. They force you to perceive action in certain terms, but this is not the nature of action. The physical senses can only perceive reality a little bit at a time, and so it seems to you that one moment exists and is gone forever, and the next moment comes and like the one before also disappears. But everything in the universe exists at one time, simultaneously. The first words ever spoken still ring through the universe, and in your terms, the last words ever spoken have already been said, for there is no beginning. It is only your perception that is limited. There is no past, present, and future. These only appear to those who exist within three-dimensional reality. Since I am no longer in it, I can perceive what you do not. There is also a part of you that is not imprisoned within physical reality, and that part of you knows that there is only an Eternal Now. The part of you who knows this is the whole self.
Roberts, Jane. The Seth Material (p. 200). New Awareness Network, Inc.. Kindle Edition.
DEEP THOUGHTS ON TIME
“If all of life on Earth was compressed into one twenty-four-hour day, anatomically modern man shows up at four seconds before midnight. Cave paintings at one second before the end... We’ve only been playing at civilization for the last fraction of a second.”
Excerpt From "Recapture the Rapture" by Jamie Wheal
Gary Nolan on Artificial Intelligence and Space-Time:
"Fast forward 10,000, 100,000 years, maybe somebody found a way to embody AI directly into the physics of the universe. And it doesn’t require physical manifestation. It just…sits in space-time.…We’re just locally ordered space-time."
From an awesome interview with Lex Friedman -
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uTCc2-1tbBQ
Brain Enhancement through Past Life Journeying?
Emily Willingham posted an interesting article on Slate.com with a unique take on “One Simple Trick for Being a Better Thinker.” Since all information is processed through the lens of past lives, I immediately saw an application for her ideas. She’s written a book on the topic and her article related this surprising finding: rather than supplements, brain games or even microdosing:
The three activities with the best support for generally salutary brain effects are physical activity, mindfulness-related practices, and interaction and resonance with other brains.
Willingham discovered the social aspect to be crucial and frames this as empathy:
We all have access to the tools to cultivate empathy; in fact, they are mostly free. Empathy expert Roman Krznaric, for example, wrote about the six habits of highly empathic people. His list includes developing curiosity about strangers, trying someone else’s life (such as doing a favorite activity of theirs that’s new to you), listening, opening up, and developing “an ambitious imagination.”
That’s where what I have to offer fits in. How better to “try someone else’s life” than to try on a different aspect of our own personality in the form of a past, or adjacent, life? This also involves those other aspects — developing curiosity about strangers, listening and opening up, and an ambitious imagination. I’d substitute “trusting the first image” for imagination. My point is, the most powerful exercise in empathy is to spend an hour walking in someone’s feet, wearing their costume, and feeling what you were/are experiencing through this Other personality’s experience. And if Emily Willingham is correct, this can lead to thinking better and “general salutary brain effects.” Brain Enhancement through Past Life Journeying? Yes!
Wm. J Baldwin Spirit Releasement and Past Lives Video Blog
I finally came to a topic that was better handled with a video than a blog post. This might be controversial, since it mentions extraterrestrials attaching themselves to humans but that was the subject of Willam J Baldwin’s book, and for some reason, Regression Therapy teachers include this form of energy clearing in their curriculum. Interesting that this is done without mentioning Baldwin’s name, possibly due to his obsession with dark force entities aka demons. But it was a fascinating deep dive for me to go through Baldwin’s books Healing Lost Souls and CE-VI - Close Encounters of the Possession Kind.
Clothes from 8000 Years Ago were made from Trees?
Clothing at a Neolithic site in what is now known as Turkey that was previously thought to be made from linen, wool or flax has now been proposed to be constructed from trees - specifically from oak bast:
Bast fibers sit between the layer of bark and wood in trees, and are commonly sourced from willow and linden trees, in addition to oak. Importantly, timber from oak was used in the construction of some Çatalhöyük ((pronounced cha-tal-ho-yook) dwellings, which shows these people were no stranger to the tree.
Why is this of any importance? I love hearing about archeological studies that update our understanding of ancient cultures. The best ones toss out outmoded assumptions based on new findings. When I’m guiding a client to a past life, I ask, “What, if anything is covering the lower part of your body?” As the client orients themself in this other personality’s physical form — ideally seeing through the eye, hearing through the ears, and feeling what that person was feeling — if that past life personality had an awareness of the makeup of their clothing, the response might be, “It’s not wool, or linen, or anything obvious. It’s like it’s made from part of a tree.” At which point, the conscious mind might try to interrupt with, “That makes no sense. You can’t make clothing out of a tree.” Well, it turns out, you can, and previous cultures ingeniously did. Trusting the image, trusting the feeling accessed in response to a question requires being open to an answer that doesn’t seem logical, and being brave enough to respond in spite of uncertainty about the information. This follows up on a previous post about gladiators being a professional occupation, upending ideas long accepted and reinforced by movies (with apologies to Russell Crowe.)
“Trust the first image” is rule #1, and following the information that’s received leads to a much deeper and more interesting past life session. This becomes even more crucial when opening to Future TimeLines, where we may not have a “logical” basis for the information. This is why I won’t guide clients to Future Lives until they’ve explored more than one past life and navigated the Non-Physical Experience between lives. With that experience, we are more open to exploring a world where even the home or work environment might be strange and unfamiliar territory. If this interests you, please contact me for a free 20-minute discovery call, so I can hear about your interest in exploring past lives and answer any questions you might have.
https://gizmodo.com/clothes-from-8-000-years-ago-were-made-from-trees-new-1848041648
Followup on a Billionaire's Quest for Proof of Surviving Death
In January I wrote about Robert Bigelow, the billionaire founder of Bigelow Aerospace, and his Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies. BICS had announced an essay contest “seeking evidence of the survival of consciousness” after death. At the time I was intrigued but didn’t think I could prove in an essay what my Past Life Journeying has proven to my satisfaction: that our consciousness continues after the death of the physical body, making the case that this non-physical state is the continuity of our consciousness, with occasional forays into the physical by incarnating into physical bodies.
Well, the winner was noted parapsychologist Jeffrey Mishlove, who’s Thinking Allowed TV and video series I was familiar with, since Mishlove has the most extensive interview with Michael Talbot (The Holographic Universe) available. According to the Mystery Wire website, Mishlove’s essay:
“Beyond the Brain: The Survival of Human Consciousness after Permanent Bodily Death” was a unanimous choice by the panel of judges. Mishlove’s essay included video snippets and testimonies regarding near-death experiences, reincarnation cases documented by memories of past lives, and seven other types of evidence that consciousness survives physical death.
(“Video snippets” - Doh! Why didn’t I think of including video links?) Bigelow was so impressed with the quality of the submission that he paid out $1.5 million, almost twice the money allowed, in order to award 11 runners-up and 15 Honorable Mentions. BCIS intends to publish all 29 essays on its website and in print to be made available “for free to hospitals, hospices, religious organizations, and others to be determined.” Gratitude to Robert Bigelow for putting his money to expanding awareness of consciousness after the death of the physical body. And if anyone is keeping score on billionaire’s going into space, Bigelow’s already been there, just not in person. His Bigelow Aerospace has produced “habitable space structures” for NASA and "the Bigelow Expandable Activity Module (BEAM), which is attached to the Tranquility module of the International Space Station.”
Shamanic Drumming as a Consciousness Altering Tool Confirmed
…but we already knew that since I wrote about this in 2018*. It was a confirmation of my own experience with drumming in a shamanic setting, but then, I’ve been tapping into the altered state that drumming provides since joining my first rock and roll band at age 14. The takeaway that got my attention from this new study was this:
Shamanic practitioners were significantly different from controls in several domains of altered states of consciousness, with scores comparable to or exceeding that of healthy volunteers under the influence of psychedelics…These findings suggest that psychedelic drug-induced and non-pharmacologic alterations in consciousness have overlapping phenomenal traits but are distinct states of consciousness, as reflected by the unique brain-related changes during shamanic trance compared to previous literature investigating the psychedelic state.
In my article, I advocated for non-pharmacological explorations, accessing altered states without psychedelics, and according to this study:
…shamanic trance, which is an altered state of consciousness anecdotally similar to the psychedelic state, can be achieved with or without the use of psychedelic substances by listening to repetitive drumming.
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnhum.2021.610466/full
Some of my favorite sessions have been with clients who’ve experienced shamanic journeys and followed Gail Gulick’s first rule for journeying: Trust the first image. (The 2nd is equally important: Promise to come back!) This study gives evidence for both insightfulness & complex imagery and elementary visual alterations from repetitive drumming. Plus it deals with one of my personal assumptions: that shamanic journeying accesses a distinct state of consciousness that overlaps with that produced by psychedelics. Establishing the reality of a distinct state of consciousness from repetitive drumming gives me hope that someday, someone will study the Past Life journeying experience with this same brain mapping technology, and possibly determine what I believe is also a distinct state of consciousness. Until then, check out this post from 2018:
My Interview with South Carolina Voyager Magazine
I was approached for an interview with South Carolina Voyager magazine, an online publication that reached out to me as an area entrepreneur. The interview was published today, with a few typos, unfortunately. But any day I get to talk about my work and give credit to William and Diane Swygard for introducing the Awareness Techniques us a good day. Here’s the link:
https://southcarolinavoyager.com/interview/conversations-with-bobby-baranowski/
Gladiators as pro wrestlers? That can’t be right? Or can it?
An article from National Geographic inspired a lesson in guiding clients in their past and future life journeys. Unfortunately, the article is behind a pay wall but the title tells it all: “Two gladiators enter- only one leaves alive, right? Think again.” Once again, new discoveries prod modern science to reframe long held beliefs, in this case, about ancient Roman gladiators. The new theory, based on the research of Brice Lopez is this:
A FEW GLADIATORS WERE CRIMINALS OR PRISONERS OF WAR CONDEMNED TO COMBAT, BUT MOST WERE PROFESSIONAL FIGHTERS.
This revision points to gladiators as a warrior class, basically a profession, with highly skilled athletes thrilling audiences in enormous arenas. Lopez doesn’t make the comparison to pro wrestling, that’s my attempt to provide a modern day model, but he does postulate the equivalent of “tapping out” instead of fighting to the death.
His conclusion: Gladiators weren’t trying to kill each other; they were trying to keep each other alive. They spent years training in order to stage showy fights, most of which did not end in death. “It’s a real competition, but not a real fight,” says Lopez, who now runs a gladiator research and reenactment troupe called ACTA. “There’s no choreography, but there is good intent—you’re not my adversary; you’re my partner. Together we have to make the best show possible.”
It’s the background of this that excites me. If a client were accessing a past life as a gladiator, feeling the “costume” of armor and the thrill of combat, their conscious mind might interrupt their process — “Wait, I’m fighting with what’s basically a chef’s knife while wearing as much armor as a Roman soldier? And I’ve fought my opponent many times before? This can’t be right. I must be making this up.”
Many if not most of my recent sessions have involved demolishing commonly held beliefs about what modern science has decreed to be fact. Past Life Journeying is the experience of being “boots on the ground” and experiencing the inner world of people living their daily lives in inconceivable circumstances. It requires surrendering to the process in order to access the inner state of the past life personality. I don't devote much of my research to finding historical confirmation of past life events, and discoveries such as Brice Lopez's confirm my belief that we get better data from Past Life Journeys than from historical texts, especially when those historical proclamations are being re-written on a regular basis.
Here’s Brice Lopez in action:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Lbrl2MLWE0