Forward
I come from a generation whose indulgent playtime expanded beyond the social imbibing of alcoholic beverages into the pleasures and ecstasies of psychedelics, – the plants, pills and mushrooms that promised and delivered expansion into a vibrational bliss that broke through the bonds of personality and conditioning into mysterious realms that we were at a loss to explain, even to ourselves. Aldous Huxley and Timothy Leary gave us serviceable roadmaps to the nervous systems then under reconstruction and we played with the puzzle pieces of personality and society. One destination seemed to be the ‘cosmic giggle’, an amusing stage on the way to someplace else where all would be understood. Meanwhile we entertained ourselves chuckling at the inanity of it all, the sheer silliness of most valued activities, the game playing puppets, ourselves and others pushing their ego agendas.
Some, occasionally plunged deeper by a lucky pure dose of lsd, would flash on many lives spinning by on some colourful carousel, often in 3-D, that grafted little movies of the toiling peasant, the harassed housewife, the soldier in battle, the local gentry at ease, the coastal resident fishing at night, the horse trainer, the blacksmith, the sex trade worker, the sailor, the captain, the general, the herbalist, the witch, the conjuror at court, the conman in the market, the monk the priest, and so on. All in some dizzying seconds or so it seemed. Others felt an strange affinity with river, rock, forest and bird, sensing lives somehow lived in those forms.
Despite the shock value of their dazzle, those amazing glimpses were hard to hang to, the pressures and demands of daily life tended to place them in the deep background, where they’d rumble suggestively. As the stoned 70’s morphed into later decades newer psychedelic prophets like Terence McKenna emerged, revitalizing our interest in the transcendent states achieved with DMT, other worlds complete with magical trickster beings quite distinct from humanity, who played with the naivete of the intrepid explorers. Visions of past incarnations were revived and reconsidered. The notion of ‘bringing something back’ from such trips was eagerly discussed, much in the manner of NDE experiencers, whose dramatic insights were similarly prone to rapid dissolution, as they attempted to re-inhabit their briefly expanded selves. Hints of multidimensionality chimed with the clues from traditional esoteric teachings. Meanwhile the intervening decades have produced an ever expanding archive from the practice of past life regression, and later, life-between-life regression. It’s from this now enormous archive that I have drawn the insights and wisdom teachings here.
Introduction
The practice of past and between life regressions, with its resulting archive of reports and analysis, much larger than many realize, has familiarised our ever expanding community with a deeper understanding of incarnation and its multifaceted nature. That we came to this planet, usually, but not always, invited from other systems in the galaxy, to check out the tough road that had been designed for adventurous souls.
Now we all know how challenging the Earth Life System can be, having persevered and sometimes thrived under its strictures: the struggle for survival, the deep distance from divinity, the perils of our passionately emotion nature, the endless taming of the ego, the path to cunning innovation necessary under repressive and demanding political and religious tyrannies.
We know that some can graduate, the old timers taking their leave, after demonstrating their personal freedom from the illusions of form and structure. We see from their example how attachments of all kinds can be can be carefully unhooked when we surrender to the scary freedoms everywhere available.
Now that esoteric teachings, once severely outlawed by church and state, are readily and easily accessible, the wisdom of the ages has opened its pages to all, far beyond the secret brotherhoods that some of us shared in centuries past. Us heretics are having our field day, and boy do we deserve it . The path from the hungry individual to the god consciousness, something an earlier me tried to teach, fitfully and with an sense of impending failure, in Ancient Egypt, and with a shade more success in Druidic Europe under our blessed Oaks and Rowans.
While many are yet caught in the illusions of nationalism and survival of the fittest, a growing minority are confronting the presence of our Extraterrestrial brothers and sisters and befriending their strange and magical ways. Others are opening up to the life streams that have evolved on earth beside us all these centuries as religion and then science strove mightily to deny them: the nature spirits, the elementals, the devas.
As we strive towards that fabled brotherhood of sentient beings, accepting them into the families and communities we nurture, I yet feel that understanding our past lives and the astral communities we live in between incarnations is an important and unavoidable component of that growth. In the following exposition of that position, I have assembled three essays originally included in my earlier collection Confronting Your Immortality, combining them with new material and some valuable examples from the work of Australian regressionist and researcher Karen Joy, whose book Lost Soul, Wise Soul, while deeply exploring the tragic ruts many of us have fallen into and perhaps would rather not think about, includes many more.
While, as she points out, guides and our higher selves will say there is no such thing as a bad choice and that all choices lead eventually to growth through trial, tribulation and eruptions of joy, we can still employ discernment rather than judgement and view the gruesome horrors and their makers with compassion and mercy, knowing that we, in earlier stages of growth, played out the primitive moves of that game.
(1)
Many modern teachers, including Krishnamurti and a host of lesser lights, often taking their leads from traditional Hindu and Buddhist sources, de-emphasized the experience of past lives, suggesting, and sometimes insisting, that they were a distraction rather than an aid to spiritual growth. That they were detours into glamour from the humdrum, hard working lives of the present, more to be avoided than sought after.
Perhaps the disciples who flocked to those teachers of the early twentieth century were significantly different from those of today. Certainly reading their journals and memoirs would suggest so. Are the seekers of this new millennium significantly more mature? I think so. They have benefited from the loosening of societal and religious bonds; they have often traveled extensively and are enriched by cultural diversity; they have tasted the consciousness expansion of psychedelics and plant entheogens, been exercised by native shamans, and wallowed sufficiently in the much lauded freedoms of free-lance sexuality to see through the promises of pleasure. I believe they are much less likely to be glamoured by the romance and tragedy of past lives than their forebears.
As a teacher and facilitator of such growth experiences I am firmly convinced of their value in coming to embrace the complexity and subtlety of spirit. By embracing a number of ‘past’ lives, say ten or fifteen, out of maybe a hundred since Ancient Egypt, the experiencer can come to see how character elements of her present incarnation are sourced in powerful distant dramas, and how certain elements were chosen, often with the help of guides before birth, to be worked on as ongoing projects.
Whether it be, say, a failure to communicate, or to stand confidently alone, or to make decisions, or to face oppression, or to treat others as equals, or resist cheating, selfishness or power hunger, the roots of such failings lie deep in our psyches and can best be mined by regression techniques of one kind or another.
When you see the peasant parallel the prince in his timidity, or the sailor evoke the miner despite their differing milieu you understand why the accountant or the chef are tempted to take the same short cuts. When the pastor and the butcher rationalize their actions with similar expediency you can see why the wife and the seamstress so connive. The princess too proud to marry becomes the wife so quickly dumped, the destroyer of forests becomes the radical environmentalist, the self-obsessed artist the self-obsessed alcoholic, and so on.
To feel these ghosts reverberate in one’s psyche, revolving around the same issues, is to see how each incarnation is a fresh take on some old issues, another attempt at scaling the heights so feared or desired before. We are like addicts falling off the wagon, we always get another chance. We will look and talk differently when we get that next chance, but it is still the same essence, albeit with a fresh energetic makeup, taking on the challenge.
Modern teachers seem to focus on the present, having the students ‘be here now’ in order to experience the unsuspected fullness of that ‘now’, and see how, hologram like, it contains everything. I disagree. I encourage all students to explore their many manifestations on this planet, because that is what the Monad, or Higher Self, can do at will, shine a light on any life and see how it is going, comparing the various issues and how they are being encompassed. And as it is my perception, my enlightenment, that the Monadic-Higher Self consciousness is what we are attempting to elevate ourselves to, I can see no Ancient man hiding in his cave from predators is not much different from modern man hiding under the stairs from a tornado, and the mother who died in childbirth is often the one who chooses a c-section now. These are elementary examples of a complex unfolding evolutionary game, and as we enjoy our modern luxuries and critique our greedy power-mad elites, we can balance that with the ongoing knowing that we have each played many parts and worn many hats, some of them functional and others fashionable.
(2)
As we watch what we think of as the world tumble into what we assume is chaos, with the usual wars, threats, squabble, plagues and ‘extreme weather events’ being ramped up by the propaganda surrounding economic distress, we fall for the customary illusions generated and sustained by negative thinking, those that produce those shadowy thought forms drifting about the etheric energy levels where worried egos can tap into their seductive gloom and give in to their despairing company. Images of wars, plagues, fires, floods, earthquakes, economic collapse, apocalyptic nightmares.
Of course it is only a small part of the planet that we currently inhabit, the other realms, astral, mental, causal, sustaining huge populations of the ‘deceased’ in their assumptions and choices of paradise, purgatory or hell. This tiny segment of the overall Earth system is emphasized by the materialist proponents in science and media who are still successful in persuading millions that their warnings and threats are the only reality worth considering, that apocalypse is nigh unless we heed their well researched wisdom.
Such dire predictors are the hellfire sermonizers of their day, insisting that we change our sinful ways or else. Dissenters chuckle at their certainties as they pick apart the careful crafting of the statistics. The doom and gloom prognostications, punched up for the mainstream media, tend to amplify the fears of the populace, both conscious and unconscious, ballooning the thought forms already floating about the etheric realms, along with their cousins, – lust, anger, ruthless ambition and vindictive vengeance.
Over the decades and centuries many mystics and spiritual teachers have pointed to the poisonous potentials of thought forms; I am merely repeating and amplifying their perceptions. For the individual on the inner path to understanding, such malign influences should be recognized for what they are, illusions built from anxiety and fear, and sidestepped. They comprise the dark side of societies, the one that we avoid when we can, while recognizing that we, in our unconscious moments and careers of indulgence in past lives helped build.
Just as practicing spirit communication aids in constructing and reinforcing the rainbow bridge to the unseen realms, so too our personal negativities keep the dark side fermenting just as much as the underhand scheming of the bad actors in politics and economics.
In bringing such to the clarity of honesty and understanding we come to see that our educations on Earth are only complete when we explore both the light and the dark. The polarities of good and evil are but partners in the dance of life, just as contemplation and action are two ways of seeing that dance. Some years back I thought to explore these themes in detail. While the contemporary references now seem dusty and dated, their equivalents continue to bubble up in that overheated cauldron of punch and counterpunch that we find in the endlessly repeating news cycle.
(3)
One of the most challenging and difficult choices on our journey inward is embracing the dark side. Whether it be on a personal or worldly level, it is a step many of us would prefer not to take. We would rather shrug, criticize or condemn, thereby distancing our precious selves from the disquieting tremors quaking above and below.
Whether it be NATO’s rather-more-veiled-motivations-than-they-would-have-us-know in Libya, the denials and evasions of millionaire bankers facing Congress, the appalled innocence of jet-set executives answering Parliament, or the affectations which embroider the sleazy and underhand in our personal manoeuvrings in either the ‘present’ or ‘past’ of our lives, the denied and ignored darkness must be explored and then owned. We cannot live as fully in the light as we would like until we gather up those shadows and illuminate them with our own lamp.
As a guide and facilitator of the many avenues of uncovering what might well be called ‘the hidden treasure’, I am well aware of those on the path who, while enthusiastically embracing other modalities of the mystic and psychic, will postpone exploring their past lives, for fear of what might be revealed. Encountering the jealous murderess; the ruthless pirate; the cold, judgmental chaplain; the chaste, manipulative maiden; the demanding, controlling patriarch; the vain, competitive boss; the lusty, contemptuous Viking; and all the others on that road to ego gratification at the expense of others, can be a chilling experience. But if you face up to it, and embrace this selfish child with love and forgiveness you can move forward in your understanding of how our education is completed and graduation assured.
Let the love of Jesus wash away your sins. Allow the smile of Buddha to illuminate the petty pieties and perjuries of your performance. Meditate your way into that dark wood in the middle of life and feel the waves of thought and emotion which rock your boat about. Then feel the calm that comes after. Maybe it’s sleep, or the dream of sleep, or the dream within sleep. Who knows? And who is the who that actually knows?
Embracing the shadows within can, of course, assist in embracing those without. Each villain in the public sphere can be seen not only as a child nakedly acting out fear and desire but as an embodiment of all that we shun in our striving for goodness. They are pursuing attainment and gratification in ways which appall us, but their attachment to desire and ambition gives us another actor to understand and another tragedy with which to empathize. The sleazy and shameful are merely more ways to explore the territory of incarnation, and embracing them wholeheartedly can help us see why they exist and are pursued. All paths lead to the same place, – the end of the journey. Or at least a place to look back and take stock, and maybe see where your deviations allowed others the space to enter and ameliorate the damage you had done in the grip of determination.
I shall never forget meeting, on a flight from Toronto to Paris many years ago, two church-going Christians who told me they never read the newspaper as it was only filled with the doings of Satan and his minions. While deflecting further debate with sociable niceties, I mused on my own pleasured anticipation, after a week in Paris, of squandering a morning or two in London over lattes, croissants and that day’s Independent, surely one of the best English language newspapers anywhere. As a citizen in my community I can see them now as only two more of the many I’ve encountered who would rather not be troubled by the world’s events as they might poison their purity/shake their stability/provoke their passions/ruin their day/infringe on their family/shatter their innocence/imprison their pleasures.
Contemplating the many ways life paths can lead us I am reminded of a great quote from the gnostic gospels collected in The Nag Hammadi Bible: “If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you” (Gospel Of Thomas). As we move along our journeys, learning to embrace more of what we used to abhor, we can be lead to an understanding of the infinite complexities of incarnation and its aftermath, that busy cross-town traffic of the planet, of which Jimi Hendrix once memorably sang, Tire tracks all across your back baby, I can see you’ve had your fun. And that understanding, raised by our continued yielding, can be connected to as the music of the spheres, that cosmic neighbourhood in which one day we shall all live and have our being.
(4)
Despite having recently experienced a delightful rest and book reading session in a sunny back garden this morning, in which the warmth of the sun was perfectly tempered by the coolness of the breeze, and I seemed to have not a care in the world, except perhaps what to have for lunch, I had the inescapable hunch that this afternoon I would be writing more on the importance of the dark side in our educative sojourn on this planet.
And as I listen to the three string quartets of Gavin Bryars, any of which would challenge the traditional string quartet enthusiast to hear them as music at all, I can see that what we don’t like in ourselves and lives can teach us, if we allow it, as much if not more, than that which gives us immediate pleasure. The unpleasant, the embarrassing, the shameful, the gruesome and repulsive, the hateful and abhorred: all these must be fully experienced and embraced before graduation is even possible.
For many currently on the spiritual path these detours into depravity have popped up as past lives, when we were younger souls and more easily preyed upon by chaotic fears and overwhelming desires, the thrills of instant ego gratification, callous contempt for the other, shoddy belief systems that promised much for the slavish adherent, and so on. In many of those lives we started out with a plan that slowly got bent out of shape by the various pressures and temptations which grow like ivy around any personal growth program.
This planet was set up to challenge us in every way possible and the polarity of positive/negative is one of the basic mechanisms encoded into the design. For every creative effort there is a corresponding surge to retard, every attempt at bearing light is hampered by the almost instant growth of shadows. As we say, for every two steps forward there’s one back. But as plants push their way up through cracks in the concrete we push onward toward the light, if not in one life then another.
If progress, either personal or planetary, seems slowed to a crawl, it is only our viewpoint that makes it so. We are inhibited by our attachment to the current incarnation, which is really not much more than a chapter in a long novel. We, even those of us who profess to accept the system of reincarnation, regularly mistake the chapter for the book. And even those who manage to graduate to the long view, can, when comparing say, Ancient Rome to Imperial America, grow despondent at the many seeming similarities, noting that although technological progress is vast, ethical progress seems paltry, and not to put too fine a point on it, stupidity endemic.
Friends, not that much is accomplished in a lifetime, even by ambitious self-starters. And some continue to circle around the same old addictive issues, lifetime after lifetime. But our measure of lifetimes and what can be accomplished is based on an illusion. As a matter of course we give ‘time’ far too much respect. The ‘you’ which planned your current incarnation from the vantage point of spirit, existed in the same eternity as the ‘you’ which planned your 15th century incarnation. And depending on which level you chose to view that ‘you’ it was, –
(a) an astral being partaking of paradise;
(b) a mental being blissed in a more rarified heaven;
(c) a radiant causal body, not dissimilar to a large glowing egg shaped aura;
(d) a formless being of intelligent light, a monadic extension about to shift its joy into a burden, –
for the ‘you’ that we are encountering here is a many dimensional being, who can activate consciousness in any form on any level, but who has to cope with the incarnate being becoming repeatedly lost in the ego identifications and belief systems on this physical plane; – egos who are convinced they are, say, limited and enslaved, or wise and all-powerful, or condemned to work and death, or endlessly tied down with debt, or unloved and unworthy, or selflessly devoted to the betterment of humanity, or…whatever sincere conviction is currently held.
The roles we play on the light side of life enslave us as much as the dark side. We are as attached to our altruism and goodness as the gangster is to his cutthroat cunning. The holy are as deluded as the wicked, the sanctimonious as spellbound as the hedonists. We are, almost all of us, totally identified with our bodies and our roles in family and society, and when we pass it can take forever, or so it would seem, to unburden ourselves of those temporary and useful illusions. But forever has little currency in eternity. When the hate and anger filled souls, many of whom embodied the dark selfish drives we speak of here, scuttling about impetuously in the lower astral hells which resemble earth enough to sustain the illusion, gradually divest themselves of their inhibiting drives and find their way ‘up’ to what can be called purgatory and then paradise, no ‘tìme’ will have actually passed at all, and they can, if they feel ready and refreshed, return to the planet in the same time slot as you and me.
Whether they move on and up or are caught in the same patterns as before is up to them, just as it will be to us, but we should always remember the dark and the light are two haves of the same coin and cannot exist without the other. At least on this plane.
(5)
Researchers on past and between life regression, active these past seventy years as they build an enormous archive, have much to tell us about the enigmas of incarnation, the choices we make and the downfalls we slip into. Some of those downfalls can span many centuries as the wounds, curses and sworn vengeances settle into a demented world view that seems so right to the soul thus ensnared.
Just as the desire to righteously serve an expanding empire can be equated to the unquestioned devotion to a religion or political system, all these passions can extend through lifetimes as the prophet must be honoured and the divine inspiration spread to the unbelievers and ignorant, so too do the deep wounds long unheeded and ignored can enflame the ego in an arc of action spanning centuries and cultures.
While many researchers in the field devote time and space to those walks on the dark side that breed many karmic hurdles, the Australian regressionist and writer Karen Joy in her book Lost Soul Wise Soul has given us a compact but vital chorus of examples that detail the links and repercussions that can gravely effect the current lives of her clients.
A child abandonment, a village massacre, disrespect from an elder, a crime of passion resulting in a curse ‘through all eternity’, careers and profits from the slave trade that breed guilt and self-damnation, suicide in times of desperation, the path of the righteous warrior, decimating the unbelievers, sacrificing the ungodly and eliminating the heretic. Such slaughter, pursuing goals that recede as the bodies pile up, severs the human from the god they aspire to and effectively separates them from the Source that continues to serve them with droplets of divine inspiration. Thus shame is buried and empathy denied. Honourable soldiers morph into heartless mercenaries. The process may take lifetimes to exhaust the energy that once fired it until someday the veil is lifted and the enemy is not the hated ‘other’ but us.
One past-life mercenary, resenting the noble who demanded fealty and let others do battle, kills him mercilessly and becomes the new boss. Now the men respect him and he has no fear of them. Then he has to “eliminate anyone of significance, the noble’s family, the hangers-on”. As he assumes control of the wife, “treating her as nothing but property”, he feels the thing inside, the “vulnerability that tries to push through”, but he “drowns it out with more violence and sexual assault”. Then, “when there is no more war, I have to do worse things”.
Then the client, currently a woman, sees how the whispers from the seed of vulnerability creeps into her life, and how she drinks to “numb her feelings”, how “periods of vertigo distract” and that various illnesses can be temporary escapes. “To see who you are you have to face your inner voices”, those nagging reminders of “the real you that has been buried”.
After his battlefield demise she looks on all the destruction and feels confused. She is not physical anymore and being physical was everything. It feels like meeting herself for the first time, like “some new born lamb stumbling around”. After hundreds of years being stuck in that pattern, she feels like a child asking for help. A guide and an “eternal mother” show up and they “float away into the white light”, where there is space for reconsideration. She sees her tough, strong-willed body as a challenge that kept her from her real self. “Killing the pagans and being manipulated by the leaders to create rage shut me down and put me on that path of being hard and murderous”. She sees variations of that hardness in other lives, but “the shutting down is most prominent in my current life”, where she feels “violent and wants to smash things”. When she “taps into that rage there is nothing else. The rage is a feeling without a target and connects me to my inner warrior. Meditation and silence can be hard for me because the rage surfaces”.
Other examples might be a soul who “has endured a series of lives where they were submissive and victimised”, triggered by “a child deformed and abandoned by family to starve to death”. The resulting feelings of worthlessness lead to several more tragic lives where the hole is dug deeper. An attempt to break the pattern is a man who attempts secret and sadistic domination of others, a contempt for his victims which masks his contempt for himself. Many years in prison are characterised by remorse and regret, seeing that “what he killed off in others was what he wanted to kill off in himself”, the weakness and sense of insignificance.
When considering why this tragic life was taken on the client finds herself in “a serene sacred place” where she comes to understand that the “merciless life was about learning to appreciate what I had. I needed to feel in control, but there is no need to try and control. You can just be. In order to love myself I need to love that man. Guides insist that the life of domination was useful, it lead to know compassion and the preciousness of life”.
When wondering about the choice of a deformed body she is lead to her body selection prior to birth. “A frail little girl, I could have had an easier life but I wanted to challenge myself”. Soul stubborn by nature, she “wanted to do it her way”. But that life was important, it showed her how to love unconditionally by experiencing its opposite. And although still stuck with the lingering shadows of worthlessness she finds herself “planning a more rewarding existence, to be born a boy, an only child to loving parents” to be nurtured and educated, marrying later with two children, and gaining a “position of some power as a lawyer with the government, then passing from a heart attack in 1952”. Those wise choices continue into her current life, one where challenges are balanced with rewards.
That souls can be ‘lost’ in isolation is an operative function in the afterlife realms as much as in the life that we know so well. They are, as Joy points out, “disillusioned with others and Source, not wanting to reincarnate. But there comes a time when the monotony drives them on to seek something more.” When she asks a client, with quite a list of lives as “perpetrators and victims, but is now open to the light after connecting with her higher self”, what it’s like to be lost, she hears that “moving in that direction was no longer productive, too risky for her soul, but she can share how the return form darkness to incarnation works”:
These souls “want to be alone and refuse contact with others”, including guides. But eventually “they see they are missing out, and somehow wind up in another life, but their motivation is selfish, they don’t really wish to grow and develop, they are only doing it for gain”. Yes, willing to come out “to balance their karmic debt, but it’s done as a bargain not an act of love”. Their guides just hope that getting on the wheel again is just the first step, one that may lead to the of gifts of giving, perhaps only in small doses.
Another client, once a hard headed missionary in distant jungles, lets his arrogant faith blind him to the motivations of head-hunters who destroy his entire team. After recovering from shock in an astral hospital, he meets up with his guides who seem “amused that he was so cocky and self-assured, ignoring the advice of others”. A century later he is a successful small town lawyer, obsessed with work and status while ignoring his depressed childless wife. When they meet up in the afterlife she is very forgiving, much more than he is to himself and tells him “that was how it was meant to be”. He sees through his perfectionist self and is now in a relationship with an ex-wife who insists on her version of the divorce set-up. She is “as wilful as he once was”. He knows it and knows why.
In this, as in other cases cited, Joy shows how soulmates, our colleagues in our soul family, often sacrifice themselves as victims in our selfish dramas, a point not to missed as we puzzle out our tangled lives. She also provides several other examples of incarnational cycles where wounds both physical and psychic shape the psyche into a model of ruthless and demented activity where gruesome violence swells the personality with the love of power and control while scarring the soul’s innate sensitivity until finally it can take no more and precipitates some shock to the system.
As we observe countries and empires struggle to shake off their attachment to tribalism, with the remorseless cruelties of civil wars exhausting the old enmities nurtured for centuries, we can glimpse the same patterns as we see in individuals, cycles of repetition where the same mistakes are surrendered to over and over until the light of inspiration breaks through the clouds of habit, so that the separation and isolation which fences off the sovereign entities of country and individual from embracing the thrilling transcendence of the brotherhood of humanity, of which each and all are equal members.
The illusion of separation can end when the other is eventually seen as just another aspect of the One; the illusion of nationality where nations come to see they are only building blocks of the communities that comprise the planetary consciousness. Surrendering to that ‘One’, where the brotherhood of man becomes obvious we can then expand to the next stage, the brotherhood of all sentient beings.
