Untitled (21 page)
Authors: Unknown Author
Over the years my observation of people who have had past life experiences while in non-ordinary states of consciousness has convinced me of the validity of this fascinating area of research. I would like to share with you some examples that both convince us that past life phenomena are extremely relevant and that our knowledge of them can help us resolve conflicts and live better lives in the present.
In the mid-1960s, while heading a psychedelic research and treatment program for cancer patients at the Maryland Psychiatric Research Center in Baltimore, I had the opportunity to work with an unskilled laborer whom I will call Jesse. He was admitted to our program with an advanced skin cancer that had spread to his internal organs. Jesse was virtually illiterate and had no knowledge whatsoever of karma, reincarnation, or any other beliefs associated with Eastern thought. In fact, under normal circumstances it might have been assumed that his strict Catholic upbringing would have made these subjects taboo for him.
Jesse had been losing his struggle against cancer, knew he was going to die, and was deeply troubled and anxious as a result. He agreed to undergo psychedelic therapy as a way of attempting to come to terms with his anxieties. In the beginning his focus was on his guilt about the way he had lived his life. He had been raised as a Catholic, had married and divorced, and for the past several years had lived out of wedlock with another woman. He firmly believed in the Church doctrine that in the eyes of God he would always be married to his first wife, making his present situation adulterous and sinful.
In his sessions he had visions of war scenes and monsters, of great junkyards strewn with corpses, skeletons, rotting offal, and garbage spreading foul odors. His own body lay there, wrapped in stinking bandages, eaten away by cancer. Then a gigantic ball of fire appeared and all this mess was dumped onto the purifying flames where it was rapidly consumed. Though Jesse's flesh was destroyed, he realized that his soul survived and he found himself at the judgment of the dead, with God weighing his good and evil deeds. In the end, Jesse's positive deeds outweighed the negative ones and he felt tremendously freed of his burdens. At this point he heard celestial music and started to understand the meaning of his experience.
He became aware of a powerful message flowing through him, through nonverbal channels that seemed to permeate his entire being. The message was: "When you die, your body will be destroyed, but you will be saved; your soul will be with you all the time. You will come back to earth, you will be living again, but you do not know what you will be on the next earth."
As a result of this experience Jesse's pain was greatly alleviated and the acute anxiety he had been suffering disappeared. He emerged with a deep belief in the possibility of reincarnation, a concept that was in conflict with his own religious tradition. Jesse died peacefully five days later, perhaps a little earlier than he otherwise would have. It was as if his mind had been freed to surrender in his struggle against his inevitable death. It was almost as if he was hurrying to go on to what he had called "the next earth."
In Jesse's work with me, there had never been any discussion of reincarnation or the survival of the soul after physical death. On his own, or with a little help from sources that neither he nor I had previously recognized, he had come up with a rather complex view of what occurs after death, a vision that gave him profound security in the last days of his life.
While Jesse's experience might be dismissed as a wishful fantasy, others contain remarkable details that might be verified. Although I have had a number of my own past life experiences, none was more vivid or more convincing than one that was associated with my first tour of Russia. This experience illustrates how these past events can be interwoven with our most recent individual history and how we might employ the extraordinary healing potentials of these memories.
In 1961 I took part in an organized group tour of Leningrad, Moscow, and Kiev. We were assigned official Intourist guides and all our sight-seeing was closely supervised; unsupervised sight-seeing was strictly prohibited. Just before our departure, I had learned about Pechorskaya Lavra, a Russian Orthodox monastery in Kiev located in ancient catacombs inside a mountain. This place was the spiritual center of the Ukraine and I had heard that the Bolsheviks had spared it because they feared a civilian uprising. When I first heard about this place I felt a strange and powerful emotional attraction to it and a desire to visit it.
In Kiev I learned that Pechorskaya Lavra was not on our itinerary, and I felt myself becoming very restless. Recognizing that I was doing so at great risk, I decided to visit Pechorskaya Lavra on my own. I spoke fluent Russian so I was able to get a cab, which took me to the monastery. I walked through a maze of catacombs lined with the mummies of all the monks who had lived and died there for several centuries. Their skinny hands, covered with skin that the years had turned to brown parchment, were clasped as if in prayer. Narrow corridors opened out into caves, decorated with powerful icons and dimly illuminated by candle light. Through clouds of heavy smoke, fragrant with incense, I saw groups of chanting monks with long beards, who appeared to be deep in trance.
As I made my way slowly through the catacombs, I was myself in an unusual state of consciousness; I had the distinct feeling that I knew this place intimately. I could anticipate every turn, every new encounter. Then I came upon a mummy whose hands were in a strange position; they were not clasped in prayer like the others. I experienced a wave of emotion that came from the depth of my being. I had never before felt anything even remotely similar to what I was feeling at that time. I ended my excursion and returned to my hotel, relieved to find that my absence had gone unnoticed by my Intourist guides.
Following my return from Russia, I continued to be preoccupied with memories of the catacombs, especially with my strange reactions to the mummy I had seen there with the unclasped hands. However, I quickly became immersed in my research and somehow the experience faded from my memory. Then, many years later, when I was working at the Maryland Psychiatric Research Center in Baltimore, the director of the institute brought in Joan Grant and her husband Dennys Kelsey, a European couple known for their innovative hypnotic therapy. During their four-week visit to our center our staff members had the opportunity to experience personal sessions with the couple.
Joan, a French woman, had the ability to put herself into a hypnotic trance and experience episodes from other times and places that had the quality of past life memories. She was the author of several books based on this extraordinary ability. Dennys was a British psychiatrist and hypnotist. In their work together they hypnotized the clients and asked them to go as far back in memory as they needed to go to resolve the source of their problem. Often people found the original source of their conflicts in past lives. Joan had the ability to tune into the clients' experiences with them and guide them to resolutions of their problems.
The issue I wanted to work on with them had to do with a conflict I sometimes felt between sensuality and spirituality. In general, I had great zest for life and enjoyed all the pleasures that human existence offers. But occasionally I experienced a compelling desire to withdraw from the world, to dedicate my life wholly to spiritual practice. Dennys hypnotized me and instructed me to go back in time to the place where this problem began. Suddenly I was a Russian boy standing in a large garden and facing a palatial house, which I realized was my home. I heard Joan speaking to me, as if from a great distance: "Look at the balcony!" Without wondering how she knew I was looking at a house with a balcony at that moment, I did just as she said. I saw an old woman with crippled and contorted hands sitting on the balcony in a rocking chair. I knew that this was my grandmother, and I felt a wave of love and compassion for her.
Suddenly the scene shifted. I was in the street of a nearby village, feeling that the simple but colorful peasant life of the moujiks was an exciting escape from the rigid lifestyle of my wealthy family. I realized that I had come to this place on numerous occasions. Then I saw myself in the dark, primitive workshop of a blacksmith. A giant, muscular man, half-naked and covered with hair, stood in front of a glowing furnace. He was pounding with a huge hammer on a piece of red-hot iron, which he was shaping on the anvil. All of a sudden I felt a sharp pain in my eye. My entire face contorted in a painful spasm and tears poured down my cheeks. With horror, I realized that I had been hit in the face by a piece of red-hot iron and that I was badly burned.
I experienced the emotional pain of a ghastly disfigured adolescent, with the agony of sexual longings that could not be satisfied and the sting of repeated rejection as a result of my repugnant scars. In despair, I made the decision to become a monk, ending up at Pechorskaya Lavra. Over the years my hands became severely disfigured. Was this the result of arthritis or a hysterical reaction modeled after my beloved grandmother's disease?
The last scene I remembered from this session was my own death and somehow being aware that I was placed in a coffin by the wall of the catacombs. My crippled hands could not be clasped together in prayer, indicating a successful closure of my monastic life, which even to my death represented a bitter retreat from the more sensual life for which I had longed.
As the session neared its end I began to sob, overwhelmed by a mixture of anger, grief, and self-pity. I then became aware of Joan massaging my hands. Slowly I felt them relaxing, no longer spastic and contorted as they had been. Finally, she took my hands in hers and brought them together in the universal gesture of prayer. Instantly, there swept over me a sense of resolution, as if something deep within me had healed. Since that moment, I have never again experienced the conflict between sensuality and spirituality that had troubled me.
In the process of experiencing episodes from past lives, people often heal emotional and physical symptoms that they suffer from in their present lives. For example, I have seen chronic depression, psychogenic asthma, a variety of phobias, severe migraines, psychosomatic pain, and similar symptoms reduced or completely eradicated following a past life experience. Had this been all there was to it, one could explain the healings that come out of past life experiences as the result of symbolic resolutions, constructed by the psyche. However, these healings often involve another dimension of reality, suggesting that something more than symbolic processes are operating here.
My own past life experience, which I related above, involved the healing of an inner conflict I had felt; the healing did not directly involve other people and could have been symbolic in nature. However, past life experiences often include other people, and the healings that come about can involve an interesting level of synchronicity. For example, I once worked with a person who was involved in a very difficult adversarial relationship of long standing. During a past life experience he saw this adversary as his murderer in a lifetime they had shared long before. After going into the past and forgiving that crime, the client instantly changed his present life feeling toward this person. Old animosities and fears instantly faded and he saw the person in a new light. As this was occurring, his one-time enemy was simultaneously but independently undergoing a similar personal experience halfway around the world that transformed him in the same direction. Within approximately the same time period, both people had experiences that changed their basic perspectives, healing their relationship, which had been so filled with animosity. Though the incidents that changed the two people seemed at the time to be entirely unrelated, they nevertheless had the effect of reuniting them.
This particular example, though extraordinary, is not unusual in my work. Again and again I have seen karmic partners experience dramatic changes that released them from the past and allowed them to heal old wounds, which had existed for many, many years. These changes of attitude occurred within minutes of each other, even though the people involved were often separated by thousands of miles and had no direct communication between them.
Have We Lived Before?
What I have thus far described concerning past life experiences raises important questions for any serious consideration of reincarnation. We might ask, does the existence of karmic experiences necessarily prove that we have lived before? Does it mean that we had a series of lifetimes preceding this one? And does it mean that we continue to be accountable for our actions from one lifetime to another? To answer these questions it can be useful not only to examine evidence refuting or supporting these beliefs but also to take a historical look at our own beliefs and prejudices on this subject. All too often it is
what we have been taught to believe
rather than our fair examination of more objective evidence, that determines our judgments about phenomena that cannot be directly verified through our physical senses or mathematics.
We have to remind ourselves that reincarnation and karma represent the very cornerstones of the major religions of India: Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, Sikhism, and Zoroastrianism. Reincarnation and karma are also integral to Tibetan Vajrayana, Japanese esoteric Buddhism, and a number of South Asian Buddhist sects.
In ancient Greece, several important schools of thought embraced a belief in reincarnation; these included the Pythagoreans, the Orphics, and the Platonists. The same doctrine was adopted by the Essenes, the Pharisees, the Karaites, and other Jewish and semi-Jewish groups. It was also held by the Neoplatonists and Gnostics and formed an important part of the kabbalistic theology of medieval Jewry. Similar ideas can be found in such historically, geographically, and culturally diverse groups as various African tribes, the Jamaican Rastafarians, American Indians, Pre-Columbian cultures, the Polynesian kahunas, practitioners of the Brazilian umbanda, the Gauls, and the Druids.
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