Namaste

After work I was walking down the street in the hot sun.  I had an umbrella in the bag, but it was not convenient to use it since I was eating prunes as I walked.  Obliquely opposite me a man was walking to.  He had low-cut grey hair and a lengthy grey beard.  Apart from my preoccupation with biting open the seeds to get the little nut, I found it interesting to observe him.  He did not just walk, he paused and looked at trees and bent to touch things on the road.  He was present in the moment and that was different.

Ahead of us a security guard stepped onto the road to smoke a cigarette.  The old man paused briefly to tell him something and continued walking.  The guard shouted after him that he was healthy, and that he takes a sweat every evening to get the nicotine out of his system, and that at 63 years old his third leg still gets a stance so there was nothing to worry about.  The bearded man never looked back.  By this time I was right upon the heels of the guard.  He turned and smiled.  I smiled.  He asked what I was eating.  I said prunes.  He asked for one.  I give him five.  He mumbled that that was too much.  They were already in his palm so I did not take them back.  I walked off.  He called after me asking my name.  For no logical reason I told him Cindy, and continued walking.

Cindy!  He shouted.  I looked back.  The prunes taste good man.  I nodded and continued my stroll.  Cindy!  He shouted again.  I looked back.  Meh tongue feel good!   I continued walking.  Cindy!  Well what did I get myself into?  I looked back.  He beckoned me to come.  He had stopped a 4-door truck and asked the driver to give me a lift.  The driver rolled down his window and nodded his approval.  I thanked the guard and walked back towards the vehicle.  It was impeccable on the outside and impeccable on the inside.  The driver was a man with a multitude of dreadlocks whose Timberlands were impeccable and so were his clothing.  Certainly not a farmer, or the regular kind.  I thanked him for accommodating me and returned my focus to the seed I was biting to ensure that no part of it fell to the floor.  Five prunes saved me a long walk in the hot sun on a lonely road.

Mr. Beard did not leave my mind.  He had that sage kind of look and might have gathered sufficient wisdom on the matter to leave a few words about nicotine with the guard, but the guard did not want to trade on anyone’s experience so he was busy acquiring his own, and so far he felt he was doing well.  It is felt that the hurts from our past lives push us to operate on the other side of the fence in this life; so that the current saint was quite likely a criminal in the past life.  We swing like a pendulum from one extreme to the next.  Phobias, intolerance of exploitation, etc. that seem to have no basis in our current life are behaviours guided by the memories of lifetimes of experiences.  The guard might not have touched a cigarette in his last life, so he is catching up on that experience now, while Mr. Beard might have owned a tobacco plantation and experienced the ills and benefits thereof so he can casually brush them aside now.

While I was at the Home my religion/politics client told me of her new roommate.  I’ve seen her moving slowly with a walker.  My client told me that is sheer tricks as she has seen her briskly going to the washroom in the wee hours of the morning without the walker.  Hmmm.  But what she really wanted to update me on was that the woman likes the male Nurses.  One night when all was quiet called out loudly for help.  A male Nurse came and inquired what might the matter be.  All smiles, she told him she had wet her pamper and needed it changed.  He said he will go get one of the females to do it.  No!  She insisted that he be the one to do it.  The more he tried to explain, the more she insisted that he be the one to take off her pamper.  He left.  A female came.  Checked her.  Pamper was dry.  The new trick now is to abandon the walker once a male Nurse is nearby and have him escort her.  She holds on so tight it becomes a cuddle that prohibits walking.  I hear the condemnation, but the lady is obviously catching up on certain experiences so that she would not be troubled by them in the next life.  Why judge her?

We have come a long way in accepting the concept of past lives, maybe not because we believe it, but because we have doubts.  We dearly hold onto the concept that it is one life to live, there was none before and there will be none after, then something happens that makes us doubt that this is our first time on earth.  Similar moments will randomly occur over our lifetime and we will find ourselves exerting so much energy to hold onto the one-life concept that we might have to let it go.  And we might arrive at that place where my friend was when she went to see a Psychologist who is also a Hypnotherapist.  She wanted to regress under supervision.  An appointment was set for the undertaking and she could not show up because she became ill.  At her request they rescheduled.  She was ill again.  As at our last communication I was told that she has decided to leave it alone.  Wise.  Very wise.

I cannot tell you what I was doing at this time two weeks ago, but it does not mean that the moment did not exist, or I did not exist.  With some effort I can regress to a particular day and get a general impression of what I did.  The more time I spend focusing on that day the clearer it would become how I was occupied for those hours.  The clarity might be overwhelming because during that day I might have been unconsciously bobbing about, but now that I am consciously looking back at it everything will be intensified.  The mind is a terrible thing to waste, they say, but it is also a terrible thing to burden.  Nature has given us the gift of forgetfulness so that we are not unnecessarily burdened by every detail of everything that we would have done.  This allows us to deal with what is before us while the past day’s memories hang out on the periphery until we are ready to seal them in our storage compartment.  This storage is taken from life time to life time and allows for random access, but our linear processing tends more to a last-in/first-out method so that much would have to be uncovered before we get to a particular memory that we wish to access.  For example, we might see our funeral or old age before we see a youthful life, or a divorce before we see our happy marriage.  The initial viewing can be traumatic as it presents things in the reverse order and unless we stay with it until that passes, we can lurch out of the regression with a tragic memory that scars us in this life.  So it was wise of my friend to let things be.

While the regression service is available because we are ‘paying’ for it, the Therapists involved know the delicacy of the matter and use a layered approach.  They take you back to the recent past, and gradually shift the timeframe until we get to the period of interest.  From another perspective meditation can be used like a flashlight to focus our attention on particular periods to see those memories.  When a flashlight is shun on one thing, the other things beyond the periphery of that beam are in darkness.  Those seeking to regress are asked to forget future plans.  We cannot be looking into the future and our past at the same time.  If we focus on the future, the past will be in the dark, if we focus on the past, the future will be in the dark.  Pick one, and focus.  I do not know if this was told to my friend, but I really can’t see her spending weeks clearing her mind of her ambitions just to facilitate a trip to the past.  When we give up the future, for whatever period of time, our behaviour and life will reflect that.  Relationships, projects, etc. go on pause, or may end as no one is obligated to wait on us while we conduct experiments that could put their lives on pause too.

When the door to the past is opened, it may not be that such was done with the right key and in phases.  Our eagerness to know might result in tweaking the methods so that the door is broken down.  Open is open.  As for the things in storage, they come tumbling down upon us.  The good the bad and the ugly.  Here is where we hear of folks going mad, for once the torrent of memories start we cannot automatically get out from under them and close the door.  It might take weeks or more with the help of persons who know how to get us out of that place.  The mind can only handle so much pressure before the body goes into shock.  So we find ourselves poor in this life with nothing coming easy, but we remain ambitious for we know that we can make it to the top.  Then we stumble upon the opportunity to regress and we see that we had wealth untold that gave us access to all the things and people we desired.  Because memories are carried from life to life, it may not be that we are fighting to get to the top of the social ladder because such is necessary, but because we are haunted by subtle memories having held that status.  So our frustration stems from feeling success within, but never quite being able to manifest it to the same degree.  Having gone through the regression we can consider the swing of the pendulum and that we have chosen the opposite this time around to learn different lessons.  But we become so attached to our comforts that death makes a mock of us continually.  We accumulate riches for 100 lives and each time bear the pain of leaving them.  How could we think that the man in poverty has problems when he is being spared our anguish?

With technological developments we no longer have to suffer the pain of childbirth, and we can have surgical procedures done pain-free.  These are minor compared to the surgery of death.  With death the entire lifeforce has to be removed from the body, and to do that without anaesthetic is plain cruel.  So we lose consciousness to save ourselves the pain of the extraction.  Having been around a few dying folks whose extraction was lengthy and gruesome I can totally understand why unconsciousness is attractive.  We are told that the one who said we must be born again gave up the ghost when His time came.  A voluntary action.  No wrestle.  To that we should aspire.  But even for Him it was a process, He had to have died before in a conscious state to be able to choose a womb to facilitate His conscious birth, and life.  And when it came to death, because He did it consciously before, He walked with death in such amicable fashion that there was no sting, no pain.  His pre-conception conversation was: here I come in the volume of the Book, it is written of me.  How many of us could say that?  We spend our whole lives seeking our purpose, but He knew before he entered the womb what the records said He was coming here to do, and a Mary prepared a body for His birth, and a Mary prepared His body for death.  Such choice is only possible when we know ourselves beyond the present.  Consciousness brings choice.  A poor house chooses a poor man, but a rich man chooses his dwelling.  Consciousness is currency.

Recently I left work with a slight ache in my elbow and went shopping.  By the time I was through I could not lift my handbag.  I became anxious.  This never happened before.  I gingerly got into taxi and headed home.  After refreshing and eating I went to bed.  When I awoke the pain was so severe I thought my arm was broken.  I crawled out of bed and tried to do a few things, but had to just relax.  When my son came home that evening I told him I needed my arm massaged.  He tried for a few minutes then I stopped him.  I told him go do something else and return.  He did.  I advised him that I did not want him to play with my arm, I want him to function as a Therapist not my son.  I explained that my diagnosis was tennis elbow and I wanted him to understand the parameters of that and treat it accordingly.  Hmmm.  I was in tears from start to finish.

Next morning the arm was worse.  I forced myself to cook and wash clothes, that took all morning.  I told myself for someone who is aspiring to die consciously I am doing a terrible job with pain.  I had to stand back.  Rinalda was not in pain.  Rinalda’s elbow was paining.  Two different things.  I then decided on massage again, but cupping therapy this time.  That afternoon the cups were strategically placed and they held on for their life.  When they came off I had significantly improved range of motion.  We did it again, and again.  The duration of the suction reduced each time.  Next morning I was up with no memory of pain, then I remembered and twisted my arm to assess the progress.  There was a dull sensation.  I was pleased.  Another cupping session was done that evening and the cups fell off in less than two minutes.  I have not had a broken limb in this lifetime, but I might have agreed to have this experience to help me remain compassionate towards my clients who have arthro issues and possibly to remember to maintain some space between my coconut kernel and shell.

So yes, we are inexcusable for life gives us ample opportunity to prepare for death so that our souls are not yanked from our bodies like a turtle from its sell.  The Death Angel is not a butcher who is to be dreaded, but we have to keep shifting to the position of observer within ourselves to experience that.  As I was saying, it is not hocus-pocus that we have past lives, and it is not contraindicated that we review them, but our energies are better spent on this life and preparation for our transition.  As we grow in knowledge of the truth of who we are we will find that our awareness becomes continuous.  The boundaries that separate past, present, and future will thin, and even disappear sometimes, and we will have access to a million memories without the trauma that comes with breaking down the door.