In another life…

I wonder which side of the fence you’re on.

‘Past Lives’ is one of those subjects that tends to divide people pretty squarely into those on the one side who roll their eyes and mutter, “Oh yeah – always Pharaohs or Native American chiefs.  Why never a road sweeper from Luton in the 1920s?”, and people on the other side who are more than eager to discuss their latest regression to a lifetime in days of yore.

Me?  I’ve been on a knife edge between sceptic and believer.  I’ve always had sympathy with the non-believers, and their point is a valid one.  You never DO find mystics who regress you to road sweeping or pig-farming days, and statistically, there must have been far more of these over the centuries.  On the other hand, I’ve been convinced by too many personal experiences and trusted channelled messages.  I do believe in reincarnation and while I don’t go off hunting my other lives out, they do tend to find me, once in a while.

In the last week, it finally dawned on me why the ‘past’ lives we hear about take place at some pivotal and celebrated point in the world’s history.  It’s so blindingly obvious, I can’t believe it’s taken me this long to figure it out.  Never mind, I’m there now, so what follows is my explanation.

Edgar Cayce (1877–1945) was a psychic of the 20th century and made many highly publicized predictions.(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I recently bought a slim and elderly book entitled Edgar Cayce on Atlantis.  It was written by his son in the 1960s and claims to bring together all his comments on the fabled land, mostly from his ‘entity life readings’ – what would now be called channelled past life information.

The sceptic in me raised a quizzical head when I read in the introduction that over 50% of the people he did readings for had – according to Cayce – past lives in Atlantean times.  As I read on through the book, I noticed that almost all these lives were said to take place around times of huge upheaval – just prior to, during or after one of three cataclysmic events in which vast parts of the Atlantean lands were destroyed, apparently by weaponry or technology invented by the inhabitants.

Cayce’s subjects all seem to have belonged to one of two warring factions.  A sizeable proportion were priests or priestesses, while most of the rest were what would now be seen as engineers, technologists or scientists of some kind – many personally associated with the building or maintenance of the weaponry which caused the destructions.

Obviously we have all heard the legends of the sinking of Atlantis and some will have read other accounts of scientific experiments or technology being tragically misused in various ways in those far-off times.  It seemed to me rather odd, though, that all these people – living in the first half of the 20th century – should have such similar past lives.

Then I thought on.

Has everyone had other lives? How many have we had?  This is the reply Neale Donald Walsch received in Conversations With God, Book 1:

“It is difficult to believe there is still a question about this. I find it hard to imagine. There have been so many reports from thoroughly reliable sources of past life experiences. Some of these people have brought back strikingly detailed descriptions of events, and such completely verifiable data as to eliminate any possibility that they were making it up or had contrived to somehow deceive researchers and loved ones.

You have had 647 past lives, since you insist on being exact. This is your 648^th. You were everything in them.  A king, a queen, a serf. A teacher, a student, a master. A male, a female. A warrior, a pacifist. A hero, a coward. A killer, a savior. A sage, a fool. You have been all of it!”

That makes sense to me.  Given this plethora of past lives to select from, then, and the era in which Cayce was working, it’s unsurprising that these particular lives were pulled out of the psychic bag.  In the twenties, thirties and forties, weapons technology was developing at an alarming pace.  The first WMDs were created.  Of all the lives these individuals had experienced, surely the cataclysmic destruction of a civilisation provided them with exactly the warnings they needed.

There is no way for us to know whether some of the people Cayce spoke to in his ‘sleep’ went on to avert another series of catastrophes, but I like to think they did.

If there is any value in hearing about our past lives, surely it is to find the events that can help us to make positive and informed decisions in our current lifetime.  That has certainly been the case for me.

 

 

 

Another Life

Many years ago, now, I had a Past Life Regression – capitalised because I paid someone to Regress me, which made it official.

It was the first time I’d done such a thing.  Untrue to say I didn’t know what to expect; I had many wild and wonderful expectations.  What I got felt real, but something of a let-down.

I was a young woman, walking along a dirt track through a settlement of some kind.  There was a strong smell of wood smoke.
“Look down,” I was instructed. “What are you wearing on your feet?  What colour is your skin?  What sort of clothes are you wearing?”

My skin was dirty, dusty and pale.  My clothes maybe plaid – very faded and grubby.  Celtic?  Were there shoes?  Maybe sandals, or was that my mind trying to logic out what would go with the setting?

At the end of the track was the sea.  It was grey and smooth.  The fear inside me dissipated slightly as I looked at the clear horizon.  They had gone (whoever ‘they’ were) and I was relieved that no sign of them remained.

“Is there anyone with you?” came the softly spoken prompt.

For the first time I noticed the child – a girl aged about 8.  She was holding my hand and standing beside me, also staring out to sea.  Her hair, like mine, was matted and windswept, her face pinched and expressionless.

“What year is it?”

How would I know?  Dates were irrelevant.  It was a distant time, but the question annoyed me, the left brain kicked in and I was back in the present, going through the motions to keep the practitioner happy.
“Can you move to the moment of your death in that lifetime?”

Nope.  Lost it.  Ah well.

“What do you think that lifetime had to teach you?”  He wasn’t done yet.

There was no ‘ah ha’ revelation, no answer to the purpose of my present life, just a glimpse of a woman weighed down with sadness, fear and responsibility, all imposed on her by whoever had sailed out of her life across that bleak sea.

They’ve returned fleetingly to my thoughts many times, that woman and child, but never as strongly as they did on my recent  stay in a house beside the wild Atlantic coast of Western Ireland.

“I feel you’ve come here for a reason,” my host told me many times during the stay and the holiday was certainly one of those synchronous, strange, illogical events that usually mean Life is moving me into position for the next instalment of The Game.

Shortly before I’d left for County Mayo, I’d had a strange telepathic communication from Higher Will.  We’d been discussing the fear and aloneness I was feeling at that time, as I struggled with rats, builders and the like.  Suddenly he sent me these words:

BE WARE   BE WAER   BE WEAR   BE WREA   BE WRAE

It made no sense, but triggered some far off memory.

“It’s a past life thing, isn’t it? It’s just at the tip of my memory. Words you’ve said to me before in another lifetime.”

YES

He gave me our names in that life – short, single-syllabled and oddly similar to our present names.  He told me that loving myself and conquering my present fears would have an effect in that other life.  He promised to help me discover more detail.

Then – nothing.  No narrative dreams, no breakthroughs during meditation, but the holiday to pack for and busy myself.  The strange conversation was forgotten.

She usually comes back to me, that distant woman, when I stand on a beach and she did so, several times, when I wandered through the beautiful landscape, healing and calming down as my recent problems faded away; learning slowly to trust my own resources and renew my love and care for myself.  I found and pocketed a pebble with markings that looked like a rune stone.

On my return, we had this conversation:

YOU HAVE BEEN TO MAYO

Yes.   A beautiful place it was too.   And a strange synchronous journey that seemed to have a reason. Can you tell me what that was?

RECONNECTING WITH YOUR FAR SELF

You mean I have a past life there?

YES

Is it the one you were speaking of before?

YES

Ok, so I’ll try to pick up impressions from you, if I can. Are you going to place the thoughts in my head?

YES

I’m getting the idea that this was the life I regressed to years ago. I was standing on a sea shore, with a small girl holding my hand and we were looking out to sea. Someone had departed the shores in a boat and we were watching – and I think glad they were gone. There was a village with mud and wood smoke behind us. I think we’d suffered a loss. How am I doing?

VERY GOOD

He told me he had been the child – my young cousin. ‘Bad men’ had raided our village and killed the rest of our people.  I got a distinct taste in my throat.

I think we’d been eating shellfish.

YES

Was the rune stone ours?

NO IT BELONGED TO THE RAIDERS

I found a reference to the rune on a site about old Norse culture…

Name: Uruz, “aurochs.”  Meaning: strength of will.

Hmm.

I’ve returned from Ireland stronger and ready to face the problems ahead.  In some strange interdimensional way, I sense that the other me – somewhen – is feeling strong enough to face her future, too.