The Thematic Convergence of my Past Lives

As I mentioned in the last entry of the opening series, I have spent time learning about Past Life Regression (PLR), including taking a multi-day course intended for practitioners. Some definitions culled from the usual sources would be useful here as a starting point.

From the always-so-reliable go-to source, Wikipedia:

Past life regression is a technique that uses hypnosis to recover what practitioners believe are memories of past lives or incarnations, though others regard them as fantasies or delusions or a type of confabulation. Past life regression is typically undertaken either in pursuit of a spiritual experience, or in a psychotherapeutic setting. Most advocates loosely adhere to beliefs about reincarnation, though religious traditions that incorporate reincarnation generally do not include the idea of repressed memories of past lives.

… and if that wasn't skeptical enough, here is the entry in The Skeptic's Dictionary:

Past life regression (PLR) is the alleged journeying into one's past lives while hypnotized. While it is true that many patients recall past lives, it is highly probable that their memories are false memories. The memories are from experiences in this life, pure products of the imagination, intentional or unintentional suggestions from the hypnotist, or confabulations.

Okay, so reading these definitions, one might wonder what the value would be in even beginning down the path of pursuing the knowledge and wisdom which may be accessible from one's past lives. I have taken a much more open-minded approach, and I believe I have been richly rewarded for doing so. I would add only this: the skeptics' explanations are not wrong as possibilities. They are simply not the only possibilities, and I have never seen a skeptic actually sit down in the chair and find out.

The initial evening when I participated in a guided PLR session in a group setting gave me a strong and powerful sense not only of my past, but of a latent power within me. The ability to draw forth the hidden and suppressed knowledge and experience trapped somewhere in the vast recesses of the sub- and super-consciousness of my eternal soul was the key takeaway. I had a brief flash of the faces of my many, many lives, and I was exhilarated at the prospect of tapping into this new world.

After this group session, I began to use a recording the speaker provided us, a thirty-minute generic past-life regression. Amazingly, I discovered that I was able to quite easily enter a trance state, and upon entering this other world, I was able to navigate a profoundly rich sensory landscape. Everyone's mileage will surely vary, but for me, dropping into a regression meant vivid visualizations and imagery, and, almost shockingly, perceptions that engaged all of my senses, paramount among them taste and smell.

As I conducted an almost nightly practice of induction and PLR exploration, I began to notice a consistent and strong theme developing in the pattern of my past lives. Namely: that by and large I was front and center a warrior of some type, oftentimes surviving many battles and transitioning into the role of guide or teacher of the warrior arts to the generations coming up behind me.

The Lives

To illustrate, here is a brief list of some of the lives I have explored thus far. Please bear in mind that the names, dates, places, and details are recorded strictly from my perceptions during PLR. They may not be deemed entirely accurate or consistent with our presently accepted "historical record," but this just serves to illustrate that our history may not be exactly what we are sold. (I plan to go in depth on some of these in future entries.)

The Practitioner Course

My next step was to make the additional effort to take a professional training course in PLR. I was hesitant to jump straight in without first satisfying the many hours of prerequisites which most of the students had completed, but the timing was ideal, and my personal experiences seemed rich enough to convince me I would be fine. In retrospect, I had a long way to go in learning about induction and the professional aspects of being a hypnotherapist.

Out of respect for the privacy of the instructor and my fellow students, I am not going to go into detail about the course itself, but I will point out several observations that struck me.

First, I discovered that my abilities in the trance state were quite a bit more developed than I had expected. The ease with which I was able to get into trance and explore the realm of PLR discovery surprised me.

Second, I confirmed that being the person guiding a PLR is no easy task. I had some serious catching up to do on every aspect of hypnosis. I have since worked quite a bit on those skills, practicing on friends and family.

Finally, I came to appreciate just how much is out there (or "in there") beyond the realm of our personal experience on the material plane. The instructor and my classmates brought a thoroughly rich set of experience to the discussions, and I had a real eye-opening moment realizing how far I would need to travel in order to fully realize my potential, both as a practitioner in the professional sense and as a warrior in the realms beyond the material plane.

The Thematic Convergence

Returning now to my past lives: it was during a practice session in the class, with me acting as the "client," that I had what I call a thematic convergence, an epiphany of sorts. After tapping into my many warrior lifetimes, I found myself wondering why it was that I kept incarnating into roles in which I existed for the purpose of killing others. How could my purpose possibly be tied to such a perpetual stream of lifetimes dedicated to death and destruction, and even to ensuring that the skills of death and destruction were passed down to the next generation?

Two key aspects of my thematic convergence became patently obvious to me.

First: the endless succession of warrior roles had very nearly continued in my present life. Coming out of school, I won an appointment to one of the nation's military service academies. I remember, from some of my earliest thoughts as a child, a strong pull toward the warrior role. And here I was at nineteen, enrolled in an institution whose sole purpose is to feed the death-and-destruction assembly line of the military-industrial complex, churning out "warriors."

Something quite profound occurred to me on the very first day. Late in the afternoon of induction day, my entire company was assembled in a lounge to view a brief film prior to taking the oath at a big, dramatic evening ceremony on the steps of the main hall. The film, whose contents I do not have the faintest recollection of, left me with a single strong impression: you must be prepared to DIE for your country if you are to be here. I felt strong misgivings about that message, and even had what I can now characterize as a voice in my head tell me, "Don't do it. Leave." But I went along with the oath anyway.

Life immediately after the ceremony became a very, very different experience for us new arrivals. It seemed as if every upperclassman was suddenly blasting hard rock from their quarters at volume eleven, and full-on chaos ensued.

I recognized it was all part of the game, and I played the game well. But about two weeks into that first summer of indoctrination, I had a powerful and surreal epiphany. As we marched around the parade grounds practicing drill deep into the evening, with the mid-summer heat and humidity bearing down on us, I heard the voice in my head again. "Leave. Get out of here. You don't belong here. Break the chains."

Early the next morning, as we lined up in the hallway outside our rooms awaiting the daily dose of physical training, I shot my arm out in front of me, the signal that I had a question. One of the sophomore cadre got in my face and, in full tyrannical tough-guy mode, shouted, "What?!"

"I wish to resign."

It took about a week before they began to take me seriously, and only after I initiated my own peaceful protest by refusing to accompany my company to most of the day's scheduled evolutions. I still made it to physical training, to practice for my sport, to meals, and to the assorted benign activities, but for the most part I simply stood fast in my room. From there, it took another three weeks or so before I was processed out and boarded a van for the airport and the flight home.

So, how does this relate to my thematic convergence? I came to realize, after all the intervening years, that my decision to leave was deliberately triggered by my soul, with the express desire and strong will to break the endless chain of warrior lives. No longer would I be an active participant in the death-and-destruction trap. True freedom, for me, was realized the moment I uttered the fateful words "I wish to resign." It took me more than twenty years to arrive at this understanding, and it has been an incredibly powerful realization.

The second critical aspect of my thematic convergence goes hand in hand with the first. I began to see that, across all the warrior roles in my past incarnations, I had not been here for such noble causes as "learning life's lessons," nor to work off some karmic debt, nor even to "raise my vibrational level." Nope. I have been here feeding some kind of parasitic, energy-sucking race of demons who live off the fear, death, destruction, and endless conflict created in the predation factory they have installed on Earth. I realize now that my roles enabled the continuation of this horrific state of affairs, an abomination against nature, and that I have been on the front lines of this war against mankind for at least several millennia, if not longer.

The brilliance of their deception is that man perceives he is only ever fighting other men. The truth is that we need to shift the focus of the battle. We need to bring the battle to THEM, and that means taking an active role in waking up to our true nature and our true abilities.

It is only by becoming cognizant of our true enemy that we will ever have a shot at defeating this pure, unadulterated evil. For many awakening souls, identifying the true enemy is that last elusive step in the process of full self-actualization. We need to unite across the artificial boundaries and perceived differences our enemy has engineered into our very essence.

I, for one, have seen the enemy … and the enemy is NOT us. Rather, it is a force which has entrapped, deceived, and enslaved our eternal souls for far, far too long. Now is the time to realize this undeniable fact, and to take action to defeat it. In a sense, my current lifetime is not about abandoning the warrior soul. It is about recognizing that the warrior has been duped into targeting the wrong enemy. Now, that warrior knows the proper target.

Please join with me and prepare for the battle. It will take many of us, and the battles will be hard-fought on a multitude of planes.

May you find and keep the truth, life, and light.

~ Ron

Part of II. Past Lives and Practice