grumpyReincarnation - or is it?
January 7th 2008 22:47
A research group in Western Australia* uses a specially developed technique combining massage, relaxation and visualisation to bring a subject to an altered state where he seems to fall into another existence. Scores of Hypnotherapists, the world over, send their patients searching back in time - often to find they spontaneously remember another life before their present one. Every morning probably more than one person on this earth wakes to the realization they have been dreaming of living in another time and place; of being someone else. A couple holidays overseas and the wife recognises streets and buildings she has never seen before. She is overcome by an undeniable nostalgia. (* The Christos Experiment)
Re-incarnation is immediately suggested to mind. It fits; it comes to an easy accommodation with the facts of the experience even if the idea does not sit well with the subject. There can be no doubt that the spontaneous memories, dreams and stories suggestive of re-incarnation must have always been part of our psychic experience, and I suggest we jump to the re-incarnational answer because it was designed to fit these experiences.
Over the past century there has been a steadily accelerating interest in all things metaphysical, to the point where even mainstream magazines now incorporate columns of the most blatant metaphysical hocus-pocus simply because they know there is a huge market for such things. Now re-incarnation is bundled along with crystal healing, aromatherapy, radionics, do it yourself enlightenment and a host of other mumbo-jumbo in a giant marketing package designed to lighten the wallets of the daily increasing number of the psychically undernourished. But snake oil and its salesmen have always been with us. The point is simply that re-incarnation is now a common term, an accepted concept within western metaphysical thought. The problem is that it is accepted as-is (or, as-was); lifted in its entirety straight from the fully formed theology of the ancient Brahmins. Words like Karma, Chakra, Akasha etc. are now common parts of our "new age" language.
If spontaneous psychic phenomena were not known to occur it would be impossible to speculate beyond the causal psycho/physical bounds of behaviorism. But since we know such phenomena are a fact of life, we must posit awareness as an objective fact of life. Without awareness there is nothing. Awareness moves along the channel into which pours the constant stream of data from the physical senses. At the same time, it is subject to a flux of data from another, essentially indefinable, realm outside the apperception of the senses. Not only does the awareness receive spontaneous images from this realm, it also stores its own sensual and emotional cognitions within this realm in the form of memories and structured behavior patterns. In this way it gathers about itself the ego complex which will define the individual nature of this particular awareness.
To shift the awareness from the psycho/physical interface, to send it into the deeper realms of the unconscious, might allow allows it to interact in a timeless way with the data stored at those levels. In this way it is quite feasible that it could come into contact not only with the archetypal energy structures, but might also become aware of the stored data structures, the egos, of other awareness points. The closer it then rose towards the conscious energy levels the more it would identify with the personality matrix. So, theoretically, it could, in a strictly non-physical sense, relive another life.
Because of the nature of the interaction, there would be no strictly causal connections between the "historic" life and the re-lived one. The elements of "historic" choice are available only to the awareness producing the life, whereas the "re-living" awareness might take a "non-historical" path, ie, those possibilities not actualized by the creating consciousness.
One would expect only the unchanging and unchangeable background of a particular life, ie, the cultural milieu, the physical environment, the personality's history, etc. to be generally shared between the two lives.
Under hypnosis, say, you regress to a life in which you describe yourself as a blacksmith living in a certain town. Your name is John, your parents are Ian and Betty McDonald and so on. Your particular regression relives a time in this man's life when he installed as Mayor of the town. Upon looking up the records you discover these facts. There was a John McDonald living in the town at the time you describe whose parents names were Ian and Betty. John McDonald was a blacksmith by trade and well known about the district as a civic minded person. He was not, however, ever the holder of the office of Mayor.
What we have to remember is that all data received through the inner pathways of the psyche can only be brought to consciousness in the form of creative imagery, and this process is mediated through the inherent proclivities of our own personality. In this way, "past life data" might become the core of a creative fantasy in which the imbalances of our own personality structure are made manifest. This is how the therapeutic value of regression originates. If, within the dramatic structure of the session these imbalances, the core of the subject's neuroses, are made conscious in such a way that he "owns" them through the veridical nature of the regression experience, then he is able to make the connections with his own life and in so doing cures himself. Such cases are becoming quite common now that past-life regression is being practiced by more and more therapists.
It's unlikely we can reach any deeper level of understanding while psychological research continues to remain locked to the social and behavioral models so suitable to the current cultural trend of positing the individual as a robotic function within a socio/economic grid.
Unconsciously we are fully aware of the de-humanizing effects of our culture. Thus, alongside the techno/social structure there has arisen an alternate cultural in which the inner realities of the individual are paramount. This culture is essentially meta-physically driven, not only because the social grid now controls the intellectual independence of the sciences, but also because it has usurped the authority of the individual religious function. Pure religious activation of the psyche can now only occur outside the cultural milieu. Western society is now driven at its sub-cultural level to sate an unconscious hunger for meaning in a lifestyle that is becoming increasingly robotic, technologised and collective.
Unfortunately, no answers come from the meta-physical except individual accommodations to this need. Once these accommodations become part of collective culture, they merely enter the socio/economic realm as the latest batch of snake oil. Thus the search for a meaning for our personal existance becomes blurred within an unconsciously motivated collective expression of anything that will oppose our present unbalanced condition. Within this expression anything becomes a possible pathway to salvation. The old archetypes rise once again to their power, gripping us and whirling us in a never ending quest to define themselves as the Gods who will deliver us.
The meta-physical logic of re-incarnation is nothing less, and nothing more, than a projection, a story from the gods. At the core of this projection, however, is a psychic fact; a fact which remains, as facts do within the search for knowledge, a tantalizing and hope filled hint of the true nature and meaning of our lives.
...and Krishna, smiling, in the midst of both armies,
stood and spoke the following words
to the grief stricken Arjuna,
"Know Arjuna, that while speaking learned words
you are mourning for what is not worthy of grief.
Those who are wise lament neither for the living
nor for the dead.
Never was there a time when I did not exist, nor
you, nor all these kings; nor in the future shall
any of us cease to be."
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to get some background