Past Life Journeying (eBook)

Introduction

As long as we look at life from the perspective of having only one brief life to live, we can only conceive of a purpose and place for selves in the larger order of things in terms that fit into these few years. From the one-timer’s perspective, we are all necessarily reduced to bit parts in life.

Christopher Bache, Lifecycles: Reincarnation and the Web of Life i

It was after a particularly intense Past lives session that a client alerted me to a realization they perceived: When we first scheduled our session, they experienced the awareness of a flurry of behind-the-scenes activity set in motion, much like a play when an audience gets tickets and takes their seats in the theatre. When the curtain opens to the spotlight shining on the stage, the audience experiences the culmination of countless hours of intricate work by a talented group of professionals covering all aspects of the production—from script, costumes, and sets to casting, rehearsals, lighting, and music.

This client made me aware that our combined “behind-the-scenes” creatives—mine as well as theirs—were at work in similar ways. And the “production”—which was our session—was put into motion from the moment they first contacted me for a session, then fully realized when I opened the curtain with my first question.

In a similar way, this book is the “curtain opening” culmination of decades of work in the process I call “Past Life Journeying.” In this first volume of a series, my primary mission is to present a new template for the work of Past life study. My goal is to move beyond the old models that utilize long, drawn out hypnotic inductions to a new, 21st century model that functions beautifully for exploring all our “Other” lives—Past, Present, and Future. I present this book as merely the first step in an odyssey of consciousness-expansion while acknowledging the work of familiar past masters such as Brian Weiss, Dolores Cannon, and Michael Newton. Others deserving of greater recognition include Morris Netherton, Roger Woolger, Dick Sutphen, Mary LaBay, Christopher Bache, Bruce Goldberg, and Michael Talbot.

I’ve read many books on Past lives and I’ve never found any authors or practitioners who used their own experiences as a basis for discussion. I saw this as an opportunity to show Past Life Journeying in action, so I include as examples my transcripts and notes selected from hundreds of personal sessions in addition to those from my clients.

I’ll show you how my introduction to a non-hypnotic method of accessing Past lives launched me into a lifelong inner journey of personal Past- and Between-lives exploration. We’ll not only discuss William and Diane Swygard’s Awareness Technique, but the history of other practitioners who successfully explored Past lives without the standard hypnotic regression model.

In my journey I eventually discovered one vital clue I missed in my personal sessions…a clue about linear Time and the way it operated. I’ll show you how this compelled me to re-examine assumptions about Time through the work of brilliant researchers who completely transformed my awareness of how Time operates. With this new appreciation of Time (now always spelled respectfully with a capital “T”), I adapted the Awareness Technique to journey to my Future lives. I never imagined that this same process which guided me to Past life explorations would work equally well when applied to Future lives.

Finally, I’ll give you some insights into my personal practice to help you on your own journey, with tips and suggestions gleaned from decades of experience. I include my expanded version of the original instructions for this method, the Awareness Technique, so that this book can become a guide in your own personal journeys into Past, Between, and Future lives.

I invite you to consider this: information from our various incarnations exists just below the surface of our daily interactions, waiting to be revealed and released. The clues are there if we know how to pay attention; it is there in our phobias and fears, our desires and disappointments, our frustrations and talents. With the tools in this book, you can choose to open your consciousness and release old impulses, heal old wounds, and recover lost skills and abilities. (And maybe even Time travel!)

I also offer Past Life Journeying as a tool to those communities involved in the investigation of expanded consciousness who might never consider exploring Past lives: near-death-experience (NDE) researchers, shamanic journeyers, psychonauts, and researchers in the UFO/UAP field open to exploring the consciousness component of the phenomenon. And the best part? It requires no drugs, drumming, almost-dying, or alien abduction.

Here is an example of how I opened a doorway into a field of information for myself when the writing process for this book became bogged down: As I sat down at my laptop, I encountered all my fears, doubts, and worries about having the knowledge and creativity to write this series of books about my ongoing Past and (now) Future lives research. In confronting this mind chatter, I decided to follow the advice I would give to someone else—get a Past lives perspective on the situation.

I followed the instructions (again, included in this book): to expand out of my physical body and allow my energy body to float high up above my house and the body in the chair, with the intention to receive a message of wisdom from a Past life. I did this, then came down to the ground in a previous body from a previous incarnation.

Then I asked myself the curtain-raising first question: “Look down at your feet. What, if anything, are you wearing on your feet?”

I saw an image of sandals made of leather, held on by a strap around my big toe and tied to my ankles. I was walking on sand in daylight. Looking down at the lower part of my body, I saw a billowy fabric—off-white and more of a wrap than a tunic—that also covered my head and shielded my eyes.

When I expanded my awareness to my surroundings, I saw that I was walking toward a village, leading a camel that was carrying much less cargo than I would have expected, just a bag hanging on either side with pockets holding my meager supplies. I had the sense of being an adult male, tall, thin, bearded, and sunbaked with a squint that came from constantly having sand blown in one’s eyes.

With a sense of what I was wearing and what I was doing, I accessed the state of this person’s inner mind in that moment. I felt that it was surprisingly calm and clear, with the Zen-like mindfulness of living fully in the moment.

I saw myself encountering a collection of tents and was greeted as if I was expected. A man took my camel and led me into a tent, where I was given a cushion to sit upon and some finger food and tea in a small metal cup. (I still love tea after a meal, regardless of the weather. Boiling water poured over leaves or herbs completes every menu for me.)

After the meal, someone came in and sat across from me. There was no physical contact, hand shaking, or hugging as they introduced themselves. Upon hearing the person’s name, I started speaking and realized I was conveying a message. They simply nodded when I finished talking, then stood up and left, to be replaced by another person who also sat down and gave me their name.

As people came and went for the rest of that afternoon, I realized that I was the Bedouin version of a mailman (I don’t know if that was an exact description, but I use names and titles as placeholders, as you’ll see). In my job I moved from village to village delivering news from families, business and trade details, political proclamations, and even marriage proposals with responses.

What was striking is that this person, who was (and is) a part of me, had incredible mental abilities. As soon as a person told me their name, I would start speaking, almost as if I was reading from an inner script; each a bravura performance for an audience of one. My script? Whatever message someone in a previous location had given me, delivered it with whatever emotion was appropriate to convey: sympathetic in delivering a message from parent to child, serious in an offered business deal, authoritative in describing a politician’s overture, or poetic in giving or responding to a marriage proposal.

This person’s job—my job—was fascinating, especially in the way he was present with each person who sat before him. I became aware of the astounding mental abilities of this “Bedouin Mailman,” who used no written notes, only each person’s name and location, to trigger his recall. I believe we created computers in the image of our own brains, so I found the mental “hard drive” and “software” that he used in retrieving information astounding. His ability was amazing, not only in remembering these messages, but also recalling and delivering them in the proper context without any obvious order to their conveyance…not to mention the fact that it could have been weeks or months between the stops on his route. He simply retrieved each “file” from his mental hard drive as people came in and introduced themselves. He delivered the message, noting any response before moving on to the...