After sitting on
The Ultimate Journey: Consciousness and the Mystery of Death by
Stanislav Grof, M.D. I finally decided to crack it open. Fanning through the pages my eyes caught a quote preceding Chapter 10 from French philosopher and writer, Voltaire “
It is no more surprising to be born twice than to be born once.” What follows is way freakin’ more than I intended to share here and in the process I tapped out that bottle of 2002 Pinot Gris from Lake Chelan Winery
http://www.lakechelanwinery.com/ from yesterday.
The phenomena of karma and reincarnation in its cultural, scientific, religious and quantum concepts was laid out in an easily-read, entertaining, and thought-expanding discussion. The subject isn’t at all new to me yet my brain felt like a helium balloon.
Grof sets the foundation for reincarnation and karma being core to Zoroastrianism, Sikhism, Buddhism, Jainism, Hinduism, Taoism, and Tibetan Buddhism but the idea of these concepts are universal. Everybody lives, everybody passes on, everybody lives again … not just somebodys. He includes a mention of great Christian theologian and thinker,
Origen of Alexandria, (I haven’t thought about this dude forever) who ruminated over the cycling of souls during his life in 185 – 245 A.D., and also an eloquent quote discussing the rub of reincarnation from
Sholem Asch, a scholar, novelist, dramatist and essayist who passed away in 1957.
Referencing research and a case study by
Ian Stevenson, the section on Spontaneous Past Life Memories in Children discusses a wowing account of an East Indian boy, Parmod Sharma, who recounted spot-on and verified memories of a life he claimed to live as Parmanand Mehra who passed away just 18 months before Parmod was born.
Note of interest: Stevenson’s research “… shows that about 35% of children who claim to remember previous lives have unusual birthmarks, strange physical abnormalities, or rare birth defects that correspond closely to a wound, often fatal, or scar on the body of the deceased person the child remembers being” .
Yet something else to ponder in the section on Spontaneous and Evoked Past Life Memories in Adults, “In situations of extreme emotional intensity, the sadistic arousal of the torturer and the inhuman pain of the tortured increasingly resemble each other. Similarly, the rage of the murderer merges with the anguish and suffering of the dying victim. This emotional fusion seems to be instrumental in karmic imprinting, rather than a specific role in the experiential sequence. According to the insights of the people who have had past life experiences,
whenever two individuals get involved in a situation where their emotions reach this state, they will repeat the same pattern in their future lives, but in alternating roles, until they reach the level of awareness necessary to resolve this karmic bond.”
And if any of you are interested in
energy work,
transpersonal hypnotherapy, the
Silva Method, yadda yadda yadda you may be intrigued by this, “In many instances my clients who had experienced karmic sequences identified the karmic partners featuring in them as being specific persons from their present life – parents, children, spouses, boyfriends and girlfriends, and other important figures. When they completed reliving the karmic scene and reached successful resolution, they felt that the respective interpersonal partners had been so deeply part of their experience that they themselves had to feel something similar and might have been influenced by the experience. When I became sufficiently open-minded to try to verify these insights, I discovered to my great surprise that they were often accurate. The persons whom my clients had denoted as their partners in the karmic sequence experienced dramatic positive changes in their own feelings toward my clients at exactly the same time when the process was completed. This extraordinary synchronistic liaison between the events in the session and the changes in the attitudes of the “karmic partners” could not be explained by linear causality. Often these other individuals were hundreds or thousands of miles away, and they had no knowledge of my client’s experience … The timing of these synchronistic happenings was often remarkable; in some instances they were minutes apart … This aspect of
past life experiences, suggesting nonlocal connections in the universe, is similar to the phenomena described by Bell’s theorem in quantum-relativistic physics … “
Another section much too much to address here (mega complex research) is in the section Supporting Evidence for the Authenticity of Past Life Memories. Of HUGE interest and implication is The Case of Renata. In a nutshell, Renata was receiving LSD (evoked) therapy for her fear of cancer when bizarre memories surfaced in her consciousness of a life which took place hundreds of years ago in Prague – she described the life of a nobleman who was executed by the Hapsburgs during the 1621 Battle of White Mountain. Coupla years later a family member who hadn’t been seen since Renata was three provided proof of the family being descendents of a nobleman who died after the Battle of White Mountain. The thing that makes you go HMM: the nobleman died in battle meaning he couldn’t start a family. As Grof wrote so unintentionally hilariously, “… physical death terminates the possibility of further genetic transfer …” (well, duh) and “A dead person cannot procreate and ‘genetically’ pass the memory of his terminal anguish to future generations”.
The question that turned my brain turn into a helium balloon … “
Does the existence of these experiences constitute a definitive ‘proof’ that some essential part of us survives death and reincarnates as the same separate unit of consciousness, the same individual soul? Despite all the extraordinary evidence discussed earlier, the answer to this question has to be negative.” That our “individual consciousness” passes on then is reborn is just one theory. The reminder that Grof timely provides is to distinguish between theory and the reality that that theory is describing … in other words
the map should never be confused with the territory.
Note: Them is nine words of wisdom there.
closing quote
“In the Hindu tradition, the belief in reincarnation of separate individuals is seen as a popular and unsophisticated understanding of reincarnation. In the last analysis,
there is only one being that has true existence and that is Brahman, or the creative principle itself. All separate individuals in all the dimensions of existence as just products of infinite metamorphoses of this one immense entity. Since all the divisions and boundaries in the universe are illusory and arbitrary, only Brahman really incarnates. All the protagonists in the divine play of existence are different aspects of this One. When we attain this ultimate knowledge, we are able to see that our past incarnation experiences represent just another level of illusion or maya. From this perspective, to see these lives as “our lives” requires perception of the karmic players as separate individuals and reflects ignorance concerning the ultimate unity of everything.”
Pour yourself a glass of an easy-drinking red or white and imagine being One. I would have liked a full-bodied red with this but the Pinot Gris was open.
