--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, "hugheshugo" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > And that is the only past-life experience I've ever had and it went > right back to the age of the dinosaurs, believe me I know what it's > like to be a nocturnal shrew in the late cretateous, I know it was > then because I saw an iguanadon. I think if two aliens hadn't > appeared on the scene and freaked me out even more I might be > inclined to think it really happened. Hey, maybe it did and I just > don't want to think of myself as that lucky. It was awesomely vivid > in the way that only other people who've had good acid experiences > will be able to relate to. But when I think two of my passions are > paleontology and science fiction the realist in me has to accept > that it was most likely entirely subjective, Occams razor and all > that. > > I never had any past-life experiences from meditation and this is > annoying as I know plenty who have and I hate to think I'm missing > out on a good time. Intellectually I can dismiss reincarnation > because it's a bit tricky to fit into the standard Darwinian model. > But as Maharishi said "Now you may not believe in reincarnation and > all that, but ask yourself this, what do I know?" To which I can > only reply, not enough. > > So can I ask you, or indeed anyone who has had a past-life > experience, how real it was? Or maybe real isn't the main thing > maybe it's how much sense it makes personally. I'm in the dark > about it.
I've only had a few that I would consider clear experiences of past lives, as opposed to having a general "feeling" about a certain era or place. Most of the former were a little "visionary" in that there was something that happened that was out of the ordinary that makes me think that I wasn't just moodmaking or that my brain wasn't just "free associating" based on things I know from this life. In a few of these experiences I had a literal vision in that the present just went away, and what I was seeing and experiencing felt like I'd stepped into some kind of "viewer into the past." I tried to write up one such experience in one of the stories in Road Trip Mind, at: http://ramalila.net/RoadTripMind/rtm46.html When the present just "goes away" and all of your perceptions seem to be taking place *in* the past, like some kind of vision, I tend to take those experiences a little more seriously than just having a vague feeling of familiarity about a time or place. Another type of experience that I tend to give more credence to and consider more than moodmaking is when I go to some place of power (as I am wont to do) and not only feel that I've been there before, I can describe what's going to be around the next bend or in the next room before we get there to other people who visiting that place with me. I've done that with Quéribus, the place I wrote about in the link above, and at other Cathar-related sites. I've had similar experiences in Canyon de Chelly and Chaco Canyon and in the basements of the Papal Palace in Avignon, where I was telling my guide where all the secret passages were before he could tell me about them. All in all, though, I just treat these things as entertainment. I may *enjoy* having these rare flashes, but I'm not convinced that any of them have provided benefit to my sadhana in any way. The visionary ones are more like seeing a clip from a movie that you starred in long, long ago. It's neat to see it, but you worked on that film *so* long ago that you're no longer getting any residual royalties from the Actor's Guild, so what use is it, anyway? :-)
