Foot Spas, Blackbirds And Reincarnation

[poliphilo]

1. Ailz acquired a foot spa off Freecycle the other day. We went and picked it up and the man who handed it over at the door called me, "my man" twice in the course of thirty seconds. In the far off and long ago "my man" was how rich men in wind-up motor cars addressed  simple, smock-wearing country folk when they had to stop and ask them for directions. It was patronising to the point of insult. Coming from a scruffy-looking bloke in a council house it presumably has other connotations- but I can't say I liked it much.

I just topped the spa up with nearly-boiling water from the kettle. Ailz seems to be enjoying herself. There are bubbles.

2.The blackbirds who nest in our ivy have successfully raised one brood this summer and are now raising another. This makes me happy. One cannot have too many blackbirds.

3. Michael Newton- author of Journey of Souls-  says we enter into a covenant not to remember past incarnations when our souls return to earth. We have lessons to learn- and it's better we start with a clean slate.  Our responses will be fresher if events surprise us-  and the task will seem more urgent if we don't realise we have lives to burn. Yes-  fair enough-  but to know what I was is to know who I am- and I'm finding it really frustrating to be kept in the dark.

Comments

[manfalling.livejournal.com]

I'm curious how you reconcile a belief in the soul and in past lives with modern science- the selfish gene of Dawkins and so on. Granted, they don't actually cancel each other out, but the one does seem to make the other a bit ludicrous.

Look at evolution- we came from monkeys who ultimately came from fish, our brains are just complex computers to hold the complex programs of our minds. Where does reincarnation fit into that? Do monkeys reincarnate, and have a divine presence watching over their 'lessons'? Do fish? What is the cut-off point, bearing in mind we share something like 97% of our DNA with chimpanzees?

From another angle, I'm curious what the 'lessons' of reincarnation are supposed to add up to. An enlightened being? But enlightened by whose moral compass and to what end goal? Or do you look on it as a kind of evolution, with no known goal in mind, only a progression steadily moving forwards towards something we know not what?

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I think you've said it- they don't actually cancel one another out. You can no more disprove the existence of the soul than you can prove it. People like Dawkins start with a Victorian materialistic mind-set and find all the evidence falling into place for them. That's what we all do, pretty much. We start with a premise and then go on to prove it- using evidence selected and tailored to our case.

Do monkeys reincarnate? Yes probably. But I think the human soul is special.

What are we learning? Love and wisdom, I suppose. But if we could define the end we wouldn't still be taking the lessons, would we?

[jackiejj.livejournal.com]

As for some sticking points--

I can let go of the grammar; I think you're right about the necessity of editing.

I can let go of my idea that he may be writing a clever dialogue himself, because that ends the discussion, doesn't it? (Freud said: either dreams mean something or they don't, and if they don't, there's no purpose in thinking about them; I will take the other route and assume meaning)

That leaves the process itself:

The idea that we become points of light makes perfect sense to me.

And, Eckhart said (long before string theory, in the 14th century):

"Heaven is pure, touching neither time nor space. Corporeal things have no place in it. It is not inside of time; its orbit is compassed with speed beyond belief. The course of heaven is outside time—and yet time comes from its movements. Nothing hinders the soul's knowledge of God as much as time and space, for time and space are fragments, whereas God is one! And therefore, if the soul is to know God, it must know God above time and outside of space; for God is neither this nor that, as are these manifold things. God is one!
"God is equally near every creature. The wise man says, 'God has spread his nets and lines out over all things, so that he may be found in any one of them and recognized by whoever chooses to verify this.' One authority says: 'To see God aright is to know him alike in everything.'"

This is pretty much where I've settled and am comfortable right now theologically, and it does fold in well with light and speeding up and tunnels--and of course physics is now suggesting that the numbers indicate at least ten dimensions, six of them "rolled up" (whatever the hell that means) and therefore inaccessible to our sensory bodies--but I am convinced that when we die that limitation is overcome (when I am believing this) as we speed up in release from this slowed-down place.

What I can't ever figure out is why--

Eckart says God loves to create, and that is ALL God does (and the son, he adds cryptically)--which I guess is one way to say God is outside time and is basically a creation mechanism (I don't know at this moment if Eckhart talked very much about love, and a personal God, etc. His focus, which seems very intuitive to me, is always about creating over and over and all the time, and that we are what God creates.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Eckhart is one of those rare people who seems to operate outside time and place. He transcends medieval theology. Those words you've quoted could almost have been written yesterday- or at any other time- they're so free of specific cultural markers.

I don't know why God creates- though, like you- I keep wondering. I suspect it's just a given. It's what God does. (And don't we sometimes speak of human artists as "godlike"?) Perhaps when we're more spiritually advanced it'll become clear and- as St Paul says- we'll know as we are known.

I don't think Newton is making it up. My daughter Alice has been going for past life and life between lives regression with one of his English trainees. What she reports from these sessions is fully in harmony with the information in his book. What I've found significant is that the past lives she remembers have all been so dull. If she were inventing, or her subconscious were inventing, I think it would have come up with something a little glamorous. As it is, her last incarnation seems to have been as an American office worker who never married and never had any significant relationships- and the one before that was as a French or German nun who worked in an orphanage.

[jackiejj.livejournal.com]

That's fascinating. And good to hear--because a great criticism of this sort of regression is that so many people were Cleopatra or St. Joan.

We've talked about this before, but I'm convinced that what lures me every time to churches is an old background of familiarity and comfort there from a life in convents. I'm pretty sure I must have sung in choirs, because I have no particular interest in solo work, and my neurotic need to show off is always overwhelmed by an inner directive to be modest and to blend in. Understandable if I'd been raised a Roman Catholic of the old school, but I was a liberal Episcopalian.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Doesn't Newton say he hears warning bells when a client claims to have been someone famous? It's the same when they start banging away about Atlantis. He tells a story about a woman who believed she was Marilyn Monroe, but- on closer inspection of her memories- realised she was actually Marilyn's housekeeper.

Of course, some of us must have had famous past lives.

I'm pretty certain I must have knocked around in the medieval church. I feel so at home in monastic ruins.

[jackiejj.livejournal.com]

Your wonderful vivid stories about ancient times--I'm thinking of course of the Purchas novels, and the fine story about Robin Hood!--convince me that you were somehow a part of those times.

I wonder: I've read that our personalities--our present lives--are like pearls on a necklace, that the necklace string is us, the real us, and that we return to that string and this person we now are is--what? Gone?--does Maxwell subscribe to that theory?

Where is this string, in relation to God? Because I tend to leave out the string and just think: okay, when I die, I get a little time floating around in Purgatory, maybe (or not) reliving the shame and humiliation and fleeting triumphs of my small life, and then I float inexorably into the great Caldron Of Life Which is God and disappear--I wistfully would love to be still aware somehow.

Still, if we knew our awareness was going to surely be snuffed out in the great caldron, wouldn't we avoid it (like hell, so to speak)? Yet that seems to be the final goal: back to the Source. (And that's why it's so tempting to think in terms of God-needing-us in terms of God's own development)

[jackiejj.livejournal.com]

By the way (and I promise I'll quit writing so much now!), I was remembering yesterday how I once, when married, had a horrible toothache and was in agony, and my husband put his hand on my cheek and held it there for maybe ten seconds, and my pain went completely away and didn't come back! I went to the dentist two days later.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

How odd that your abusive husband should also have been a healer.

I have that skill too. I don't much like to use it. It makes me feel weird. And somehow phoney.

Alice has it- and is currently training as a Reiki healer. When she was a little girl she once laid hands upon a dying gerbil and brought it back to life.

[jackiejj.livejournal.com]

He's now very ill and can't leave his house anymore--he can't breathe.

They are, his mother told me (she lives creepily around the corner from me, a bent-over old woman, cold and sad) suggesting hospice for him now.

I am so used to rushing in to right things, to--oh: smooth things over. This time I just stand by, knowing there is nothing I can or should do, ever, now.

Kate and Richard must do this themselves, without me.

But there's this part left: that I still see him as a boy, and unbroken, in the brief time when we first loved each other.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

That's sad.

But, yes, you've played your part in his life.

Do Kate and Richard have a good relationship with their father?

[jackiejj.livejournal.com]

Kate steers away from ever talking about him. She once said, "Mom: there's nothing there. I don't feel anything for him." I think that she has compassion for him as she would any person going through a hard time, but as a stranger.

My son's relationship is more complicated, I think, and less resolved.

Both, I think, feel sad for him, and go on with their lives.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

That's karma, isn't it?

We reap what we sow.

Maybe he'll do better next time round.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

We will all have lived many, many lives- hundreds possibly. I believe our spirits have access to memories of them all, but for practical purposes dwell only upon the more significant ones. I think the image of pearls on a string is good- but a little misleading- because in this case it's the string that's valuable.

I don't believe the return to God is a snuffing out. Maybe it would be more accurate (and cheerful) to suggest that what happens to us is that we become God.

[jackiejj.livejournal.com]

we become God.

I can believe that more than anything else we've said.

[jackiejj.livejournal.com]

My ex-husband once told me that he was convinced that in my last life I was a shallow Victorian woman with many little talents and of no great use to anyone.

I believed him for a long time, but don't anymore.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Yes, he was merely trying to put you down.

[jackiejj.livejournal.com]

One thought I've had before: can we be picking up on other soul's stories during these regressions, random lives?

Not that it matters so much--that, too, would help verify life after death.

I wish so much that we had a little more information!--these tantalizing glimpses are frustrating.

If I try to imagine life somewhere else, it's impossible, in the same way that even very good science fiction writers seem unable to describe un-humanlike alien lifeforms! And if I do manage to dream up something--I once imagined a place near rocks where there was a cave where God was, and beings, among them me, were gathered all around the cave and singing, but I am certain it was just my very limited imagination and based on nothing else. And it was also a bleak place, much unworthy of the grandness and expansiveness of God! (God in a little cave under brown grass!)

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Could we be picking up on other people's past lives? I suppose so. But I think a skiful therapist would probably be able to tease that out.

Why shouldn't God be in a cave under brown grass? It's no grimmer than that stable in Bethlehem?

[jackiejj.livejournal.com]

But, but: I'm pretty much thinking of God pantheistically, and so locating God in one place doesn't work...but I return to that imaginary scene often in my mind! And I know that one of my wistful desires is to finally be able to join that group of singers--that's where I am most myself, I think. Don't understand it, but know it.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

If God is everywhere then He's also present in particular places.

It's a lovely image- and clearly significant. Maybe it's an image of some past life- even an extra-terrestrial life- or maybe it's purely symbolic. Whatever it is, it surely tells the truth about you.