Past Dwelling Places
That is a phrase used in some features I write, ‘She or he was one of my past dwelling places’.
It is an indication that the subject has become aware of what is often called a past life – reincarnation.
The strange thing is that every natural thing is unique. As humans we all have a unique DNA sequence, a unique finger print, unique bodily features and also our personality, the thing we refer to as ME is also incredibly unique, having millions of life experiences that are completely unrepeatable – so how can anything be born again?
What I see is that our life is all recorded in what people have named the unconscious, the core self, the spirit, the akashic record, the collective unconscious and many other names. As such, as I am fond of saying,
A single cell, which is a seed from which all life forms evolved from, doesn’t become old or die because it is immortal, for it keeps dividing and doesn’t die. In dividing it constantly creates copies of itself, but as it does so it gathers new experience, it changes what is copied, so becomes the ‘seed’ for multi-cellular organism. We all started from the original one cell, and we, you and I, are the result of gathered experience.
No plant or creature grows from a dead seed, and each living seed carries within it all the past gathered from all its forebears. So, the seed in your mother’s womb is as old as and even older than human kind, and you carry that wisdom or memories in you. But in this life you developed a new brain, and the memories, education and programming you gathered this time are what you built your personality from, but beneath that is a very ancient self.
Finding this very ancient self, hidden as it is by all your personal thinking and opinions, you find you are free from all the painful emotions, suicidal urges and personal hurts. To explore it see Opening to Life
Such collective memory creates a new being from memories that fit the time of its birth, the situation it is born into and the many past dwelling places it has known.
Example: I experienced a wonderful dream about a very ancient and large house. It was such a pointed and significant dream, for I looked through a hole in the floor of this grand old house and tried to bring up things belonging to my forbears using a rope, with no luck. But while exploring what meaning the dreamt held within it, I realised I had the key to be able to open the door to my ancestors’ belongings that were all hidden in myself, and I began to see what the message of my ancestors told me. But I had explored that way before, and quickly went deeper, finding myself in the great catacombs or cavern. As I walked I passed a gravestone a on my right, I suddenly realised myself as the woman who had been buried there. It was an extraordinary experience to suddenly know myself as a woman and realise I as a woman had died in enormous pain of losing all the family, all that was dear to her. I felt her pain to the point of trying to gouge my legs and bleed to ease the pain.
After suffering such agony for a time, it gradually calmed down, and now it was no longer alive with her pain but was an empty grave, so I passed by it.
As we drew level with the tomb an enormous change occurred in me. Suddenly I became a woman. It was no longer imagination. I was now completely experiencing myself as a woman whose tomb we had approached. As such I was torn by an immense pain of loss. As my complete identification deepened my body curled up with the pain as I was torn by wretched crying. Suzanne told me my voice changed as I cried out again and again for release from the pain of losing all my children, my husband, even my parents. My hands were clawing my legs in an effort to express the misery, and I was screaming that I could not bear to live any longer with such pain. I cried out to God to take me, for there was nothing left for me to live for. “Why? Why did this happen to me? Why has everything I loved been taken from me”
There was no response to these awful cries and tearing sobs. But slowly a shift began. It seemed to me as an observer witnessing this awful pain that by entering this place the spirit of that woman had woken in me. But as she had died in such unresolved agony of loss, that is what was met when she awoke. But gradually she realised she was alive again in a new way. She began to recognise that I was holding her within me. Because I was not frightened of pain and emotions, the misery could play itself out in me. And because my understanding of what was happening flowed into her awareness, she slowly saw and felt her loss in a different way. In fact, we were both realising she was experiencing resurrection, and that in turn meant there was no final death as believed by many. Therefore, there was no loss as she had originally felt it.
At this point, something truly incredible occurred. She and I both realised she was one of my past dwelling places. But for her the viewpoint was slightly different; for she saw me as a continuation of a life that she had failed to be a part of because of the awful pain of loss. It had kept her from flowing into what was her future as my life.
Something very similar happens in nature. Most of us are familiar with flower bulbs which are often sold. As such thy have been planted before and produced flowers, but when we plant them they flower again and produced a flower that carried within it all that the bulb produced before, but also the countless generations before that, yet the flower that grows is not a reproduction of any that went before it, but a unique creation.