What Are Past Lives – Are Past Lives Really You?

Article Highlights:

• Were lives before this really you?
• What else might be true?
• Pondering the true nature of the universe

Dear fellow journeyer through space, time and dimension,

The previous article was about karma and we can’t really discuss karma without considering past lives, can we?  Much of the time we associate karma with deeds and happenings of the past – the distant past, the past’s past – in a time before this time, this life In past lives.

In this article, I’m going to question another sacred spiritual cow: past lives. It’s about time, it’s about the right time, I think, to question what we mean by past lives.  Let’s ask what they are and if they’re really… well… real.

Why is it especially timely? For one thing we are starting to engage with certain new ideas such as timelines instead of past lives, and multiple timelines, and jumping timelines, and the simultaneity of time, and the fact that there is no past really and….

Well, you get the idea and may also glimpse some of the conundrums now sitting like so many elephants in the room.  It starts to feel like past lives might need an upgrade in our understanding.

Let’s poke at this with a stick and see if it squirms a little. When I return for another life some“time” down the road, will I remember being this me? No. Is it likely I’ll be much like me? No. Will I have the same personality?  No.  The same life, astrological makeup, sex, circumstances, career, partner, children? Not all. Will I think the same, react the same, care about the same things?   Not likely.

Now let me put the proverbial wrench in the works here.  Is it really me then?  Or is there another way to think of it? If so, how? The Hawaiians – and many other indigenous cultures as well – didn’t have the concept of past lives. They have the concept of the ancestors.

We have the concept of ancestors too but for us they aren’t the same as past lives because past lives were “mine.” Mine. We can feel a little possessive about our past lives, can’t we? For better or worse they were mine. And we do love to identify and past lives gives us ever-so-much more to identify with, don’t they?

In part we like this idea because past lives are comforting. This isn’t our only chance, we all get lots of go-arounds.  Plus there are so many us’s to be fascinated with. Cool. The problem with that is it’s based on old idea about being not good enough and how we might go to the bad place and therefore need lots of chances to get right.

However, lets go back to the Hawaiians and see if they’re really missing anything after all.  To us, our ancestors are decidedly not us.  Ancestors means something different to us than to many Indigenous.  They thank source and Mother Earth for giving life and thank the ancestors for making us who we are too.  They don’t thank themselves of the past.  They have a very interesting and profound ancestral understanding.

In the book, Bowl of Light, by anthropologist and shaman, Hank Wesselman, he tells of Kahuna Hale Makua giving one of the reasons such detailed lineage is/was kept by Hawaiians.  It was to recognize, for example, if a child began to show signs of sharing many traits in common with great great great uncle so and so who was a powerful healer but went over to the dark side.  The child would be watched carefully and if it became clear there was this overlay they would be taken to the sacred healing ground and worked with carefully to protect them from this ancestral inheritance.

The same might be understood if a warrior had a wound that wouldn’t heal… they would look back in his lineage for the ancestor from whom this might originate and start the healing there.  We call that past life influence.  They call it ancestral relationships.  Could they be the same thing?

So by that reasoning, the problematic overlay isn’t from “me,” per se, in my previous lifetime.  It’s great, great, great uncle so and so’s unfinished business.  And his “akashic” intensities are bleeding through for various reasons within a very complex field of human energetics.  And they knew how to recognize and work with that.  It’s Uncle’s energetic “karma” coming up for healing resolution in the child.  Not the child’s. 

I think the implications of this train of thought are very interesting.  It might be time to understand that at the level of the individual we have this one life as this specific “us.” This one precious life with it’s very specific opportunities.  

Switching now to the language of the new age, at the level of the soul, we are All One.  At the level of the individual we are only one.  A piece of the Soul breaks off and comes to earth.  Is it exactly the same piece that came before? No.  It’s a new life construction.  It contains, however, many complex weaves or threads, energetic connections etc. from within the group soul, including what Uncle was.

I recall Tom Kenyon telling of a conversation with a… well… an E.T. encountered during astral travel.  He told Tom they saw no justification for the concept of past lives.  They lived very long lives – being able to prolong one life almost indefinitely through advanced science – but if a life did end, it was final.  

As had happened to the individual Tom was speaking with who had been a technician on a starship.  It was, he said, a life he loved and it was unjustly interrupted when their ship was unexpectedly damaged right where he was standing, ending his life abruptly.  

He was somewhat resentful or regretful of that abrupt ending because in reading of this other person’s interrupted life in the available records it was a life vastly preferable.  So we see several things here that indicate quite a different view of things. There were records, there was awareness, but also awareness that it was not him.  That storyline had been ended.  Hmmmmm.

Oh my gosh, so much to try to get our minds around in considering all the implications of our musings today.  And I’ll leave you to it.  It’s something I’ve been feeling into and pondering on a personal level for a few years now and I’ve found it to be a rich and rewarding arena of thought.

Please know I’m not suggesting old understandings about karma and previous thinking regarding past lives were necessarily wrong. They just might not be a final level of understanding.  And new thoughts and understandings might be added to take us farther.  

Opening to query isn’t always entirely comfortable but it can be very rewarding to ponder the true nature of the Universe.  Perhaps –  with quantum thinking – comes evolved understandings of so much we have previously held to be true and dear. 

Maybe some of the only ones who really have past lives are the great masters such as the Dalai Lama.  Would that be because at a level of Mastery one integrates all experience of the Soul, only in that way becoming one life?  And that each life within the group soul might have that same opportunity?  Hmmm… Interesting to consider. 

🧐 🤔 💭

I wonder what you think?

X♥️Mayet