Consciousness Journal: Past Life Regressions and Cat Poop in a Tub

OK, stop me if you’ve heard this one before. A sea captain, a medicine man, and a Catholic Cardinal walk into a bar. So does a samurai, a sumo wrestler, a British house wife, and a caveman. Add to that menagerie a school house teacher from the American frontier, a frail child from 18th century London, and an elderly, obese Russian Bolshevik.

This set up to a joke is no joke. Nor is it the description of the worst Comic-Con ever. It is a list of my previous lifetimes I have become aware of since 1996. They first appeared during a multi-discipline Complimentary / Alternative Medicine (CAM) session. It was four “mental movies” that appeared in my mind’s eye while receiving acupuncture, Reiki, aroma therapy, and music therapy simultaneously. Yes, that’s a lot. It was a gluttonous meal from the metaphysical menu and I had ordered the whole page. Western medicine has failed and the decision before me was to have a cadaver’s tissue transplanted into my ankle or to try this mumbo jumbo.

It blew through me like a psilocybin tornado in a trailer park.

Thereafter, it seemed that I had penetrated some real or imagined psychic membrane as the movies started slipping into my dreams and meditative states. I was never alone. Everywhere I went, this was my metaphysical posse.

I stopped seeking them out around 2012. They were consuming enough of my free time that I was not honoring this lifetime. Frankly, it was easier to cultivate friendships with my former selves than it was with people here on Earth. While I have not tried to backfill any more of their narratives, I have carefully packed away the notebook I used to commemorate my discoveries. At first I thought it would be respectful to learn as much about them as I could. Later, I decided that the best way to honor them was to live this life as best as I could by capitalizing on their lessons and sacrifice.

Years later, after a medical emergency and recovery, I sat reviewing the twelve different profiles. Each of them was a lesson that was either manifesting, or had manifested, in this lifetime. I wanted to see if one of them had my medical condition and why. As I reminisced through the pages, I remember the angst I had back then. I thought that I might be developing schizophrenia. Dude, seriously, there was just so much mental data that was, and was not, me. Also, the content for each lifetime didn’t arrive in chronological fashion. No life runs in a straight line and these lives were no different.

I was thinking to myself at the time that I had somehow broken my brain. I wondered in a separate journal entry if this is what it is like to go insane? If I stayed in the mental construct of YOLO, then I was absolutely going mad. If I adopted the mental construct of reincarnation, then I was as sane as nearly half the world. I decided to follow that path. The voices in my head agreed. Just kidding.

I was thinking to myself at the time that I had somehow broken my brain.

I also considered brain damage because the Kodachrome flashes would appear just before I went to sleep or right before the alarm went off. Again, I thought some psychic barrier had been unlocked but only when my brain was relaxed. I would learn later that the brain’s activity is measured in cycles per second and the Delta state is just above the threshold of consciousness. This would be important later in life.

When I stopped stressing and surrendered to the process, my snapshots became protracted vignettes. They then grew to become short movies. And I didn’t think it was my imagination. I can imagine being on a cigarette boat with two Swedish bikini models but there would be no emotional content associated with it. The sensory memory of these story lines was muted in places but the emotional content associated with these memories was more real than my own. It was pure, unadulterated emotion.

In my thirty some years on the planet, I had finally found the feeling of unconditional love. Unfortunately, it was not in the life I was currently living. It was within the memory of a long deceased American Indian shaman whose body I had use of in that life time. Like eating the last Krispy Kreme donut but nuking it for a few seconds beforehand, the memory of a psudo-memory was sad and amazing at the same time. “Anguish” would be too strong of an adjective now but not in that moment of discovery.

It is worthy of mention, but not elaboration, to say I see my “movies of the mind” from both first person POV and as the director’s POV. And to this day, I still have trouble calling them memories. Seriously, what do you call a chain of related thoughts that feel like remembering but have nothing to do with the meat suit you are currently driving? Are you the originator of a thought or are you the receiver of a pre-existing thought untethered from liner time? My answer to that question — today — is that we are both. More specifically, the mind is the originator of thought energy, is unbound by time, and is a cohesive energy that grows in complexity with each experience. The brain is the meat receiver of the energy that is thought. Think of the Swedish Chef. Your brain is the pot roast. Your mind is the chef. The big question I will tackle later — who’s hand is that?

Think of the Swedish Chef. Your brain is the pot roast. Your mind is the chef. The big question I will tackle later — who’s hand is that?

Let me step back because this all feels a bit abstract so far. Let me go back to that day when past life regression / past life retrieval / soul fragment retrieval became a reality for me in this life time. They appeared during my CAM smorgasbord I had requested for my chronic tendonitis. I was lying on a massage table in a darkened living room with a dozen or so acupuncture needles in me. I was listening to either Deuter or Jonathan Goldman and I felt myself beginning to relax. I was thinking a bunch of random thoughts and, like a baseball card collector, I had to examine each one and then set aside. Everything from ‘What is that smell?’ [Nag Champa] ‘Am I going to break the table?’ [No] ‘Did she catch me staring at her boobs?’ [She did.] ‘Are the needles going to hurt?’ [No; but there was a tingling sensation as she fine tuned them]. I finally focused on my relaxation techniques. My big deep breaths were huge as I was still singing opera and had a nearly four liter lung capacity. The needles in my chest undulated like a porcupine in REM sleep. I had relaxed from my toes to my butt when the first movie started.

Exterior shot: Fade in. American frontier. Early 1700’s. An opal sky contrasts the sage brush, lithe grasses, and the occasional obstinate tree. A broad creek meanders through a reedy bend on the left while a cluster of tee-pees is nestled among the undulating grasses to the right.

POV: Sitting on the back of an equally brown and white horse, we see a hand and forearm of the main character holding onto the brown mane. The skin is the color of caramel. The veins are so pronounced that I would call it ‘nurse porn’. It is a masculine hand and, while not old, has lived many winters based on the well-earned callouses and modicum of scaring.

Camera pans L to R: We see several small children playing in the creek, women making reed baskets and mats, and a grandfatherly figure standing among them. He raises a hand in salute to you. You reply. You cast your gaze to the right, searching the tee-pees to find the one that belongs to you and your family. A circle with two vertical lines and three horizontal lines calls to you. You are home.

POV: Main character is standing in front of a woman who is a foot shorter. He has buckskin pants and a vest made from fine sticks that have been woven together with wooden beads of different colors making a V pattern. His charcoal hair has stripes of silver starting to show and it is tied behind him with another strip of woven beads except these are more refined and appear to be ceremonial.

She is wearing a buckskin skirt with similar bead work. Gauze like material binds her waist and her vest is nearly identical. In his hair, there are two feathers; one from an eagle and the other from a condor. Her hair is held back by a leather strap with a sharpened wooden stick. The hide has been tanned and the family symbol has been meticulously carved into it. They stand before each other with a familiarity that shows they have been in this intimate moment before. With foreheads touching, they are caressing each other’s hands as though they are about to forget the feeling.

There is familiarity here for me. I know this woman. There is an energy that passes back and forth between us that is both tantric and sacred. I am breathing her in. Every conjoined breath is a lifetime enveloped by unconditional love and overshadowed by a sense of terminal foreboding. My current body here synchronizes its breath with theirs in both action and emotion. A crushing sadness and inevitability of death well up from within. I lie in a darkened living room with tiny antennae reaching out to the ether and I cry for the loss both are going to experience. More emotional content fills my mind.

There is an energy that passes back and forth between us that is both tantric and sacred.

Where I am to go, she cannot follow and I cannot resist. We both know that I will not see the next sunrise for I am to go to battle to defend the ego of my chief which I had injured months earlier. For him to solidify his position I would have to either die as a martyr or as a soldier. But, die I must.

External shot: Sundown. The men are quietly riding off to a battle they all know is unnecessary but is obligatorily as they are supplicants to the chief. In an act of both defiance and love, I turn around backward on my horse and watch my wife, children, and all I know and love fade in both distance and nightfall. The smell of her body clinging to my hair is my final memory.

Immediately, like changing a channel on a TV, I am the captain of a ship and am in one of the worst storms of my lifetime. Needles of rain stab my face where the beard does not protect. Listing dangerously to port, I look again at the rigging and sails to make sure the wind is sloughing off. Though the wind screamed its maledictions to me, it still could not cover the ominous moans coming from the main mast or the crew below crying out to God, their mothers, or their ancestors. None of them were coming but all were ready to receive.

A burst of lightning against an onyx sky revealed that the load had shifted and the cargo was at risk of tumbling into the sea or was going to pull us down to the deep. I had lashed myself to the wheel so I released myself from that security, bound the wheel in place, and began crawling towards the stack.

Next scene is me crawling away from the stack. I had taken extra line and secured the saturated rigging. I had managed to crawl three feet away from the stack when a rogue wave caught us nearly broadside. Poseidon’s fist was in the shape of a green wall that rocked the boat in the opposite direction, knocked me back into the stack, and snapped the rigging I had just tied off. A crate caromed of the top of the stack and landed on my left leg just below the knee and nearly amputated it. I screamed.

The storm itself paused to ascertain what damage it had caused. The deck was awash in my own blood and whatever Fate had planned for me was accomplished because the storm abated immediately. There was so much pain. So. Much. Pain. There was the pain of a crushing injury that pinned me to the deck so that I had an equal chance of drowning or exsanguination. Some of the crew began to shout my name but I was not aware of it. There was also the anger of losing a shipment and heretofore my record was unblemished. I was a privateer or a pirate depending on the circumstance of our meeting but one thing I wasn’t was a quitter. I rolled up some cloth and tied off my ruined left leg as best I could and made three quick cuts with my cutlass to free both cloth and flesh from the box. I remembered in that moment that I had been trapping once before and was amused by the parallel of chewing off a limb to escape. I was laughing at the absurdity of it all when I was found by crew members. Another wave of pain hit me as I felt their respect and my ego wain. In one life, I was lead to death because of a leader’s ego. In this life, it was my own ego that was going to get us all killed. Neither side of the equation was desirable and both were pivotal in this lifetime’s spiritual development.

There was the pain of a crushing injury that pinned me to the deck so that I had an equal chance of drowning or exsanguination.

Although my current self did not have the proper lexicon, I had a set of extraordinary experiences that I had to process and the least of which was a pain free ankle. Frankly, it took me a couple of days to stop ruminating and a couple of months to form a mental construct to allow me to continue successfully moving through the world.

Here’s a real life metaphor. After getting my driver’s license, I thought my 1971 Super Beetle was a blast to drive. Hardly any of my friends knew how to drive a stick so I would show off for them by doing some speed shifting without the clutch. I felt like a total badass. That changed a year later when I would be flying down the Autobahn in Volkswagon’s cousin, a Porsche 911, at 135 mph. The only way that my Super Beetle would see 135 mph would be if it got abducted by a hurricane. I thought I knew the capacity of human love based on my childhood and my marriage until I felt what was possible in both my American Indian past life in 1995 and later from my near death experience in 2005. Once I experienced the latter, the former paled in comparison.

Somewhere in that decade, I came to the understanding that consciousness was non-local and that our earthy lives are really a symbiotic agreement between the physical self and the spiritual self — much like a car and a driver are paired for a race. The car may break down but the driver can just get back into another car. They may even change vehicle styles and sponsors. But they’re drivers… until they become owners.

My great paradigm shift would occur after the death of my mom in 2011. I was back in Sarasota, Florida acting as her Executor and, when I needed a break from the sadness and madness, I would occasionally visit familiar haunts from years before. I connected with a woman at the Unity Church who was trained by Dr. Brian Weiss to do hypnotic regression therapy. I contacted her because wanted to flesh out the four previous lifetimes in as much detail as I could discover. As usual, when I thought I knew what I was doing, I was woefully ignorant. Man plans; God laughs.

Brian Weiss is an important guy because he normalized the discussion of reincarnation. As a physician, psychotherapist, and educator, he brought credibility to the discussions that actress Shirley McClain, and the channeled entities of Abraham and Seth has introduced into the American Zeitgeist of the 1980’s. And when both science and metaphysics bring you to the same crossroads, it is guaranteed that there will be a fundamental shift in your perception and life path.

When both science and metaphysics bring you to the same crossroads, it is guaranteed that there will be a fundamental shift in your perception and life path.

According to Weiss, in 1980 one of his patients, “Catherine”, began discussing past-life experiences under hypnosis. Weiss did not believe in reincarnation at the time but, after confirming elements of Catherine’s stories through public records, came to believe in the survival of the human personality after death. Weiss claims he has regressed more than 4,000 patients since 1980.

Weiss advocates hypnotic regression as therapy or as an adjunct to traditional therapy. To get a gist of what I am saying and to also be surprised by a cameo performance, watch a movie from the 1980’s called Dead Again and you will understand why many claim that phobias and ailments are actually rooted in past-life experiences and that the discovery by the patient can have a curative effect. In other circles that have the smell of patchouli and a sweaty crystal ball sack, this would be called soul fragment retrieval.

Weiss also writes about information received from “Masters”, “Teachers” or other evolved, nonphysical souls [a.k.a. Ascended Masters], which he claims to have communicated with through his subjects. Again, those doing shots of wheat grass and toting a talking stick might say they are communing with their master spirit guide. Back in the day, Weiss held workshops and seminars across the United States that explained and taught self-regression techniques to psychiatrists and sages alike.

I went to her home office to suss out more of the details of my four lifetimes but, instead, discovered eight more. I made this discovery while being the Executor of my mom’s estate as well as repairing her condo after a decade of hoarding. Frankly, I was hoping to hear that my time was nearly over and that my metaphysical self was circling the drain like a tiny renegade turd that fights the swirling flow of inevitability. I was tired of “The Game”. I wanted to go home. From 2009 to 2011, I have lost my marriage, my job, my son, my company, my savings, my home, and my mom.

Little did I know that I was not going home; I was being tempered for challenges to come.

I know I keep referring to The Game but there are really many parallels between an action / adventure video game and what is going on here… at least for me. Actually, every time I watch The Matrix, I see many more similarities than in a video game but I’m not ready to meet the Wachowski’s in court. I’ll keep those thoughts with me for now.

But I thought I was wrapping up my experiences here on Earth and that my game playing was done because of the flea market of human experiences I had collected / earned. Now, a disclaimer: I’m not fishing for sympathy or bowling for soup here. Just look at this as a grocery list of human experiences: incubator baby, abused child, ridiculed adolescent, devalued spouse. Bankrupt, coma, professional sabotage, homeless, unemployed. Diabetic, depression, ADD, hypertension, arthritis, broken bones, reconstructed bones and joints, removed organs. Turning off life support on both parents. Losing my ‘heart’ son to an IED. It’s a lot of baggage.

On the other side of the coin we have some bedazzled shit biscuits: singing in front of more than 10,000 people — twice, watching the Oak Ridge Boys square dance in the wings while we sang Elvira, singing Ave Maria in Notre Dame cathedral and having strangers from around the world join in, singing for a President, going way too fast on the Autobahn, being a DJ / bouncer at 19, being arrested by Russian soldiers, getting invited to try out for the Cowboys by Jimmy Johnson, getting invited to tour the Mediterranean on a billionaire’s yacht by his daughter, piloting a cruise ship off the coast of Granada, starting 3 companies, creating an organic skin cream, getting to work on a cure for a type of breast cancer, diabetes and auto-immune disorders, self-publishing two books, batting .667 in my CRP skills, and getting some screen time in a Hollywood movie without having to see any of Harvey Weinstein’s body.

Then there is the whole metaphysical awareness toy box — talking with the deceased, astral projection, remote viewing, Reiki, ancestral healing, communing with members of the Medical Assistance Program, being given a tour of Heaven by George Carlin, becoming angelic music, meeting extraterrestrials, blending the disciplines of remote viewing and Reiki at haunted locations, and being adopted by St. Germain and Archangel Michael at my Reiki Master Attunement. However, none of these things can compare to the sacred and rapturous bliss of being unshackled from my corporeal restraints and basking in the pure and perfect bliss of Creator energy.

Sigh…

Anyway, I am back in my mother’s Florida condo. I was chiseling away at the strata usually seen in archeological digs except this was the bathtub she had turned into a litter box a couple of years… YEARS… before her transition. Marveling at the dilation capacity of Mr. T’s sphincter, I thought I had experienced enough shit in this lifetime to warrant coming back home. Turns out I still have a few more decades before that happens. I still have work to do.

By the way, Mr.T was one of mom’s cats. I am relatively confident that the other Mr. T did not drop a baby leg in mom’s bathtub. But if you saw what I saw, you would have had a glimmer of doubt too. Like the saying goes, ‘I don’t know what I just saw but I know that I have seen enough.’

I am relatively confident that the other Mr. T did not drop a baby leg in mom’s bathtub.

Yes, I thought I was done with Earth. However, the dude in charge of my access to the Cosmic Costco / Akashic Records said otherwise. That dude, my ascended master teacher, identified himself as “Joy — with Attitude”. Just my luck. My master teacher is going to help me up with one hand and give me a purple nurple with the other.

As I revealed yet another super-sized Tootsie Roll, the recording from my last regression session is still playing in my mind. My whole spiritual soul group refers to me as “Speedy” because I do not rest in between assignments. Turns out my soul is a Type A personality. So, it was decided for me that I needed to slow my roll, therefore, there were deliberate blocks added into this lifetime to force me to do the necessary introspection. Apparently, the unexamined after-life is also not worth living. Mentally and physically, I kept chipping away. I soon had my epiphany. I was becoming a professional in abandonment and loss.

My sea captain had been abandoned by his family so he ran to the sea. He would be forced to abandon it. As a peg leg, he would be just another shadow of a man reliving days that are no longer relevant. He lost his purpose and his status. He drank himself to death within a week.

My American Indian Shaman was forced to abandon his family so to follow his chief. He would lose his life, his family, and his sense of faith.

My Catholic Cardinal was abandoned within his caste as he would not take a mistress. Out of a sense of piety and supremacy, he sought to elevate himself above the rest of his brother Cardinals. He wanted to lead by example but they refused to trust him. He would lose his sense of direction, his status among the other Cardinals, and his life from an assassin’s dagger.

And on and on it went…

At my last regression therapy session, after exploring the aforementioned characters I had played until now, I asked for a different tack. I wanted to talk with my master spiritual guide. I wanted Joy with Attitude to provide spiritual guidance counseling to me to review the work I was doing.

The samurai, the sumo, the Nubian slave, the British housewife during the Blitz… they all were subtle variations of abandonment and loss. For whatever reason, I was that video game player who chose to play the same game repeatedly. I kept increasing the difficulty and changing characters so that I could explore all the variations of abandonment and loss.

The answers that evaded me are why do I keep coming back for the same lesson and for what purpose? One morning, during a pre-dawn thunderstorm, rain drops against my window were telegraphing a message to me. Another Kodachrome flash happened and a series of messages were delivered to my consciousness. My answer arrived.