In the late 1980s, I was given some past-life regression tapes.  They had been made by Dick Sutphen, and were some of his earliest published series of such tapes.  One of the courses gave me brief overviews of several lives, including my earliest incarnation on this planet and my life of highest spiritual attainment (before the current one).

At the time, I never got around to using all of the tapes I had been given, and after a few, I never did another hypnotic regression.  Within a few months of those first regressions, I had begun spontaneously to recall past-life memories.  For a few months in the summer of 1990, it was easier for me to bring to mind details from past lives than to recall what I had for lunch that day.

In this current life, I have been told that I have a memory that works better than most people's.  In the short-term memory portions of intelligence tests, I excel.  On two separate occasions, testers have told me I was the only person in their experience who had ever been able to max out the section where one is tasked with repeating sequences of digits forward and backward, beginning with just two, up to a maximum of nine digits. 

My long term memory is pretty good, too.  In writing my memoirs, I have found that the periods in which I moved around a lot are easier to recall in detail than are those times when I stayed in one place for a long time.  Memories from a given place tend to become jumbled in chronology, but it is easy to separate what happened in one place from what happened to me someplace else.

Something similar seems to work in reference to past-life memories.  I can easily separate the events of one life from another, and when something triggers recall of a life that I hadn't remembered previously, that fact is clear.  There is no tendency to confuse one life with another, and it is fairly easy to order them chronologically.

My life of greatest spiritual development was relatively recent.  In the early twentieth century, I was a rice farmer in Southeast Asia.  That this would be my life of highest spiritual attainment makes good sense to me, because the culture there and then was a Buddhist culture, and Buddhism offers fewer obstacles to spirituality than just about any religion I know.  In my current life, working in the soil or walking in the rain often brings up memories from that time.

The glimpse I got from that first regression tape into my earliest lifetime was brief and strange.  I was a child, about five years old.   A few feet from where I lay, several people whom I knew to be my family were seated around a fire.  It was night, and I lay all alone, rolled up in some kind of rough fur, in the shadows, away from the fire, behind my mother.

I had a fever.  I was shaking, hallucinating, and convulsing as I died.  That death was the first of many from past lives that I have re-experienced in this lifetime.  I think I probably had a normal fear of death before I started remembering all those previous lives and deaths.  I was never, however, phobic about death, and at this time I don't really know what such a fear would feel like.

At the time of that regression, I learned that the life had occurred on the Eurasian continent, about 25,000 years ago.  Since then, a few other memories of that life have come back to me.  From the time before I became ill, I remember people, work, and play.  The play and work were interrelated.  Throwing sticks and stones were games that developed practical skills.  Games of push and pull and hand-holding human chains seem to have been as much about relating to one another as anything.  We danced... I remember that, and I know that none of the people I knew in that life have been with me in this one.

I have lived hundreds of times.  More than half of those lives ended before I reached the age of twelve.  Only once have I ever lived as long as I have in this lifetime.  That one was about 12,000 years ago, and by the standards of the time I was truly ancient.   I was a revered elder and my people had long depended on me for healing and herbal knowledge.  All my children were already dead, and I had passed along my knowledge to my grown grandson by the time I became physically incapacitated.

We were nomadic hunter-gatherers, moving from mountain caves in summer, down to lowlands in winter.  My last winter was a harsh one, and by the time it ended and the clan started preparing to move, I was unable to stand unassisted.  My grandson prepared a strong sleep tea for me, to take me out gently and painlessly.  It was as easy a death as any I remember.  My last memory is of him stroking my hair and sadly turning away.  Him, I have met again a few times in other lives, and he saved my life once in this one, and gave me the son who is keeping me going now.

Karma, I have learned, is not a simple thing of black and white.  It is a multi-dimensional spectrum of experience as broad as imagination and as deep as emotion.  Thirty to forty years ago, before I started consciously recalling my past lives, I used to concern myself with my karma, thinking about the karmic repercussions of my actions.  I never think of it in that way now.  I just do what I know I must do to remain true to myself and maintain my self-esteem, and my karma takes care of itself.

by Greyfox
with some editing
and fact-checking by KaiOaty

We all create our own realities, through our actions, choices, and beliefs. Of course, there is some co-creation going on--realities do overlap, particularly when one is dependent on others for mundane stuff like food and shelter. But our worlds, for better or for worse, are pretty much what we choose to make them.

I first saw the useful phrases, "reality bubble" and "reality tunnel" in the works of Robert Anton Wilson. They refer to our created worlds. If yours is a bubble, it is impermeable to logic, and learning or growth is difficult if not impossible.  That's a dire situation.  A tunnel is bad enough.  It implicitly reminds us, with echoes of "tunnel vision" and "light at the end of the tunnel", that all beliefs are limiting beliefs.

For instance, in the reality tunnel of an indoctrinated Republican, Bush is a strong and faith-based leader--in my R.T., he is a draft-dodging, lying, all hat no cattle buffoon. In the reality tunnel of a right-wing Christian, gay marriage is an abomination and a threat to the foundations of our society; in my R.T., gay marriage is simply people exercising a civil right that has nothing to do with me.

If you accept, as I do, that "the more you know and the less you believe, the better off you are," and you have a desire to improve your lot, it follows that the wider your reality tunnel is, and the more inclusive and all-embracing it is, the better off you are.

There are many ways to widen your R.T., many of which are unpleasant in the extreme. The young woman who had her arm bitten off by a shark got her tunnel widened in a hurry, you may be sure. Likewise, cancer survivors, and POWs who are tortured by the enemy and live to tell about it have wider R.T.s than most of us. Dropping acid is another way to accomplish this, as is checking into an ashram for a few years.  But I wish to suggest a fairly simple, quick, and easy way of widening your R.T.--magazines.

To be specific, specialty magazines for folks who are interested in a specialty that does not interest you. Reading these gives you a wonderful glimpse into someone else's R.T., and hence perforce widens your own. For instance, I once read a magazine for and about horse-lovers, folks who own and care for and ride the critters. They are vitally interested in things I never heard of.  Interesting to me, just to get a glimpse of a world previously unknown to me.

Another time, I read a Christian music magazine--kind of creepy, but still enlightening. Most recently, I read a magazine entitled "Alaska Weddings." Why people invest so much money and energy into an enterprise that has maybe only a fifty-fifty chance of success is beyond me, but then that was the whole point of reading the thing in the first place.

So the next time you get a chance, pick up a magazine you would ordinarily never dream of reading--discard boxes at local libraries are a great source. If you care nothing about celebrities, read "People"--if you are a male chauvinist, try "Cosmopolitan." Or a technical mag, like "Aviation Week." Or "Boston" magazine, if you live in the South. You get the idea. You will even learn something.

...and, KaiOaty here:
 Last time I was at the Wasilla library, someone had donated several magazines published by and for the Coast Guard Auxiliary.  For me, they were everything Greyfox suggests here they might be, and motivational, too.

I have been asked during the recent Mercury retrograde period, when it will end.  That would be today.  Just don't celebrate too hard right now.  Mercury stationary can be as challenging as Mercury retro, it just doesn't last as long.  Forward momentum builds slowly, and in two weeks or so, after Mercury has again passed over the point at which it went retrograde last month, electronic gadgets, communication, coordination, thought processes, ideas, and sensory information from both conscious and unconscious, will be back to "normal," but it might be a new norm, due to the recent/current Plutonian transformations.

For me, today, half formed thoughts bubble to the surface of my mind and pop before I grasp their flavor.  I recognize that I have been changing, am changed, but I'll have to get to know the new me a little better before I understand what that will mean.  In the last few weeks, observing myself has been an interesting and instructive process... interesting and instructive, not gratifying or satisfying.  Maybe that comes later.  For now, there's work to be done.