Boy Remembers Previous Life As World War 2 Pilot

The Boy From Mars!

From Pravda: http://english.pravda.ru/

Moscow-Russia-A boy named Boris Kipriyanovich, or Borishka, lives in the town of Zhirinovsk of Russia's Volgograd region. He was born on January 11, 1996. Since he was four he used to visit a well-known anomalous zone, commonly referred to as Medvedetskaya Gryada-a mountain near the town. It seems that the boy needed to visit the zone regularly to fulfill his needs in energy.

Boriska's parents, nice, educated and hospitable people, are worried about their son's fascinating talents. They do not know how others will perceive Boriska when he grows up. They say that they would be happy to consult an expert to know how to raise their son.

Being a doctor, his mother could not help but notice that the baby boy could hold his head already in 15 days after his birth. He uttered the first word 'baba' when he was four months old and started to pronounce simple words soon afterwards.

At one year and a half he had no difficulties in reading newspaper headlines.

At age of two years he started drawing and learned how to paint six months later.

When he turned two, he started going to a local kindergarten. Tutors immediately noticed the unusual boy, his uncommon quickwittedness, language skills and unique memory.

However, his parents witnessed that Boriska acquired knowledge not only from the outer world, but through mysterious channels as well. They saw him reading unknown information from somewhere.

"No one has ever taught him," Boriska's mother said. "Sometimes he would sit in a lotus position and start telling us detailed facts about Mars, planetary systems and other civilizations, which really puzzled us," the woman said.

How may a little boy know such things? Space became the permanent theme of his stories when the boy turned two years old. Once he said that he used to live on Mars himself. He says that the planet is inhabited now too, although it lost its atmosphere after a mammoth catastrophe. The Martians live in underground cities, Boriska says.

The boy also says that he used to fly to Earth for research purposes when he was a Martian. Moreover, he piloted a spaceship himself. It took place in the time of the Lemurian civilization. He speaks about the fall of Lemuria as if it occurred yesterday. He says that Lemurians died because they ceased to develop themselves spiritually and broke the unity of their planet.

When his mother brought him a book entitled Whom We Are Originated From by Ernest Muldashev, he got very excited about it. He spent a long time looking through the sketches of Lemurians, pictures of Tibetan pagodas, and then he told his parents of Lemurians and their culture for several hours non-stop.

As he was talking, his mother noticed that Lemurians lived 70.000 years ago and they were nine meters tall. "How can you remember all this?" the woman asked her son. "Yes. I remember and nobody has told me that, I saw it," Boriska replied.

In Muldashev's second book, In Search of the City of Gods, he looked through pictures for a long time and recollectedx a lot about pyramids and shrines.

Then he claimed that people would not find ancient knowledge under the Great Pyramid of Cheops. The knowledge will be found under another pyramid, which has not been discovered yet. "The human life will change when the Sphinx is opened, it has an opening mechanism somewhere behind the ear, I do not remember exactly," he said.

Boriska is one of so-called indigo chidren. They start to appear on Earth as a token of the forthcoming grand transformation of the planet.

The boy says that the displacement of Earth's poles will cause two catastrophes. Only a few people will survive, he said.

"No, I have no fear of death, for we live eternally. There was a catastrophe on Mars where I lived. People like us still live there. There was a nuclear war between them. Everything burnt down. Only some of them survived. They built shelters and created new weapons. All materials changed. Martians mostly breathe carbon dioxide, if they flew to our planet now, they would have to spend all the time standing next to pipes and breathing in fumes," Boriska said. "If I am in this body, I breathe oxygen. But you know, it causes aging."

Specialists asked the boy why man-made spacecraft often crash as they approach Mars. "Martians transmit special signals to destroy stations containing harmful radiation," Boriska replied.

The boy has deep knowledge of space and its dimensions. He is also aware of the structure of interplanetary UFOs. He talks about that like an expert, draws UFOs on slates and explains the way they work. Here is one of his stories: "It has six layers. The upper layer of solid metal accounts for 26 percent, the second layer of rubber-30 percent, the third layer of metal-30 percent, and the last layer with magnetic properties-4 percent. If we give energy to the magnetic layer, spaceships will be able to fly across the Universe."

Boriska has a lot of difficulties with school. After an interview he was taken to the second grade, but soon they tried to get rid of him. He constantly interrupts teachers and says that they are wrong. Now the boy has classes with a private tutor. (LOL-from me about the last sentence!).

It has been awhile to say the least since I have posted anything. Hopefully, now I am somewhat on track (at least 50 percent ;-) with at least TRYING to keep things up on at least this blog. I will try to dig up more about this fascinating story from Russia as I can. Peace and best to anyone stopping by! The image is of fourteen year old Boris Kipriyanovich.

Rene Guenon & Reincarnation Part Two

Rene Guenon talked about reincarnation in many of his books always from a negative standpoint. In these books he seemed to assume that the reader was familiar with his reason for rejecting it. The problem with this was that he explained his ideas about his rejection of reincarnation in an early book of his that was not translated into English, L Erreur Spirite (The Spititualist Error", 1921). In this book, Guenon stated the 'metaphysical' argument against reincarnation to which he would always refer.

The debate Guenon brings out boils down to this: People who believe in reincarnation believe that the same being can be born more than once in a human body. Guenon says that this belief is wrong because people misunsderstand what a being is. When Guenon thinks of the word 'being', he is thinking of it in very wide terms. Many times he is thinking of Universal Being as a polar opposite of Non-Being. At other times he is thinking of it in the sense that a being is one of the multitude of entities that Universal Being appears to divide itself, in compliance with the principle that every possibility of manifestation must be manifested or brought into existence. This is in obedience to the same principle of Universal Possibility, each of these beings manisfests in all the possible states of formal existence.

Each of these states of being has its unique set of qualities and characteristics, such as corporeality (this word can be thought of as the extent of the 'denseness' or how much the being 'lives' in the physical plane in Guenon's way of thinking-for example human beings have a greater 'corporeality' than angels or the hidden people -talked about in an earlier set of posts), intelligence, temporality (the amount of time a being is 'alive' on its plane of extence) etcetera. The human state is just one of these states of being-nothing special about it at all. Other states would be-the 'states' of plant life, animals, the beings of higher planes of existence-maybe the sylphs, hidden people and even devas or angels would be in this category. From the point of view of Universal Being, which is beyond time, space and causality-all of its 'states' exist simultaneously. But from the states that are subjected to existence in space and time no matter how refined they seem--they are subjected to a sequential existence with a past, present and future.

Guenon states, "In universal existence, the return to the same state is an impossibilty; in total Possibility, those particular possibilities that are the states conditioned existence are necessarily indefinite (when Guenon says indefinite he means infinite) in number; to deny this is to try to limit possibility. One must admit it, on pain of contradiction, and that is enough to prevent any being from passing twice through the same state. Guenon's objection to reincarnation stands or falls on whether one agrees with this hypothesis or postulate-that there are an infinite number of states of being in the universe/multiverse and the human realm is nothing so special at all that a 'soul' would need to go through the human state of existence twice.

I think Guenon's 'proof' that reincarnation as we think of it is a 'logical impossibility' is anything but simple and maybe quite presumptious. However, I find many parts of his metaphysical ponderings very beautiful. To give another way of looking at why he believes a being can ever only 'incarnate' in one state it is very useful to think of numbers. In an infinite series, like that of the real numbers, or integers each number appears only once. Likewise in the infinite totality and variety of the Universe and Universal Mind, experienced in its totality by every being , no single state of being need be or can be repeated. The being contains, or to use the sequential metaphor, passes through them all, without singling any particular state of being for repetition or attention. This is where I think Guenon's dry logic and wordiness get in the way of the beauty of his vision. Human life, he seems to be saying, is nothing so special that souls need to experience it over and over. Beings including you, me and all of humanity are wonderful and noble creatures. In Guenon's view there are an infinitely vast and incredibly other modes of being that we can't even conceive of, but will eventually experience.

I am pretty sure this is the end of the series on Guenon's views about reincarnation, unless anyone that reads this blog is still confused about what he meant -which would be perfectly understandable-then maybe I will do a post to clarify questions if anyone has any. Peace and be well to anyone stopping by!

Rene Guenon & Reincarnation

For a few posts I would like to talk about the French philosopher and metaphysician, Rene Guenon (1886-1951), and his views on both metaphysics and reincarnation. I do not know how many posts this will be and I might even interrupt them with other things. I also am not making any promises about how fast they will get here. I think a quote from one of Guenon's books about the nature of the human spirit would be valuable to put here-even though it is a bit wordy: The "gross state" in fact is nothing else than the corporeal existence itself, to which[...] human individuality belong by one of its modalities only, and not its integral development. As the "subtle state," it includes in the first place, the extra-corporeal modalities of the human being, or of every other being situated in the same state of existence, and also, in the second place all other individual states[...]. It may be said, therefore, that the human being, considered in its integrality, comprise a certain sum of possibilities, which constitute its corporeal or gross modality, and in addition, a multitude of possibilities, which, extending in different directions beyond the corporeal modality, constitute its subtle modalities; but all these possibilities together represent, nonetheless, one and the same degree of universal Existence.

It follows from this that human individuality is at once much more and much less than Westerners generally suppose it to be: much more, because they recognize in it scarcely anything except the corporeal modality, which, includes, but the smallest fraction of its possibilities; much less, however, because this individuality, far from really constituting the whole being, is but one state of that being among an indefinite multitude of other states. Moreover the sum of all these states is still nothing at all in relation to the personality; which alone is the true being, because it alone represents its permanent and unconditioned state, and because there is nothing else which can be considered as absolutely real.

When I come back with the next post I hope to have some thoughts on his thinking about this subject. His vision of reality is really very grand-what he is basically saying in these two paragraphs is that the human spirit on the physical level of reality is only taking in a very tiny fraction of reality itself; and that the physical part is a very small part of universal existence that is mostly made up of non-physical planes of reality. As I go along I would definitely enjoy any comments from anyone who agrees or disagrees with Guenon-or anything else. I will give part of the series away right now -Guenon thought the idea of a human soul coming back to the physical or earth plane time and time again was absurd, so he didn't believe in the 'reincarnation' that people usually think of. I will get into some of the whys in the next post. Peace and be well to anyone stopping by! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ren%C3%A9_Gu%C3%A9non

Reincarnation: Children's Memories of Another Life

A three year old girl living in Sri Lanka asked her mother an odd question in 1990. The girl's name was Pumima Ekanayake, and she asked her mother whether car drivers who kill pedestrians are bad people. The question turned out to be important, because in a few months Pumima claimed to be able to remember details of a previous life. In this life she was an incense seller, who got about town on a bicycle-until one day she was struck by a car and killed. Pumima recalled 'floating about' for a bit, before she was born into a new body. I think this is interesting because Pumima's description of the life before life was very similar to the one in the Two Souls-One Body, Iris/Lucia series I did in December.

Pumima Ekanyake's story is anything but an isolated case. All across Asia, in countries like India, Sri Lanka, Thailand and Burma, there has been a great increase in the number of children claiming to remember past lives. The number of these cases has reached such a level, that finally some in the scientific community are taking an interest in these cases. Dr. Ian Stevenson, a psychologist from the University of Virginia, became deeply involved in the subject of children who had past-life memories. Stevenson's investigations into these cases began in the 1960s in India. He encountered many children there who exhibited past-life memories. In some of what I think are his most interesting cases,(that I hope to post here in between other things, along with other stories about reincarnation), the children's bodies had strange birthmarks that coincided with the area of an injury in the claimed previous life. Dr. Stevenson became convinced of the reality of reincarnation, and published a major work in 1974, Twenty Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation, that is still wide quoted and studied today.

In one of these cases, a young girl named Swarnlata talked of having been a married woman named Biya Pithak, who had lived in a nearby town in a distinctive house. One of Dr. Stevenson's colleagues interviewed Swarnlata later in which she gave over fifty details about Biya's life that were later verified. Swarnlata was taken to the town where Biya had lived. During the visit to this town Swarnlata not only recognized her own house(Biya's house), but also some members of Biya's family. Dr. Stevenson had offered this as one of his 'best evidence' cases for reincarnation. Different investigators and psychologists were not so sure.

In recent years psychologists have studied children with past-life memories. They have tried to quantify this phenomenom and also tried to see if there were any 'rational' explanations for these cases. Their studies have shown that children claiming to have past-life memories are indeed mostly in nations and communities that have a large Hindu and Buddhist following. However, isolated cases occur all over the world from Australia to Zimbabwe. In a typical case the child will begin to 'remember' scenes from their past-life at around three years of age. These memories, if that is indeed what they are stop at around about five years of age. During this small window of time that the child remembers things from an apparent past-life, they will describe family scenes many times and very vividly remember the manner of their death in the previous life, which is almost always violent in nature-anything from an accident to being murdered. Some other details that are remembered are what the town, city or houses they lived in were like and some, as in Pumima's case, remember what job they held.

Psychological profiling of the children shows them to be prone to attention-seeking, daydreaming and they often describe themselves in the third person. (Remember Bob Dole anybody?:-) Many of these children have similar psychological profiles to people who suffer from dissociative syndromes, such as multiple-personality disorder (MPD). People who suffer from MPD are able to create very real fantasy worlds and very different personalities. This disorder is sometimes caused by extreme abuse when one is a child. Some psychologists then suppose that children with overactive imaginations are having memories of their 'past-lives' 'nurtured' by parents whose religion has a belief in reincarnation. I think in some cases this is exactly what happens. A child with an overactive imagination (I think it is good in some ways to have an overactive imagination) is 'led on' by parents and the story continues to grow. There is a famous case from England in the 1960s in which twin girls claimed to remember details about the lives of their elder sisters who had died years previously. The Pollock twins case, as it was known, was debunked when it came to light that the father was a fanatical believer in reincarnation. The father of the twins had told people they were the incarnations of their sisters before they were even born! It is now thought that the father had unknowingly 'taught' the girls to remember the lives of their dead sisters.

I do think that psychology can explain many aspects of the past-life recalls of children. An example of this would be why it so often happens in families that believe in reincarnation. However, as Dr. Stevenson also questions, I do not see how psychological explanations can fit all of the facts involved. The children provide facts about their previous lives such as names, dates, addresses, how they died and many other smaller details that can be and have been verified. Sometimes it is the smaller details that once verified are the most fascinating to me. This is because the smaller details are often not known by anyone outside of the family the child claims to have lived his or her previous life in. Some researchers have offered extra-sensory perception as a mechanism for this to be happening. I am not totally averse to this idea, but it is every bit as mysterious as the reincarnation explanation, if not moreso. Dr. Ian Stevenson is not wavering and is adamant in his thinking about the children's cases: "My conclusion so far is that reincarnation is not the only explanation for these cases but that it is the best explanation for me." I hope anyone reading this has enjoyed these last segments. I hope to continue having posts about reincarnation, UFOs and other paranormal phenomena as time goes on. I am looking forward to starting the next series because it is about a subject that was discussed in the posts about the Belmez Faces. Thanks again so very much for the thoughtful and intelligent comments I have been getting! Peace and be well to anyone stopping by!

Reincarnation: A Case of Past Life Recall

In 2004 a Swedish man recalled a previous life in Scotland for a television program about reincarnation produced by Strix Television AB. While under hypnosis in Stockholm, Jesper Bood, then 29, said he had been born John Smith in Dunbar, East Lothian, in 1852. He said he was the son of a blacksmith, also named John Smith and Mary Craig. He became a fisherman when he grew up. Local census and registrar records confirm these names. A later census records a fisherman named John Smith, aged 30 and married to Elizabeth. While hypnotized Bood had called his wife Betsey or Bessie. The family lived in Public Road, Gateside, on what is now the A1 between West Barns and East Linton. The community no longer exists, but records show a blacksmiths forge was operating there at the time.

A local historian, Roy Pugh, who was invited to be a researcher and asviser to the program, was amazed by the penetrating knowledge of Dunbar that Bood had shown. Bood had never been to Scotland before. "I was completely sceptical about the whole idea. But in two days when I walked about Dunbar with this young man, I now know what it means to experience a shiver in the spine and a curious feeling in the hairs on the back of my neck," said Pugh. Bood spoke of it having taken thirty minutes to walk to school, and when descrbing a Dunbar parish church, he said, "It was the first building I saw when I went to school every morning. I know it was close to the sea and that I could see it from my classroom window, it being diagonally opposite from the school." Mr. Pugh said this and other details given by Bood were an accurate description of the church and the former Woodbrush school, which was demolished after it closed in the 1950s. Mr. Bood also described in great detail, the site of a former fisherman's tavern in Lamer Street, which had a green sign hanging from the door. The site Bood had identified indeed once was known as the Jersey Arms, a well known fisherman's hang-out. The image is of the Street in Dunbar where the Jersey Arms used to be, it is now called the Creel restaurant. This case leaves me with some questions, both pro and con. I think a lot of it boils down to how trustworthy the information gained from hypnosis is and also if Mr. Bood could not have come by this information any other way-I am not trying to question his integrity. I just wanted to add this post as a continuing investigation of reincarnation. Personally, I find myself very much wanting to believe Mr. Bood's story while under hypnosis. How about you? The source for this article was the Fortean Times magazine, July 2004 edition. I am anxious to start the next series, but have come across more reincarnation type stories that I think I should do first-it will probably not be a lengthy post-or two at the most. Peace and be well to anyone stopping by!

Paranormal & Fortean : Deja Vu An Unusual Case

The French expression Deja Vu means "already seen." It describes experiences that people have with some frequency. Some cases of deja vu seem to 'hit' the person experiencing it lightly, and some like my experience discussed in my 3 January 2009 post hit you over the head like the proverbial ton of bricks. The following case is one of those and is of a higher degree than most instances of deja vu.

The story appeared in a four column article written by Christopher Wren in the New York Times on 17 April 1979. Wren was in Egypt when he wrote the article entitled, "Briton with a Sense of Deja Vu Calls Ruins 'Home'. It all started when Dorothy Eady, at the age of three, fell down a flight of stairs in her home in Plymouth, England. She had been pronounced dead by the local doctor. "When he came back with the death certificate, the body was sitting on the bed playing', she revealed. Then she began to cry. "They asked why I was crying, and I said, 'I want to go home.' They assured me I was home." Wren wrote : From then on she was convinced that she belonged in another, dimly remembered time. She played hooky from school and hung around the Egyptology Room of the British Museum in London. When she first saw a magazine photograph of the magnificent temple at Abydos, she told her parents: 'Here is my home, but why is it in ruins and where are the gardens?' "

It was not until 1933, when she was in her late twenties that she was able to go to Egypt. " I never left; I never wanted to." She took a job with the Egyptian Antiquities Service and acquired experience in field excavations, but it was some years before she had time to travel to Abydos. 'As soon as I saw the mountain, I knew where I was. The train stopped, and I got off.... There was no other place for me to be." The Times article continued: "In 1956 she managed to get transferred to help with the excavation and restoration of Abydos, which has some of the finest bas-reliefs of pharanonic art. Her colleagues were surprised by her immediate familiarity with the temple. 'In the pitch dark I went to each place they told me to.' " She would then describe the scene. "Every time I was right."

Dorothy had mentioned gardens being at the place as a child. No discovery of this was made by any archaeologists. However, when Dorothy got to the scene she was able to give the exact location. The tree roots, vines and even the old, dry water canals were there too. The Times article continued: "She also correctly estimated the height of damaged columns where the temple roof was missing and she translated some of the more enigmatic hieroglyphics. In a previous incarnation, she believes she was the orphaned daughter of a common soldier and a vegetable seller and she was adopted by the temple, where the spring resurrection rituals to the god Osiris were conducted. " I can't remember an ordinary life, so I think I must have been stuck in the temple. I have a vague memory of possessions. I can remember an awful killjoy of a high priest."

The period of history that Dorothy believes she had previously lived in was 3,200 years ago in the nineteenth dynasty under Seti I and his successor Ramses II. Dorothy Eady named her son Seti. She had married an Egyptian, but the marriage had lasted only two years. In the village where she lived, Dorothy was known as Om Seti, which means mother of Seti. Dorothy admits that "her Odyssey from the middle-class gentility of Plymouth to the rural poverty of a remote Egyptian village (where she was living in at the time of the article and living on a modest pension) sounds bizarre." Some people say that when "I fell downstairs it knocked a screw loose." Whatever the truth behind this story, there is no question of her abilities as an archaeologist. "Her grasp of ancient Egypt is formidable", writes Wren. "Egyptologists still visit her sparsely furnished house in Abydos to benefit from her knowledge and her lively self-deprecating wit. James P. Allen of the American Research Center in Cairo has described her as a patron saint of the profession. ' I don't know of an American archaeologist in Egypt who doesn't respect her."

Note to reader: There are other cases where bodily trauma has triggered what people feel are past-life memories. In a German newspaper, Rheinischer Merkur, from 31 May 1947, a similar story is told. The story involved a girl in Ihansi, India, who fell out of a third story window. Fortunately she did not suffer lasting bodily harm, but suddenly began to speak in several languages. Scholars later found these languages to be old Indian dialects that had not been used for centuries. Dorothy Eady died in 1981 and is buried in the desert near Shunet el-Zebib. I wanted to do this post because I thought it related to my continuing study of reincarnation and different theories and experiences of it. The major source for this post was, Reincarnation A New Horizon In Science, Religion And Society by Sylvia Cranston and Carey Williams. The book was published by Julian Press in 1984, pp 80-82. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dorothy_Eady

Paranormal & Fortean : Reincarnation Part Eight

Here are some more questions and research I have done for my posts on reincarnation. This is really turning out to be stream of consciousness research and thinking so I hope I am not losing anybody-please feel free to comment if I am or am making anything unclear. First I would like to give a short list of 'musts' for my theory to be valid.
1) We must have souls.
2)We must have other bodies than the physical, the subtle bodies.
3) Our reality can not be a 'matrix' type reality where all we are is ones and zeros in some hugely powerful cosmic computer.
4) This bit is just some thinking I have found in my research and am 'synching' to in my own theorizing, so number 4 is not a must but I find this line of thinking intriguing. We may not be one but many souls even though to us it seems our lives are being lived sequentially. From a timeless standpoint-eternity-everything is happening at once. This leads me to wonder if along the lines of thinking how many people we are and how many roles we play that if we are in reality not one soul-but many. I think that looking at it this way each person may be composed of a 'group soul'. Who knows how many souls this might be and the number would probably be different for everyone and is not that important. From the standpoint of eternity 'I' might be alive in the days before agriculture, the Roman Empire, the Renaissance, the Bolshevik Revolution and an era even closer that relates to my own story that I will tell here soon-about why I think the ideas about reincarnation have some validity-although we may never know 'what' theory is correct. In this viewpoint 'I' would be alive at all of these times simultaneously. This thinking would explain some things and yet open up a whole other can of worms in other areas. I have also wondered if not only human souls or group souls reincarnate, but I wonder if certain periods in history are themselves 'reincarnating' in a way. I first thought of this when I looked at how modern day America has so many parallels with old Rome and also things like the bizarre coincidences and synchronicities between the Kennedy and Lincoln assassinations and other historical events have given me pause to reflect on this idea. Hopefully there will be more to come in the future on what I am starting to think of as 'timecycles'.


The transmigration of souls, the doctrine that after death the soul moves on to inhabit other bodies for as long as it needs to, until liberation from maya and samsara in the Eastern religions, in other words liberation from the cycle of death and rebirth into this world of illusion (maya) has been around for a long time. In both Buddhism and Hinduism samsara is the endless round of birth, death and re-birth to which all sentient beings are subject. Samsara is conceived as having no beginning or end. The overall determining factor of a soul's wanderings in samsara are determined by karma. In Hinduism, moksha is release from samsara. In Buddhism, deliverance from samsara is achieved by reaching the state of nirvana. The range of samsara goes from the lowliest insect, in some religions the vegetable and mineral kingdoms are even included, all the way up to Brahma, the highest of the gods. Belief in some form of reincarnation can be found in almost all societies, from the most primitive to the most 'advanced'. The belief in reincarnation is somewhat fashionable among the most materialistic and spirit-denying cultures and is a way of life in some of the oldest and most spiritual cultures.

From antiquity there is examples in ancient literature such as Ovid's, Metamorphosis, in which deities take on human and animal forms. This may have been an early forerunner of 'reincarnational' type thinking. The idea of reincarnation is thought to have emerged from the Nile basin and then spread as far as India and then westward to Greece. The extreme eloquence of the ancient philosophers made reincarnation a source of hope for people who longed for eternity and justice. It is important to note that the thoughts along these lines of the ancient Greeks are quite different in some ways from the Eastern religions. Among the major religions the doctine entered Judaism through Kabbalists, via Jewish philosophers into Christianity and finally into Islam through the ideas of religions and sects like the Sufis. Belief in reincarnation in Egypt, India and Greece could have developed out of a need for immortality of the soul. It again should be noted how different the Egyptian and Greek thoughts on the afterlife were from religions like modern day Buddhism and Hinduism. The ancient Egyptians clearly believed in a form of afterlife and other realms besides the earth plane of existence, but it is very obvious from looking at works like the Egyptian Book of the Dead that their main core of beliefs were to prepare for life on another plane of existence and not come back to this plane again in human form. The belief that the ancient Egyptians actually believed in reincarnation could have come from Greek translations of Egyptian work that had things in it like the transmigration of souls and souls being able to take the forms of other bodies after death. However on closer inspection the Egyptians were thinking of taking the forms in the earth plane from a higher realm of existence and not taking the forms by coming back to this plane of reality.


I think the ancient Greeks were much closer to what we now think of as reincarnation than the Egyptians. Pythagoras believed in metempsychosis, a philosophical term in the Greek language referring to the belief in the transmigration of the soul, especially in it reincarnation after death. It is also obviously a doctrine followed by the Eastern religions although there are many variations here, Jainism and Druzism, where a human can incarnate into the bodies of another human, animal or even plant. The term metempsychosis has also been used by modern philosophers such as Schopenhauer and Kurt Godel, the word also plays an important part in James Joyce's Ulysses and is also associated with Friedrich Nietzche. Pythagoras believed that souls reincarnated again and again until they became moral. His ideas of reincarnation were influenced by ancient Greek religion. He claimed to have lived four times previously and to remember them in detail. Pythagoras also claimed to hear the cry of a dead friend in the bark of a dog. Another of Pythagoras' beliefs that are interesting to think about in light of previous posts at MFM is that the essence of being is number. Being relies on the stability of all things that create the universe. Things like health relied on a stable proportion of elements; too much of one and too little of another causes an imbalance that leads to sickness. Pythagoras viewed thinking as calculating with the idea of numbers. The philosophy evolves into a belief that Knowledge of the essence of Being can be found in the form of numbers. If this is taken a step further one can say that because mathematics is an unseen essence, the essence of being is an unseen characteristic that can be encountered by the study of mathematics.


So just how old is the idea of reincarnation? I think the ideas and thoughts that led to the belief in reincarnation are very old, going back thousands and thousands of years. But in the current form that modern Hinduism and Buddhism believe in it, the idea is not that comparitively old at all. Paraphrasing Swami Agehananda Bharati, who is an Austrian by birth and was initiated into Hinduism in India in the early 1950s: Q How old is the doctrine of reincarnation? Bharati: "It is not as old as people would think. You only have marginal mention of something like transmigration in the older sections of the Vedas. There is the first complete mention, though brief, in the Brihadarankaya Upanishad which is quite old. But the real thoughts having to do with reincarnation come in the Puranic age (500-300BCE), at the time the Puranas were composed, and then of course through Buddhism. So it probably reached a state of common acceptance around 300 BC, so it is old but in its highly articulated form not that old."

The image is of the Bodnath Stupa in Kathmandu, Nepal. I forgot to mention the credentials of the just mentioned Swami Bharati-they were very impressive and I will come back with those once I find where I wrote them down. I hope you enjoyed this kind of detour and history and some ponderings on where and how the thought of reincarnation first got started. I want to do many many different things in January, so it will not be reincarnation all the time here at MFM. I have done a lot more(well comparitively a lot more writing for my book) and want to start new topics of discussion also. I still owe all of you 'my story' about how I came to be interested in the subject of reincarnation so that should be coming very soon. Here are some more links.
http://reluctant-messenger.com/origen10.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shinto
http://www.iep.utm.edu/l/laozi.htm

Paranormal & Fortean : Reincarnation Part Seven

The astral body in the 'theory' I am trying to develop would be the next subtle body after the etheric and higher up the ladder spiritually. There is an enormous variety of different placements of the subtle bodies in the religions and metaphysical philosophies of the world. I am just trying to set my own foundation in a way that makes the ideas of ancient times fit my ideas without having to use a jackhammer and a chisel to make them fit.

The concept of the astral body as it is thought of in western esotericism goes all the way back to the famous Greek philosopher, Plato. In the Myth of Er, Plato told an account of an afterlife that led to reincarnation after travelling through the seven planetary spheres. Plato taught that man was composed of a mortal body, immortal reason and an intermediate spirit. The word 'astral' means 'of the stars'. The late Neoplatonist Proclus (412-485 AD), who was one of the last major Classical philosophers developed an elaborate system of metaphysical thought and is credited with being the first to speak of the subtle planes. By the time theosophy came around the astral body was thought to be a desire body and am emotional body through which it was possible to experience all varieties of desire. George Gurdjieff referred to the astral body as "the vessel of the soul"; it is of the sun and all planets, just as the physical body is of the earth. In Gurdjieff's words while the astral body is not developed a person is a "human being only in quotation marks", who cannot be considered in any meaningful sense to have a soul and will "die like a dog". In depth psychology parallels between the astral and unconscious mind have been drawn. Carl Jung drew on alchemical and classical imagery to explore the dynamics and symbols of memory, dreams and religious initiation. Jung saw the astral journey as a paradigm of "modern man's search for a soul", and imagined a collective unconscious memory, driven by archetypal forces and knowable in the symbolic language of dreams and visions.


The astral plane is also called the Barzakh or inter-world of Islam, the world of Yetzirah in Lurianic kabbalah, the Spirit World in Spiritualism and the Fairy World of Celtic spirituality. As we can see notions of the astral body and astral plane or realm vary widely. In the system I am trying to develop I think of the astral body relating to the etheric body, as the etheric relates to the physical body. While the etheric body channels energies from the subtle realm to the physical body and is also the 'template' the physical body is based on, the astral body envelopes and interpenetrates the etheric body the same way and is also the 'template' the etheric body is based upon. The astral body in 'my' system can be a bit hard to explain, as it already seems we could have an infinite series of subtle bodies and the templates they are based on. However, in the ideas I am working with the astral body differs from the etheric by a large magnitude. Whereas the etheric has all of the qualities that the physical body needs to keep regenerating and also contains 'memories' of lifetimes lived before on a physical level, the astral body retains the emotions, desires, needs and wants of the soul. In my system the astral body would not need to mirror the physical body at all as far as appearance goes.


With the ideas I am forming the astral body has the ability to explore other planes of existence whereas the etheric body does not. The astral body in my view is a lot more important than the etheric and physical bodies when looked at in a certain way. The astral body in my world view would not only envelop the physical and etheric bodies, but would also inhabit a world a lot like the Imaginal World of Sufi mysticism. In esoteric Ishraqi, Sufi and Shaikhi Islamic traditions the Imaginal World or Realm is a region of pure forms (archetypes) intermediate between the region of pure spirits and archetypes totally unconnected to matter and physical reality. It would also be equated with the Egyptian Ba (a human headed bird). The Ba is the 'soul' connected with the Ka which is symbolized by a pair of upraised arms and represents the individual ego, character, and disposition of a soul and is created with or even before the physical being. The Ba dwells in or with the Ka. In many texts the Ba also lives with Ra or Osiris in heaven. The ba also plays a role in cosmogenesis. The soul, ba of Shu was the fire produced by Atum at the moment of the initial creative emission of semen. Likewise the Creator "made metamorphoses startting from this, his ba", the ba thus playing the role of the determining individualizing force, the first active principle, parallel to the first coagulation, the disruption of the inertia in the cosmic ocean."


In my view if we take a look at our psychic beings, but up a level from the plane where the etheric body has its being, this takes us to the astral body and the astral realm, which somewhat corresponds to the plane of occultism and esotericism that investigators of psychic phenomena are so fond of. The astral realm and astral body in my system closely correspond to the Imaginal World of the Sufis. the world of Yetzirah which is one of four planes of existence in Kabbalah and is also known as the 'World of Formation', somwhere between the World Soul and Divine Mind (Nous) of Neoplatonism and between the mental body (manomaya-kosa) and higher intelligence body (vignanamaya-kosa) of Hinduism.
The image is of the Hoysalwswara Temple dedicated to the Hindu god Shiva in Karnataka State in southwestern India. This was originally going to be one post but I have some more information I can hopefully put up today or by the 31st. I have a lot of things I am working on right now and have worked a lot more on the book I am trying to write and am working on ideas for posts to put in between the work on reincarnation that I am doing, as this will probably go on for some time. I very much appreciate getting all of the thoughtful comments and enjoy reading the blogs I link to and follow. Peace and be well everyone! Here are some links-more will be coming in the next post. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neo-Platonism
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proclus
http://www.religionfacts.com/jainism/beliefs.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sufism
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindu_cosmology

Paranormal & Fortean : Reincarnation Part Six

Some thoughts to finalize what I thought would be a one-post idea. The ideas and theorizing I am doing borrow, as I have said before, from an enormous variety of people, religions, philosophies and some ideas in science. I do not consider the ideas I am trying to develop the last word on anything. As always I welcome any comments and criticism that people may have, I enjoyed tremendously getting the great number of intelligent, thoughtful and caring comments last night. I felt I just had to come back and put these final thoughts about the etheric body, life force and the soul here. I watched with delight as my cat began some exploring of her own while I was working on the ideas for this set of posts. I actually think she is a bit upset with me now for being up all night :-). While I was writing down some thoughts I watched as her hind end disappeared into a cardboard box. That caused me to think-isn't that what this post or posts is really all about? What causes her feline need to go exploring? Materialist science would tell me that it is simply instinctual curiosity -nothing more that caused Clementina to literally almost pry her way into the box. I am sorry-as an animal lover I have witnessed too many delightful, funny and awe-inspiring things dogs, cats and many other creatures have done to feel that there is no life-force or soul in those little heads of theirs.


Along with this line of thinking how many have heard of a medical miracle where someone who was supposed to die in a matter of weeks or months managed to pull at something both beyond them and inside them to survive. I wonder if they are somehow drawing energy from the template and foundation of the life force itself-the etheric body. Modern science itself tells us that within a year 98 percent of the atoms in our bodies will be completely replaced by new atoms and every seven years each one of us is literally by this time made of 'new' material. I have no doubt that there are scientific theories that explain why we are continually rebuilt into the same form against the forces of entropy. On an intuitional level I feel that the reason this happens is that energy from the foundation, the all sustaining life force of the etheric body is constantly renewing our physical bodies with energy from beyond the physical realm.

I think this is quite enough theorizing to look at for a bit. I will definitely break up the series the next time I post with something new and different. I hope that anyone stopping by or passing through has a wonderful holiday season and is getting ready to have a beautiful and awe-inspiring 2009!

Paranormal & Fortean : Reincarnation Part Five

For anyone stopping by to read this series-please read the post below this one first. I had meant to do the thoughts about the etheric body in one post. For a time I lost my train of thought and I realized it would have to go into a second post to get everything here that I wanted. Continuing on with my theory-and once again I am using ideas and thoughts by many other religions and esoteric traditions, so far I do not think I have wildly veered away from the major ones in what I am trying to get across about the etheric body. Lets say you are looking at an intricately designed snowflake or a glorious spiral galaxy. You can easily become enthralled with the beauty of their forms. The forms these objects take on are decided by the laws of nature in cooperation with the immediate enviorment they are formed in. As we move up the scale towards conscious sentient beings I disagree with the materialist world view that the forms human beings take are only decided by physical laws and heredity. Perhaps if you have been in the presence of the body of a dead loved one, maybe you have felt an even deeper 'absence' than the normal circumstances would dictate. I have been in this situation and felt not only grief-but I felt the 'void' left by the life-force of the deceased person. I can easily relate this experience to the etheric body because the etheric body is the foundation and the life sustaining force behind the physical body.


I also look at the ideas I am developing this way. As a gay man I very much enjoy looking at the faces and physical bodies of certain men who I consider 'good looking'. However, no matter how good looking some may appear to me, if they seem to be no more than handsome, empty headed beefcake dolls, if I happen to meet them in 'real' life I lose interest quickly-note to reader-in 'real life' yours truly doesn't get to meet these men, nor turn down any hypothetical advances they might make towards me very often :-). If I could 'train' my own handsome latin lover properly this would be no problem (joke). Here is where my ideas of the etheric body might take a slightly different turn than the major religions and philosophies. I believe some people have more 'essence' in their etheric bodies than others. On the surface this might seem obvious as people come with very different personalities, levels of energy and things of this nature. What I am proposing is a bit different however. I don't know how this might take place or why, but I am literally thinking that the etheric body is built up somehow. In other words-and this can be for the better or for the worse, in this area people are not created equally in this regard.


Lets go back to the example I gave of looking at very handsome men. I would rather, in a lot of cases, look at a woman who has 'substance' than an extremely good looking man who seems to be devoid of the life essence. However, this is not saying something judgemental about the hypothetical man, it just means to me that he lacks 'depth' and is more oriented towards the life lived without introspection. In my November archives I posted a video that someone uploaded as a tribute to Anne Sexton. I like to watch the video not only because I admire the work she did, but in the video the person used images of Anne displaying a symphony of personas. I see everything from outright anger, childlike innocence, thoughtfulness, vulnerability, a haunting sense of melancholy, a 'femme fatale' kind of pose and one image where she seems to be truly happy working at her craft. She appears to me to be a person of great depth and mystery. I could imagine Anne, along with many other men and women throughout history as having lived before. I have also met some people in my life who may be extremely intelligent, successful, happy and even kind-but I have almost felt -in some cases, like asking them: "Is there a you behind that face." Some of these people seem to be almost programmed in a way-you could very likely predict what they would say or do in a lot of typical mundane situations-this kind of leads back to my thinking under the 'Questions about the nature of reality post'. It almost seems like some folks are fill-ins or extras on the stage of life. What I would meekly-at first propose is that this is not because these people are being run as a program in a universal CPU-but their 'code' is new to the human level of existence. There will be many more thoughts and speculation along this line (I hope) in the future. What I am trying to say is not as mean spirited as it would first appear. These people are every bit as 'human' as you or me-the only thing that is different about them is that they have not been exposed to the human 'hamster wheel' existence before (this idea also gets a nod to another person or persons that comment here for its origination). In many cases this may actually be a good thing. The underlying reality of the universe that I am speculating on is so vast that literally every single code, combination, probability, time-line and thought that a person could possibly imagine will be in existence at some point. The ideas about some people's etheric bodies having more depth than others basically mean (in the most simple terms-there is a larger foundation for this) that they have been around the block more times than others in this human existence.



Now I am at a point where I think my so-called 'new' theory also starts to diverge from the mainstream. I think the levels of existence in this universe or multi-verse are literally infinite-transfinite even-going back to Georg Cantor's proof that there are higher degrees of infinity. That some people seem to have more soul than others -for the good and also very possibly the horrible (maybe Hitler, Stalin and the whole host of other human embodiments of evil were able to get as far as they did because they knew the human soul all too well)-is in my way of thinking a very neutral non-judgemental way of saying that for some of us our 'code' is very attracted to this one incredibly small slice of a vast multi-dimensional reality called the human realm. For some reason that maybe we can explore together some of us come back here again and again. Others among us maybe only pass through once and after their time in the human realm eventually find another area in this enormous sea of existence that fits their 'code' better. Also getting back to thoughts against making judgements about people who seem 'plastic'-perhaps these people seem this way because in the depth of their souls they are so horrified by what they see here that they are afraid to make the slightest mistake or acknowledge their predicament.

Paranormal & Fortean : Reincarnation Part Four

The above image shows how non-physical bodies are related to the chakra system. In this series I think it would be very valuable to talk about certain things even if they only touch on some of the ideas I am trying to develop about reincarnation, where humanity fits in the universe and of course how it relates to my personal story that got me started thinking about some of these ideas. One of the subjects that relates to the theory I am trying to develop is the religious, philosophical and esoteric idea that human beings are composed of not just a physical body, but also of non-physical bodies. In this post I will talk about what is largely thought of as the etheric body and is also known by different names depending on which religion or esoteric system a person follows. In this line of thought the etheric body would be the next one up, so to speak from the physical body. As you move outward from the physical and etheric bodies the next levels are less and less tied to the material universe and higher up on the ladder spiritually. This series is turning out to be very stream of conciousness for me and I hope I am making the ideas I am presenting as clear as I possibly can. Normally I would not think it would be wise to do a long series of posts this way, but again intuition is telling me to go this route. I am definitely going to try to tie all of these thoughts together by the end of the series and I would definitely appreciate any comments or criticisms if I am becoming muddled or unclear to any readers I may have. I can't put into words how much I appreciate the thoughtful and thought provoking comments I receive here at MFM-believe me as far as comments go-you can do no wrong here!


For the purpose of the theory I am trying to develop I will not be going into all of the non-physical bodies and all of the spiritual levels that they are connected to. Like I have stated before I am using the lines of thinking of a very large number of people, religions, philosophies and even science. The etheric body in the ideas I am developing which I think also agrees with the vast number of religions and esoteric thoughts about it, is the body that connects the human physical body to the vital life force. In the Kabbalistic system (here I give a nod and a thanks to one of the many bright people who comment here for this idea), the etheric body would be the sephira Yesod, the foundation. In the ideas I am thinking of it would be very appropriate to think of the etheric body as a foundation for the physical body. For the ideas I am going to propose I think of the etheric body as both enveloping and interpenetrating the physical body and also linking to the next body higher up the ladder spiritually that I will talk about in the next post. The etheric body is also the 'template' that our physical bodies are based on. This body channels the appropriate energies to the proper physical organs in our bodies. In the ideas I am working on the etheric body would also 'have' the wounds and 'have' the memories, both the beautiful and the horrible ones of a previous life. Drawing again on a huge amount of other people's work and ideas; in my imaginings-lets say -lets actually use two examples both male and female-because in my story the idea of both being female and male are very important.


First let us use the thought experiment of a woman during the French revolution who goes to the guillotine. I am thinking in her next life perhaps she has an odd birthmark on her neck-maybe a fear of public spectacles, perhaps even a fear of sharp knives. Let us also imagine a man is shot to death by someone he thought of as a close friend-in this man's last moments he realizes that for all these years this 'friend' was after nothing more than his wife-money -whatever and that in addition the man also realizes in his last moments in the previous existence that his 'friend' actually secretly hated him all these years and finally lets suppose that when the man is shot, he is shot many times. In my theorizing and ponderings maybe in this man's next life he has a very hard time trusting anyone, it is so extreme it causes him lifelong problems. I can also imagine in the next existence this man has a series of strange birthmarks, discolorations-maybe even moles on his skin. I thought of this last one example to use because on my body I have a large number of dark moles all over my body, they really stand out as my skin is very light colored, with this part of me it could be genetic-but no one else in my family is this way and I wonder if sometimes (not using this particular example in my story) that the etheric body 'remembers' where to put the information from the previous existence on the body in the next life-just not in the same way the 'information' happened in the first. I can even imagine that using our hypothetical woman who was beheaded, that if she went to the guillotine in her twenty-seventh year in 1793, that maybe on her next go around when she turns twenty-seven in 1993 that perhaps this is when the strange discoloration on her neck appears-in other words she is not born with it. The 'information' synchronizes in her life in the way the events happened in her previous life. We can even imagine that her fear of crowds and spectacles does not appear until she is twenty-seven or maybe appears earlier after she sees a painting of Jean Paul Marat that for some reason chills her to the bone and she has no idea why. I am going to see how this post looks and continue with my theorizing about the etheric body in the next post. I did not want to do two about it originally but I think I have some other thoughts I need to gather.

Paranormal & Fortean : Reincarnation Part Three

The above picture literally breaks my heart. It was taken by a photo-journalist, Kevin Carter, who committed suicide some years back. The violence and degradation he had witnessed in his life, especially in Africa had become too much for him to live with. The above photo is of a Sudanese girl who had collapsed on the ground as she was heading to a relief station. I chose the image above for the main topic of tonight's post-karma. Before getting into that I would like to give some quotes and a link at the end of the post about prominent people who believed in reincarnation. As this series goes along I will continue to give links and stories about situations where the idea of reincarnation seems to work very well. There are two stories that I have lost among the magazines and books that I have that I thought were particularly interesting and hope to paraphrase here, quote directly or find links on the web to. Mark Twain said, " I have been born more times than anybody except krishna." Ralph Waldo Emerson stated, "The soul comes from without the human body, as into a temporary abode, and it goes out of it anew it passes into other habitations, for the soul is immortal." He also said, "It is the secret of the world that all things subsist and do not die, but only retire a little from sight and afterwards return again. Nothing is dead; men feign themselves dead and endure mock funerals....and there they stand looking out of the window, sound and well, in some strange new disguise." These are just a couple out of a huge number of quotes by famous and not so famous people who had ideas about reincarnation. I included the Mark Twain quote because I thought it was funny in a way, knowing about his many other delightful quotes and I included the Emerson quotes because I thought they were beautiful and thought provoking.


The law of karma and ideas about it may need more than one post to talk about. Karma, broadly stated is simply a law of cause and effect. Most religions and philosophies that adhere to belief in karma believe that good deeds in this life are rewarded in the next incarnation and bad deeds are punished in the next life. I think one of the most intriguing things about the law of karma is that it is not administered by any god or deity in many religions and philosophies. The law of karma just is-much like the laws of nature. This makes me wonder then-how are good or bad karmic actions acknowledged? It seems to me that at some point a mind or consciousness-perhaps universal and cosmic would have to intervene at some point in the process of deciding how a soul's fate is meted out. I will give an example-a thought experiment really-there are probably many, many others people can come up with that just makes me think that at some point a consciousness has to weigh in on certain events. Say a man robs a bank to get money to buy emergency medicine for a group of children who will die without it. The man is very poor and has no time at all to start a charity drive or anything like that, the children will die long before he can do this. This man is generally perceived to be a good hearted family man with a strong character. The man's intentions are good. However in the course of committing the robbery things go terribly wrong. During the robbery a bank guard is killed completely by accident by another guard who is a friend of his in the confusion. The whole plan falls to pieces. The man whose motives for the robbery were noble in a way will now go to jail and his family will be destroyed. The children will die because in my thought experiment this man was the only one who knew of their plight and nobody else will do anything. The guard who accidentally shot his friend will live with the guilt for the rest of his life, even though it was a complete accident.


This very hypothetical scenario leads me to some speculation. Was it wrong for the man who robbed the bank in the first place to have empathy for the children? If he had not cared a whit about them the whole chain of events would not have begun. Did the children who will now die and the guard who was killed do something in a past-life that has led to their fate? What about the guards friend and the family of the man who will now go to jail-did they do something in their past existences to deserve such a fate? In the way karmic law is administered was it wrong for the man to have even considered robbing the bank-even though had it gone as planned it would have been taking paper money to save human souls? Could the universe possibly be this cold? Certainly in our hypothetical story here no one is aware of anything they did wrong in a past life, so how are they supposed to learn any lessons in this web of events? Perhaps the guards friend will now kill himself over his guilt at accidentally killing his co-worker and buddy. Maybe without the man who is now going to jail his whole family will completely disintegrate with the subsequent possibilites of some of his kids becoming homeless, drug addicts and the like. It seems to me that if the chain of events I just described really took place, I can see so many more possibilities for regression and an endless cycle of new bad karmic actions taking place where no one learns a thing, much more than I can see a tale of hope and good karmic actions taking place. Maybe people who will read this will disagree and I completely respect that. It just seems to me that in real life very little good can come from a string of bad events.


This is where the new, quote -un-quote ideas I am trying to develop may or may not be of help. When I look at the human realm I so often see instances of incredible cruelty and magnitudes of injustice. So often I wonder what the hell am I or anybody else supposed to be learning from this? In some instances of people who believe in karma and reincarnation-note to reader here-I am not knocking anyone or any religion or any philosophy, but I think this must be added here for future reference. I actually find many beliefs of Hindu, Buddhist, pagan, theosophy, African and indigenous cultures who believe in some form of reincarnation and karma extremely pleasing and in so many cases I find the belief systems of these cultures and religions much better descriptors of universal reality than western beliefs. That is why I am using these religions and philosphies as a background for the new set of ideas I am trying to work on. There is one area I have seen that I would like to take a glance at because I think this is where some-obviously not the majority of people with these belief systems are getting things wrong. In some instances there seems to be the view that when a person is found to be in a state of disease, starvation, agony, addiction, poverty-etcetera-that that person deserved everything life is throwing at her or him, due to the past-life actions of people in this state. The person who is playing god so to speak when looking at the troubled other and deciding to do nothing to help is in my humble opinion wrong. I think were the more capable person to lend a hand or heart to help the troubled one, it would begin a situation where some soul-learning could actually take place. That is the reason for the above image-can anyone viewing that look at that helpless little child and say 'oh that is just her karma-deal with it'?

Dear reader, I know I said I was not going to do this as far as putting anything else besides poetry and my writing (assuming my muse comes back) while this series is unfolding, but the ideas I am trying to develop may take more time than I originally thought and access to information I do not have readily available. I will not start another 'series' as this one is in progress but as I am looking through massive amounts of material, I have discovered many funny, scary and thought provoking stories I could do as one-posters in between under the subject of the paranormal and if time starts to get lengthy between developing my theory I will start putting some of these in between. To me some of these tales are solid gold so I would like to share them with anyone interested in these subjects. Here are the links this one involving quotes and beliefs of well known people's thoughts on reincarnation http://reversespins.com/famousquotes.html
Here is one involving African beliefs in reincarnation http://www.deathreference.com/A-Bi/African-Religions.html
This is a link to wikipedia about Ian Stevenson's work involving reincarnation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twenty_Cases_Suggestive_of_Reincarnation

This link is to various other religions that believe in reincarnation http://www.deathreference.com/Py-Se/Reincarnation.html

Paranormal & Fortean : Reincarnation Part Two

Some of the issues I would like to talk about in a set of posts are the varieties of experiences where reincarnation is a possible explanation for. The previous series about Iris Farczady (Two Souls-One Body) gives an excellent example of post-natal reincarnation. This would be where the soul of a person is taken over, sometimes almost completely, by the soul of a person who is no longer in the human realm of existence well after the birth of the 'possessed' person. In the case of Iris Farczady she was eighteen years old when 'Lucia' pretty much took over her whole being. Deja vu experiences are well worth mentioning-even though reincarnation is no the only plausible explanation for these. However, in the body of literature that covers both paranormal phenomena and others there are just to many cases where the person having the deja vu experience felt that this was the only explanation. Here at MFM I do not want ever to go much by 'the only truth' or 'the only explanation', but I can't express how important I think it is to take a person's word or intuition when they talk about their reincarnation or perhaps UFO, mystical, time-slip-really any of the wide variety of paranormal phenomena experiences. I get very angry at people who scoff at folks who have the courage to speak of any paranormal events that happened to them. In my own viewpoint humanity isn't at a stage where it understands even one percent of the universe or 'reality' and maybe never will be.


The great investigator of the psyche and soul, Carl Gustav Jung, had a deja vu experience that moved him deeply. This experience happened to him when he during a visit to Africa in the 1920s-in Jung's own words: "The train, swathed in a red cloud of dust, was just making a turn around a steep red cliff. On a jagged rock above us a slim, brownish-black figure stood motionless, leaning on a spear, looking down at the train. Beside him towered a gigantic candelabrum cactus. I had the feeling that I had already experienced this moment and had always known this world which was separated from me only by distance and time. It was as if I were at this moment returning to the land of my youth, and as if I had know that dark-skinned man who had been waiting for me for five thousand years. I could not guess what string within myself was plucked at the sight of that solitary dark hunter. I knew only that his world had been mine for countless millenia." I wanted to include this quote by Dr. Carl Jung not only because I greatly admire his work, but I also thought this quote was very beautiful and it brought me back to my ponderings on eternity (maybe time really does not exist and only our puny human perceptions make us think it does). The quote also made me think of how deeply at some level humanity is connected and in the 'theory' I am trying to develop this is very important.


Many other experiences exist that I think are important to mention that may suggest reincarnation. Some of these I will pay more attention to than others. Some children are born into this life with vast talents in many different areas, from music to mathematics and beyond. Though reincarnation is not the only explanation for their amazing abilities, it seems like it should at least be mentioned among the possible explanations. I think that the other 'explanations' for this and other areas I want to get into are also very fascinating and I am drawing on many of them for my so-called 'theory'. One of these would be the scientist Dr. Rupert Sheldrake and his theory of 'morphic resonance'. This theory directly ties into non-locality discussed in the 'Questions about the nature of reality' post. I will give a link to his website at the end of this post. Note to reader-although I am putting a lot of effort in the exploration of my experience and developing a theory that I hope has some validity, it is very important to note I think that -and I think delightfully so-human knowledge will always be incomplete. The quest for an understanding of our universe and where human beings fit in it will go on for a very long time, if not forever. The theory or hypothesis I am trying to develop is only a map-NOT the actual territory.


Here is a 'tricky' one to talk about and not get misunderstood-or in my case perhaps-Miss Understood (joke). This is the idea that some have that nations and races have certain characteristics that departed spirits are attracted to and souls will reincarnate, even in groups into these countries and races. I will give an example from a book I am reading as I do research for this series, it is one of many. This book is called Reincarnation: A Critical Examination by Paul Edwards. This quote is from page 49: "Many other puzzling facts seem to lend themselves to the same treatment. How are we to explain the characteristic differences between the English and the French? According to one of my favorite theosophists, Irving S. Cooper, the English display "a tendency toward colonization", a "lawmaking instinct", a "thoroughness in every undertaking", and a "massive style of architecture". These admirable characteristics, it must be noted with regret, are accompanied by a "sacrificing of beauty to utility and strength" and a "lack of imagination in art, religion and philosphy." In France it is just the opposite. There is very little interest in colonization and no lawmaking instinct worth mentioning. However the French have an "imaginative touch", a love of beauty, a "worship of form and expression", and a special "intellectual keenness". There is only one way of accounting for these differences in "racial" characteristics. May it not be, writes Cooper, in what is purely a rhetorical question, "that in a mass the egos of Greece have taken incarnation in France, the egos of Rome in England?"

Another note here. I was wary of putting this quote here because many of the points in it I completely disagree with and some I think are great over-generalizations. Theosophy itself, in my opinion, although I am by no means taking issue with all of it, had some founders and followers who were outright racists. Perhaps Mr. Cooper had not ever heard of Shakespeare or William Blake, and obviously not heard of Algeria, although perhaps he was not alive at the time.
As always you have to separate the wheat from the chaff and come to your own conclusions. I very much enjoy the work of Rudolph Steiner who was a theosophist. I think you have to look at the work of each individual carefully and use your own mind and take the best and leave the rest so to speak. I will also be looking more into Rudolph Steiner later in this series. I included the quote because the theory of group soul reincarnation is out there and mentioned by people in many different fields of study-going all the way out to Jane Roberts and the Seth material, some of which I also found very interesting and worth mentioning later in the series and of course some not so. I am no world traveller by any means, but I have noticed differences in the various countries I have been to, in the people and the culture. These differences are beautiful to me and are part of what makes each human on this planet a precious resource. Some countries I very much regret never having had the chance to visit (these are not the only ones by any means) are as diverse as Russia, India, the east European nations, the nations in Africa both in the moslem north and the heartland of the deepest rainforest and savannah, the south American nations, New Zealand and Australia, Thailand, Malaysia, Japan-heck take me anywhere!

The image is of a statue of Shiva in Bengaluru, southern India sitting in meditation. Here are the links. http://www.sheldrake.org/homepage.html and
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hinduism

Paranormal & Fortean : Reincarnation Part One

Here I go. Ready to start a new series, one that I hope will have some things in it that everyone who visits here regularly can enjoy, learn new things-as I am at the same time I am doing it and hopefully will comment on with their own views, experiences, opinions-really anything! I am learning so much from the people that I link to and that comment here that it is truly amazing to me. The only things I will break up this series with are poetry and if the muse ever comes back to me examples of my writing. In this series there will be a chance for me to hopefully show a bit of my writing when I get to the part of it that is 'my story' and experience. I do have my experience written down already on paper, but not written in the style that I enjoy when my 'muse' comes for a visit. I definitely agree with wise woman-you can't rush or even beg for creativity to come-it just comes-no sense at all in fighting it. This series might end for a bit after awhile and return as I am also developing a theory or hypothesis as to the nature of the 'human reality' and the human soul. Even if 'my' hypothesis takes flight with anyone as I go along, I would never claim it as 'mine'. I am drawing on the work of a vast number of people, opinions, philosophies and religions-both in the mainstream and from the borderlands of our world that I take such delight in. I would also like to apologize for not having more examples of my writing here for folks to enjoy or criticize-I have a ton of 'bite sized' as in the previous examples I gave, of work done but have resolved not to post any more until it is as lengthy or longer than say my longest post in the H/A series. There is just -to me anyway no sense in posting writing I have done until it is a lot more polished. I am working on this also as I will work on this series.


The developing thoughts on my experience and that of trying to develop a 'new' theory of human reality and also thoughts along the lines of how big and incredibly strange, yet beautiful the universe or perhaps multi-verse we live in started coming to me in large parts from reading the men and women who blog under the category of synchromysticism. They also started developing when I began pondering on things like, 'what does our human reality look like from a higher dimension of space time', or from a timeless dimension. What constitutes a human soul? Are cycles of time (historical) in any way reflections of other historical periods? Perhaps the historical eras are 'spiralling' in such a way that 'time' to us is speeding up? Is there an archetypal realm, maybe the 'pleroma' talked about by the Gnostics and Carl Jung, that somehow projects itself into our daily three dimensional space and time? Are there different-maybe unimaginably so, realms of existence? Maybe there are an infinite number or 'planes' of existence? Do the psychic, synchromystic, UFO and paranormal experiences people have come from these other realms or planes of existence? Do the various religions and philosophies that believe in reincarnation and a multi-level view of reality provide a good 'map' to go by when talking about things like this? For tonight's kind of 'introduction post' I would just like to lightly touch on two or three of these questions.


What makes up a human soul or spirit? I have almost lived 15,000 days. During this time I have been so many different 'people'-indeed in the course of a day I think people can see they play many roles and their thoughts and moods change wildly, sometimes from hour to hour. How is it that I view myself as a continous being? I am a greatly different person not only from say 10 or 15 years ago, but even from a year ago. I only remember very little of those 15,000 days, some of the memories being wonderfully positive and of course some negative. With all of these gaps in my memories and the vagueness of some of them I can almost start to think that maybe people as different as the science fiction author Philip K. Dick and some modern philosphers and scientists might be on the right track when they talk of tales or theories that our memories 'lie' and that indeed that we only think of ourselves as continuous souls or beings based on these misperceptions. How do I know, going back to thinking on an earlier post-'Questions about the nature of reality', that I am not some 'program' that is run in a universal CPU-maybe named Devin version 2.0 :-). Maybe all of my thoughts, experiences, dreams only came into existence this very second? In my almost 15,000 days I have very few memories of my very young years and my life viewed over the vast panorama of human history-if indeed human history is 'as advertised' covers an immensely small portion-not to even speak of astronomical and geological time scales. Yet there has been this one area of feeling-maybe memories maybe not of perhaps being 'here' in a different historical period of perhaps 17 to 5 years before 'I' was born and in a greatly different culture than the one 'I' currently identify with.


In regards to other realms, levels or planes of existence I would like to give a very brief overview of one of the major religions that believes in reincarnation-yet very interestingly-says that there is no actual 'self', soul or person that is reincarnated-just a set of 'karmic' tendencies. I find this extremely intriguing because it gets back to issues that deal with the nature of the soul and personality. Tonight I will just touch on the different levels of reality this religion believes in because this is also central to my developing theory. Note to reader: There are different schools of thought in Buddhism-this is only the most generalized look at the belief structure.
1) Naraka beings, these beings exist in the hell realm or lowest realm in Buddhism. There are many different types of 'hell' in this religion and also levels. I wonder-could this realm be where we encounter such paranormal subjects as possession, 'bad' near death experiences and cases of malevolent hauntings, maybe this realm could even account for many UFO experiences that an abductee has that they consider terrifying. Also very interesting to me, in the UFO literature there have been encounters with occupants who tell the contactee that 'they' have no souls and are very curious about the human experience because humans do have souls and personalities.
2) The animal realm. This is pretty obvious and self-explanatory. Some sects in Buddhism think the animal realm overlaps the human realm but is obviously a different level.
3) The Preta or 'hungry ghost' realm. This level is sort of self explanatory. It should be noted that this realm to some schools of thought overlaps the human realm, but the beings are usually invisible to humans. It should also be noted that this level is only considered to be slightly above the hell realm and is a terrible one to be re-born in. In this level of reality the beings are always hungry but never sated. This can be with issues in the previous life such as addiction, emotional and psychological issues and the like. I wonder if many paranormal phenomena humans detect come from this realm also, involving hauntings, electronic voice phenomena, images of 'ghosts' on video and photos etcetera.
4) Human realm. Very obvious here-our realm. The human realm as good or as horrible as it can be depending upon the immense varieties of human experience is considered a very good one to be born in if the human uses it to break the cycle of suffering and re-birth, samsara. I will get much more into the topics of karma, samsara and maya later in the series.
5) The Asura realm. I have always found this realm to be somewhat confusing as to exactly what it is supposed to represent. This realm is not recognized by Theravada Buddhism. This is the realm of the demons, titans, low deities and 'gods' who are always fighting. As much as this realm is sometimes confusing to me it also fascinates because I wonder if many synchromystic and archetypal phenomena could emanate from here and I also wonder if some of the vast variety of experience in the UFO/abductee literature might be explained by this plane of existence. Many people who have had ultra-terrestrial contact have felt they were in the prescence of beings not completely friendly to human beings and also some who have had these experiences appear to be in contact with an archetypal realm. I have wondered if this could be the realm that the archons and demiurge of Gnosticism have their foundation and being in. Perhaps this realm could also be were the ancient gods of Egypt, Greece and Rome emanate from.
6) The Deva realm. This is the highest and most glorious of the realms. The 'heaven' plane of existence. This realm would include brahmas, gods, high deities and beings and what we would think of as angels. Reincarnation into some of the various heavens or Pure Abodes can only be attained by beings who have conquered being caught in the constant cycle of death and re-birth.

The image is of Salvador Dali's, Gala~Abraham Lincoln. I included it in this post because in this series I want to explore how deeply we may all be connected to each other and various other places in our own and other levels of reality. I hope to anyone reading the first post of this series I did not throw out too many things at once and that I made some subjects as clear as possible. Believe me by the time I am done with the series I hope to make everything I post about into as seamless and connected a 'theory' as I can. I would greatly welcome any comments about anything I talked about in this post or any experiences people who read it may have had and any criticisms also. I also want to give these two links to wikipedia because I will be returning later to these religious philosophies and others as I go along. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buddhism
and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gnosticism

Two Souls-One Body?- Final Questions

The case of Iris Farczady has been so interesting to me on so many different levels. The questions of what really did happen to her and why being the most. Lucia told the three hard working investigators (when this post is finished I will try to post a link to their site), that she never had the intention of taking over Iris's mind and appeared to be emotionally upset by the question, maybe thinking that people would think she did this with intention to inhabit the body of a pretty, intelligent young woman from a well to do family. Lucia said she had no will towards coming back to earth. She did remember a small bit about the time before she began inhabiting Iris, she said she was "floating happily in space like a small boat on water." Suddenly, with no clue as to how it had happened she found herself in Iris's body.

The SPR team was satisifed that there was no question Iris/Lucia was trying to perpetrate a fraud and began the next steps of doing all they could possibly think to do to find a trace of the past Lucia had mentioned in Madrid. They put out an appeal for information in a popular Spanish magazine, Mas Alla. They wrote letters to every Altarez or Salvio they could find in telephone directories and as these are not typical Spanish names, they also sent off letters to the somewhat more common Altares and Salvo names they could find. The team did a search that had been previously done in 2002 in the archives for birth and death records in Madrid. The teams search included the names of children Lucia had mentioned as being hers. The three investigators unfortunately came up empty handed-I say this not only because it is such an interesting case but they put such a huge amount of hard work into their efforts. The team of Mary Rose Barrinton, Titus Rivas and Peter Mulacz had tried to do everything they could possibly do to find any trace of a past for Lucia. The team's conclusions on the case vary a bit but I think the words of Peter Mulacz sum up their thoughts on it the best, "My conclusion is that the case is truly inexplicable, and remains an enigma."

So we are left with a host of fascinating and intriguing possibilties. Was this a case of psychological dissociation? A case of multiple personality disorder? Xenoglossy combined with cryptomnesia? I find these explanations for this case-although they are also interesting, too simple. You can come up with your own conclusions about this case of course and I hope anyone passing through MFM will comment if they have any thoughts on the case. For me Iris's mastery of the Spanish language in the local Madrilene dialect, even though she had possessed a gift for languages was too precise. Her mastery of the style of dance she performed, the Flamenco, is an extremely hard one to learn and can't be learned by just watching it performed.
Iris/Lucia had mentioned the name of a street, Calle de Lista which has now been changed to calle Ortega y Gasset that was unlikely to have been listed in any travel brochures and books and other information available to a young woman in 1930's Budapest,as this was the era long before the internet where one can find incredible amounts of information in a very short amount of time. Iris as Lucia had also made the las tias references were also unlikely to have been known without having direct information about Spain and Madrid. When she spoke of the gypsy healers she spoke exactly how a Spaniard from Madrid would speak about them; using the way Spanish people have of referring to people not related as relatives, as stated before las tias means 'the aunts'. Iris as Lucia simply knew too much information about Madrid and Spain to have been learned from travel books, encyclopedias, novels and the like. For me her knowledge of the language, mastery of her dancing style, knowledge of local customs and information she gave about the era in Madrid she claimed to have lived in was too concise and time specific in some areas-not all- to not in some way, to have had direct contact with someone or something
in and from that era.

That leaves me with a choice of post-natal reincarnation-which is what Lucia claimed it to be or spirit possession combined with xenoglossy. Of the two I simply can't decide-both are extremely interesting to me and lead me to question and maybe some of you to question cherished belief systems and models of reality. I am paraphrasing and I hope not making too much of a hash of what aferrismoon, one of the synchromystic bloggers I link to said in the comments section of wise woman's beautiful (all of her posts are beautiful and thought provoking to me) new post at too long in this place 'no one has decided what a human being really is'.
In this line of thought I would also suggest reading Jeff's post on 30 January 2007 at Rigorous Intuition-"Are You Being Served?", with Jeff Wells as with so many bloggers I link to-it is hard to name a favorite post, but I really loved this one. This ends my series on Iris/Lucia unless any new information comes up but I hope to be discussing many of the paranormal and esoteric questions and others here that this case brings up. This information came from the link I am going to try to provide, other sources on the web, and Guy Lyon Playfair's fantastic article in the April 2007 edition of Fortean Times magazine. I am still behind on the H/A series-I was hoping for a very productive day today, but insomnia and loud neighbors at night have prevented this. I will keep trying to have new things here at MFM whatever happens with some sort of frequency as long as net connection stays up. Peace and be well and remember always try to question the 'history', 'belief systems' and other things the Powers That Be try to shove down our throats in their attempts to mold our 'reality' for us to suit their needs! Oh-the picture is of Titus Rivas with Iris, of course now as Lucia in 1998.
The Links- http://www.psican.org/alpha/index.php?/20080808103/Ghosts-Hauntings/Possession-Or-Transformation.html
http://members.lycos.nl/irislucia/onepiece.html