Clean Up in Aisle 3
"Don't Take Sides!"
This is actually a follow-up to my last post:
Since we’re on the subject of Classrooms of Life….
Classrooms can be long and experiential learning for souls. There are classrooms for souls who still need to learn the futility or necessity of hate and war, classrooms for scholars, sportsmen, scientists, etc.
Somewhat segregated thankfully…
We exist in, what I call, an 'intelligent soup’…an Intelligent Universe.
Now soup implies cooking…
In a sense, everyone is already simmering in their perfect 'medicine'…or classroom of life, whether or not it appears that way (it usually doesn’t).
There isn't always much that we can add to the mix. Our minds naturally want to organize and codify and understand. And we yearn for better. But we are dealing with a pulsating, living process that is beyond our present understanding and one that defies too much organization.
Think of what is lost every time we try...
The Shaker, Quaker, Spiritualist, Pentecostal and evangelical movements were/are just that, for example.
They are attempts to imitate and re-create spontaneous experiences (becoming ritualized, stylized…and idolized…counterfeits in the process).
When I felt the incoming of transcendent energies for a purpose yet unknown, when I read scripture or truths encountered in other sources or when I experienced (real) Reiki, I shook and quaked...long before I heard of the Shakers and Quakers.
I was Kundalini-awakened before I knew the word or the concept… (in the late 90's, spontaneous Kundalini awakenings were happening around the globe. Neophytes all…with profound and varied impacts).
In that vein, here is a story of one of those classrooms….
It came in the form of a spontaneous past-life experience...my first…where I experienced the final hour of my life as a Civil War soldier dying on a battlefield.
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We begin by eavesdropping on a massage session…
Pam: “Do you believe in reincarnation? Have you experienced any past lives?”
Me: ”Oh yes… But I did not believe in reincarnation until I experienced it.”
Pam: ”Have you done regression therapy? Is that how you learned about a past life?”
Me: ”I have experienced several past lives, but not through regression therapy. I experienced them unexpectedly in a variety of other ways.
Did I ever tell you about my first experience…the one that took place in the Old South?”
“Why, no…” Pam declared in her soft Southern drawl.
I knew she would be particularly interested in this story…
”It happened during a Reiki attunement about 15 years ago. At that time in my life, I wasn’t particularly inclined to believe in things like past lives and reincarnation. Due to a bit of Christian association, I had been taught to reject those things out of hand. In my early years I upheld the church’s admonition to steer clear of such so-called false teachings and religions. I suppose I learned to just shut such controversies out of my mind…you know…just to be on the safe side.
As time went on, however, I began to realize that the church did not possess all the answers…or many of the remedies.
So many times, and in so many places, I questioned some of the murkier bits of scripture. Not only did the various pastors and teachers not want to discuss those matters, but I was told to keep such questions to myself or find another church. Free thinking and exploration were heartily discouraged and a herd mentality prevailed. I found that the church had a vested interest in holding people back and keeping them in a dependent and immature state.
Finally I felt it was time to start over and get my teaching from the Source….
God- within and without (if there was indeed such a thing).
I needed to begin again with a clean slate and get out from under the big business of religion, the controversies, bickering and lack of reality.
The first thing that I was shown was to let go of the ‘us and them’ mentality. The one that states that we alone have the true doctrine, that all others are, at best mistaken, and at worst, the children of the devil.
Hard on the heels of that lesson was the one on dropping prejudice. I was simply unteachable with my heavy load of opinions, judgments, fear and prejudice. Dropping prejudice and setting my notions aside took the better part of a couple of years, but it was worth the effort.
Not having all the answers…fixed and immovable…made me somewhat teachable…finally.
And so I began to learn…slowly and experientially. With a beginner’s mind and heart, I started to make my way as guided by Spirit.
I walked the (cleaned-up) Christian path/classroom quite conscientiously and, to my surprise, it wasn’t long before my spiritual experiences outstripped their old theological boundaries.
There was an unseen hand guiding me into powerful experiences and dynamic insights. The church did not have a monopoly on the truth...or the action. My spirit began to enlarge, my heart lightened and my life began to make more sense.
In retrospect, I saw that in surrendering my mind at the door of the church, I had been attempting to pound an octagonal peg into a square hole that was much too small…for far too long.
It had never been necessary… (though I gained a lot of experience. Nothing is wasted in God’s economy).
It was so liberating to take leave of limiting religion and take hold of a living experience of the Almighty.
It was no longer necessary to believe, but only to ask…and wait for answers.
I could never have imagined what laid in store for me….
This story will give the reader some idea of the breadth and height and depth of what is possible and what goes on even today for one who walks this path.
Getting back to the story….
I had noticed in recent weeks that my thoughts were guided in the direction of reincarnation…a subject I hadn’t thought about in 20 yrs. I felt a softening around the subject that I couldn’t explain (though, in my youth, I could argue anyone under the table about how mistaken it was).
I had also been led to apprentice in Reiki (the Japanese lineage of hands-on healing). I was preparing for the 1st degree. The setting was a lovely old home in Atlanta, Georgia. There were six of us being initiated in a simple ceremony. After the attunement, we were to take our places on massage tables to receive a treatment from experienced practitioners.
I laid down, closed my eyes and relaxed deeply. A pair of gentle hands supported my head and another pair rested on my feet. I drifted peacefully for the first few minutes. Then suddenly I ‘flipped’ into a different reality.
‘Flipping’ is what I have come to call the experience of a rapid and total exchange of personal subjective reality. One moment you are fully here…in the next moment ‘you’ are totally gone. You are suddenly and completely present in a different time, body and reality. It is instantaneous and it is experienced as real.
In the very next moment I found myself lying in a field….actually, I was dying in a field. My first awareness was that I was ‘dying in the dirt’.
I literally felt myself bleeding out, my blood seeping into thirsty earth. I knew that it was too late for me and that I would certainly die. I was now fully conscious in that moment and I was overwhelmed by a flood of strong emotions.
More than anything, I was furious with myself for having thrown my life away in this manner. A litany of angry phrases poured out of me…”How could you do this to yourself?! You had your whole young life ahead of you and you threw it away!!! And for what??!!”
“You threw it all away over this stupid brother-against-brother conflict!!!” This was insanity!!! How could you let yourself get caught up in this foolish and futile war?!!”
I saw my life as it would have been, had I not chosen this prideful and foolish path. It would have been a very good life…a comfortable and privileged life. I saw the woman I was engaged to, the fine house we were to live in…everything that could have been. I saw the future that I had thrown away.
Painful, razor-sharp, inescapable remorse. “Here you are…dying in the dirt! And there’s no hope…no undoing! So horribly wrong! So beneath you…and you threw it all away. You fool!!!“
As I lay there, the physical impressions became clearer... I felt myself as a man…a small shock. I remembered being rather slight with dark hair and a small mustache. I felt the hard earth underneath me, and the pounding of hoof-beats jarring the ground…the realization that I was on a battlefield. I saw billows of smoke and dust everywhere under a forlorn sky.
Then the worst part… I heard the anguished cries and agonized screams of men in mortal pain dying all around me. It was horrible beyond belief.
And again, the feeling of my blood seeping into the ground….I was dying in the dirt! As my eyes registered more of the scene, I looked up to see a bayonet being pulled from my chest by a soldier dressed in a dark blue uniform. To my great surprise, the face was familiar…the face of a woman that I considered a friend in this life…someone I was helping. (that didn’t compute at the time and I cast it behind me) But what was instantly clear to me was that I was in the Civil War, fighting for the South.
I made several instantaneous present-life connections that surprised me, opening windows of understanding.
As a young girl studying U.S. history, a classmate and I became crazily obsessed with the Civil War. We had to know everything about it. We were literally in the grip of it for several years…odd for 2 young girls. However, we wound up tracing her forebears to John Wilkes Booth, the man who assassinated President Abraham Lincoln! (I had no interest in any other wars….though I had a keen and vivid interest in the Holocaust)
Years later, in my thirties, I was inexplicably drawn to the South. I grew up in the west and midwest. That was one part of the country I hadn’t seen. Finally I arranged a road trip just to have the experience. To my surprise, I had a very visceral reaction to the region as I crossed the Mason-Dixon Line. I experienced a deep recognition and connection.
I remember exclaiming ‘I should have been born here!!’ These were my people, this was my climate, my food, my manners. It struck such a chord in me that I soon rearranged my life and business so I could live there.
As I was making those connections, I was drawn back to my body. I felt my body getting colder and colder…and then my senses seemed to falter as I was drifting in and out of consciousness. My body was shutting down…fading out. I had no pain…only aware experiencing.
Clean-up in Aisle 3…
The Reiki master saw that something unusual was happening across the room and he hurried over. He leaned in and whispered to the woman holding my head ‘Ask her what the lesson was… (of this life)’.
I heard her soft voice repeating in my ear. “Debbie, what was the lesson?”
Faster than I could think, from someplace deep inside, the words shot out of my mouth with piercing clarity…
“Don’t take sides!”
Then back on the battlefield, I saw myself looking down at ‘my’ soldier’s body from high in the sky. Pain-free, strangely peaceful and detached. I watched for a minute as the body went through it’s final death throes. I had only the merest curiosity about it…and then I turned heavenward and disappeared.
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In the next instant, I was totally back in the present time lying on a massage table in a living room in Atlanta among friends.
I knew/learned from this experience that there is no sting in death, just as truly as scripture asserts. We exit the body before the final moments.
Prologue: One thing that struck me was that I’ve always been inclined toward pacifism and not taking sides. I never really thought about it. It was just my nature. This experience had the effect of clarifying and making crystal clear that stance. I realigned instantly and lived that with much greater understanding going forward.
I also understood my strong youthful inclinations to enter the armed forces. I had been thwarted at every turn.
It was as though I was picking up where I had left off in this life…
Eventually what came through to me internally, was that despite patriotic loyalty and a desire to serve (the childish fantasies of the old life), the actual thing that I sought to serve was evil in ways I could not comprehend…the opposite of what it portrayed itself to be…something I was not to touch. I reluctantly let it all go.
Now I see the Wisdom that guided me…
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I also understood that it might take an entire lifetime for one lesson…
I was a young hothead with all the brashness, violence and foolhardiness of my gender and youth. I had opportunities to not engage, but I did the foolish thing anyway. There was no other way that I was going to learn.
Every generation of students such as myself will enter that classroom. The only way we are going to learn…
Once you see it…
Lessons like these are never forgotten. They are burned into our souls…or hides, if you will.
Life is an experiential classroom. This is how we all learn.
Luckily, such classrooms are segregated to some extent around the world.
America is a relatively peaceful place (though you might factor in ghetto life as that classroom).
But those that leave here to fight on distant shores in meaningless wars engage with others in that classroom, while the rest are kept safe and out of harm’s way…able to engage their more peaceable classrooms and lessons.
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This gets a bit more complex…not required reading…
Other lessons learned:
The face of the soldier who was pulling a bayonet out of my chest belonged to a woman in my present life who I was trying to help as her husband battled terminal cancer. She was a very troubled woman with a penchant for suing people and practicing witchcraft. When she went after me in this life, she was on a bloody quest for my money (money I had already planned to simply give her). Those events unwound about a year later, so I was completely unaware of any impending trouble.
Internally, I had been warned to sever connections with her for several weeks. I didn’t know why…which was painfully disconcerting. In my ignorance and sympathy, I did not obey the impulse immediately, but tried to let her down slowly and gently (AKA doing it MY way, because I know better than God).
That failure to act cost me dearly in terms of mental distress for the next two years as she inexplicably proceeded to sue ME!
In a ‘the buck stops here’ attitude, I elected to be the person to prevent her from making a career out of suing people. In the end, her lawsuit was eventually judged to be frivolous…costly only to herself.
This experience underscored the importance of moving when I’m prompted to move rather than letting sympathy or my reasoning delay things. Costly and oppressive lessons…
It was important for me to notice why and how I blocked the information regarding the soldiers face. It did not compute in the moment. Such details matter.
Final thoughts… I experienced deep regret for getting involved in the war conflict.
It was an ego-driven choice and I lost my life to it.
I experienced slipping out of my body painlessly just before the final death throes.
So much understanding came out of that felt event.
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Once we get the lesson of these classrooms…we get to move on. Some are brief (like your 1st crush), some longer-lasting…
If we refuse the lesson, there is every likelihood that we will repeat the class….perhaps with the volume turned up.
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Later on, I found that many of my Thai teachers had clear past-life recall. It was culturally accepted, rather than hindered. It often came through their meditation.
It was actually considered normative! Not strange or suspect (as most of our new age cons are).
When I asked them about it, they said “Why wouldn’t you want to have this recall? Those were hard lives with difficult experiences. You EARNED that knowledge and strength! Why wouldn’t you want to bring all that experience into your present life to help you through this life?”
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As always, thank you for reading… You are welcome to DM with questions or comments.