The question naturally arises as to whether these past life regressions actually are past lives, or whether the whole thing is just an exercise in imagination.  These regressions are not always factually accurate portrayals of other times and places (unless you’re very psychic).  You can certainly interpolate anachronisms into them if you want to.  Moreover a life supposedly taking place in ancient Rome often looks suspiciously like something out of Cecil B. DeMille.  In other words, we obviously filter these regressions through our present-day concepts.

 Also it is often difficult to relate to the “you” in a regression.  He or she doesn’t act or react the way you would, and so it’s hard to accept or understand in what sense that person is you; much less that you are personally responsible for all the mischief that person is doing. 

 Nonetheless there is an emotional truth in regressions that argues for their being taken seriously, no matter whether they are “real” (whatever that means) or merely figments.  The real touch in a past life regression is with the feelings that the “you” in the regression is experiencing.  There are emotional echoes – little pings of recognition – that you will know mean something to you personally, even if you are at a loss to put them into words.  For example, you often recognize the people you know from this lifetime when you encounter them in regressions by the feeling you have for them.  I first learned to feel the people around me (instead of merely react to them on a thought form level) by doing past life regressions:  understanding how I felt about them in past lives helped me to get a grip on how I really feel about them in this life.

 It is the emotional content of these regressions which is of primary importance, not whether they are conceptually real (although my spirit guides assure me that they are no more nor less real than the life we are living now).  Nor is it important that you intellectually resolve the “meaning” of this or that life.  You just try to be aware that such-and-such a person is hurting you in this lifetime because you asked him to, to atone for what you did to him in another life; or that your stirrings towards music, say, or agriculture reflect a valid part of your being – another life in which you were a musician or a farmer; or that your irrational anger, joy, fears, and hopes are often quite rational and logical after all. 

 The emotional recognition in a regression is due to an actual line which connects you to the “you” in the regression. Clairvoyants see these connections as fibers of living light, but most people sense them as feelings, emotional connections.  The theory is that these fibers from other lives bind us to neurotic patterns of behavior in this one – we feel a need to keep reliving our mistakes until we get them right.  By running past lives it becomes possible to recognize these patterns, which immediately releases a lot of the energy that’s tied up in them;  i.e., it loosens the fibers between that life and this one, allowing the conscious mind to decide if it wants to do something about the patterns (instead of being dominated by them unawares). 

After running a life, it often helps to jot down the impressions you have of it.  What was the main thrust or purpose of that life?  What lessons did you learn?  How did you feel about it after you died?  There’s no need to become morbid or obsessed about past lives – just draw your conclusions and move on.   After you have run a great many past lives, you will begin to notice certain trends or feelings that keep recurring over and over.  For example, during a difficult time in my marriage my guides directed my wife and I to run scores of past lives that we had together, so that we would understand how it was that we were at the place we had gotten to.  It turned out that in most of our past lives together one of us had murdered the other one.   Beyond that there were many other recurrent themes throughout our lives together that were repeated in this present life.  

“The victim must, in the Shiftings, live the act of cruelty, not as victim but as tyrant; whereas the tyrant must by a necessity of his or her nature become the victim. …The souls of victim and tyrant are bound together and, unless there is a redemption through the intercommunication of the living and the dead, that bond may continue life after life.”   – W.B. Yeats, A Vision

Because our viewpoint is necessarily couched in linear time it is inconceivable to us that everyone we have met in our lives – even strangers passing on the street whom we don’t even nod to – get together on some level and agree to people each other’s lives.  It’s very much like actors in a play getting together, rehearsing, having a performance, and disbanding at the end.  

 For most people the vast majority of past lives consist either of unremitting hardship and suffering, or else of selfishness and chicanery.  I, personally, have had lots of lives as a scoundrel, and it’s interesting how many bells these ring for me in my present life.  It can humble you a little, or at least make you realize that in your own heart there is a killer, a drunkard, or a psychopath, no matter how pious and privileged you think you are; and they’re not that far beneath the surface, either. 

 On the other hand, you’ll find lives in which you were quite admirable – courageous, loving, and wise.  These lives will also directly connect to your better side in this life, and confirm your sense of purpose and direction.

An Example Past Life Regression

 Because listening to other people’s past life regressions is not unlike sitting through a slide show of their trip to Europe, I have deliberately chosen for this example the most bizarre, outré past life I’ve ever run.  Notice how first I plug into the feelings of that lifetime, and only when that connection is made does the story unfold. 

 …. An old wooden shack.  It looks like Appalachia, or maybe the pine barrens of south Jersey.  I think it’s the pine barrens.  I hate my mother.  I don’t know if I really hate her, i.e. her treatment of me leaves me fuming; it’s very unfair.  She just happens to be a bitter, bitter woman who takes it all out on me.  Father is dead?  At least he’s not present.  It’s just me and her.  She uses me for her whipping boy, but although I fume, I bite my tongue and don’t cross her.  It’s because I understand how unhappy she is, and that she doesn’t feel she has any choice except to be the way she is.  I tend to forgive her as we go along. 

 I seem to be more sensitive, understanding, and loving in this life than in most of my other lives (I think it’s just an image).  For example, I can talk to plants and animals.  I try to spend as much of my time as possible off in the woods talking to my friends, the plants and animals.  I run naked.  I have animal vision and animal sense.  I can tell when there are other humans around and I avoid them.  With my mother I feel I am pretending to be a human being, but that actually I’m not.  My humanness is a masquerade.

 Actually, I’m kind of nuts, although I do have a lot of sixth sense intuition.  It is true that I’m repressing a lot of feelings to maintain this façade of equanimity.  I see now [from the vantage point of my present life] that a lot of my gentleness and communing with nature is an image, an escape from her, because I won’t admit to myself how much I hate her.  I pretend she doesn’t affect me, that I’m not really human anyway.  In other words, I’m not as gentle and spiritual as I think, that’s just an image of myself that I have.  I think I’m superior to human beings, that I’m on a level above them, but that’s just a game I’m playing (although I can talk to plants and animals).

 Anyway, I do hate my mother more than I’ll let myself cop to.  I try to pretend I’m above those sorts of emotions, and that she can heap all her poison on me and it doesn’t affect me at all.  I’m glad I’m there for her to do that to, I understand why she’s doing it, it’s not her fault, etc. etc.

 Except one day I pop.  Something in me just snaps, and I kill her.  I hit her in the face with an iron bar.  There’s no thought behind it:  she’s carrying on like she always does and I’m taking it like I always do, and then the next minute I’ve killed her. 

 Then I sort of go into a state of shock.  There’s no precedent for this.  My world heretofore wasn’t that pleasant, but at least it was pat and figured out and everything had its place; and now my mother is dead and I’ve killed her.  I’m totally at a loss; so what I do is go on as before.  I pretend she’s still alive.  I prop her up in her chair and serve her food at meal times; we eat together; then at bedtime I carry her to her bed and tuck her in.  In the morning I get her up and brush her hair, take her to the table for breakfast, etc.  Even as the months go by and she starts rotting and falling apart I carry her back and forth from the table to her bed to her easy chair.

 Of course, there’s a part of me that knows this is a total fiction – that part is diabolical and is happy that the bitch is dead and I can mock her every day by pretending she’s alive; it’s like a sarcastic side of me.  But the outward part – the image part – continues to pretend that nothing has changed.  This is also calculated to make whoever discovers me think I’m nuts, so I won’t be held accountable for killing her.

 But it is the continuation of the masquerade I adopted when she was alive:  “Oh yes, mother?  Anything I can do for you, mother?”  It’s the continuation of my “nice guy”, “spiritual guy” mask:  that guy wouldn’t have killed his mother, so of course I didn’t kill my mother.  The diabolical, sarcastic part of me is actually my anchor to sanity, and the nice guy mask is actually nuts.  The two of them are in sort of a battle.

 Probably, if I’d lived longer, the nice guy would have won and I’ve have gone completely nuts for good.  But eventually a bunch of cops came in and shuffled me off, and everything after that is a blur of uniforms and cells – nothing that makes any sense.  I guess I retreated into insanity to be able to handle it.

 They must have executed me because I’m still young when I die.  I meet my mother.  She has not changed one iota.  She is still, in the afterlife, playing all the same games she did on earth; and she was hanging around waiting for me to rejoin her and serve her.  She doesn’t blame me for killing her; she just wants me to take up the same role I played for her on earth; and I do it.  There in the afterlife we create a perfect replica of the life we had together on earth:  the same ramshackle house, furniture, etc., with her abusing me all day long and me sneaking off to be with the plants and animals.  The only difference is that in the afterlife I no longer hate her.  It’s as if all my images finally came true – I’m truly indifferent to how she treats me, I know she’s doing what she does because she can’t help it, etc.  I certainly don’t love her, but neither am I repressing anger at her because I don’t know what else to do.

 We’re still at it to this day – out there in the ozone somewhere she and I are still carrying on this pine barrens life as if nothing had happened. 

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