Entering Past Lives, Watch Out for Drowsiness
It is tempting, particularly here in the Halloween season, when the veil between This Side and the Other Side has grown threadbare and a bit transparent like an old white T shirt that has hung in your closet for too long, and the possibility of a free interchange of ideas opens up between the Two Sides, to sit down with a neighborhood psychic and explore your past lives.
This is the business, by way of various chantings and formulas and summonings and elixers, of identifying and then conversing with previous versions of yourself.
There are, apparently, any number of these fine people who have inhabited the same psychic space as you through the centuries, and who have moved through their time on this earth without thinking much about it before somehow handing off the baton to the next you. And so on down the line.
Who wouldn’t like to see all the aspects of their fascinating self find full expression as an officer in the English Civil Wars or an artist in Florence at the time of the Renaissance or a statesmen at the court of Henry the Eighth or on a pirate ship in the Barbary Seas?
There is by this way of thinking the original beta version of yourself back in the time of the Neanderthals, and then succeeding versions 1.0 and 2.0 all the way up to the 1032.0 Deluxe XI which coincides with the current moment in the space time continuum. In other words, the current you.
It is as though this psychic space is a rare commodity and the universe is doing the best it can with its own recycling program.
It is unlikely given all these eons of time and the expanse of the entire world to work with that you would all get together at the same time at the county lake for a reunion and recognize each other because you’re all wearing the same t-shirt that says “I’m one of you!” which is why you have to go to the bother and expense of this seance dealeo that I speak of, where each of these characters is summoned for a moment to say a few words about himself, where he went to grade school and what he likes to order on his pizza and what not, and then gets on with his life.
I however caution against the practice.
Your average consumer might guess that the caution stems from finding out that a past self was a card shark on a Mississippi steamboat, or a piano player working the bordello circuit of San Francisco just before the big earthquake, but these are piquant details that add spice to your personal biography without you ever having had to live them and are in fact welcome.
People don’t really mind hearing of their previous selves what a rogue and sly devil they were, as long as you here in the present day don’t have to pay the consequences.
Far worse, and this goes to the heart of the matter, is to find that your past lives were occupied by folks known even in their time for their blandness, their lack of distinction, their notable way of coming up with just the wrong word at just the right time or just the right word at just the wrong time, and their ability, well before the invention of artificial sleep aids, to put people to sleep using only natural methods such as conversation.
You run the risk upon these psychic explorations of finding that when friends, strangers, and even spouses at the time were asked to reflect upon your previous selves’ colorful characteristics, the telling details that says, ‘oh, my God, that is so him!’, they are apt to have said, ‘hmmmm,’ or even ‘let me get back to you on that.’
This is hard on your current version, who had hoped for something a bit juicier, not something that has an eerie resonance with how people today view you.
You — you here in the current coordinates of the space-time continuum — may have for instance found yourself entering a large room and seen the expression on many a person’s features, ‘I know I’ve seen the face before but for the life of me I can’t tell you exactly who that fellow is.’
All the more alarming when the room we speak of is the interior of the church you are to be married in that very day.
At such occasions you feel a sudden surge of fellowship for all these other fellows in the past who themselves seem to have found it hard to make much of an impression.
But this danger is baked in the cake, this is what I want to get across to you.
If there is anything to the concept of past lives at all it is the sense of an enduring, irreducible personality transmitted through the ages, which, all in all, as we have seen, can be unfortunate.
You would rather that it introduced you to all sorts of new professions and environments and colorful versions of yourself making your way through the world of the time. A kind of Take Your Multiple Selves to Work Day that spanned the centuries. You may dream, as we have surmised already, that you may have been the architect of the Pyramids say, or a confidant of Marco Polo, or a fur trapper in the Appalachians in the late 1700s.
What you wouldn’t like to find, or I wouldn’t at any rate, is that through the centuries of your two-thousand-year-career to date, if it was laid out in resume format bringing your best experience to the top as we are all told to do these days, it would read something like:
256 AD to 272 AD – file clerk
333 AD to 356 AD – file clerk
379 AD to 401 AD – janitor
432 AD to 441 AD – file clerk
…and on and on. And on.
Right up to the present day, where you list your current position, which lo and behold is a file clerk, or at the outside edges of possibility, a janitor.
Perfectly honest work, the world couldn’t function without file clerks and janitors, but a letdown if you were expecting to find an explorer of darkest Africa or the inventor of color television in your individual family tree.
It would make it seem that not only are you a rather colorless personality here in your present state who never seemed to muster the get up and go necessary to rise above your current class of employment, but that you also come from a long line of folks who felt and acted just the same way.
In this way you are carrying on the family tradition, if that is any comfort.
Nice! Perfectly nice! We all are into self-exploration and what not.
But not I’d say the sort of thing you’d mention on a first date, when you’re at that point in the conversation where you want to highlight your prospects going forward. “Want to hear about my past lives? What do you know of the file clerk business?”
No, far better to just not know. Some things are better left unexplored when it comes to the mysteries of the subconscious or our past lives.
