slave hiding from a group of men who were coming to lynch me. The man in charge leading the search was none other than Frank! I was petrified. Frank’s voice brought me back to the present when he informed me he had found the highway. I was once again in the passenger’s seat, breathing a sigh of relief.
Later when I had time to reflect, I questioned why this very vivid experience had surfaced and looked for the message it contained. I recalled two other flashbacks that had occurred shortly before this one. In the first, someone was placing a black hood over my head just before cutting it off! In the second, I was imprisoned in a pit with an iron door of some kind covering it. Obviously, none of these flashbacks was pleasurable. As a member of an A.R.E. Search for God Study Group (and I still am), the work I had done in the group caused me to look at the pattern these flashbacks reflected back to me. The theme was clear; it was that of a victim. The next step for me was to ask myself how I was acting or reacting as a victim in my current life. Then, I consciously began to observe when I was acting or thinking that way and intentionally changed my response. When I began taking more responsibility for what happened in my life, it changed in very positive ways. Thankfully there were no more victim flashbacks.
Past-Life Dreams
Dreams of another time have a very distinct quality to them that is hard to articulate but also makes them difficult to forget. One of Julio’s favorite dreams (and you will meet him again in this book) is a dream of a “lifetime” in which he was either a tree or a flower. In this incursion into the physical he was in front of a meadow watching all the life around him as he felt the breeze. He said that this was great because it was a timeless experience of just being and seeing life. This is very reminiscent of the story revealed to us by Edgar Cayce of our evolution into matter when we first began to experiment in the material world and experience its effect by projecting our spirit into the forms of nature.
Past-life dreams, like many other types of dreams, are sent to us by the soul for a reason. Icléa shared one of hers with me in which she was doing a ritual in Egypt. Before she entered the place that housed the altar where she was going to perform the ritual, she looked at herself in a shield that was highly polished like a mirror. What she saw was a very young woman, very beautiful and very dark. When she looked in the mirror, Icléa just knew that “she” was “me.” The altar had charcoal and a fire. Icléa could even smell the fire. Then she reached into a basket, picked up a snake, bit it in two, and threw the pieces into the charcoal. She knew she was “not nice.” Icléa woke up trying to clear her throat. The vividness of the colors, the music that was playing, and the intense smell convinced Icléa that this dream was indeed a remembrance of a past-life event.
Sometime later she attended a talk given by the late Betty Bethards, a spiritual healer, meditation teacher, psychic, and mystic. After the meditation, Icléa went outside for a breather, and Betty was there. Betty said to her, “It’s okay. We meet again. We knew each other in Egypt, but we were not very nice.” Then Icléa shared the dream with her. If Icléa had needed any confirmation, Betty’s comments did just that. Perhaps this dream was giving her a message similar to the one delivered in her spiritual regression you will read about in Chapter 5.
Past-Life Remembrance
Georgina Teyrovsky and I were introduced at a local meeting of the International Association for Near-Death Studies (IANDS) where I was giving a talk on reincarnation. She shared many stories of her past-life remembrances, especially those of when she was a child. The following is one of her more compelling experiences, which I am presenting in her own words.
“The year was 1939, March 15, and I was fifteen. On that spring day I was in the kitchen in our home in Jahodnice, Prague. When my father came home that afternoon, he called in an excited voice to Mother and me, “Do you know what the news is today?” We answered, “No.” “The Second World War was declared today!” he said in a voice filled with apprehension.
Some voice inside me called out, “War, again war! How many wars do I have to live through before people will discover that wars are harming everybody! They bring so much pain and suffering for everybody!” I was stunned! My young personality somehow answered, “How can you say that?” I searched my memory and answered, “You were born in 1924, the First World War ended in 1918, and there wasn’t any war in Europe or in our country since then!” But I remembered many wars! I felt these thoughts inside me. I remembered the suffering, the anguish, and the humiliations of lost wars! I even remembered being in the middle of one with the emotional pain of a lost cause.
A vision came to me. I was standing in front of some big gates. I was a strong, enthusiastic man about thirty-years-old. I valiantly held some weapon in my hand, but I knew that the attackers were much, much stronger than I. I knew they would win, kill us all, and kill our just and righteous cause. Death did not scare me, but the destruction of all that we believed in gave me tremendous pain in my heart. It was a pain which my fifteen-year-old person or personality had not experienced before. Its depth scared me.
Then I came out of my vision and wondered what to make of it. I lacked any explanation. In conclusion, I decided it had showed me that I could be a person of courage. I said to myself, “When the opportunity comes, I know I will be courageous!”
Our soul speaks to us in its own language of the subconscious. It prods us through means such as these as it guides us through our lives.
Past-Life Regression Information Quest
In my own past-life regression practice I work in concert with my client’s intention to take him or her back to a former time. This is done not only for spiritual archeology, but also, more importantly, for spiritual therapy. However, great benefit can often be derived by merely accessing a prior life and learning the “history” of it. The following regression is such a case. As you read details of Dean’s former life from childhood to death, note the recurring patterns.
DEAN
Dean always talked about being a mountain man, and when he saw the movie Jeremiah Johnson, he knew he had lived a similar life. [Jeremiah Johnson tells the story of a trapper in the mid-1800’s who lived a solitary existence in the mountains of the western United States.] Dean’s wife Samantha gave him a gift of a past-life regression with a well-known regressionist to explore this feeling that was so strong for him.
After the regression, he said this was a “trip of a lifetime.” Here are some of his own words which he recorded immediately after this episodic experience.
My parents are leaving in a covered wagon with all of their belongings, except their children! I have an older brother and sister and a younger sibling. We are being left in the care of a couple roughly the same age as our parents. There are other people leaving with my parents, but no children. It seems that they are going someplace that is too dangerous for children and will return for us at a later date.
I must be eight or nine. The man caring for us is a bit of a tyrant. The land is quite rocky, and my brother and I are trying to remove rocks from the fields with picks and shovels. There is no respite from the chores to be done; he works us very hard.
My brother has finally had it and runs away. I try to talk him into taking me with him. However, he feels I am too small and leaves without me, presumably following the trail of our parents. Now I have to do his work as well as mine, and it is not a pleasant situation. Our “surrogate father”
