The Continuity of Consciousness; the Continuity of Lives

When I was a child, I knew I had lived in other bodies, in other lifetimes.  It was as if this knowledge came with me out of the womb. It was a remembering–a felt sense.  When I was 11 years old, I read the now famous Seth Material channeled and recently published by Jane Roberts. In it, Seth spoke about the multidimensional nature of reality and the fact that we live in many probable lifetimes and many probable selves. He also spoke about how our experience of a linear time is an illusion and that time is, in fact, holographic: everything is happening at once. So it is that our greater consciousness is one continuous stream of experience. Within that great stream we choose to incarnate in many bodies, many lifetimes, and even to experience more than one probable destiny line of our self. In this worldview, there would be more than one probable Rachel living out a number of possible expressions of myself within a similar space-time continuum.

I was excited by what Seth said because as a young girl, I knew it was true. 

When it comes to my own spiritual life and because we live in a pluralistic society where there is so much diversity in beliefs, expressions, experiences, I tend to prefer in public to be more circumspect about what I declare as fact versus fiction. As a lifetime explorer of consciousness, I am well aware that one’s experience in non-visible, non-physical realms is always a personal matter–a ultimately, always a matter of perception.  All that really matters is what we take away from it, not whether the whole world agrees with our interpretation or not. Yet as as shamanic healer and mystic, there are many indications that we do, in fact, live in multiple lives in multiple realms.  This fact has direct relevance to the pain we feel in our own lives and in the potential within it for healing and changing out lives for the better.

I have already shared in previous writings that I experienced the death of a Holy Warrior on a field of battle in the Middle Ages.  This felt to me to be one lifetime of many which my larger self, my soul, had lived or was living.  This man, named Jean, his life of violence and his  intersected in profound ways with my own life as Rachel living in the late 20th century.  The resolution of his psychological pain as he died due to coming to the realization in those last moments that he had lived his life all wrong in killing under the banner of Christ was directly tied to my rising from that healing table and being pain- and depression free for a long while afterwards. How is this so?

Western shamanic practice conceptualizes ancestral experience as multidimensional not only within family legacies and bloodlines, but also as lifetimes lived by a single soul.  One way to approach this subject, if we are not inclined to the more religio-spiritual view of reincarnation is to reach to Carl Jung. He talked about the layers of the individual subconscious as expanding outward from the personal (one’s own in-this-life experiences) to the familial/ancestral and on outward to the entire human collective–the “collective unconscious”.

In the concentric circles of these dimensions of personal to collective consciousness, we encounter multiple dimensions of human experience which can be revealed in imagination, dreams, meditation, vision quests, ceremony, journeying, or energy medicine.  A core principle of Jungian psychoanalysis is that our subconscious contains all the suppressed, forgotten, yet to be revealed, and lost memories and dimensions of ourselves and of all of humanity. When we encounter these experiences in the practice of shamanic energy medicine, whether we describe them as “past lives” or “collective memory”, we follow the thread of connection to the personality, problems and symptoms of a client.

I envision the holographic matrix of reality is formed like a dodecadohedron, which in 5-dimensional space, consists of multiple and infinitely multiplying polyhedra. We can then imagine how in any one stellated dodecahedron, there would be a constellation of certain individualized expressions of the self interconnected in dynamic and intimate ways through holographic–5-dimensional– time and space.

What this means in simple terms is that in a single lifetime in a single body, we are influenced by and are working out related issues across a number of individualized experiences and expressions.

For instance, Jean, the Holy Warrior, without my intervention from the “future”, died in agony and despair. He believed he was going to hell.  Because of the power of our beliefs and thoughts in the formation of our reality, then after he left his body, Jean would have experienced hell as he imagined it.  Yet, because of the fact that, through energy medicine, a wrinkle through time was created, I was able to connect with his consciousness at that critical moment and give him comfort and solace so he could merge with unity consciousness expressed as soul and spirit.  In my lifetime, as I released him, then I myself was released from my own pain.

Our “karma”, which I define as the lessons and goals we carry from lifetime to lifetime, was balanced out such that both of us could finally be free of suffering. Our suffering, in this sense, was not punishment, but a construct of our mutual perceptions and experiences of reality–Jean’s of the existence of Heaven and Hell, of redemption and damnation–mine of a chronic sense of self-recrimination, guilt and depression because of my mentally ill mother’s constant disparagement of me.  Nothing I could do was enough in the same way that in the last moments of Jean’s death, he came to believe that his lifetime of sacrifice, work and dedication through the use of murder and war was wrong and so, he was dying under the weight of self-recrimination and guilt.  He believed he was unforgivable.

In the energy healing session, I was able to reach through the veil, and tell him through directed intention that in the eyes of His Lord Jesus and the Creator, there is no such thing as a lack of forgiveness. I gave him forgiveness and told him that because of his powerful learning in those last moments as his life ebbed away, he was guaranteed a seat in the light of the great and infinite God-force.  So it was in that moment, so deeply touched in my being by Jean’s agony, I felt his soul rise up and depart from his body as if it was a sweet wind.

Western science and Christianity long ago relinquished this multidimensional understanding of human experience.  A human life was reduced to a single body in a fixed, linear space-time continuum.  Within these two worldviews, when the body dies, either the soul returns to heaven or hell (Christian) or all life as it is known in a single body is extinguished (science).  The condition of a person’s consciousness within both of these frameworks is solely dependent on their individual actions in one lifetime.  In the multidimensional view of reality held by many mystical traditions, including western shamanism, we are in any one lifetime the sum total of multiple experiences of often thousands of individualized expressions of the greater consciousness that we are. In this way, we are provided with a powerful and ultimately invincible ability to work through any and all suffering and illusion on the road to enlightenment.

There is far more to this matrix of which I speak–about how our consciousness in multiple forms is also divinely interconnected with the consciousness and expressions within Mother Earth and Nature.  But for the time being, I will end here and say with joy: How much love there is in this view of the universe and Mother Life! How much promise, sweetness and potential for us in our one small, yet no less important lives!