The Soul Remembers

At the age of 10 my perception changed. I was an awakening to something outside
of myself, that there was a larger scope to the world than just my being. In
looking back at this experience, I realize that what I was sensing was the
collective consciousness of the people who comprise this planet. I have since
felt a much greater consciousness beyond the Earth, as well as more of my own
consciousness, but for now I'll focus on just that first awakening.
My awakening caused a flood of curiosity about the world and how it
works---meaning how and why people act, think, and feel the way they do. I began
questioning the way things are, wondering why about everything.
My asking why at first was a purely mental quest for information and knowledge,
but the more facts I loaded into myself, the more I was able to define that what
I was yearning for was not of a mental or physical nature. My questioning was
coming from my spirit. The answers around me in the society were not satisfying
to me. Something was missing in the Christian philosophy and practice that was
ubiquitous in my surrounding environment. Thus began my spiritual quest to find
'something' that gave me an answer, which would be equated to a sense of
satisfaction.
In my desire to find Truth, harmony, and fulfillment, I was drawn to the
emerging sense of spirituality that was entering into the mainstream. It started
off as New Age, but this is a broadly applied term just as Paganism is a broadly
defined term for any religion or spiritual philosophy that is non-Christian.
I began meditating and practicing the methods put forth by Eastern and New Age
philosophies. I really liked Zen!
As I worked on exploring Reality and my own consciousness, things started to
happen that left the realm of the mainstream. I had entered the realm of the
spiritual where the rules no longer necessarily apply.
One of my first experiences that is still with me today took place in a dream. I
was 15 yo at the time and I had a boyfriend. He was a Native American and was
very much into exploring his ancestral roots of shamanism and NA spirituality.
I awoke from this dream feeling very peculiar. It left me with a very intense
feeling that I could not rationally explain. In the dream I was riding in a
carriage, it was the 1700s, and I was in Europe, the country look liked France,
but it may have been anywhere on the European continent. In the carriage with me
was a man who sat opposite to me, and I looked at him, and I knew him, not just
in the Biblical sense, but much more complex. There was this intense feeling of
love between us, the kind of pure love that you can only feel when you aren't
weighed down by a physical body. It's pure love energy, and there is nothing
like feeling this, because it fills you all up and it's just wonderful to
experience because there is room for nothing else.
I felt guilty for feeling this love for this man, because my mind thought back
to my current boyfriend. My logic said, you shouldn't be feeling this way about
this man because he isn't your boyfriend, and you're only supposed to love one
person. Until that thought entered my mind that I had a boyfriend, I was this
other person---the person in the carriage traveling back to our home that was a
chateau.
I couldn't shake the feelings of this dream, nor the intensity of it, so I told
my boyfriend about it, wondering if he might know what had happened. His
response was that I had dreamt of a past life. I was incredulous at first. No,
that couldn't be the answer. I wasn't totally sold on the idea of reincarnation,
it was something that I entertained as a possibility, but felt that it was a bit
hoaky because the New Agers that always talked about it always claimed to be
famous people of the past. How many Cleopatras, Caesars, and other assorted
historical figures could there be?
He explained to me that a past life, especially if there was an intense feeling
or experience, will work its way into your active consciousness. The feelings
that I had for my previous husband were very intense, and in that life I was
very happy. There was a need for this past life to be remembered, which was why
it was revealing itself. He encouraged me to contemplate this previous life to
find out more, and so I did work on it. I was able to uncover that this
particular life ended unpleasantly, and unresolved issues from that life were
manifesting in this current incarnation.
How they menifested themself took a number of years to come full circle, so the
dream I had was only the begining of the journey. In my next post I will
continue with what happened next, and I will give the conclusion.