I'm reading Five Lives Remembered by Deloras Cannon. Apparently I was supposed to read it before I took the QHHT course, but it was one of two books on the recommended reading list and I read the second one first, without realizing that it was the second one, and figured that was enough. This book really is a different take on reincarnation and the afterlife.
The book was written in the seventies, before almost all reincarnation stuff we see today existed, and it shows a naive and simplistic afterlife with no big messages, schools, hell, saints or teachers, and all described from the point of view of the deceased, with their level of education and world view. Later books contain much more detail. Deloras has said that she believes that she was shown only what she could understand and handle at the time.
My journey to acceptance of past lives was convoluted, I was regressed as a teenager, but I forgot what it was, for decades. I'm not sure why. I seemed to go through a patch where I didn't want to have anything to do with anything outside of the main stream. For some reason I didn't want to seem different or rock that boat is any way. I was studying computer science after all. I was busy working, going to school all year round, and then working and raising a family. Perhaps I was just too focused on being the husband, father, brother-in-law, son-in-law, fitting in and doing the right thing to take the chance I might be seen as different or someone wouldn't like me. For decades. Until the emptiness in my life and the pointless of it all could no longer be ignored. Everyone old enough has confronted the "mid life crisis" where you realize you are no longer on your way up, and all you see in the future is more of the same until you decline into death. You no longer can keep fooling yourself that there's a "it" waiting down the road where everything is going to fantastic.
You know how it is. Watching TV every night, the same shows, same job, same problems, same people, staleness and boredom insinuating themselves into every nook and cranny, turning everything gray and pointless. Looking back on that time, I understand why there are so many angry people, so quick to take offense and argue about the most trivial things. Of course they are, for what else IS there?
When you deny everything spiritual, you cut the heart out of life. I went along with the materialist program, though I liked a good bit of science fiction or fantasy. But I reached a point where weren't any good books or movies left. I just couldn't lose myself in them any more. I had no escape.
I tried focusing on religion for some years, but that also led nowhere. To me it just seems like materialism, except the goal is not getting rich but getting into heaven. The methods are the same: do the right actions, follow the right rules, hang with the right people and, boom, your in. Unless you're not, for there's no way to tell and the rules are really confusing and contradictory. Even if you win the prize and get to heaven, what do you get? Do you sit around all eternity doing nothing, or partying? Is the entire point of existence to struggle and suffer through an earthly life to then, if you somehow managed to measure up, make it to heaven where you spend the rest of eternity worshiping God and being an utterly useless slave!? My gut doesn't buy it, though I can concede that it may be all that people at a certain spiritual level can handle. I don't like it much because I want to believe that everyone has a chance to "reach for the stars" as it were. But perhaps it just takes time.
The Disappearance of the Universe by Gary Renard is what, I think, pushed me over the line. Somehow the ideas here seemed just possible. Maybe it really happened, maybe the ideas actually make sense and maybe I could accept enough of them to give some meaning to my life. I'm still asking that question, how much can I accept as "real?" Reality is not so black and white as I used to think, more like a million shades of gray.
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