Elemental Chaos

Maybe I'll be back some other day
To live again just who can say
In what shape or form that I might be
Just another chance for me
***
Time is up it couldn't last
But there's more things I'd like to do
I'm coming back to try again
Someday maybe I'll wait till then

~ Steve Harris from To Live Again

It's ironic that I should start this article with a quote from an Iron Maiden song, as the band first rocketed into popularity in the 1980's. You see, I missed the 80's as far as music and other popular culture are concerned. I was deep into spiritual journeying at the time, travelling and experiencing inner and outer worlds and the art of pushing boundaries to discover the full magical potential of life on the edge. It was the sort of real life study that many people only read about on the internet. For three years of that time, I devoted myself to intensive study of reincarnation.

There was no specific catalyst for this. Many people begin to study questions of life after death when they come close to death in some way, either themselves or through a close loved one. There were no traumatic accidents, bouts with disease or loved ones suddenly taken from me then. For me it was just a need to know.

Like many questions of spirituality, reincarnation has been hijacked to a degree by the New Age. Even at Pagan conferences you will meet many people who were once priestesses of Atlantis, crystal healers from Mu, and similar lofty characters from periods of history that hold a certain romanticism. They remembered their former glory in meditation, or a vision. In some cases, a close friend even hypnotised them after taking a weekend course in regression hypnosis. There was a message on a serious magic(k) e-list recently from someone who listed past lives as a Crystal Healer of Atlantis, an Egyptian Priest, a Roman General and a Greek Oracle reader.

SAFEWORD!

Oh sorry, wrong alternative group…but you get the idea. While I can't attest with perfect conviction that nobody has ever gone through eternity moving from one place of glory or spiritual importance to another only to land here, where they work in a factory and live a seemingly ordinary life between dropping nuggets of great wisdom into the collective information pool of the cyberwaves, a pedigree of this sort does raise a healthy dose of scepticism. This is actually a good thing when pursuing a subject with unquantifiable facts. It keeps the mind questioning every detail, even of one's own experiences in the process.

My study began with the usual book research. I scoured libraries, even bought several volumes, and read endless case histories of people who had examined past lives through professional hypnosis. It was interesting that a wide variety of sources were coming up with similar experiences of people describing their death memories, either from a near death experience in this life or at the end of the tale of another. While some of these experiences like the tunnel of white light have become widely known now and may well be suggestible to new subjects of this form of hypnosis, the books I read were written when it was all a very new study.

Naturally it didn't take long for me to decide that this method of research was something I wanted to try. I was in a large city at the time, which made it much easier to find a qualified practitioner. My choice of hypnotist was a psychiatrist (not a psychologist) with the attendant medical qualifications to filter out much of the potential for nonsensical approach that one might get from an Atlantian Priestess with a certificate from a weekend course who had come back to help others.

He was a highly qualified hypnotist who normally used this skill for therapeutic purposes. He also charged accordingly, although I believe the price was less than his ordinary psychiatric fees would have been for the same time commitment. He certainly wasn't doing it for the money. My first conversation with him convinced me that he had a serious attitude toward the subject and practised this area of hypnosis because he had a similar interest to mine. He could glean much second hand research from his subjects.

Before my first appointment, I took steps to follow another path of research simultaneously. I pulled three adverts out of the back of magazines that list psychic readers and invested a small amount of money in what I saw as an objective experiment. Rather than assuming that they were all bunk, I wrote to each of the three, sending along my small fee. It took some self-discipline to collect the replies without opening them until I had finished the three hypnosis sessions which in the end, were all I could afford. But I managed it.

Hypnosis is never what you expect it to be on the first trial. Many people don't realise that you cannot be hypnotised against your will, conscious or not, or that it relies heavily on your active co-operation. My first session was an introduction to the method. I was taken into hypnotic trance and traced memories from my early current life, much of which I have always actually remembered without the benefit of hypnosis. Some of the less remembered events took a bit of a struggle, I did have some resistance, but in the end it was largely a success.

On each of the following two sessions, I was taken back further. I didn't get the transitional experiences that I had read about. No tunnel of white light or loved ones waiting for me, but I did get some definite visions of places that felt suddenly familiar with people I suddenly knew. Most of these were snippets, a moment on a Greek hillside with my gay lover (yes, I was a man in some of them) or a few moments as a girl urchin in what looked like a rather nasty part of Paris, wishing I was back in the countryside where things were clean.

Countryside? I've always been a city girl…but not then. You see, this was the telling part. To feel and experience a situation as someone else, with different likes and dislikes than the self I was now. There were no celebrity memories, no lofty pries(tess) positions, although there was one snippet where I may well have been sacrificed on an Altar, it wasn't one of the more clear memories and I would question its authenticity.

The clearest memory spanned across both sessions. It came in the second session and we tried to explore it further because of its length and clarity. Again, there was no position of importance and again, it was the memory of a man. Hardly a man really, a new recruit around the age of 18 in the German army that was in a trench about to be overrun by the enemy. My best friend Hans was already dead, lying against the side of the trench with arm outstretched across the rifle that did him no good. The rest of us were about to die, but we were so miserable that it was easier to accept.

For just a moment, I wished I had taken up flying as one of our planes was overhead, above the danger. There was no thought of anti-aircraft weaponry, as far as I knew nothing of the sort existed. The plane couldn't do much to help us, but it would be a nicer place to be than the trench. I saw the uniforms of the enemy as they attacked us, and then nothing.

What was significant about this memory was the absolute feeling of being this other person. And then, something I didn't expect occurred. I left the session as myself, walking down the pavement toward the bus stop, and more memories of life as this other person came to me. Just little things, but all too natural recollections of the ordinary. There had been a post-hypnotic suggestion to remember all I had seen of course, but this after-memory was something I had never read about in the case histories.

On the last session, the hypnotist took me back to this experience, and tried to take me further before the last day in the trench. I remembered everything I had seen before clearly. Then I had flashbacks to going into my father's study at a younger age, feeling a little frightened because I was not normally allowed in there but I had been summoned. The large sepia globe of the world stood out among ornate chairs and a table that spoke of some elegance. Apparently we were fairly well-off, but not enough to keep me from the front lines. My impression was that my father had actually encouraged me to join the army, out of patriotism.

I was not the best hypnotic subject. Looking for detail in my memories was a struggle. But enough had come from the two sessions of this particular life to do some research. When I had described the plane and the uniforms to the hypnotist who was much older than myself, he suggested that I should look into the first world war. This was a period wholly unfamiliar to me, as my history classes had only skimmed it on the way to WW2. Funny how the world is still so fascinated with Nazi's, but they didn't exist yet in my life in Germany.

I went to the library. This was where it got a bit weird. I had read of people who actually remembered their own names and relatives that they were able to look up, sometimes even addresses. My information was nowhere near as detailed, yet the vision of the bottom of a plane and a vague impression of uniforms was a starting place. It was the plane I was hoping to find, and some indication in history that would justify a strong feeling I had during the hypnosis that we were travelling north before we had been stopped.

As a chaos magician I've grown very used to the 'lucky co-incidence' as a lifestyle, but I was very young then and it was still always a surprise. I tried to look up books on WW1 only to be faced with a card catalogue (yes, there was a time when libraries used drawers full of cards instead of computers) full of WW2, no use to me. Eventually I went to an information desk to ask for help. By a 'lucky co-incidence', the library director was at the desk speaking to the person behind it and overheard my query. He explained to me that WW1 would be listed under 'European War' and went to get some books for me. I had explained that I wanted to identify a plane and he knew which books would have a lot of pictures.

I went for the book on planes first. He had actually brought me a nice pile of books that covered various aspects of the war. Only the enthusiasm of a librarian could have provided such vehement information. It didn't take many pages to find what I was looking for. Pictures of the undersides of planes, and a Fokker just like the one I had seen staring back at me. What I hadn't expected was another of the books which had many photographs of trenches. I flipped through casually, easily recognising 'ours' from 'theirs' by style. All of 'ours' of course being the German trenches. We definitely had our own way of making them. For someone who has never taken an interest in war, it was rather eerie to suddenly feel so knowledgeable about such details.

Then I got to the map of battle lines and all became clear. The only one facing north was on the border of Lithuania. In another of the books, the uniforms confirmed the nationality of the troops that massacred us that day. I had previously had no idea that WW1 went toward Russia before then, not in this life anyway.

It was about then that I opened the psychic reader envelopes. Neither had anything about my life in Germany, but one had the life as a French girl during the Revolution and another had my Greek experience. Spooky! The third had nothing that related toward anything I had seen. That two out of three had contained any correlation at all was a surprise to me. I hadn't expected much of these readings. Still, it was what I felt of my hypnosis memories that convinced me that something here was very real.

The question is, how does reincarnation actually work? If you start looking into the Eastern religions where the belief came to us from, you will find several versions. The best known is the basic Hindu idea of moving from one human life to another, learning things along the way until you become 'enlightened' and return to a central force called 'Godhead'. The Hindu theory of creation suggests that creation begins when the individual souls becomes separated from the undifferentiated One. In some of the Oriental versions of reincarnation the soul may start as an animal or even insect form, and rise through 'higher levels' until they reach a human existence where the process of perfection through experience continues. This has been taken up by the 'New Age' to a degree that a woman once told me that she had been the water in a pond and the partner I had at the time had been an oil slick that had killed her.

Further into New Age philosophy we come across the idea of parallel lives. This idea is related to the perfection of the soul, but in several bodies simultaneously. It is offered as an explanation for the increasing number of live humans walking about as well as a warning that we have to hurry up and perfect ourselves before the end of the world, another theory which continues to exist in several versions.

It would seem that the theory of reincarnation has evolved and reincarnated itself, but that does not change the hypnotic experiences of those who have been there. Many of these have been children who could identify addresses from a previous life and remember details from these lives to the extent that in at least one case study a child demanded repayment of a debt from an old brother-in-law. The evidence is there, but the tendency to theorise takes over until the belief that consensus reality will change the workings of the universe and the realm of Spirit drown it in its own credibility.

Modern magicians have started coming up with ideas for reincarnation rituals. There is precedent for this in Hinduism, but of course it takes a different flavour from a 21st century Western magician. The question is, does it work? There are some obvious difficulties in applying the scientific method to this one. First, you have to identify several subjects who are unavoidably near death and gain their co-operation. Then, they each get one shot at after-death communication with the living researcher. Add to this the evidence that lives seem to generally recur many years apart, even centuries, and the whole project goes up in scientific smoke. We are left once again with fragmented evidence and personal belief and experience.

It may be that modern magicians could set the groundwork for eventual proof of reincarnation. It would mean setting up a research base that could span a great deal of time, something like a project within the Theosophical Society that could be perpetuated through several generations. You don't know if you don't try. If my only experience of hypnosis regression had been the light hypnosis and vague impressions that generally occur with a weekend hypnotist, I probably wouldn't be convinced enough to see it as worthwhile. Yes, I've had that experience too.

However, for those of us who have seen and felt ourselves in another time and place in a way that the objectivity of research will not invalidate, the belief will not fade regardless of what research is done or not. The need to prove it to others may vary with each person, but the intent to prove it to ourselves in future incarnations is an ever-present temptation. All it needs is method. The changing theories roll off as irrelevant in the face of clear memories and personal proof. The belief systems of religions are similarly meaningless to me, I do not believe in any central god force by whatever cultural perspective one applies to it. What is left is absolute belief that new experiences await me in a different time and place, and contemplation of what skills and experiences I am gaining now to take with me into the next round.

I haven't finished with this life yet, many new experiences still await me. The Taoists believe that we choose our own life span. It makes one wonder if we might also make that choice, to live again.