after my 2nd apparently failed attempt at past life regression, I had a series of amazing dreams all within a weeks time, not like any prior lucid or normal dream, but like reliving events sort of thing....
I've also been to a past life regression class and was to my judgment fruitless. I attended with a friend. However, I am able to induce out of body experiences almost at will (circumstances and environment tend to influence these ease of such experiences) remaining fully conscious the whole time. Generally what happens is I get to a point of stillness with my mind... enter a deep blackness that has a 3 dimensional vastness quality and then I begin to feel strong vibrations (these vibrations decreased over time) a loud rushing and/or long ringing tone and then the vibrations and tone die down as I feel myself become light and begin to slip free of my physical body. On numerous occasions I have come half way out of my body and poked and proded my physical body (usually the legs) with my "astral" hands/finger and still "felt" the pokes although it felt more like pressure or warmth going into my legs. I've studied the second body state extensively and obviously have more to learn. Anyway, for a number of years even though I had been having controlled full blown out of body experiences I did not believe in "past lives" because I had never experienced one. I went to the regression thing and it didn't seem to work for me.
However... and it's a big however, after several years of dedicated Qi Gong, Tai Qi and deep level meditation I began to literally feel these.. what I would call knots of energy within. Every time I released one of these knots my level of awareness, perception, as well as control and higher level astral experiences (and dreams) were heightened another level. At a certain point I started to have what I can only classify as memories surface during deep meditations that would sometimes seem like normal recollections and other times would be full blown relived moments from lives in the past. That is when I began to be much less skeptical of past lives. Personal experience is really the only way to truly know something. Anyway, the experience you shared is very interesting.
instead getting up and walking into another level of reality, first meeting a group of children who told me how they had died.... then being curious about what was up and what was next....I asked if I knew this one gal and she said no and I looked around and found no one I knew at all.... then I saw someone a head taller than all others and accepted him as a leader of some sort... I asked him If I should wait for my group or what? he said, no, but that I should not interfer too much in the life of others but to work my own path.
This sounds very classic or inline with my own and many others experiences.
then I grew curious about the other realm [this one] and asked why I still remembered it, but when I was there [here], I had no recollection of this side....
Whenever I leave my body in my second body, or my consciousness phases into a higher level through another form of meditation (this does not require leaving the physical body in the second body) I have regularly noted that I immediately KNOW much more and REMEMBER much more in those states than I do when I'm in my physical body. It is an expanded state that provides expanded memories and experience we do not always have access to while in the physical body. Your experience seems to coincide with my own in that way. People have asked me to prove the out of body experience to them by leaving my body and going and looking at something then coming back and telling them. However, I generally am not able to do that. Although I did visit a new friends house once I'd never been to and told him what kind of house it was (3 story), what color it was (blue), and that it resided in a culdesack and what the curve of the street and the hill beside it looked like. We were having coffee one day when I told him. He just stared at me and didn't say anything. I assumed I must have gotten it wrong. A couple days later he sat down with me and looked pale and shaken. He then proceeded to say he had been shaken up when I had described his house because it was dead on. He then grilled me about whether I had found out his address and had gone and looked at it. I had not. For a long time he still had a hard time believing it. People need to experience things for themselves to really know. I convinced him to try the meditation technique I use for leaving my body. To date he's had 3 out of body experience each successively longer and more controlled. He's on his way to some fun experiences. Anyway, I digress. What I was getting at is that a lot of times I'm not able to just decide to go somewhere and then have an out of body experience and then go where I decided to go while I was in my body. The reason is that when I leave my body I suddenly have more memories and different desires and purposes based on that expanded memory.
It's kind of like a person who lives in a house and while they are in their house they only know about the things in the house. But when they leave the house they are aware of much more. Imagine this person living in the house decides he's hungry and wants to go get some pizza and beer. However, the moment he leaves his house he remembers he's a fireman and he needs to go help rescue people in a fire. So, he goes and rescues the people in the fire and comes home afterward. He walks in the door to his home and suddenly he can't remember he is a fireman anymore and he says, "man why didn't I go get the pizza and beer?? (scratches head)"... what I've noticed is somewhat like that except that each time I come back I can still remember some of what I was doing while out of body and each time I bring back a little more memory from my expanded state. I think that the human brain does store information, but generally only memories and information having to do with this physical world. However, it is possible to go out and get other memories and information from other levels of consciousness and bring those back or transfer them back down into the human brain so that we can remember them while we are focused in this human physical body. Does any of this make sense to you?
I said, "but this realm is a mental invention too, right?"" he walked up to this window overlooking a city and tapped on the frame and said, ïts as real as real gets"" to which I protested and said "but it is a mental invention?"" and then I noticed another guide.... he was standing behind me to the right and he looked at this object sitting infront of me to the left and it lept into the air.... showing me, yes this world was also mental not physical as it appeared....
I don't see any disagreement here between your experience and mine. The only possible disagreement would be the interpretation of the experience. This is the one thing that can really snag us. We are creatures who want everything to be concrete and rational so we are always trying to rationalize and figure things out. However, we can't really every get the full understanding of our experiences because how we interpret our experiences always depends upon the combined full experiences we have experienced up until that point. Basically, we have limited resources from which to interpret our experiences at any given moment. So we do the best with what we have and hopefully we remain open to the possibility of being wrong and find ourselves being corrected as we go. Yes, I agree that every world IS mental that is, it proceeds from a consciousness and/or group of consciousnesses. I believe your experience does illustrate this very well. My own experiences agree. However, be careful not to take that one experience farther than it really goes. There is a lot of additional information your experience does not cover. It sounds to me like you were being somewhat teased about the nature of reality... given a bite if you will and allowed to bring the memory of it back with you into your physical mind.
Another thing people tend to do is read into their experiences way more than is there. For example, a guy has an out of body heavenly experience in which he's sees what he thinks is Jesus... so then he decides this means his is a special messenger of god and goes and starts a religion and convinces people god has chosen him... when perhaps what really happened is that the guy did indeed have his own personal experience, the entity was not Jesus but the guys own belief system projected that image onto the entity (who might be a guide), the entity may have given the guy a PERSONAL message meant for him and his life circumstances alone. However, the guy gets an ego trip and decides god has chosen him to create a following and tell everyone his message. I think a lot of smurfy "new age" gurus are somewhat like this. That being said although I've had A LOT of experiences I have NEVER received any indication that I was supposed to start any religion, bring a message to the masses, or that I was a special representative of god. I admit that in the very beginning I was tempted to think that way a little. However, over time as my experiences have expanded and my previous egocentric beliefs and misconceptions slowly stripped away it's become quite clear that each and every one of us is a unique individual with a very unique path and a unique purpose in the scheme of things.
Ian, it's also interesting that my personal experiences have led me to realize the value of letting go of attachment in order to realize true compassion and love. This is one of the things that was very striking to me when I finally got around to reading about Buddhism more deeply recently. This Buddhist philosophy agrees deeply with my own experience. I noticed as my experiences became more and more profound that I started loosing any interest in needing or wanting to accumulate wealth or earthly possessions aside from using such funds and items for positive purposes. Don't get me wrong, I still enjoy things as much as anyone, but I'm generally not unhappy without them, and I don't actively seek to fill my life with possessions and money beyond what I need to fulfill my purpose.
Additionally, when I was younger I always thought of love or felt love in a I WANT THIS kind of way. My experiences brought me to realize that true love is a real energy and it is not associated with possession of others but rather a willingness to give freely without expecting anything in return at all. In the past I had heard similar words before and of course read Jesus example in the Bible but honestly never understood them deeply until I began deep meditation and my subsequent experiences.
If there is any one message I would give to anyone or encouragement I would give to anyone it would be to meditate. Learn and practice many forms of meditation. Examine yourself, dive into your own inner world and know yourself more fully... and along with that learn to follow your own unique path and be content with it. Instead of trying to control everything around you, learn to be dynamic and change, go with the flow, as well as exherting your own will as you can along the way.
