My Past Lives

“Why should I fear death?

If I am, then death is not.

If Death is, then I am not.

Why should I fear that which can only exist when I do not?

Long time men lay oppressed with slavish fear.

Religious tyranny did domineer.

At length the mighty one of Greece Began to assent the liberty of man.”

Epicurius

When I was born, I almost died right away. Due to negligence on the part of the doctor, my leg was cut, and I inhaled fluids. My granduncle who's an Irish Jesuit priest, prayed over me at the hospital as did my mom and dad. I managed to survive thanks to their prayers and the skilled nurses who helped me.

However, I always wondered about this dramatic entrance fate seemed to have planned for me. Whether you're agnostic, atheistic, or religious, the concept of past lives and relived trauma is something you can find interesting and intriguing.

In this article, I want to explore the concepts of past lives through my own personal experience. However, before this article becomes a personal journey, I'd like to explore the concept of past lives more broadly.

**Before we dive in, this is meant as an exploration. This shouldn't be seen as my beliefs or personal endorsement of any belief system**

What Was the Gnostic Perspective of Past Lives?

“When they come forth from the body, such a soul is given over to the powers created by the rulers, bound in chains, and cast into prison again. Around and around it goes until it manages to become free from forgetfulness through knowledge. And so, eventually, it becomes perfect and is saved."

The Secret Book of John (Apocryphon of John) http://www.gnosis.org/naghamm/apocjn-davies.html

The term "Gnostic" is somewhat unpopular among scholars these days. This is because there doesn't seem to have been a sect of Christians who identified themselves by such a term. Rather, it was a blanket term applied to a vast variety of dissenting Christian sects during the early church era.

The term Gnostic is used by most lay people today to refer to dissenting early Christians. The term Gnostic means "Those who know," from the Greek term for knowledge, Gnosis.

Generally, these diverse peoples believed in a complex cosmology where the God of the Old Testament was an evil deceiver. This runs contrary to the mainstream Christian worldview, where the God of the OT is the same as the NT.

Simply put, Gnostics believed you should prize your own understanding above the writings of the Bible. "To know," to them, was synonymous for "To know God."

I'm not here to evangelize anyone into either view, but I believe it's important to have a basic and honest understanding of their beliefs.

Some of the names Gnostics used for themselves included:

• The Children of Light
• Sethians
• Cathars

I'll use the term Gnostic today, but just keep in mind that not all Gnostics applied the same beliefs, and they varied widely. But they differed from mainstream Christians primarily in their belief about where knowledge originates.

Mainstream Christians believe true knowledge of God comes from the Bible and God. Gnostics believed true knowledge of God could only come from truly understanding yourself.

Gnostics did not believe in Heaven and Hell the same way Mainstream Christians did. They did not believe that sinners went to Hell. Rather, they believed the earth is hell and our goal was to escape this illusion.

Some of you might see some similarities between this belief and the Buddhist teachings of Maya (illusion) and Nirvana (Nothingness). This isn't surprising, since many Gnostic teachers actually journeyed to the east and may have engaged with Buddhist and Hindu teachers.

If souls did not go to hell or heaven, where did they go?

They were recycled. Gnostics believed the soul would cycle in and out of the earth (illusion) until it could shake off the illusion. Therefore, your soul could die and be reborn thousands of times before you finally come to the light.

This belief was carried well into the Middle ages when the Cathars of France preserved it. However, thanks to persecution by the Catholic Church, the belief fell into obscurity in the West until it was only recently reborn in the 19th and 20th centuries.

Who Were the Cathars?

Awake, Arise!

Or be forever fall'n!

John Milton, Paradise Lost

The Cathars were a group of heretical Christians dwelling in the South of France from 1100 to 1200. They believed in a Manichean dualism, where two fierce deities warred against one another eternally.

The devil was equally as powerful as God but evil. To the Cathars, this was the God of the Old Testament, the one who tortured and tormented our souls with illusions.

Similar to the Gnostics, their Spiritual Forebearers, they did not believe in Heaven or Hell. They believed the soul would cycle over and over again until the soul was purified and finally absorbed into the Father in its purest form.

Sadly, this last remaining remnant of Gnostics was annihilated in the 13th century after the Pope issued a decree that they should be extinguished. At Chateau de Peyrepertuse the final stronghold of Cathars were viciously killed by the Inquisition (soldiers actually killed them and many Cathars never saw a trial).

Hundreds of people died in a single night. Those who managed to escape threw themselves to their deaths over the cliff edge, hoping this would release them from their physical bondage.

Moving Forward or Backward?

Now, fast forward over 700 years. People throughout the mid-1900s reported having traumatizing memories of throwing themselves from a cliff, seeing a fire, and being pursued by men like a hunted beast.

Dr. Arthur Guirdham, a psychiatrist in the mid-1900s, treated several women from Bath, England, who claimed to see images such as the ones above. He actually wrote a book, The Cathars and Reincarnation, where he documents their journey and amazing experiences from their past lives.

He believed these women were remembering real experiences of past lives.

While his claims are highly contested, there are some stunning reasons why his reasoning makes some sense. His clients were able to describe features of the Cathar culture that were unknown at the time, and later confirmed.

These include, what their coins looked like, the types of robes they were, their opinions of sex, and more!

While I'm not going to claim this "proves" past lives, it raises some interesting questions. One of the most interesting explanations was a Jungian belief that places can be psychically traumatically imprinted.

Similar to how a person can be traumatized by an event, places can hold this trauma as well. When people visit these places they relive the trauma of those who suffered in these places before them.

Or, perhaps it's a similar phenomenon to Jerusalem Syndrome. Jerusalem Syndrome is a phenomenon where people travel to the Holy Land and suddenly start to reenact the life of Christ or one of His Apostles.

Whatever the cause, the notion of past lives is a fascinating one. Now I'll tell you a little more of my story and why this matters to me.

Pursued

Ever since I was little I've had a horrific dream which always plays out exactly the same. The youngest I recall having this dream was three years old.

This is the dream:

I'm a young girl, perhaps 7. I have brown hair. I'm wearing a white dress, but it's dirty, and so am I. I'm panting and frightened. I've been running for days and haven't eaten.

I'm in a logger's camp someplace in the mountains. I'm hiding behind one of the large trucks which holds a bunch of large trees which have been chopped down. In my mind I can see a man.

He has short brown hair and is balding in the front. Blue eyes. A mustache. He's thin. I can tell he wants me. I panic and decide to run again. Even though I don't look back, I can sense him chasing me through the forest.

I trip.

He's on top of me. I feel him rape me and then I wake up.

I've had this same dream hundreds of times and it always plays out the same. I never knew what to make of it, but while I was traveling through Southern Pennsylvania to visit West Virginia at the age of 23 I had a very strange experience.

I saw the area and had an overwhelming feeling of dread, horror, and like I've been here before. Now, I've never visited this region before that day and hadn't had any negative experiences in a place that looked similar.

Something inside me felt like the little girl in the dream. I've been here before and something horrible happened to me here. Still, I could not make sense of this feeling nor did I know who this young girl was.

While I lived in West Virginia I befriended a woman who was a mystic. She told me I am an old soul. When looking over my palm she noticed my lifeline was broken.

She told me that this meant I was unable to fulfill my fate in my previous life. My past life, which was supposed to be my final journey to this world, was cut short. I was sent back but was unwilling to re-enter the world thanks to the traumatizing experience I had in my previous life.

What to Make of it All?

I still wonder about my dream and the possibililty of past lives. What do you think of past lives? Do you think they're real or something else?

There is such thing as past life regression. Has anyone ever received this treatment?

You can learn more about the Cathars here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PDT00aT24_c

Thank you so much for reading this article! I hope you enjoyed :) :) :)