(In which your spiritual adventurer shares his first two experiences with past lives.)
Continued from My Spiritual Journey, Part 1
My Spiritual Journey, Part 2
My Spiritual Journey, Part 3

In my experience, karma and reincarnation are real, though not the caricature of “If you step on a bug, it could be your grandmother.”

Here are the basics for me: I am Soul, a Divine spark of God. I have always existed and always will exist. God created many lower worlds as a kind of school for Soul to experience every story, every kind of life. We grow in spiritual awareness. The main rule is, everything you think, do, and say, like little boomerangs, comes back to you. They can return in minutes or lifetimes. You are 100% accountable for everything you experience.

The worlds of God are grandly divided into two unimaginable segments.

• The lower worlds of time, space, motion, matter, and language, roughly representing the physical, astral (emotional), causal (lower-world past life records), mental (where most religions reside), and etheric (subconscious).
• The pure positive higher worlds, the God worlds of pure Spirit, beyond mind, beyond language, beyond philosophy, beyond karma and reincarnation. Worlds of pure Divine Love.

After thousands upon thousands of lifetimes, Soul reaches a point where it gets bored with repeating the same stories and begins looking for a return home to God. The primary law is, You Gain All by Giving All. You move away from self-indulgence and self-service to serving all life with unconditional Divine Love.

You strive to overcome the lower psychic worlds, the lower worlds of duality, to achieve a passionate, non-judgmental neutral state that allows you to serve all life, wherever that may be, without judgment, including self-judgment.

And that’s why Eckankar is so darn hard and remains a tiny religion. To face oneself fully without judgment is the foundation to truly serving others where they are at, not where you would want them to be.

Everything important in Eckankar defies language. The language of Soul is a language of Seeing, Knowing, and Being.

* * *

Eckankar promised me experiences with past lives, dreams, and Soul Travel (not astral travel, a different lower world thing.) In my first ten years practicing the various Spiritual Exercises of ECK, I had experiences with dreams and Soul Travel. But I did not have any past-life experiences. Not even in dreams.

I wondered why. Like many who start on spiritual paths like this, I wanted phenomena, experiences. But one thing that happens with the spiritual exercises is that they open your heart more and more to Divine Love, so your spiritual focus begins to shift upward.

Spiritual exercises also build spiritual stamina so that you can handle spiritual realizations. Little did I know in those first ten years that there is a good reason why the veil is drawn to hide our past lives.

* * *

I was at my townhouse in Carmichael, CA. My roommate was out for the day, thank goodness.

I was reading a wonderful book collection of essays by an English professor from the first half of the 20th century. My college friend and I (he now teaches in a Catholic university in Texas) had been in Berkeley visiting all the used books stores, most of which no longer exist. My friend called out to me, “Hey, here’s a book by that guy you like.”

I took it from him. Long after the author had passed, his two elderly daughters had published this collection of essays. At first, I wasn’t sure I wanted to pay the $10 cost, but an inner nudge told me that I would regret not buying it. I bought it.

That day in the townhouse, I read one essay after the other, enjoying the heck out of the writing. The guy wrote in ways that reflected how I thought.

Then I hit a passage where he explicated an idea that I had had but I had never heard anyone else express. And that knocked me back a bit. I thought, “Who is this guy?” I turned to the back of the book and read a little of his biography.

He was born in the late 1800s, had started out in college focused on math and science, but later he switched to English and ended up heading up the English department at Swarthmore college.

Wow, he was just like me. I had started out focused on math and science (my Math score on the SAT was 750, old style) but after some computer programming classes and then selling articles to computer magazines and having a monthly column in a monthly computer newspaper, I had switched to an English major, thereby discovering great literature, Dante, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Samuel Jonson, and the ancient Greeks.

I read more of the essay and noted how he phrased sentences the same way I thought, and his authorial voice projected a kind of enthusiasm which was very much like mine.

I went back to the bio and noted that he had died in 1950. I had been born in 1956. I thought, “I wonder if this could have been me?”

What happened next is hard to describe. A voice that was not a voice, but more like the entire universe conveying something to me, said with a resonating loudness inside, “It is you.”

And I felt myself break through a shattering pane of glass. The awareness that I was reading something I had written more than 40 years prior flooded into my consciousness.

I jumped off the couch, throwing the book away like a hot potato, backing away, shaking, tears forming in my eyes. Yes, it freaked me out. I had never had such an experience before.

After I had calmed down a bit, I crept back to the book and continued reading. It was like looking into a mirror.

Some years later, my wife and I were in Pennsylvania, and I decided to drive to Swarthmore and see if being there triggered any feelings. All the buildings had been replaced so nothing resonated. But I saw the Friends Historical Library and decided to go in and ask about this professor. They pointed me to an archive of materials, lesson plans, student evaluations, and testimonials upon his retirement. They let me copy them all. Here’s a picture of him/me at the time of his/my retirement. (Hey, pronouns can be useful after all!)

One reason our past lives are hidden is due to the shock to the mind when remembered. “Mark” is no longer unique. He is one of a series of personalities that are more like clothing for the true identity of Soul. The mind resists the idea that this ego is not primary, but rather secondary to the spiritual identity that we all can claim.

In Eckankar, the inner teacher takes the individual on a journey to becoming aware as Soul in such a way as to minimize the shock. That’s why Eckankar has to be an individual path, customized for each Soul. It is not a cookie cutter religion that one must fit into. One fits it into one’s own life and journey of Soul.

That is why when you talk to difference members this religion, current and former, they will tell different kinds of stories, customized to their experiences and spiritual needs.

Okay. On to a much more problematic lifetime. One that has some historical notice, but one who almost nobody has heard of (thank goodness) although given this educated audience, I wouldn’t be surprised if a handful of you have heard of him.

Although many people want to claim famous past lives, I’m sure nobody wants to claim this infamous one.

I was born with a powerful sarcastic wit. I grew up thinking I was very funny, having no idea, until sometime in high school, that I was causing great harm. With that glimmer of awareness, I attempted to moderate my comments. But to no avail.

It was as if my sarcasm was in my cells, on autopilot. I wanted to reign it back, even eliminate it, or at least have some conscious control over it, but I failed, year after year.

Once I became a member of Eckankar, I realized sarcasm is a form of anger. Apparently, I carried a deep anger without any understanding why. I asked for help in contemplation, but year after year it continued. I later understood that I was not ready to confront this lifetime.

Several years after my first past life recall, I was ready to face my second. A dear friend who I helped write the initial draft of her book, was also the only kinesiologist that I trusted, about 95%. (She mentions me on the Acknowledgement page, which you can view in the Sample. She is the exceptional master of the Monet style of impressionistic painting.)

While working on her book, I asked if she could help me figure out the source of my sarcastic humor. She came up with a past life in Restoration English where I was an Earl. That’s as far as we got.

For years I had owned the Durants’ classic, 11-volume The Story of Civilization, required reading for anyone who wants a classical education in history. I decided to see if I could locate that lifetime with the minimal clue of Earl under Charles II. (This was pre-Internet.)

I pulled out volume VIII, “The Age of Louis XIV,” turned to the index and started looking up all the Earls, starting with the A’s. First up, “Argyle, Archibald Campbell, 9^th Earl of.” I turned to the proper page and read about him. Nothing. Next up, “Arlington, Henry Bennet, Earl of.” Turned to the page. Nothing.

I don’t know what kind of recognition I was expecting, but I was well into my second hour of research when I hit a name, one that I did not recognize, and just with the name, I was filled with a sense of dread.

“Rochester, John Wilmot, 2nd Earl of.”

I turned to the pages 270-271, thinking “Oh, no.” Here is a splash of what I read, with a growing sense of nausea.

[Buckingham’s] rival in figure, wit, revelry, and decay was John Wilmot, second Earl of Rochester…Charles repeatedly banished him from the court, and repeatedly let him return, relishing his wit. Like Buckingham, her was an expert mimic… In nearly all his disguises he pursued women, quite disregarding their rank…He amused himself by writing satirical obscenities, ruined himself with liquor and lechery. And boasted of having been drunk uninterruptedly through five years. He died in poverty and penitence at thirty-three…Rochester wrote a play entitled Sodomy.

Ugh. I closed the book after reading all the pages referencing Rochester. I thought, “Great. That’s done. Maybe I can now let go and move on.” Little did I know that I had just started a three-month process requiring not only acceptance of this kind of lifetime, but also forgiveness and not beating myself up about such a lifetime.

I didn’t want to learn anymore, but inwardly Rochester would not go away. There were nights where I felt like my body was being beaten up by the karma of that lifetime.

I bought novelist Graham Greene’s Lord Rochester’s Monkey in which Greene found some redeeming literary value in Rochester’s poetry. I ended up buying collections of his works, wondering how I could get past all this.

Weeks went by where I mentally tried time and again to let go, not judge, be neutral, but nothing seemed to work. One afternoon I manned the Sacramento ECK Center. I tried to put Rochester out of my mind, but I couldn’t, and I couldn’t sit still. My body felt twisted with this gunk. I walked around feeling like the Elephant Man. There was a group HU song coming up, where several of us would gather and sing HU together. I wanted this out of my system. I didn’t want to pollute the HU song with this gunk.

The HU song started, and about two minutes in I knew there was no avoiding it. So I simply mocked up an image of Rochester’s face, one that was puffier and more unpleasant than any image I had seen, and simply starting singing HU into the image.

A minute later I smelled something burning. I opened my eyes to see if the heat had turned on, or if anyone else was smelling it. No to both, so I closed my eyes again focusing on the smell. It turned out to be sandalwood incense. I was not a fan of incense, having quit smoking. But this was different. It was like someone was holding a bowl of sandalwood incense under my nose and I started breathing in these healing vapors.

There is a Tibetan ECK Master named Rebazar Tarzs, who is associated with sandalwood incense and healing. I knew he was present even though I did not see him. I breathed in those healing vapors, and they were like oxygen. I watched inwardly as the vapors went deep and cleaned out the stain of Rochester at the cellular level. In minutes the spiritual cleansing was complete. At the end of the HU song, I opened my eyes, still smelling the sandalwood. No one else smelled it.

From that moment on, my sarcasm was a choice. I was rid of that automatic behavior. HU is Divine Love, and I realized then that Divine Love is a non-judgmental healing love. Getting out of my mind and letting the Holy Spirit in was the secret to Spiritual Freedom from past lives.

And it turned out that facing that lifetime was the key to opening the door to many others. Over the next six months, past lives opened up going back 2,000 years.

Next up, Soul Travel experiences.