36 - Past Lives and Awakening?

Let's discuss past lives.  Do we have past lives?  Are they important?  Why?  Do we need to believe in past lives to awaken?  Can they be proven?  Hypnosis and past lives.  Does Christianity prove reincarnation?  Psychology and past lives. Etc.

These podcasts are here to support your personal path of awakening whatever that might be. I feel they are most powerful when listened to in sequence from podcast one forward because each is built on the last. Though they, also, all stand on their own. If anything does not resonate, please disregard it and follow your heart. All my podcasts and website are free. Enjoy!

Though I am a psychotherapist, and these podcasts are offered to be spiritually helpful, they are not psychotherapy. If psychotherapy is ever needed, please reach out to a psychotherapist.

www.williamecooper.wordpress.com for more support. You may, especially, enjoy the short contemplations and the resource page which gives you some supportive material.

Transcript

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Hello, this is William Cooper. Welcome to Awakening Together, Relaxing into Happiness. I trust you're doing well. Today, let's talk about past lives. I understand that most people listening to this podcast already trust and believe in past lives, but because I've got a wide audience, some would really be interested in the discussion. At one time, I didn't believe in past lives. I was a conservative Christian, Church of Christ. We certainly didn't believe in past lives. I then went on to a four-year theological program, got my Master of Theology at what I considered one of the best, if not the best, theological school in the country at the time, and we didn't touch on past lives, at least not more than a sentence or two on the subject. Even after I loosened up and became a board president of a unity church, I still didn't feel comfortable nor believed in past lives. Now I do. What changed? Let's talk about it. First of all, I guess past lives could be defined in many ways, and what I'm talking about is a continuity of your life that you evolve over lots of lives, learning in each life, and then when you pass away in one life, you then continue and are born into another life, picking up where you left off with the things that you had to learn or wanted to learn, and moving on from there, culminating in where you are today. As you continue forward with your life and continue to open and blossom and bloom at your own pace, death is considered an illusion. There is a continuity of life where you continue. You pick up where you left off at the so-called end of each life, and you're born into the next life right where you left off, and you continue to open up from there. In one sense, there's less stress and more of a natural pace because you just let life unfold and follow your passions and trust that you will open, you will awaken, you will become your best self over a period of time, taking as long as it takes. There's a continuity of life with the concept of reincarnation. People who don't believe in past lives believe that they're influenced by all of the events in this life, and that culminates in where they are today. So, in one sense, it doesn't really make a difference. You are who you are today either way, and either way you can awaken, and either way you can work on your things, and either way you can have a family and a job and do all the things that you want to do, enjoy life. So, there really is no pressure to believe in past lives, nor in some sense a need to believe in past lives. Nonetheless, let's talk about them. I suppose that the biggest difference is with reincarnation. There is no pressure to get things right in one life. There is no such thing as death of your spirit, only death of your body, and you reincarnate into a new body as long as that's helpful for you, but your spirit continues on through various realities until your fullest and best self, and there really is no end to living or to life. Rather, death is an illusion. Early on, I started working with hypnosis. I was interested in hypnosis ever since I was a kid, and I used to study it. I even ordered a hypnotic record and would hypnotize myself for hours in our basement. I continued to study the concept through college, and in graduate school, we talked and worked a lot with hypnosis in the psychology department. I am a licensed professional counselor now, and through the years, I've worked with around 25,000 people with hypnosis. Early on in my career, I was trained just because I was curious in past life regression, and even though I've worked with 25,000 people, probably past life regressions, I've had under 100 cases, yet they were pretty interesting. One woman came to see me, and I typically worked mostly with traditional psychotherapy. I didn't push for somebody to do past life regression. She was referred to me, and I guess she knew that I did hypnosis, and she said, and she wanted to regress back to the source of a problem of hers. And she said, but one thing, she says, I do not believe in past life regressions. I don't want anything to do with past lives. Just go to this life and tell me where my problem began. She was the head of the Humane Society in her city and found that she was deathly frightened of horses, and she wanted to resolve that fright. So I used hypnosis as I often did in my practice, and I just asked her to be in touch with the fear that she felt, and I was going to count down to zero, and she would see what she saw and feel what she felt when the first time that she became alarmed with horses occurred. She was in deep hypnosis. So I counted back down to zero, but she herself popped up into a past life, and what had happened is she was an equestrian and going over a horse jump, and her foot got caught in the stirrup, and she fell off the horse, and the stirrup was dragging her. The horse was dragging her. It killed her, and it was a painful death. She was dragging along for some time, I guess. Anyway, in this life, she just was deathly afraid of horses. So if past lives had been excluded, she would have had a much more difficult time dealing with this fear because she couldn't get her finger on what could she resolve. It didn't happen in this life. That's the significance I found through hypnosis, to my surprise, was that past lives helped people explain things that they could not explain by events that occurred to them in this life, like phobias or anxieties that would pop up or depressions that had nothing to do with this life or their childhood in this life. They had to do with other lives, and if you cut off that avenue to touch those other lives, you can't get involved in the solution for them in the same way. My very first past life case was a man came to me and he had epilepsy, and he said he wanted to find out why he had the epilepsy. Now, people often assume that in past life regression, everybody comes out to be the queen of Egypt, Cleopatra, or some famous person, Jesus or somebody, but it's really not true. I don't think that ever happened in any of my past life regressions. In his case, he went back to the Middle Ages and he was just a humdrum soldier, and he did not stand up for himself. He got in a lot of bad circumstances. He had a miserable life, and then he ended up getting stabbed with a sword and died, and nothing much good happened in his life. Now, in this life, his... Uh-oh, I'm going to open another door here, but I'm just telling you what happened. His angels came and talked to me through him, and they said he was given epilepsy in this life because he had the kind of epilepsy that is only brought on by stress, and if he didn't tell the truth, if he didn't speak up, if he didn't have his voice, he would become stressed out and have an epileptic fit. So, epilepsy was given to him as a gift to force him to stand up for himself in this life and learn the things he needed to learn that he didn't learn in his past life because he was too afraid. So, when I avoided past lives, I was somehow truncating my life experience and not really touching on the continuity that goes on from life to life. Now, why would I do that? In my case, as a conservative Christian, it was forbidden, and I just went along with what people felt. Stephen Walensky, in his book, Trance As People Live, says that we are all hypnotized, and when people come into his office as a psychologist, he doesn't hypnotize them. He de-hypnotizes them out of their trance. I was in a trance. I somehow believed I couldn't be a Christian and believe in past lives at the same time. Certainly, nobody around me believed in past lives. Their heads would spin on their shoulders if I even brought up that word, and I didn't believe in past lives. That happened later. But later, as I looked back at the Bible, some very interesting things appeared. For instance, Jesus claims that John the Baptist is Elijah. Now, Elijah was a prophet way before John the Baptist died, way before. So, there would have had to have been a reincarnation if John the Baptist was indeed Elijah. You can read that in Matthew 11, verses 3 through 15, and also follow it up with Matthew chapter 17, verses 10 through 13. We could even build on that a little bit when Jesus asked the disciples who people thought he was, and his own disciples said, well, some say that you're John the Baptist, others say that you're Elijah, and still others, Jeremiah or one of the prophets. Now, all of those people died before. So, again, they would have had to reincarnated and become Jesus. And one more. When Jesus healed the blind man, the man who was born blind, the Pharisees asked him, why was he born blind? Was it a sin he did, therefore before he was born, or one that his parents did? So, again, he would have had to have lived before he was born to have done the sin to be born blind. So, implied in the question is also reincarnation. So, I was struggling over something that people of the time, including Jesus, really wasn't struggling with. They were fine with reincarnation. In fact, isn't Christianity centered around Jesus dying and being born again? Reincarnation. So, my whole reason for not believing in past lives was pretty much shot. But even so, I got there another way. This didn't even affect me. This is way after the fact. I just started noticing things in the Bible. And frankly, I don't care either way. But it just makes more sense. You know, the philosopher William of Ockham came up with the dictum, Ockham's razor, which says that usually the explanation that fits the facts the best and the easiest is the correct explanation. So, that's what started happening to me. There were so many different parts to this that past lives just fit the best. I'll tell you a few of the pieces that made sense to me and that I discovered long, long ago. As I said, I came from a conservative Christian background. And so, I was scared to death of psychics. I didn't even know if I believed in psychics. And I started investigating. And one of the things that I did to investigate was to read this book called There is a River about Edgar Cayce. And it was just amazing and super compelling. Anyway, Edgar Cayce believed in past lives. I'm not saying that did it, but it carried a lot of weight with me. This was way before people spontaneously started having past lives with me as a therapist or that I started looking at the Bible in a more relaxed way. But somehow it made sense to me. Let me ask you this question. Don't you feel timeless inside? I know your body is aging, but don't you feel timeless? Sometimes don't you feel very young, timeless? Well, your being is timeless. You know, in quantum physics, it's been proven that there's either no such thing as time or there's no such thing as space or both. That's proven as odd as that sounds. In fact, Einstein that came up with quantum physics, he believed that these principles, which hadn't been proved until long after he died, were spooky evidence of action at a distance. He thought it was spooky because it's crazy. In our reality, it doesn't make sense. Now, from an Indian perspective or Eastern perspective, maya is an illusion. Some people say that the world is an illusion. Others say, which is what I believe, it's a delusion. They say that one of man's strongest powers, siddhis, siddhas are people with powers, but one of those powers is the power of delusion. We can delude ourselves. We can hallucinate thoughts in our head and get lost in our own thoughts and concepts and not see things clearly. Why is that helpful? Well, sometimes it's not helpful, but sometimes it is because if we can delude ourselves, we can not be one with all things or at least appear not to be one with all things. As a separate person, you can enjoy things from afar. You can't worship somebody or something if you are that person or thing yourself. You can't enjoy chocolate quite as much if you are the chocolate. Instead, you want to be the person tasting the chocolate, right? So, there's actually some sects in India that try not to become one with everything, even though they know that's the deepest truth. They kind of enjoy getting to be almost one, but not quite one. They want to keep that slight separation. So, in general principle, there are two tasks in this creation or in this universe or in existence, however you want to call it. One is just to enjoy it. Just to enjoy it. And to enjoy it on one level, there's a certain way of enjoying it when you're a separate person. You have drama. You can die. Things are life and death. They're very dramatic. It's a good movie. It's our life. As Joseph Campbell would say, it's the hero's journey. And it's worthwhile. We learn a lot that way. But at some point, being separate is just too painful and it's not worth the effort. And we begin to let go of the delusions, the delusion that we're a separate self, that we are our thoughts, that we are our personality that's made of thoughts and emotions, just like we've talked about in previous podcasts. When we begin to let that go, we start to see clearly and we start to become one with all. And we experience the vibrancy, the bliss, the joy, the peace. I see the universe strobing in and out a million times a second. I experience it when I touch things. I feel they are made of love and bliss. We all, I was so cut off from myself and now I, even I, experience those things. So of course you can. And we all are. That's our journey into oneness, our awakening together. So that's our other task. The first is to enjoy life. The second is to find the truth of our life, which is ultimately oneness. And in that path, past lives play some role. If we're an individual, sure, it's all right to be born and die in this life. And that's all that happens because it supports our individual hypnosis. We are hypnotized to believe that that's so. But when we relax our intuition, at least my intuition, I feel a continuity that stretches beyond this life. It continues. It never begins and it never stops. It's one, like all life, all life force, all existence. I know it, but I can't prove it. Nobody can prove past lives. We can say, oh, Jesus said that, or this happened or that happened or Occam's razor or whatever we want, continuity, hypnosis, therapy sessions, but none of it proves it. And it doesn't need to prove it because either way you're good. Either way you're good. As I said, you can still awaken without believing in past lives. What often does happen as people do awaken, their intuition becomes clearer and they begin to see beyond the confines of the illusion of this simple world where we are today. And they start to feel the continuity of their life. It also occurred to me that the people who meditate quite a bit, the Buddhists, the Hindus, they all believe in continuity of life, reincarnation, past lives. Those are billions of people that sit down and meditate, become clearer in the ancient rishis and seers. That's what they saw. Aren't we being hypnotized by our culture? Are we looking for ourselves? But if we drop what other people are telling us, don't you feel timeless? Don't you feel that continuity? Of course you do. You stretch from one. You never die. You're never created and you never die. I mean, I don't want to get into this too deeply in this podcast, but when your personal self dissolves and you become one with all things, what that old Jesus said, the father and I are one, that's true. And all he talked about, by the way, he says he, he was trying to show us the way in the East. They think very highly of Jesus. He's the God of love. I mean, he's the guru of love and deep enlightenment. I absolutely know that Jesus did miracles because I've seen gurus do miracles. By the way, on my website, you can read about all of this. If you're interested, I've seen miracles. I've written a writing. It's entitled miracles. You can read it. If you want to talk about beyond time and space, and this was a huge surprise to me when it happened, but Archangel Michael and Jesus at different times appeared to me and we've had quite in-depth conversations. Krishna has. Just today when I was in the park, early in the morning, I've noticed over the last number of weeks, I start seeing between existences. So to speak, I start to see things in other dimensions. As you get clearer and clearer, this starts to happen, which kind of blows the old Newtonian physics out of the world, out of the water. And it is more quantum physics. Einstein was right. I know many of you have been experiencing these things for years and know exactly what I'm talking about. I'm mentioning these things for those that haven't, just to let you know they're going to be happening as you clarify, as you clear, as you sit and meditate and become clearer and clearer. They're pretty much automatic because that's the way things are. And you just start seeing it. You open to more and more of these realities that are all happening at the same time. When you put all this together, it doesn't prove it to anybody else, but it does to me. And as you awaken, you will be in touch with what you know. And this isn't any religion. There's nothing you have to believe. Just follow your truth. Let it unfold for you. I'm just explaining my perspective. And we're talking about past lives at the moment. Past lives indicate that there is no such thing as death, that you continue. And don't you feel deathless? Don't you feel that inside? It may not be the reality of your body, but don't you feel that? And really, what is awakening? It's letting go everything on the outside, letting go of all these other thoughts and emotions and fears and anger and hurt that would say otherwise. And when all that melts away, isn't what's left, doesn't it feel timeless? To the degree that you are in touch with your being, you know what I'm saying. And I think we're all in touch with our being on some level. You don't have to be completely awake to feel yourself. I mean, in the process of awakening, there's the bright light of you, the timeless you, the loving, joyful you. And it's there all the time. And then there are these clouds and blocks kind of floating around like nuggets in a soup. You can feel it all at once. You can feel the hurt, the pain, the blocks. But at the same time, somehow you feel peace around the edges. Tune into that. That's after all what you're tuning into when you do meditation. And if you haven't really become a consistent meditator, the reason you want to do that is because you're letting go of the delusion. Delusion is a good thing to use on yourself and others when you want to. It's a good power to have. It can allow you to enjoy separation and so on and so forth. But when it runs incessantly and you have no control over your power of delusion and you delude yourself, that's no good. So in meditation, we're letting go of those delusions as we've described in other podcasts. The method of meditation that I like a lot, and there are thousands of meditations, some relax you, some help you be more psychic, some help you manifest, some do this, some do that. They're all good. But what I suggest is a meditation simply to awaken and discover yourself because from there, manifestation happens effortlessly. Miracles happen effortlessly. Clear seeing happens effortlessly. Health happens effortlessly. Well-being effortlessly. That is the nature of your being. Happiness effortlessly. So why spend the energy on all these other things which do work when you can just go to the source and rest in your true self? You're the power of the universe. Anyway, on my website, I describe it and also an earlier podcast. You'll see it. I would listen to all these podcasts if you're new to all this. But my website address is www.williamecooper.wordpress.com. You can find a one-page summary of how to do that meditation under the Awakening Meditation tab and go to the writings and read, if you're interested in this topic, read Jesus and Archangels say hi and read the one entitled Miracles. Also, Ram Dass did a good podcast on the powers of Indian saints that he ran into. And so if you google Ram Dass Indian stories, it'll pull up that podcast. I don't know why I'm mentioning that right now, but it's a good one. I suppose all of them corroborate each other and just indicate that there's a lot more going on than our narrow hallucinations, our thoughts. They're the same thing. Allow, because those are just hypnosis, right? They're just tools that we make up. But when we really connect to life as it is, it's mind-blowing because it's well beyond the mind and it helps you in the process of your awakening. The bottom line is I enjoy relaxing in the truth and letting go of all the stuff I don't need that blocks and holds me back. That's what I enjoy at this stage of my life. Because we're talking about past lives at the moment, I'll say that it fits. It's the Occam razor that fits my experience the best. You see what fits yours the best. Okay, I'm enjoying this. I look forward to talking to you next time. Take care. Bye.