Y'all know I'm a member of the Rhine Research Center's Book Club, right? We get to read some really dry material sometimes. And sometimes we get the juicy stuff. I'm here to tell you about the juicy stuff.
A few months ago, we read Carol Bowman's Children's Past Lives: How Past Life Memories Affect Your Child. Really good book! (I reviewed it here.) In it she discussed the mounds of evidence about kids having legitimate past-life memories, but her approach was different. She examined this from a "how does it affect the child?" point of view, with the hopes of easing any trauma the child might experience.
Why should someone want to come back with the same people around? Turns out that people can want to make things right between themselves and another person. Or there's the simple fact that they love that other person and want to continue to live with them.
There's one instance in the book concerning twins. They were being carried by Mother A. One of the twins decided that no, he wanted B (the brother of Father A) as the father, not A, though the other twin most definitely wanted Father A. But the twin was insistent; their cord wrapped around their necks in utero, and they were miscarried. Mother A, of course, was devastated.
Seven or so years pass, and now Father B is married. His kids turn out to be the twins (twins no longer, but born a couple years apart). The older yells often at the younger about how he wanted Father A to be his daddy. This upsets the B couple, of course.
Over time they realize that their boys are the twins reincarnated. The older boy admits that he truly loves Father B, and makes up with his younger brother. They love being around their cousins and aunt and uncle, though. Eventually Parents B gingerly tell Mother A that these are her twins, returned.
She's ecstatic! She hasn't lost her boys after all, but can still enjoy them in the close unit that these two families share.
Pretty cool stuff. There's also a couple of chapters where Carol talks about and meets Dr. Ian Stevenson, who worked for so many decades gathering evidence about past-life experiences seen through the eyes of children. (FYI, Dr. Stevenson died in 2007.) After meeting with one of her case families, he discussed with her possible reasons for coming back in such a situation, after she'd tried to puzzle it all out. His theory: "Isn't love reason enough?"
Lovely. I see that Dr. Stevenson's successor has also written at least one book on this subject. I'll be checking that out.
Billy Kagan was in his sixties, homeless in Miami. He'd often been a drug addict, sometimes involved with the underworld (hence him using the "Billy Fingers" alias so they wouldn't know his true name), and sometimes he walked the straight and narrow. One day he ran out in front of a car and was killed.
His sister, Annie, about twenty years younger than he, pretty much went into a fetal position when she got the news. They'd had a rough relationship, but she loved him and she knew he loved her. She lay in bed for days… until she clearly heard Billy's voice next to her.
Billy told her to get the notebook he'd given her the year before and write down what he told her. What he told her was what happened after he died.
I've read a lot of Near-Death Experience recollections, and Pre-Life Hypnotic Regressions. There are more and more fascinating books documentating these things appearing all the time. But Billy didn't come back. He went on farther than any NDE. Those people who reincarnated? Billy had reached the end of his reincarnation cycle. He went on from there. Gleefully. Having the time of his afterlife.
He grew and grew in knowledge, delighting in merging with the universe and then telling his sister about it. Then came a time when a being we might call a goddess performed a ceremony recognizing the end of his reincarnations. After that came the day when he loosed his soul, cast it off as he'd cast off his body when he'd died. He became all and nothing.
Pretty heavy stuff! And it's beautiful. My only gripe is that there wasn't an extra chapter with corroborating testimony from the people who were in on at least a part of this, like Annie's good friend, Tex.
Billy leaves us with some lessons. There is no right or wrong. Yes, he was an addict. He wanted to understand addicts, plus he wanted to be more in tune with the universe. This was his final life, and he made sure he had a terrific time during as much of it as he could.
Karma? Eh… Nope.
He says that Martin Luther King and Mahatma Gandhi were members of the Great White Brotherhood/White Light Brothers (the "white" is the color of the light, and "brotherhood" encompasses both genders), really, really big figures in the afterlife. Yet I know that neither of them were near perfect. "Most of the White Light Brothers never go to earth, but their absolute light intermingles with and protects your world. If you focus on the white light, as you do my voice, I know you'll feel it… You see, the Brothers aren't souls. They are pure Spirit. Just as our bodies are the carriers of our souls, our souls are the carriers of our Spirit."
"I was an incurable drug addict who wasn't even capable of making a living," Billy says. "Who would have thought that I would be ready for becoming the Universe? Well, that just shows that you can never judge anyone's life, yours included."
He loves a metaphor of an oyster. Life gives you grit, so you should make a pearl out of it. It's true that Life has an awful lot of grit in it, but you are more powerful than you think. You are an awesomely big and powerful oyster. You can choose which grit you let disturb you enough to make a pearl out of it.
"Make your life as interesting as you can," he counsels. "Take chances. Go after your dreams." And: "People spend lots of time on things that make them unhappy—too much focus on the sand in the oyster. To cultivate joy, pay attention to what you like." He means every day. Every moment that you can. Focus on what delights you.
"I took on form to enter time. I entered time to partake in creation."
This is a book I'll likely reread a number of times. It's that good; it's that much to think about.
Happy reading!
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