PAST LIVES?
Question: What about past lives?
Answer: I love this question, because I believed in past lives for about fifty years, before encountering quantum physics and the truth of the Human Game model. Not only did I believe, but I had many detailed “memories” of a number of those past lives.
But before we can talk about past lives, we have to talk about time….
From the research in quantum physics, we know time does not exist in The Field, where all experiences are created that make up the physical universe. Space and time are created as part of a hologram – scientists would say space/time is a “function of the hologram” – and therefore time is not “real” in the same way the hologram is not “real.”
In fact, as many others like Seth1 and Eckart Tolle2 have said over and over again, the only thing that’s “real” – or better, “relevant” – is the present moment. This not only applies to “past lives,” but the “past” in this present life as well, which should be self-evident when we see how someone can change their past by getting new information or changing their perceptions of what happened “back then.”
Einstein said “reality is merely an illusion – albeit a very persistent one;” and it’s true that “reality” seems to have continuity, as one moment blends into the next moment. But it’s also possible to look at those moments as individual holograms coming quickly one after the other, like a movie consists of one individual frame and then another in rapid succession. Therefore, the “persistence” itself is illusory.
It’s even possible there actually is nothing except the present moment, and that everything we consider to be the “past” is created in each present-moment hologram.
Karl Pribram spent years trying to find the location of “memory” in the brain and finally decided the brain itself was a hologram. So what if “memory” really doesn’t exist at all? What if our “memory” of the “past” is being created in the present-moment hologram instead? What if, when we say someone is living in their past, the opposite is actually true: that their past is living in their present?
So the “past” may be a “story” that is part of the present hologram; and we are free to rewrite the ending to that story at any time by changing our reactions and responses to the experience, letting go of the judgments, beliefs, opinions, and fears. This is clear, and actually very necessary, when you move into the second half of the Human Game. When the judgment is dropped, for example, of how “bad” your childhood was, and you gain appreciation and thankfulness for the perfection of those experiences in creating limitation in the first half, the “past” changes dramatically. What’s actually happening is that the story in your present hologram about the “past” is changing. In essence, you are creating a new “past” in the present, since there really is no “past” per se.
A good actor does this. If it’s not part of the script itself, an actor will make up a past for their character, giving them a reason – the “motivation” – for any line or action they have in the movie. But that character’s past is not real and only exists in the present moment when the actor is acting, using it to give background for how they deliver their lines.
Am I making myself clear? Since time is not real, all “past memories” could actually be nothing more than parts of the present-time hologram which fill in the storyline of our total immersion movie. What we call our “history” – personal history, human history, even the history of our planet and the physical universe – could simply be one small storyline in the current “Earth Environment” template downloaded to a Player for its present-time experience.
L. Ron Hubbard, in another one of his genius moments, called these “service facsimiles” – “‘service’ because they serve him; ‘facsimiles’ because they are in mental image picture form…. The service facsimile is therefore a picture containing an explanation of self condition.”3
In other words, we may well be making up our “past” in the present time to explain our current condition in life.
Believing in past lives was, at least for me, a very important part of that process. I could use a past life as a reason for my present-time behavior, just as we use a dysfunctional childhood to explain a dysfunctional adult.
Quick example… I had so-called “memories” of being a pharaoh in Egypt in the 14th century BC who was murdered by the priesthood when he tried to take away their power. This explained why, in this present life, I had done everything possible to get out of politics once I got elected, believing on some level that rising up the political ladder would eventually result in my death.
But for me, past lives explained more than just the “negative” behavior in the present….
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I had very little sailing experience in this life, limited mainly to building and sailing a twelve-foot Sunfish in my teens, taking my wife for a ride on a Hobie Cat on our honeymoon (bad idea!), and skippering a 42-foot Morgan from Los Angeles to Catalina to scuba dive with friends.
Then in 1994 I stepped onto the Kairos – an eighty-foot wooden schooner – to be the cook for a year. But somehow I knew exactly what to do and how to sail her perfectly – even single-hand her – including how to tie all the standard sailing knots. Within a short time I was replacing the captain when he went onshore for extended vacations, performing difficult anchoring maneuvers in pitch dark, turning the ship 180 degrees in a one-hundred-foot harbor, and sailing her precisely for three days and nights on open ocean from the Canary Islands to Madeira.