Hi, Suzie. The first part of my journey starts with an experience when I was three. Standing in the doughnut shop with my mother, I found myself quite drawn into another world ... which I would only come to understand almost twenty years later. In retrospect, I believe it was a Tibetan Buddhist Master, plus his large group of students, who included me in a very significant event ~ 1975 ~ affecting all of Humanity.
I also remember as a child somehow
just knowing that there was nothing to fear, or worry about when it came to UFOs. And although I have certainly never gotten into any religion or spiritual practice that directly involves trying to make contact with people from other worlds, I came to accept that our planet has always been visited - and assisted by them.
Another thing that stuck with me for years, originally in an understandably unpleasant way, was when my cat was struck by a car. Often times kids are exposed to death in this way and at an early age. I was very upset by it, and I didn't have any intuitive understanding in the least regarding
how death works. Nor had anyone bothered to explain it, since so few people know ... especially at places like Christian churches, or in religious circles.
So it became significant to me in later years when I was able to remember 2 or 3 figures kind of huddled around the spot in the road where my kitty `bit it,' and I realized they'd always been there, sort of in a dream or maybe in an ongoing, constant waking vision. I met two of those people, and had meaningful relationships with each of them, at different times. If there was a third figure, I have yet to know who it was, for certain, but it is a very interesting experience finally meeting
not one, but two different people who have been with you, as it were, for 15 or 20 years ... subjectively like that. It all makes good sense now, but if you'd tried to explain to me in the interim who those people were, I'd never have understood it, and it might have even freaked me out.
The other event I vividly recall from childhood, at least in this one occasion, was an out of body experience. My folks were at a cocktail party, I was across the street staying with neighbors, and I was
asleep. I floated out, past a beautiful, soft white streetlamp which was both soothing and full of symbolic suggestion (even for a 2-yr old) ... and crossed the street to go in through my bedroom window and get my parents. I went to the side of the bed where I expected to get Mom out for play (children do this as a given), but she wan't there!
So, I panicked, I remember being yanked back or jerked into my body at great rapidity (across the street is no distance at all; it occurred in a snap!) ... and I was sick, threw up or something. That's not the only out-of-body experience I've had, but since that one was at about two years old, I can't help laughing at people who like to say these things are imagined, or are just lucid dreams, etc. Of course they're lucid dreams! Why the heck do you think it freaks some folks out when we realize just how different parts of the astral plane are! If only we could set aside such crap as the psychologists, and plenty of religious cranks have filled our heads with all these years. Sometimes, our experience is most definitely the best teacher.
Still, even with all these experiences happening as a child, I was never given a good outlet to explore the paranormal, or the occult, or anything much at all outside of what kind of nonsense they preach at you in Sunday School. And hey, I mean I was even going to a small, Lutheran church, where most folks are a whole lot more open-minded than the kind of zealots I would encounter 10 or 15 years later. Besides, it's all very positive being taught things about God's Love ... even if most of the folks there really can't help you in the least with questions like, "What happens when we die?" ~ or, "What's this Holy Spirit business all about?"
So, with parents who wanted me to go to church, and both of whom had that in their past experience as a `given,' I pretty much got that kind of exposure until I was 13 or so and decided to just
screw it. At that point, I slept in on Sunday mornings and realized there were much better uses for my time than participating in a bunch of mindless rituals which, at that stage of my life, were already kind of outworn and unproductive. I did return to an appreciation for, and belief in Christian Teaching several years later, but it was only after I learned how to cut through much of the CRAP ... and realized that what Christ actually taught has little resemblance to the `Churchianity' which today bears His stamp, but only dimly hearkens to His Inspiration.
I remained a rationalist and a thinker, and when I was 17 I began to have a whole new type of experience which I look at as recapitulation of certain developments from previous lifetimes. I was already well aware by that age of the memories of a lifetime that ended abruptly in Vietnam in 1968, '69 or '70. I knew that I'd only spent a few years in the `in-between,' and I even used to have something like *conversations* with `the me who I had been,' although as a child I had my very own way of understanding that [guy] and relating to him.
It wasn't always entirely pleasant, or positive, and while technically I was kind of
haunted, it was never intentionally nightmarish ... or meant to frighten. After all, that person was already reincarnate, and what was technically taking place was the usage by the Soul, for positive purposes, of a still semi-ensouled *shell* ... so I maintained a type of relationship with, or understanding of that aspect of my [prior] consciousness during much of my childhood. By the time I was a teenager it was important enough to take different measures, so ~ with much help from the Inner worlds ~ I was assisted in doing something like
integrating that aspect of my being into the current personality equipment.
This did not include, at first, the simultaneous integration of another `presence' which had been with me since childhood ... also since about 2 or 3 years old. I played with a little plastic model of a Knight Templar, given to me by my parents, having been brought from Portugal where they had visited on their honeymoon. I have the reproduction of that model today, since I lost the original, and since it was so meaningful to me 35 years ago.
The Knight, whom I would only come to fully understand nearly twenty years later, was another method by which the Soul ~ and positive spiritual influences ~ was/were able to reach me from early on. I never recall quite the same thing as what we call conversations, or anything out loud and exactly verbal, especially since, naturally enough, the knight himself would only have been able to speak French ... as well as I can guess. And again, this is a thoughtform, not a projection, with a much less astrally-mired `shell' as was the case with my other childhood *friend*.
So I came to have some contact, at 17 or so, with this Knight Templar who was so familiar to me from childhood, and I was able to learn who he was (or who my Soul was incarnated as) ... and the understanding was fairly mature and almost entirely productive. This was something like a guardian angel I suppose, and the Knight remained `with' me until about age 21, when I had a waking vision of him in the Botanical Gardens at UNC Asheville in college. He rode up, he placed a symbolic sword into the ground in front of me rather dramatically, raised up on the hind legs of his horse ... and rode off. That was the end of the Knight in any kind of direct encounter, memory or experience in my life ~ because certainly, prior to that, I would often enough remember *being* this man (in about his 50s) from 12th Century France.
This is really still, in many ways, just the beginning ... because, at age 17 or 18, I had my first exposure to Buddhism. I saw a book at work, in the library, entitled,
Being Peace, by Thich Nhat Hanh. I read it, and doors began to open. Soon I was encountering books on Theosophy, some of which were strange, and certainly difficult to comprehend at first ... but I soon came to accept that what was happening was simply a RE-awakening, and by no means the first encounter of my mind and spirit with these sorts of teachings. Within the next few years, and on through graduate school, I was able to recall various memories from the past 6 or 7 incarnations, almost in an unbroken stream.
The astral plane, while not exactly an entire, fully understood or conscious experience for me, is most definitely one of continuity, with the acceptance that we live a much, much fuller life in that domain, broken only by our loss of awareness as we return to outer, physical brain awareness ... THIS world being the only thing like `DEATH' which actually occurs.
So I recall death, in its most recent visit, and I have a decent idea of how I was greeted a few other times, if certain specific details now escape me. But hey, I never really ASKED for any of this, or visited psychics, or meditated to try and remember. I believe, and I KNOW, that all of LIFE, and each & every one of the Infinite, myriad Lives in Cosmos, has [a] Purpose, and meaning. So, I try to be patient, and always smile, and use diplomacy when speaking with people who don't see things the same way.
I do at times become passionate about things; after all, I find it a burden sometimes to remind myself, "Not everyone has had the same experiences, even if I have now known many hundreds of people, plenty of them Westerners and Christians, who can accept everything I've said in this post!" Yes, we are all learning about what each other believes, and why, and I'm glad you started this thread inviting folks to discuss it!
My path, while I would have called it `Buddhist' from about age 18 to 25 or so, evolved into a comfortable enough affirmation of being an occultist, or
esotericist, because unlike some, I do not believe that there are simply 800, or 8000, or even 8 million different BRANDS out there of religion, religious belief, etc. I refuse to accept that out of many THOUSANDS of Christian denominations, each one is
accurately and faithfully reproducing the only accepted, official interpretation of the example of Jesus of Nazareth, and that the rest of us are all ~ simply deluded. Besides being impossible, childish and foolish, this shows what extreme prejudice, blindness and narrow-mindedness are capable of doing to our spiritual potential. It's possible to be held back in growth this way for ... lifetimes.
I don't argue that we are all at somewhat slightly varying stages on the Spiritual Path, or that each of us walks a slightly
different path ... but when someone stands up and tries that crap about, "My way is the [only] right way," I just wonder, when's that poor old fool going to come around! And, more often than not, there's not a thing in the world that I or anyone I know can say to help him out!
I like the teaching, Theosophical and reflecting of Universal Wisdom, that "Truth is One, Paths are Many." So, unless someone is spouting off about the flying spaghetti monster, or shoving their plastic jesus down our throats, or pushing some other fanaticism up in my face, I just take it as a given. YOUR path, and YOUR beliefs, no matter WHO you are, where you are, when you are, etc. ... hold a measure of the Truth, for YOU. That doesn't mean that it, and we, don't all intersect somewhere, somehow, because my experiences ~ even as early as age 3 ~ proved to me beyond a
shadow of a doubt: We ARE all connected, and we ARE all of the same Spiritual Source. In Christian enough terms, the same LOVING spiritual Parent welcomes and waits for us ALL. And I know as a simple matter of fact, in time, we ALL shall `get there.'
Peace,
~Andrew
