Past Indian Lives, Epigenetics and the light at the end of the tunnel.

I was conversing with someone on Facebook about their native American heritage.  When we think about "past lives" and reincarnation, we often connect it to what we know about DNA and genetics.  "Hey, I'm Irish and Italian, is it possible that my genetic code remembers the lifetimes of my ancestors?"

My favorite pic of Sitting Bull. Sitting at the same table
I sit at every time I go to Rome and sit in Caffe Greco.
He's with Bill Cody, from the Wild West Show. You can't see me because
I'm in this photo 100 years later.

Epigenetics is a new branch of science that claims this to be true. Well, actually it's a new branch of psychology meets biology, and people are trying to prove or disprove the theory. The idea being "imagine if I could take a pill and I would no longer be connected to the diaspora my relatives suffered through!" (Note: Scientific research is driven, in the most part, by capitalism.  If someone wants to be able to sell or profit from science, they sponsor a study.  This isn't news - it's just the nature of the beast.) 

The basis of the research comes from a study where rats were killed while the smell of roses was prevalent. Then their offspring were exposed to the smell and they showed panic and fear.  "Oh no, the creep who murdered my dad for an experiment is back."  As William James, father of modern psychology (and some credit with marrying quantum theory with psychology) points out - "Just because we can observe something in the brain does not mean  that it necessarily springs from the brain."

Meaning, there are many reasons why the rats fear humans who smell like roses.  It could be that they're remembering the fear from their progenitor (I assume their parents were murdered first, and then extracted to make new mice to prove this diabolical point.) or it could be that their loved ones on the flipside are screaming "Look out! This guy who smells like Minnie is coming to kill you!" 

The reason I sound disbelieving is because based on this afterlife research I've become aware that all animals are sentient.  Full stop.  Their sentience is related to their journey on the planet, just like ours.  And the fact that we continue to experiment on animals so that we can benefit humans is... well... kind of old fashioned, let's say.  

Cruel?  Perhaps.  Insane? Okay, I'll accept that.

I'm not arguing vegetarianism here, although my billion or so pals in India have embraced it. (Older dataset and all).  I mean plant based diet may be the healthiest diet around, but why force people to do what's good for them? How would they learn?

But it's possible the "spirit" of these rats has returned to warn their offspring.  I mean it's not a likely scenario, but is also a possibility.  When we look at the rodent in Africa who when bit by a poisonous snake knows what plant to rub against to cure themselves of the snake bite - what's happening there?  Is it that their code has that information? Is it one of their parents whispering in their ear? And when did the code begin to pass itself along genetically?

Or ants that move their colony after 5 years due to overcrowding.  At what point did they determine that five years was enough? And how is the message sent? (ant mail?) And who sends it?  And why?

I had a professor in college who said "You don't have to know the answer to your question in order to ask it.  In fact it's better if you don't know the answer, because asking the question gets the reader to think."  Smart guy that Julian Baird.

So today I was thinking about the journey.  Here were are on the planet, with a limited amount of time to pass along information.  We do our best to learn as much as we can, and then pass it along. Either we speak it, film it, tell our family, friends, or write it into books.  Now we have facebook and email to pass along information.  And what percentage of that information gets to the rest of the species to keep it moving along?

Hello? Any sentient beings left?

Well not much apparently.  

Here we are arguing about things that people have been arguing about for decades, and perhaps longer - and yet, its as if we're starting the arguments over from scratch.  That might be part of the journey on the stage of life - that we get onto stage with only so much information and try to enact it.  After all, how do we get notes from all the other actors that have played this same part?  Wouldn't it be lovely if just prior to going out to do Hamlet, we could converse with everyone else who has played the part?

Perhaps.

So today a woman wrote me about her son who is part native American and is just beginning to access and process that information.  And is hopeful it will take him out of his depression he's had since the election - as everything from his perspective is looking dark, is looking pointless, is looking like there's no light at the end of the tunnel. 

I sent her this video.  It's Scott De Tamble doing a spontaneous "past life regression" with a woman who was at one of my book talks.  I was talking about my own past life memory of being a native American and witnessing the massacre of my wife, son and tribe. And how I thought it so extremely odd that if I was making this information up, why I'd allow myself to feel that kind of tragedy.  And I did feel it when I saw it, experienced it. 

Woman listening to my talk burst into tears.  Scott asked her if there was something I had said that caused that reaction.  She said there was, and he asked "would you like to explore it?"

So she did.  In front of an audience.  I know this woman pretty well, we've been friends for a long time, we had never talked about this work or research.  She worked at a University, and told me she was interested in the topic of "between life hypnotherapy" which "Flipside: A Tourist's Guide on How to Navigate the Afterlife" is about.

Here it is: 



As noted in the text, she remembers some details that aren't easily accessible. That she came from a Sioux tribe in Virginia sounded implausible as she said it - until I found her tribe living in Virginia prior to the "Trail of Tears."  She mentions having to burn all the clothing of her tribe so that they could "rest in peace" in the afterlife is not an easy detail to access - I found a reference to it in a book about western native American traditions written in the 1800's. I also found it mentioned in Apache death rituals mentioned here:

So - is she like the mouse remembering an event that happened to someone in her blood line?  She is not part of this blood line, so that's not physically possible.  

Is she remembering a lifetime of someone else, who just happened to experience these events? (The Jungian unconscious theory) Also not likely, since the memories seem to be related to her journey through all of her lives - the lessons she signs up to learn.  

I've shown in Flipside that two people have had identical memories of previous lives - they were married to each other in the 1840's - but I used two different therapists to ask the question on two different continents - and neither the subjects or the therapists knew of their shared background (but I had heard it from one person, and suggested we do a blind test with the person he saw in his past life memory.)  I arranged for the session with this woman who didn't know anything of my friend's session, nor did the therapist asking the questions.

So remembering a previous lifetime is not someone picking up on the "leftover" energy of someone else's lifetime.  

Could it be hypoxia or cryptomnesia? (Hypoxia - hallucinations from lack of oxygen, cryptomnesia remembering something you read or heard somewhere else)

What she says is "new information."  It's not anything that she could have known (most people will automatically argue that the Sioux are from western US and not know their history without the forensic search) - the information she recounts is specific and detailed - unlike the accounts that are written that are available through forensic research and the information is not anything that could come from a hallucination - as it's accurate.  

Could it be synthesthesia? (The wiring of the brain somehow picking up the wrong message). 

Well, that wouldn't account for the details she's remembering that are not part of the public record... burning clothes to release spirits, or building model huts and burning them to release spirits... it's not a common practice among any tribes.  

It's just light in the Vatican. Its only light in the Vatican.

And it's not part of her lifetime of memory or experience.

So why is this experience light at the end of the tunnel?

Because the veil is lifting. I'm talking about events and experiences that are becoming more and more common on a daily basis.  And once a person has had these kinds of experiences,they start to end seeing the planet as some kind of polarized, walled off experience.  It's like the overview effect that astronauts report after circling the earth; they no long see borders. They no longer see races. They no longer see gender. They no longer see clothing or status or wealth.

All they see are humans.

Epigenetics and the Afterlife

Got this email today.  About the study that shows that "cells remember previous lifetimes."

"Rich, Holy shit. Have you seen this study?

http://themindunleashed.org/2014/01/scientists-found-memories-may-passed-generations-dna.html

http://www.nature.com/neuro/journal/v17/n1/full/nn.3594.html

So cool. What do you think? Does this provide an alternative explanation for LBL experiences? That rather than remembering past lives, those past lives are embedded in the DNA of our brain when we’re born? Or are there still things that would be inconsistent with LBL?

Do tell…"

Epigenetics.  

They've even got a new science to spend money trying to explain it. Here's Google's tongue in cheek entry:

Epigenetics is the study of these chemical reactions and the factors that influence them. Meet the epigenome and learn how it influences DNA. Change the level of gene expression in a cell with the turn of a dial!

They tortured mice, and then the children of those mice would be afraid of those dudes who tortured them.  That was the first study.  "Mice remember FEAR!"

Well, that doesn't mean that there is only one mode of communication between a mouse and what's been happening to him.  Could be auntie or uncle mouse's ghosts whispering in their ear "Watch out for humans in white lab coats! they'll torture you!"  Could be that the white coated devils thinking of evil torture influenced the mouse.  (I'm just giving you the kind of "super denial" that I've read from scientists about consciousness existing outside the brain. That somehow the "thought" of the action has influenced the action itself.  If that's true, then its true here as well.)

In this case, as I read the study -  they expanded it to smell.  The smell of cherry blossoms.. Okay.  (We had a cherry tree in our backyard, and I can smell it now. My brother fell out of it and broke his arm. I wonder if his arm aches when he sees cherry pies? But I digress).

Is there a possibility that the ghost mice are telling them to watch out for humans who want to torture them again?  It's possible.

And it's also possible that some forms of fear - terror - are passed down genetically into the body.

Which is why I hate kneeling in church pews.  From too many times kneeling and digging up potatoes in Ireland.  My knees are predestined to hate kneelers.

But I digress.

Data is data.

What does this tell us about this test?  That there is a possibility that something gets passed down to the mice.  Could be a smell trigger, could be a sound trigger, or a light trigger - how did humans realize that sharks were dangerous? Or snakes for that matter?  Was it only from watching others get eaten?  Or is there a cell memory of that kind of terror from when we swam alongside them?  I know when I've been in shark cages and I see the open mouth of a shark coming at me, something beyond panic sets in to my "lizard brain."  It feels like memory.  I'm not saying it is.  But it feels the same.  "Oh right, I remember this. Run!"

(I used the term shark cage facetiously. I've been in aquariums where the sharks swim around you while you walk through a glass tube. Sydney Aquarium for example)

There's more - and here's where it gets fun.

Some animals already know the antidote to poison.  They weren't told or taught by their parents - but there's an animal in the bush that after being bitten by a poisonous snake knows to go and rub its wound on a particular shrub that is the antidote to the snake bite.

That's been a known fact for decades.

They discovered that a particular type of female bird "pretends" to mate for life - but actually goes out and mates when anyone who flies by in order to produce offspring.  And.. it turns out the male sperm of the bird doing the flying around has a killer sequence in it - at the end of its output - that is spermicide to any new sperm arriving in its mate.  

Like nature is trying to protect his sperm from other sperm that might (and often does) show up later. So where did that spermicide come from?  Some bird class on safe bird sex?

So let's ask - "What's the difference between animals who use their genetic memory to keep them alive and humans?" 

Animals - human animals included - must have certain "cellular memories" or "epigenetic memories" in order to keep the species alive.  

Humans are NOT ANY DIFFERENT THAN ANIMALS. (Since we can't prove or even define consciousness, we can't rule out that animals are conscious as well, can we?)

So, there's one "how do you do" moment that science has found a way to prove.

But now go a step further.  

Thousands of people - and of course it's 100's of thousands, over the course of history - remember previous lifetimes.  And these previous lifetimes aren't in their same genetic tree - sometimes they remember being asian, african, caucausian, male, female, etc... and if you look hard enough you'll see the forensic research that matches their accounts.  

So they can't be remembering someone in their family tree - if their family tree doesn't include this particular lifetime.  

But what are they remembering?

Science (tries to) tell us that it's a "pool of consciousness" as described by Carl Jung.  This geriatric pool of stored memories, that must go somewhere after someone dies, because energy doesn't die, it just moves elsewhere, so when someone is "remembering" a different lifetime, they're merely remembering "bits and pieces of a particular lifetime that happens to be out in the universe." (I've heard this theory from more than one scientist.)

But that doesn't make a lick of sense either.  Because people don't remember bits and pieces - when they're properly interviewed about their memory.  They remember the death, and then what happens after that.  The traveling back to their "home" - the between lives realm where they get to reconnect with their loved ones who talk to them about information they never knew (New information) where they learn about people who are dead they didn't know were dead (New information) they have life reviews from various points of view not only their own (New information) and they find themselves remembering the conversations they had before coming to this lifetime and why they would do so.

So it's not quite the same as the body flinching when you put a knife to it - or smell the sent of Cherries (unless you were drowned in a vat of Cherries in a previous lifetime, or even choked on a pit) - then you too might flinch the way these mice have flinched.. from their "epigentic memory."

What they're doing is proving that we are human animals - but completely avoiding the research to understand and examine how we are also spiritual creatures AT THE SAME TIME.

We are both animals and spirits.  We are perfect combination of the two.  And one has a physical evolution that requires DNA, requires a safe environment, requires being able to be born, grow up, reproduce and pass away.  And one has a spiritual evolution that includes previous lifetimes, current lifetimes, and future lifetimes, each with its own version of "graduation" from one level to the next.  At least that's what the reports show.  That's what the research shows.

So sure, why not?  We have cell memories.  Might help us in a fight with a poisonous snake (if we can only remember the name of that shrub - which I can't for the life of me.)  And yes, we have spiritual memories that we appear to be able to access on a daily basis - and often on a nightly basis.

OK. I FOUND IT: "The roots of the plant “chota – chand” in Nepal were found to be antidote for snake-bite, a fact learnt after watching mongooses feeding on the plant before fighting cobras. Man may not after all be the only sapient animal."

and that's my two cents for the day.  RM