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.

Three books FROM the Flipside, the Overview Effect and Sentient Plants

There are three books I recommend about the Flipside, written from the POV of people who are no longer on the planet.

1. The Afterlife Of Billy Fingers by Annie Kagan.

2. My Life after Life by Galen Stoller

3. My Life after Death by Erik Medhus

I talk a bit about Annie Kagan's book The Afterlife of Billy Fingers" in It's a Wonderful Afterlife: Further Adventures in the FlipsideVol 1;" -- Having read Galen Stoller's " My Life After Life" and Erik Medhus' "My Life After Death," I think it's worth comparing all three - first person perspectives from the flipside. (Galen Stoller writes the foreword to "It's a Wonderful Afterlife: Further Adventures in the Flipside" Volume two with the help of his dad and a medium.)

Not one person's POV (like most books on spiritual topics are) but three people basically the same things about what they experienced just after life, what they're experiencing now after they've checked off the planet. Not every observation is the same (how could it be? we each have our own path and journey) but enough is the same (a feeling of being still here, but not "here" - classrooms, teachers, soul groups, life reviews, a sense of unconditional love and insight into the human condition) to make it worth examining. 

When compared to near death experiences and between life hypnotherapy sessions it comes together like a massive puzzle. (at least for me).

And now.. the overview effect:

Astronaut Scott Kelly's shout out to the US from space

"Good morning western USA" from a guy who's spent a year in space. You think he's concerned about whatever it is people are concerned about down here, raging about? Or just kind of in awe? I choose awe and the ‪#‎overvieweffect‬.

NASA's Earth Observatory

NASA astronaut Scott Kelly (@StationCDRKelly), currently on a year-long mission on the International Space Station, took this photograph and posted it to social media on Aug. 10, 2015. Kelly wrote: "‪#‎GoodMorning‬ to those in the western ‪#‎USA‬. Looks like there's a lot going on down there. ‪#‎YearInSpace‬"

The space station and its crew orbit Earth from an altitude of 220 miles (359 kilometers), traveling at a speed of approximately 17,500 miles (28,100 kilometers) per hour. Because the station completes each trip around the globe in about 92 minutes, the crew experiences 16 sunrises and sunsets each day.

See his tweet at

https://twitter.com/StationCDRKel…/status/630719952555786240

See more astronaut photography at

http://visibleearth.nasa.gov/view_cat.php?categoryID=1461

And even more at 

http://eol.jsc.nasa.gov/Collections/

The overview effect is important when discussing this research about the Flipside.  Because for those who've had a near death experience, or a between life experience via hypnosis, or an out of body experience that's profound - it alters their view of the planet.  The overview effect is what astronauts experience after coming back to the planet - THEY NO LONGER SEE BORDERS OR HUMANS AS SEPARATED BY COLOR, GENDER, ORIENTATION, ETC.  They have begun to see the planet as we see it from our perspective in the afterlife - one big ball of fun.  It's worth repeating.

And finally; a new book that claims plants are sentient:

 Beech Tree, on the North Downs near Dorking, Surrey, UK. Photograph: Derek Croucher

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/radical-conservation/2015/aug/04/plants-intelligent-sentient-book-brilliant-green-internet

I prefer to call trees "lungs." After all, they not only look like them, they function the same but in reverse. So plants are sentient? Reminds me of one of my first short stories in grade school, guy with a new set of headphones suddenly hears screaming coming from outside. All he can see is a neighbor cutting grass...

Are plants intelligent? New book says yes

A new book, Brilliant Green, argues that not only are plants intelligent and sentient, but that we should consider their rights, especially in the midst of the Sixth Mass Extinction

Plants are intelligent. Plants deserve rights. Plants are like the Internet – or more accurately the Internet is like plants. To most of us these statements may sound, at best, insupportable or, at worst, crazy. But a new book, Brilliant Green: the Surprising History and Science of Plant Intelligence, by plant neurobiologist (yes, plant neurobiologist), Stefano Mancuso and journalist, Alessandra Viola, makes a compelling and fascinating case not only for plant sentience and smarts, but also plant rights.

For centuries Western philosophy and science largely viewed animals as unthinking automatons, simple slaves to instinct. But research in recent decades has shattered that view. We now know that not only are chimpanzees, dolphins and elephants thinking, feeling and personality-driven beings, but many others are as well. Octopuses can use tools, whales sing, bees can count, crows demonstrate complex reasoning, paper wasps can recognise faces and fish can differentiate types of music. All these examples have one thing in common: they are animals with brains. But plants don’t have a brain. How can they solve problems, act intelligently or respond to stimuli without a brain? 

Intelligence is the ability to solve problems and plants are amazingly good in solving their problems

Stefano Mancuso

“Today’s view of intelligence - as the product of brain in the same way that urine is of the kidneys - is a huge oversimplification. A brain without a body produces the same amount of intelligence of the nut that it resembles,” said Mancuso, who as well as co-writing Brilliant Green, is the director of the International Laboratory of Plant Neurobiology in Florence.

As radical as Mancuso’s ideas may seem, he’s actually in good company. Charles Darwin, who studied plants meticulously for decades, was one of the first scientists to break from the crowd and recognise that plants move and respond to sensation – i.e., are sentient. Moreover, Darwin – who studied plants meticulously for most of his life, observed that the radicle – the root tip – “acts like the brain of one of the lower animals.”

Plant problem solvers

Plants face many of the same problems as animals, though they differ significantly in their approach. Plants have to find energy, reproduce and stave off predators. To do these things, Mancuso argues, plants have developed smarts and sentience....

Many plants will even warn others of their species when danger is near. If attacked by an insect, a plant will send a chemical signal to their fellows as if to say, “hey, I’m being eaten – so prepare your defences.” Researchers have even discovered that plants recognize their close kin, reacting differently to plants from the same parent as those from a different parent. 

“In the last several decades science has been showing that plants are endowed with feeling, weave complex social relations and can communicate with themselves and with animals,” write Mancuso and Viola, who also argue that plants show behaviours similar to sleeping and playing.

So, instead of a single powerful brain, Mancuso argues that plants have a million tiny computing structures that work together in a complex network, which he compares to the Internet. The strength of this evolutionary choice is that it allows a plant to survive even after losing 90% or more of its biomass. ....

“The main driver of evolution in plants was to survive the massive removal of part of the body,” said Mancuso. “Thus, plants are built of a huge number of basic modules that interact as nodes of a network. Without single organs or centralised functions plants may tolerate predation without losing functionality. Internet was born for the same reason and, inevitably, reached the same solution.”

Having a single brain – just like having a single heart or a pair of lungs – would make plants much easier to kill.

“This is why plants have no brain: not because they are not intelligent, but because they would be vulnerable,” Mancuso said.

In this way, he adds, it may be better to think of a single plant as a colony, rather than an individual. Just as the death of one ant doesn’t mean the demise of the colony, so the destruction of one leaf or one root means the plant still carries on.

The wide gulf

So, why has plant sentience – or if you don’t buy that yet, plant behaviour – been ignored for so long?

Mancuso says this is because plants are so drastically different from us. He says it is “impossible” for us to put ourselves in the place of a plant.

“We are too different; the fruit of two diverse evolutive tracks...plants could be aliens for us,” he said. “But all the same we share with plants life, the same needs, we evolved on the same planet. In the end we respond in the same way to the same impulses.”

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 The banana orchid is threatened with extinction. Photograph: Jose Pestana/PA

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 Deforestation in the Amazon. Forest destruction worldwide has pushed innumerable species into extinction, many of which we may never know. Photograph: luoman/Getty Images/iStockphoto

Yet, human actions – including deforestation, habitat destruction, pollution, climate change, etc. – have ushered in a mass extinction crisis. While plants in the past have fared better in previous mass extinctions, there is no guarantee they will this time.

“Every day a consistent number of plant species that we never met, disappears,” noted Mancuso who added that mass extinctions “are never happy events and I suspect that, despite their diversity, even plants don’t like to disappear.”

At the same time, we don’t even know for certain how many plant species exist on the planet. Currently, scientists have described around 20,000 species of plant. But there are probably more unknown than known.

“We have no idea about the number of plant species living on the planet. There are different estimates saying we know from 10 to 50% (no more) of the existing plants,” said Mancuso.

Many of these could be wiped out without ever being described, especially as unexplored rainforests and cloud forest – the most biodiverse communities on the planet – continue to fall in places like Brazil, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Papua New Guinea, among others.

Yet, we depend on plants not only for many of our raw materials and our food, but also for the oxygen we breathe and, increasingly it seems, the rain we require. Plants drive many of the biophysical forces that make the Earth habitable for humans – and all animals. 

“Sentient or not sentient, intelligent or not, the life of the planet is green...The life on the Earth is possible just because plants exist,” said Mancuso. “Is not a matter of preserving plants: plants will survive. The conservation implications are for humans: fragile and dependent organisms.”

Ho Ho Ho!

Merry Flipside Xmas, Festivus, Holiday!

Flipside is on sale at Kindle Amazon for 99 cents.

Flipside : A Tourist's Guide on How to Navigate the Afterlife [Kindle Edition]

Richard Martini (Author), Gary Schwartz (Preface)

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Send it to your relatives who already think you're off your rocker.

Send it to relatives who you think need to hear about this research.

What the heck, make a donation in their name at GoFundMe for the sequel!



Either way, Happy Holidays from this side of the Flipside... and as we honor and remember all the amazing or lousy experiences we've had over countless holiday seasons (you know the ones I'm talking about - like driving around for four hours trying to find a New Year's Eve Party when I was in high school - which we never found - but was like looking for a ghost in the ether that we couldn't find).

Then imagine that you've had dozens, perhaps hundreds, even thousands of lifetimes!  Oh my!  What holiday fun!

And remember; Santa is more real than you think.

Santa is reflected in quantum theory - at least in the quantum butterfly effect.  The good that you do on the planet, the good intentions and gifts that you give, are like an energy wave that goves out and affects other people. And when you consider that Santa is part of our hearts - it's easy to understand how he can be in two places at once, travel through portals that wouldn't make sense in a materialistic world - and because we emanate his kindness from our own hearts, our own sense of kindness and love and compassion - then he exists as a reminder to see that we are all connected.  So the gifts that you give this holiday season will continue to gift and help others, and the love that you create this season, will live on long after you - like Santa.

And like The Overview Effect, once you've experienced Santa, then your perspective on the planet changes forever.

OVERVIEW from Planetary Collective on Vimeo.



My two cents.  Happy Holidaze!

RM

News from the Flipside and the Pale Blue Dot

Photograph of Earth from the surface of Mars

The overview effect - a possible explanation of "the shift?"

This is a pretty unusual film that was made about astronauts who had an unusual side effect after traveling in outer space.  They started to relate to the Earth in a different fashion.  An author coined the phrase "the overview effect."

Essentially it's that once you see a photograph of the Earth from the moon, there's an effect that alters our perception of the Earth.

Here's the video:

This effect was noted by famed astronomer Carl Sagan in his reference to the big blue dot:

“Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there-on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.” 
― Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space

Also, as a side note, the fellow who leaked all the information to WikiLeaks, claims (as reported in the film "Wikileaks" by Alex Gibney) that it was Carl Sagan's quote about the pale blue dot, that inspired him to release this information.  I don't know if that's a quantifiable effect, but it certainly moved one person to do something completely out of the ordinary, no matter how one views the effects of that kind of revelation.

and finally, here's a photograph from the Cassini spacecraft of Saturn - and at the very bottom, you can view that pal blue dot as a bit of light. On July 19th, Cassini will take a photo of Earth from deep space. We we all should be waving. Floating through space in the Spaceship called Earth.

Saturn from Cassini

Artist rendering of photo July 19th

As was said to me during my own between life session as recounted in "Flipside" - I asked if there was any one message I could bring back from that session that would help others.  And the answer was to tell people to "Just let go."

Which I took to mean let go of fear, let go of anger, let go of the borders between us, let down the defenses that disconnect us, let go of everything that doesn't point to the fact that we're all on this spaceship together, what happens to one of us happens to all of us, what happens to the air and water and soil happens to all of us - and that is a fundamental shift in perception.  My two cents.