Past Lives

[Monica]

Part of my childhood was spent in a STS environment,

Sorry to hear that!

where orders are to be followed, and never questioned. All my childhood was spent in atheism. Would you mind to give some hints about what to look for, when examining that?

When children are taught to blindly follow orders from 'authority' figures, without ever questioning, that is STS programming, and it can leave a very deep imprint.

Children are told to respect their elders to the point of obeying them without question. This has gotten some children abducted because they didn't question the adult who told them to get in the car with them, for example.

In religious fundamentalism, obedience is valued above all else. A 'good' child is an obedient child...one who never questions or rebels. Rebellion is considered something to be squashed in teenagers. A Christian pastor once told me that rock music was 'satanic' because it was 'birthed in a spirit of rebellion.'

This type of thinking is designed to keep the kids locked into the religion when they become adults, blindly following the dictates of their religion. This makes them very easy to control. They are afraid to dabble in alternative forms of spirituality because they are warned that anything outside their narrow doctrine is 'satanic.'

This blind obedience can then become habit for those children, when they become adults, to continue their habit of obeying without questioning.

If they leave Christianity for some Eastern religion, they might be susceptible to joining a cult. I had a friend who got repeatedly raped by her 'guru' because she had been taught to submit to authority.

If they get into some sort of New Age spirituality, they can carry over the habit into their past life recall, psychic abilities, whatever. But, instead of blindly obeying their dad, teacher or pastor, they are now blindly obeying/believing some psychic, some vision, or some oracle such as Astrology, Tarot, or whatever.

They are looking for an authority.

Example: My husband and I attended a Rebirthing training in Florida. We swam with wild dolphins. One day we were scheduled to visit a dolphin research center, but it was closed. So we had the choice of going to some tourist attraction or going to the beach. My husband and I looked at each other and decided instantly we'd rather go to the beach.

Well, the others were all into muscle testing. Instead of deciding what they wanted to do, they were pulling on their fingers to get an answer about what they 'should' do! We were incredulous.

They had traded one authority for another!

Anything can become an authority. Even the belief that everything that comes through the person in a psychic vision can become an authority. Psychics often get trapped by this. They blindly accept whatever info they channel, and can be influenced by STS entities, because of their lack of discernment. Look at how many psychics/channels have predicted the aliens landing on a certain date!

I'm certainly not suggesting that we live in fear and doubt! My point is that too much certainty can be just as much of an imbalance as too much doubt.

When one becomes so certain that everything they're doing is 'right' they can become locked into a certain mode of thinking, and miss opportunities to expand that thinking or gain new insights. When they get very comfortable with a certain religion, philosophy, or system of divination, they can turn it into an authority, and lose their ability to discern.

I don't know if any of this applies to your childhood, since it was an atheist household. But it would seem that, whether rooted in atheism or religious fundamentalism, the pattern of expecting blind obedience is the same. The end result is that it may be challenging to learn proper discernment, since that ability was never encouraged.

I don't know anything about your background, so I am speaking only in generalities here.

My belief is that most of our memories are distorted in some way or other. Not all of them though! I also believe that this doubt has its grounding in its original doubt, which is doubt of self. But as you, I believe that it serves a very good purpose, that of discernment.

What do you mean by original doubt and doubt of self?

Thank you for sharing this. I totally agree with you that the message/lesson is what is of importance.

Yes, but at the same time, I also believe that many past life memories really are past life memories. We know that we've lived past lives. So if we remember them, there's no reason to doubt whether they're real or just symbolic. This is a case where I see no reason to doubt them.

I remembered being in a dungeon. The logical reason for this is simple: I really was in a dungeon. My memories of that lifetime are no different from my memories of my childhood in this lifetime.

Well, here is where my logic comes in and hit the breaks. Who I am in this life, is not who I was in those other lives. I sense the same essence, and in some memories, I can even bring forth that personality, as it is a part of me. But I am not the same person. Which means that stuff that happened in this life was experienced by current personality, and physical body, remembering it on all these levels, while stuff that happened before that, can still be put in doubt, as *I* was not that same *I*, if that makes sense to you...

It depends on how you define I.

Each personality is but a fragment of our whole self. It is the whole self who remembers the past lives. So when I remembered being in a dungeon, it was ME. Not someone else.

I still remember the agonized wailing...the despair. Those emotions were very raw. They haunted me my entire childhood. That was me who experienced that.

Being told by a psychic that I was a merchant in Venice, for example, evokes no such emotion. Since I have no emotional connection with that person, then it might as well be an other-self.

It is the memories I retrieve myself that are meaningful to me. It's like retrieving parts of myself that were lost, and reintegrating them back into the whole.

The memories aren't even what's important. The healing is what's important. Memories aren't likely to surface unless there is healing to be done.

Note: Post has been edited.