Dreams and Past Life Memories

Within each life we have several lifetimes so to speak. When we are born and until we are about seven years old might be considered one lifetime. Then until we are about 14 we have yet another. This tends to follow seven year cycles and my theory is that each seven year period reflects a different previous incarnation's karmic factors. I am sure there are no hard and fast rules here, and it seems probable that some cycles are 14, 21, or even 28 year periods. I am sure everyone who reads this understands and can identify with the fact that circumstances in their lives have changed over the years, and perhaps it might be because of a changed inner identification with another past life. Until we are finished with our incarnations, we experience lifetimes for the development of various attitudes and personality characteristics through identification with both sides of issues and life-questions.

Within our cycle of incarnations we have a need to belong, to a group, family, brotherhood, or whatever is available. Part of our inner identity comes from these associations, and helps us to build our sense of self. Yet apart from this, we also have part of our inner identity coming from other lives we have had in our long past. I have found that the past life associations I have recalled in certain dreams shed a great deal of light onto "who I am" in this life. In several lives as a very dogmatic priest I have done things which required later adjustment. That "later" adjustment is happening now in this life. I had a need for seeing how being dogmatic (and severe) can cause problems, and so set this up in this life, and is one of the issues I have been working on resolving.

It could be said then, that one of the myths of my current life is the idea that I am independent of religion and dogmatic thinking. This has in turn led me to develop an independent way of thinking which has led me away from most of our cultural institutions. This turns out to be exactly what I needed to develop in myself in order to have the capacity to correct my own dogmatic ways of thinking. Implied in this is the idea that we carry over attitudes and ideas from life to life, and this is done by the identification process mentioned in the dreams and inner identity page.

Getting back to my recalled experience of the death by drowning (if you have not read this it might be helpful to go to the page on dreams and inner identity before continuing here), I have become convinced that this particular recall was in fact a past life experience, and have used it as a beacon of sorts so that I can identify other past life experiences as they are recalled as they usually are, woven into dreams that I can understand within the context of my current ability to understand things. My real motivation then, has been to get a handle on my own struggles through life, and to be able to help others going through the same sorts of things. Helping others is the most rewarding thing that can be done, and adds greatly to our overall personal development.

This particular recall was not negative in the sense that it did not cause me any panic. In fact, I can recall thinking during the experience... "well, I guess this is it! I am going to die", but I felt a curious mixture of regret and also relief that I wouldn't have to do anything more. I suppose I will always think of this experience as a genuine recall of a former life because of the fact that I really had identified with how it felt to be in the body of that man that lived some 120 years ago now. When I woke up, my own body felt very different to what I had just been experiencing, and that difference was apparent to me for several days afterwards. The experience gave me the ability to feel my own body as if I had just occupied it and it was this more than anything that makes me feel certain that this was a memory and psychological identification and not "a dream".

The bulk of the recall focused on events just before I died and around the book I saw after the death, as it seemed to show pictures of "my" life in various scenes that were familiar to the "me" I was in the recall. This particular recall did not seem to offer any further information to help me solve the problems I was having in life at the time in the short run, but was used by me as a literal launching pad into the creation of an important inner identity, the second one to be mentioned here. This is of being an explorer, both as an outdoorsman, or being more worldly than I have been in my other lives, and a traveler in strange and wild country, including the wild west.

I believe that this inner identity has given me strength in my day to day life. It has also given me a sense of rightness in exploring those same environs in my present life, as well as a better connection to nature in general. The countryside in the west and Utah in particular have held a special magic for me in this life in ways that I can�t do justice to in trying to explain in words... suffice it to say that I feel like I belong there in a way that I rarely feel even where I am currently living, and this has everything to do with that lifetime and also with the inner identity that arose from it.

After considering the point for a very long time, I now think that not developing an inner identity can have a very detrimental effect on a person. An inner identity is a platform for building aspects to the personality, and without those added aspects, the person loses vitality in their physical and emotional selves. This is partly because we all must continue to grow and change or we stagnate and stop growing. New possibilities will be overlooked, and all too often we become detached and depressed, or perhaps simply cease to develop over a long period of time. This is not a favorable situation, and can lead to the seeking out of closed mental environments such as those found in cults, where inner identities are traded for the myths of the cult, which is then followed without personal analysis of the situation, leading to anti-social acts and even mass suicides.

One of the best ways of turning this around is to adopt a new inner identity, to find something we can identify with and put our energies into. This is getting a new start in life, making a new lease on life. It seems likely to me that this process is almost always begun in a dream or series of dreams, in that a dream element is somehow seen as very important to the waking self, which can then be used in order to construct a set of beliefs which will support the new inner identity idea. Amazingly enough, the dream need not even be recalled by the conscious mind in literal detail, but the emotional impressions and realizations are passed on to the inner identity and again perhaps not even in words, but in that realm of impression and inner conviction which is experiential and cannot be denied.

The dream element is almost always a condensed symbol, containing many past and present life associations which when added together create a sort of psychological stance which can be added to as the element-symbol evolves over time to include more and more of the personality. Let�s take a simple example of this. In most lives the symbol of a house means family, comfort, warmth, acceptance, belonging, and many other positive things. But if a person has one or more lives with intolerable family situations, the symbol of the house takes on quite a different meaning, yet even that meaning is still shaded by the original good associations that the idea of HOME originally had- even for this person.

As this new emergent symbol gains in importance and dominance in the conscious and unconscious minds, other inner identities that no longer are serving the personality gradually fade in significance and are replaced by the new one. I believe that this is what happens both in cases where great success is won, and also in cases where people suddenly seem to age quickly, or develop a sudden serious illness. In this case, the inner identity takes an ominous turn and the health of the personality is in question. Yet on the positive side of this, spontaneous cures from diseases have taken place and in this case I feel it likely that the person has constructed another inner identity to grow into, and finds in that development a purpose and a place in the world which was not there before the inner identity was created. The person develops this new stance in life, and uses it as a platform for further understanding and identification with others who have endured similar circumstances. This is akin to a lens through which the person sees the world, causing all of the other events and priorities of the person to be organized according to how they fit or do not fit in with the new inner identity orientation. Religious conversions may also work in this way.

In my case, the past life memory of James A. Bradley led to the inner identity of being an outdoorsman in this life, which led me to go camping quite a bit, and I learned a closer connection to nature. For me this extended itself to help me understand the nature of my own physical body and of my own personality. After spending quite a lot of time out there in Utah in this life, I don�t seem to have any further need for taming the wild west, but I have certainly been trying to understand as well as enjoy my dream world of wild wonders!!!

I have developed many other dream based inner identities derived at least in part from various past life memories. I believe that these also help to increase my ability to understand my present life, and the causes of some of the difficulties I have had. I do not think that it is a good idea to concentrate too much on past lives, yet when they are presented as memories or as memory fragments woven into dreams, they are given to us to use and it is a good thing to try and understand their place in our lives.

I now consider that most all of my waking experiences are interpreted in the light of my various inner identities, which of course are maintained and limited by my beliefs about what is possible or probable for me in this life. This accounts for the many interpretations that different individuals will give when giving an account of an event which has been witnessed by many people who were present for the event. Each person sees the event differently, and adds or deletes things which do not fit in with their particular beliefs about people, or about the event itself. The various inner identity structures of the people witnessing the event will color their interpretations accordingly, and the event, when reconstructed by the process of going over the event in memory, will literally become a different event to each person. It will mean different things automatically, and this is why it is often so difficult to get people to agree on the actual details of any given event.

After remembering many such dreams and past lives, and analysing the construction of many of my own inner identity, I began to imagine a composite person within myself built up from all the inner identity structures which "I" have created during the course of all of my lives so far. It was then that I realized that I have generated all the situations which I have had to face from the viewpoint we call karma, because in each life the events that happen are created by decisions and attitudes that have been a part of the personalities of former lives and of course their inner identity concerning themselves and the times in which they lived.

Over the years I have seen various selves emerge from my memory which I can now see have influenced my emotional life in this lifetime. I say this because it seems that past lives most strongly affect the present personality through the emotions; creating a melange of feelings which are a psychic composite from former existences. It should be again noted that these feelings are not strange or alien to the person experiencing them. This is because they were created by that person�s whole self during various incarnations; yet the creation took place in former physical selves and the attitudes and qualities expressed by those selves are then expressed through the present personality on an involuntary or subconscious basis- until those former selves� attitudes are faced and assimilated by the present personality. This assimilation process does not involve the destruction of any personality, but simply the exchange and developed concordance of attitudes, values, and desires. As each successive incarnational personality develops from the efforts of previous ones, so do those efforts reflect back into the fields of the former personalities for their benefit. In other words, past selves benefit from our efforts!!

Inner identities are crucial to the health and stability of our physical personalities. When our American culture is viewed from this perspective, it is obvious that we as a culture have lost the original heritage of our inner identity to a large extent, and partially as a result our youth does not know who they want to emulate. It is true that in most recent years, many men and women have emerged as role models and good leaders, however, the perceived gap between today�s youth and those role models is wider than ever, and the role model�s achievements seem all the more unattainable. This naturally leads to despair, and to the assembly of individuals who share these problems.

These assemblages take many forms, but the most notable ones are gangs, but to the individuals involved, involvment in these gangs is one of their only ways of being able to access a valid personal inner identity structure (as seen and experienced from the individual�s point of view). Granted, the structure exists amidst the context of violence and aggressive intents, but the group consciousness gathers about itself it�s own traits and characteristics which then become available for identification by all of the group�s members. This provides group cohesivness, and strengthens all the more each member�s version of the group inner identity.

What options, then, can be provided for people such that they can take on an inner identity which is supportive of the family in particular, and the community in general? Certainly the new inner identity must be strongly centered and aggressive because it needs to have a desirable and attractive character. People must also feel that their own feelings and desires are being spoken to and acknowledged, otherwise they yell louder and louder and commit ever more aggressive acts until they are responded to. Sometimes in our culture, people are not heard soon enough perhaps, and reach a point where they yearn to be heard, and so devise some extreme act through which to receive public recognition. This is extremely available with our current news media, which becomes an extension of the voice of our personal and group inner identity as we seek to guide ourselves into the future of technology and the ever expanding choices of livelihood and lifestyle.

Yet the inner identity gives dimensionality to life and a richness of associational interplay which further stimulates personal growth and development and the desire to seek out life and relationship. The development of a set of healthy personal inner identity is worth the effort put into it. It is best guided by your heart, and with a feeling for what is best for you and all concerned.