While obviously I'd read of the idea previously, The Process offered my practical introduction to it. That group was quite emphatic about convinced belief in a number of metaphysical topics, decrying intellectualised skepticism as a “human” self-deception. While anyone could rationalise away such matters, we the Processean elite knew they were actual and true.
I was reserved on its teachings about reincarnation until it I was baptised with my sacred name, Luke, in 1970. The names were chosen for us at that period, and I had no expectation of what I would get. My immediate reaction during the short baptism ceremony was mild disappointment, since I would have preferred something more exotically macho, like Ra-Hotep or Mahaprajna. Luke sounded dismally Anglican.
But over the next hour, I had an experience of feeling a powerful, high-level influx, coming from somewhere far back in time. I'd not been primed to expect such a thing, and nobody else I ever spoke to reported anything similar. The familiar “Processean look” of straight-eyed openness came into my face that night, and I felt blessed. I still recall that evening as extraordinary, with me fully present with other people, while being simultaneously “flowed into” by power and grace.
It was understood that these “identities” we were given probably related to past lives. I took the Apostle Luke as the historical precursor for my name, and that sense of identification stuck for many years. I recall one time reading how Luke and St. Paul had crossed the Mediterranean and been caught in a storm, and promptly I had to throw up. I found myself close to other people I met in the group whose names related to events and people in the Book of Acts.
An additional identity I was given later, which did have a solid Egyptian ring to it, came back to me in a less focused but still intense way 20 years later, when I began tentative magical work with Egyptian deities and found strong connections to aspects of that name. I still prefer to keep it private, even today.
But time has a way of erasing the impact of spiritual highs. In The Process, I was in a high-intensity cult, where everyone became cross-linked in a psychic infrastructure of intense interaction. There was a bombardment of constantly reinforced spiritual ideas, to which I contributed my own quota, convincing myself all the more deeply. We had always had, among our system of apologetics, the notion that humanity had been on a spiritual downward spiral for millennia, which explained why we, these demi-gods and bodhisattvas and apostles, had fallen from the state we were in when we were originally the people and beings whose names we now bore. But I could never wholly accept that. Eventually, I was bound to leave.
Once you left it, that support network and that infrastructure were not present, and the glamour dissolved. All of us, I think, have kept some Processean ideas alive, but probably nobody adheres to a whole portfolio of them.
And yet.
Magical ritual uses god-forms. Practising magicians are, for an hour or two, Thoth or Neith or Horus, and something remarkable then happens in terms of consciousness shifts. Even on our own, this will work: I've prowled my own neighbourhood “being” Anubis and been in a completely different state of heightened alertness to the trees, the shape of the houses and the plants on their lawn, and so on. The mindfulness has been intense.
Working with past lifetimes has a similar effect. Moving into an “as if” state with them, I find they magick-up ordinary living. When the Ancient Egyptian identity I mentioned a couple of paragraphs back kicks in, coincidences pile up. Even if they're only apparent coincidences, they still pile up. Or I find myself anticipating events of the next hour, or of remembering personally significant ideas I last thought about years ago. People say oddly meaningful things to me or around me. I will actually win $10 on my lottery ticket.
One time, years ago, I was in a desperate state at work. For a project we were working on, and with which he was having lots of problems, my boss arbitrarily told me to find a newly designed food package, and see what I could learn about it. And within an hour. He was quite capable of delegating things like that when he couldn't manage them himself.
I had had a reverie going earlier that day about a past Tibetan lifetime involving being a servant of the Fifth Dalai Lama (in the 1500s), and more out of desperate escapism than anything else, I fell back into it as I headed to the variety store in the basement of our office tower. Where I found what turned out to be a test marketing effort for a new plastic orange juice bottle.
It was a long shot, since I still had to find out details of how it had been designed, and by whom, and what the intent was. Still mentally operating as a Gelugpa monk (this was still partly bizarre escapism, not a magically informed decision), I called the company on the label, and was promptly referred to the design firm that had created the bottle. The owner was about to head off on a business trip to Asia (though not to Tibet), and could only give me 15 minutes, but we talked fast.
Half an hour later, I had a slightly Buddhist-influenced, 500-word report drafted - that is, it lacked upbeat phrasing about market opportunities, and was full of observations about the impermanence of both market forces and bottle designs. But my boss was off my back..
There's nothing here that “proves” anything, of course, apart from the fact I use unusual methodologies, especially when I work for unreasonable managers. The best I can come up with is the inference that past lives are remembered only in the form of a kind of concentrated essence of their primary lessons or their key experience, and that gives them special potency
What I could never rationalise with the Buddhist monk scenario, however, was why a notably non-materialistic past life might help me locate a test-market plastic juice bottle that was only being sold in a dozen places across the country. At the time, I put it down to the power aspects of Dzogchen Tantric teachings, which could be used in any context.
On more recent occasions, I've found letting myself fall into past-life “clicks” brings up images and other sensory impressions that have the subjective feeling of personal linkage to a place and time. I tend to fight the notion rather than encourage it (I am truly a skeptical theurgist), but under such circumstances the idea that there is a genuine historical root to the experience is hard to beat back into the sphere of mere overblown daydream.
This happened in the Catalan city of Girona (also spelled Gerona), and I can still speak of “my past life as a Hebrew Qabalist in Girona” in a surprisingly matter-of-fact way. Something similar happened outside an old church in Mainz, Germany, some years ago, where I had a strong though oddly not disturbing sense of having been tortured or burned for some religious crime (perhaps believing in reincarnation...?) In retrospect, the matter-of-fact nature of that experience was the most convincing part of it, since if I wanted to wallow in delusion, an affect of full-blown horror would have gained more of my attention.
Logically, the idea that the 50-million or so humans of 5,000 years ago somehow became six billion is hard to argue, and there is a host of related ideas that come into contention if we suggest our existence extends beyond one body's worth of incarnate existence. I have no answer to these practical issues.
But if I try to deny that the whole issue is nonsense, the part of me that knows when a bad week or a good day is coming rebels. Indeed, my reincarnational agnosticism might be merely a way of dodging an issue on which I have a strong, secret conviction: that is, my own partaking in the continuum of human consciousness necessarily implies that whatever “I” am manifests itself repeatedly, like agitated water pounding as waves on a shoreline until all its energy is expended.
Darn it. I wish I knew for sure. Sometimes, agnosticism can be hell.