Dear Subscribers,

Today is a special holiday in Sweden, kind of the opening of the Christmas season. For the first time in many years, I have actually been thinking a bit about the season. The web surfing turned out to be quite wild.

This time in 1968, I was in the north of Afghanistan. It was a very curious epoch in my life. Ostensibly, I was driving a Land Rover from England to India where I was to work for the State Department, but Afghanistan in December seemed vast and almost deserted.

There were almost no roads in much of the area traveled. This presented some challenges, but several really unusual events bear noting. At the time, I did not pay quite as much attention as I might have. However, you might say I took mental snapshots.

For one thing, the Land Rover proved to be hugely troublesome. Crossing the north, I had not seen any cars for weeks. Then, somewhere more towards the East, perhaps hundreds of miles from Mazar-e-Sharif, the ignition coil went dead. Out of nowhere, a man on horseback came up to my car and began speaking Japanese. I asked him why he was speaking Japanese to me. He said it was the only foreign language he knew. He asked me about my car and I said I'd trade it for his horse. He said he saw a jeep once during WWII so perhaps he could help me. About then, I was thinking that if he learned as much about auto repair as he did about Japanese, perhaps it was worth a shot. I told him I was having brake problems, not 100% untrue but obviously not the real issue. He looked so competent that I explained about the ignition coil. He told me to wait. Obviously, the Land Rover was going nowhere so I told him I'd wait. Three days later, he came back with a Japanese ignition coil that just happened to work perfectly. Honestly, I can't explain it.

The Afghan people are incredibly hospitable and they showed me a cave with a painting of Jesus meditating. Since I didn't know the language, I depended on gestures, but given what they showed me, I more or less assumed that Jesus had gone to Afghanistan and perhaps beyond during the years for which we have no surviving records. You can imagine my concerns when we started bombing these areas of Afghanistan. Last week, I thought I'd surf a bit and see if anyone knew anything about the paintings I had seen. To my surprise, that search led to several web sites that suggested that Jesus did not die on the cross but rather recovered and went to Kashmir, i.e., the paintings I had seen were not from the missing years as I had assumed. . . or this is the theory those writers were advancing.

After reading The Da Vinci Code, I had done some similar surfing and stumbled on sites that proposed that there was no historical Jesus, but I find this rather hard to believe; however, for some reason, it was not hard to believe that someone who could cure blindness and raise the dead would survive some hours on the cross. There was a surprising amount of medical detail about the crucifixion online, difficult to read, but somehow I found myself going over the horrific details of what is known and what is not. That said, anyone who survived such an ordeal would be wise to expatriate! Interestingly, there are apparently a number of scholars who sincerely believe that Jesus did survive and that he eventually settled in Kashmir where he ministered to the Jewish community.

Despite having Jupiter in Cancer, I hated how history was taught in school, but what I have learned since leaving school makes me believe that the victor of any conflict writes the history and spins the stories however his paymasters determine. However, in regressions, we see and hear details that are seldom found in books.

Many of you have written asking questions about whether people find themselves as historic personages during regressions. While this can happen, it is quite rare so if I were to try to account for why so many people think they were Anne Boleyn or Napoleon, I would not propose delusion so much as confusion. It's curious that a severe pain in the neck can suggest beheading and that association leads to Anne Boleyn and not Marie Antoinette or some other individual, but my experience is that these associations are made by the conscious mind. The unconscious self does not process the information in the same manner. For the same reason, we could look at a period of history when Napoleon was influencing the course of European history. Anyone on either side of the battle could have been familiar with the name since small as Napoleon was, his reputation was larger than life and apparently made a bigger impression on history than Wellington, despite being defeated at Waterloo.

When someone in an altered state does encounter a scene with profound historic content, the purpose is usually to reveal psychological dynamics and karma, not aggrandize the ego. In fact, what is shown is often devastating to the ego since the purpose is to show patterns, not enhance one's sense of self importance. Thus, if one finds oneself as a feudal lord or even a monarch, there is often more remorse than cause for celebration.

There are many methods for inducing an altered state of consciousness. The main one I have been describing in recent posts was originally called the Awareness Technique, but as time went on, I was exposed to a number of other approaches and gradually developed my own style which, alas, does not have a name. Probably, it does not need a name? I don't want to go into the details much less the pros and cons of any technique because, truthfully, these must be experienced before experiments begin. They share some common denominators, one being that they are very labor-intensive for the facilitator since they require immense concentration. Let me try to give an example. If a suggestion is made to visit another existence in which parallels to the present one exist in a manner that will help to resolve current issues, the facilitator has to follow the story carefully so that the prompts are meaningful. One interesting feature that occurred many times in discussions after a session was that one of us, either me or the client, was seeing the mirror image. The vibrations were identical, but if a client said something like, "the horse who came up from behind and stood on my right", I would have seen the exact same horse, same color, same movements, but it stood on the left. A detail like this is not important, but someone is on the astral plane and seeing reflections and we do not actually have any way of knowing who is seeing the mirror image. That mirror is however potentially a very important clue to other much bigger concepts so we must make a little note about it.

Each technique tends to support just slightly different insights. In the Wellsprings Technique, the use of music together with massage supports what we might call "resonance". Memories have patterns and music has patterns. At some point, the patterns connect and memories begin to surface and can be lifted out of their archives into consciousness. The music is not suggestive. While this statement is 98% true, it is not 100% true. What I mean is that highly dissonant music does not necessarily foster memories of discord. It may serve to break through resistance and unlock some vault that is protected by fear and ego. Likewise, pastoral music does not elicit pleasant memories. It may help people to relax and to feel safe enough to explore what they have hidden from themselves. The exception, the 2%, is that I found pentatonic music tends to enable memories that took place in cultures where these scales were favored over heptatonic scales. Keep in mind that an octave is an octave but you can divide it into parts and the precise tuning of each note can vary enormously. My experience has been that whether we are talking Debussy or a Japanese flute, the tendency to bring up memories in the Orient or very ancient cultures was strong. Otherwise, factors such as orchestration, solemnity, piety, etc. had little or no influence on the memories.

My inclination would therefore be to ascribe — tentatively — most of the benefit of using music to the inspiration affecting the composer. Because most compositions are long and contain many parts, what happens is once a particular issue is brought to awareness, use of the same recording will elicit something entirely different if used again. To test this theory, I often used the same music four or five times, in different sessions, but what triggered the memory was always a different passage and always related to some as yet to be resolved issue.

To test this theory even further, I asked someone to facilitate recall for me using opera, in this case, Norma. I know the Druid story and libretto very well, but when the session began, I found myself in a very, very ancient incarnation, probably many, many thousands of years ago, in a tropical place where I had traveled from Inner Asia. In short, there was nothing whatsoever about Druids, Romans, broken vows, funeral pyres, or anything else one finds in the opera. Moreover, what I want to emphasize is that I know the opera so well that when I was ill in the mid-60s, I tried to design sets for a production (in my mind since I had no formal association with any opera house.) What this means, I believe, is that what the conscious mind knows or thinks it knows is completely irrelevant to what is known by other parts of our psyche so when we cross from conscious to the altered state, we must be prepared to explore that state with a sort of virgin mind since the one with all the clutter is useless.

These essays will continue, but I want to post this while it is still the 13th (here at least) so as to wish you a safe and spiritually meaningful holiday season.

Many blessings,

Ingrid

Copyright by Ingrid Naiman 2011

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