Dear Subscribers,

A subscriber sent a link to a video on youtube about a young boy with recollections from his previous life as a fighter pilot. It is quite detailed and also emotional. I think many of you will find it interesting:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SF3KqGpxXvo&

I don't want to say much until some of you have had a chance to watch it. This is a subject I have studied in great depth for many, many years so there will be comments later, but not now.

Well, a few words . . . for those who are resistant.

In the clinic where I was consulting in Germany, it was normal to work on Saturdays but to have half a day off on one weekday. I was very much looking forward to a tiny bit of downtime when the doctor began reciting the schedule for what I thought would be a respite. He noted the droop in my aura and asked what the problem was. I said, I was really hoping to find a way to visit Hildegard of Bingen's Abbey. He said, "You want to go there?" To make this short, he cancelled everything and arranged a guided tour with a very warm and well educated nun named Hiltrud who quickly figured out how keenly interested I was in absolutely everything pertaining to Hildegard and that chapter of history. She began talking about Hildegard's voluminous correspondence with extremely high profile persons in practically every known realm. I sort of knew that, but she looked directly at me and said, "Hildegard corresponded extensively with the Cathars." I was stunned, almost choked. I asked, "Did Hildegard believe in reincarnation?" She very sincerely responded saying she did not know the answer, but what was interesting was that there was no personal edit in her sentence. She could have sounded hesitant or judgmental, but she gave a very simple and pure answer. A few minutes later, she showed me Hildegard's coffin. I will never forget the shock. I can still feel this when I write about it. Her bones are entombed in a glass coffin that is in front of the altar which is simply gorgeous, lovely mosaic tiles with incredible shades of turquoise and blue. If you are attracted to Hildegard, you must visit Bingen if you have a chance.

I don't know if the Inquisition destroyed every Cathar. I doubt it. The Inquisitors pursued them relentlessly and there were countless martyrs to the tyranny but there were also some sympathizers because when evil is completely out of hand, there is always an underground movement.

At the end of my first trip to the clinic, the doctor took me to dinner at a castle that had been converted to a nice restaurant. It was high on a hill and shivers were going through me as I looked at the castle on the other side of the river. He was starting to figure out where my buttons are and he said softly, "Many people died." The German Inquisition was particularly thorough. There were towns and villages where no women were left alive, such was the furor of the misanthropes who rained hell on Earth for hundreds of years.

I don't want to get stuck in a chapter from the past but there is a famous saying that those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it. We must learn and we must learn quickly.

When I was looking for parallels between the present time and some other period of history, the Inquisition seemed to fit the bill. It was officially established in 1184 A.D. to root out heresy. The Office of the Inquisition has never been closed, just renamed. The figures for the victims range from a few thousand to 68 million. Many people have written me saying the numbers I have sometimes used are way too high, but I didn't pluck them out of thin air. In actuality, what happened is that when the Inquisition was disbanded in one area, records were often burned because of embarrassment. On the one side, there were the informants, neighbors who reported their suspicions to officials and on the other side, there were family survivors who sought to close the book on allegations made against their kin.

Initially, the Inquisition only targeted Christians but eventually, it targeted Jews and later Muslims. Keep in mind that much of the grandest culture in Spain, everything from flamenco music to incredible academic and architectural achievements were due to the erudition and culture of these other populations. Jews who converted to Christianity were called conversos; however, if suspected of retaining their allegiance to Judaism, they could be hauled before the Inquisition, tortured, and sentenced to death. Their property would then be confiscated, leaving surviving family members devastated and impoverished. Eventually, all Jews were expelled from Spain. The year was 1492. That might ring a bell.

Most who were exiled went to Portugal, but the risks turned out to be worse than they had been in Spain. Because of the dangers on the Iberian Peninsula, countless converts to Catholicism sought safety in the New World while others went to Morocco or the Ottoman Empire and later to Amsterdam, invariably bringing with them their wealth and whatever influence comes with money.

In fact, what we never learned in school is that the voyage of Columbus was financed by conversos from Aragon and many crew members, the interpreter, and perhaps even Columbus himself were conversos. Today, the percentage of Sephardic Jewish DNA in Spain and Portugal remains high and includes the most aristocratic families, but what is even more astounding is that many conversos actually offered their sons to the priesthood so as to have some protection from within the church. I don't want to write a history of conversos or their Islamic counterparts, moriscos, but rather to focus on a different aspect of this history.

Some may remember what we were taught in school, i.e. the Pilgrims came to America in search of religious freedom. Yes, of course, we know that, but now we also begin to appreciate why someone would have such a desperate need for freedom that he or she would abandon everything and cross an immense ocean, but the truth is the Conquistadors had been all over both North and South America long before the Mayflower set sail. They had even established offices of the Inquisition in the New World.

As we know, the Pilgrims arrived in November in what is now Massachusetts and only half survived the first winter. When you think about, really think, there is a very strange picture that emerges. There were 102 passengers on the Mayflower, many of whom were children and some, not all, were members of the congregation that was in quest of religious freedom. That congregation was headquartered in Amsterdam, converso capital of Europe at the time.

I skipped a lot but there is another parallel to our times. In addition to the Inquisition, there was the Plague. Everywhere you go in Europe, you find a monument to the Black Death.

As the oppression and fear mounted, an opposition movement called by some the Protestant Reformation and by others the Protestant Revolution began. It was greatly helped by a new invention: the printing press (1439). Gutenberg himself was born into a family that had a hereditary position as goldsmiths for the ecclesiastic mint, and most of us know that the Bible was one of the books printed on the new press. What is less well known is that the press was used to mass produce indulgences which were sold at immense profit, sounds like a scam to me?

Martin Luther railed against this, but the response to his scholarly attempt to dispute the notion that souls can be prematurely released from purgatory by monetary gifts was greeted with the banning of books, Index Librorum Prohibitorum, often because of a single sentence that was the subject of controversy. Bodies burned and heads rolled. Scandinavia broke from Rome and other countries would follow suit. The Index is still maintained by the Vatican.

I don't know what you see in this thumbnail sketch, but I see extraordinary subversion of both doctrine and common sense, psychopathic abuse of power, and relief in the form of an intelligent movement to resist usurped and corrupt authority. I also see exploration and colonization as responses to the terror pervading Europe. I see contamination of the New World by the Old but also some breathing room for those who hardly knew a day without fear. However, I see great injustice perpetrated on the people who were here before the Europeans, great transfer of wealth from the New World to the Old, and mounting incentive to be free of the Old World agendas.

In terms of the parallels to today, they are so obvious, they hardly need to be enumerated. We have similar ethnic and religious tensions, a new invention called the Internet, and a hemorrhaging of wealth . . . and now a political climate that relies on informants and that condones torture. We are looking for other planets in hopes of escaping this one . . . so what has changed?

It has irked me that the history taught both in public schools and Sunday schools did not include a proper account of the Inquisition. Of course, we know that Joan of Arc was a victim, but not everyone realizes that Marco Polo and Galileo also suffered major encounters with this insane organization. To this day, the Vatican has not really admitted error. In the case of Galileo, they have acknowledged that some of the members of the tribunal were mistaken in their failure to appreciate the merits of the Copernican theories of astronomy. Galileo recanted rather than suffer the fate of Giordano Bruno, but he died under house arrest and his work was road blocked.

What is important here is that if we think for one second that anyone in officialdom will quickly embrace some discovery that downplays the supreme importance of Earth in relationship to the Universe or that man is perhaps just another species with limited claims to fame, take another hard look at what is involved in the death of an idea that has outlived its usefulness. However, to the astonishment of many, the Vatican appears to have rushed to admit the possibility of intelligent life elsewhere in the Universe. They may know something the rest of us haven't yet been told, but the usual explanation is they don't want to make the same mistake they made with Galileo. I don't think that explanation holds water. I think they know something and are getting ready to export people.

This is actually — obviously — one of my major areas of interest and if brave enough, I will eventually explain my take in more detail. Suffice it to say that what was disturbing about a heliocentric "universe" is that the Sun became more important than the Earth. You could say that just as we are egocentric and ethnocentric, we are geocentric. The Egyptians tried to correct this by introducing not just monotheism but special emphasis on the Sun. We could probably talk for years as to whether or not the transmission of this knowledge impacted life on Planet Earth, but the vision I saw as a child was that when we understand that our Sun orbits around another star and it around yet another, we will have to deconstruct even more of our "-centricity" in order to prepare for galactic interaction. My bet is that unlike the conquest of the Aztecs and Incas, the next adventure will demand a change in habits because our behavior will not be tolerated elsewhere in the Universe.

So, rather than an opus of doom and gloom, I am praying that we begin to realize what went south on us and we become much more receptive to cordial relationships with galactic beings from whom, I suspect, we are going to learn a lot.

Many blessings,

Ingrid

Copyright by Ingrid Naiman 2011

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http://www.lifeafterlife.tv/watch-life-after-life.php

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