Elias

“I see fire,” she said with her eyes closed. “I feel like my skin is burning but I can't move, I think I'm stuck.”

A bit earlier we had both eaten a good handful of Psylocibin mushrooms we had just found on our walk and set the intention to find out what our souls had experienced in our past lives, to maybe find out why we felt so connected when we first met.

While completely letting go of any conscious thought process, she had started seeing the face of a young Asian girl in something which seemed to her like a mountainous area of China. She recalled how she enjoyed braiding the girl's hair and how they both enjoyed playing with simple kites, imagining how they themselves would one day fly like the kites and like the birds. Apparently, the young girl was embodying my soul in a past life and she had been my older brother.

Then she remembered how we both died. Our house was on fire and (s)he had gotten stuck under a collapsed part of the house. I tried to free him but I wasn't strong enough. As she was going through the feelings of this experience I could also feel the intense emotion of trying to save (my brot)her while at the same time wishing to get out, breathe fresh air and stay alive. I felt intense desperation and sadness over this situation, knowing that either she or both of us would die. Then the whole roof collapsed and we both died. I felt the pain. And then it was over. And we were back in our actual reality. Stunned. Sober.

We both took some time to digest the fact that we had died together as siblings in a past life and now were happy to spend time together again.

When she told me that knowing how I sacrificed my life trying to save her gave her a deep sense of trust in me,

I couldn't help but imagine an inner dialogue:

“Wow, you led her to imagine you were siblings in a past life only to gain her trust and have sex with her!” “Dude, this is real...” I responded. “Man, I can't believe you're actually believing your own shit!”

I had to laugh and was happy that I could simply observe this conversation in my mind. But it was this discussion that was at the core of what was happening in my mind at this time and in the following days.

The ego, as I understand it, is the part of my sense-making-machinery which is most concerned with survival. It is looking for the simplest and most robust explanations for its experience. But it was never too concerned with growing past its limitations or with long-term happiness or with other people.

The new self that was emerging was more concerned with long-term happiness, with finding and following the most interesting and fulfilling path. It seeks to connect with people, find deeper truths, experience joy, give love. I want to grow this one so far that the old one simply agrees with it.

From one point of view, the memory of a past life seems to be outrageously hard to explain by anything else than pure imagination, which on the other hand is an amazingly simple explanation.

But then, even if it is just an imagination, I'm willing to live with that. Because it still makes a lot of sense, it connects very well with how I actually feel. There is a connection that is similar to that of a sibling and I would like to maintain that throughout my whole life, and not believe that it is a passing feeling.

I also don't mind sacrificing my life, because seriously, how likely is it that I'll have to do that? If it happens at all, it's likely that I still have a good number of years or even decades to live before it happens.

A different story would probably be what Orwell described in his book “1984” – facing the certainty of a horribly painful death, all alone, I think Orwell is right – my love for anyone would probably also be shattered quite easily.

In any non-dystopian real-life-scenario however, risking my own life to get a chance at saving the life of a loved one still seems like the best idea.

“Wow, you fucked her once and now you would die for her...”

This is the voice of my former ego again. But even seen rationally, this life is not about surviving – we're past the point where this needs to be our priority – it is about experiencing what we want to experience. And I choose love.

What supports my belief in this past life memory to be actually true, besides the trust in her feeling that it is, and the fact that it rationally makes sense to see it as such, is that she actually discovered an image of a burning house in the place that she travelled to one day later.

Even my colleague Sathvik, after asking me about our relatedness, hearing this story and seeing this image, let out an “uff” and said: “You are exactly at the same point as me. If she and my girlfriend meet, I'm sure they'll have a lot to talk about. My girlfriend always kept saying how she remembered me as a temple guard and how she used to visit the temple with her parents and that's where we first met. But I don't remember shit...”

Of course, he's an engineer, he's not receptive to this (yet).

I recalled the words that he had quoted a few days earlier:

“If you believe there is god, there is god. If you believe there is no god, there is no god.”

I told him how these words seemed true as never before to me and how I was starting to believe that truth might ultimately exist only relative to each of our experiences.

Maybe our explanations for our experience should mostly be selected based on which ones work best for us, not on which ones are the simplest and the most likely to be true. Of course I will still always be drawn to the simple explanations because they offer such a strong foundation, but I also came to the conclusion that I don't have to decide for any single explanation but I can also assume different explanations to be similarly true.

A bit earlier I had explained to a friend, who found her way to Jesus and seems very happy with that, how I believe that we shouldn't limit ourselves to just one explanation for experience in the same way we shouldn't limit ourselves to just one emotion. They're all valuable and contain their own truth, and they're not mutually exclusive.

And sometimes, imagination might actually be more true than reality.

If it's you I'm quoting in the text above and you remember what you actually said, please let me know so I can adapt and expand this text.