A man residing somewhere in southern California had become tired of an ongoing phobia that showed up whenever it rained. The phobia struck whenever he came close to a mud puddle--he would get an unbearable anxiety attack in which he felt that the puddle might swallow him up at any given moment.
As the area around Los Angeles is generally not known for its abundant rainfall, he delayed seeing anyone for a long time until one day he went to see a hypnotherapist known for his keen ability to get to the core of a problem through time regression therapy.
After intensely scanning the man's life experiences all the way back to the moment of his birth without finding a clue, the hypnotist extended his search into the man's past lives. The therapist and the patient were about to give up when they stumbled upon a scene at a log cabin in the early nineteenth century old west: There he was, the man with the phobia, sitting no more than six months old in a wooden bathtub.
While the little tot in the tub was splashing around joyously, the door to the cabin opens, and the baby's father, all dirty and sweaty, comes and demands a bath right then and there. "Can you just wait until the baby is finished and then you can have a bath in his water?" asked Mom. "You don't expect a hard-working fella to sit down in that filthy sewage puddle, do you?" Dad replied. Fearing Dad's rising anger, Mom reassured him "You can have a clean bath in a minute," she gasped as she carried the tub through the cabin door and dumped its contents on a vegetable patch in the back yard.
Less than a second later, there were screams of panic from the baby and Mom and torrents of foul language coming from the Dad accusing Mom of intentionally having thrown the baby out with the bath water.
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Lol! That's as likely the origin of the caveat as any! But really, I do have some interest in past life regression. It has been said that birth and death are the true dichotomy--not life and death. Life is therefore a continuum I surmise. I have wondered about genius and precosciousness. I have a question regarding the origin of a particular phobia. What may be the creation story of the phobia of fear/lack of courage/faith itsself? Interested in some more details of that regression process.
ReplyDeleteThanks for your comment, Harmon. One source of skepticism on my part is that past life regressions don't appear to pan out numerically. With a world population of around six billion, there would hardly be enough human lives in the past to accommodate all those living today. So what's the answer? Maybe the Hindu way--some had to contend themselves as animals in past lives, others perhaps inanimate objects--there is the story, as yet untold, that a past life adventurer found out that he had existed as a chamber pot some centuries ago... What do we know? In the words of Paul McCartney "there will be an answer..."
ReplyDeleteHoward, there may be a counterbalance to your skepticism. The assumption may be that what transmigrates is an individual or unitary soul.
ReplyDeleteIf collective soul is taken into account, it may be that each of us is a collection of more than one lifes experience, like an exponential reality rather than a one to one reality. What do you think of the Dali Lama as a reincarnated Buddha? Or, what would be the ultimate purpose of transmigration or waking up every day for that matter?
Short note 1. on PLR and fear. Read an account from the Upahishad of creation story from Joseph Campbell's, "Oriental Mythology", that is a way of answering my question about the origin of fear itself.
ReplyDeleteShort note 2. Re: learning through levity, numbers and transmigration of "individuals" not adding up and thought that what we call "all" is not in our purview being part of that totality at ANY given time. Ooops! Someone rescue the baby! Peace.
Correction on Dali Lama reincarnation as the Buddha: its actually Avalokitsvara
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