Memories of the afterlife.

I don’t have many, probably because every time I get anything remotely similar to a memory of the afterlife, I have enormous doubts. I think I lose concentration thinking it must be a mere fantasy, my logical mind starts to interfere, and at the end I haven’t gained much new. Clearly I’m not like all those enlightened people who find out all their lessons, all their soulmates in their current life and their spiritual purpose in a single regression.

Nonetheless, I do have brief scenes in my mind and a couple of insights that seem to come from a “higher” part of me that I barely understand. In that state, in the few occasions I feel I’ve been there, I see things in a completely different way, it’s like you really are a different being... yes, not even a different “person”, as now you are not human. It’s hard to describe, and at least for me, hard to comprehend.

Since it’s hard for me to believe and it usually sounds too “spiritual”, I do not usually talk about these memories, but earlier today I said to myself, “Well, why not?” To do it, I’ve chosen the term “afterlife” because I think it’s better than “the time between lives” as I usually say, and of course much better than the “academic” term invented by certain researchers: “the intermission”. This, in my opinion, doesn’t say anything different to an interval of time, no matter if you’re waiting for the bus or going to the bathroom for a piss before the second part of your favorite series begins. It sounds like the only thing you can do during that time is hovering in the sky looking for a body to reincarnate. It sounds so superficial.

Michael Newton had already coined the expression “life-between-lives” (with LBL being the abbreviation) but these researchers have completely ignored him, as they may think they’re the wisest among reincarnation researchers and they’re great putting names to things that already existed. For my part, I’ve decided to use “afterlife” because it’s a wider term. It doesn’t imply you have to reincarnate, you may choose this option or not. Through my experience I’ve also come to differentiate several states of consciousness in the afterlife, a point that inexplicably most researchers miss (not Michael Newton, by the way). I just can’t see why it is so difficult to understand that ghosts are one thing and spirits in the “spiritual world” (for lack of a better term) are another. If you call all these different states of consciousness by the same general definition of “intermission”, the only thing you’re doing, as usual for “academic” researchers, is to mess up things and bring confusion.

[Note: the reason I put the word “academic” between quotation marks is because I feel that’s intended to mean they are the “serious” researchers, that is, the only ones that can be trusted. I’ve found that’s very far from the truth, so I’ve decided I’ll never use that word without quotation marks, implying they don’t deserve the respect they want for themselves].

Well, I’ll stop rambling now and tell what I meant to tell from the beginning.

Tow nights ago something strange happened to me. As I mentioned in my latest entry, I suffered a severe fall while I was skating on Maundy Thursday. I am still recovering and I need to do rehabilitation exercises to regain the mobility of my left shoulder. It aches... a lot. And though this is not something new in my life, I’ve been reflecting about how we miss things only after we’ve lost them. Those words from a Marillion song always come back to me: “You never miss it till it’s gone”. I don’t know if this was the reason, but when I was left in the sofa quiet and in the dark, I breathed deeply and all of a sudden I was overwhelmed by deep feelings of sadness and depression. It was Katrina again. It was as if a past life review passed before my eyes. I saw the main scenes like quick flashbacks: the fear in the field hospital, the German officer who scared me, the church and the sound of the airplanes above, the loss of my boyfriend, the pistol in my hand, the desperation, the flash from the machine gun in the darkest of nights, the blood staining my clothes. I wanted it so much to be over. I know how much I’m fighting now, despite the physical pain, because I want to swim again in the summer. I know how much I want to live. I knew I didn’t want any of that when I forced the soldier to kill me. I had no more hope nor strength to survive.

But then it seemed the scene went on. I was curious because I’ve never had memories of what happened right after I died as Katrina. I only knew my life ended there in the blink of an eye, as I was lying in the middle of the dark street. I had the impression I was looking from the outside now. I saw the soldier lifting me in his arms like a broken doll, so tiny and shrunken, in fetal position. And then everything started to fade. Tears were rolling down my cheeks and I was doubting as always. “I want to go further, but aren’t I imagining it all?”

What happened next? Did the depression state I was in send me to a temporary hell with other depressive souls in the lower astral planes? Who knows, but certainly that’s not what I saw. I tried to forget about my negative thoughts and just go deeper into the trance. Then I felt as if I was waking up. I was also in a fetal position, but everything was light around me, a bright and dark yellow light. I was also light, it seems. I was “bigger” now, but lighter, ethereal, almost transparent... I was going to say immaterial, but I don't think this is exact, as I was somehow corporeal. I still felt "feminine", something I consider strange, as I think I have more masculine traits. I still could feel some of Katrina’s sadness and depression, but it was as if those emotions were just impregnating me, adhering to my being like some kind of dirtiness I hadn’t washed away yet. I no longer felt I was Katrina. Katrina was just a thin layer of skin I had left behind, like snakes do when they molt.

I’m not sure if there was someone else there helping me reflect and understand, but I do know I was wondering what Katrina’s life had meant. I’ve had the same thought in other occasions, and here it came back again: “To experience the absence of love”. There wasn’t love in Katrina’s life. There was no one who cared, except her boyfriend, taken away by war. I wasn’t surprised of the outcome: suicide was one of the likeliest options, and probably not the worst. I wasn’t concerned about that in the slightest. It was as if I was just evaluating my decisions and thinking: “Well, that was to be expected, given the circumstances”.

Basically, that was all. I went to bed still feeling emotional, but not giving too much weight to those memories that probably are imagination. But the truth is that at the following morning they were still clear and strong in my mind. They indeed have the “texture” typical of past life memories. They’re weird, different, hard to describe, as it’s not a physical world as we know it, you’re not even “you”. But they feel just as real. I just can’t know if they’re fantasy as I don’t have a way to verify it. I only have my intuition to judge. And it’s long since my intuition tells me we are so much more than flesh and bone, so much more than we can't even imagine.