A Cat Biting a Cat.
Once many years ago I tried past life regression, where I was hypnotized by one of the world’s leading experts on the subject, Jörgen Sundvall, and the goal was to reach an earlier life. I’ve always been incredulous to the idea of past lives, as many who have tried being under this form of hypnosis always seem to have been someone terribly important; special people, someone with power and wisdom, or connected to famous or infamous historical events. That makes me skeptical, as it more seems like classic self-confirmation; placing oneself higher up on the ladder than everyone else — something most humans wants, as it brings a feeling of importance. It’s ego, and it’s not an especially flattering form of ego.
So I laid down in a comfy chair with a blanket over me and Jörgen started some meditative music, and started to count down. I had decided to be very open minded about this, and let my self go into the unknown. Suddenly something opened up to me, a light and then a path in the jungle under a crystal clear starry sky…
I ended up being a nice Asian farmer, who lost his parents at a young age during an enormous fire, and finally passes away with a loving family around him in the year of 1232 in what’s now Khon Kaen, in Thailand. It was a happy death and overall it seemed to have been a quite good life. I was satisfied I didn’t ended up being an emperor or holy person or someone too fitting my own profile of people trying out past life regression.
This was a very realistic and vivid experience, and to be honest I don’t know what to make of this. In my book Homo Satanis: How I Learned to Love Satan and other Insights from my Childhood, I wrote a chapter about it and how we in this case can use imagination for therapy and under hypnosis deal with traumatic experiences. I’m convinced that could work as a healing process, even if it sounds unconventional.
A couple of years later I thought about cats, as I often do; how this magnificent creature behaves together with us humans and other animals. For example, a cat always know exactly where to bite an enemy to kill or incapacitate it in some other way; all animals do that. They just KNOW. That’s what we called instinct. But what is instinct? If you mate a cat with a beautiful pattern and long elegant tail with another similar cat their offspring often turns out beautiful, with the same pattern and maybe an even longer, amazing tail. And so on. Their looks is inherited from earlier generations of cats, and so a specific cat is shaped.
So what about their behavior and personality, the instinct? Isn’t that the same thing then? If two cats, a long time ago, who both have understood that if they bite their enemy in the throat it will kill the enemy, will that instinct, that behavior move on to the next generation or the generation after that? Wouldn’t this be true for humans also?
We often say that a child of someone have the same personality as his or her parent, or both. That means our personality traits and behavior, to a certain degree is moved on, sometimes it degenerates and sometimes it evolves to something even larger and better. The person we are now is the average of thousands of generation before us. If I look at my family for example and one of my ancestors, the Canadian explorer Henry Larsen, he obviously had an urge to see and do new stuff, some kind of restlessness and to a certain degree open to new things and new ideas. That’s how I percieve him after reading the history books. Then we have my father, who likes to be by himself, he doesn’t talk that much and enjoys to sit at home listening to music. I have both of these personalities inside me: I have the urge to explore, but I rather do it from home. It’s simplifying to the extremes, but hopefully it will explain my idea.
Let’s keep an open mind and throw away preconceived opinions, theories and both pro- and con comments about the past life experience. Here’s how I see it: there’s no eternal, infinite I-being jumping from body to body at the moment of death and rebirth, there’s nothing supernatural going on. Instead of Past Life Regression, let’s call it Past Behavior Regression. Let’s say that down by the roots on the family tree, there was someone that was very much like you, someone with very similar — or exactly the same — personality straits, same behavior — and what happens is that when you appears in this life you can through the genetics of your family “connect” to this person, and he or she therefore almost seems like a “past” life, when it’s actually the past behavior and past experiences you match with — like an abstract Tinder date over the distance of a thousand years.
I was always smiling when my mom, who have been moving insanely much in her life — mostly because she feels restless, or she needs to move place — sometimes says she think it’s because of the Romani people we have way back in our family tree. Maybe it’s true, maybe she inherited that need to move around, to travel, from those past relatives? Maybe they once travelled from South East Asia and much later ended up in Europe — which can explain the dark hair and skin of my mom and her mother, and maybe it’s a connected to the farmer that appeared in my “past life” experience?
If this would be the truth we could also learn from our relatives, which we can. Destructive and creative behavior can be inherited, both through genes and external influence from our parents and other relatives. Look back and see, what did your ancestors do? How did they behaved?
Look into the legacy they leave behind, and you can probably understand how to shape your own future life and maybe career, avoiding things that will never be good for you and indulge in the things that will do you great.
Try it, you might be surprised what these past existences can advise you, no matter if you believe any of these theories or not.
Fred Andersson is an author, individualist and television freelancer from Sweden. His book Homo Satanis: How I Learned to Love Satan and other Insights from my Childhood was published in 2018 is available on Amazon.
