Diversity, Freedom and Past Lives
- Rev. Will Jordan

People often ask about their past lives and how those lifetimes affect them now. There isn’t one simple answer, but as III got ready to have a booth at Pridefest, and the situation in Iraq continues to deteriorate, I began thinking about diversity and past lives. How are Pridefest, Iraq and past lives connected you might ask? It’s really very simple, very direct: past energy affects current life. We are the sum of all our past lives.

We carry information lifetime to lifetime in the form of mental image pictures that guide us in our present incarnation. As we learn, grow, and experience life in present time, we use information gathered over the ages to aid "our current knowing" of the world. Pictures with little or no energy we release – no reason to hold them whether that great gay/lesbian life in 325BC in Athens or Sapphos or as an Oracle at Delphi. However, images which carry a great deal of energy tend to make us wary or feel endangered – as in "last time I did that… I got killed – I think I won’t do that this time and anyone who does is stupid or bad."

These images can be simple as in the picture of "fire is dangerous" if you got burned to death previously. Slightly more complicated, might be "burned to death defending your country in a war" – you died, but it was "valiant." Much more complicated might be the image of "burned at the stake during the Spanish Inquisition because you were gay or psychic." You might come away from that past life thinking, " That was tough on the body, I’m not going to do that again," even as a spirit you say, "I learned a lot." Either way, you have to make choices in the following lifetimes about gay or psychic or Spain or Catholicism.

Now, you take a body this life and say, "I’m going to come in gay or psychic n 2004 and see if I can do it right – live, prosper and be happy." Or you might take the flip and say, "I got burned for being gay or a witch… I hate gay or spiritual stuff." and come in a bigot. It is pretty safe to say that at one time or another we have all been gay or spiritual – as well as bigots.

We see a great example of this in Iraq. With 6000 years of history from Sumer, Akkad, Ur, Babylon, and the Assyrians as indigenous culture and the Persians, Greeks, Arabs, Mongols, Turks, British, Baathist and now the US as outside invaders – most of us have at one time lived or died in Iraq. No wonder there is a lot of energy focussed there just as on the other end of the Fertile Crescent in equally invaded Israel. Energy is left in each of us from those lifetimes so we all feel we have a stake in the outcome of Iraq or Israel. We listen to the epithets, and we know the energy: raghead, sand coon, kike. – not unlike faggot, nigger, wop, honky. Each word energized by fear. When we release the fear, we realize we’ve been what we feared, and our past lives free us to embrace the entire world.