introducing Student #3: Nehanda
Nehanda lives in a hut with a dirt floor and corrugated metal roof, brings water from the village well
Her mind was totally on Tilt. Professor Peter Goras had blown her away, and not just her, but just about everyone else in class. They were stunned, even though by now they had seen this type of drama unfold several times.
Nehanda is certainly familiar with the concept of having other lifetimes. The oral history of her ancestors is quite comprehensive.
Growing up in Africa near a rural township, she had been well-briefed by not only her parents, but also her grandparents and even her great-grandparents. In every family, in every tribe of relatives, there are those keepers of the history and tradition who pass it along to the later ones who take an interest. Of course she was very young during the time of her great-grandparents, but the next 2 generations spent many hours steeping her in the lore of her people.
Still, all that preparation notwithstanding, being reminded of your other lifetimes did not exactly classify as boring. There is nothing dull about recalling critical events from before you were born into this particular body. No matter how buried and forgotten they might be, the significant ones will light you up like a Christmas tree, reviving memories you didn’t even know you had.
Nehanda is learning that lesson up close and personal.
Today’s “victim” is a man who returned to the memory of his death in the most recent lifetime before this one. Dr. Goras uses that term “victim” humorously, although some students see it as dark humor. Nehanda has nothing but sympathy and love watching him relive how that life ended.
After Nehanda puts her daughter to bed, she reflects quietly on today’s lesson. The man, even though he is having a rough day, manages to navigate the emotional residue from that memory with a certain level of grace. She is glad that she doesn’t live in a noisy and rowdy larger city, because it gives her a chance to absorb and integrate her studies. In the stillness of the night, she ponders the circumstances of the man’s death, what was happening at the time that he died, and how he is now working to forgive and to heal.
On his appointed day, Nehanda’s classmate has done his homework, his self-care preparation. Dr. Goras gently escorts Robert to a place that turns out to be 1940s Nazi-occupied Europe. Hitler’s SS, the Schutzstaffel or “Security Unit,” a paramilitary group of enforcers of Hitler’s policies, is charged with exterminating Jews and other undesirables. Robert and his wife, a poor married couple living on the outskirts of a city in the Ukraine, are guilty of only one crime in life: being Jewish. In a wooded setting, the SS officers force able-bodied prisoners to dig a large pit, and that pit becomes their grave. Then the officers use belligerence and brutality to identify and round up all the Jews in the surrounding area and bring them to the pit, where they are shot and thrown in on top of the laborers who dug the pit.
Throughout his life, Robert has experienced reactions any time he has contact with the history of Nazi Germany and World War II Europe. He has certain health issues, plus odd fears and worries, paranoid fantasies that, if you see them on a list, seem to be random and unrelated. However, in the context of this story, suddenly they take on new meaning and can be seen to have a possible connection to each other.
The trauma of being shot in the back last time around has left him with a chronic health issue located in his torso.
Although he says it’s a minor thing and only appears rarely, Robert has also reported being possessed his entire life with the peculiar recurring fear of a sniper finding him at home and shooting him from long distance. He seems to be perversely drawn to books and stories about snipers, despite being a lifelong pacifist and otherwise having no interest in the military.
Robert’s entire laundry list of issues and symptoms which could relate to the 1940s and the SS will be reported in class over the coming weeks.
Robert’s challenge is ponderous: forgive all the players in the drama, including the German SS officers and the townspeople who reported him and his wife. In the following weeks, the entire class will watch him muddle through the process of forgiving and allowing and accepting.
The class meets twice a week. During the first class of each week, the Facing Personal Trauma day, Dr. Goras initiates a new student by taking them to the time and place of a trauma or critical event. The other weekly class is set aside for follow-up debriefing and healing work: this Recovery class allows students to process the fall-out of revisiting the old memories. Students are also required to keep a journal of the fall-out from their Trauma day, to help them work through it, and in case there isn’t time for everyone during the Recovery day sessions.
Over the course of months, Nehanda sees classmates break down into tears, sobbing hysterically. She watches classmates sink into fear, sometimes bordering on abject terror, turning white as a sheet, natural skin tone notwithstanding. One woman is provoked into screaming, spitting tacks, a fit of rage at the memory of a painful betrayal. Her reaction seems perfectly understandable once you hear the circumstances of her particular story.
Unexpected bouts of emotion are becoming the norm.
“It is hard to say whether this course should classify as credit towards my degree, or as intense personal therapy,” Nehanda thinks. The students quickly learn to regard Dr. Goras with awe, and even some fear. If you didn’t know he was an academic and scholar, you could be excused for wondering if he was a genius-level psychologist and practicing therapist. “Or a sadist,” she thought wryly.
The list of past students of Dr. Goras reads like a Who’s Who of reincarnation research science: Dr. Raymond Moody. Robert Monroe. Sylvia Cranston. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross. Elisabeth Haich. Each of those luminaries produced books which are now required reading in this class.
On her assigned day, Nehanda isn’t fully prepared for her reaction.
She had plenty of notice. At the very start of the course, students put their names onto a schedule. The appointment calendar designates the day each class member reviews a piece of their past-life history. The students who volunteer early in the schedule know they are the guinea pigs. They become demonstration cases for the rest of the class. The professor uses the early cases to instruct the other students how to prepare for what is to come, because facing trauma, and recovering from the memory of it, takes preparation and support. Each student has special custom-tailored self-nurturing homework before and after their big day.
Nehanda is near the middle of the list, so she knew many weeks in advance when her time would come.
Nevertheless, by the time Dr. Goras had finished guiding her through her review with as much kindness as possible, she was not herself. There was no recapturing whatever mood she had been in when the day started. She ends that day numb, and the numbness carries over into the rest of the week. She is in a state of shock on her way back from class, picking up her young daughter from child care, arriving home, providing the evening meal, and putting her daughter to sleep. A week later, she is still struggling to recover from the glaring memory of that past-life death experience.
Nehanda’s reflections continue for a long time. Perhaps it’s a good thing that the human system blocks out the memories of previous lives. Perhaps it’s a balm to the soul that we have forgotten what went before. The human mind can only handle so much disturbing information, so much emotional intensity, even if that intensity has faded with the passage of time and with the change-over from one human body into another one.
Tabula rasa. The blank slate. As Dr. Goras explains to the class, in some societies everyone assumes we all begin with a blank slate, with no memory or experience or awareness of anything that has gone before. We arrive in this world like a fresh slate that has not been written on. Then, once you are born, the experiences begin to be etched onto the mind, the heart, the person. The blank page, the empty notebook, starts to fill up with experiences and memories.
But Nehanda knows that the idea of a tabula rasa start in life is an illusion, a falsehood. She thinks to herself, “I have heard stories of children in my own tribe, ancestors of mine, who spoke of the former lifetime, the one most recently ended.”
“And yet, despite knowing since early childhood that reincarnation is real, and despite doing all my homework perfectly, facing this memory is hard, so very hard.”
Her trauma:
Nehanda, in another body with a different name, had been burned as a witch in medieval Europe.
Recommended Reading:
Sylvia Cranston, editor: Reincarnation: the Phoenix Fire Mystery. This book is the Bible on reincarnation. A comprehensive study of the literature on reincarnation, including personal accounts by the world’s luminaries: writers, scientists, philosophers, known figures from Freud to Jung to Edison to George Patton. Kübler-Ross, Moody, and Stephenson all get mentions in this encyclopedia.
Joan Grant, The Winged Pharaoh. Personal account of a past life in ancient Egypt, a real page-turner. One of a series of books, presented as historical novels, which Grant says were personal accounts of her own past lives. https://joangrant.net/
Elisabeth Haich, Initiation. Her autobiography, which leaps from her 20th Century life back to ancient Egypt and Haich’s memories of induction into the mysteries of reincarnation and spiritual development. Riveting.
Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, On Life After Death. Thin book. Brilliant summary of her lifetime of experience working with dying people. See what a real expert believes.
Robert Monroe, founder of The Monroe Institute, researcher, developer of Hemi-Sync technology, and author of Journeys Out Of The Body. The book is a classic. He gets credit for the expression “out-of-body experience.” No relation to Marilyn.
Raymond Moody, Life After Life. Pioneer in the field. This book is a classic.
Ian Stephenson, Twenty Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation. Pioneering investigation into people who remember their past lives. Stephenson traveled all over the world to locate and interview people for his case study. Blows your mind.