About reincarnation experiences as animals and plants Eastern religions claim that we could become animals
and even plants between lives as humans and some Tibetans even that we would
more often be animals and plants than humans. Hindus claim that certain bad
karmas could require an incarnation as an animal. More primitive tribal forms
of reincarnation belief often claim that you could become an animal. More developed
theories of reincarnation seem to claim that “once a human, always a human”,
seemingly leaving the question quite open if you could have been an animal or a
plant before becoming a human the first time. The Cabbalists had different opinions about becoming
animals. Some said yes, others said no. The Gnostic Christians taught that we
were human already in our very first incarnation, but Origen has a remark about
souls, which are “bad enough” to “fall” further down to the lowest level – the
level of “demons and adversaries” – that some such souls prefer to instead
enter the body of an animal. By the way, if a soul falls to that lowest level,
it in the Gnostic view doesn’t stay there forever, there is no eternal
condemnation in their teachings. It only stays there as long as needed for
insight and reversal. I had extremely few cases of clients who experienced
themselves as animals. Maybe three, but I remember only two. One person
experienced herself as being a Tibetan cat, which used to lie on a Buddha
statue and thought that she was being revered while the monks actually revered
Buddha… In only one case did a person – after a group regression (so that I
didn’t have the opportunity to investigate it further) – tell me that she had
been a tree. A woman experienced herself as being a female black
panther in Africa. She had a love story with a male panther, and then there
soon were six little panthers to feed... She went hunting for them and herself.
One day, she got caught in a trap and brought into something like a zoo (or
rather some place for temporarily keeping animals). Later on, the cage she was in was brought on a ship
and then unloaded in a town, where it fell down and broke during the unloading
process. She ran off in the town, confused by all the strange smells (an
interesting remark that fits to being a panther) and other things. She was again
caught and now brought to a real zoo, where she refused to eat and drink (she
wanted to die). When she died, she experienced herself like an egg that rolled
out of the mouth of the panther. The egg broke apart and her soul went up to
the sky from it. So in all the several thousands of regressions I
have done, these cases are much too few for any statistics… Hans Ten Dam writes in his book Exploring Reincarnation [1] that a person “may attach himself to a
fox, a bird or whatever animal he feels an affinity for, but also a living
person. He may follow the animal or person around, identify himself with it and
even make some contact (‘crawl into the aura’). With animals this is only partially
possible and is often pathological, unless it is a conscious choice as an
educational or sometimes therapeutic experience…” (page 265). The last sentence
seems to fit with my panther case. I have a few times tried the following successfully:
“Ask your guide to show you a scene in your first
incarnation” – “Ask him, which person you were in that scene” – “Enter the body
of the person” – “Now go back to the moment in which you were just born in that
life” – “And now go back one year in
time”. One year is more than 9 months, therefore the client will find himself
in the state he (or she) had shortly before entering the womb of a mother the
first time. What do people experience? The experiences are highly reproducible in the sense
that they are very similar. People experience themselves as an entity without a
physical body that never had a physical body, so that their state is normal to
them. They know that they will become human and find it interesting, like the
boy who goes to school the first time. A week later, the boy finds that the
school is no fun, after all, and likewise after the first incarnation they
don’t like to incarnate again, but have to. It goes more or less like this: “Where do you come
from?” – “From a big light” – “How was it in there?” – people find it hard to
find the words to describe the harmony and love in that light – “Why did you
leave the light?” – “I have to pass through experiences of reincarnation in
material worlds so that I can grow with those experiences” – “How did you get
out of the light?” – some said: “I don’t know. I just found myself outside”,
others: “I was gently pushed out of it” and one woman said: “I was curious and
wanted to know what is outside. Then I couldn’t go back again”. One is aware
that one day, after a last incarnation, one will return to that light to stay.
I presume that we between lives enter a peripheral region of that light, but
not fully, since the time has not yet come to stay there. Out of such experiences I have the following
hypothesis: We have in our bodies a kind of “biological memory”
from life forms, which with time evolved to become human bodies. At some point
something new joined the body, when it became human in the process of
evolution, and that was a “human” soul. I suppose that animals and plants also
have souls, but different kinds of souls. It seems possible that we after a
human incarnation could become an animal, and then of course a human again, but
it seems to be a rare exception. Therefore, it seems possible that some regression
techniques (like also the LSD experiments by Stanislav Grof) can take a person
back to pre-human forms of biological states. That would mean that we could
follow two traces back: The trace of the biology, or the trace of the soul. In
the latter case we will before the first human incarnation arrive at experiences
like mentioned above. Literature: 1.
Hans Ten Dam: Exploring Reincarnation,
Rider, London, 2003.
When she then met her inner guide, I had her ask (with doubts in my mind...) if
she had really been a black panther, or if the experience was symbolical. The
answer was that she had really been one. Next question: “Why should you have
that experience?” – “In the life before I was a learned man and completely in
my rational mind in the head, with no feelings and no intuition. I needed to
experience a life with only feelings and intuition and no rational mind, to
develop that, too.” I think that that answer makes sense. Then: “Why does it
happen so rarely that people experience themselves as animals?” – “Because they
don't like to see themselves as animals.”
In two or three cases it seemed that the person had been a spirit of nature
before becoming a human. One person experienced herself as a little girl who
wanted to play with these spirits, but they said: “Go away, you don’t belong to
us, anymore!” She was very sad about that. Asking the guide why they said so,
she was told that she had been such a spirit before.