TRANSCRIPT
I would like to explore the psychology of past lives and life after death. Now, people who watch my YouTube channel might be very surprised to hear that I would open up such a topic, but I open up a topic from a different perspective than most people have. In fact, I pretty much don’t hear people talk about this topic from this perspective.
Now, I’ve certainly read a lot about people talking about past life experiences, experiences of being different people before they were ever born, hundreds or thousands of years ago. And certainly, a lot of people I’ve talked to who believe in all sorts of different versions of life after death—well, I don’t actually believe those things, just to be clear. But I believe that both of those things, past life experiences and life after death, are accurate in terms of being metaphors.
So let me start with past life experiences. Now, I have heard people talk sometimes in very great detail about past lives that they have had. And what I think, as I reflect on these past life experiences that they talk about, is that they are metaphorical for something that’s very true and real in two different ways. And these two different ways that they’re metaphorically true are both actually connected with each other.
The first most simple thing is that what I’ve observed is that most people really don’t know their own actual past very well. They really don’t know the true story emotionally of their childhood. They’re so traumatized and they’re so unaware of how traumatized that they are that, in effect, they’re profoundly dissociated. They’re unconscious of what really happened to them on an emotional level. And often, actually, sometimes people know to a degree what actually happened to them more than other people know, but they can still be very emotionally unconscious of it.
I think when people—often when people are very unconscious of their own actual history, who they were as children, what they went through, what they went through when they were babies, the different ways especially that they were violated, often by the people who were entrusted to love them the most—their parents, different caretakers—unconsciously, people know that something happened. They know that they have a whole history that’s unexplored and buried and profoundly significant.
Some people make the leap into believing that they actually had a literal different past life, when they were a different body, a different creature from a different culture, spoke a different language, wore different clothes, perhaps a different gender. And often, I think that the different past lives that they imagine or fantasize themselves as having had just goes to represent how profoundly split off they are from their own actual history and how different, on a level of consciousness and lifestyle and everything, they are now in the adult self that they know versus the buried childhood history that makes up the person who they really are underneath the surface.
I think for a lot of people also who believe in these fantastic—and I will say not true—past lives that they believe that they lived once upon a time, it’s a lot easier to believe in a past life of being someone else in a different culture and a different place because it’s not painful to excavate one’s own true actual history, the past life that one actually lived and yet one has buried. It’s inevitably incredibly painful to start to make sense of it, and there are consequences.
Nobody cares if you believe you were one of Napoleon’s generals. It’s kind of interesting. You can even tell that to your own parents. They might think you’re a little strange, perhaps, or maybe you’re very spiritual or something like that, but they don’t get threatened by it. When you start saying instead, “Listen, you horribly traumatized me. You violated me. You neglected me. You mistreated me. You failed to live up to your responsibilities and your duties, and I suffered. I was crushed by that,” and that is the truth of my past. That’s the truth of most people’s pasts.
Parents don’t like that. The world is uncomfortable with that. Adults don’t like that. Society doesn’t like that. Society is much more open to people who believe well fanciful magical things because it doesn’t really threaten anyone. Yes, it might threaten logic and it might threaten reason, but it doesn’t threaten people’s emotions in the same way. And I think society in general would much prefer it if people break the rules of logic and reason than if they break, well, the sanctity—our conception of the sanctity of the family system. That’s when things really get messy, when people really start to talk about the taboos of family trauma, especially mild family trauma, the stuff that goes on pretty much everywhere.
Life After Death
And now let’s talk about life after death. To me, it’s very connected. People having a fantasy that they’re not going to die, that they’re going to go on living, some part of them is going to go on living, their soul will go on living forever. They’re going to be in a blissful place, or maybe they believe some people will go to a horrible evil place of hell or something like that. But the idea that they fundamentally cannot die, that the essence of them—sometimes even maybe even their body, their brain, something in them, their spirit, their energy—will go on living for all of eternity. The love that they have, the good things that they have, their relationships even will go on for eternity. Their fantasies will all come true. All the magical things that they wished they could have gotten will come true someday after they die. It can be a very comforting thought for people.
Well, to believe that they’re going to be held in some love, that there is a better world afterward—certainly a lot of religions hold to this as a cornerstone, and it pulls people in because wouldn’t it be nice? Wouldn’t it be nice to think that, well, for me, I’m 50, and you know, 10, 20, 30, 40 years, whenever I die, that it’s not really going to end and I’m going to go on living forever? A nice thought. And I think it keeps people, well, feeling placated, not feeling the pain—the pain of their buried history, the pain of their lack of purpose in their life.
I think so many people just have a lack of purpose, have a lack of meaning in their life, and that is directly connected to how disconnected they are from their real true childhood history. They’ve never resolved their traumas, and because they’ve never resolved their traumas, they can’t be connected to who they really are—their beauty, their magnificence, their inspiration, the deep sense of meaning, the guided purpose in their life that comes only from being who we really are, knowing who we really are, having a deep intrinsic conscious connection with that truth.
If we are traumatized, even to a little degree, then to that little degree we’re going to be disconnected to who we are and from all the great things that we can have in our life. To really be alive means to really be connected with the core of ourselves, to be connected with the core of our history. The life thread that we have—all these decades of life that we’ve lived—really starts with a connection of knowing our history. And when people block that out, they live a hobbled life, a crippled life, a disabled life. And how nice instead to fantasize about a world of magic somewhere after we die, where we don’t have to do all this painful excavation and make all the painful sacrifice of figuring out the trauma, of healing it and grieving it and getting away from the people who harmed us.
Many people, they would much prefer to live a fantasy about life after death than actually getting away from the people who harmed them, calling them out, being rejected by their family systems for breaking the rules and calling out their traumatizers, often their very parents.
Yet I did start this video by saying I believe in life after death. And so what is my conception of life after death? What will my life be after I die? Well, in my case, the life I live after I die will not be my life. My spirit’s gonna be gone. My brain, my body, it’s going to go away—ashes to ashes, dust to dust, for sure. However, the mystery for me of my life after death will be the ways in which I have reached people, I have touched people, I have inspired people. And also, back when I was younger and I was stupid and…
Unconscious and buried, I didn’t know myself. The ways in which I traumatized others, thankfully mildly compared to what many people do. Thankfully, I didn’t have children and traumatized them out of unconsciousness, out of denial, out of dissociation.
But that is how I think most people really live on in the future, in the ways in which they affect the children that they create. Because that’s how most people really touch other people in this life. They affect their children. Yes, they help their children, and they nurture their children to grow in some ways, but so largely they traumatize their children too. They stunt their children, they wound their children, they block their children from becoming true, full, alive, connected people.
And these children go into the future and perhaps replicate that same dynamic with children of their own. And so people live on in this replicated dynamic. Often, I think that’s really how most people live after they die. This is what they pass on. They pass on their unresolved traumas. Yes, they might be a little bit alive, and they pass that along, but I think most people, actually, from what I have observed, are more dead than alive, are more shut down than woken up, are more dissociated than self-actualized, are more unconscious than enlightened.
And this is what they pass on. They pass on the template of their own living existence into the future. And so this inspires me to live more now, to be more connected and true now. And from a very stressful place in my life, that’s motivated underneath it by deep altruism, to share what I have learned, to share my strengths and weaknesses, my successes and my failures, to share my vulnerability, to share my inspiration, to share the truth of my process.
So that other people can see it, learn from it, maybe learn from my mistakes, maybe follow or test some of the things that I have done that I feel have worked for me. And through this, this is the ripple that I spread out into the world.
And for those people who will outlive me, whatever little bits and pieces and tidbits of inspiration that I might have shared or shared with people who then share it with others, such that it may become totally anonymous. My name and my existence may be forgotten, but some little bit of thing that I found, something that I discovered, might be passed on in different ways.
And this is how I will actually live in the future after I’m gone.
[Music]