You can listen to me read this post on Soundcloud or Youtube, or as Bliss and Drumming wherever you get your podcasts.
“The World and You” was written for the Stars Turn Me On album Goldrush. I redid the version above with a full band, my songwriting partner Justin Caucutt and Judah Collins on bass, and the audio is on the album The Collection from 2014. I wanted to do a couple videos of songs where I was playing drums and singing at the same time. People would ask me if I ever sang back there, so I thought I’d record me doing it.
There are two problems with singing from behind the drumkit. First, it’s kind of a nightmare to get the vocal mic to not pick up the drums without some experienced and dedicated sound person to have your back. The bigger problem is I feel dorky, or more dorky than usual back there when I sing. I feel like all drummer jokes ever uttered descend on my head. There are a very few drummers who have pulled this off and looked cool doing it: Levon Helm, Brann Dailor, Trinidad Leal from Dixie Witch. I am just not that cool.
In my book, I wrote about the story of this song, the past life regression in which I was living on a gorgeous green hill in some Scandinavian country, a fisherman, in love with a very loud and funny woman whom I adored. I’ve written about wondering if maybe what we call past lives are just cellular memories from our ancestors.
In the two experiences I had in that first regression, I was Scandinavian and Native American. In this life, my great-great grandfather was Ole Johnson, from Norway. My great-great-great-grandfather on my mother’s paternal side married a woman from the Menominee (Mamaceqtaw) tribe of Wisconsin. So maybe these past lives were only memories drifting up through my DNA. Either way, pretty neat.
These encounters have stuck with me, and through them I see some of my own patterns and tendencies. In the life on the mountain, I felt what it was like to love unconditionally. The way I felt about that woman had so much wonder in it, like she was a rare butterfly, and I was always rubbing my eyes disbelieving my luck that she had landed. That was lovely to feel, and showed me how defended I am in this life. Maybe it’s the switch of genders, and the driving need to defend my pursuits from being thwarted by someone else. That separates me from the man on the mountain, and his life has given me insight about what it feels like to let go and trust.
As the Native American woman, I was gathering herbs to anoint a young apprentice who had died, to help her leave her body. As her spirit left her body, it entered the top of my head like a comet, filled me with love beyond anything in this reality, and then left the way it came, like a giant check mark. Years later, I met someone who had this same experience when his father died, he had been checked off too.
Isn’t the mystery of everything just so exquisite?
I’ve had many, many regressions since then, and now I lead people through them. I don’t do the kind of regression like the ones I’m describing. Those were a sort of past-life tourism. Instead, I lead folks through the process in a therapeutic setting. This is not as much fun. Often, we are going to moments of trauma that established the patterns we’re trying to figure out in this life.
In my own personal work of this kind. I’ve seen myself burned at stakes, murdered, killed in battle, hung and drowned. I’ve been men, women, children, fetuses being born, and some sort of creature in a swamp. All of this of course in a safe and protected environment in which these experiences gave me instruction about paths for healing and not new trauma.
I just heard the Faces song “Stone” in my head…
Well, once I was a daisy, many years ago
In pastures green and lazy, many years ago
But I was et by a goat who fell in a moat and forgettin’ to float
He sunk like a lead and stayed until dead
But was relieved to find, well, just how kind it all was
I love that First Step album.
There is a study that has been done at the University of Virginia since 1967 that has a list of over 2.500 past life experiences reported by children that have been verified… in which the facts the children spoke of turned out to be true, that the situation in the past was as they are describing now. 30% of the children have marks or birth defects related to the wounds they incurred when they died in those past lives.
In the healing modality I use, we look at the last thoughts of the person in the past life for clues as to how that life carries into this one. This is a Buddhist concept, I believe, which is why there are many Buddhist practices concerned with death and getting okay with it. It’s why the Dalai Lama was concerned when he first saw the Muppets, wondering if it might be dangerous for children to be so in love with the characters that they might identify with a frog or a pig, and in their untimely demise might inadvertently be propelled into a life as an animal, not a human.
This is a story I heard Robert Thurman tell. Thurman was considered one of the leading Indo-Tibetan scholars in the world, and co-founded Tibet House at the Dalai Lama’s request. His ‘Mahasamadhi’ was a month ago, the day he left his body for the next one. I owe a lot to him. I listened to over 100 of his lectures from Columbia, which led me to study in a Buddhist Psychotherapy program he was affiliated with, which led me to study with his colleague Isa Gucciardi, who developed the work I do with people today. He is where I first heard the word ‘psychonaut,’ and I know wherever he’s traveling, he is living this title to the fullest.
The most profound past life I ever had was one in which I was a young man who was being unfairly lynched. The idea of this scenario has always been too much horror for me to believe. I think the first time I knew such things happened was watching Roots as a child, and I just have never gotten over the horror of it. Just the thought of such a thing makes me feel physically sick, and to write about it here sucks. However, in the past life experience, I was looking through this young man’s eyes. I saw people jeering at me, the hatred and bloodlust in their eyes. As I looked at them, all I felt was sorrow. I could see that there would be a day when many of them would look back at this moment with pain, and would suffer for their contribution to my agony, their part in the injustice. I saw how this moment would ruin many of their lives. My last thought was feeling bad for them.
If I believed in past lives, the propulsion of the last thought, karma, and all of it, I might say that that particular thought, what I would call ‘Christ Consciousness,’ that moment in which is spoken ‘Forgive them Father, they know not what they do,’ that thought in that previous life might be why this life has been so blessed (and maybe why the cord was wrapped around my neck at birth?). In that experience I got to feel the highest consciousness a human can arrive at, which is to recognize, through empathy, Oneness with the Other. I held not a bit of anger or retribution when I looked at these people. I felt their pain like it was mine.
Once I experienced that feeling, my capacity for that consciousness opened wide, and I saw that this compassion was already inside me. The faucet was turned on.
If you know me, believe me, you know that there are many, many people I would prefer to keep my distance from. Just because I think we’re One, unified as drops in the same ocean, doesn’t mean I want to invite them to dinner. Vulnerability doesn’t mean a loss of discernment.
But I feel something happen when I look into someone’s eyes. I see their light. Doesn’t matter who it is, what they look like, how they identify, what their politics or bank account or attitude or what stupid thing they’re doing. It’ll make me cry if I spend too much time there. I can see their pain.
I know these days this kind of empathy toward others is not respected. To feel sorrow for both the one perpetrated against and for the perpetrator is not popular, might even be dangerous to express in some sense. I watch celebrations around certain retributive violence, and I will never accept it.
Sometimes, I have a thought that it might be a better world of a particular person wasn’t here anymore, I’m just as susceptible to those impulses as anyone. Almost instantly, I wish for them, instead of death, that a lightning bolt of empathetic feeling immerse them, and they change their perspective and thus their actions.
There’s a kind of silly talk going around that empathy is a terrible weakness, that we should stamp it out. Everybody knows that’s baloney. Survival of the Fittest doesn’t mean The Guy With The Monster Truck Wins. Empathy IS fitness. That’s what Darwin says, apparently. Without empathy, no babies are getting cared for very well. See how long we last then. It’s our first experience in every life we live.
The strongest person in the world is the one who is unafraid of vulnerability. The one who needs no mask to prop up. All the tough guy stuff, making yourself into stone. It just separates you from true strength, which lives in fearlessness and openness, and knowing nothing can ultimately harm you. Alexei Navalny modeled this, worrying about the feelings of the men who were assigned to torture him in prison rather than hold hatred in his heart.
This is why I don’t speak to political sides publicly, why even when I am in horror at things that happen, I strive to model equanimity, and want to bring people together. Those who know me personally know I have a mouth on me, that I have to express my opinions like a valve that resets my nervous system.
But I can’t help but be sorrowful for both sides in any conflict. I am wrenched by the stories of those perpetrated against so unfairly, in so many numbers, in so many places, in so many ways, the unfairness of it, the inhumanity of it, the despair it spreads, the frustration I feel, the helplessness.
As for the perpetrators, I can’t help but see the terror that has brought them to such actions, the terrible ways they have been tortured and manipulated to behave in such awful ways. I see the agony of lives that bring people to concoct such horrors and can’t imagine living a life in which I was so brutalized by living that causing harm is the only way to feel good. I can’t imagine living in such fear that I can cheer for others’ agony. How deep the pain must go to submerge the heart.
It’s even more terrible to think of what will be there for them in that moment when empathy for those they harmed washes through them. This time comes for everyone, that much I believe, even if it takes several lives to get there. I wouldn’t wish that on anyone.
