Letting Go of the Past

This is a most enjoyable book, and also very moving and profound: Soul Survivor: The Reincarnation of a World War II Fighter Pilot. A little boy remembers a past lifetime as a world war II fighter pilot and his parents research the whole thing. On his father's part, who was the driver of the research, the intention was to disprove reincarnation, while his mother being more accepting of the possibility. Meanwhile the book inevitably adds up two and two and comes up with five, seeming to conclude that reincarnation is real. Clearly memories from past lifetimes can be a valid experience, but if they prove reincarnation is another matter, what they do prove is the mind's ability to view different contexts in the hologram of space and time, not limited to the apparent lifetime we are then experiencing.
Having said that, the detail to which this little boy, James Leiniger, experienced these things was quite amazing, and the book is very much worth reading. There was also a Prime Time interview with the parents posted on their website. My favorite line from the book may well be when the father said to his young son that he loves him, and the son says: "Of course daddy, that's why I picked you." So when did he pick his parents the bewildered father asks: "When you were in the pink hotel in Hawaii." The fathers memory then zooms back to a time spent with his wife in Hawaii, about five weeks prior to the time of conception of his son.

The holographic model of time and space which the Course implicitly espouses, and which is at least implied by the quantum physical model, suggests another way of looking at this. The mental activity of the separated mind simply consists of reviewing a past gone by in the present, so that it's not only the notion of past life memories, which represent in a way reviewing a past experience, which in turn can preoccupy us in the present. Our entire life experience is like this, for the world never exists in the present, hence the Course's dictum that: "There is no world!" ♠

    There is no world apart from what you wish, and herein lies your ultimate release.  Change but your mind on what you want to see, and all the world must change accordingly. Ideas leave not their source. This central theme is often stated in the text, and must be borne in mind if you would understand the lesson for today. It is not pride which tells you that you made the world you see, and that it changes as you change your mind.

    But it is pride that argues you have come into a world quite separate from yourself, impervious to what you think, and quite apart from what you chance to think it is. There is no world! This is the central thought the course attempts to teach. Not everyone is ready to accept it, and each one must go as far as he can let himself be led along the road to truth. He will return and go still farther, or perhaps step back a while and then return again. (ACIM:W-132.5,6)

The same theme comes up in Logion 52, of the Thomas Gospel, in which Jesus points out to the apostles that they are trying in vain to understand him from the past, whereby they fail to be present with Jesus, and joining with him in the now. Although it is not explained in so many words, the implication here is evidently the same, namely that this is our human condition as children from the ego, that we fail to recognize Jesus, because we are judging based on the past, and so we are repeating the past in the present, and thus keeping the present safely outdoors, outside of the framework of reality which we are prepared to accept.

In the book, the research of the parents ends up being useful to young James Leiniger to let go of the past and move on with his life, so they were extremely helpful to him by not suppressing or denying his experiences, as a result of which he was able to deal with the past and let it go. The more common outcome would have been to suppress the experience, and staying stuck in it for a long time. In terms of the Course, this is an example of the miracle, as follows:

    Miracles are both beginnings and endings, and so they alter the temporal order. 2 They are always affirmations of rebirth, which seem to go back but really go forward. 3 They undo the past in the present, and thus release the future. (ACIM:T-1/I.13)