My current perspective on Reality - an experiential report

I don't give much weight to regression techniques - far too much room for the imagination to take over - but I've been for a couple of sessions and have been given information about my supposedly previous incarnations. If they are to be taken seriously then ....

Thanks for that, it is interesting and thought-provoking to hear of the experiences of someone else.

Myself, I only tried regression relatively recently (during the last two years or so) and then only a brief self-regression using a youtube video. I had some small results, the first fragment seemed to confirm ideas I already held. A second later attempt also produced a brief fragment, but was at least of a different, much earlier lifetime.

Again, according to some ideas I've heard, we may have contrasting lifetimes, almost like the segments of an orange. Some lives may be similar, others very different, with all the segments taken together forming some sort of whole. Which one of those lifetimes is the 'real' person? One could say both that they all are, and that none of them are. A matter of perspective.

By the way, apologies to Manjit for hijacking this thread. An unfortunate tendency I have.

By the way, apologies to Manjit for hijacking this thread. An unfortunate tendency I have.

Hey?! No, not at all!!  Really, really enjoying reading all the comments on my phone, genuinely providing much food for thought, which kind of was the intention of my post .. Thanks to all! 

As I started Kripal's book today I thought he was leaning a bit too far in the "Your present self is a fiction" but he did note the paradoxical nature of the self vs The Self, let alone the self vs the One.

I think part of the challenge here is the way English, at the least, and arguably almost all language, projects discreteness. That is what makes language useful, to some extent, especially in the day-to-day? As such we seem to have only two options - "One" vs "Many" - but it isn't that simply defined. We could be Both-And, as noted above. IIRC this is what Teilhard believed we would head toward - similar in some sense to how Jesus is One in Being with the Father and yet a separate entity.

I think a good deal of our suffering is our inability to properly surrender the Ego while also having trust in the integrity of the I-Self. Even for me this manifests more as a pendulum than a balance, given two pieces that occurred to me while reading Manjit's perspective in the OP:

1. this is okay. i can roll with it.
 my mind runs out across the universe.
 finds its level.
 i'm not leaving.
 i'm -- arriving.
 everywhere at once.

 and whatever else it might be it's not the end.
 it doesn't feel like death.
 unless a rock pool dies, when a wave breaks over it.
 or warm breath dies as it fades --
 and makes its peace with the air.
   -M.Carey, 'Eve'

2. If this life be not a real fight, in which something is eternally gained for the universe by success, it is no better than a game of private theatricals from which one may withdraw at will. But it feels like a real fight.

• - William James, "Is Life Worth Living?"

Geez, manjit! I would've thought you had an NDE or something with that kind of a revelation. I concur with many of your points for sure