The Phora - Axis Past Life Homepage

wintermute

09-09-2004, 12:38 PM

I'm submitting this one without comment. If you find something interesting here, be sure to write back and let us know.

Wintermute

http://www.geocities.com/axispastlife/soldierlookingback.jpg

http://www.geocities.com/axispastlife/index.html

What is this all about?

A small but significant number of people world-wide have recurring past-life flashbacks and/or vivid dreams about themselves in the Axis forces of World War 2. Unfortunately when it comes to experiences like this, people often think they're the only one and feel that they can't really talk to anyone else about it. Well this is to let them know that they are definitely not alone and there are more of us out there. This page has been set up so that people can find other people and share experiences, find out that they are not going insane and talk openly about their experiences and feelings - as unfortunately there is still a lot of embarrassment about talking about past lives at all, let alone from the wrong side of the war.

Note that there aren't any weird agendas or anything. Just sharing experiences, regression techniques and the like.

What's meant by Axis?

Axis meaning anyone from World War 2 who was with the Germans, Italians, Japanese, Rumanians, Bulgarians, Finns or Croats. Also to complicate matters there were volunteers from France, Spain, Denmark, Norway, Czechoslovakia, the Ukraine, the Cossacks etc. The formations we're talking about include the Wehrmacht, Waffen-SS, Luftwaffe, Fallschimjäger, Gebirgsjäger, U-Boot-Dienst, Kriegsmarine, Ustasha etc as well as the various non-combatant and political organisations.

Reincarnation

A good number of people are open to the possibility of reincarnation these days. But whatever you believe, there are always people who have a life-long fixation for aspects of the Third Reich or Axis forces and even though they may abhor the misguided racial ideas from back then, the era seems to have some deep-seated emotional hold over them. Reincarnation seems to go some way to explaining why - especially when some people get flashbacks and vivid dreams of being back in that time.

How do you tell?
If you don't have past life flashbacks etc then it can be hard to tell if you were in the Axis forces last time around, but there are some signs which keep cropping up again and again. If some of these points are true for you, you may well have have been there...

you have a fascination for the period
you have feelings of déjà vu when seeing shows, places, etc from WWII
you have had strong recurring feelings or dreams about WWII
you are drawn to military or political pictures from the era
you have felt a need to own/buy WWII artifacts, eg belt buckles, medals, etc
you have a 'thing' for the uniforms, jackboots etc
you find some of the music of the era inspiring/hauntingly familiar
you get unaccountably upset at shows or movies where Axis forces are defeated

you might even be in an Axis forces re-enactment group

wintermute

09-15-2004, 01:20 PM

Well I'm a "crazy New Ager" anyway so I am inclined to give stories like that the benefit of the doubt.

Well then, why not an Asatruar perspective?

http://www.harbornet.com/folks/theedrich/hive/

Death and Afterwards

Such, then, are some of the preconditions for, impressions of, and impacts on, those who verge on the state of death. What, then, can we say about the situation which all mortals must face: the experience of actually being dead?

Firstly, there will be no more information input from the body.(14) Brainwave frequency will have died completely. This means that the soul is totally exposed to the inframental environment.

To help us in understanding this postmortal condition, we can now draw on the monumental work of University of Virginia psychologist Ian Stevenson, MD, titled Reincarnation and Biology: A Contribution to the Etiology of Birthmarks and Birth Defects.(15) Dr. Stevenson, who teaches at the University of Virginia, has worked with many different colleagues in various countries for 20 years. The cultures from which his many cases are drawn are mainly those in which reincarnation is an accepted part of the world view. Specifically, these cases are mainly from Burma, Thailand, India, Sri Lanka, Turkey (especially its southern portion), Lebanon, black Africa, and the Amerinds of southeastern Alaska (Tlingit, Haida, etc.). He lists (p. 11) a total of 536 cases which he has investigated, although by no means all of these are detailed in his work. The average interval between death and rebirth is less than two years, the longest case reported being about 45 years.

A brief synopsis of discarnate souls would include the fact that they can and may: appear in apparitions; become attached to the family of their future rebirth; communicate through mediums; occasionally engage in poltergeist activity; in the African Igbo belief (as in the reports of some Near-Death Experiencers), they may make a "contract" or agreement for their future life; interact with other discarnate personalities; observe the surviving members of their previous families; remain in the vicinity of their previous body’s death or of the body itself; and send dreams to living people.

In an earlier essay I have reported on Dr. Stevenson’s work and its importance for Ásatrú. Here we are concerned with conclusions which may be drawn from it regarding the afterlife.

One of the many striking findings emerging from the fact that some birthmarks and birth defects come from previous lives, is the extraordinary importance of the last moments of life and the intense concentration (often due to lethal wounds or other inflictions) by the individual at that time. Occasionally there is concentration on such seemingly small things as ear piercings for earrings and does not seem to be associated with one’s final moments, but reflects great concern with socially important body decoration. At other times, the body may be marked after death. The soul, in many cases, seems to become as it were "frozen" in this concentration or fixated by the marking. Then, when it reincarnates, it may impose this obsession on its new body. (Stevenson thinks [Vol. II, p. 2077] this might even be considered a defect.) If it was suffering from wounds or other physical trauma, it may carry this trauma over to physical expression as birthmarks and birth defects in the new life. This leads to the suspicion that, often in its "between-life" state, and even when it does not reincarnate, the soul remains for some time more or less static in the same state in which it died. (Some Near-Death Experiencers and psychics also report stages of "advanced study" or "continuing education" for some discarnate souls.)

It also appears from many oriental traditions that there are some souls who do not reincarnate, but remain discarnate and fixed in form for extended lengths of time, perhaps even permanently. The Oriental term for them is "pretas," and this is generally not regarded as a desirable state, since pretas are often considered malicious. (Cf. the "demoniac" possessed by a "legion" of pretas whose mortal remains lay in the cemetery of the Gerasenes, as reported in the New Testament [Mark 5,1-20; Luke 8,26-39].) In yet other cases discarnate souls, after a longer period of time, appear to "regress to the norm" for the race, as will be discussed below.

The Otherworld according to Germanic Shamanism

The shamanism of our ancestors left certain traces in the religious vocabulary handed down to us, even though that vocabulary was greatly changed by Christianity. The Goths, our earliest literate Germanic kinsmen, called the world of living beings midjungards, "the middle realm," literally, "the walled enclave (gards, "yard") in the middle (midjun)," or "Midyard" in modern English. This terminus technicus of shamanic language indicated that there were other realms above and below it. The realm below was halja, the hel of Norse myths (hell in modern English). Halja comes from an ancient root meaning to "cover over, hide" (as with earth, in burial). It referred to the grave and thence to the netherworld of the dead, not to a place of general punishment. The Gothic name for the other realm, the realm above, was utterly eradicated by Christianity. But we can get an idea of what it must have been from Norse mythology, which speaks of spheres such as Ásgarðr (Osyard), Vanaheimr (Waneham), Jötunheimar (Etenhams), Álfheimar (Elfhams), and Útgarðr (Outyard) at the least, as the abodes of supernatural powers both benevolent and malevolent. The Norse Valhalla, "(mead) hall of the slain (warriors)," also gives us some idea of the ancient Germanic sense of afterlife reward for those warriors who died fighting loyally for their warlords (in Gothic, *drauhtinôs). In short, these other realms testify to the existence of non-human forces and entities, as opposed to halja, which was mainly the abode of discarnate human souls. Among the Northmen, by the way, part of Halja or Hel was also associated with the ninefold Niflheimr (Nivelham, "Fogland"), which was a place of ghastly horrors, and seems to have included both human souls and non-human spirits.

Moreover, both the burials of Germanic royalty, as at Sutton Hoo in England, and the ship-cremation ritual and voluntary sacrifice of the slave girl in Ibn Fadlan’s account of ninth-century Swedes in Russia show that, on one level, some among the Germanic peoples expected life in the afterworld to be essentially an enhanced version of life in this one. On the other hand, the Ibn Fadlan account is also an indirect confirmation of the belief in reincarnation among our ancestors; the naked kinsman who set fire to the dead chieftain’s funeral ship backed up to it, eyes averted (so as not to behold the corpse and thereby allow its ghost into his own brain), with his hand over his anus in order to prevent the chief’s soul from entering him by that orifice and becoming reincarnated as his son.

A part of the myths describes the other worlds as altered versions of this one. But other parts describe them in phantasmagorical and magical terms: Thor’s thunderbolt-hammer Mjollnir, the shamanic shape-shifting of Loki and Othin, the creation of gods from a block of ice licked by a magic cow, and so forth. All of this is symbolic language used to express the ineffable.(16)

In reporting their experiences, those who have undergone an NDE tend to use similarly fantastical imagery, often without realizing its symbolic character. Christians will speak of meeting an all-loving Christ in a paradisiacal landscape, Hindus talk of having been taken before the throne of the Lord of Death, Buddhist art is filled with bizarre figures from the otherworld, and so forth.(17)

Thus the ancient myths reveal both continuing existence of the human soul after death (halja), and the reality of beings of supernatural intelligence other than human (the other realms). The juxtamortal dream, the NDE, floods the soul with information which is interpreted according to the perceptual categories pre-established by one’s race, culture and personal experiences. But this information is nonetheless often quite valid even in our Midyard, as can be seen from prophetic and clairvoyant statements often made by juxtamortal experiencers as well as by mystics and psychics.

The suppression of northern religion by Christianity made it a miracle that even such fragments as we have, have come down to us. They show that the shamanic cosmology of northern antiquity reflected the true complexity of afterdeath events, a complexity revealed anew by Stevenson’s recent research on reincarnation; postmortem existence is not the simple state Christianity has preached.

An interesting note from Stevenson (the researcher) on what might actually be happening in those bardos:

Stevenson suggests that the soul which does not soon reincarnate begins to lose its individuality and to regress to the norm for the species. He writes (Vol. II, p. 2084):

"Even though I cannot describe the substance of the psychophore, I can offer some conjectures about its form. I think that immediately after death the psychophore’s form would correspond closely to that of the dead physical body. We might call this shape the tautomorph [identical form], meaning a duplicate in form of the most recent physical form. Within groups of peoples a eumorph [ideal form] highly regarded by its members may emerge. In Western countries the female eumorph may resemble the Venus de Milo, but among the Khoikhoi (Hottentots) the eumorph would include steatopygy [enormously fat buttocks]. During discarnate existence, the form of the psychophore may become modified in the direction of the local eumorph or may regress toward some more universal urmorph [proto-form].

"In the cases of subjects with birth defects or unusual physiques related to previous lives, the psychophore would not return to the eumorph, but would retain the form of the tautomorph. It would then act as a kind of template affecting the form of the developing embryo or fetus. …."

Europe, America and other developed (especially White) countries do not report reincarnation with anywhere near the same frequency that the cultures investigated by Stevenson do. It is possible that, since the memories of people in more complex societies are correspondingly more diverse and complex, it takes longer for the eumorph or urmorph (i.e., the inframind of the race or of the whole species) to "digest" these memories. And therefore the discarnate period between lives might be longer in the developed world, a length that might cause greater forgetfulness of former lives. Stevenson (Vol. II, p. 2104) mentions that in the (Third-World) cases he has investigated, there is little evidence of any personal progress beyond simple reincarnation.

WM