CHAPTER 6
CONFRONTING THE PAST

Here we are going to be doing some more subjective processes and it seems like an appropriate time to mention some useful rules to follow.

Your processing will go much better if you have enough food and rest and can do the processes in a quiet and safe space with no distractions.

Avoid running subjective techniques when you are upset or disturbed unless the process is addressed directly to the upset itself. Objective techniques, such as those given in the first few chapters, can be run in all circumstances.

Objective techniques are those which are addressed to perceiving or doing things in the present and they can be very helpful if you are tired or upset. But in those cases, you should use processes that you already know rather than trying to learn a new one while you are in a non-optimum condition.

In general you should avoid processing under the influence of drugs or alcohol except for objective techniques which help you pull yourself together.

But sometimes you have no choice. Subjective processes will run in the presence of painkillers and other things which keep one's mental state suppressed, but it tends to be slow and the results are shallow. Go ahead and use everything you know to aid your recovery if you should find yourself in the hospital sometime, its just tough rather than impossible or forbidden.

With these cautions in mind, let's do some processing to improve your recall and confront of the past.

As traumatic incidents accumulate, one's "life force" or "theta" as it is called in Scientology gradually becomes stuck or encysted in these unpleasant experiences.

The best technique for loosening these things up and regaining some horsepower is not to dive in and wrestle with the trauma but instead to recall pleasant times. This pulls you out of the unpleasant stuck portions of your history.

Think of your history as a sort of "time track", A timeline with dates and events on it or a reel of movie film. The unpleasant experiences on it are sticky and accumulate mental charge which traps your attention and horsepower. Eventually the whole thing can go black and occluded because of your resistance to looking at the unpleasant experiences.

But there are many good times in between the unpleasant ones. By putting your attention on these, you reduce the blackness and occlusion and draw energy away from the stuck points.

Eventually you will need to clean up the traumatic experiences, but that is better done after raising your horsepower, reducing occlusion, and mastering control of simple recall style techniques. And this recall of pleasant moments is an essential trick for bailing out of a traumatic memory if it is too far over your head.

There is a rare chance that a specific question which asks for a pleasure moment will instead stir up a moment of loss. In general we do not back down from such things, but in this special case, we are looking only for pleasure moments.

If this does happen, confront and acknowledge the loss if you can and then immediately and firmly look for a pleasure moment. If it is too heavy or sticky or you cannot find any pleasure moments connected with the specific question, then drop that question and find ANY pleasure moment by whatever means. If even that fails, then do the drill of looking around and noticing things from chapter 1 until you calm down and feel a little better and then recall a pleasure moment. When you are back on track, skip the question that gave trouble and go on to the next one.

Do not end this process if you run into trouble such as described above. Its like falling off a horse, you must get back on immediately so that you do not develop trouble about shying away. So be sure to recall at least a few good pleasure moments before stopping even for a break.

Note that these are repetitive processes. You do the set of commands over and over until you achieve a result.

6.1 Simple Recall - Affinity

Do the following 3 commands alternately until you feel good.

Spot specific times and peoples.

6.1a) Remember a time when somebody liked you

6.1b) Remember a time when you liked somebody

6.1c) Remember a time when two people liked each other

6.2 Simple Recall - Agreement

6.2a) Remember a time when somebody agreed with you

6.2b) Remember a time when you agreed with somebody

6.2c) Remember a time when two people agreed with each other

6.3 Simple Recall - Communication

6.3a) Remember a time when somebody enjoyed talking to you

6.3b) Remember a time when you enjoyed talking to somebody

6.3c) Remember a time when two people enjoyed talking to each other

6.4 Simple Recall - Understanding

6.4a) Remember a time when you felt that somebody really understood you

6.4b) Remember a time when you felt that you really understood somebody

6.4c) Remember a time when you felt that two people really understood each other

6.5 Simple Recall - Senses

Do the following 5 commands alternately until you feel good.

Spot specific times and try to re-experience the desirable perception.

6.5a) Remember at time when you saw something beautiful

6.5b) Remember at time when you heard something you enjoyed

6.5c) Remember at time when you tasted something you liked

6.5d) Remember at time when you smelled something good

6.5e) Remember at time when you felt something nice

6.6 Detailed Recall

Here we will take a certain type of experience and work it over in detail. Each major question is a separate process. The first one will be described in full. The remaining ones should each be run the same way. If you can't get specific answers to the detailed questions, then get approximate ones.

6.6.1 Remember a Time That You Enjoyed Eating a Meal

a) when was it?

b) where was it?

c) who else was involved?

d) notice the color of things in the incident.

e) notice how things sounded.

f) notice tastes, smells, and sensations.

g) notice your body position at that time.

h) did anything else interesting happen then?

Then remember another time (possibly earlier) when you enjoyed having a meal and repeat the above detailed questions. Continue finding additional times until you feel good.

6.6.2 Remember A Pleasant Moment of Intimacy

This could be sexual intimacy or a moment of special closeness between parent and child or even a moment of deep friendship or mutual support.

Use the same detailed questions as above and keep finding additional times of intimacy until you feel good.

6.6.3 Remember Doing a Job That You Were Proud Of

Run as above.

6.6.4 Remember Having Fun as Part of a Group

Run as above.

6.6.5 Remember Exploring Someplace That You Liked

Run as above.

6.6.6 Remember a Time When You Were Glad to Be Alive

Run as above.

6.7 More That Can Be Done

Before moving on to more advanced topics such as past lives, you should feel really good about the subject of remembering things in general.

Notice whether or not this was achieved while running the above processes. If not, it might be possible to get some more out of them. Check each one over beginning with 6.1 and see whether it can be run some more or whether it went to a point of release that was too good to improve on at this time.

There is also a book called "Self Analysis" by L. Ron Hubbard which gives lots of recall processes that can be run in addition to the ones above if it seems needed.

Note that we are not trying for perfect recall here, but simply an improvement and some certainty and skill at remembering things. There will be many more recall processes as we move along.

6.8 Remembrance of Past Lives

 We are immortal spirits who have lived through many lifetimes. Some people will consider this to be obvious but others may have a hard time with this idea.

If the idea is difficult for you to swallow, then I ask only that you give it a chance and try out some things.

Continuing on with this book does not require that you actually believe in past lives.

However, processes can stir things up and bring them into view and you need to be willing to confront whatever comes up on them. Sometimes these things might not fit logically into your current lifetime.

At a minimum, you need an open mind and a willingness to look at things that might come up without undue prejudice. And you will need a bit of information and orientation and some practice working with the concept of past lives so that you can see how things fit together when they do come up.

But you don't have to become a believer. You could think of these past lives as exercises in imagination or as a way of providing enough room to handle the wealth of mental constructs that lie within the subconscious.

So do these exercises whether or not you believe in past lives, and be prepared for strange and unusual things to come up occasionally as you work through this book. And don't get into a tizzy about proving or disproving this stuff. It will sort itself out in its own good time.

6.9 Some Basic Information on Past Lives

Therapies which allow for the existence of past lives often concentrate on traumatic incidents that occurred in past lives. This especially includes the continual unpleasantness of dying. But these unpleasant experiences are one of the reasons that people don't want to recall past lives.

Therefore, we will concentrate initially on pleasant memories and skip the bad times for now.

In recalling things, one has a tendency to twist them into familiar patterns, especially when the actual scenery was radically different than what one is used to. And, on gaining a real but vague recall of something, there is a tendency to fill in the blanks with what one has seen on TV or read in the history books. You will find, for example, that there is a strong tendency to dub-in one's native language rather than the actual language that was being spoken in some old incident.

And there is a bit of wishful thinking that can come into play. Remembering a snatch of ancient Rome, one might be tempted into thinking that one was Julius Caesar since he was a well known and powerful figure.

Another mechanism that comes into play is a tendency to reverse roles and misremember that you were the winner instead of the loser or that you were the victim instead of the guilty party. It actually works both ways, the grass is always greener on the other side. Since you did not experience the unpleasant portions of your opponents existence, it is easier to misremember being on the opposite side of a conflict rather than face up to either the pain or the guilt that you actually experienced.

We have been around for a very long time, and to some degree we are stuck in a rut. So the civilizations and cultural styles often repeat. There have been many Earth like planets and history tends to repeat itself at least in its broader outlines. So what at first glance might appear to be a lifetime in ancient Rome might eventually turn out to have occurred on some distant planet millions of years ago.

All this will gradually sort itself out, and much that is dubbed in initially will fall away as you advance.

So don't assert the rightness and accuracy of what you recall vaguely and thereby commit yourself to defending or hanging on to inaccurate recalls from a mistaken sense of pride or status.

But also make it a point not to invalidate the recollections or discount them as complete fabrications just because there are some logical inconsistencies.

When you are trying to find something, the subconscious will often let an important bit come through even if it must be surrounded with inaccurate substitutions. If you need, for example, to run a "past life" as a fictional character in a movie that you saw, go ahead and do so. Don't sit there and say, for example "this is obviously impossible, I could never have been Shakespeare's MacBeth".

If you invalidate the whole incident, you will also invalidate the tiny piece that is true and which has been presented for you to look at. You might, for example, have once murdered your father for gain, as did MacBeth, but the actual incident is too far out of reach. In confronting the mostly fictional incident, you also face up to that tiny part which is a true recall and which is necessary for you to face.

So don't fight with the recollections and don't force them to be historically accurate. Just let them be whatever they are. Gradually you ability to face things will improve and the amount of mental charge will decrease and you will recall the realities behind the half-truths that you find initially.

6.10 The Beginning Step to Past Life Recall

The course of our existence has encompassed millions of lifetimes in this and earlier universes.

Our time on this Earth is but a drop in the bucket in comparison. But the Earth like mockups have been around for a very long time and will generally be easier for you to recall than other more alien ones. Even if they only form one thousandth part of your past lives, they represent the ones that you are most familiar with and which you are being constantly reminded of.

We will take advantage of this and search for a pleasant lifetimes in settings that you already have some familiarity with.

Pick your favorite period of history and the civilization that you feel the most natural affinity for. Or, if you are strongly drawn to science fiction or fantasy, consider the idea of some space empire or fantasy realm that gives you a really good feeling.

Once you have made a selection, discard all the details, especially famous names and events and concentrate instead on the general character of the civilization. And if some historical detail strikes you as really wrong, then discard it in favor of what you feel is appropriate because you might actually be sensing something from long ago and far away rather than the recent Earth civilization that you have read about.

Since we are focusing on a period that feels good to you and trying to stir up a pleasant lifetime, you can probably trust your feelings as to what kind of person you were and what kind of things you might have been doing. With a good lifetime you do not have as much of a tendency to substitute pleasant experiences for the harsh ones that actually happened because the actual experiences really were pleasant.

Now consider what kind of activity you might have enjoyed doing in such a civilization. Visualize an incident of doing this activity, trying to get the colors and sounds and any details that seem right. Adjust this based on what "feels" right or wrong until you are happy with it. Consider that it might be an approximation of a true recollection.

Do this a few more times, visualizing instances of the activity that you enjoyed. Then look over the various occurrences and see if you can sort them into a sequence of which might have happened first and so forth.

Consider what kind of job or station in life feels appropriate. Visualize incidents of performing the task in question. Sort these together with the other ones into a sort of a time line. It will help to write this down leaving much space for additions.

Consider what kind of people you might have cared for in these circumstances; friends, lovers, parents, children, etc. Try to visualize some really good incidents with these people and add them to the sequence.

Consider if there might have been some really good event which might have happened; some personal success or an important occurrence that affected your life favorably. Again visualize incidents and add them in.

If some bad thing occurs to you which you need to face, go ahead and consider that as well and add it into the sequence of events. But balance it by spotting some of the good things again. Don't go charging off in a search for the horrible things that happened to you.

Now repeat the detailed recall procedure given in section 6.6 above aiming it at this past life which you have been reconstructing.

Now write a brief summary of the lifetime. And note down anything of which you are certain occurred.

Pick another historical period (or another space empire or whatever) and repeat this entire procedure on a second lifetime.

Do it again for a third lifetime. You want at least three so that you don't fixate too much on the first one.

Accept the idea that what you have come up with might only be half right, a mixture of true recall and imaginative fabrication. Even the imaginative part will help broaden your viewpoint.

6.11 Final Step

 This is not the final step of handling past lives. You will do much more as you go through the book. This is only the final step of this chapter and it is aimed at putting this all together and stabilizing whatever gains you have made in recalling your past existences.

And if these past lives seem very vague and uncertain, don't worry about it. We are not yet far enough along for good solid recollections unless you have already been working extensively on past lives or are in quite exceptional shape.

The idea here is simply to open you up so that past life things can come up easily when they need to during processing.

But now that you have some orientation towards past lives, an excellent finishing touch is to run processes 6.1 to 6.5 again on a broader time span, unless of course you were already pulling up past life memories the first time you ran these.

There is a possibility that these processes could overrun because they have been run before. If this does happen, simply rehabilitate the earlier release point as discussed in chapter 2. But the odds are that most or all of these processes can be successfully run again on the larger time span which has opened up.

And don't limit these processes to the 3 lifetimes that you ran in detail above. Simply accept whatever is ready to come into view.

This is the step where you might actually get some very real and vivid recollections because of all the hard work you put in on the previous steps.