The history of humankind is a valuable study, even with the holes in the knowledge, and the prejudices and assumptions of the people who write it. It provides important information, insights, and understandings.
The history of the individual soul can also be a valuable study. It provides insights and understandings into the dynamics, current condition, and possible futures of that soul. The work of early psychotherapists provided some limited insights, but these were distorted by their prejudices and procedural carelessness. (And more severely by their misconception that one's personal history begins with birth, or possibly conception.)
(Which is equivalent to a working assumption that the history of humankind, or of a culture, began with the birth of its oldest living person.)
Why is Aunt Ida a favorite of yours? Why do you fear horses? Why does your boss have such remarkable antipathy for Poles? One can imagine various, entirely mundane reasons: Aunt Ida may be invariably friendly. Horses are large and potentially dangerous. And your boss may have been bullied by Tommy Sobleski in third grade.
But rather often, such phenomena result from experiences in past lives, and simply being aware of that can simplify life, while to revisit those experiences in Life Healing can provide powerful insights, as well as dealing with major or minor phobias and psychosomatics.
From The Collected Public Lectures
of Ngunda Aran
"Ben!" Lee half wailed the name.
"What's the matter?" Her husband called his answer from the bathroom.
"Oh, Ben! Oh, God! It's too much!"
What now? he wondered, and reached for the roll.
When he emerged, a minute later, she was slumped in her reading chair, a sheaf of papers on her lap.
"Would you care to elaborate?" he asked.
She picked up the sheets and held them out. "Ellen, in Communications, just came to the door and hand-delivered these."
He took them, and looked them over, frowning. This was a crisis! "Okay if I call Lor Lu about it?"
"Lor Lu?" She'd seen this as a family emergency. "Why Lor Lu? What can he do about it?"
"Sweetie, consider that beautiful operations chart you're developing. Lor Lu will show this crap to Legal, and if necessary, Mike Shuster will call Conroy, Morgenstern, and Blasingame in New York. They're as good a legal firm as you'll find, and Millennium pays them a sizeable retainer each month." He grinned. "I do work in Accounting, you know."
Her gaze turned thoughtful, though fear still lay beneath it. "Do you think they can beat this?"
"I have no doubt they can." Mentally he crossed his fingers. He expected they could, but courts were something of a mystery to him. "You're an important part of this organization, you know. Lor Lu won't let this go through."
"Mark is such . . ." She looked around as if for her daughters, then remembered they were at the Kleins, playing with Lori and Kari. "Mark is such a damned asshole!"
"You have my whole-hearted agreement on that. Why don't we call Lor Lu now?"
"It's 5:30."
Ben laughed. "He's a bachelor; he lives in his office. And he'll want to know." Ben stepped to the living room phone. "I'll call him, if that's all right."
She nodded, and his fingers pecked out a number. "Lor Lu, this is Ben Shoreff. Lee just got a very disturbing registered fax from"he looked again at the first page"from the Monroe County District Court, Rochester, New York. Her ex-husband has initiated a suit to get custody of Becca and Raquel. On the basis that Lee is an unfit mother, a member of a cult, and the children are growing up in the cult. He probably watched the CNN special, saw the family interview, and got visions of revenge."
He stood listening for a moment, then spoke again. "Lee divorced him on the basis of his cocaine addiction, and got custody of the girls. Mark didn't even contest it, and Lee had gone to work with a high-powered consulting firm, so supporting them wasn't a problem. Meanwhile, Mark's dad had cut him off, no doubt for the same reason Lee had. But apparently Mark got clean. And I suppose that dad, the source of money and all good things, took him back into the family and the family law firm."
Again Ben listened. "Sure. Just a moment." He switched off the transmitter. "How about eating with staff this evening?" Lee nodded, and he touched the transmitter switch again. "We'll eat at staff this evening, and give you the papers after supper."
Lee's gaze had taken on increasing life as he'd talked. Now he disconnected, and dialed another number. "Hi, Betty," he said. "Lee and I have decided to eat at staff this evening. Would you send the girls home, please? . . . Thanks."
Again he disconnected, then grinned at his wife. "There you go, sweetheart. It's as good as handled."
He really had no doubt it would be handled, but he also didn't doubt that the unpleasantness had only begun.
The next morning there was a knock on Lee's office door. When she called, "Come in," it was Ngunda Aran who entered.
He smiled. "Lor Lu has told me of the unpleasantness with your ex-husband. It may take some time to settle, but I want you to know it will be handled, and as smoothly as possible."
He left, Lee staring after him. She'd felt a lot better after talking with Lor Lu the previous evening, and this visit, brief as it had been, had added to her assurance level.
She would though, she told herself, prefer quickly to smoothly. She also told herself that if she was still with Mertens, Loftus, and Hurst, she'd be on her own in this, dangling in the wind.