Reving memories Re: Re: [Buddha-l] Article of possible interest

[Joy Vriens]

Lance,

>> >>I am pretty distrustful of correct memories of childhood. I am not 
>>>>sure correct memories exist. How does one correctly revive something 
>>>>that is gone? 
>> 
>>>There is a description of how to do this in Achaan Brahm's latest book :-) 
>> 
>>Can you give a hint without spoiling the plot of the book? :-) 
> 
>Basically you enter a state he claims is jhaana with the aim of 
>remembering past lives. On emerging you remember something. He talks 
>about the kind of thing that happens. 

Simply for curiosity. I stumbled on the following passage:

"It is tantalizing to note that the prototype for this Hindu body of theory and practice-of both the "logic of projection" and "inner" travel to "higher" worlds-may have been Greek. The notion of the spinal column as a channel for semen and seminal thoughts (logoi spermatikoi) was both a medical and a mystical notion dear to the Stoics. Here, however, I wish to concentrate momentarily on a pre-Pythagorean doctrine that was formative to Plato's theory, found in the Phaedo, of cyclic rebirth and the recovery of lost knowledge as "recollection," anamnesis. This doctrine identified the female soul (psyche) with the breath (pneuma) that was flung upward through the head via the action of the diaphragm (prapides) to travel to higher worlds. The female psyche was a divinity that inhabited the human body and a person's spiritual double, whose function it was to link individuel destinies to the cosmic order. Whereas in most people the female psyche did not leave the body to travel to!
  the higher worlds until their death, the case was a différent one for persons initiated into the esoteric practices of the diaphragm and breath. These persons, as part of their "spiritual exercises" of rememoration and purification, would undertake "practice in dying" (melete thanatou), by which they would fling their female psyche into the higher worlds to rememorate all the wisdom they had lost in the process of rebirth. The psyche would be made to rise along the same channel as the seminal thoughts, but would then continue beyond the cranium to the higher worlds where wisdom resided."
Kiss of the Yogini, David Gordon White
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