Hi Bruce,

Congratulations on a beautiful website. It appears to be assisting many people on their journey, which in itself is a legacy worthy of any teacher of universal principle.

A note on my mystical experience: it was similiar to an nde but I didn't die, I meditated for several hours on going to God and leaving this world. Hence, I awoke in a higher level and a Higher Being was there with me, as well as what seemed to be everyone who ever lived or would live. We were formless but appeared (in my mind, I believe) to be like eggs or circular beings, all of us were inside the Higher Being who was there with me and was itself a circular being (but actually formless). We existed there forever but also had the ability to project ourselves into the physical world simultaneously.

There were more aspects to it, of course, but reading on disks theory made me want to share this.

Thank you for all your great work.

Peace,

Laurie

Welcome Laurie.  Your mystical experience sounds wonderful and rings very true. Thank you for sharing this with us.

Namaste,
Mairlyn ;-)

Hello Laurie:

Sounds like a great experience.

Regarding the egg like shapes, recently, on several occasions,  I've closed my eyes, and saw a brilliant, bright white light up in space. I got the sense that this is my disc. One time it sort of looked like a golf ball, because of the depressions on it.

One time as I tried to go to where it is, I saw these grapelike structures floating around. Michael Newton has been told by hypnosis subjects that souls look like grapelike structures when they are with their soul group (disc).

It seems to me that the egg shaped structures you saw, might be the same thing as the grape shaped structures I saw. They were different colors.

I don't know if they actually look like grapes. This might just be how my mind translated what I saw.

Hi Laurie, I too welcome your input and resonate with it. I just recently described becoming an orb myself..involved a bit of a mini crash there, but very freeing all in all and so thank you again for joining us. love, alysia :D

Hi Laurie,
I saw something like soap-bubbles, a hierarchic system of it. One time also a disc. Sometimes a sea of waves, a sea with an overall surface. And lights, more or less round. But this aspect of wholeness I think is the common point, all together, in my case in this sea where everyone was modifying the pool of waves with the own waves.
Bye, Spooky

A couple nights ago I was dreaming of huge bubbles with scenes of people interacting in each one. I know someone who has seen past lives in different bubbles.

Namaste,
Mairlyn

Laurie,

Your vision of human souls as eggs inside a Higher Being is a strikingly maternal image of God.   You might assume that this image is very non-traditional and non-Western. It is true that the "masculinity" of God is stressed in Judeo-Christian tradition.   But there are also several feminine images of God in the Bible.  Here are just two examples that are reminiscent of your vision.  First, consider this literal translation of Jeremiah 31:20, which is usually defeminized in modern translations.  God addresses Israel thus:

"Therefore, my womb trembles for him [= Israel] ; I will truly show motherly-compassion upon him."

Here God uses a wordplay on the Hebrew word for "womb" (Hebrew: "rechem").  The plural of this word for "womb" means "compassion." which is therefore a maternal concept.   I find the image of souls bieng cradled in the protected womb of a loving divine Mother comforting.  Here is a second biblical example of this maternal image of God:  

"I [God] cry out as a woman in labor, gasping and panting (Isaiah 42:13-14)."

In your vision you sensed that the soul eggs had been in the Higher Being "forever."  The Bible presupposes the doctrine of the preexistence of the soul, but does not teach reincarnation.  The question of when these souls were created is never answered in Scripture, but is answered in a non-biblical Jewish text from the biblical era:

"Al souls are prepared for eternity before the composition of the earth (2 Enoch 23:5)."

So your vision resonates well with this Judeo-Christian maternal imagery for God.

Don

Laurie:

Regarding reincarnation, of course you can trust your own experience more than somebody else's interpretation of the Bible.

I totally agree with Albert, Laurie, about learning to trust yourself, what you get and deciding from that basis which belief to go with based on what you have received in your quiet moments of reflection.
its all belief systems here, and we seem to go from one belief to another gradually, in that we change beliefs, or absorb more information as we go. the thing is to not get too serious about what another believes but weigh it carefully against what you know to be true within you. love, alysia

Laurie,

I just wanted to point out both the similarities and differences between your vision and the biblical image of souls in the womb of the divine Mother to provide you another model by which to interpret your experience.  I never addressed this issue of whether you should or should not believe in reincarnation.  But this site's thought police (e.g. recoverer and Alysia) need to chime in with their  insinuations.  Therefore, I will do what I hadn't planned to do--give you the dreaded other side of the argument about soul disks.  

No astral explorer has ever had verifications of the quality of Emanauel Swedenborg.  So his anti-reincarnational view, (reinforced by classical mediumship) of the soul disk at least warrants careful consideration here.  ES would view Bruce Moen's spin on the Soul Disk as a perversion of what actually happens:

"Kindred souls gravitate towards each other spontaneously...for with each other they feel as though they are with their own family (HH 44),"  

"There was a kind of angelic face that appeared to me, and this varied according to the qualities of affections...that were characteristic of the individuals in a particular community.  These variations lasted quite a while, and through it all I noticed that the same general face remained constant as a basis, with everything else being simply derivations and elaborations from it.  So there was shown me through this face the affections of the whole community...Not many individuals leave their own community to go to another because leaving their community is like leaving themselves or their life...(HH 47, 49)."  

"Sometimes a whole angelic community appears as a single entity in the form of an angel, a sight that the Lord has allowed me to see. . .Michael, Gabriel, and Raphael are nothing but angelic communities that are given these names because of their functions (HH 52)."  

Similary, in classical channeling, the group soul is not like the Monroe/Moen soul Disk composed of multiple selves of the same soul unit.  Rather, the group soul is composed of originally distinct kindred souls with the same purpose.  Yet this channeled conception might easily be confused with the soul Disk concept.  For example, consider this quote form Paul Beard, "Living On," p. 135:

"The group as a whole is in a real sense a soul also, a group soul, and [the discarnate person] is in very truth part of this soul.  The bond, the common purpose, will not all be seen in a flash....[but] will be carried out gradually, until the various parts are gathered together and made a whole."  

This alternative understanding may be the key to solving a significant contradiction between Bruce Moen and Robert Monroe.  Moen claims to be part of the same soul Disk as Monroe.  But Monroe is astrally informed that he has only one parallel incarnation--a female one.  He is also told that "she would seem like a long-lost sister (UJ 174)."  Moen reports no such intimacy in his earthly encounter with Monroe.  Perhaps, Moen, Monroe, and even this unknown female are distinct and separate souls destined to participate in a group soul in this Swedenborgian sense.  If so, there is no such thing as retrieving portions of one's self.

The group soul in the Swedenborgian sense gets rid of the the troubling notion of parallel incarnations from a timeless astral realm.  
Consider the contradictory nature of Seth's perspective on the timeless interval between lives.  In "Eternal Validity of the Soul" Seth says, "There is no time schedule, and yet it is very unusual for an individual to wait for anything over 3 centuries between lives, for this makes the orientation very difficult, and the emotional ties with the earth have become weak."  But Seth assumes that time is irrelevant for entities between lives.  The earth ties can only become gradually weakened if there is in fact a passage of time!  A real contradiction!

Don

SWEDENBORG'S REJECTION OF REINCARNATION

Laurie, this post complements the preceding one and helps explain how ES's higher guides dissuade him from construing his past life memories as evidence for reincarnation.   ES discovers that we are mistaken in our belief that our thoughts are isolated.  Our minds receive an influx from a endlessly changing array of good and evil discarnates who have not yet arrived at their ultimate destinations.  We are normally connected in this way to both good and evil spirits.  The particular combination of these spirits at any moment depends on our state of mind at that moment.  Neither we nor these associate spirits are normally conscious of the other.

What survives death indefinitely, says ES, is our inner memory which contains our inner loves and the patterns or approaches we've developed in reaction to life's experiences.  Inner memory is totally distinct from bodily memory of life's details which eventually fades after death and becomes quiescent.  ES's insight here is confirmed by astral adept Robert Bruce: "Memories of earthly life also seem vague [to the dead], much like how a half-forgotten dream is remembered by a living person.  Many spirits seem to be aware only of their present reality."

Occasionally, the bodily memory of spirits is activated and gives the connected person the impression that these memories are hers and that she must have reincarnated.   Ian Stevenson's celebrated research on the past life recall of young children is flawed by its failure to take this insight seriously.  In at least one of his cases, the child's alleged past life continued until well after he was born--a sure sign of possession.  If a discarnate spirit's bodily memory is completely restored, that memory can override the connected person's memories and create the experience of possession.  Robert A. Monroe [= RAM] creates such a possession during an OBE visit to Locale III: "I temporarily displaced him.  My knowledge of him...and his past came...evidently [from] his memory bank.  I have wondered what embarrassment I have caused him ("Journeys Out of the Body", p. 96)."

RAM's possession experience should have made him suspicious that his implausible astral past life experiences are bogus fabrications.  e.g.:

(1) his prior incarnation as a cave man pilot of a mentally controlled aircraft that is forced to dodge the spears of hostile natives (UJ 157): We are asked to believe in such a combination of prehistoric motifs and modern technology.

(2) a prior incarnation as a novice Christian priest who is invited  by his fellow priests to rape "a frightened young girl" who is tied down and spread-eagled: We are asked to believe that Catholic priests would order such an atrocity, that the victim is an earlier incarnation of his wife Nancy, and that the stabbings will cause her "exquisite ecstasy"  (UJ 154-156' cp. the earlier version in FJ 115-16)!

RAM's failure to address the credibility problems of these absurd "memories" is sufficent reason to mistrust the astral insights in his last 2 books.

ES discovers that discarnate heavenly souls readily grasp the significance of his insights, but humans confined to the world of spirits (= Focus 25-26) refuse to believe because they are unwilling to experience the inevitable belief system crash that would cause them to renounce reincarnation:
"I [ES] tried to convince them by many proofs that this is not true, but in vain (HH 246)."

Don

I agree with Tim. I wish to welcome Laurie again here, and Don, how come you rarely say anything positive about TMI, Bruce, or Monroe?
It just makes me wonder what you are doing here on his website...how strange...

Tim,

I pasted and revised my two posts above from another thread.  I hadn't noticed that the last paragraph about "another planned post" was appended.  I erased it.  I planned no additional post.  What is relevant are alterative views of the of group soul concept.  If you and Alysia will erase your last posts, I will erase this one to minimize the distraction.  It was cheeky for recoverer and Alysia to remind Laurie she can think for herself.  Duh!  So I stand by my thought police comment.

Don

In defense of the Monroe/Moen disc doctrine, Don, if I hear about the flying caveman, priest-rapist, or other images again from Monroe, I'll go insane.  This does not invalidate his theories or claims with any certainty.  It simply means he had some spaced out experiences, and put a wacky interpretation on them.  

Don, as you well know, our subconscious brain works in images and symbolism.  Lucid dreams and OOB states may be difficult to interpret. We are constantly in danger of using the part of us Bruce calls "the perceiver," in the wrong way.  Your criticisms make sense; but his misinterpretation does not validate ES' theories or invalidate the Monroe/Moen theories.

Likewise, Swedenberg may have misinterpreted symbolism shown to him.  We are all fallible human beings.

All taken together TMI has had others validate certain aspects of the focus levels, and some of the hemi-sync data and Monroe's ideas.  Is it perfect validation?  No.  But don't throw out the baby with the bathwater.  Monroe did not have the scientific mind of ES - perhaps his interpretor was flawed.

I have not seen my disc, or reached that level of awareness.  But I won't discredit a man's theories based on a few misinterpreted lucid dreams or OOBE.

Think about it Don

Matthew

hmm..I've never been called cheeky before ;) I almost like it...but Don, you didn't answer my question. Please, why don't u ever say anything positive about TMI, Bruce, or Monroe? thats nice of u to suggest we delete our posts, but u go first..ha ha!

Quote:

In defense of the Monroe/Moen disc doctrine, Don, if I hear about the flying caveman, priest-rapist, or other images again from Monroe, I'll go insane.  This does not invalidate his theories or claims with any certainty.  It simply means he had some spaced out experiences, and put a wacky interpretation on them.   Don, as you well know, our subconscious brain works in images and symbolism.  Lucid dreams and OOB states may be difficult to interpret. We are constantly in danger of using the part of us Bruce calls "the perceiver," in the wrong way.  Your criticisms make sense; but his misinterpretation does not validate ES' theories or invalidate the Monroe/Moen theories. Likewise, Swedenberg may have misinterpreted symbolism shown to him.  We are all fallible human beings. All taken together TMI has had others validate certain aspects of the focus levels, and some of the hemi-sync data and Monroe's ideas.  Is it perfect validation?  No.  But don't throw out the baby with the bathwater.  Monroe did not have the scientific mind of ES - perhaps his interpretor was flawed. I have not seen my disc, or reached that level of awareness.  But I won't discredit a man's theories based on a few misinterpreted lucid dreams or OOBE. Think about it Don Matthew

Excellent post Matthew. If only Don would go to TMI and take Gateway Voyage, he'd change his way of thinking, or else say that he'd been drugged.  We each have our OWN experiences, not someone else's. Everyone perceives differently. Of course he'll say he can't afford it. I couldn't either but I budgeted for 9 months until I had a credit card paid down enough to be able to afford it. There is always a way.

Namaste,
Mairlyn ;-)

Alysia................cheeky. LOL  That means you're unique.  ::)

Luv ya,
Mairlyn  ;D

Alysia,

I love what Bruce and RAM are trying to do.  I loved RAM's first book because (unlike the other two) it never got mired in New Age orthodoxy.  The day I finished it, I met a woman at a club who was a RAM clone.  She was the first OBE adept I ever met and I took her out to dinner to hear her experiences.  I don't think that meeting was an accident.  And remember, I tried to take the Gateway course at TMI.  It was a higher priority than my first trip to London and Paris, which I took instead because the TMI course was closed out.  If I give up on my exploration with my Gateway CDs and the Robert Bruce method, then I will buy and practice with Bruce Moen's latest book.  Long before I heard of Bruce, this thought popped into my head one day:
"Don, if you could properly focus your imagination, you'd be able to explore other dimensions."  I now connect that thought with Bruce's method.  

I criticize them only because I don't want to throw out the baby with the bath water.   I'm trying to sort out what I can embrace from what I must reject.  If I don't respect a New Age author, I don't normally critique him; I ignore him.  This is deeply personal. I'm not here to convert others to my viewpoint.  Rather, my creative insight is ignited by debate because I then obsess over how I could have offered a better response.  And sometimes I learn important insights from the experiences of my fellow posters.  In almost every area of my life, immersion in contrary perspectives has been a major source of personal growth for me.  Besides, my participation here has generated some ongoing E-mail dialogues that I treasure.

Don

Don,

Whatever our disagreements, you are the best!

BTW, TMI has scholarships for those who might be interested.

Bob

Don said:  Rather, my creative insight is ignited by debate because I then obsess over how I could have offered a better response.  And sometimes I learn important insights from the experiences of my fellow posters.  In almost every area of my life, immersion in contrary perspectives has been a major source of personal growth for me.  Besides, my participation here has generated some ongoing E-mail dialogues that I treasure.
_____

I have to agree, I've grown a lot thru some private emails from this group. might I suggest that using the NEW exercise, which both Bruce Moen and Robert Bruce describe, that u try that for 30 minutes and see what happens? I shot out of my body like a rocket one time using this method. I also used a vision with it, of hugging the world as a way to see if I could feel PUL. must of worked. the obe happened that night. it's really a simple exercise, just drawing in energy with the imagination basically.
cheers alysia