Dear Bruce,
I am new to the conversation board but I have been reading your books for several years.  I have also read all of Robert Monroe's books and worked with some of the tapes and cd's that TMI has created.  I hope to be able to attend some seminars at some point but for now I will continue to work on my own due to financial and health reasons.  I am rereading Charting Unknown Territory again (6th time). I am wondering, do you think that those of us who have been strongly drawn to Robert Monroe's and to your work are of the same Disk as you are?
Other than retrieving aspects of ourselves that may be lost or stuck for some reason, how might we assist each other so that our particular Disk will be able to graduate when it is supposed to.
Also, do you have any kind of a guess or notion of about how many different Disks there are that may represent other realities on Earth at this time?  Thanks so much for all of your work.

Dear Recoverer
I am happy that you did weigh in on this one.  This is my first post on this conversation board so I am not sure about the process or whatever.  So I hope that if I get this thing wrong someone will let me know so I can correct my errors.
Have you read the part in Charting Unknown Territory on page 248 where Bruce talks about memories of his physical world experiences being stored in the consciousness of his Disk or I/There?
I have checked in from time to time on the conversation board and the topics are interesting but I have some topics that I have not seen that it would be helpful to me to see what others are thinking and doing with some of the things that Bruce has discussed.  I like all of his books but my favorite is Charting Unknown Territory.  It has some really interesting experiences in it.  What is your sense about the issues that I brought up in my previous post?  I am going to be away from my computer for a while.  It has been a very long day and I am going to go rest for a while.  I hope that others will also weigh in on this discussion.  Thanks again for your first response and I hope the hear from you frequently.

Don,

I too have wondered about the reality of past lives.  I looked at Dave's hypnoregression technique for exploring past lives (and I must say that Dave is one of my favorite people on the board).  He has a person completely relax, then eventually find several doorways within themselves.  With some effort, they step inside the doorway, then describe what they are experiencing and see (forgive me Dave, if I shorten or paraphrase incorrectly).  Often a contact is made with a past life which can be linked to the present.

However, if there is a shared Jungian subconscious, or a field that ties us all together, might not the doorway be a "linked soul," but not necessarily a past life?   If thought can be shared, perhaps we could make such close contact that we think another's life was our own.  This point of view can not be summarily dismissed and must be explored. 

Still, one would imagine that if the life were not our past life, but one we made contact with, there may have been a relevance or purpose in the sharing, or the contact.  Perhaps we still are meant to learn from the experience, and this may explain where the disc/linked souls uitility comes in.

Matthew

[Betson:] "Could someone describe these disks."

You pose a simple but important question because it must be asked whether the soul disk concept is even logically coherent, let alone true. The notion of life in a disk of distinct selves from past lives initially sounds rather intolerably suffocating from our standpoint, doesn't it?  I recall a long-time poster, Ginny, who promised to explore life in the soul disk, but was apparently unable to do so. 

Perhaps you might appreciate a revised version of one of my posts in my earlier Swedenborg thread.  ES provides vague hints of how life in a group soul can manifest itself to the astral traveler:

"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)." 

Of course, ES learns that a group soul is comprised of orginally distinct likeminded souls rather than a fusion of different selves of the same individual:

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

ES discovers that the phenomenon of group souls is the culmination of the increasingly mental life of the heavens.  One stage of this is the eventual melding of earthly soul mates into an androgyne.

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 Bruce Moen's 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 the 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

First of all, soul's aren't created by bodies. Rather, souls make use of physical bodies. Therefore, if it is possible for a soul to incarnate in a physical body during a current incarnation, why couldn't it do so on other occasions?

One of the main reasons we physically incarnate is so we can learn and spiritually grow.  Considering how slow people are to change, it is doubtful they can learn everything they need to learn during one incarnation. Yes, it is true that spirits can learn in the spirit realms, yet physical incarnation is a possibility. Why? Because the density level of a physical incarnation allows growth opportunities that don't exist in the spirit realm. It just doesn't make sense that a soul would be afforded such a learning experience only one time.

There are lots of sources of information which show that reincarnation is a fact. Only people who are vehemently opposed to the idea of reincarnation would be so quick to reject them.

Why are they opposed to seriously considering the possibility of reincarnation? Here are some reasons.
1. They don't want to be responsible for anything the might have done is a past life.
2. They are rigidly attached to their current personality and body image, and they don't want to have to admit that there is more to who they are.
3. They have a Christian belief system which believes it is heretical to believe in reincarnation,  and because they don't want to go to the hell they believe in, they won't allow themselves to seriously consider the possibility of reincarnation.
4. They want to believe that they'll have to live through only one physical  incarnation, before they get to live in heaven for the rest of etternity.
5. They aren't willing to admit that they might be wrong. After all, this could lead to a major belief system crash.
6. Their way of making a living relates to not believing in reincarnation, therefore, they can't find the openess of mind to seriously consider whether or not reincarnation exists.

Do an internet search for Ian Stevenson.  He's found lots of evidence for reincarnation, and his was of doing research is very credible. If somebody responds to what I say about Ian Stevenson by saying these are cases of possession, that just goes to show you how opposed they are to seriously considering the possibility of reincarnation. I read about Ian Stevenson when I really had my doubts about reincarnation, yet his evidence is hard to dismiss.

It's odd that Beserk sites Seth as a reference source, even though he's so oppossed to Seth. Personally, it doesn't concern me what Seth has to say about reincarnation, because I don't consider Seth to be a source of personal inspiration.

Don't give up on something simply because there are inconsistencies, because you would be hard pressed to find a religious or philisophical belief system that is consistent.

Regarding Bruce Moen's disc theory, don't expect to figure this out over night. I don't believe that you can figure out what is true in this regard simply by reading what somebody else has to say about it.

It probably isn't possible to figure out what it's all about while we are here in the physical. It is possible to find out that in whatever form they exist, there are loving spirits in the spirit World who are trying to help you.

I believe the most important thing to do is to grow inwardly. To find the love that exists within you more and more. Anything else you learn is secondary by a long shot.

Here's a good article on reincarnation. Besides this article, this site has a number of good articles.

http://www.near-death.com/experiences/origen03.html

Westtexascrone,

>> do you think that those of us who have been strongly drawn to Robert Monroe's and to your work are of the same Disk as you are?  <<

From experience I'd say it is impossible for us to not to be from the same Disk, and then I would ask, Oh, which Disk do you mean?

In Voyage to Curiosity's Father Denise and I were experimenting with partnered exploring and chose the "evolution of conscious" as a topic of exploration.  Some of what we found indicates that we each exist as an individual expression of a much larger form of consciousness.  My first exposure to this form of consciousness was described in my first book and I labeled it a Disk because that's the form my perception presented it in.  From what Denise and I explored I would say that the first Disk I found is an individual expression of a much large form of consciousness that has other Disks as its individual expressions, each in turn having forms like you and me as their forms of individual expression. 

We followed the trail of our curiosity about the evolution of consciousness through about eight "generations" of ever larger forms of consciousness, perceived as Disks, each  having the previously explored Disks as their individual forms of expression.  I my view, no matter what "local' or "first level" Disk any being in any dimension or reality is an individual expression of, at some level of Disks we are members of that same Disk.

>> Other than retrieving aspects of ourselves that may be lost or stuck for some reason, how might we assist each other so that our particular Disk will be able to graduate when it is supposed to. <<

In my opinion, follow where your curiosity leads you.  Learn to experience and express unconditional Love to an ever greater degree.


>> Also, do you have any kind of a guess or notion of about how many different Disks there are that may represent other realities on Earth at this time? <<

No, but from what I've found so far the number is at least in the thousands.

I would like to add  that in my view it is meaningless to speak of any Disk at any level of Disks as something separate from who and what you are.  I might say, we have found the Disks and "them is us."

Bruce

Westtexascrone:

I wrote about reincarnation not because I believe that you need to know about a pro viewpoint, but rather because I wanted to present a viewpoint that is opposite of the viewpoints that speak against it.

You're right about what you wrote on your last post. If people are like me, some of them took the time to check out this website because they were drawn to the disc/I-there/higher self viewpoint. "Not" because they are interested in a religious viewpoint that is quite different.

Yet some people come here with the belief that they are going to save people from themselves. A person would have to be pretty weak minded to change his or her mind about something they have been drawn to, simply because somebody presents long contrary arguments.

Regarding the flaw, perhaps some children recalled the memories of another member of their disc.

Or perhaps because linear time isn't real, there was some overlap in their incarnations.

Or perhaps they telepathically picked up on the memories of another person, and reincarnation wasn't the reason.

There's also the factor of how some of Stevenson's case study children had birthmarks in the exact same place the person they had memories of had an injury. This principle is similar to how some people don't get over a physical problem they have, until they find out that this problem has its origin with a past life memory. For example, Bruce Moen and many other people.

Regarding the possession theory, would a possessing spirit actually believe that it could go back to its prior life situation by taking over the body of another?  Have Stevenson's case study children shown other signs of possession? Does Stevenson's case studies reveal that the people for whom past lives were remembered, were people who were evil minded enough to have the tendency to try to possess somebody?

Regarding Swedenborg and his higher sources of information, there are examples of people who did have access to higher plane knowledge, and they confirm reincarnation. I don't believe that Swedenborg's word is more trustworthy than the word of other people, simply because it is possible that he displayed strong medium and predictive abilities. There are other people who have displayed such abilities, yet they have a different viewpoint.







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