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'a strange night of stone'
Aug. 19th, 2023 08:28 pm~In the final scene of "Reversal of Fortune" Claus Von Bulow [Jeremy Irons] has gotten into a car to leave. Alan Dershowitz [Ron Silver] says to to him, "Claus, you're a very strange man." Von Bulow gives him this wonderfully enigmatic smile and purrs, "You have no idea."
That is my motto. I am a very strange man and most of you have no idea. lol
~I committed suicide in my last life. I was an Irish writer, originally from Ulster. Middle class, well educated, Orange. And I hated my family and the North. At sixteen, I lied about my age and joined the British army. This was in mid 1916. I spent the next two years in the trenches of the Western Front. I emerged with hardly a scratch...physically. Mentally and emotionally, I was devastated. So I drank.
Having studied the German philosophers, I was fluent and literate in German. I somehow got a job as a news stringer in Berlin. I loved Berlin. Between the wars it was an amazing and insane city, vital and alive. And I fit right in. I wrote and drank and whored. I lived with whores and had sex with Nazi Brown Shirts, too. The latter gave me entree into Berlin's chaotic and violent political life. I fit in there, as well.
This life lasted for fifteen years. But in June of '34, Hitler purged the SA, Der Sturm Abteilungen, the Storm Troopers, whose upper echelons were notorious homosexuals. Six hundred were murdered in one night, The Night of The Long Knives. I knew my days in Berlin were numbered and left the only place that I ever felt was home, though in truth, it had left me. The capital of the Third Reich was not my Berlin.
I went back to London. And imploded. I drank and drank and had nothing to 'pull me up'. No street brawls between rival factions, no debauched, but brilliant night life, no plump Teuton prostitutes, just gloomy Ol' Blighty. I began to wind up in sanatoriums.
I went in and out for years. I think my family paid for them just to keep me out of Ulster, but that is all very vague. Then came the next war. That pushed me into real madness. The last thing I remember, which was actually the first thing I remembered - my past lives unfold to me from the moment of my death - I was wandering the English countryside in a hospital gown. I knew I was going to die. I didn't know how, only that I was.
I found a barn and climbed up into the hay loft. There was a rope and a beam. I wrapped one end of the rope around my neck and the other around the beam. Then I leaped. The fall lasted for a thousand years. And then, as I fell, I heard a sound, a sound that was Important, but I didn't know what it was. I listened and listened in that seemingly endless fall.
Finally, I realized what it was, a steady drone getting louder and louder. The sound of hundreds of American B-17 bombers heading East to smash the Reich. And then SNAP!! I got to the end of the rope.
This was either Autumn of 43 or Spring of 44. I would have been 43 or 44. It was not until I passed my 44th birthday that I got that regression, starting with that long fall. And as I looked at that life, I had a grim revelation. I had gotten the same life once again. This time however, I had made a crucial decision differently. I did not go to Viet Nam to escape my family.
I felt guilt and loss over that for years, not doing military service. I knew a Buddhist master in New York named Garuda. He had flown over one hundred combat assaults as a Huey pilot in the Central Highlands. I shared my feelings about this. He smiled compassionately and said, "If it had been meant for you to go, you would have." That frustrated me at the time. But with that last regression, his words came back to me and I cried. He knew. And I finally understood.
The Karmic Lesson here is this: if you kill yourself out of despair, you hit a 'Karmic re-start button' and get another version of the same life. Better to hang tough and work out what you can. It does get better.
And So It Is...
That is my motto. I am a very strange man and most of you have no idea. lol
~I committed suicide in my last life. I was an Irish writer, originally from Ulster. Middle class, well educated, Orange. And I hated my family and the North. At sixteen, I lied about my age and joined the British army. This was in mid 1916. I spent the next two years in the trenches of the Western Front. I emerged with hardly a scratch...physically. Mentally and emotionally, I was devastated. So I drank.
Having studied the German philosophers, I was fluent and literate in German. I somehow got a job as a news stringer in Berlin. I loved Berlin. Between the wars it was an amazing and insane city, vital and alive. And I fit right in. I wrote and drank and whored. I lived with whores and had sex with Nazi Brown Shirts, too. The latter gave me entree into Berlin's chaotic and violent political life. I fit in there, as well.
This life lasted for fifteen years. But in June of '34, Hitler purged the SA, Der Sturm Abteilungen, the Storm Troopers, whose upper echelons were notorious homosexuals. Six hundred were murdered in one night, The Night of The Long Knives. I knew my days in Berlin were numbered and left the only place that I ever felt was home, though in truth, it had left me. The capital of the Third Reich was not my Berlin.
I went back to London. And imploded. I drank and drank and had nothing to 'pull me up'. No street brawls between rival factions, no debauched, but brilliant night life, no plump Teuton prostitutes, just gloomy Ol' Blighty. I began to wind up in sanatoriums.
I went in and out for years. I think my family paid for them just to keep me out of Ulster, but that is all very vague. Then came the next war. That pushed me into real madness. The last thing I remember, which was actually the first thing I remembered - my past lives unfold to me from the moment of my death - I was wandering the English countryside in a hospital gown. I knew I was going to die. I didn't know how, only that I was.
I found a barn and climbed up into the hay loft. There was a rope and a beam. I wrapped one end of the rope around my neck and the other around the beam. Then I leaped. The fall lasted for a thousand years. And then, as I fell, I heard a sound, a sound that was Important, but I didn't know what it was. I listened and listened in that seemingly endless fall.
Finally, I realized what it was, a steady drone getting louder and louder. The sound of hundreds of American B-17 bombers heading East to smash the Reich. And then SNAP!! I got to the end of the rope.
This was either Autumn of 43 or Spring of 44. I would have been 43 or 44. It was not until I passed my 44th birthday that I got that regression, starting with that long fall. And as I looked at that life, I had a grim revelation. I had gotten the same life once again. This time however, I had made a crucial decision differently. I did not go to Viet Nam to escape my family.
I felt guilt and loss over that for years, not doing military service. I knew a Buddhist master in New York named Garuda. He had flown over one hundred combat assaults as a Huey pilot in the Central Highlands. I shared my feelings about this. He smiled compassionately and said, "If it had been meant for you to go, you would have." That frustrated me at the time. But with that last regression, his words came back to me and I cried. He knew. And I finally understood.
The Karmic Lesson here is this: if you kill yourself out of despair, you hit a 'Karmic re-start button' and get another version of the same life. Better to hang tough and work out what you can. It does get better.
And So It Is...
