Today, tomorrow and yesterday

I met my lost rib, what Aristophanes calls our other half.

When I was young and just out of the Army I began studying ZEN. I meditated a lot and discovered many things about awareness, of those things that people are aware of and of those things that most people who are not aware ignore. Along the way I discovered the One true and Living God. I became a Christian.

During my meditations I had many visions of past lives which confused me as a Christian. Were these real past lives, were they just dreams or fantasies? I prayed and discovered something. It did not really matter and the most important aspect in understanding this was ZEN.

In ZEN there is the awareness of the now. These past memories only detract from awareness of the now. In many ways it is similar to the teaching of Christ in Matthew chapter 6 or in John Chapter 3. Each moment we are reborn into a new moment. This moment is now.

Yet the past does influence our present, our perception of the now, until we release our past.

Our concerns of the future influence our present until we release the future.

Releasing does not mean we are no longer aware of the past or the future.

I had many, many visions of past lives and like most lives they were very boring. Filled with soldiering and farming and being a slave and a sailor.

In one life, circa 600 A.D. I was a commander of a company of soldiers sent out to convert pagans. We came across a pagan temple of Diana and I found my other half, my lost rib. As a good Christian Soldier I worked to convert her and as a Priestess she worked on converting me. There was never any doubt about the outcome, people were either converted or their souls were released to the mercy of God. I helped burn her and the others to death as witches and when we finished I fell on my sword, unable to live without my lost rib.

This set in motion a common thread where my lost rib and I became estranged from each other. I was never really angry at her through the many lives that we did not share. Burning is not the worst you can do to someone, years of imprisonment and torture are, in my opinion, worse and I have visionary memories of both. I don't believe I was ever forgiven, as if I could have prevented or changed the outcome.

I often wonder if people who believe they were born into the wrong body are just people who are reincarnated and unable to accept the present, as if the materialism of their sexuality defines their lives. Can your other half be the born as the same sex? I doubt it, but, then it would not matter since true love transcends sexuality.

In this life we came together and like ships that crash and burn in the night we sank, as we have in so many lives before.

In the now there is my wife of 13 years whom, in spite of many problems, I will not leave easily. Like my other half I commit myself and stay committed. It is not the past or the future that really matters, it is the now and the greatest gift we can give ourselves and others is to be happy with the now and love each other as we love ourselves.