Леонід Українець's picture
Леонід Українець
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Interview with empath: people remembering their past lives

Inspired by Antonina's story, the American of Ukrainian descent also decided to share her own experience.

Leonid: We’ve known each other since high school. You seem like a quite interesting person. Thank you for agreeing to interview you.

Valeriy: My pleasure.

L: You were interested in esoteric stuff since I’ve known you. When did this interest start and what did spark it?

V: It started when I was 15 years old. Before that moment I’ve always been interested in the world in general - how it works, why the sky is blue, what happens when we die, what is the purpose of our lives on this Earth. To find answers to these questions I’ve read a lot of books, magazines, newspapers, and studied well in school. A positive by-product of this knowledge seeking was me being very successful in school to the point of participating in international conferences and olympiads.

L: Yes, I remember we both participated in those competitions. We both even won silver medals in one.

V: The problem is that the answers to the most important to me questions, like what is the meaning of life, haven't really been answered. The answers seemed to be different for people of different faiths. If you are an atheist, then the answer seems to be just enjoy life while you can, because when you die, you die for real. If you are a christian, the answer is to be good so that you go to heaven after death. For religions that believe in karma, the answer is to improve your karma in this life so that you can have a better next life, or even, you can stop the whole rebirth cycle.

L: I agree. So were you able to find the answers to your questions?

V: Yes. I didn't get all the answers at once, but I’ve got them very slowly over the years. Every year I spent my Summers in the village where my grandma lived. The village was very beautiful with a lot of picturesque views, trees, flowers, forests. This made me feel connected to nature more so than city folks, and even more than the locals in the village, because I was very introverted (thinking alone about all the big life questions), so I’ve spent most of my time there just walking or bicycling everywhere enjoying nature.

L: Oh my God, this is so cool! I spent a lot of time in the village too.

V: The more time I’ve spent there, the more I’ve started to feel like trees and flowers have souls, not just animals, which is easier to believe, because, I mean, look at a puppy or a kitten - would you really say it doesn't have a soul, right?

L: Yes, I agree, I had a pet and every time I looked at its cute little eyes, I felt like there is more to that little critter than just a bunch of cells without the soul. One of my cats was a vegetarian.

V: This feeling that even flowers and trees have souls started to become very strong when I was 15 years old. I am not sure why at that particular age. It could be because my grandma died when I was 14. Her death shocked me a lot, because we all loved her, she was a very good person. I was forced to go to church by my parents after the grandma died. I don't know their motivation for that. Maybe my grandma’s soul after death saw something in my soul and decided to help me to grow spiritually using some kind of spiritual magic.

L: Her death probably sparked big life questions in your parents and they probably became more faithful, because it's, like, we are next, you know, so that's probably why they forced you to go to church.

V: Yes, you may be right. Another reason for my spiritual awakening at 15 could be that 15 is a typical age when everybody falls in love for the first time. Something opens up in us that allows us to love for the first time, heart chakra probably. I think me being 15 and other reasons that I’ve mentioned earlier made me have my first esoteric experience. I started to feel like trees and flowers have souls. For example, when I cut a flower to pick it from the ground, I felt like I could feel the flower’s pain when I cut it. When I was around trees, I felt like I could feel what they felt towards me. If I hung around my favorite trees, I felt like they were happy that I made them their favorite. I could feel the pain of a dying tree which had half of its branches dead. This made me start to feel love towards nature, and I think it made nature return this love. I always went to my grandma’s garden and said good-bye to all the trees there before I left the village for the city. I could feel that they were as sad about me leaving as I was about leaving them. Then I’ve realized that everything has a soul, this made me love the whole Earth, and even the whole Universe. The nights at the village were very beautiful with all the stars visible. Every time I’ve looked into the night sky, I felt the beauty of the Universe and I felt connected to it, because I felt like if everything has a soul, than each of those visible galaxies have souls too, so looking at the night sky was like looking at the Universe itself and it made me love it, just as you would fall in love with a very beautiful woman.

L: That sounds interesting and exciting. So, did this experience help you answer your questions?

V: Partially. See, I was a christian at that time, because everyone around me was one, so I was forced to become one by my parents. But my experience with nature during my Summer vacations made me think that JudoChristianity is not correct, because it says that plants and animals don't have souls, but I felt like they had. Since I’ve read a lot of literature on esoteric stuff, Buddhism seemed to be like the doctrine that is in line with what I’ve felt. Buddhism supports the idea that plants and animals have souls. Besides this, it has karma and reincarnation, which sound more logical to me than having only one chance to prove to God that you are worthy of heaven. Many books and articles that I’ve read at that time mentioned people remembering their past lives and even being able to speak a foreign language when they were very young and never learned it.

L: Oh, yes, I have similar experience.

V: Besides my love of nature I also started to feel like I loved people in general, because they were also a part of nature if you think about it. I mean, we are still animals, right? Just very smart animals.

L: But man is still the bearer of the spirit.

V: As years went on I’ve started to feel like not only each flower and tree had a soul, but many flowers or trees who grow very close to each other, create another soul that combines all of them. For example, a forest has its own soul. A garden has its own soul as well. This feeling was proved to be correct by the articles that I've read at that time that said that if you have an ant or a bee colony, the whole colony has its own soul. This made me wonder if it’s the same with us, humans: do we, humans, have a humanity soul that combines each of our souls? My intuition told me yes. The more I’ve meditated on this, the more I’ve started to feel like not only humanity has its own soul, but the whole planet Earth has its own soul that combines souls of each of its living beings. And even animals like us, humans, have little souls of all the little microbes and bacteria living in our bodies. This made me realize that the line between us, humans, and the world in which we live, is not clearly defined. It seems blurry. I started to feel like everything is part of one big thing. I didn't know what that thing was. As a former christian I started to think that maybe there is а God and we are all part of God. It even says so in the Bible, that God is everywhere, including in us. But it contradicted the rest of the Bible, because if God is everywhere, even in you, why should you go to church to talk to him? Why can't you just talk to yourself? Why do you even need to speak when you pray, isn't God everywhere and knows everything including our thoughts?

L: Yes, I agree. Stuff like this made me not like Judochristianity a lot as well.

V: These unanswered questions made me explore other religions and beliefs. No particular religion seemed to support what I’ve felt was right. I think the main problem was that I didn't dig too deeply into every religion, because they were too hard for me to believe at that time. For example, Hinduism supports the notion of existence of many gods, which made me discard it too quickly, since I have always believed in either 0 or 1 God. Having many Gods seemed unbelievable to me. But the more I’ve explored Hinduism, especially by watching Alan Watts videos on YouTube, the more I’ve started to realize that Hinduism is correct - it supports reincarnation, karma, and the most importantly, the notion that we are all a part of one thing called Brahman. It sounded similar to how the Bible says that God is everywhere, including in us. But the Bible rejects the notion that it means that we are all God. After reading more on Judochristianity I've learned that the Bible that we know now was a collection of texts selected by the Vatican to support a very specific belief, where God is a separate thing from us, humans, and that we need to be good so that God will allow us to heaven. I’ve learned that there were christian texts that supported karma and reincarnation, but that they were removed from the official Bible. I think the Bible was created as a book by which the Vatican could control its population, rather than to help its population grow spiritually. Hinduism is much more respectful towards us, humans. It says that we all are one god-like thing called Brahman. It supported my feelings of connection to the Universe and feeling like we all are one, so I've switched to Hinduism.

L: That was quite an unusual spiritual path you took there.

V: Yes, I agree. There are other things that I’ve learned that strengthen my belief in Hinduism. For example, I’ve learned that people who experimented with DMT (Dimethyltryptamine) saw gods and there were examples of one person meeting a god of all ants or spiders, I forgot, which supported my strong feeling that every specie has their own soul, as I've mentioned earlier, and this soul gets represented as a god during DMT trips, in my opinion.

L: Interesting. Did you try DMT yourself?

V: No. I feel like my strong feelings about all the esoteric stuff I've described earlier is enough for me to believe in it. I don't want to waste resources on proving to myself stuff I already know.

L: Sounds logical. I remember you’ve mentioned to me once that others told you they could feel your aura. What was that all about and how it is relevant to your spiritual growth, if any?

V: Yes, many of my close friends told me that they could feel my aura, meaning, they could feel what I felt when they were close to me, which in most cases was the feeling of love, since as I’ve mentioned earlier, I felt that I loved the Universe, and this includes all the people, especially the ones close to me. They always told me this in a bragging way, as if they could read auras in everyone, but when I asked them if they could feel only my aura or other people's auras too, they all said that it was just mine. This proved to me that it's not them who have aura reading skills, but that it's my aura that makes it able for them to read it. I don't know what it is. I could not find anything on that anywhere. My opinion on this is that probably my unusually strong feeling of connection to the Universe and how we are all one, made my soul, and thus aura, which kind of represents our soul, grow into some kind of advanced state that made it possible for others to feel it. Or maybe my soul was a reincarnation of either a soul of an alien from an alien race with a more advanced spiritual growth or a soul that developed too much to return to a human body, but it returned anyway to help humanity grow spiritually, which is what I’m hopefully doing by having this interview with you.

L: Have you tried to learn about your past lives using something like past life regression hypnosis or other methods?

V: Yes, I’ve tried a past life regression meditation that I've found on the internet, but it didn't show me anything. I’ve asked 2 psychics on the internet about it and they both gave me different answers, so I don't believe them. I’ve decided not to be interested in this any more, because my thinking is that if this Universe was designed so that we don't remember our past lives, maybe it's for a reason. Maybe remembering our past lives slows down our spiritual growth because we cannot let go of the past.

L: Oh, OK. Yes, it makes sense. Is there any other exciting esoteric stuff you experienced?

V: Yes. I took a course on Reiki, which supports the notion that there is energy everywhere around us and we can use it to heal others. I hoped that the course would give me answers to why others felt my aura. The instructor did not answer this question, but the closest thing that she told me was that there are 2 kinds of energies - one is our energy, which we should not use to heal others, because we would drain ourselves of our own energy and will feel tired, and another is Reiki energy which is a free universal healing energy, which we can use to heal others, - this way we don’t drain our energy. On that note, recently I’ve learned about empaths - people with many interesting powers, one of them is healing others by giving them some of your energy. The empaths get tired after a while from such healing, so they become withdrawn from others and prefer to be alone. Besides just having the healing power, empaths have other powers that I felt like I had, for example to be able to read the mood of the room, reading auras of others. This makes me think that it was possible that the aura that others felt around me was me giving them my healing energy. It does drain me energetically and I always get tired when I am around many people for too long. And the problem is that I cannot control it - the energy just gets released on its own, so I have to adapt my behavior to survive, like taking long breaks outside near my favorite trees where I can recharge alone.

L: Oh, interesting. Don't drain yourself too much. You don't owe anybody your healing energy. You’ve mentioned to me once that you believe in the Simulation hypothesis and the Multiverse Theory. How is that tied into your beliefs if any?

V: Yes, even though I say I am a Hindu, what I mean is that I lean more towards it, but I am open to the idea that, for example, this world is a simulation created by higher beings, maybe Hindu gods, for our souls to grow. People in the ancient times didn't know anything about programming and simulations, so when they expressed their beliefs, they used examples of things that they could understand. The latest developments in physics seem to support the ideas of simulation and multiverse. If you dig deeper into the ancient texts, I am confident you could probably spot some ideas on the simulation hypothesis or the multiverse theory. For example, just the idea of us living in this physical world in our physical bodies, which are more like vessels for our souls, reminds me of playing a VR game. In this sense, our physical bodies would be an equivalent of a VR device, our soul would be a player, our word would be a simulation for our souls to learn something, like how to be kind, how to love each other, how to feel connected to others and to the Universe as a whole. I also heard about some ancient texts telling that time is not like a line, but more like a wave, which is in line with the Multiverse Theory. Think about it like this: If time is not linear, but 2D, then every possibility happens on a quantum level and each possibility spawns its own timeline, - the key word here is “line”, because if our linear time feels like a line, then if you represent all possible timelines, you will get a 2D object like a circle with its center representing  some start time and each line from the center of the circle to its diameter is one possible timeline out of almost infinite possibilities (the key word here is “almost”, because if the universe is a simulation, there are no infinities, because you cannot have infinite resources for the simulation, just like we cannot have infinite hardware for our computers).

L: Wow, this is so exciting and interesting! I’m happy about your spiritual growth and the insights you’ve discovered and shared with me! What's next for you?

V: I plan to continue to learn every day more and more about the esoteric stuff as I’ve been doing all of my conscious life. I don't have any specific plans, though. I’ll definitely notify you if something major happens, so that we could have another interview like this one hopefully.

L: Sounds great! Have fun in your future spiritual growth!

V: Thanks!

If you consider yourself a Hindu, what do you think about Jainism?

I don’t like it. I think violence is needed in some cases like to fight the injustice. Also, they are vegetarians, which contradicts things like humans needing animal things to survive, and they don’t have sex, while is like too much lol. Also, they don’t believe that everyone is one, Which is what made me interested in Hinduism in the first place.

Anyone who is interested in Valerie's outlook and wants to get to know him better can find him in the telegram.

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