SEPTEMBER 2013
by Athanasios Komianos
When in Estonia I received an email from an American client in which she said that she felt great after the session we had last year and that a friend of hers had asked her: ” Jane, have you had a near-death experience ? ” I said, ” I am having a near-life experience!” Do you know why she feels that way? Because she went through her painful death and then in the afterlife, and it seems that this precisely is what makes the difference.
On August the 30th I will be giving a presentation at the Annual Convention of the International Association for Near Death Studies (IANDS) at Arlington Virginia. The title of this presentation is Assessing the Benefits of an NDE without Having One.
You all know what happens to people when they have an NDE. They are transformed. Their life changes radically because they realize that nothing ends with physical death. This particular experience is th
e catalyst for a shift in their life perspective. Also, you all have heard about the common features of NDEs, the out of body experience, the tunnel, the escorts, the life review, the judges, a feeling of universal love, the boundary which one should not cross etc. You also know that NDEs are unique, no one is alike another and not all of the features just mentioned are evident in them. You should also know that there are negative NDEs, terrifying ones that also have a profound impact on the experiencers. But the essence of all this I repeat is that after such an experience people have a strong conviction that death is nothing but a transition.
Now, does that ring a bell? Don’t you all as regression therapists have had your clients experiencing similar scenes during therapy? What is the most impressive part of a past-life regression? For me it is the death scene. The death scene as viewed through the physical body of the former personality, the death scene as seen from above, the death scene as it is seen through grief of the loved ones, etc. So, the death scene as sensed during a session is the most life-changing event a person can have during a PLT session. Why is it so? Because it changes the life perspective, it makes you realize that not all things have to be settled here in this life, that there will be another chance (and another and another). But what in the world have the ancient mysteries to do with our subject? Well they do. The ancient mysteries, especially the ones practiced in ancient Greece and specifically the ones at the city of Eleusis, are precisely the ones that are of the greatest significance. Do you think that the miracle of the Golden Age in Athens was just a historical coincidence? Absolutely, not. On the contrary it was precisely because all the major figures of social life in antiquity had undergone the initiation in these Mysteries. If one is to keep something from this millennia tradition it is not the Parthenon or the majestic temples, or the comedies, or the tragedies. If one is to really grasp the essence of ancient Greek tradition they should really study the process of incubation and dream healing on the one hand and delve into the Eleusinian Mysteries on the other. For these ancient people afterlife literacy was a prerequisite to graduate from this life to the hereafter. The Mysteries were precisely that. They were a deep, long and transforming “experiential workshop” into the depths of the human mind and the nature of death. As Plato said, the ultimate design of the Mysteries was to lead us back to the principles from which we descended a perfect enjoyment of spiritual good. “So by participating in this enactment the Greeks were actually undergoing an initiation process that was unique and life-transforming and also gave them the opportunity to glimpse the divine. They had to face their own fears and their own deeds first and then realize the shadow part that had to be worked before anyone can even think of looking towards the light. That is why I find all this “angel-therapy” fashion so ineffective, it refuses to touch on the dark side of things. As Hans TenDam so nicely put it, “you first have to go down before you go up”.
I think that the closest experience resembling the ancient mysteries is an NDE or a past-life regression. Since an NDE is not something that we can have on demand and I assume it would be a bit too risky, I suggest that we should all whisper to our friends to whisper to their friends that they know of a very good regression therapist in their neighborhood that for a minimal amount of money (it is indeed minimal if you think how effective it is) will transform their lives with a session.
P.S. Time for you to learn that my name means A-Thanatos thus Immortal. My name is reminding me that we (as all of you who read this) are immortal.
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“For among the many excellent and indeed divine institutions which your Athens has brought forth and contributed to human life, none, in my opinion, is better than those mysteries. For by their means we have been brought out of our barbarous and savage mode of life and educated and refined to a state of civilization; and as the rites are called “initiations,” so in very truth we have learned from them the beginnings of life, and have gained the power not only to live happily, but also to die with a better hope.”
—Cicero, Laws II, xiv, 36
