Dropping Lives

I‘ve been going around dropping lives and parts of lives like I was shedding skin. I can see them sort of floating around me and I can go into any one of them and feel the feelings, think the thoughts, etc, and then I just sort of let go of them and I’m disengaged from that life. Past and present lives all have the same weight and value, and I can see them as though they were composed of multiple layers of colored patterns and shapes that overlap and project images—and I’m the light of the projector, so to speak. The layers are made up of layers inherited from the people and environment in my life—my parents, society, the world. They’re sort of like templates– that’s the word I used once when I was watching the 8 year old son of a friend of mine run across the field in front of me I could see very plainly a sort of crystalline, translucent shell around him and that shell was in the shape of his father. The boy had assumed his father’s shell, and his father had given it to him, or perhaps even insisted on it’s being there—and I new that the boy would grow up trying either successfully or unsuccessfully to fit into that shell, that template. Attachment to and identity with the shells, the templates, is how we go from life to life, linking similar familiar shells, trying to recreate the pleasant ones and heal or avoid the unpleasant ones.