CHAPTER 4
DESCENT INTO ASSAULT AND TORTURE
People who assault and torture others have souls that have strayed into the wilderness. They have suffered in the past and decided to trust no one. This means they are on their own, making their way in a world they see as dark and dangerous. Cut off from their inner wisdom and cut off from other people, they are ignorant of the feelings of others. In fact, they are so detached, their ability to understand or predict the actions of others is greatly compromised. A path not lit by the wisdom of higher guidance will always prove dark. In lifetime after lifetime, they stumble around in the shadows, creating turmoil and destruction for themselves and others until they learn that this path is a dead end.
In this chapter we explore the limitations of souls in this state, their fear and vigilance, shame, eventual awakening, and the climb back to connection and understanding.
Blind to the Motivations of Others
Souls that are not aware of their own motivations are lost, not knowing what they are doing or the consequences of their behavior. They are blind to the relationship between their actions and their experiences. As well, their failure to understand themselves means they cannot understand or predict the behavior of others.
Jaime was a lost soul in several of his past lives. In one past life, he was a giant of a man who was troubled from the beginning. He enjoyed torturing animals during his childhood. But then something happened that made him even worse: his mother died while he was still a boy. His father, full of grief, took him into the forest and left him standing alone on a road. Although he said he’d be back, he never returned. The boy perceived his father as weak because he never got over the loss of his wife. He despised his father’s vulnerability. He coped with this abandonment by deciding he needed no one. Now we move to a later time in this life as Jaime continues the story.
Now the child is a man. People are looking for him. He believes he can outrun them, thinking he is smarter than them. He has been killing people randomly. He despises vulnerability. He hurts them until they don’t hurt anymore, until they are dead. He enjoys watching the fear on people’s faces. He thought he could make them fear him, but they hunt him like an animal. He could never understand why they were so determined. He didn’t expect that. He thought they would leave him alone. He still doesn’t understand. He is confused.
The man is subjected to a tortuous death in front of the men from the village where he took his victims. He hated these people, thinking they were weak and foolish. He wanted to be alone, and he thought they would be too afraid to come after him. He never realized that his vicious behavior would cultivate enormous anger and hate, which he would eventually reap. By his actions, he had created in the villagers an angry, vengeful version of himself.
Souls like this man’s are not self-aware or self-reflective. They cannot be. They are too wrapped up in satisfying their own need to stay safe in the menacing world they have mentally created. They are on constant alert, afraid of others who they perceive as dangerous. In this case, the man was so apprehensive, he attacked without provocation.
To reflect, make connections, and understand ourselves, the world, and others, we need to feel safe. We need to calm our mind. None of this is possible for perpetrators or perpetual victims. The world is too dangerous for them to let their guard down—even for a minute—to undertake insightful contemplation.
Climbing out of this deep darkness is not easy. First, we have to waken to what we have done, then understand completely the terrible actions we have taken by suffering torture and abuse ourselves. Lastly, we have to find a way to universal forgiveness and redemption.
Facing Shame
An example of this long, challenging journey comes from a client who came for six regressions over a period of three years.
Jacobo, a builder, is one of the most courageous people I know. He is on the hero’s journey of facing his demons. Most people think their demons are outside of themselves, like the horrific monsters we see in comics and movies. Jacobo knows the real demons are inside us.
Jacobo had resolved many of his issues before he came for his most recent regression. Most importantly, the anger he described as “bubbling lava” had been put to rest. Now, he decided to face his deepest shame. He acknowledged this was difficult, but he had gained sufficient success and confidence from our previous sessions to trust that I would not judge him in any way.
In the session, once he had settled comfortably in the chair, he proceeded to tell me about the burden he had been carrying all his life.
I feel like I am a sexual predator. I have always wanted to see up girls’ skirts and into their pants. As a small boy, the babysitter would put me and her daughter in the bath together, and I remember being curious and fascinated by her little body. From my earliest memories, the compulsion has been there, and that’s why I think it has carried over from a past life.
It is a daily battle to keep my eyes up. I haven’t acted on these urges. There has been something driving me down that path all my life, and I have continually fought it. I am so tired of every day facing the urge and the shame of it. It has been a lonely battle. I never shared it with anyone, including my wonderful wife who I love dearly.
Hate and Sexual Assault
Jacobo’s story starts many thousands of years ago when he first incarnated on the planet.
His first human life occurred 27,000 years ago when he died, aged two, of the cold. After that life, he had many simple lives that were mainly peaceful. He only behaved aggressively when he needed to protect his family or community.
These ordinary lives changed significantly around 10 BCE, during a life set in a rural area of the Iberian Peninsula. Before this incarnation, Jacobo experienced a life where he was betrayed. We don’t learn any details of this betrayal, but his guide tells us it was relatively inconsequential. Perhaps Jacobo still carried some bitterness into the Iberian life, because there he makes a devastating decision.
It is dusk. I am looking out onto open plains with a village behind me. I am dressed in soft leather shoes, leather or suede long pants and a long-sleeve shirt with no buttons. All are an olive color. I am a man aged twenty-four.
The village is made of huts set out in a horseshoe shape. Each hut is made of leather with a conical roof held up by a high pole in the middle. You can see through the walls in certain parts. It is a simple life with cattle as the main industry.
I am carrying a sense of melancholy and disappointment after just being rejected by my father-in-law. He is one of the elders of the village and has significant influence. I see him sitting beside the chief of our people. For years, I have been trying to get the respect of these men, wanting to make my contribution to the village. I came to him with a plan to move our cattle to other places for feeding. In front of everyone, he told me I was a fool, that I didn’t know what I was doing. Now I feel shut out.
He has always been contemptuous of me. He never accepted me. He only let me marry his daughter because it was what she wanted. She is his favorite.
I am very angry, and I am going to hurt him by hurting my wife. I push her, verbally abuse her, and treat her as if she is nothing. There is a hardness in me now. I take her sexually whenever I want, ignoring her feelings.
Contributing to the village is important, especially for a man. Not being able to do this emasculates me. I need to feel powerful in some way. My wife has borne me no children and that is another reason why I feel diminished and annoyed with her.
We go to another scene in this life.
My father-in-law has just humiliated me once again in front of the other men. He rejected my ideas and dismissed me, saying, “You are a vicious fool!”
Now I am inside our hut standing over my wife’s body. I just sexually assaulted her before beating her to death.
I run. The village is on a rise, and I am running down the hill toward a forest. I can hear the people in the village stirring as they realize what has happened.
The others are coming after me, and I feel panicked. I trip and fall. Because of my terror, I’m not thinking clearly. I stumble and fall again, near a stream. The ground is slippery, and before I get up, they are upon me. I am beaten and dragged back to the village. They spread my arms and tie them to a horizontal log. Then they throw me into a fire. I feel relief that it is all over.
I am floating above the village where I see my father-in-law weeping. I am pleased that I have finally hurt him so deeply that he is in tears. Now I am in darkness, floating in space with my shoulders slowly rotating around in circles, moving into a tunnel. I am feeling quite sick. Suddenly I am back in the village, looking down on my father-in-law who is saying something to my cooking body. I am trying to hear.
He is screaming at me, “I curse you to an eternity of life as a worm. You are scum. You will never be a man. I will follow you through eternity.” He is repeating this over and over while kicking at the bones and flesh remaining on the fire.
I am floating up again. There seems to be a presence on my righthand side taking me by the arm and guiding me off to the right.
We are sitting in the same field where I have been before, an undulating slope like rounded-off terraces. It is Gabriela, my guide. We sit on the grass, and she is saying, “These are the consequences of your actions.”
I ask Jacobo what she means by “consequences.”
She is telling me that this life was a turning point, the beginning of being caught in a loop, a loop that feeds itself. The way my father-in-law treated me, the burning and the curse, is what I created. My attitudes and actions feed this loop.
My head is in my hands, and I am sobbing. I haven’t been told this before, and I am in shock. I wasn’t aware of what I was doing.
The decision to seek retribution from my father-in-law by assaulting and killing his daughter leads to a cascade of negativity, building the loop. When I was first created as a soul, this path as a perpetrator was an option. The decision to take that path is a choice, an exercise of free will as a human. Gabriela, the guide, says it isn’t a wrong decision. There are no wrong decisions. Experiencing pain is important because it sinks you deeply into the human experience.
I feel shame at the way I was treated, and then I feel shame at the way I treated my wife. The father-in-law’s curse vibrates through my soul and intensifies the shame. As my lives progress, I build the loop with my anger and bitterness. I act out my anger, and I reap the awful consequences. The loop grows strong and robust.
From the beginning of his incarnations, Jacobo’s soul had agreed to be tested. In this pivotal life, his father-in-law baited him. He had several choices—to remain a victim, to respond by standing up to his father-in-law, or to seek revenge. Killing his wife was a vengeful act that took him down a treacherous path. Instead of protecting his wife, like he did in previous lives, his hate and anger took over. This was an act of free will, and free will is sacrosanct in this system. Because we reap the consequences of our decisions, it is how we grow.
Carrying the Curse
Jacobo says that after his father-in-law curses him, he feels his only power is to destroy others. I ask if he knows how curses are carried into subsequent lives.
Words are vibrations. Vibrations are codes that can travel with you through your lives. The codes enter the DNA and the DNA travels with you as code through your lives. Because I was in a vulnerable state, just after dying in the fire, the vibration of those words penetrated my soul.
Following that curse, Jacobo was caught in the loop. The “loop” is really the hundreds of years he spent in his dark night of the soul. He lives many violent lives before a turning-point life in the thirteenth century. He has built such a robust wall around him with so little empathy that he fights brutally in many wars and other violent situations. He sexually assaults and tortures people. And he is sexually assaulted and tortured himself. He is so shut down he feels very little—emotionally or physically.
I’m immune to the inhumanity of torturing people. I have their lives in my hands, and I whimsically choose whether they die slowly or quickly. This gives me a sense of power, but this is the only power I have. In other areas, I don’t feel powerful at all.
After twelve hundred earth years of experiencing this devastating path, Jacobo’s soul is ready to start a turnaround. The elders carefully plan a life that is designed to begin his reformation. A closely connected soulmate agrees to play a crucial role.
Beginning the Turnaround
In this life, Jacobo is a Christian soldier named Peter. Peter takes part in the notorious Fourth Crusade that sacked Constantinople in 1204. Our guides give us only what we can cope with, so, in an earlier regression when we visited this past life, Jacobo did not see the full desecration that the crusaders inflicted on the women and children of that city. Now, Jacobo is stronger and ready to see the truth. Jacobo describes his actions as Peter.
The streets are quite steep and cobbled. Evening is coming, and people have pots over fires. I smell smoke. We charge in on our horses, screaming and waving our swords around, chopping at the women. They run, and we chase them. I see dead women lying in the streets with their bellies cut open.
I am separated from the others now. I dismount from my horse and walk casually from door to door, still killing. I stride right up and face people before I cut them up. I am kicking open timber doors, going into courtyards, killing women and children, anyone who is there. I feel nothing. I just chop them up, look at their mutilated bodies on the ground, and walk away.
I am going next door. A group of people are cowering, backing away and screaming. I slice them up before walking out and going to the next house. The whole army is doing the same thing, all throughout the city.
I am sexually assaulting someone now. I cut her throat. Something about what I have just done has shaken me. Suddenly I walk out, feeling different. I have shocked myself out of the madness. My sword is in my hand, hanging by my side. Now I am looking at a number of terrified people waiting to be slaughtered, but I walk straight past them and out the door, shutting it as I leave.
Back on my horse, I am trotting up a hill in the opposite direction from whence I came. I am curious about what just happened, wondering how I managed to abuse and kill so many people. I feel like I have been in a trance and I just woke up. I am thinking how we were supposed to bring God to the unsaved, to the infidels, but instead we were encouraged to kill. Killing became normal until I woke up.
After the crusade, Peter goes back to England to confront the monk who sent him to this holy war. He is bitter, full of anger, blaming the monk for sending him to slaughter innocent civilians. The frightened monk kills him in the church by stabbing him with a knife.
Jacobo is given an important insight. The woman he sexually assaulted and murdered in Constantinople is his soulmate, his beloved current wife. He realizes she sacrificed herself to break the loop. This moves him deeply. We sit silently for several minutes.
After this turning-point life, Jacobo’s soul continues his journey back to connection. He has much to learn.
The Struggle Back
After the turnaround, Jacobo still struggles with his violent impulses. In one life, he sees himself on the deck of a square rigger with others laughingly shooting the innocent inhabitants of an island.
In another life, he is an ordinary member of a community in love with the chief’s daughter. He is a young, simple man but good at fishing. He is afraid but encouraged by others to ask the chief for her hand. Unfortunately, her father has other plans for her. The young man is killed for his audacity and clumsiness.
Now I am floating away above the treetops. On either side of me, two beings guide me away from the earth. I am sitting in the park with them. They are talking to me. They say, “You need more practice at speaking your mind.” I understand they mean expressing my point of view, the art of negotiation. That life was about the start of learning how to do that.
Jacobo’s soul has many lives where he is loved, where he suffers loss, and where physical sensations and emotions gradually return.
All the dark stuff sticks to you like tar as you go through your lives. When it dries, it cracks off. Some of it falls off of its own accord and some you have to pick off. When you become aware, light comes through the cracks and it becomes easier to let it go, like picking cracked toffee off a toffee apple. When you heal, it leaves a residue on you. You are guided to do what is needed. There is no point worrying about what you are carrying until you are aware that it is there. Your attention will be drawn to it when the timing is right.
In his immediate past life, Jacobo fought in the First World War.
I see trenches, smell gun smoke, and hear gunshots. My ears are buzzing. I am a young bloke, and there are dead people all around me in a trench. I don’t want to be here.
He survives the war and vows to never kill again. Residing in a little stone cottage overlooking a village in Scotland, he never marries and lives a solitary life. He is afraid. He knows he can kill without feeling, but he doesn’t want to. He spends much of his time sitting up high above the village, looking down at green hills, watching the colors of the dawn and sunset while living a life of quiet and calm. But in that life, he avoids connecting to anyone. He doesn’t know how to interact with people. He is so used to war.
Until he did the regressions, Jacobo was still carrying some of the remnants left over from all these challenging past lives.
I am getting an image of sweeping the crumbs off a table after the feast is eaten. The crumbs are the journey I have taken through the regressions, and the feast is the many lives I lived. The feast is satisfying. I have learned much and now I better understand human nature.
As part of “brushing the crumbs off the table,” I ask Jacobo to renounce the original curse of his father-in-law that propelled him deeper into his perpetrator lives. I ask him to speak with conviction the following words:
I reject that I am not a man and cannot be a man. I am a man in every positive sense of that word. I am a man with an open heart.
Reconnecting
Before he completed the regressions, Jacobo was afraid of being close to his wife and others, and deeply bothered by his thoughts of sexual predation.
Because of my fear of acting violently, I locked myself away. My wife was rattling my doorknob to get in, and that felt threatening to me. I wanted to open that door, but I was afraid. I never wanted to hurt anyone again, and I didn’t trust myself.
I have had lifetimes of using sex as power. I am completely releasing that now. There is nothing without the beauty of connection. I am seeing a lotus flower, sacred and beautiful, representing authentic sexual connection.
He also had many headaches, finally discovering their source.
The many headaches I get, especially on the left side of my forehead above the eye and at the base of my skull, come from my resistance. Being locked down takes constant energy. Keeping the door shut on my feelings is exhausting.
Jacobo spent his life working hard to meet his obligations to his family, but he felt the heaviness of this load. He is given insight into this burden.
The guilt I feel in taking time for myself comes from my feelings of obligation, my sense of needing to make amends. Now I know I have no reason to feel guilty. I do have obligations but, in the past, I fulfilled them from a sense of guilt, which always felt heavy. Now I will fulfill them lightly, “wanting to” rather than “having to,” joyfully doing what needs to be done.
We ask Jacobo’s guide, Gabriela, about the heavy path Jacobo’s soul has taken during his earth journey. She gives us important information.
The majority of souls do take a dark path. It is about gaining balance. One of the purposes of coming to earth is to experience the dark. Earth was built for it. Other places are lighter, softer, and gentler than earth, and not as good for learning.
We discover that the father-in-law who cursed him in that past life, two thousand years ago, shares the same soul as Jacobo’s current father. This explains an unusual incident that happened after Jacobo’s first regression.
Two days after that first session, Jacobo had a serious accident at work that severed a part of a finger. The physical nature of his occupation meant Jacobo could not work for several months, so he was given time off with full pay. During this period, his father was dying. Jacobo’s father had been a difficult man, so their relationship was not easy. His father expressed much torment as his life drew to a close. Nevertheless, Jacobo loved his father and spent two months taking him to his medical appointments, sitting with him, talking to him, and being at his side when he died. Jacobo’s “accident” was no accident at all.
Jacobo wrote me an email after his father passed.
Without the guidance you and two others gave me to open my heart and drop old baggage no longer of any use to me, I wouldn’t have been available to my dad.
I would not have been calm enough, still enough, or patient enough to stand quietly beside my father as he embraced his mortality. I would not have been able to sit beside him on his last day and just hold his hand. I would not have been able to cradle his head in my hands, gently stroking his face and reassuring him that everything was okay when he woke two hours before he died, with horror and fear contorting his features. Thank you for the part you played that allowed me the honor to attend to my father.
In his final regression, Jacobo successfully faced his last demons: his sexual thoughts and compulsions. Gabriela told Jacobo that he has completed over ninety percent of his earthly lives. He is on the downward run of his soul journey, and his future lives will be a consolidation of all that he has learned. He will be given the opportunity to love and guide others who will benefit from the experience, compassion, and wisdom he has developed.
A few weeks after his last draining regression, which included the complete story of the crusader, Jacobo sent me an email.
It has taken me a while to bounce back from our last session. The next day, Saturday, I was crying on and off all day and felt flat and tired for the next two weeks. This last week I have felt free. That is the word that I keep using when I check in on myself. Free. My mood has lifted, and I am no longer feeling driven as I was prior to our session. Thank you once again for providing all I needed to face this part of myself.
At last contact, Jacobo had just finished his first year studying kinesiology, planning to complete the diploma in the following year. He reported continuing his personal growth, founded in the work he and I did together.
I know it took a lot of courage for Jacobo to face the inner demons of his past, to bring them into the light where they were dissolved with unconditional love and understanding. He completed many lifetimes of confronting experiences before undertaking some lives that included opportunities for quiet contemplation.
Conclusion
We have lifetimes to experience and then lifetimes to reflect and grow our understanding of ourselves and our journey. Because we tend to live longer lives in our current era, we have the opportunity to experience challenges in our life and, as well, reflect and integrate what we have learned. The current lives of many people in this book were designed to create opportunities for contemplation. That is why they undertook their regressions: to figure out the nature of the challenges they have faced and why. Many reading this book will be on the same journey, curious about their lives and keen to clear any blocks to fulfilling their life purpose.
One of the first steps is vicariously exploring the journey of others. To that end, we now look at those acting out their deep inadequacies by dominating others. They appear arrogant and entitled, with no care for their victims and no inkling of how destructive they are. Why do they oppress and misuse others? Are they trying to prove how powerful they are?
In the following chapters, we explore the need for domination more deeply.
