Around the Campfire

My memories usually show up as oft-told reruns of the small handful of things I actively remember from my past life. The recollections that line up for my attention each morning are a small subset of my lived life, and even those events lack the feeling I must have felt while I was living them.

My tendency is to blame the memories themselves for their listless performances upon the stage of my mind. But perhaps the fault is not in the memories, but that they are forced to walk out onto the stage in moth-eaten costumes to repeat their lines before a theater that is empty, save for an audience of one sitting there half asleep.

Then the other morning, this gathering of remembered events from my past life felt different. They were not different memories. After all, my past is my past, and whatever comes forward from those times is never completely unfamiliar. But the memories felt different because they came into my mind in a different way.

I credit a book (“Dimensions of Mind” by Tarthang Tulku), for this change. I was reading about how we are born without a clue and then go through several phases as we try to learn how to get along in this world. This survey of the typical course we run as we live through childhood and adolescence looked at several dimensions of how we adapt to society, school and whatever spiritual teachings we encounter along the way.

This invocation of a spiritual dimension in our evolving adaptations to life pointed out how some of us follow the teaching of our birth family and some of us become involved with other paths, eventually sticking with one of them or foregoing all of them. As I read, I found a fresh interest in my own past life being ignited.

Instead of isolated images bouncing in and out of my mind, I found myself gathering together my spiritual engagements over the years: in the mid-1970’s, reading books by George Gurdjieff and Peter Ouspensky during the three-mile passage across Lake Babine to and from a Norada open-pit copper mine; in the 1980’s, learning to meditate and attending services at a new age church, Hillside Community Church, and practicing Tai Chi at the Chinese Culture Center; then in the late 1980’s, finding a lifelong connection with the Tibetan Buddhist Nyingma tradition brought to America by Tarthang Tulku.

There was nothing unfamiliar about any of these remembered images from earlier times in my life. What felt different was that they felt like part of a coherent journey, which the person experiencing that journey was now remembering. It was as though ordinarily isolated and fragmented recollections were coming together, like beach combers walking along a beach and pausing at a campfire, to join with others who have also paused there. They are pleased and surprised to notice, as their assumed sense of separation falls away, that they share common interests and aspirations.

Instead of a later choice superseding earlier ones, earlier choices have prepared a place for what followed. Together, they were building a place for my soul to feel at home.