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I am not a human-being having a spiritual experience. I am a spiritual being having a human experience.
—Teilhard de Chardin
He just likes to do his own thing/He's a little man in a cat's body
—Jane’s Addiction (Maceo)
There are over eight billion people on the planet presently, and each one of them is a soul having a human-incarnation.
There are an estimated one billion domesticated pet dogs and cats in the world, each one also a soul but in an animal incarnation.
Once we factor in wildlife and insects, we get to the uncountable numbers of life-forms: each individual one being a soul in a various lifeform. Now add plants too. Absolutely every living thing is a soul in material clothing.
There are countless universes within multiverses and countless Earth-planets too. Ours is relatively small: our galaxy, planet, and population of souls is on the small end of the spectrum of life-holding galaxies. There are Earth-planets in other galaxies in solar systems a thousand times bigger with suns dwarfing ours. There’s no mention in Sanskrit tabloids regarding the ET, UFO, interstellar connections: They don’t say we never make close encounters of the third kind, neither do they say we do. It’s spiritually irrelevant.
The Akashic knowledge teaches every one of the countless souls on this particular Earth-planet has lived here together for eternity. Therefore, it stands to reason that, over an eternity, you’ve had relationships with all of them at one time or another.
All the souls in this planetary manifestation coexist together forever, same as all the souls from another universe spend an eternity together, and never shall they meet nor in death do they part. When and if someone has a past life regression memory of living in an Atlantean or other-planetary experience, it’s still here: could be tens of trillions of years ago, more or less, but it’s still here.
The Atlantis that Plato described in his works truly existed. Xanadu, Avalon, and the other so-called mythical utopias were right here, on this planet, in long before prehistoric times. There is new science supporting our planet Earth has gone through several cylces of being dormant and being active. This concurs with Vedic knowledge. The engineering of ancient structures from Egypt’s pyramids to Indonesia’s Gunang Padang and Stonehenge are not testaments to early civilizations but testaments to survivors of prior ones who attempted to reboot what they once had.
Yeah... I’ve had intense past-life regression experiences well before my NDE that certainly seemed interplanetary. Some lasted a day or two, some were quick visions, and one regression went on for several months. Many of my past-life regression travels have been self-induced, some induced by others, and many activated by circumstance, like NDE.
Just as our physical bodies live, die, and are reborn again, so does our universe, galaxy, and planet, Gaia. As Sanskrit texts offer, there is a pralaya phase of material phenomena and a mahapralaya phase. Pralaya means dormant and refers to the stage when our known universe proverbially dies and goes into a dormant state for a long, long... long time; kind of like cosmic winter. Maha-pralaya is when the entire material phenomena, the multiverse, goes dormant and ceases to exist in form for a time that is not time, because even time goes dormant in that phase of creation/manifestation.
● Did you know nearly every ancient civilization has a deluge/flood story like that of Noah’s ark? From the Sumerians to the Aztecs, all have a nearly identical story of the end of humanity due to a deluge with the exception of a few survivors left to repopulate the planet. They also all have a legend of the arrival of a great teacher who comes by sea from some unknown land and gives them knowledge from architecture and agriculture to astrology and religion. Ancient Egypt’s Osiris and the Mayan’s Quetzalcoatl are just two of the dozens of identical legends of ancient lores.[ss1] [NS2]
During these dissolved phases of Creation, all the uncountable, infinite souls become formless and reside in a formless dimension, like The Portal. Sanskrit scriptures actually say they reside within God—like absorbed by Him. And when it’s time (haha... during these phases there actually isn’t time), He activates the process of creation and manifestation, unfolding the multiverse and activating the souls to take life again. It takes a bit more than six days of work and one of rest for the Creator God to manifest the Earth and heavens, but the magical, mystical seven is prime allegory.
On one hand, the Western religious view of Creation is accurate and cosmos; life and humanity indeed had a genesis of a starting point and will indeed have an apocalyptic ending too. But it happens all the time and has been happening and repeating forever. Not kinda, not sorta, not a lot, but countless times since eternity!
This does not conflict with the Eastern proposition existence is eternal; it has no beginning and no end. And quantum physics is right too; energy is forever too. It cannot be created nor destroyed; it just changes form, going from pure energy to light to matter and vice-versa.
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As a mystic, I experience past-life regression regularly. All the time. I meet people, interact as mere passersby, or get acquainted professionally, platonically, or romantically and see their pasts, present, and even futures. It used to happen automatically in early NDE days, but now I’ve found the on/off switch and the volume control, so it needs permission to present to my consciousness. Sometimes it still happens spontaneously, and I see a view of how we knew each other in a past life and the karmic circumstances drawing us back together. The more time I spend with someone, the more clearly their own past lives and Soul’s Journey details become viewable.
One woman I met for harmless bedroom fun on occasion was a bit blown away as I shared some prior life insights with her. She confessed to being in a loveless and sexless marriage, and her partner had encouraged her to have a boyfriend, which is where I came in. Our pillow talk was revelatory.
“You and your mate were siblings in the last life you met each other in. When you first met, you both misinterpreted the feelings of connection as romantic instead of familial.”
This triggered a total paradigm shift for her, and she called me the next week.
“It all makes sense!” she exclaimed. “Now that I’m seeing that we are more siblings than partners, I’m not angry with him anymore!”
This past-life consideration liberated her from a wrong expectation she had held. My work was done, I guess, because I intuitively knew we’d never see each other again, and our several attempts to hook up after that never came about. She crossed the threshold to acceptance and indifference, and their grudges with each other dissolved. Her gain, my loss, haha! I don’t know, nor did I bother to meditate on, how she and I knew each other before. It was just a fling; our karmas this time round were satisfied, and we moved on.
But sometimes... I recall when and/or how I knew someone, and it is fun. It’s always a little painful, but sometimes pretty harmless. Painful because there is always some sort of tragedy we shared because humans are stupid, driven by desires, and exploitive of one another. Fun because some of the elements of a past-life intertangling can give some good laughs, so long as we don’t get caught up in the shitty things we did then. A little humor and maturity allows us to reunite with a past lover, friend, or even an enemy and not have hang-ups on karmic debts.
That’s Chow-Chow-Bang.
Chow-Chow-Bang is the name my current roommate goes by in this lifetime. At this moment, as I type this, he just got up from where he was sitting just a foot away, walked in front of me, between my eyes and the laptop screen, pivoted, turned, sat, and laid down. I’m now typing with far more typos and backspacing as I awkwardly bowleg my arms around his furry body to reach the keyboard. You guessed it: he’s a cat.
I don’t like to say my cat, any more than you see me type or say my son, my girlfriend... These are living souls, not my possessions. They do not belong to me nor me to them. We share time and space and have done so multiple times in various incarnations in various ways.
Brandon was once my mystic-mentor and guide; a teacher of sorts. I have past-life ties with the priest at my temple whom I have coffee with regularly, and we chat about Joe Rogan podcasts and argue over who’s better, Dodgers or Yankees. He’s from Brooklyn, so he says Yanks, even though I try to enlighten him with the trivia that Dodgers are originally Brooklynites. The ashram’s temple priest and I have a past before Doubleday even invented baseball. I remember a past life when he and I were grifters, stabbing each other in the back; it was just business. He doesn’t remember shit of past life, but I do!
Chow-Chow and I were once partners in crime too. In this life, we’re friends: I protect him with a safe and comfortable life, and he gives me low-maintenance friendship. He has his own private entry/exit pet door to the house and comes and goes as he likes. He prefers to toilet outside, so I rarely have to clean a litter box, let alone even put litter in it. He gets a free pass on the vegetarian-food-only policy in the house because there’s no karmic consequence for him to be an omnivore. Even with his revolving outdoors, there’s only been a few occasions of him being a predator. And most of those little, headless rodent gifts he brought in were just in the first couple years of his domestication. He’s had autonomy since just after we were introduced.
***
“Just look at him! If you don’t wanna keep him, fine, but just meet him once!” Janete had pleaded with me in 2010, three years before I would be killed.
“No! I don’t want to! I take my son to Cancun for a high-school graduation present, and instead of just dropping by to bring in the mail, you start feeding homeless animals, drawing them to my house! I don’t want a cat! I don’t even like them!”
I came home from Cancun and saw small dishes of pet food scattered around the perimeters of my house and knew my bleeding-heart girlfriend tried to Florence Nightingale the homeless pet population.
I was able to do things like go to Cancun with my son, India on my own, and long road trips with my girlfriend because I was free: F-R-E-E, free! I had no dependent pet at home confining me and didn’t want one!
A client who couldn’t pay her bill offered me seven days of use in her timeshare when I told her I wasn’t going to abandon her and her family because she couldn’t pay me. I had been counseling her, her three daughters, and her husband for months, and they relied on me: no way was I going to abandon them over lack of payment. Turned out, the reason they were upside down financially was because of being suckered into a timeshare deal. So she insisted I use it in lieu of payment. Win-win: Brandon and I had an unforgettable time diving freshwater cenotes and drift-diving Cozumel to honor his high-school diploma, and all it cost me was airfare.
I violently throw the food dishes into the trash to make a point like slamming a door:
I. Do. Not. Want a pet!
The next day, she had snuck the pet dishes back. Finally, I agreed to see this scruffy wretch of a cat to shut her up and give my final veto.
See... I had perpetuated this anti-pet persona since we had met. In spite of being the initiator of our vegan/vegetarian lifestyle, I had her convinced I didn’t like animals. The truth is I love them. The reason I didn’t want a pet was out of sympathy: I don’t think you should take a pet unless you have the time and heart to care for and love them properly. I am and was capable of this; I just didn’t want to. People that get pets and then lock them alone indoors and are never home are going to captor-pet-hell. I was gone a lot and didn’t want to imprison a pet in lonely solitude as I worked nonstop and lived my travel adventures.
I kid you not; he’s got a sixth sense. He is annoying the fuck out of me right now as it is so damn uncomfortable to reach around him as I type and he lounges nearly on top of my keyboard. But I won’t shove him away. It is sweet he just wants to be near me. He doesn’t need anything, doesn’t complain, whine, make a mess, never gets sick, and is almost entirely self-reliant. Yet, he’s cuddly, cozy, adorable, and adoring. Even though he is outdoors seventy percent of the time, roaming through forests, rolling in grassy meadows, he’s completely clean: his fur is soft, unsoiled, and only one time did I ever have to get a flea solution. He’s never had them and never gets bit, scratched, or bothered. I don’t know how he does it. I have thought of fastening my GoPro camera to his head to see where he goes and what he does, but he’s earned the independence and mystery. He’s the perfect companion: never too much, but neither too little. Low maintenance but affectionately dependent. He gives me responsibility and purpose to take the sting out of a worthless world celebrating Wheel of Fortune and respects McDonald’s for having a “healthy options menu.”
Why am I acting like an annoying pet-person and taking up content space in a book about triumphing over tragedy about a cat?
He deserves it: he’s been my only consistent, present friend and companion throughout this whole ordeal. He entered my life three years before it began and is resting his head on my typing arm as I type this to you.
It gives an actual, experiential opportunity to explore high concepts about past life and the nature of the soul.
It’s very likely you and your pet are bonded by a past life. Whatever we are emotionally attached to in our life and at our time of death creates a karmic bond. Like a tractor-beam, our lives intersect and draw each other in. Yes, yes ... of course... kids, parents, lovers, and even enemies are karmic destinies. Most pet owners feel a unique and personal connection transcending the limited time they’ve been associated. Past life!
Yes, sure, every pet and animal has endearing qualities, and each person in a relationship with one thinks theirs is more special and extraordinary than any other: that’s love. We all think our love is The One, the grandest, most special, and unique to all others. We are all endowed with this natural capacity to feel our experience is exclusive and stands apart from all others. But this just ain’t so, and if I have to ever hear a non-parent tell me ever again their pet is like their child, I’m going to euthanize them.
I am not bragging as I share the extraordinariness of my life experiences: the magnitude of their paranormal-ness, the gorgeousness of my love affair, the complexity of my medical triumphs... I share them because I am now aware how extraordinary they are. If you like average people doing average things, go watch reality TV. I read books, watch movies and films, and go hear professional musicians because I do not want ordinary. Otherwise, I’d marathon Desperate Housewives and just see live music at the local hometown tavern.
We’re surrounded and saturated in common/average/normality all the time. I go on a rollercoaster because I want something different. I SCUBA’d those cenotes because I want risk. I want the abnormal, not-complacent. If I want reality-show content, I’ll go to the fucking mall and people-watch. I offer you this memoir because the experience can be inspiring. Not me: the experience.
Chow-Chow is not ordinary or just cute.
He and I knew each other once when we were criminals. I’m sensing it is late ’20s, prohibition, when we were buddies. We were grifters and conmen. Moonshiners? Bank robbers? I can’t access the details, but I know one of us killed the other. It was no big deal; whether it was me who shot and killed him or he shot and killed me is immaterial. We had some sort of deal going down, and one of us killed the other to take advantage and keep the spoils without sharing. There were no hard feelings about it, so we really have no actual karmic debt; the killer doesn’t owe the killee a thing. We both would’ve done it to the other under reverse circumstances.
I’m guessing I shot him, and I agreed to be his caretaker in this life to make up for it, but I’m not sure. Maybe he shot and killed me and has come back as my companion to make up for it. Or... I killed him, and he’s come to burden me with the worry and care for him as a passive-aggressive penance! It’s all good.
He is a Manx. I only recently learned this by coincidence. When he recently went missing a couple days, I became sad and desperate to find him. I’m living on about an acre, and half of it is pretty wild and he still comes and goes as he likes. Brokenhearted because I figured the last time I saw him was the last time I’d see him, I drafted letters and drove to the other ranch properties in my neighborhood, put them in mailboxes, hoping someone mistakenly adopted him. I recalled Janete had him chipped; a small computer chip had been embedded into his ear so if anyone ever found him, he was in a data base and might be returned. As I looked them up online, they required I update the data and asked his breed: I had no clue. I googled cat breeds, and sure enough, there was his identical twin! He was hands down a Manx breed of cat. Had I known this and what a Manx was back in the day, I might’ve auctioned him off!
A Manx is a rare breed, which is very valuable, and he was clearly purebred. Even rarer, Manx breeds are tailless: their tails are not clipped; they are born without them. But Chow-Chow has a tail, making him even rarer. He could fetch a cool $500.
Bred on the Isle of Man in the early 1800s, they are rare and highly sought after, being known as skilled hunters and great companions. There are folk lore tales and mythic histories of them.
If you want to see one, google Manx cat with tail: Chow-Chow is identical to the grey/black ones. And I do mean identical.
There are only three things that have remained constant through this NDE: Brandon, my Guru, and Chow-Chow-Bang, the cat. My Guru doesn’t count: He’s divine. And He is mine because He is also your and every other souls’ who wants, accepts, and surrenders to Him. That’s what saviors do: they make you theirs if you make them yours. Everyone and everything else are temporary. Brandon and I have many lifetimes connecting us. Janete and I too. But my Maharaji and I have an eternity together: always had and always will have. He’s mine. He belongs to many others, but He is mine.
And I am His. Only His. I don’t belong to anyone or anything else. Everyone else is simply on loan.
Janete is gone. The guys I played tennis with are gone. The twenty to forty other girlfriends and lovers from my past are not around. Every couple months, there’s a new front desk clerk at the tennis club I play at. Neighbors, mail-carriers, aunts and uncles, and even sons and daughters are never permanent. Few make it with you just one entire life, let alone several. Brandon is a permanent fixture in my heart: now.
But the first zero to twenty-six years of my life, he wasn’t even the proverbial gleam in my eye. We’ve had many, many lives together, but our relationship is not eternal.
The only thing in my life which I interact with daily is my Guru and Chow-Chow-Bang the cat.
I dread and deny the inevitable day when my close, daily friend and pal, Chow-Chow-Bang, leaves me for that great gig in the sky. That’s the real reason I never wanted a pet: to avoid the inevitable heartache of losing someone who exemplifies innocence, humility, and comfort. I like animals because I’ve never had innocence of my own. I was full of shit at birth. I get to at least be near innocence when they’re around.
I took a while to firmly conclude hoping he goes before I do.
I often felt me dying first would be way easier. But then I thought of how much I’d freak out about who’s gonna care for him if not me. We understand each other, and it would take too long to get well enough acquainted with him to let him be the free, well-rounded, spirit he is in this life. If I die with Chow-Chow on my mind, that binds us karmically, and I don’t want any karmic bindings forcing me back to the world.
Chow-Chow reveals the depth of my attachment to loving worldly things regularly. Several times, he has disappeared. As a free spirit with his own entry/exit access to the big, outside world, he comes and goes as he pleases. But he is smart and usually within a visible circumference of the house. He occasionally breaks from his reliable routines and goes on some mysterious adventure which only he knows about, and I begin to mourn. By nightfall, I am totally convinced I won’t see him again and doing all I can to come to terms with what I know to be true: that time of death is predetermined, he and I have a limited time together, his ultimate experience as a soul is not my responsibility, and blah, blah, blah—my shoes are on, flashlight in hand as I scour the forests calling his name, unable to focus on much else. Yes, Chow-Chow certainly has the capacity to bind me to the material phenomena if I am not careful with my loving attachment to him.
Let me repeat: whatever we are attached to in this life is what we will be bound to associate with in the next life. Take your pick: friends or enemies? Pets or God? Whatever you desire and are attached to in your mind and heart is what you’re getting. Your final thoughts at death carry a lot of weight to where you go next!
My Maharaji has mentioned to a few devotees over the years some animals that become pets to devotees were once His devotees who lost their way and are now in animal incarnations.
The other day, he parked his furry butt at the doorway to the meditation satsang room and meowed until I opened the door so he could nap inside. I conceded but told him with a playful finger wag, “But not in the altar! You can nap in the big space!” and the two closet doors to the altar remained closed. I came back by in five minutes, and, lo and behold!, he had opened the altar doors and snoozed inside the altar to be with Radha Krishn and Maharaji! How he opened the freakin’ door is a mystery! That’s sanskars, baby! He wanted to be near God and Guru and made it happen!
God and Guru have been laying waste to each and every attachment I had, which may give me a clean slate to die with no attachments. It is Their Grace. But be careful what you wish for. I have had many heartfelt pleas to my Spiritual Master to do whatever He felt was necessary to help me become spiritually perfected and not return to the shabby, material phenom ever again, so if He is taking a wrecking ball to my life, it is because I asked for it! The way to God is most often a purification by fire process.
He totally wrecked Job’s life in the Tanakh account, and when Job questioned Him, God set him straight! Mine is not to reason why but to do and die (Tennyson). I try not to ask what is God’s plan, striving instead to accept the changes as gracefully as I can, which I fail at regularly. I suspect the trick is to align our material attachments to our spiritual ambitions.
All attachments are bad for spiritual progress, which is why Abraham followed God’s order to sacrifice Isaac on Mount Moriah, which he tearfully proceeded to comply with. But can some material attachments and relationships align with our spiritual progress and not be sacrificed? Yes, yes, of course I am attached to Brandon! But he and I entered this life with an understanding it could be a last one, and he will never stand in my way of exiting samsara. I will have given him all I have, and I have shown, by example, the way out of samsara, and our karmic account will be balanced. And he has inspired me to be a good man and so has Janete. Before them, I was a criminal dope fiend, but lookit me now!
Chow-Chow and I don’t owe each other anything. Unless I am struck by lightning, my nearly supernatural health should provide me with a long while after he leaves to get closure over missing him and have nothing but gratitude for his company. I have done what I can to provide him with spiritual association: he sees my Guru speak on video, listens to kirtan, and even joins me sometimes in my home satsang room during meditation. He’s a cat training and preparing for his upcoming human life and developing spiritual sanskars. He’s not a kitty having a spiritual experience; he’s a spirit having a kitty experience.
I share this because I hope you will keep in mind that during the entire saga you are hearing in this tale, Chow-Chow is present in my life. All the dark and light, the miracles and the tribulations, he’s in the background. He may not be mentioned in my tales of lonely woe and adventurous journeys, but he is. Keep that in mind. I’ll try to mention him from time to time just to remind us all that even in the midst of fortunes and misfortunes, there are constants. That’s God’s grace through mercy.
One final thought: as an independent man, I chose not to have pets. This deprived Brandon from a childhood with one (except at his mom’s) but allowed us to have a worry-free, more liberated lifestyle. For about ten years, I had a few tropical fish with very fun and creative names. I have a unique formula for naming animals.
Brandon was given a writing assignment when he was in fourth grade: write a story about wagon train families to show you understood the lessons on the time. He wrote this hilarious story of a family and the wagon train cook’s name was Chow-Chow-Bang.
Around that time, Brandon and I started backpacking in the high sierras: ten-thousand feet up, backpacking for a week in the wilderness, and we gave each other nicknames to use just when we hiked as a secret and private kind of bond. I won’t tell you mine, cuz it’s lame, but his was Chow-Chow-Bang. As he got older, it was too childish to use, and when this wayward feline came into my circumference, he adopted the name, as I adopted him.
He also answers to Chow, Chow-Chow, Bang, and Bang-Bang, and even Pi, which is a derivative of Pie, short for Piewacket from the classic movie Bell, Book, and Candle with Kim Novak (yum) and James Stewart. Piewacket was overused as a pet name, so I spun it to refer to the mathematical equation. Besides, it fit better on the ID tag he wore when he was getting lost in the snow when we moved to Olympia, Washington.
When Chow-Chow-Bang is in his final days, I will comfort him and hold him close and make him comfortable near the alter in our home satsang room. I will surround him with images of Radha Krishn and our Maharaji and play Hari Ram, nam-sankirtan, nonstop while he passes. So he can cross over to his new life with a fresh set of devotee sanskars!
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