Know Yourself - Why Am I The Way I Am !!

Ever asked yourself one intriguing yet simple question….Why am I the way I am? Well, it might sound a bit crazy but, honestly, I’ve tried to figure out many times, the reason for my being the way I am. I don’t mean my physical appearance but my mental and psychological framework, my perspective, the way I handle life situations and my attitude towards life and people in general. What makes me different (in a good or bad way) from those around me? Why am I different from others, in the first place? There has got to be some valid reason behind the stark dissimilarity existing between the species of the same class. What could be the best explanation for two children to be like poles apart, despite being born of the same parents and raised in the same environment? Why does one kid love his paint brush and color palette and the other one, robotic machines? Truly, there’s got be something more to it than the simple genetic and hereditary explanation for varied behavioral patterns manifested by human beings.

Every single living being on this planet seems to be carefully and meticulously designed and artistically developed by our Creator. It seems that He ensured, while creating life on this planet, that every living creature was different from the other. Perhaps, the beauty of His creation lies in the diversity that He intended. How drab and monotonous would a garden look if there were flowers of only one color adorning it! Amazingly, the ‘diversity’ filters down even to level of finger prints which are not similar in case of any two persons or for that matter, the pattern of stripes on the body of a tiger which are in fact used to differentiate one tiger from the other; the stripes of one tiger are, strangely, distinct from the others in the same group. I’ll try not to go off track here. Coming back to the point, is it possible that we exhibit varying types of behavioral patterns just because we all exist at different levels of awareness in the same cosmos? We are, most certainly, a result of our (past and present life) experiences and our wisdom is a conglomerate of the type of experiences we might’ve had while walking the path of life.

At this juncture, I can suddenly picture myself walking through a dense forest along a narrow and seemingly unending road. I see some people ahead of me and some following me but no one seems to be concerned about the fellow travelers. Everyone seems to be worried about finding one’s way out of the forest before dark. I suddenly see a traveler run out of breath; he struggles for a while and then drops down dead. Tears fill my eyes but, like the rest, I feel helpless and leaving his cold and lifeless body behind, I move on. I see some people walking on the wrong path, losing their way into the dense forest. I try to dissuade them but they don’t seem to listen. Again, feeling sad and helpless, knowing their obvious outcome, I take a deep breath and move on. Suddenly I see a little boy walking beside me. I smile at him and he smiles back. A sudden realization strikes like a lightning bolt. I recognize his spirit. He is the same man who died in front of my eyes but since he had not been able to complete his journey in the old fragile body, he had abandoned it and chosen to resume his journey in a new body. This little boy, certainly, had a young body but he was already a wise soul for being born with accumulated wisdom of many past lives. It dawned on me that all of us, despite walking the same path, were at different levels of understanding, all rushing forward to find our way before the sun down and trying hard to stick to the right path. It’s definitely a challenge but then that’s what the purpose of being born time and again is….to fulfill life’s purpose by reaching the ‘light’ before it gets too late (dark).

Finding out the nexus between who we are and who we were in past lives can be a daunting task as we are supposed to be born with accumulated wisdom but with no memory of the lives we might have lived on this planet. Courtesy some astonishing revelations made by the pioneers in the field of science and spirituality, some of us have been able to travel back in time and relive our past lives so as to mitigate the trauma in our present lives. I’m sure most of you might have read some interesting anecdotes revealed by Past life experts, e.g. Dr. Brian Weiss in his book titled Many Lives Many Masters. I’m no expert on this subject but I, too, have some real life incidents to share with you where people were able to better understand the reason behind pain and suffering in their present lives and the reason for bringing out the worst in their partners, no matter how hard they tried not to. This is only the tip of the iceberg.

1. A young woman cried her heart out when her father passed away. It felt like losing everything she had. Carrying the burden of her crushed spirit, she lived like a dead woman for many years. Her childhood memories kept coming back to her and tormented her. She couldn’t understand why she wasn’t able to do anything for her father while he was alive. She kept cursing herself for being the cause of pain and misery to him, all her life, for going against his wishes and for bringing bad name to him. Past life regression revealed that her father had been her husband in one of her previous lives and in that life he had humiliated and subjected her to untold misery by marrying a beautiful and younger woman while she was still married to him and had to live in the same house despite the second woman taking over. (She recognized the second woman as a celebrity in the existing life). It seems that in the present life whatever pain this woman caused her father was only a pay back. The man, who abandoned his wife in the past life, was probably given another opportunity to fulfill his responsibility towards his first wife but this time she chose to be his daughter. It’s easier to escape one’s duties as a husband than as a father.

2. A woman sacrificed everything she had for her only son. She left her family only for providing a safe and secure environment to her child. She couldn’t understand the reason of her being over protective towards her son as such an attitude had brought her nothing but pain and distress all her life. Regression revealed that in one of her previous lives, she had tried hard to protect her three children from someone whom she could not recognize. She found herself making secret arrangements for running away with her kids in the middle of the night. In another vision she saw herself standing outside her house in a state of shock. The house had blown up in an explosion with her kids inside. The woman cried inconsolably when she came out of the trance. It was obvious that her soul had retained those strong feelings of protecting her child from the previous life. She understood why she had always feared that something bad would happen to her child if she did not take him away from the rest of the family. It was perhaps some unfinished work which her soul forced her to complete in her present life.

Digging Out the Cause

There are countless such anecdotes which provide explanation for “Why a person does what he does?” or “Why does one feel insecure or angry?” or “Why does one run after money or turn towards spirituality?” It seems that our past life experiences are responsible for our psychic impressions which in turn govern our actions in the present lives. Ultimately, it comes down to being at different levels of awareness and understanding. Perhaps this could even explain bad marriages and broken relationships too. It’s just because one partner keeps struggling to raise (or bring down) the other one to his (or her) own level which, definitely, is not possible and, therefore, they drift apart. It’s as simple as that. I wish prescribing a solution could be as simple as making the diagnosis.