• Thank you to Carol and Steve Bowman, the forum owners, for our new upgrade!

Monk anyone?

apparantly we're related, cause I'm also a descendant of Christian
Click to expand...

LOL... So we´re distant cousins then:laugh:. Lund is where I´m born and bred BTW, and as a little kid one was always told about the church and taken there for tours. I don´t know, maybe some of that stuck anyway...

a street in a small medieval town, between the houses - crossing the street - hangs small flags in red, green and yellow, like if there's a festival.
Click to expand...

Interesting- my father has PL memories of living in a town like this... and also of participating in some kind of festival or parade. This would have been at least a couple of hundred years ago, not sure of the dating (gonna have to ask).

Unfortunately, as of yet I myself don´t have any real clue of a location where I could have lived the life/s of a monk. Around the mediterranean somewhere, would be one guess...

Hildegard sounds interesting, will be checking her out! (this is the kind of tip I was fishing for:) ).:D


Karoliina, you have all my sympathies...;) (well...;) :D )
 
Hi lights,

Wow, that sems to be quite an impressive place- Thanks for sharing! Very interseting:thumbsup:

I´m curious... what´s your feeling about orthodox christianity nowadays? And in what ways, if any, do you feel the connections to this life today...? If possible I´d love to hear more sometime.
 
Oh man, shield, I used to be Orthodox Christian this life for a while. It's a nice religion, but the sexism and homophobia finally got to me. I left about six or seven years ago to join the Old Catholic Church.

Yes, Trinity Segius is an impressive place...it has the designation "Lavra" which puts it in the top monastaries in Russia. It was (in my time) and still is, a major place of pilgrimage.

My flashback was of being in a long line of priestmonks at a pontifical liturgy ( one where a bishop is the presiding celebrant) and it was absolutely beautiful, all of us in creme vestments bordered in blue, the choir singing some soaring hymn, light coming in through the windows, the air heavy with some rich incense.
 
The problem was that so many of those in monastic life bioth gave into fear and negativity and ignorance instead of trying to combat them. Sad, really.
Click to expand...

Lights, yes... and I guess implied in what you´re saying is also that a certain kind of insight into the fact that " peace and love" is in the end the only solution, is not at all necessarily the same as an actual attainment of those spiritual states... But no less important, maybe, as a roadsign to stick by pointing the way in making it there.

Or, like someone said: courage is not necessarily to be without fear but to go ahead in the face of it.

And I guess what I´m curious about in this context... is to what extent an idea of monestaries as some kind of cornerstones of the (inner) spiritual life of society would be mostly an idealistic delusion (of mine) or if there could anything at all to it in reality.

(I´m reading Thomas Merton again, mentioned above, describing his view of monastic life. A great writer who´s not actually painting it all rosy... but it still sounds just a little to good...(?))

I guess I´m just gonna have to look up a real life monestary and go visting, asking silly qustions...:rolleyes:
 
Hey, shield, sometimes silly questions can have some very interesting answers!:)

I think that for a fortunate few, monastic life can be very rewarding and these people can pass these rewards on to others...or at least a path to them--hence the idea in Orthodox monastic life of "elders"....I just never ran into any.

I am much happier back out in the world...maybe putting up with what I did for almost twenty years was worth it to find that out. As the Greek philospoher ( and no, I don't know which one lol) said: "Know thyself".

My experience is mostly with Orthodox monasticism...probably one of the largest monasteries of this sort is Holy Trinity Moastery in Jordanville, New York. Here is a link to their website.
http://www.jordanville.org/


Here is a link to a site regarding a small monastery in Platina, California as well:
https://orthodoxwiki.org/index.php?...,_California)&mobileaction=toggle_view_mobile

And an interview with one of their monks, a Fr. Damascene:

http://www.pravoslavie.ru/enarticles/060222155510

These may give you some insight into monastic life Orthodox Christian style.
 
shield said:
I´m wondering...does anyone have memories of a PL in a monestary as a monk (christian)? Would anyone know of sites to research physical facts about monestary buildings etc.?

For a long time now I´ve had a thing of nostalgic longing for that kind of life (no specific memories, though). Not that it would in any way be the thing to do in the present life. In the present I´m split between being not very fond of the church or organized religion at all... and a "secret" feeling:o of possibly being very comfortable in the role and life of a sincere catholic monk/priest, although maybe somewhat rebellious...
Click to expand...

Me too...i think i have lived in Tibet.I can't remember being a monk or nun but i can remember my legs being very short and finding it difficult to climb practicaly vertical steps.(i checked this out and monastery steps are like this)
When i was very young i would get clear,clear visions right out of the blue of Buddhist deities.
I grew out of this but took refuge as a Buddhist in 2003 after thinking about it for most of my life.
I saw an advert for calm abideing meditation just up the road from me so i went along.When i got there it was a Tibetan Buddhist group running the meditation.
They had Thankas(Buddhist religeous paintings)on the walls,a Huge brass Buddha and offerings to him,insence burning,and a shop selling prayer boxes(i had never seen a prayer box before but knew at once what it was as i felt so drawn in to touch it)as well as other things mainly from Tibet.
I can't explain how i felt when i walked in.
It defo felt as though i had done it all before.The smell and everything felt natural to me.
The prayers and mantra's we recite seem easy for me to do even though it's Karma Kagyu so Tibetan.
I have never been a religeous person...more of a happy go lucky hippy type person.I think it must be my past life that connected me to Buddha in this life.
Thats just my thoughts anyway...who knows.
 
Hi again Lights, I´m sorry to have left this thread dangling (although that´s kind of a personal specialty:o )! Thanks ever so much for the links you provided- that little monastery, St. Herman, certainly looks nice and inviting and the interview was real, well,... informative.

I gotta say I don´t agree with that guy´s theology. But, after all... theology is an outer thing and what matters lies inside, i.e.in the end I have to concede to the fact that someone I may judge as representative of a not totally apealling ideology might at the same time have gotten somewhere with his inner person that would deserve all respect.

And since that´s not anything I will ever really know anything about... I guess I might just as well accept him, like all, as one of an inner person in identification with Christ. If nothing else it sure would save me a lot of work:D ;) (Now, there´s the little business of my ego finding this whole idea perfectly revolting but let´s forget that for a second...)

Hey, shield, sometimes silly questions can have some very interesting answers!
Click to expand...
Thanks!:thumbsup: I suppose a fool´s got all the wisdom in the world to win, don´t he...:D

On monasticism I suppose a simple conclusion I´ve come to this far is that like all very extreme modes of human life (like war, intense romantic love etc.) it holds in itself readily available potentialities of Heaven and hell and, well...the less exciting grey zone of everyday life .
 
Hi Karma Tsring,

Glad to see your post! Please let me come back soon about what you´re writing- very interesting:) - don´t got the time now!
 
Josefina said:
The first time I heard about reincarnation was when I was around 10 years or so, and the first idea about myself was that I've been a monk who copies books.

I've seen visions about that life, but all I know is that it happened in England, maby around 1400. I don't have any clue about the Catholic order I belonged. Any guess is as good. The main thing to me from that life is that I used to talk at night in a forest with a lady I loved dearly, and "they" went and burned her at stake for that. She must have been considered a heretic.

It's possible that later in my life I left the monastery and roamed around Britain, maby tried to cure people having plague and other ills.
Click to expand...

Your memories sent chills down my spine and as i am writing this i have goose bumps.
Norton Priory was a foundation of the Augustinian Order of Canons Regular,also known as the Black Canons,because of the black cloak which they wore.
You may think...but why tell me this?
I live in England /Cheshire near to the Norton Priory Monastery.
Locals talk of a young monk meeting his death because he couldn't stop meeting his love late at night when all else were sleeping.
The monk would sneak out and meet his love in the woods next to the monastery.
One night he was seen, and being mistaken for a pocher was shot.
His love was captured and burnt at the stake.
She was considered a witch for leading the poor monk astray and to his death.
It may have nothing at all to do with what you feel but wow i had to tell you.
 
shield said:
Hi Karma Tsring,

Glad to see your post! Please let me come back soon about what you´re writing- very interesting:) - don´t got the time now!
Click to expand...

I don't mind sharing or waiting.
I warn you in advance,once i get going my spelling is awful.
look forward to your views on these great experiances.

smile love Tsring
 
I thought it was interesting when i was trying to explain what prayer was to my son who was maybe 4 years old at the time that he said 'Oh, I know what you are talking about.' Then he proceeded to get down on the floor on his knees and elbows, feet off the ground and hands clasped together in a praying position at his forehead. I asked him where he learned that and he said 'I just remember it.'
I found out later that certain monks pray that way and a psychic told me he was a monk in a past life.
He's finally stopped just flopping to the ground wherever we are and praying like that. He's done this at school, walking down the street, at our Jewish temple. I like it but I think others think it is weird.
Vicky
 
My parents tell me i would make prostrations to the buddha that sat on our fire place for good luck only, my parents are not really religeous.
Although i do not remember doing this,i do remember meditating deeply at a really young age.I wish i could clear my mind this way today but i can't and now i have a teacher.
I wonder if it's right to cling to a past religeon as i find myself doing.
It feels right...but then why am i wondering.
Life is fast.
 
Hi Karma Tsring,

i can remember my legs being very short and finding it difficult to climb practicaly vertical steps.(i checked this out and monastery steps are like this)
Click to expand...
I´m curious, did you experience yourself to be a young person here (short legs).

I grew out of this but took refuge as a Buddhist in 2003 after thinking about it for most of my life.
Click to expand...

That sounds like a great thing:)! I´m curious , what are there dfferent steps
of initiation you take to come to that point?

This last year I´ve found myself increasingly
interested in buddhism as opposed to not being completely keen on it before. For some reason. A couple of months ago, though, I went to visit a Zen tempel in a nearby town and got a real nice impression. Had it been possible for practical reasons I probably would have started going to meditations and so on, there.

The difference now is probably I don´t find the different ideological fine points stand in the way, just quite as much, of an experience of inner kinship
E.g. my little thinkie mind-computer would prefer to see "God" as "the ultimate non-dual reality", etc. ( Funnily enough without being able to begin to fathom any of this :laugh: ). But... let it, huh:D.

(Well, what I´m saying is, I think... it´s important to find and repect one´s own chosen tradition and path but not to let it stand in the way of what it´s actually aspiring to- spiritual freedom)


I think it sounds very cool how you where meditating and seeing images of deities at a young age! Our daughter, who seems to have been living a life in India before this one used to do what looked like yoga when she was around 2-3 yrs old.

I noticed in another thread you mentioned worries (if I remember rightly) about being sort of stuck in the memories of an earlier life as a Buddhist monk. I don´t know of course but, hey, I wouldn´t worry about that. Maybe it could be fruitful to see it as a picking-up of a life thread and going on again in new circumstances and with new challenges.

I imagine in order for any spiritual tradition to stay alive it must, as well as being faithful to tradition, be in a sort of a constant evolution.

Not the least in a general context of using past lives as a way of personal
exploration I think it´s probably about loving and leaving the old grooves we´ve made... If that makes any sense:D.
 
Hi Karma Tsring, thank you for telling that story! Never have I heard anything the least kind of similar thing to my own experiences, though I'm quite sure that I as a monk lived a long time after my loved one had been burned at stake. But not "happy ever after"...

But after many centuries stories do change, so it could be possible it was me but they remember it all in the wrong way... I must put down those places you mentioned and study them!

:thumbsup:
 
That´s fascinating how similar the stories are... Josefina, please tell if there´s anything further there that rings a bell:).

Karma tsring, here´s a book that you might enjoy (if you haven´t already read it):
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1582340455/002-8321636-3087219?v=glance&n=283155

It´s a true story about a english woman becoming a tibetan buddhist nun,
living in a mountain cave for 12 years meditating 15 hours a day (:eek: ;) ). I read it several years ago myself and was more than impressed.

Here is her, Tenzin Palmo´s (and that of the nunnery she´s founded) website: http://www.tenzinpalmo.com/
 
Probably there have been many monks and novices who have had secret affairs, and where else one could had meet than in a forest at night... But I had a funny idea:

When I was a child, I got an obsession about how I just must write books when I grow old. I actually have written some stories and even a whole novel, but what matters now is how old is this obsession about telling stories...?

What if I told stories in my former life as a monk? I remember travelling quite a lot in the later part of my life. I do believe that I had lived as a child in southern England, and what happened to me, happened around there, but it's possible I later travelled here and there. I had met a young boy in my monastery, and I have an idea that I went and met him again about 30 - 40 years after. I have a vision about me as an old man, partially bald head, some white hear - probably I looked to a mirrow in that place I was visiting my old friend (who was 7 - 10 years younger than me).

There is a castle that lookes a bit like one of my visions (although total regocnition hasn't occurred). It's the castle Beaulieu, and I guess it's not that far away from Cheshire? (Vision about a light brown wall with a round tower.)

So, what if I told my story, what had happened to me, when I was meeting my old friend, but didn't tell that it happened to me? Told it as a legend, told that the man in it was killed?

Anyway, I must check those places out in maps and pictures... But even if the story wasn't mine, the possibility that that kind of thing could happen is nice to know. (Well it wasn't nice when it happened, but to me it is one of the things that comforts my soul, when thinking about does death really exists?)
 
After a long time of not being able to post, I am back! And ready to catch up. I remember a life as a young monk in a Catholic monastery. Most monks there spent their days transcribing and illustrating books. I however was not allowed near the books. I worked the fields and tended to the livestock that fed the monastery. I was eventually poisoned by an older monk.
 
Josefina, I enjoy reading your musings about what might have gone on with your monk life. Kind of like how I do it myself, intuiting and zoning in. "What if...? How about...? Hmm...?":cool

Greenknight, pleased to see you:). Very interesting about your monk life there... I´m curious do you know of any specific reason you weren´t allowed to work with the books (or just to young and lowly) and do you know why you were poisoned...?



BTW for you and all other former monks that may be interested I found this site. It looks to be a real treasure chest of old (4th-20th ctry) christian writng. Greenknight, maybe you will find some of the books here, you weren´t allowed to read back then;).

http://www.ccel.org/
 
To be a monk...

I guess my father tought that I was no good in our shop, and because I had older brothers, there would be no room for me in the shop anyway after he would be gone.

But the main reason, the reason of the soul, to be a monk to me was to not mess with sexuality, again. I needed some retirement from those things that happen between a man and a woman. I know that monks haven't always been so chaste as they should be, but I think that I was.

:tongue:
 
Monk Anyone?

Hej Sheild!

You asked, "Monk anyone?"

Yes! Well that is what I relived anyway. It was in England in about the late 1400s to mid 1500s. It wasn't a very happy life. I was homosexual, and to 'escape' I became a monk. Problem is you take yourself with you :(

No, I never 'did' anthing, just beat myself up for being 'bad', and finally went crazy and was locked away. After the monasteries were disbanded (about mid 1500s) I lived alone as a hermit, copying manuscripts. It was very lonely and I died alone.

Interestingly, two people who I know who also remembered that lifetime (one was a young knight, and the other a woman who came to me for confession) said that I had helped them. That was surprising to me, as I thought I had been too imersed in my own stuff to be able to help anyone else.

What feels nice is that I seem to have worked through both the major themes in this life. Quite early on I was able to break away from a very repressive religious system, and become free.

I was also able to work through my confusion about sexuality, by reliving and resolving early childhood sexual molestation in this life. Interestingly, even before I got to that, I was a campaigner for gay rights.

So whatever that was about, I think I have got that one in the bag. Both those in the bag in fact. I sure hope so :) It feels good to look back and see how far we have come, doesn't it!

I think from the life memories that came inbetween, that maybe I was working on those issues in little baby steps through several lives, but this life seems to have been the pivotal one in dealing with those two issues to resolution.

There was a loneliness theme in that life time that I haven't resolved yet, but I know I am working on it.

Have you had any more insights into your feelings around monks and monasteries? Feel free to share.

Varma Hälsningar!
Persephone
 
I had many lives as a shaman or religious figure, but as a priest/monk in the conventional sense, only a few times. I was an early Christian missionary in Egypt(Alexandria) and Ethiopia in the 300s and later was a Christian monk in either Greece or the British Isles in the 10th century, who died young of pnuemonia. I had wanted to die because my family had been killed but didn't kill myself out of fear. I just stayed outside all night, got sick from the cold and rain, and died shortly after. I was also a blind Buddhist monk killed by the Mongols and a Cather priest once, or possibly twice, in the 1200s.Finally I was a travelling renegade priest in the late 1500s who was imprisoned, tortured and burned at the stake for extreme heresy. I may also have been a minister briefly in the late 1600s.

Although I don't much care for religion today, I do kind of like the priestly lifestyle of austerity and seclusion. I can still see the influence on my personality. Sort of a paradoxical like of the lifestyle, but not of the ideology. People often confide in me, I'm not very experienced relationship-wise and I'm a loner who likes reading and writing amongst other things that carried over. I also like the robes ;)
 
I think I was a young servant to Monks

I think probably Buddists monks. I was probably in training to be a monk myself ,but for some reason I never did become one. Either death or something else may have intervened. Can't tell for sure. I have always had an affinity towards buddhism though.
 
Thanks Shield -and everyone

I think the reason for not being allowed near the books was probably youth and lowly origins. I was possibly an illiterate peasant with a huge yearning to learn. As to why I was poisoned, it's hard to say exactly. I suspect jealousy or the act of someone whose advances I rejected. I do remember parting from a young woman (my present wife) when I was taken away (unwillingly) to the monastery. This seemed to be somewhere in France.
 
Here´s an interesting modern monk worth checking out:cool:

http://www.gratefulness.org/brotherdavid/bio.htm

A "snippet":
"The heart of every religion is the religion of the heart.[...]
"Heart" stands here for that core of our being where we are one with ourselves, one with all, one even with the divine ground of our being. "Belonging" is therefore a key word for understanding the heart—the oneness of limitless belonging. A second key word is "meaning," for the heart is the organ for meaning. As the eye perceives light and the ear sound, the heart perceives meaning. Not in the sense of the “meaning” of a word that we might look up in a dictionary. Rather, “meaning” as that which we have in mind when we call an experience deeply meaningful. Meaning in this sense is that within which we find rest."
 
Hi GreenKnight,

It's been a while since you originally posted about the monk.

I will find the time to research this. I have promised myself.
Click to expand...

Have you found the time to do some research? :D Do you have anything new to share? I'm curious!



Ailish :)
 
shield said:
I´m wondering...does anyone have memories of a PL in a monestary as a monk (christian)? Would anyone know of sites to research physical facts about monestary buildings etc.?
Click to expand...

I have only done one regression, where I was a catholic priest (from Ireland / England) in NW India from about 1850 ~ 1900, where I died. Most of the regression was on the last moments of that life.

In this life, though still of european ancestry, I am a Buddhist monk. Although I speak fluent mandarin, and read the classic chinese Buddhist scriptures usually without too much problem, my main influence is still Indian. I am presently studying sanskrit, and it seems very natural to me.

Peace.
Huifeng :)
 
Illiterati

GreenKnight said:
There are some PL's that I remember rather well (as a Civil War soldier for one) and others I don't know quite as much about.
I know that in most of the Pl's I do remember, I was illiterate or semi illiterate. In most of those lives I had a great desire to learn to read and write but almost never achieved that goal. In my present life, I have a great love of books and learning is very important to me.


I remember (not very well) a life as a monk. In that life I believe that I was poisoned or murdered somehow as I remember an older monk making sly remarks and smirking as I was dying a slow agonizing death. In that life I wanted to to copy manuscripts and do illustrations but was forbidden to do so.


Now my question here is..would a monk have been illiterate? Is that likely? It is possible that I was not allowed near the books because I was very young and low ranked. But would a young man have been taken into a monastery being illiterate? I think it may be possible since a large percent of people then would have not known reading and writing.


Any thoughts out there?
Click to expand...
Lay Brothers were in fact known as Illiterati at one time because they often did not know how to read or write.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top