My 5,000 Year Autobiography
The other day I was thinking about my life. It’s kind of unusual. And I was thinking about the many unusual things that I have done or that have happened to me. The idea came to me that I could write up a series of stories about these unusual things and share them with those who are interested in such things. So, the first one is written, and I’m going to put it here. I hope you enjoy them.
How could I possibly know about my life for 5,000 years? I’ll share about that during this first story which is about something that happened to me in this life but explains why I know about past incarnations.
Story 1
Transforming Krama
This story starts on December 7th 1993. December 7th is known as Pearl Harbor Day because the attack on the US naval base at Pearl Harbor happened on the 7th of December 1941. I have often said that I had my own personal Pearl Harbor Day because it was on that day that a deranged stranger came to my front door and shot me in the chest.
The door had a large oval decorative glass window in it so when he came to my door I could see that it was someone I didn’t know.
But as I started to open the door, this stranger pulled a big handgun from behind his back and pointed it at me.
I was leaned over a little bit to grab the doorknob. It was the kind of knob that you push in and turn it to lock it, which was what my immediate reaction was to try to keep him from getting into the house. I yelled out to my wife, who was at the dinner table not far away. “Oh God! He’s got a gun!”
But he stepped over and shot through the decorative oval glass that had enough clear glass in it that he could aim the gun at my chest.
I found out later on that it was a .44 caliber gun. That’s a big gun. Hunters use this kind of gun to kill bears! The bullet did hit me in the chest, just to the left of my right nipple.
Later, one of the doctors who assisted at the first of two surgeries I had came to my room to see how I was doing and he said to me, “Tom, you know, you are really quite lucky.”
“Lucky?” I exclaimed. “What do you mean lucky? I just got shot in the chest.”
“Yeah, lucky.” He continued. He knew from being at the surgery and from my X-rays what had really happened.
He then said, “Only one in 100,000 people would survive a .44 hit in the chest, and one in a million would come out of an attack like this as unscathed as you did without losing any organs or getting paralyzed or anything like that. None of that happened to you, so you are indeed quite lucky.”
“Well, when you put it like that, I guess I can see what you mean,” I replied.
Because I had been bent over at just the right angle as I was trying to shut and lock the door, the bullet had hit the lower edge of one of my ribs at just the right angle so that it was deflected down into my body.
It had gone through my diaphragm, had passed right between the two lobes of my liver, continued through the psoas muscle, ricocheted off of the pelvic bone, and lodged in the bone behind my 5th lumbar vertebra.
Later, someone else who knew my case told me that if the bullet had actually gone through my liver, I would very likely have died of internal bleeding. And if it had gone through my body instead of deflecting down, then I would have quickly bled to death.
More about why it didn’t kill me in a little bit.
When I was shot, my eight-year-old daughter Serenity, was in her room where she could see me. The force of the impact of the bullet pushed me back, but I was still able to turn to her and yell at her to stay in her room.
I could hear the decorative oval glass panel in the door starting to granulate. That means that it was tempered glass. All the shooter would have had to do was tap it with the gun, and it would have become a pile of glass granules on the entrance floor.
I stumbled into a room adjacent to the left side of the front door and fell to the floor. Then I yelled as loud as I could for my wife, who was still sitting at the dinner table, to call the police and then in a bit lower tone said and an ambulance. I was trying to scare the shooter with the part about calling the police. I hoped that doing that might make him go away.
My wife did go straight to the phone and made those calls. I lay there on the floor terrified that the shooter would get into the house and finish me off and kill the rest of the family, but he turned around and went up the stairs to the parking area by that side of the house.
Years before, I had seen a movie on TV about captured Vietnam Veterans, and one of them got shot in the leg by one of his captors. One of his buddies told him to put a finger in the hole to stop the bleeding. So, I tried to do that. But the bullet hole was too big. A .44 has big bullets.
By this time my wife had made the phone calls and came to see what was happening with me. I told her to put pressure on the wound, and she tried, but she couldn’t press hard enough. So, I pulled her hand away and put as much pressure on the wound as I could myself.
I was still shaken with fear, afraid that maybe the shooter would come back or maybe there was more than one person attacking the house.
I couldn’t imagine why this was happening as I couldn’t think of anything that I had done in this life to deserve getting shot.
Soon the police arrived, followed shortly by the ambulance. As they carried me up the stairs in a stretcher to the parking area where the ambulance was waiting, one of the stretcher carriers backed into the oval glass, and it shattered onto the entranceway floor.
I continued to hold the area of the wound the best I could. I remember feeling grateful that I had enough presence to think to do that. That may have been due to having practiced and taught Transcendental Meditation™ (known as TM for short) for over 30 years at that point, so it seemed that doing so had served me well.
The house that I was living in was tucked back in a grove of redwood trees about 100 yards from the street. Redwoods are quite rare in Iowa so this was quite a special location for a house.
There was a long dirt and gravel driveway out to the street, and it was quite bumpy. On every bump, I would get a jolt of pain, but we finally made it to the street.
I found out later that as the shooter was walking out to the road, the police picked him up, and as he got into the police car, his .44 dropped onto the floor of the police car. So, they took him to the local police station and put him in a holding cell to wait and see what to do with him.
In the meantime, I arrived at the small local hospital in the town of Fairfield, Iowa.
The TM movement had purchased a defunct college called Parson’s College that was on the edge of town, and they had been doing renovations and upgrading many of the buildings there. They had built a large geodesic dome where many hundreds of meditators would do group meditations together and then practice something called Yogic flying. That group meditation was going on right during the time that I was getting shot. Who knows, perhaps having the group meditation energy in the environment helped me not to get killed.
When I arrived at the hospital, the one resident emergency doctor put a large bandage on the bullet hole wound so that I didn’t have to keep pressing on it myself. They told me that they didn’t have the staff or the expertise to do the kind of surgery that I needed at the small local hospital, so there was a helicopter on the way that would be taking me to the university hospital in Iowa City. That was north of Fairfield about an hour’s drive by car, but of course, it was normally much faster to get up to the hospital by helicopter.
I asked the doctor at the Fairfield hospital if he could give me something to lessen the pain, and he said that this wasn’t a good idea and that the doctors in the university hospital would know what to do.
I waited for the helicopter to arrive with a sob of pain with every breath, and it seemed like it was taking quite a long time. And it was.
It turned out that the first helicopter had developed a fuel leak and had to stop at another town between Iowa City and Fairfield. A different helicopter was being sent from Cedar Rapids that was on the way.
When the helicopter from Cedar Rapids finally arrived, they loaded me onto it, and off we went to get me to the Iowa City University Hospital.
I may have fallen asleep on the flight there. I don’t really remember, but when I got there, they took X-rays right away because there was a bullet hole but no exit wound, so that meant that the bullet was still inside my body.
The X-ray showed the bullet to be lodged just behind my fifth lumbar vertebra. The emergency doctor who was going to do a surgery to try to get the bullet out said that they would be making a long abdominal incision from my solar plexus down to my pelvic area so they could see what the bullet had passed through on the way down to where it was embedded in the bone,
Again, I had enough presence of mind to request that when they made this incision that at the belly button, would they please go around it rather than through it, as I know that the navel has a concentration of nerves that and I didn’t want to get cut. They assured me that they would do that, and they did.
I remember starting to wake up after the surgery, and I had a breathing mask on. As I was only partly conscious at that point, I felt like I couldn’t breathe. And I had the thought that here I had just survived getting shot, and now I was going to suffocate after the surgery. I went back unconscious but obviously didn’t die, or you wouldn’t be reading this account of what happened.
My wife had in the meantime, called one of my good friends and told him what had happened. He immediately went and picked her up and drove her up to the university hospital while I was already in surgery.
I was initially put into a private hospital room after waking up in the surgery recovery area. My wife and friend who had driven her to the hospital greeted me and everyone expressed gratitude that this had not killed me. They had given me morphine with a little button device that I could push to give myself a bit of the morphine when the pain got to be too much. But it also made me sleepy.
My wife got a hotel room not far from the hospital so that she could come and see me during the visiting hours. As I was recovering from the wound and the surgery. The wife of the emergency doctor who had initially bandaged me up in Fairfield stopped by to see how I was doing. She told me that her husband had said that it was really fortunate that I had had the presence of mind to put pressure on the bullet hole wound, or I would have very likely bled to death.
I was wondering why I got shot, as it seemed to me there was no reason that this should have happened. I am a kind and peaceful person and hadn’t done anything to significantly hurt anyone in my current life.
I had just learned to do self-muscle testing, which is done with the muscles of the hands and fingers. I learned to do this at some seminars that I hosted at my house in the Redwoods during the few months just before the getting shot incident.
In the seminars, several uses of self-muscle testing were taught, and one of them was how to figure out things from past lives. This of course, is based on the notion of reincarnation.
So, while lying in my hospital bed after some days, the need for morphine was becoming less. Although my behavior hadn’t been perfect in this life, I thought that getting shot in this life must be some karma from a past life because I couldn’t think of anything that I had done in this life to deserve getting shot.
I had already experimented with the protocol for using self-muscle testing to figure out stuff from past lives. It was really rather simple. You just tested for which century the life you wanted to know about happened in and then the country where it had occurred and the circumstances. And if you are intuitive, which I am pretty good at being, then what happened starts to come to you.
So, what I got was that I was in England during the 10th century, and I was a nobleman practicing archery. This guy who shot me in this life had been a servant who was picking up the arrows. He would hide behind the target and come out to pick up the arrows. One time he came out before I was finished shooting, and I accidently missed the target and hit him in the jugular vein killing him instantly.
I tested that he had attempted to kill me in several ensuing lives throughout the centuries, and this time it was supposed to work, but due to numerous lives of spiritual austerities, that softened the karma so that when he tried to kill me in my current life that I wouldn’t die from the attempt.
So, I was in the hospital for several days, I don’t remember how many. But at a certain point, I was able to go back to my home in Fairfield. It was a lovely home tucked as it was in a grove of redwood trees, but now the oval hole in the door where the decorative glass had been boarded up.
As I was continuing to recover, I started to have all of the symptoms of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), and I also had some spontaneous shaking of my legs, particularly at night that I couldn’t stop. I also started to have some shooting pains down my right leg into my foot, particularly into the big toe. They got increasingly painful and frequent. Pain medicine wasn’t having much effect in lessening the pain, so I went back to the university hospital and had a battery of tests to see if they could figure out what was happening. It was clear to me that I certainly didn’t want to try to live with the pain.
A neurosurgeon was assigned to my case, and as we discussed the results of the full day’s battery of rather “medieval” tests, he said that if they did another surgery from the back side and took the bullet out that he thought there was about a 10% chance that it might stop the pain.
My reply was that 10% was better than 0%, so I said let’s do it as soon as possible.
So, I got into the surgery schedule fairly quickly, and my mom came out from California to be with me during the surgery and my recovery.
After the surgery, as I was waking up in the recovery room, I reached over with my left foot and pressed on the area of my right foot where the pain would show up as it had reached the point where just pressing a bit on that area would trigger the pain.
But there was no pain. The surgery had worked. I was so happy about this that I started to cry. I wouldn’t have to live with that pain for the rest of my life.
The recovery nurse came over to me right away and asked me what was wrong. Through my tears of joy, I said, “I’m so happy. The pain is gone.”
I found out from the neurosurgeon a bit later when he came by to check on me that scar tissue had been encapsulating the bullet, and it was the scar tissue that was pressing on the nerves that went down to my right foot. The neurosurgeon had removed the bullet and carefully removed the scar tissue from the nerves, which stopped the pain completely, and it didn’t come back.
After going home, I gradually started to be able to walk, but it was about a year before I could jog. But I didn’t mind. I had recovered from getting shot in the chest and having two surgeries and hadn’t lost any limbs or organs. I was returning to what looked like a reactively normal life.
My daughter was homeschooling and was being guided in her homeschooling studies and getting books from a teacher who had been hired by the local school system to help kids who were homeschooling. This teacher was also organizing Vedic Astrology readings for local meditators living in and around Fairfield that were given by a guy from India who did something called Nadi Astrology. This involved doing a regular Vedic Astrology chart, but it was supplemented by information written on some stacks of wide strips of palm bark on which were recorded in Sanskrit the things that were apparently seen by wise ancient seers who could access something called the akashic records. That is said to be a body of information about every important event that happens throughout time.
I was curious about this as I thought that perhaps the information about what I had done in a past life would explain my getting shot in this life.
The Nadi astrologer who was coming to town was named Surendra Pandya, but people called him Shastri.
I managed to get the first reading appointment, and I was intrigued as Shastri related many of the experiences in my past during this life and also some of the events that would be coming up in this life.
As we came near the end of the reading, he asked if I had any questions. I told him about the getting shot incident and asked what I had done in the past that caused me to get shot by this guy in this life. He then asked me in good English but with a strong Indian accent, “Oh, you like to know where the karma came from.” I replied with a “Yes!”
He looked at something that must be like an index and then flipped through to the place in the stack of palm bark strips and said, “Here it is.”
He then proceeded to read and translate from the Sanskrit on that palm bark the following:
“In the Middle Ages, you were practicing archery on the banks of the river Thames.” (The famous river that flows through London).
He continued, “You were practicing archery, and you accidentally killed this man with an arrow. Even though it was accidental, it still created a karmic debt, and he has tried to kill you 10 times in past lives, and this time it was supposed to work, but due to numerous lifetimes of spiritual austerities, it softened the karma so that it didn’t kill you.”
I was astounded! It was almost word for word what I had tested for myself in my hospital bed.
As I was leaving the reading, I stopped and asked Shastri if we are the ancient seers who wrote down the information on the palm bark strips for our own benefit in our future lives. And he said that, yes, that’s exactly how it is.
My limited belief in reincarnation was transformed into a very strong belief in it at that moment, as you might imagine.
A couple of years ago, Shastri’s wife died and he also died about a month later. I had been quite close friends with Shastri, so I was disappointed that he died. But not in a painful way, just in a missing him kind of way.
After some time, I started looking for someone to replace him. I got several referrals from the guy who had supervised many of the Vedic Astrology rituals that we had done under Shashti’s guidance. After trying several Vedic Astrologer’s readings, I hadn’t found anyone who impressed me. Then I found Ritesh Shukla, who turned out to be terrific. I found him to be the most knowledgeable person about Vedic knowledge and in particular, Vedic Astrology that I had ever met. I let my students know about him, and he did readings for many of them which I observed. I was amazed by them.
Ritesh is the only advisor to the Indian Society of Vedic Astrologers. He can answer questions that the priests who do the Vedic rituals called kameshtis couldn’t answer. He doesn’t do the Nadi Astrology with the palm bark strips, just the basic Vedic Astrology charts but in great detail. His readings are amazing. I have listened to many of them. His profile is on this page of my website.
Ritesh Shukla
This is the end of the first story
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Story 2
Erasing the Sins of the Past
At a certain point, Shastri told me a story that he got from the palm bark strip inscriptions. In that story, I was the son of one of the ancient seers who cognized the Vedas, and I had my personal guru named Agustya. As a part of my initiation into becoming a spiritual seer myself, Agustya assigned me the task of walking along the Narmada River that cuts across the middle of India and I was to walk along one side of the river, visiting the various temples on that side of the river and when I reached the end of the river I was to walk in the other direction on that opposite side. Along the way I came to a temple devoted to the god Shiva. There were dancers there who were all wives of Shiva, but it was acceptable for these dancers to have sex with a man and even have children by him. But the dancers were supposed to never leave the temple permanently.
One of the dancers and I became deeply involved and at a certain point we left the temple together. This was not at all permissible and everyone seemed to know about it anywhere that we went. People knowing that we were “breaking the rules” they treated us as outcasts.
We couldn’t make any kind of a life and were having trouble surviving. So at a certain point we decided to separate and I left her alone. According to the Nadi information this dancer became a prostitute just to survive.
And in this life I met the incarnation of the Shiva dancer in an interesting way.
I have a special set of techniques for resolving hidden emotions that have been so deeply suppressed from infancy that people don’t even know that these energies are inside of them. I call it your inner emotional landscape.
I had been invited to teach my course on how to access and resolve these deeply suppressed emotional energies in Germany several times.
And then I was asked to teach one of my seminars in Switzerland. Prior to the start of that seminar, I had a strong intuition that I was to meet someone there with whom I had some kind of very significant connection.
I arrived at the seminar room and looked around the room. There were about 25 or so people but I didn’t sense a feeling of deep connection with any of them. Then just before I started to teach a lovely woman came into the class room and the sense of connection with her was powerful.
She joined me to share a pizza at lunch time in a nearby restaurant. Later she drove me into the town nearby and we got coffee and pastries. On the way back to the seminar room I said to her that it felt to me like we had some connection from some past lives. She said she felt that too. Her name is Pavla, and in this life she was originally from Czechoslovakia. She speaks Chech, German, Swiss-German and English.
When the seminar was over, we parted ways and started to communicate by email. At one point she told me that when she left the seminar in Switzerland that she cried for a long time as she felt lots of emotions from our separating.
We continued to write to each other, and it was some months before I went back to Germany to teach another seminar. She came to that seminar, and we were both so happy to see each other. We went to dinner by car with some of the other students from the seminar and we sat in the back seat of the car. We held hands and it was the most passionate holding of hands I had ever experienced. It really turned me on and it was obvious that she was having the same experience.
We spent some intimate time together in my room at the hotel that night where the German seminar was being held. We didn’t have sex but had just about everything short of that. We were making a kind of feeble attempt not violate our commitments as we were both married. Somehow, our connection was so strong that we just couldn’t avoid the intimacy.
Again, we parted ways at the end of the seminar both feeling strong feelings of disappointment about having to part.
As it turned out, I needed some dental work, a couple of teeth needed to be extracted and the replacements of these teeth would ideally be made of Zirconium.
At that time Zirconium implants were not available in the USA. But they were already being used in Germany. I really needed to get two teeth extracted and replaced with the Zirconium implants so I arranged to go to one of the best “biological dentists” in Germany near Hamburg. The need for this created a justification to get back to Germany and see Pavla again. I arranged everything including staying in a small bed and breakfast place at the dental office so I could recover from the dental surgery for a few days.
Pavla took me to the dental clinic and stayed with me during the few days of recovery. She then drove me to Frankfurt where I caught my flight back to the USA and she went back to Switzerland.
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(There’s a lot more to this story not written yet.)
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This is the end of story 2
Story Three