While I was fighting my anxiety during these last days, besides Roderic, another of my past lives turned up: Reginald. I had asked a person to send me reiki from a distance. While she did just that, she could see in her mind a man that I recognized as Reginald, but none of us knew what he was doing here. Could it be that my anxiety also comes from him? This is harder for me to elucidate, as I haven’t connected with his emotions as much as I did with Roderic’s. However, I suppose that knowing you are hovering between life and death must cause a great deal of anxiety. And apart from that, linking with another one of my theories, the rigidness I was feeling on my shoulders was maybe making me connect with the pain I also felt in that same region over 500 years ago. Even when we want to find a spiritual meaning for everything —and I am not saying it doesn’t exist— perhaps all can be reduced to pure physiology, even if this physiology enters fields that are still unknown to science. Could it be that our consciousness is in each and every one of our cells, and so when something is hurting, this brings us memories from other lives? I wouldn’t rule it out.
But let’s go back to Reginald. One of the events that most marked me in that life and has repeated itself several times, is when some men assaulted me in a forest to rob me a book that I had purchased in a Spanish city, possibly Seville. It was a book that was clearly heretical, like all those our secret brotherhood liked to collect. This brotherhood had been born under the wing of a religious order that in reality served as a cover. Knowledge had to be preserved, not destroyed.
Nearly every time I remembered this life, I felt a slight pain on my right shoulder. The first time I mention it (January 22nd, 2012) is in a regression that seemed to take place in Gloucester. I described it like this:
“During all this regression I have felt a pain on my right shoulder, but it is not like Roderic’s, which is localized on the back, but rather in the front part, on the middle of the clavicle. It is like a pressure. The chain mail weighs a ton, but this is something else. I think it is a wound that never healed properly... a wound by a sword during a battle... I think somewhere faraway.”
Further on (January 26th, 2012), I wrote:
“I go forward in time and I am traveling again, on my horse, through a wooded area but with a lot of light and a gorgeous green, as if we were in summer. I carry the book in a saddlebag, I got it, though I think I had to go up to 1500 ducats. I wonder why this book is so important. I see myself flicking through it, and I see the date 1293, hand-drawn with black ink. It may contain important information for us. More than 200 years have passed and it is as if it has a certain historical value, I feel it comes from ‘someone’ who was destroyed but whom we want to perpetuate. It comes to my mind that we are ‘custodians’ of some type of knowledge. I don’t see anything else, but for a second I have the impression that I am going to be assaulted and my book is going to be stolen, it might even happen that the wound on the shoulder is related... but I can be wrong. I also think about the long journey I have made to come for a book, if it is true I come from Gloucester. I think about the way back, and I see it on a map: I go through all the peninsula (I think of Burgos) until I reach the north, and I think I take a ship in Biscay, possibly up to Portsmouth. It seems to me quite a peculiar itinerary, but I think it has something to do with places where I can find support from my order. I also think that I must avoid sleeping out in the open as much as possible, it is very dangerous, because of the highwaymen. I go from inn to inn. And I have the impression that I ‘work’ and live in Gloucester, but I wasn’t born there.”
On February 2nd, 2012, a quite worrying memory came to me:
“The first image more or less clear was when I started to feel the pain on my right shoulder, in the middle of the clavicle. I am not very sure but I think I am kneeling on the ground, and I am covering the injury with my left hand, bloodstained. The surroundings are very similar to what I see when I am riding, so it is possible this a bit ahead in time. But I haven’t been wounded in a battle, and I don’t know if some skirmish has occurred. I only know I am kneeling and I think there are two men nearby, deciding what to do with me. I don’t know exactly what has happened, but it comes to my mind that I have been betrayed, someone in the order has spoken out. It is someone I know, and though it grieves me, I understand. I don’t really know if here is when the end takes place or if I am taken as a prisoner. I do feel the wound is going to give me problems, I feel the pain is spreading to all the arm, could it be that it gets infected and I become ill in the following days? In this case, I don’t die here...”
Finally, on February 3rd, after finding out many other things from this lifetime, the scene seemed to expand:
“Then I am in the forest again, kneeling. In front of me there are two men: one wears a black cassock to his feet and a tonsure. I think the other is a soldier or at least someone who uses weapons and protects the priest. I feel pain on my right arm, I think it is because they have tied them up on my back with a thick rope, beside the wound on the shoulder, of course. I talk to them. Somehow I know someone has betrayed us, and the name of Guilliem or something like that comes to my mind. I think they confirm it to me. I pity him, in a way it comes not as a surprise as I considered him weak. They take the book away from me. I think I have lost 1500 ducats and the prefect is not going to be happy at all, but the worst is they take me like that, hands tied (this time in front of me), and I have to walk to a city. I am imprisoned. The cell is small and squared, with seats held by chains to the walls. I am scared. I fear torture, and death at the stake. The wound on the shoulder is looking bad, it needs medical care, and I need to rest, I feel very weak.
However, I am lucky. I don’t know how long it takes, but the door opens and someone appears, saying: ‘You have very influential friends. You are free.’ I feel enormous relief. I ask about the book but he replies: ‘Book? There was no book...’ I regret the loss. But I keep my life. The worst is not over yet. The next thing I see is that I am in a hospital. I am in a foreign city, I am alone, and I haven’t been able to ask anyone known to me for shelter. I find myself among strangers in a grotty hospital, with a wing that is said to be full of lepers. I see a wide, long room, packed with dirty and foul-smelling beds, and I am surrounded by groans of pain and a nauseating odor. I have fever and the pain is growing. I pray God to let me live. I think I will insist my prefect so that he allows me to come back for the book.
In that moment I hear the words: ‘Not in your wildest dreams, Antóine!’ Miraculously, I could survive and make my way back.”
“I started to feel a severe pain on my right shoulder, in the middle of the clavicle. Very severe. I wonder how I got injured, but I don’t know yet. I see the soldier pointing with his sword very close to my face, when they woke me up in the forest. I imagine I resisted, but I don’t get to see it. I also start to feel a sharp pain on my left hand, as if it were a perforation of several centimeters of diameter between thumb and index finger, as if they have thrust something there but I don’t identify what it is (in some corner of my mind I think about torture). The next thing I see is that I am in the hospital, the wound on the shoulder aches a lot, I see it and it looks awful, dark and with pus, and I have fever and I feel sick. I know my life is in danger.
I look around me and the scene is disheartening. It is a large, long room, packed with wooden beds with poorly attended dying people, filth everywhere, and very few medical workers. To my mind come images of a medicine book I read in the school’s library, written with very fine lines of black ink, with drawings. I know I remember the name of a plant, or a remedy, but I don’t know which. I properly wash my own wound, after some time looking for a recipient for water, and I tell a nurse to search for that remedy or plant. With it I make a plaster and I dress my shoulder. But after that the image turns blurry, and I think I was between life and death for some days. Like I did that other time, I ask God not to carry me with him yet, to let me live.
When I regain consciousness, I am lying on the bed, very weakened. Besides the bandage on the shoulder, I also see my left hand is dressed. I see myself eating a broth that looks like water in a wooden bowl. I recover little by little and get up.
Then I see the wing that is devoted to the leprosy sufferers. I remember it is one of the experiences our order stipulates, we must live with sick people and help them, and I go there, despite the woman who tries to stop me and warns me I must not mingle with them. I don’t pay her any heed. I pass through what it looks like a curtain and I get into the lepers area. My heart goes racing when I see the people there, with detached pieces of their bodies, that old man without an eye, that woman with no fingers, that other one covers her face with a rag... most likely she doesn’t have a nose anymore. There are also children among them, condemned to death... a little girl walks next to me and I follow her with my eyes. This whole vision impresses me a lot, but I manage to recover and I see myself gathering them together in a corner, reading tales to the children that are in reality excerpts from the Bible.
When I fully recover and I am ready to travel, I leave the hospital and go on with my journey. I don’t have any idea where all this could take place, but I think it could be in the center of the peninsula, before arriving to France.”
For a long time the flow of information that was coming from Reginald stopped. It is quite frustrating because for me it is one of my most interesting past lives. I have kept it almost secret until now because it is very hard to verify certain things. But curiously, the other day, when I was still fighting my anxiety, new images came to me.
I already knew that at some point I had washed my wound in a river (this had to happen after I was released from prison). It ached a lot and looked bad. Also, I was feeling sick and I was sweating all over my body, which makes me deduce I had fever. I could barely move, but I needed to ride my horse, with the hope of arriving to Toledo before it was too late. I saw myself arriving to a house with an arched door and a metallic knocker. When an old man turns up and asks me how he can help me, I am already very weakened and I can only mutter “Help”. I was carried to a bed and I came in and out of consciousness.
Well, I had just started to meditate when I noticed the pain I was feeling on my right shoulder got more intense, and with it, images of that wound and that hospital began to emerge. At the beginning I only saw random and blurred images. For instance, I saw myself mounting my horse from the left side, as if I couldn’t do it from the right due to the state of my arm, which is close to my body and I think I can’t move it much. To this day I don’t know how I got that injury. I would say that my rival’s sword reached me but fortunately it wasn’t a too deep wound. I don’t think I was wearing my armor at that moment, but perhaps I did wear some kind of leather garment that protected me from the impact. I am sure it was an open wound and bled profusely. I have to tear apart a shirt to bandage it, but I don’t think it was a good dressing, as I did it on my own.
In the hospital there is an old man and I ask him to do something for me. In the regression the word “poultice” (in English) was constantly coming to me, but it is not a word that I use frequently and I had to look it up in the dictionary: it means “cataplasma”, or as I had already described in a previous regression and forgotten, a plaster. The new detail is that I tell him he has to make the plaster with a specific plant, one that I hadn’t remembered until now. I see myself trying to draw it on a paper so that he can recognize it: the leaves are long with smooth edges, and though I didn’t get to see the flower, I knew it was similar to daisies. Shortly after, the word “Arnica” came to me.
I have to say that slightly over a year ago I did a homeopathy course to use it in animals. It was a very brief introduction course, of only a month. One of the most used remedies is Arnica montana, so it wasn’t the first time I heard its name. However, I didn’t study so much as to be able to draw the plant in the waking state and know it looks like daisies. Certain skeptics might think this is not a real memory, that it is only some kind of contamination for something I learned. The truth is that I have reviewed the short notes I have available and they don’t tell anything about the history of this plant, for example that it was already used in 16th century to treat wounds and bruises, in the form of poultices. It also would be too much of a coincidence to recall exactly that plant among the dozens of remedies I studied and not one used to treat urine infections, for example. And it is still much harder to find references to Jewish physicians from the same era who had knowledge of medicinal plants and used them in their daily practice, with the risk of being considered heretics and condemned to die at the stake. My theory is that, maybe, reading again about this plant made that the rusty routes of my memory leading to that datum open to complete the memory.
“History
Arnica has a history of folk medicine use in many locations, including North America, Germany and Russia. The herb has been used in folk remedies since the sixteenth century. A North American indigenous tribe, the Cataulsa, prepared a tea from arnica roots to ease back pains. The German writer Goethe credited arnica with saving his life by bringing down a persistent high fever. Arnica preparations are used extensively in Russia. Folk use includes external treatment of wounds, black eye, sprains, and contusions. Arnica has been used in Russian folk medicine to treat uterine hemorrhage, myocarditis, arteriosclerosis, angina pectoris, cardiac insufficiency, and in numerous other unproven applications.”
http://www.encyclopedia.com/plants-and-animals/plants/plants/arnica
“Arnica in Traditional Medicine
Arnica montana, a wildflower that grows in the high mountains of Europe, has likely been used as a healing herb since the Middle Ages. The first documentation of the use of Arnica as a medicinal plant in Europe dates from the 1500s.”
http://www.arnica.com/about-arnica/history/arnicas-humble-beginnings/
After this meditation, no pain on my shoulder of any kind has come back (though this doesn’t mean it won’t in the future).
Update 30-10-2016.
I was kneeling, with my hands tied behind my back. The soldier keeps aiming his sword at my neck. The priest is behind him, with a book in his hands (not mine, but some kind of handbook), and he is interrogating me. He asks me where I acquired the book, from whom I had purchased it. I tell him I have not bought it, it is mine. The soldier slaps me with his gloved hand and nearly knocks me down. The priest keeps asking, I answer the same again and again. I don’t intend to reveal the identity of the man who gave me the book. I am not sure one hundred per cent, but I would say that it is then that the soldier plunges his sword into my shoulder, front to back, passing through the clothes and causing me a lot of pain, obviously. It is not a too big wound, but it goes deep, and bleeds profusely (my current self thinks that maybe he knows where to hit not to cause death, like torturers do). The priest says something like “Be calm, he will soon talk”. I tell him something like: “This may go unpunished in front of men, but it won’t remain unpunished in front of God”. He replies that the name of God on my lips is blasphemy. That almost makes me laugh, as they are the ones who are killing people, and I think about Jesus and what he preached. I am taken to prison, I walk with my hands tied in front of me, held to one of their horses. They also take my horse.