| Templar Knight Initiation I have decided to start taking notes on some of the remembrances of past life experiences that I have had. The first one that I'm going to write about took place probably in the 12th century or perhaps the 13th century. I was a Templar Knight and the signature experience of that incarnation is that I underwent a death and rebirth initiation ritual. It wasn't easy to qualify for this experience. The church was very powerful, and nearly everyone lived in extremely destitute conditions. I have a sense of what it took to eventually qualify, and capture the attention of the priests or the clergy in order to be allowed to undergo this experience. For years, I had to go through the most visible and severe and asceticisms, self-flagellations, severe fasting, bloodletting, and many other forms of torturous self-discipline. All with a sincere understanding that that is what I had to do, because in the eyes of the church it was greatly esteemed, or thought of as a show of worthiness and piety. I was eventually to feel that I had been played for a fool, and that all my sincere and extreme efforts had been betrayed. During the course of the ritual, they give you a funeral. It is nothing special, it is almost impersonal. By rote, perfunctory, ceremonial, and without any feeling for whom you were as an individual. And yet you are held in such high esteem because you are about to die for Christ. After that tape which you in a crypt, a coffin, and for six days, exactly six days, to coincide with the amount o time it took God to create the world, you undergo extreme and punishing states of near madness closed inside a darkened tomb. This is my most profound memory of the experience. I can really remember having been in that crypt. I can remember the heaviness of the chain mail armor on my body, and how cold it was. I can remember my legs and arms being so cold, that I could not move them, that I hardly had any experience of them being there, all sensation having been cut off. Of course, in that tiny space I could not move. I could feel the chain mail on my neck, collecting and in folds, and being very heavy, cutting off the easy flow of breath. Also, I had no pillow and my head was too low, an unnatural position. It was very uncomfortable, and it was very painful and caused a great stiffness. Actually, my entire body became very stiff from the cold. The first day you sleep for a while and then you dream. It did lose all sense of time, shifting around, trying to find new positions. After that something very close to madness comes. A kind of extreme and irrepressible claustrophobia comes upon you, but you want out of there so bad he will do almost anything to get out. Now here is the trick, you are buried in your knightly garments, and with you is your sword. Your sword is a lying on your chest with your to hands folded over it, exactly as it would be if you were really and truly in the tomb. The thing that they don't tell you is that you have been buried with the means of ceasing your suffering. You have an instrument of death you can use to end it all. It you have no idea how intense, how strongly you want to end it, and are ready to slash your own risks upon the blade of your sword to make this happen. It you will do almost anything to bring this about. And in that state of silence, darkness, madness, and anesthesia the thoughts that run through your brain are constantly of real suicide. Add to that the fact that your own bodily processes have caused you to defecate and urinate upon yourself several times during the course of the days that you are in the crypt, you are sweaty, thrashing, cold, and soiled. You are beyond miserable. To be honest, I don't really know if I made it through the initiation or not. The way the clergy spoke about it, the entire aim of the process is for you to die to one life and to awaken to a life of Christed service. If it weren't for the fact that the clergy were so entirely corrupt, then that may have been a worthy endeavor, but it is hard to say if that a was the case. The main thing that I can't tell you of this experience is that the intensity of being in that crypt was of extreme importance. Extreme enough to be remembered even into this lifetime. I do have a sense for what happened afterwards, so perhaps I did make it through the initiation after all. One thing I remember is that instead of leading a life of prayer and of spiritual contemplation, the clergy would often send you as an ambassador in to political situations. Now, on one hand, you were the chosen person, the Holy Knight, whose job it once to bring light into a certain situation. The Holy Knight was supposed to have had special spiritual protection and favor from God. But instead it was just a bunch of old, power-hungry bastards sending young men into almost certain peril, not caring whether or not they would survive. Often times being an ambassador in a foreign land, or a neighboring city-state, where another language was spoken, was so dangerous that the messengers were often killed outright. So we were the political pawns of power hungry men who used religion and the desperate willingness of the populace to accomplish their own greedy ends. Yet another one of my many, many lifetimes where I have been confronted with Christianity in its worst form. Where I have been confronted with spirituality and the Holy Spirit used for the basest of purposes. written spring 2000 |