David Lovegrove’s Past Life Experience

Reincarnation had seemed an exotic idea to me growing up, and certainly because of my orthodox Christian upbringing, I had been taught that we lived one life, ‘and then the Judgement.’

After my NDE, and subsequent few years in a Christian Community, I had left and set off on a journey of discovery of myself and the true meanings of life.

In 1996, whilst still at art school, I began to practice Iyengar Yoga at a Shala in Sydney.

It was the last pose of our 90 min early morning yoga practice, and we lay supine on our mats, bodies covered by blankets, our eyes masked and our heads relaxed. 

The pose is called Savasana,( sounds like ‘sharvarsana’), and the word literally means ‘corpse pose’ (which I must admit I always found a little spooky!)

The teacher soothingly talked us through this unusual practice, wherein we did no stretching, no balancing, just breathing and adjusting our mind state.

We set ourselves to gently let go of our physical body, surrendering it to gravity and the earth. We brought our attention to the point between, and just above, our eyes (to an area some call “the third eye”).

We were to continue our practiced yoga breathing (pranayama), and to drop our attention down, down, down to the back of our heads.

My frontal brain, my cerebral cortex, where lay my conscious mind, quietened its chatter and became silent.

I found myself entering a timeless space.

All that existed was me and the flow of my breath.

Suddenly I became aware that I was no longer lying on my yoga mat. I was lying on a large, flaming funeral pyre!

It was so intensely real that I almost opened my eyes! The roar of the flames was frightening, but fortunately for me, I was dead. 

I couldn’t feel a thing!

Photo by Dewa Wira

It was night. 

Looking to my left, I saw a tall, muscular, naked man with long red hair and a bushy red beard. He held a flaming torch high in his hand, and he chanted in a language that I didn’t recognize. 

Somehow I knew that he was my brother. 

Beyond him stood a great forest of trees covered with hanging lichen, and it seemed to me a Scandinavian forest. 

Down near my feet, and off to the left, were a number of young women. All had long, straight, dark brown hair, and wore baggy, tan-colored dresses, like simple long shirts.

They were obviously distressed, crying loudly, and I felt that I loved them and missed them, but I couldn’t recall who they were.

Lifting my “head,” I observed my body.

It was being rapidly consumed by the roaring flames, and I could see the blackened burning bones of my chest, and the smoke of my body billowing up and away into the air.

I thought to myself, “There’s nothing here for me now.”

Photo by Sean Paul Kinnear

A needle-thin whirlwind came down from above, and “I” was sucked up with the rising smoke, up through the treetops, and up high into the dark overcast sky.

Everything went black.

I stayed up there, somewhere mysterious, for a long time.

Instinctively I knew that the ‘me’ lying on the Yoga mat, in Savasana, wasn’t allowed to see what was happening up there.

Eventually I returned from the sky, once again carried inside the atom-thin whirlwind, racing at fantastic speed down and through the now daylit forest, zigzagging wildly through the trees.

Suddenly slowing, I saw what looked like a pile of dead trees and turf.

I realized that it was a crude shelter.

Photo by Svetlana Sinitsyna

I floated inside. There, lying on her back, panting rapidly, was a young, heavily pregnant, blonde girl. Still in my tiny whirlwind, I slipped between her legs and into her womb. 

I remember vividly the pink walls, and then there I was, lying curled-up on my right side, so blissful and peaceful in her womb, a baby about to be born.

Eventually I opened my eyes, back on my mat, lying on my right side.

 Slowly I sat up, still blissed out and at first speechless. The class had finished.

I told my yoga teacher what I had experienced, thinking that perhaps this was a normal occurrence. She said that she was puzzled, and admitted with a smile that she felt a little jealous.

“I’ve practised Yoga for twenty years and I’ve never experienced anything like that.”

Neither had I!

Photo by Steinar Engeland

My feeling was that the person whose fiery funeral and rebirth I had experienced was me, but different me’s, long past me’s.

I knew that this visionary experience was probably unusual, and certainly a gift to me, a profound insight into the truth of our lives.

Not long after, I went to a seminar with a very highly regarded yogi, and interestingly, one of the themes he touched on was that the idea of Savasana being a sort of yogic ‘warm down’ was a misunderstanding. 

He told us that Savasana was a stand-alone practice, a deep practice of meditation on death itself. 

I have since that time experienced two other similar profound Savasana experiences, that also opened a very graphic window for me into the truth of death and rebirth, of the reality of reincarnation as a fact of life, and of course this is not news to the great philosophies of human life.

I have even read recently of Plato’s belief that reincarnation was real and the possibility that this knowledge had written out of Christian doctrine during the first few centuries after Christ.

Whatever the truth, I find the experiences of myself and millions of others who have had experiences of being near death, sharing another’s death, and past life experiences very exciting indeed, and worth very serious and intelligent study.

Friends, we do not die!  

If you enjoyed David’s story, you might enjoy Jeremy Kagan’s account in the post A Personal Guidebook to Death.

DAVID LOVEGROVE

David Lovegrove is a 64 year old Australian writer and visual artist, a spiritual researcher, a 25 year practitioner of ‘Internal’ Chinese Kung Fu and Hatha Yoga. A number of unusual experiences as a child led him to seek the reality of ‘God / the Divine’ and a numinous experience at age 12 led to a lifetime interest in the reality of the spiritual, the supernatural and the paranormal.

He trained and worked as a general Nurse at a major hospital after leaving school, and during that time came into regular contact with death and dying, leading to a number of unusual experiences.

When he was 22 he contracted severe meningitis leading to a NDE. He interpreted this NDE to have been a Christian experience at the time, which lead to him becoming the Lay Pastor of a Pentecostal Church group. In the couple of years after his NDE David experienced several profound spiritual experiences, some of which he now interprets as types of SDE’s (Shared Death Experiences) involving other people and an overwhelming bliss-filled spiritual light.

At 26 he felt that he was spiritually directed to leave orthodox religion and to ‘work it out for himself’. He became a Psychiatric Nurse and then a Policeman, and at 30 he committed himself to training and entering a creative arts career, gaining a Diploma of Fine Arts and subsequently a Master of Arts degree.

At 35 he began practicing Wing Chun Kung Fu, a remarkable Chinese internal art (a form of Nei Gong) as well as Indian Hatha Yoga.

David’s ongoing practice of these three intense art forms led to many interesting spiritual discoveries and experiences. He sought to find the common thread between his more religious early spiritual experiences, his NDE and SDE experiences and what he was learning from the three ancient arts he practiced.

The concept of The Portal (a virtual connection to the divine appearing to be located around the area of the rear brain) and the often observable ‘superpowers’ released by this connection, appears to be that common thread, and researching this has consumed his interest ever since.
David maintains three Youtube channels devoted to these arts and to this Portal concept - ‘The Portal Superpowers’, ‘Wing Chun Mind Force’ and ‘David Lovegrove Art’.

He is highly regarded by many practitioners of art, kung fu and yoga. During his Masters degree practice he conceived of the idea of drawing and painting with two hands at once, and began practicing this artistic approach (which appears to have grown out of his mind/ body practice in Kung Fu and Yoga). International Airline Qantas became aware of this unusual skill and had a primetime ad made showcasing his skill. He has been commissioned to create art for other major corporations including Emirates Airlines, Cochlear Ltd, HBO, Bender Spinks and others, and an episode of the international art series ‘Colour in Your Life’ was filmed showcasing his ambidextrous style.