Feel as though I was a Hare Krishna in a past life

WARNING: some graphic in-roads into my personal life here. Read at your own risk of being offended. I won't apologize for what I honestly relate here.

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Hi,

So, this is something I haven't yet myself explored fully yet, but I thought it might be nice to broach the topic, as I would hope others to find it interesting and perhaps even insightful.

I believe in my past life I was a Hare Krishna. There are a sufficient number of incidents in my life which I don't think a thoroughgoing naturalistic account can really explain.

Take for example these "clues" which, though by themselves mean little, are nonetheless sufficient altogether to "connect the dots" :

- From my childhood onwards I have absolutely loved the sense of being alive in a deeply sensual and ecstatic way. So much so that I practically lived an ascetic life in my suburban home, having few interests and practically no friends, relishing things like the taste of yogurt and the sunshine on my back. For the longest time, until somewhere around my twenties, it was as if all the world around me was spiritualized in a deep and profound way - so I didn't exactly need to "do" anything to have fun. This was almost, if not on a par, with a psychedelic trip. I believe that this experiential, or intuitive way of seeing the world was a holdover from my previous sadhana (spiritual practice) which birthed it. This isn't to say I was always in "bliss"; on the contrary I at times experienced excessive anxiety and loneliness in these states, probably because I simultaneously reveled in and resisted them, and found them alienating in certain Oriental ways, and enticing in others.

- I have always been fascinated by the sound of words. Not merely the name of "Krishna" (although that is perhaps the richest possible sound-form I believe to exist on the material, vibrational level) but also any word, any sound. This isn't to say I've ever had a knack for languages. No. Rather, what I've always tried to do was *amalgamate* myself to words, to sentences.... To read into them so deeply and so experientially that it was as though I had a mind-meld no, a body-meld with words..... I used to read and study books for hours and days on end; the same book, but reading it so carefully, so deeply, and so profoundly, that it amounted to something like an orgiastic experience (pardon the sexual implication, - though it exists - I have been a very virile creature all my life, though celibate)

- This brings me to my sexuality. I have always needed pleasure. I have been quite literally a slave to pleasure. In Krishna Consciousness this is seen as a valid form of desire, except the rightly ordered source of pleasure happens to be Krishna and the chanting of his Names. Now, I had never been tempted to chant, really. Such spontaneity never overcame me. But this I have felt comes from a duality in my nature - on the one hand I am strongly identified with my material being (which is dull, dense and inert, etc) as opposed to purely spiritual being which is akin to something like Bliss - lively, spontaneous and free. Lust is a sort of intermixing and transformation of these two things. A good example from the Hare Krishnas is the adding of tamarind to milk to produce yogurt - where the milk represents unadulterated bliss and the tamarind represents an inherent limitation of darkness or ignorance that births mad desire. I feel that I have been guilty of foisting this illusion and returning to the material world, again and again.

- And that brings me to a most crucial other point: even though I have always lusted after girls, I have always been, simultaneously, turned off by them. It is as though I rightly fear the "external energy" (Maya) which in this case is feminine, the material principle of illusion. I am still a virgin at 23 and still struggling with this duality. Somehow the idea of the raw physicality of sex is too cumbersome and even disgusting; although the swirl of emotions to be found in the sexual energy, the "Shakti" of it all, entices me to no end. I can have an orgasm at the mere swirl of images in my mind, all calculated to produce an over-wrought emotion of pleasure in constant nervous agitation.... But the actual physical prospect of me having sex is too dark, too grossly material, for me to entertain it more than a brief time..... This unhealthy duality I think stems from the fact that I have been mixing and interbreeding forms of desire in a wayward way.

- I have always felt alone and alienated in this world, as though my home does not exist in the material world. I have been more sensitive, more frail, more sick, more anxious and paranoid, than anyone I can ever say. I have also never identified with any in-group, spurned all all attempts to live a normal life, engaged in constant self-sabotage and identity questioning.... So I do not belief I belong here, but am a spirit-soul..... I am too cowardly and soft-hearted to stay here though, on the contrary, the duality within me has often taken on shades of extreme psychosis. That is my material part.


I will try to articulate more points as they come to me but hopefully at least now they are a start.