ANASAZI: A journey into forgiveness
by Peter Farley

Like the normal conversation about aliens or UFOs one might have, the subject of past lives still borders on the paranormal for many people?especially if you are serious. But what do you do when you wake up one morning and find yourself dying from something that you did in a past life more than seven hundred years ago? It sounds like something out of one of a Kurt Vonnegut novel, kind of corny, but kind of realistic as well. And that?s exactly the way it felt living through this experience just about three years ago now.
All I knew when I woke up that day was that I was dying from something that had no outward signs of disease or other physical manifestations other than the overwhelming urge to lay down and just die.

The experience I went through for my cure taught me much about myself, as well as about one of the more significant of my past lives, one which is still changing my life even today. It also taught me a great deal about a race of people about which so little has ever been known, and most of that based simply on conjecture.

On a planet where we live our day-to-day lives without apparent explanation, the name Anasazi still rings as one of the greatest mysteries on Earth. Mention the name to an archeologist or cultural anthropologist and the most common reaction you might get is a faint sigh of exasperation and a gesture of hands thrown up in the air in hopeless resignation.

Speculation and conjecture don?t come into the fact of dying, however. It is a physical fact. One?s health is a multi-layered labyrinth much like a computer game?once you are able to successfully complete one level, you have then only earned the right to go to a deeper and more complex level and begin working again from there.

The summer of 1997 had been one of great healing and cleansing for me in preparation for following my mission here in this lifetime. It had involved healing and cleansing on many different levels. As a matter of fact, by that September I was probably feeling better than almost any other time in my life up until that point. I was experiencing a clarity of thought and purpose beyond any that I had ever felt before. Although I was also losing hair at a much faster rate than ever before, the rest of my body had more energy and needed less rest and sustenance than at any time in the 45 years previous.
It was unusual then that as October approached I felt a waning in my energies and a return to the need for more and more rest, and less and less physical or mental exertion. I had experienced similar waning at this same time of year in the past, but never to this extent. Before long it was hard to get out of bed at all. Going to the bathroom became a major challenge of having to roll onto the floor and kind of do a sideways shuffle on hands and knees to take care of my personal business.

Psychically-gifted friends could see the darkness taking over my normally bright aura. Using every technique at our considerable disposal we tried to overcome this dark miasma that was steadily sucking away at my vital energies and literally strangling the very life out of my body. No matter what we did to remove it, within a few hours?or at most by the next morning, the darkness would always have returned.

A trip to my doctor, a man who not only could see psychically but could also hear clairaudiently, brought me the answer I needed?but one that I could never have imagined, not even as a gifted and creative writer with what I thought was a very strong imagination.

The answer turned out to be very simple, I was dying of self-imposed guilt. Together, the doctor and I explored this particular past lifetime in whose events lay my cure and now meant my very survival. In it, I also found the answers to what I had done that was causing the guilt, and what it was that I now needed to heal.

The events of that lifetime had taken place in the area of the Gila River in what is now southeastern New Mexico more than seven hundred years ago. And, even though it had been unintentional, the repressed guilt I had felt from what I had done was now killing me in this lifetime because it had come time to deal with that very deep-seated level of my health.

What had I done that was so awful that I had carried it with me through seven hundred years and those numerous lifetimes in between? The answer was to be found at the cliff dwellings once built by the Anasazi before their sudden and mysterious abandonment of the area.

As anyone knows who has ever driven the torturous winding road into the Gila Wilderness, whoever lived there had once enjoyed a lifestyle that would have made Adam and his Eve jealous of this seemingly idyllic location. Fresh running streams, plenty of wild game, protection from the extremes of summer heat and winter cold, privacy from marauding enemies who might seek to destroy what these people had worked so hard to find and maintain, made this particular site a veritable paradise on Earth.

And what I learned about what was still affecting me so deeply was that I was the one responsible for this little slice of paradise having been abandoned. Not only abandoned, but indeed, having caused the brutal massacre of those who once enjoyed this paradise as well.

As the crow flies, the Gila Wilderness lies hundreds of the miles to the south of what was once the center of the Anasazi culture at Chaco Canyon, in northeastern New Mexico. As one of the head shamans of this culture at the time, it had been my responsibility, and indeed my greatest pleasure, to spend my days traveling from outlying community to community along what have been called ?the spokes of the wheel?. These were the giant roadways leading out from Chaco Canyon to sites such as the Gila, Portales, and Clayton; and out into what is now Colorado and Arizona to what were then only small settlements separated from the main group as experiments in subsistence living.
It was my duty to deliver the news of what was going on in other communities, to take fresh supplies of herbs and healing medicines on an exchange basis from one settlement to another, as well as spreading the new methods of healing which had been acquired along the way, and maintaining a spiritual connection between the center of the culture (the Source) and those who chose to live outside it. Like a traveling circuit judge of the Old West, I dealt with situations which arose much as a spiritual leader of the clan would have done, my trips being planned to coincide with the various sacred seasonal times of the year.

But it was on one particular day in early October all of seven hundred years ago that I found myself traveling the road to the Gila community with fresh supplies of summer herbs from up north to be exchanged for those which grew better further in the south.

(The following part of the story is taken over by that shaman as he recalls it).

My mind was occupied with various concerns about the forthcoming opening of the portal that would allow our peoples to return home to their own home planet should that be what the group decided they wanted to do. This knowledge of our ancestry and the methods by which we traveled to and from the Earth planet are fictionally related, but with a factual basis in research, by the great western author Louis L?Amour in his most popular book The Haunted Mesa.
Even our name came from the other ancient tribes of Indians who called us Anasazi meaning ?ancient enemy.? Even though we were a more highly evolved race of people than they, and lived only to be at peace in the early days of our existence here on this planet, they still considered us to be different, and so gave us this name to differentiate us from other tribes to whom they were related ?those with a Pleiadean ancestry in the stars. Our true enemies were the dark-skinned peoples who habit was to raid up into our territory from the part of the world that is now Mexico. They were a very warlike and barbaric peoples who would eat many parts of their vanquished enemies in order to gain their power. Thus it is that now your archeologists find skeletons which seem to indicate cannibalistic activity, but it was not of our own peoples. It was only those who were killed in defense of their homes and families who suffered this atrocity at the hands of these mindless savages. None of the bones that you now find are those of our true race of peoples. When you have dug down deep enough and learned the secrets of ancient Anasazi burial rights, then you will find out more about the secrets of the Anasazi.
Everything you now see as the remnants of our culture shows that we lived a defensive lifestyle, surrounding our major centers of population with outlying watchposts and encampments meant to warn of any impending danger. It was only after the main body of our peoples departed from the planet that those who were left behind mingled with your Pueblo Indians, teaching them how to live safely high up in the cliffs of small canyons much like the ones we once had in what is now called the Gila Wilderness.

(A return to myself)

Small, the largest of the Anasazi being only about four and a half feet tall, I can still feel the power of that ancient shamanic wiseman as he strode over the rough terrain, loving the feel of freedom in nature such as he had never found before on his home planet. Lost in thought and experiencing only the solitude of the moment, I was unaware on that fateful day of the small band of dark-skinned enemy lying in wait many miles away from my destination. Their intent had been to wait for someone to pass whom they could follow to the main body of the group. Whereas that person could have been anyone passing along the narrow trail that day, the person who it happened to be was me, the once powerful shamanic warrior of peace.

Unknowingly I led these bitterest of our enemies along the banks of the stream that is now the Gila River, through the dying stalks of the recently harvested corn which were planted along the valley, and right up to the very entrance of the small side canyon in which lay the cliff dwellings of our people.
It was then only a matter of a day or two after my arrival that the main body of the enemy attacked, setting fire to the drying corn stalks and thick vegetation at the entrance to the canyon, driving the flames and smoke up into the caves that housed our people. The men, women and children suffocated in the trapped position in which they then found themselves. Our men fought valiantly, but to no avail. The forces of the enemy were just too overwhelmingly large for the 60 or so people that we had in that place. Most of us were killed by the scorching flames as it rose into our nostrils and seared our skin with its heat. Although badly burned, I was one of the last left alive. The local shaman, a dear and wonderful friend even in this lifetime, died from the heat and smoke-inhalation while trying to work her way up to reach me. Only a few of us remained to be killed in other less pleasant ways, but we did not go alone. Although we were a short people, we were a very, very, powerful race, much like the Navajo and Hopi warriors of today, many of whom still carry within them the remnants of our ancient bloodline.

I took twenty-seven of them with me that day into the afterlife before I was finally vanquished by the sheer size of their numbers. Twenty-seven has continued to be a very significant number in this lifetime as well. It was twenty-seven years from the time I first dropped out of college in my youth until the time when I finally came to graduate with my first degree and get a position in my chosen line of work?7,000 miles closer to the Gila Wilderness than where I was born in this lifetime in Sydney, Australia. The number 27 has come up in so many other ways as well, but suffice it to say I feel like there was one year of unfulfilling life I have lived in this lifetime for every one of those enemy I killed that day.

And now, every September and October for the past few years of my life I had always felt down-in-the-mouth, lacking in energy, apathetic and not knowing why?until this particular year when the answers came to me why I had always been feeling that way. This year I needed to release the guilt of so many hundreds of years past, I needed to ask forgiveness of the spirits of all those dead Anasazi, and moreover to forgive myself for something I could not have helped. This year I had finally cleared out all the blockages that were keeping me from dealing with this most major problem that was now demanding my immediate attention . . . or die in the process.

It may sound strange, but I?m sure many of you reading this will understand how one can feel so guilty for something they have done, even though it really was not their fault. This is a human condition, to store away our repressed anger and guilt and emotional distress in so many forms. This can, however, also carry forward from lifetime to lifetime should we not choose to deal with it in this one. It does not always go away as we would sometimes wish it to. As a spiritual healer now, using much of what I knew or had learned from that lifetime as a shaman, I find most of my clients have similar issues to deal with?this being the nature of our lives in Soul and the progress through reincarnation (see my article Humanity vs The New World Order for a healing technique of forgiveness?David Icke E-magazine September, 2000).

I needed to forgive and to be forgiven, and this involved taking a trip back to the Gila Cliff Dwellings to acquire forgiveness, and then back to Chaco Canyon to also ask forgiveness from those whom I felt I had deserted in never returning from my trip. Neither was a place I had ever been to in this lifetime.

The trip to the Gila was an adventure in and of itself since I had been warned in advance by my guidance that my car would not make the full journey. After borrowing a friend?s car to make the rest of the drive from Las Cruces to the Gila, I snuck in to the Gila River canyon in between what turned out to be the worst floods on record in the area. Many of the roads were washed out, and traveling was dangerous, but I knew this had to be the time, and I knew that I was being watched by all those other souls who also wanted release from these feelings they had been holding onto for so long as well.

I managed to make it near the cliff dwellings late that night and slept in the car to await the new day and the final leg of my journey. My energy was almost totally exhausted the next morning as I got up to make the short trip up the side canyon to the dwellings. My doctor had led me to experience what it was I needed to do when I got there, and had told me that in my current state of near-death that I was down to using only about three-percent of my brain whereas the average person on a normal day is using somewhere around 15 percent of their brain. I thought of this as only having my pilot light on, and that morning it felt as if that too were about to be snuffed out.

I had been told that what I needed to do was to go up to the cliff dwellings and address myself to the chief and other head shaman of that time who would be there in spirit, to ask their forgiveness, and then to accept their forgiveness as well as accepting my own.

The forest service guard who opened the gate for me that particular Monday morning was a woman who was very interested in my story. As I intuitively felt at the time, and later had confirmed for me, she had also been one of the Anasazi there that fateful day seven hundred years ago. Now we were both there to resolve our pasts, bury the deep-seated grief and pain arising from that event, and then be able to get on with our own respective futures.

As I knew I would be, I was left alone in the dwellings for almost two hours that morning before other tourists started arriving. In that time I was able to perform my little ceremony of forgiveness, to ask for and to receive forgiveness, and also to let go of the guilt that had nagged at my soul lo these many hundreds of years.

As I sat with the guard at the entrance to the small side canyon later on and watched the new people arriving, I instinctively knew that many of these people had also been there that eventful day, people who were being led to share in this day of atonement and release for all.

Life returned to my body that very same day, and the next day I was back to normal, only healthier. The knees on which I could barely walk only a day or two before were now back to normal, and I showed my incredulous friends how I was able to dance a jig in celebration.

Since my journey seven hundred years ago had also been meant to cover some of the other outlying communities, I took time off work to make a pilgrimage to those other sites, to complete the various legs of the trip that I had started so many years ago. Two weeks later also returned to Chaco Canyon ?again? for the first time, completing the journey I had started all those seven hundred years ago.

The Anasazi were a peaceful people, a peaceful people who came to teach the other tribes how to live in harmony with the planet on which they existed, and with each other. Many of the sacred ways of the Hopi and the other Pueblo tribes come from the Anasazi teachings, as well as from their own admitted origins in the Pleiades. They are lessons we all must learn again, and very soon, for the Anasazi, ?the ancient ones? of time are returning, and if we do not heed their message in this critical time of existence, all our lives may once again be in danger.

2006-12-12