The first time I experienced this was around the year 2000. I was thinking back to an episode from my early childhood, when I was about four years old. I recalled being on vacation with my mother and studying some rabbits, which were in a cage. I could remember the scene very clearly, as I was going through it again, decades later, with my eyes shut. I could see the rabbits in the cage in front of me. As I was reliving that old memory, I suddenly became aware of something, that I hadn´t been aware of before. All of the sudden, I opened my eyes and stared in front of me startled. What I became conscious of so abruptly, didn´t make any sense. The rabbits I saw as a little girl were somehow… me.

But how on earth…? How could some rabbits in a cage be me? I didn´t understand it. What my consciousness was telling me was in stark contrast to what I had learned about this reality. It was impossible. People were people and rabbits were rabbits and if I was myself, I couldn´t be somebody else at the same time. I didn´t know what to think about it, so I tried to forget it. It made me uneasy. It felt as if the firm and safe ground, which I always had been standing on, all of the sudden became soft and strange. I judged it as too bizarre to tell anybody and avoided thinking about it. But it was only a beginning.

Not long after that, came September 11, 2001. I had been in the woods, picking wild mushrooms and when I came home, somebody I knew called me from the USA and told me to turn on the TV. When I saw the pictures from New York, I became very upset and afraid. What was happening? Why were they doing this to me? What had I done? I saw myself jumping from the towers, one me after another and I just wanted that to stop. I didn´t want to watch that, but I couldn´t stop either. How many of me had to die in this way? I was there, jumping from the buildings as I was watching it on TV - falling all the way down, together with each one of myself. Why were they killing me?

Some time after that, we got two new neighbours – two twin brothers in their fifties, who lived together. Even though they were identical twins, I had no trouble telling them apart. In fact – the opposite was true. When one of my acquaintances saw a picture of them and said, that they had to be twins, because they were identical, I thought: “How can she see that?”. All I saw, was how different they were. It took me a long time to learn to see their similarities and to discover, that there was, in fact, some resemblance there. It wasn´t easy. I had to take a step back, in a way. I had to stop myself from looking at the person and instead focus on the body alone. I had to concentrate my attention on the surface, instead of looking inside. I still couldn´t see, that they were identical, even though everybody else seemingly could.

Talking about identical twins – isn´t it strange how they almost never are quite identical? This is one of those areas, where scientists claim one thing but the real life experience shows something quite different. Anybody who knows identical twins knows, that in most cases they cannot fool everyone – there are always those people – usually among those, who are close to them – who have no trouble telling them apart. So while science claims that they have identical DNA and therefore are natural clones, people who actually experience them in real life keep telling us again and again: “they are really quite different”. If they had been truly identical and had grown up in the same environment, then it should be impossible for anybody to see any difference between them at any time. So it appears that either their DNA is not quite identical or – we are not our DNA.

When I first met them, I immediately recognised my grandmother, who had passed away few years earlier, in one of the twins, but not in the other. I was baffled by that, I couldn´t understand how it was possible – even though my grandmother was older than them, they were still contemporaries. I didn´t even believe in reincarnation and had no interest in such things (I still don´t). Besides, as for this kind of experiences, I feel, that reincarnation, whether one believes in it or not, has nothing to do with it. So how could there be my grandmother in another person? It couldn´t be. And yet that perception persisted. Every time I saw him, she was looking at me through his eyes, his laughter was her laughter, his humor was her humor, he would joke in identical way as she used to do, he would make the same, funny faces as she did, they spoke in the same way, it was the same personality. It wasn´t that they had something in common. Apparently, they had nothing in common. They were different genders, different nationalities, they came from different cultures and they looked very different, too. Apart from that, they were the same.

The two twin brothers resembled each other externally but were different within, while as for my grandmother it was the opposite. She was different from the twins on the surface, but she was identical to one of them, deeper down. As I wondered about this strange thing, I came to realise, that for some reason, my perception was gradually changing. As time went by, it became more and more natural and automatic to see straight into something deep down and at the same time, it would be more and more difficult to notice what was on the surface. That´s why I had trouble seeing the twins´ mutual resemblance, which everybody else noticed, while I instead registered something else, something within, beneath the surface.

Over the years, this new perception has become stronger and more persistent and the strange experiences, as the ones described here, have become daily occurrences and feel natural. I am not even sure if this is a new kind of perception, I think it´s possible, that it has always been there, but it has become much stronger in the last decade or so. Today, I would be mystified, if I looked at my neighbour and didn´t see my grandmother. I think, I might have trouble recognising him then.

Once, I bent down to pick up something from the floor in the bedroom and, to my horror, I saw some sort of a hairy caterpillar right in front of me. It was vigorously and at the same time, peacefully making its way across the floor to some unknown destination in the direction of the shelves. It was raising part of its body, creating some kind of a loop and then straightening it out again as it moved forward. I am usually disgusted by this kind of creatures, so I wondered frantically how I could get rid of it without having to touch it, when something stopped me in my tracks and made me take a second look at the little monster on the floor. I stared at it with disbelief for a long while. The caterpillar was… me.

I saw how my body instantly froze in one position, as the huge creature suddenly bent over me. I was waiting motionless on the floor, checking out the situation. What was happening? Was it dangerous? Would that giant hurt me? What should I do? The enormous creature above me, appeared to be frozen still, too. I was lying motionless for a long while, checking inside of me for the information on what to do. Finally, the feeling from the inside signalled: “Proceed”. Slowly, very slowly and hesitantly, I started to move forward again. Suddenly, I froze still again. Something was being done to me.

I managed to get the caterpillar on a magazine or something like that and I carried it outside. There, I lot it slide down on the grass and lost the sight of it. But I hoped, it was unharmed.

How could that be? How could I be both myself and a caterpillar at the same time? As long as I was just going through those experiences, they felt strange, but also natural at the same time. They didn´t bother me. But as soon as I tried to think about them, tried to figure them out, I felt uncomfortable. The more I thought about them, the more uneasy I felt. If I am somehow both myself and others, then what becomes of me? Is there something like a separate me? Do I have any personal identity or is it an illusion? I don´t want to be others, I want to be myself. I want that part of me, which is only mine, and nobody else´s. Without it, I am nothing. Without it, I don´t exist. Or do I? I don´t know, but the more I thought about those experiences, the more I tried to understand them, the more they felt like… death. They felt like dissolution of me. When I forgot to think, I was fine. Dissolved or not, I continued to exist.

Like with so many of my other strange experiences, there was something strongly paradoxical about this type, too. The more I learned about my personal identity, the more experiences of mirroring I had. The closer I came to my true self, the stronger the outside world seemed to be reflecting this self back to me. The more I managed to untangle myself from some people and relationships in my life, the more connection to everybody and everything I experienced. The more of a separate me I was becoming, the more of oneness I was getting. The more of myself I was, the more my life appeared to be showing me, that I was others as well.

At present time, I have these experiences daily and they don´t feel strange any more. They feel natural. It would feel strange if they suddenly stopped. Once, I saw Michael Jackson on TV. He showed up in court in his pyjamas, looking very much like a little boy, who had got lost in a dark forest and didn´t know what to do. Behind his mutilated face, there was fear and confusion. How has it come to this? What am I to do now? Why are they so angry with me? Why is everything turning bad? Which way is home? I recognised not just one, but two different persons I knew in him.

Another time I saw one of my friends in Yoko Ono. I can see one of my aunts in an English actor. I can recognise myself in the pine trees outside the window.

I don´t see that they all resemble each other. In most cases, there is no resemblance whatsoever. I see that somehow, behind the apparent differences on the surface, they are the same. Mirrors seem to be everywhere nowadays.

Apparently, our bodies differ from one another in every way. But they are all made of the same stuff. A hydrogen atom from one person is identical to a hydrogen atom from another person or from an animal and these atoms can easily be exchanged. And before we were born, the same atoms were in somebody or something else. And before that, they could be in a star. Is a person a star? If I eat a pear, that pear ends up inside of me. My body keeps the part of it, that it finds useful. What used to be a pear tree once is now a part of me. The same atoms that were once part of a tree, are now part of my body. But doesn´t this mean that part of me is, literally, the same as that tree? Is there any part of my body that is only mine? Is there any part of it that doesn´t come from somebody or something else?

I haven´t yet seen other reports of similar experiences, as the ones I have described here. But I can´t be alone. Surely, there must be others. I hope that they will come out of the closet one day.

Picture from: www.apartmenttherapy.com

Copyright © 2008 Aida Gundersen

25 August 2008

Parts of the horoscope active:

Neptune conjunct the Descendant

Aida square Neptune

Sun conjunct the Super Galactic Center, conjunct Roentgen

The South Node conjunct the Galactic Center

Mercury sextile Neptune

Mercury conjunct Uranus and Pluto

Moon square Uranus and Pluto

Moon square Chiron

Chiron in Pisces in the 12th house, Retrograde

Aida in Aquarius in the 11th house, Retrograde

Aida opposite Interkosmos

Saturn in Aquarius in the 11th house, Retrograde

Saturn conjunct Jung in Aquarius