Life on The Seventh Cloud: 2017

Saturday, March 4, 2017

Shadows of the Flesh: Visualizing past lives

Apart from whatever religion you might be, you can't deny that there are still great mysteries about the human being that science can't discover, one of the reasons for this is that these mysteries are not a tangible/ physical thing to experiment with.

The soul is our essence, but where does it come from, and where does it go after our physical body is gone?

According to my religion: The Catholic Church teaches that God breathes a unique, immortal soul into every human being at the moment of conception. The soul does not exist before this moment (pre-existence is rejected), nor is it a physical product of biology.

The Breath of God

The foundational imagery of the soul's origin comes from the very beginning of scripture, where God infuses life directly into humanity.

Genesis 2:7 "Then the Lord God formed man of dust from the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living being."

The Catholic Church teaches that at the moment of death, the soul separates from the physical body. It immediately undergoes Particular Judgment, where its eternal destiny is decided based on its faith and actions during life.

Hebrews 9:27 "And just as it is appointed for men to die once, and after that comes judgment..."

The soul goes to its reward or punishment immediately after death:

1. Heaven

2. Purgatory

3. Hell

I believe it but I am a simple mortal, so I also believe that through history MEN probably changed religion, meanings and words for their benefit. So it is not wrong to believe that a concept like reincarnation or past life is attached to religion ( like these ones ).

Every time I take photos of places, monuments, or things that were made and belonged to a past era, I always feel attached to them, not only because I love past eras in terms of aesthetics, culture, society, lifestyles, etc., but also because I somehow feel connected to them. I have found online articles that discuss signs that your soul has reincarnated or that you lived a past life. Bear in mind that there are 2 theories: whether your soul might have reincarnated in the same body, thus you are repeating your life again and again until you learn what you are supposed to learn, or your soul reincarnates in different bodies and different eras.

-Signs your body has reincarnated : ( for more go here )

Recurring dreams.
Out of place memories.
You have a strong intuition.
Deja Vu.
You are an empath.
Precognition.
Retrocognition.
You feel older than your age reflects ( or maybe younger, hence you died at a young age).
You have a great affinity for certain cultures/time periods/environments.
Unexplained fears or phobias.
You feel as though this earth is not your home.

here.

Reincarnation:

It was also known as “metempsychosis” and “transmigration”. Reincarnation and the concept of past lives has existed for thousands of years, spanning back to the ancient Celtic, Greek, Asian and Indian traditions.

It was likely that indigenous tribes and oral cultures around the globe held beliefs about rebirth much earlier, the transition from abstract spiritual concepts into structured, written philosophy happened in a few specific texts, these are the earliest written records:

1. The Earliest Records: Ancient India (c. 800–600 BCE)

The oldest explicit, fully conceptualized written descriptions of reincarnation—known in Sanskrit as Punarjanman (rebirth) or Samsara (the continuous cycle of life, death, and rebirth)—are found in the Early Upanishads, which are ancient philosophical Vedic texts.

2. The Earliest Western Records: Ancient Greece (c. 500s BCE)

In the West, the concept was called metempsychosis (the transmigration of the soul). It popped up roughly a century or two after the Upanishads.

Wiccans:

Wiccans and many modern witches believe in a unique synthesis of the two concepts: the soul moves on to a beautiful resting place, stays there for a while to reflect and regenerate, and is eventually reincarnated into a new life.

Sunday, January 8, 2017

Victorian Remembrance: The Art of Post-Mortem Photography (Pt. 3)

To read about Victorian Mourning and Post-Mortem Photography Part 2: Go HERE

Some facts about the time: In the 19th and first half of the 20th century, everybody knew about death in childbirth, particularly those women who were about to go through the process. Although death rates from many other conditions were high, they at least were among people who had been ill beforehand. Death in relation to childbirth was mostly in fit young women who had been quite well before becoming pregnant. They died, often leaving the baby, and other children in the family from previous births, with a widowed husband.

To inmortalize this chirdren who had barely lived, the families used to decide to take a post mortem photography of their children, after all this was the only memorie the family would have of their angel.

It is only recently that the Church of England prayer book removed the service for the ‘churching of women who had recently given birth’ which starts by giving thanks to God for:

‘The safe deliverance and preservation from the great dangers of childbirth.’

From 1800 to 1950, maternal mortality was the yardstick for assessing maternity services and it was carefully examined by obstetricians. There were certain problems in defining maternal death (such as the inclusion of those associated with spontaneous abortions) and how long after delivery was the postpartum period. Until 1900 this was 1 month, and after that 6 weeks, with maternal deaths up to 1 year still being noted in Britain. It was also difficult to get the exact numbers of women dying in childbirth, for there was no national counting of deaths. Until the Registration of Deaths Act of 1837, one had to rely upon bills of mortality or parish registers.

Every modern, economically developed nation has experienced the demographic transition from high to low levels of fertility and mortality. America is no exception. In the early nineteenth century, the typical American woman had between seven and eight live births in her lifetime and people probably lived fewer than forty years on average. But America was also distinctive. First, its fertility transition began in the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century at the latest.

Other Western nations began their sustained fertility declines in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century, with the exception of France, whose decline also began early. Second, the fertility rate in America commenced its sustained decline long before that of mortality. This contrasts with the more typical demographic transition in which mortality decline precedes or occurs simultaneously with fertility decline.

American mortality did not experience a sustained and irreversible decline until about the 1870s. Third, both these processes were influenced by America’s very high level of net in-migration and also by the significant population redistribution to frontier areas and later to cities, towns, and suburbs.