[cs_content][cs_section parallax=”false” style=”margin: 0px;padding: 45px 0px;”][cs_row inner_container=”true” marginless_columns=”false” style=”margin: 0px auto;padding: 0px;”][cs_column bg_color=”hsl(0, 6%, 91%)” fade=”false” fade_animation=”in” fade_animation_offset=”45px” fade_duration=”750″ type=”1/3″ style=”padding: 0px;”][cs_text]Landscapes, Memories, and Past Lives
I am often asked about landscapes. How some landscapes that we have never seen before feel familiar, reassuring, or threatening.
They feature strongly when I conduct past life regressions.
Two years ago I visited the Callanish Stones on Lewis in the Outer Hebrides. It was a profoundly spiritual experience. Not only did the standing stones cast a spell, but crucially, the landscape around is wholly undeveloped and unpopulated.
What I was seeing was what the people who built the stones saw. No-one knows exactly why they were built, when they were built ( probably around 5000 years ago) or what they were for. That only added to the sense of place and mystery.
One of our deepest needs is for a sense of identity and belonging. A common denominator in this is human attachment to landscape and how we find identity in landscape and place.
Landscape therefore is not simply what we see, but a way of seeing: we see it with our eye but interpret it with our mind and ascribe values to landscape for intangible – spiritual – reasons.
Landscape should not be looked on as simply a pretty picture or as a static text: rather it is part of a process by which identities are formed.
The connections, therefore, between landscape and identity and hence memory, thought, and comprehension are fundamental to understanding of landscape and human sense of place.
But memory of landscape is not always associated with pleasure. It can be associated sometimes with loss, with pain, with social fracture and sense of belonging gone, although the memory remains, albeit poignantly.
The past lives on in art and memory, it shifts and changes as the present throws its shadow backwards. The landscape also changes ,but far more slowly; it is a living link between what we were and what we have become. This is one of the reasons why we feel such a profound and apparently disproportionate anguish when a loved landscape is altered out of recognition; we lose not only a place, but ourselves, a continuity between the shifting phases of our life.
Landscapes are the repository of intangible values and human meanings that nurture our very existence. This is why landscape and memory are inseparable because landscape is the nerve centre of our personal and collective memories.
Whilst there exist relic or fossil landscapes, most cultural landscapes are living landscapes where changes over time result in a montage effect or series of layers, each layer able to tell the human story and relationships between people and natural processes.
I am very fond of the Heights of Abraham , Matlock, Derbyshire, hills which have been mined for 2000 years and worked methodically since Roman times. When you visit there you also visit the history of England. Landscape and identity are inherent components of our culture.
Unesco’s world heritage sites reflect that, a list can be found here:
http://whc.unesco.org/en/list/?&&&type=natural
Do landscapes have memories?
They certainly hold the memories of what has gone before. The rocks in their strata, the soil in its layers, the polar ice in its water content. So when we remember past lives, past landscapes are an essential part of that. Often providing a connection between the past, and the present.
For a past life regression to visit your landscapes and memories contact jane-osbornembs@outlook.com[/cs_text][/cs_column][cs_column fade=”false” fade_animation=”in” fade_animation_offset=”45px” fade_duration=”750″ type=”1/3″ style=”padding: 0px;”][x_image type=”none” src=”https://jane-osborne.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/stones.jpg” alt=”” link=”false” href=”#” title=”” target=”” info=”none” info_place=”top” info_trigger=”hover” info_content=””][/cs_column][cs_column fade=”false” fade_animation=”in” fade_animation_offset=”45px” fade_duration=”750″ type=”1/3″ style=”padding: 0px;”][x_image type=”none” src=”https://jane-osborne.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/many-lives-one-soul.jpg” alt=”” link=”false” href=”#” title=”” target=”” info=”none” info_place=”top” info_trigger=”hover” info_content=””][/cs_column][/cs_row][/cs_section][/cs_content]
