It was towards the end of Ike Eisenhower's second term of office as President of the United States, in one of the two major hospitals of a mid-sized Midwestern town in the Bible belt; that is where I first saw the light of day in this life. 

I remember the first few days of my journey on this earth, looking up at the fluorescent lights, pinkish against a soft white ceiling as I lay on my back swaddled in baby blankets in the hospital nursery and unable to turn over. It was hard to sleep with that light always in my eyes. I remember that I later would often dream of that ceiling and of the frustrating feeling of trying to enter into this world through the birth canal. In these somewhat nightmarish repetitive dreams it would appear to me as if I were being forced to traverse a squarish shaped tunnel made of rigid concrete, and with barely enough space to pass through. 

Much later I would remember the physical feeling of being born, but that is another story. I remember the early part of my life in this way. My sister was to be married just about six weeks after my birth. I know it was at that time, because it was Christmas and the bridesmaids' dresses were in themes of red velvet and the decorations had poinsettias and such types of things. I just remember the old family photographs of the wedding. 

What I directly remember of that day, the day of the wedding, was that someone handed me to a bearded man and I started to become afraid and to scream.  Everyone standing around started to laugh, but I was terrified of the beard and I didn't think it was funny. The groom, however, was not bearded. He was a very tall and strapping blonde haired youth with looks befitting a movie star. My sister was dark-haired and lovely with bright red lips and pale, smooth, creamy skin, not unlike Snow White. 

So my mother had gone into labor and delivered in the early part of November and the wedding was to take place just before the holidays. She was given some kind of anesthesia for the delivery; I believe they knocked her out. That was typical in the fifties and of the nine live births, six had been handled that way in hospital. Only three of the children, born during WWII at home in attendance of my mother's primary care physician, a general practitioner, had been born without an anesthetic. Hence, she was not conscious of me at my birth itself. I was the eighth of the nine children, the ninth pregnancy of my mother, and the sixth female child.

Yes, I remember reliving my birth quite spontaneously while entering into an altered state of consciousness in a Berlin apartment on the 3rd floor of a back courtyard lower class dwelling in the early 90s. I lived there for seven years in total just at the border between Berlin-Schoeneberg and Berlin-Kreuzberg, until my first trip to India in 1996. I was trying to meditate and kept playing around with different methods and different types of breathing. I don't know if I read it in a book or why I was changing my breath. I just remember all at once experiencing, completely out of the normal sequence of time, the physical sensation of the feeling of the birth canal as it suddenly gave way as my head emerged from my mother's body, that the passage was elastic and tightened snugly around my neck as my head pushed through and I took my first breath. From that moment on, after reliving that event, I was to become more and more aware of not only my origins but also of my death in and to this world. 

I could feel the fear of my mother before I was born. I became conscious of it presently as I lay on the floor of that cold water flat in Berlin in my early thirties. The remembrance, the physical memory I was experiencing, had begun to "replay itself" at the point just before I was about to be born. I felt my mother. I was one with her in her entire emotional body. I didn't possess any feelings of my own, but was melded in my feelings with hers. These were feelings of strong trepidation, anxiety, a kind of frustration also. I was surprised at the strength of these feelings that were not at all mine, but that I was not able to escape. She seemed quite a timid woman. Either that or that is simply the condition of humankind upon this earth. Perhaps she wasn't particularly fearful by comparison as a person. I just remember that I felt what she was actually feeling, and apparently I had been bathing in that feeling for the whole of the pregnancy. Then, suddenly I came out of her body and breathed in the duality of this existence; and from then on I was on my own and was free to experience my own feelings. Or was I? 

It might have been sometime after this day in the early 1990s that I became aware of "knowing" two things: One, the exact hour, day and year that I am to leave this earthly plane, and two, the last words I had heard before I incarnated into this body, having been spoken by the wise men, the three wise elders who had surrounded me somewhere up there in the stars as I was getting ready to come to earth. They had all shared the same sentiment and the one with the longest beard had pronounced the judgment, not directly to me, but within my hearing: "The mission in this life is highly unlikely to succeed." That was the last thing I had caught as I had tumbled down to earth. That "memory" was suddenly a part of my history, after the spontaneous "rebirth".

Dear Reader,
In describing these events and the backgrounds to them as accurately as I possibly can, now, over six decades hence, I am aware of the subjective distortions and the melding of “memory” and the ideas of remembering with the notions we entertain as humans of what our life has become.
Also, perhaps unlike others, perhaps not, I must admit that I am not at all sure of the “source” of these “memories”. I am simply describing something that I experience as a memory or perhaps a story I have been told or have told to “myself” for the last so and so many years of my life. I cannot vouch for any of it, as I cannot be one hundred percent sure that I have lived any of it or all of it. I simply “remember” that this is what I feel happened, whether or not it actually did take place. These are the contents of my MIND and some of my feelings about those contents.