This book is closed

This book was not born with the intention of being a book. It was born of a need.

I hope this book may help people who reach a moment in their lives when there seems to be no way out of the anguish or the problems they are going through. It is a book intended to set them on a path toward gaining as much clarity as possible to face those painful points.

You do not need to have lived through a regression, to believe in past lives or to be curious about hypnosis for these pages to be of use to you. The scenes that will appear are mine; the questions they left behind are far more universal. Guilt, fear, difficulty in setting boundaries, loss, attachment, the need for affection, exhaustion, uncertainty or the need to forgive oneself are part of many lives. My intention is not for you to reproduce my experience, but for you to be able to use what I learned in order to look at your own with more clarity.

Some chapters include audio recordings to make the book easier to use. Many people, when they are going through moments of great emotional intensity, cannot easily sustain reading; for them it may be better to listen to an audio recording, let the voice accompany them, and return to the text when they have the strength.

Some time ago I fell ill. The doctors gave it a name: burn-out syndrome and a recurrent major anxiety-depressive disorder, after two and a half years carrying workloads I didn't know how to put down in time. My doctor, to whom I owe so much, insisted that I couldn't go on like that, that I needed help, and she sent me to Puy's practice. I went there sceptical. I came out of that first session, and of the ones that followed, with the feeling of having woken up.

In those sessions of expanded consciousness —guided regressions— experiences, images and teachings began to appear. And, shortly afterwards, something harder to name: a channel through which answers started reaching me, answers to questions I had been asking myself my whole life. I don't know whether they come from my subconscious, from another plane or from a mixture of the two. That is why I began to write: so as not to lose any of what arrives before the source, one day, closes.

Here I want to pause for a moment to thank Puy, with all my heart. Throughout these sessions she has never judged me or told me what I had to do. She has given me something far greater: real understanding and absolute respect for every decision I have made during this process. Her companionship, her patience and her serene presence have been, without exaggeration, the support that has made it possible for this book to exist. You can find out about her work here.

I want to say this clearly, right at the start: I have decided to call these expanded-consciousness sessions “regressions” because it is the term that best allows me to order and narrate what I lived through. “Expanded consciousness” is also the expression with which I describe that state within my own process; I do not claim to present it as a universal clinical category or as a closed scientific explanation.

Every time you read the word “regression” in this book, I will be speaking of sessions carried out with professional accompaniment in which I remained conscious, could listen and answer, and in which images, bodily sensations, emotions and understandings of uncertain origin appeared. Some referred back to recognisable memories of my own life; others seemed to belong to settings that I experienced as if they were other lives or different realities.

I cannot prove what status those scenes had. I can tell what I experienced, what emotion they provoked, what interpretation I made afterwards and what changed in my life because of them. That distinction will matter throughout the book.

When I gathered all of it together, I realised I had a problem. There were very intense experiences, but they were written for me, in my own words and my own shortcuts. Anyone reading them without knowing the terrain would get lost straight away: I talk about expanded consciousness, about the economy of energy, about recalibration, about bodhichitta, about astral planes, as if everybody knew what I was talking about. And that isn't the case. It took me months to understand it myself.

An important note. This book recounts a personal experience and is not a substitute for medical, psychological or psychiatric care. Nor should a regression be used to abandon an indicated treatment, to prove that a memory really happened, to attribute uncorroborated events to another person, or to establish on its own the cause of a psychological problem. If you are going through intense suffering, a crisis, trauma, a substance-use problem or symptoms that seriously interfere with your life, the priority must be to receive appropriate professional help. Contemplative practices, writing, spiritual accompaniment or an experience of exploring consciousness can be, for some people, complementary resources; they are neither an obligation nor a single path.

That is why this book has two movements.

The first is called The Keys. They are short chapters, and their only mission is for you to take in, unhurriedly and effortlessly, each of the concepts I will speak about later: what a regression is, what the channel is, what sensitivity is, what energy is, what I understand by soul, what the teachings are that put everything in order, how to move from the experience to your own life, why music and who Pema Chödrön is. None of those chapters aims to exhaust the subject. It only aims to make sure that, by the time you reach the territory, you already have the map.

The second movement is the deepening. That is where the complete experiences are, just as they happened and just as I wrote them: the regressions, the channel, sensitivity, energy, music and some meditations on love born during this process of recovery and healing.

If you are one of those who prefer to dive straight in, you can jump directly to the second movement. But if you'll allow me a piece of advice, read it in order. The Keys are short, and they make everything else fall into place.

I have climbed into the boat. I still don't know where it is taking me. But I have decided to write for as long as the crossing lasts.

What comes now are short chapters. Each one presents a single idea, explains it calmly, and lets it rest. There are no full experiences yet, no proof, no details: only the concepts you will need so that, later on, everything I tell makes sense.

Read them the way you would look at a map before walking into the forest.

Before I tell you anything, I need to ask you for something. It is not a condition: it is a pact.

In the pages that follow you are going to read that I was an Eastern boy who brought a snake into his house as if it were a toy and that the snake killed his mother. That I was an officer who put innocent peasants to the katana. That I crossed a portal and appeared in a building where life was being created. If you ask me to swear that all of it happened literally, I cannot. And if you ask me to deny it, I cannot either.

I come from a Catholic family. I have never stopped believing in God, nor in the coming of his son to Earth; Christ's compassion, his self-giving and his gaze toward those who suffer are still an essential part of my faith. But over the years I also took the Buddha's teachings into my soul.

Tradition tells that the Buddha, on his way to enlightenment, was meditating beside a river. Down its course a boat was drifting gently, and in it a master was teaching his disciples to play a stringed instrument. And the Buddha heard him say: “Do you see? If you tighten the strings too much, they will break. But if, on the other hand, you do not tighten them, the instrument will not sound.” There he understood what we call the middle way.

That is what I am asking of you. Neither to tighten until it breaks, declaring that all of this is literal. Nor to loosen into silence, dismissing it as delirium. I have no means of assigning a probability to either possibility. That is why I prefer not to feign a precision I do not possess. I do not claim that everything is literal, but neither do I need to deny what I lived in order to examine it. I keep the question open and work with what I can actually observe.

And I want to be very clear about one thing, because it is one of the beams that hold up the entire book: for the practical purpose of these pages, I do not need to settle first the ultimate nature of each scene.

If these experiences were real memories of other lives, their spiritual meaning would be obvious within that framework. And if they were constructions of my mind or of my imagination arising during the session, they would still hold for me a different but real value: they would have placed before me emotions, fears, conflicts and patterns that I was later able to relate to my present life. What I cannot do is turn that usefulness into proof of their origin, or claim that a scene, on its own, reveals the clinical cause of an illness.

In both cases I can work with what I felt and with what I did afterwards. The interpretation may remain open; my responsibility for my present life may not.

I must also make another distinction. An image lived with enormous vividness does not thereby become a proven historical memory. Human memory is reconstructive, and hypnotic or highly suggestible states do not guarantee greater accuracy of recall. That is why, if any scene in these pages resembles a memory, I will treat it first as a subjective experience. Only facts that can be corroborated by independent means should be presented as facts.

This precaution does not diminish what I felt. On the contrary: it allows me to be faithful to the experience without forcing it to prove something it perhaps cannot prove.

It is also worth your knowing where my doubt is not. It is not placed on Puy, my therapist. I trust her deeply, and I trust the way she accompanies me. My doubt lies in the ultimate nature of what appears during expanded consciousness, which is precisely what I cannot name.

That is why you will not find anyone here trying to convince you of anything. You will find a man who fell ill, who saw things, who wrote them down honestly and who decided to stay in the center.

If you agree to read it this way —without the obligation to believe and without the rush to deny—, this book can serve you. That is the pact.

To take in

Faced with any experience in this book, try separating three questions: what did I experience, or what is described as having appeared? What interpretation am I making of it? What concrete change can be observed afterwards?

Then ask yourself: if the scene were symbolic, would there still be something useful to learn? If it were literal, would the practical teaching change? When the same understanding helps you live better in both scenarios, there is no need to rush into a metaphysical certainty.

All of this began because I fell ill.

For two and a half years I carried a workload that was never mine to carry. I asked for help through the official channels, with emails copied to all of my superiors, trying to make as much noise as possible. It did me no good. It was already too late.

The diagnosis was burn-out syndrome and recurrent major anxiety-depressive disorder.

My current doctor, whom I cannot address as “tú” but only as “usted,” had a great deal of patience with me. One day, during one of the check-ups, she told me that I couldn't go on like this, that I wasn't making progress, that I needed help. And she sent me to Puy's office. I have to admit that I decided to go because it was she who was recommending it, since I remained fairly skeptical.

The illness did not come alone. Anxiety pushed me toward compulsive behaviors: smoking more than I should, drinking one beer after another, as if by doing so I could analyze the situation better or calm down whatever was happening to me. And it came to alter my perception in a way that still astonishes me: one day I opened the music app on my phone, the one I had always used, and I was certain that someone had changed it completely. I couldn't find the options, I didn't recognize where my library was. Only after staring at the screen for a while did I begin to recognize it all and understand that the app was still the same one.

And now I have to say something very carefully, because I don't want it to be misinterpreted.

Sometimes I feel that it was almost necessary to have gone through this illness in order to get here. I don't say it as a justification of suffering, nor as a way of making pain beautiful. I say it as an intimate understanding that is beginning to make its way inside me: as if the wisdom obtained from these processes were part of an incredibly complicated puzzle that I was destined for.

But I qualify it right away, because I believe free will exists. I feel that this experience could just as easily have arrived by another road. I could have turned up at Puy's office for another reason —the loss of a loved one, for example, instead of a burn-out— and she would have been there to help me all the same. What changes is the form in which the experience appears, not the experience itself. It is as if the same scene were painted by Rembrandt or by Picasso: looking at them with our eyes we believe we are seeing two completely different paintings, and in part that is true; but if we look with the spirit, we perceive that the essence behind them is the same. What is depicted has not changed.

The illness was a painful piece, difficult and almost unbearable. But it was also the crack through which the light came in.

The nuance

The illness was the crack through which the light came in, but that doesn't turn it into a gift, nor does it justify the suffering. Free will exists: what changes is the form in which the experience appears, not the experience.

It's worth your knowing what this is, because the word “regression” drags a lot of fantasy along with it.

In my experience, a regression was not lived as being asleep, nor as losing control completely. I remained aware of Puy's voice, I could answer her and I knew I was taking part in a session. That state, within this book, is what I call expanded consciousness. It is a way of naming how I experienced it, not a clinical category that claims to define anything universally.

In that state scenes, images, bodily sensations, emotions and associations appeared that I did not experience as ordinary voluntary reasoning. That something appears in that way does not allow us to determine automatically where it comes from. Precisely for that reason I will always separate the experience from the interpretation.

What appears isn't a film either. Almost always it starts out as a photograph inside a picture frame that I'm looking at. Sometimes that photo takes on a slight movement. In general, my visual perceptions have been very faint; except for a few, which became extraordinarily sharp, above all when I was looking at landscapes on other planets or the interiors of buildings: there the colors and the structures had an incredible vibration and harmony.

The method is simple. Puy asks; I describe what I perceive. When she wants me to move from one place to another, she accompanies the movement with a count: “one, two and three.” And here something appears that will turn out to be important later on: sometimes, before she had even begun to count, I was already there; other times she reached three and there was no way I could get there at all.

The body is the main route of access. The throat that closes up, the hands, the nerves, the shivers. The information comes in through there before it comes in through the head.

There are resistances too, and they are very physical. In several sessions I wanted to turn my neck to see who was on my right and I couldn't: it was as if my neck were made of stone and I, with my brain, were trying to move it without managing to. The movement was denied me over and over again.

And there is something I want to say without drama, but clearly: not everything is possible. There are scenes that refuse. In some sessions I experienced the presence of what I described as entities: within the experience I felt that they interfered, that they did not want to answer, or that they even asked me to abandon the session. I do not know what nature those perceptions had, and I do not present them as an external verification; I am recounting how they were lived from the inside. Expanded consciousness is not an à la carte catalog.

Finally, a practical detail I discovered late. In my case I found that I arrived at these sessions in better condition when I had rested and was not physically exhausted. The more energy I brought from this plane, the more capacity I had to sustain the experience. I note it as a personal observation, not as a universal clinical rule. Why this is so you will understand in the chapter devoted to energy.

The frame of accompaniment

Having a professional whom I knew and trusted gave me a frame of accompaniment for passing through intense emotional material. The guidance does not eliminate the uncertainty about what appears, but it creates a frame where the material can surface without completely overflowing. That trust does not make every image true, nor does it guarantee that any given technique is appropriate for any given person. It means, in my case, that I was not exploring alone something that could stir me deeply.

If a practice of this kind significantly increases distress, disorganises everyday life or reactivates traumatic experiences that are hard to hold, the responsible answer is not to force the experience further, but to stop and seek appropriate professional guidance.

If you try to read an entire regression all at once, you will get lost in the details: the snake, the horsehair helmet, the color of the kimono, the scales of the breastplate. The details matter, but they are not the message.

It took me months to realize that, every time I tried to understand a session, I was always doing the same thing without knowing it. First I looked at what had appeared. Then, where it had touched me in the body. Then I searched for the sentence that remained when everything else faded out. And finally I asked myself what had to change in my life.

There are four layers, and it is best to descend through them in order: scene → emotion → teaching → integration.

The scene is what appears: a night ocean with a bottom as thick as chocolate, an Oriental boy, a meadow, a breastplate of jet-black scales, a golden temple, a portal opened in the middle of nowhere, an immense machinery on a planet without a single leaf.

The emotion makes the scene meaningful and shows how the experience was lived from the inside: guilt, hatred, loneliness, fear, sadness, uncontainable laughter. It is almost always felt in the body before the head: in the throat, in the chest, in the arms. Its intensity does not prove that the scene was historical, but it does allow us to recognise the affective experience that was taking place.

The teaching is the simple sentence that remains at the end, like someone leaving a note on the table: to forgive myself; to say no, and to say it in time; not to claim more than I know; to look after my energy; to love without possessing.

Integration does not prove what the regression was. It proves something different and more modest: that the experience produced an observable change. A boundary set, a rest taken, a guilt revisited, a decision that had been waiting for years, a line of ants that is no longer stepped on: all of that already belongs to present life.

Layer — Question — What we get

Scene — What appeared? — The lived or symbolic material.

Emotion — What did I feel and where did I notice it? — The affective and bodily experience.

Teaching — What understanding remained? — A possible transferable reading.

Integration — What changes in my life? — A behaviour, a boundary, a decision, a forgiveness or a new way of looking.

And now notice a consequence that was very hard for me to accept: the scene is the most spectacular layer and, paradoxically, the least necessary in order to check whether something helped me. I can go on doubting whether that Oriental boy existed. I can state that during the experience I felt guilt with enormous intensity, that afterwards a teaching about forgiveness appeared, and that this teaching influenced the way I began to look at certain guilts in my present life.

That is why, when you enter the second part, do not read to find out whether it is true. Read by descending through the four layers.

An important precaution

A regression must not be used as proof to accuse another person, to reconstruct as true an episode that cannot be corroborated, to establish the cause of an illness, or to take on its own a medical, judicial or safety decision. An inner experience can open important questions; when the answer depends on external facts, those facts need external evidence.

Golden rule

It is not about accumulating extraordinary episodes, but about seeing which dimension of the same path each one teaches. The scene is the layer that draws the most attention and teaches the least.

After the sessions —or perhaps long before, without my having recognised it— I began to pay far more attention to certain brief phrases, images, associations and intuitions that appeared spontaneously. Something was left open.

In order to speak about it I needed a name, and I chose “channel.” It is a term that describes my experience, not the claim that I have demonstrated an objective route of communication with another plane.

I do not hear external voices, nor do I see texts projected in front of me. I experience it as a mixture of intuition, image, sensation and sudden thought; something resembling someone whispering to me, at a very low volume, from behind my field of vision. I could not tell you whether it is a male or a female voice, young or old. Sometimes I interpret it spiritually; other times I consider that it may be a production of my own mind. I have no conclusive way of settling it.

The answers never arrive as treatises or as closed explanations. They arrive as brief phrases, images, symbols or memories. “They are your food.” “They were defending their community.” “It is a shamanic instrument.” “Energy.” I am given just enough for me to reason it out afterwards. The teaching does not arrive closed: it arrives open, and the work of closing it is mine.

When does it arrive? I have observed two moments. One is calm: coming home tired, taking a shower and lying on the bed for a few minutes. Little arrives there. The other is nervous excitement, and there it arrives in torrents. It is like switching on a television: you press the button and, suddenly, all the electrons in the circuitry begin to move. It has happened to me while driving, in that minimal instant of tension when calculating whether I will make the traffic light while it is still green; while doing complex tasks; while listening to music that moves me; while watching a scene from a film that carries me away.

And that is where the rage appears, because I know something important is arriving and I do not have a pen at hand, nor paper, nor a computer. I was given a mnemonic to hold on to it —repeating it out loud—, but I cannot always use it: if I am talking with someone I am not going to start reciting, because they would think there was something wrong with me.

I have learned to distinguish two types of messages. There are the answers to vital questions, the ones you throw into the air for years without expecting a reply. And there are the clarifying memories, which do not answer anything old, but instead come afterwards to complete or explain a scene that had been left open in the regression.

There are also failed communications: dizzying bursts of images that I can barely make out and that vanish at once. I think they are transmissions that begin and are cut off, like when you try to tune in a radio station and all you hear is someone talking inside a tin can, or like a cassette tape that loses tension and gets tangled inside the tape player.

There is a third place where all of this falls into order, and that is meditation. Sometimes I sit down to meditate and afterwards I transcribe what has appeared. Other times the information does not arrive while meditating, but in a quiet, everyday moment, without my having looked for it. The first of those meditations was the attempt to understand something very simple and very enormous: what love is.

And there is a word that arrived to name this whole stage. I asked for some help that would define what was happening to me and a single word appeared in my mind: recalibration. It is an industrial term; it describes the optimization of a piece of machinery so that it runs better. I cannot think of a more exact description, nor a more humble one, of what is going on inside me.

All of this has a price. There are days when I am exhausted by mid-morning, and it is not only physical tiredness: it is as if the process of receiving, ordering and recalibrating consumed an enormous amount of energy before the day had even got going. Hold on to that word —energy—, because it will come back.

Where does all this come from? I do not know. Perhaps it is my mind. Perhaps my subconscious. Perhaps an outside entity. Perhaps a mixture of several things. I cannot rule out absolutely the interpretations I consider, but neither can I treat them as facts merely because I do not know how to rule them out. I can hold them as possibilities and, in the meantime, observe their usefulness, their coherence and their effects.

And I want to make one thing clear, so as not to claim more than I know: perhaps these channels did not open as a result of the regressions. Perhaps they had been open for a long time and it was I who discarded what arrived, taking it for useless notions. Perhaps it does not happen only to me, but to many people who do not realize it. Puy may simply have been the one who placed it in front of me.

What I can state is that Puy's accompaniment changed the way I observe myself. I lived it as an awakening with respect to certain automatisms I had been repeating for years: working without limits, reacting without listening to my body, and moving forward out of inertia without asking myself what I actually needed.

What matters, for now, is that the information arrives. And that I must write it down before the source runs dry.

Rule of inner hygiene

Not every image has to be forced until it becomes meaning. Some are written down, left to rest, and only retrieved if they come back with clarity. Sometimes an image is not a revelation: it is an incomplete attempt at communication.

When in these pages I relate sensitivity and perception, I am speaking of a hypothesis born of my own experience. I cannot claim that there is an objective relationship between being more sensitive and receiving information from an external plane. I can state that, when I am more attentive to my body, my emotions and the nuances of what happens around me, I perceive more things that used to go unnoticed. That fact alone already has practical value.

Read in a practical way, this chapter also speaks of something everyday: some people need more rest, more boundaries and more care of their surroundings in order not to become saturated.

If the channel is a radio station, sensitivity is the cable.

Everything I keep perceiving points to the same idea: sensitivity improves the capacity for perception. It doesn't mean that a less sensitive person can't receive anything; it means that sensitivity makes communication easier. It's like the difference between wiring a house with high-quality cable, shielded and protected against interference, and rigging up temporary wiring pinned to the wall with thumbtacks. In the second case, if you plug in a bulb, it may flicker. Not because the electricity doesn't exist, but because the channel isn't properly prepared.

But sensitivity isn't only emotion. Over time I've been discovering what it's made of, and the list surprises me: it's the upbringing in how to conduct yourself that my parents instilled in me, which isn't about saying good morning but about realizing that the other person exists; it's the naivety and the innocence that have cost me so much grief; it's curiosity, not the meddling kind, but the technical, scientific and human kind; it's compassion; it's the capacity for wonder; it's the pain at an animal's suffering; it's the care of someone holding a flower in their hands who doesn't want it damaged.

And it comes at a high price. Sensitivity has made me naive. It has made me believe someone who was mocking me. It has led me to take on the work others left on my desk. It has made me feel betrayed, with that sensation of being pawed at inside, as if something pure had been touched without care. It has made me live bonds and losses with too much intensity.

You feel it in the body, and I have learned to tell the shivers apart. There is one that appears when a new teaching reaches me: it is felt in the triceps and behind the ears, and it is a bodily “wow,” an inner celebration. There is another that appears when something overwhelms me: it starts at the shoulders, drops down to the hands and runs along the legs, as if I were the cable an electrician uses to splice two ends together. That one doesn't say “wow.” It says: this is beyond you.

Alongside sensitivity something else is needed: an open mind. There are perceptive minds, ones that listen and observe without immediate objections, and there are minds that laugh at what they don't understand and close themselves off out of conviction. One of my favorite lines, which I remember being attributed to Gerry Spence, says it better than I can: I would rather my mind be opened by curiosity than closed by conviction.

There are also two traits of mine that I still don't quite know where to place, but that I suspect are part of this.

The first is discursive thinking. When I face a complex problem that fails intermittently, I start talking to myself: I argue about where to check, where the fault might originate; sometimes I feel that I am talking to the problem itself. It happens to me with everyday problems too. My lips move without a word coming out, as if I wanted someone to read my lips. But the reality is that I need to analyze information in a different way from how everyone else analyzes it.

The second is ADD. I was diagnosed recently. On the sustained-attention tests the result was disastrous: the moment the task turns monotonous, my mind wanders off. But on the complex tests, the ones with those very strange figures that hold a correlation, I didn't miss a single one. The psychologist explained to me that with ADD there are things you're bad at and things you're good at, and that in the end it is like trying to level a scale: a shortcoming is offset by a virtue. I wonder —and I want to work on it with Puy— whether that disorder conceals some quality that has to do with all of this.

And there is something else I have observed, and it doesn't depend on me but on other people. When someone is going through a problem, whether of health or of any other kind, kind people appear who help them. But the help is twofold: on one side there is the advice, and on the other it is as if you could perceive, very subtly, a sharing of energy that shows you the way. I don't experience it only as help, but as an amplifier: something that makes your sensitivity wake up and be there to hold you.

For years I thought my sensitivity was my weakness. I am beginning to suspect that it is, precisely, the tool.

Over time I have also come to understand something that may be useful even if the reader shares none of my spiritual interpretations: being sensitive does not oblige you to be available to everyone. Perceiving a great deal does not mean having to carry everything. Sensitivity without boundaries can turn into exhaustion, people-pleasing or self-abandonment. Looking after it also means learning to withdraw, to rest, to ask for help and to say no.

Core idea

Sensitivity can be a valuable capacity for perception, but it needs boundaries, rest, a cared-for body and interpretative prudence. Perceiving intensely does not automatically turn an interpretation into truth.

I use the word “energy” here in the sense in which it appeared within my experiences and within the model I built afterwards. I am not claiming to have measured an unknown physical energy, nor am I describing an established scientific mechanism. It is a personal model that helps me order why some images appeared and others did not, why some emotions were felt with enormous intensity, and why I ended some sessions exhausted.

The reader may keep this spiritual model if it is meaningful to them, or translate it into entirely everyday language: attention, mental effort, emotional activation, rest and physical resources are limited. In either language a practical teaching remains: we cannot go on indefinitely spending our resources on what is destroying us.

This is, perhaps, the most important concept in the book, and also the hardest to explain. If you take it in now, you will understand almost everything that comes afterward.

In my experiences not everything is shown to me. Some images appear complete and others do not. Some senses switch on and others stay blocked. I could smell the burnt wood, but not the blood. I saw the upper part of an officer, never his whole body. I could not turn my neck. I could not see the rest of my family.

For a long time I read all of that as failings of my own: a lack of sharpness, a poor capacity to visualize, fear. Until I began to ask. When, already in the transcription phase, I would inwardly throw out questions of the sort “why can't I read this? why can't I see that?”, different visions began to reach me: words that seemed written on a document with a black background and white lettering, appearing and disappearing intermittently, like a tic. And the word was always the same:

Energy. Energy. Energy.

From there was born the model that puts everything in order. The experience works like an optimizer: it does not seek completeness, it seeks symbolic efficiency. Its principle is to obtain the maximum meaning with the minimum expenditure of energy. It does not reconstruct the whole scene; it selects only what contains the necessary emotional or spiritual truth.

From this follows something beautiful that I want you to hold on to: absence is information too. That I don't see someone does not mean emptiness. That I can't smell something is not an incapacity, but a selection. Every gap answers a question: what would showing that have consumed? What received that energy in its place? What teaching was that omission protecting?

And energy is not reserved only for pain. In the experience of the little girl whose father marches off to war I could not see anyone else from my family, and now I know why: all the energy had to go to something else. To the sensation of my father lifting me up very high, to my little legs swinging back behind me, to the tickle in my chest and an endless laughter. It was the greatest happiness I have felt in all my experiences. Energy also protects what is essential.

Over time I have distinguished several functions: energy of visualization, sensory, emotional, narrative, of action and of recharging. Even the stammering, that short circuit that comes over me when Puy asks something of me, seems to be a signal that I need to recharge on an intermediate plane before I can go on.

And then comes the leap that changes everything, and that no longer speaks of regressions but of my life. If in the experiences energy is never squandered, if it is always reserved for what is essential, why did I spend years of my vital energy holding up the very thing that was destroying me? Enduring, justifying, resisting, not breaking away, not acting.

Learning to say no is also a form of economy of energy: withdrawing it from what has turned deeply negative and reserving it for what I must protect. My dignity, my health and my future.

Key concept

An experience does not show everything possible: it shows that for which there is energy, that which can transform and that which the system can hold without breaking. And its practical corollary: if a piece of information demands damaging rest, health or stability, it is not being integrated correctly.

What follows is the way the soul was represented to me during one of the sessions. I tell it as a spiritual and symbolic experience; not as a proven description of the structure of the universe. The image I received represented the soul to me as something not limited to a single biography: that is the spiritual understanding I drew from it, not a factual description I can prove scientifically.

In one of the sessions I strayed from what Puy was asking of me and asked, on my own, something I had carried inside my whole life: I asked about the soul.

I was shown a book with white covers, though not a uniform white. It had many pages, and each page bore a marker resembling a yellowish, transparent sphere. Those spheres moved very fast from one page to another.

It was explained to me that the nature of the soul is not what we understand here, on the physical plane, and that we could not grasp its whole concept. I asked for a simile, and I was given one: each of those pages represents a portion of the soul. One of them is the portion living on the physical plane. The rest are other portions that are on other planes, other universes or other dimensions.

It is not exactly a matter of space-time, nor of the multiverse understood in a simple way. What I was able to glimpse was another simile: imagine you could travel through time with the dial of an analog radio, moving it back and forth. That concept is too simple. Now imagine that the dial is not a line but a sphere; and that this sphere has no fixed dimension: it is infinite. It can fit between your hands or be as large as a planet. Moving a point within that sphere places you somewhere: Earth now, Earth in another age, or another kind of universe altogether.

That fit with something I had read. In books by psychologists who use clinical regression hypnosis, many patients who reached the moment of disincarnating and passed toward the light were surprised to find there people who were still alive on the physical plane. I joined that reading with what had just been transmitted to me and felt that I understood it: our soul is not bound exclusively to our body.

And it also fit with another reading that had intrigued me for years. A book proposed a speculative explanation of déjà-vu by means of parallel worlds and concepts borrowed from quantum physics: a déjà-vu could be a memory that reaches our present consciousness from another self, from another parallel world, who has lived the same experience a few seconds or a few minutes earlier. That other self would have arisen from a binary decision —“do I marry this person or not?”—: in the instant the question opens, two universes would be generated, one for each answer, and both lives could cross paths at some point in a very subtle way. That reading had impressed me and may have formed part of the material with which my mind built the scene. I do not present that explanation as an established result of physics: I mention it because it was in my memory and because it influenced the way I interpreted what I saw.

Alongside this there appear other notions that I will be using and that it is worth your knowing.

Within the spiritual framework of these experiences, I call the astral plane the one where, according to that reading, we all appear once we disincarnate, and where we remain for a time until the soul finishes shedding its layers, the shell of the earthly life we have had. I do not present it as a demonstrated plane of existence.

Within the same reading, entities appear. In one session, the answer I experienced was that there were entities feeding on my hatred; I live it that way, within the scene, and not as an external verification. According to certain spiritual readings, and also according to psychiatrists who have worked with regression, others would be disincarnate beings who in life abused tobacco, alcohol or sex, and who draw near to those who practice those same behaviors. And there are mocking entities, which simply laugh and play a joke on you. I record these descriptions as part of the language with which I order my experience, not as verified facts.

In the image I received there are places where there are no hierarchies or social ranks as we understand them here, but there are indeed superior entities that give instructions and others of us who carry them out; and where, when a task is too complex, several beings join together and act as a single being.

And there are portals. I saw one open in the middle of nowhere, with no wall or physical place to hold it, and on the other side there was another building. The message seemed clear: you do not need spacecraft like ours to travel through space or through time.

One last image remains that I want to leave with you here, although the full experience of it will come later. In one regression I saw a completely desert planet, without a single leaf, and inside an immense machinery a being that processed millions of data per second before a bluish light that I knew was light of information. On leaving that chamber it showed me an artifact, and when Puy asked me what it was, I answered without thinking: a sower of life. And then I said a word: panspermia. The theory that life could have been scattered through the universe by delivering to the planets embryos that would later give rise to more sophisticated forms.

I acknowledge that I had already read about panspermia, just as I had read about the Shemsu-Hor before encountering them. I cannot rule out that my subconscious built the scene with materials that were already in me. The pact of the first chapter returns: I neither affirm it nor deny it.

Caution

I had already read about the Shemsu-Hor and about panspermia before encountering them inside. That does not invalidate the experience, but it demands caution: the material could already have been in me.

If I had to sum up in a few pages everything I have learned, it would be this. I am not asking you to take it all in right now; each one unfolds later on, with its own story and its own pain. I just want you to know where we are heading: five central teachings and four learnings that run through them.

First: to say no, and to say it in time. When I came out of the regression in which I was an officer who obeyed atrocious orders, I said the teaching was “knowing how to say no.” It struck me as ridiculous. You expect to come to this plane with loftier duties, with some metaphysical power, not with something so mundane. But it was exactly that. And there is a nuance that makes it terrible: it is not enough to set the limit, you have to set it before the harm is irreversible. In that life my hands were already stained with blood by the time I tried to refuse. Even if they had executed me all the same for refusing from the start, at least my hands would have been clean.

Second: to forgive yourself. Not all guilt corresponds to a real responsibility. I was a boy who brought a snake into the house as if it were a toy, and that snake killed my mother. I spent an entire life bent under the weight of an accident. The teaching came at the end, when I was already an old man sitting under a tree waiting for death: I had to forgive myself. Everything that belongs to that body stays there. The compassion Christ taught me to direct toward others must also be directed toward oneself.

Third: to let go. In the experience I was a girl who watched her father leave for the war with the certainty that he would not come back. The scene left me with a very strong spiritual understanding: life was represented to me as a chapter within something larger, and love as something not exhausted by a farewell. That is my reading, and I cannot present it as a certainty about what happens after death.

There is, however, a teaching that does not depend on accepting that interpretation: a loss can become fixed at the instant when we understand that something will never again be as it was. Letting go does not mean forgetting, nor ceasing to love. It means no longer demanding that reality return to a form that has already ended, and learning to carry the bond, the memory or the love in another way.

Fourth: to love without possessing. Attachment says “I need you,” “I can't live without you”; it tries to bind the other person and turn their presence into a condition for our own stability. True love looks straight into the other's heart. Sometimes loving means letting go, and even accepting that the other person may find with someone else the happiness they no longer found with you. And from that follows something it pains me to see all around me: life should not become a waiting room where we sit until a partner appears, nor should we consider ourselves incomplete in the meantime. When love arrives, it will have to find us living.

Fifth: affection. Loving does not consist only in feeling something inside yourself. Love that is not shown may exist within a person, but it can hardly be recognized by the one who needs to receive it. That is why affection is not a secondary element or a superficial expression: it is the way love draws near to the other, becomes visible and can be felt. Affection is coming closer. It is showing up. It is letting the other know they have been seen. I know this well, because the oldest memory I keep of my life is being alone in my crib, gripping the bars, waiting for someone to come.

Four learnings that run through the five teachings

First: learning to live with not knowing. Not every question has an accessible answer. I do not know what my regressions exactly were, and I have had to learn that uncertainty does not invalidate the experience. In everyday life the same thing happens: we may never know why someone acted in a particular way, what would have happened had we chosen otherwise, or what awaits us after a loss. Growing up also consists in not filling every gap with an invented certainty.

Second: listening to the body before building an explanation. Many of my experiences began in the throat, the chest, the hands or the stomach before turning into words. This observation can be transferred to any life: before analysing why we are angry, frightened or sad, we can stop and recognise what is happening physically. The body does not resolve the interpretation on its own, but it can warn us that something deserves attention.

Third: looking after one's own resources. I have explained it through the idea of the economy of energy. The reader may understand it in a spiritual sense or simply a human one: we have limited attention, physical strength and emotional resources. A life devoted to sustaining destructive situations indefinitely ends up taking its toll. Resting, asking for help and setting boundaries are also ways of caring for what we have to go on living with.

Fourth: sensitivity does not mean self-sacrifice. For years I sometimes confused understanding others with putting up with too much. Being sensitive can help us listen, perceive and care, but it does not oblige us to accept any burden whatsoever. Sensitivity needs discernment and boundaries so as not to become a form of self-abandonment.

The five central teachings still point in the same direction: there are things that hold us back —the yes we did not know how to refuse, the old guilt, the loss that fixes itself in place, the attachment that ties— and we need to learn to relate to them in another way. The four cross-cutting learnings add the method: tolerating uncertainty, listening to the body, caring for our resources and protecting sensitivity with boundaries.

To take in

None of these teachings reached me as a piece of moral advice. They all arrived embodied in a scene, with a body that felt them. Perhaps that is why they are not forgotten.

When I relate music, rhythm and states of consciousness, I do so as a personal hypothesis and an observation of my experience. A musical measurement can describe a rhythmic pattern, but it does not by itself prove a therapeutic causality, nor does it turn a Western song into a shamanic practice in the technical sense.

From a very young age I liked rock, because I saw it as music with grit, capable of lifting my spirit. In my group of friends everyone appreciated the quality of a guitar or a bass. What caught my attention, though, were the drums.

All my life, without realizing it, I analyzed the percussion of every band I heard. The drums set the beat; they are probably the backbone of the song, though not everyone sees it that way.

One of the first answers that came to me through the channel responded to that old question: why do I like drums more than any other instrument? The answer was simple:

It is a shamanic instrument.

That was all. As if I were being forced to reason out the why of an answer that, deep down, I already knew.

And here something happened that still astonishes me. I wanted to check it. I isolated the drum track of Alive and Kicking, by Simple Minds —that song that has lifted my spirit forever— and I asked for help measuring it, because I am not a musician. The result was that the climax of the piece reaches about 4.1 beats per second, and that number falls right inside the classic range of shamanic drumming, from 4 to 4.5 beats per second, associated with the theta brainwave band. The moment when the piece feels most ecstatic is exactly the one in which its beat density touches the speed of the shaman's drum.

In all honesty: technically those drums are not shamanic. The pure shamanic drum is a monotonous pulse, without structure, sustained for fifteen minutes or more, designed not to be music but a tool. Mine is a song. But functionally it pulls the same levers. And there is one argument that convinced me: the experts remind us that cultural context rules, that if rhythm alone were enough, half of Africa would be in a trance all year round. Well then: if cultural context rules, then for us, Western Europeans, these drums can be perfectly shamanic.

Later I discovered that music had yet another function, different from trance. Listening to it in a particularly sensitive state, I felt how my body began to fill with energy, especially in my chest. I understood that those drums could work as a generator: an additional charge before facing a regression, or perhaps to sustain the reception of the channel.

And then there are the songs that start playing in my head and do not stop, until I understand what they had come to tell me. When the teaching is received, they stop playing.

Central idea

Rhythm orders the body, the breath and the emotion. That is why the answer I received was not musical, but spiritual. And there is one detail I use as a compass: when the teaching of a song has been received, the song stops playing in my head.

Throughout this book I will constantly quote a woman, and it is only fair that I introduce her to you first.

Pema Chödrön is a Buddhist nun and a meditation teacher, a disciple of Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche. Her books kept me company all through the illness. Her teachings are beautiful, but they use a very dense Eastern rhetoric, one you have to “chew”; that is why I wanted to gather here, in a few pages, those concepts of hers that held me up the most, within reach of anyone going through a process of healing.

These are her concepts, the ones you need in order to follow me:

Bodhichitta. It means noble heart, or awakened heart. It is that tender, sensitive place we all carry inside. Just as butter is already contained in milk and oil in the sesame seed, that goodness is already in every person from the very beginning. And no matter how cruel or petty we may have been, it is never lost: it is like a jewel buried for a million years that, when brought out into the light, shines untouched.

Maitri. Loving-kindness; unconditional friendship toward oneself. Pema explains it with the image of a mother bird caring for her young. When she is asked whether we are the mother or the chick, she answers that we are both at once.

Tonglen. Taking and giving. It turns our instinct inside out: as we breathe in, we take in the pain; as we breathe out, we send relief and freshness. It takes courage to practice it, and practicing it fills us with courage.

Impermanence. Nothing is static; everything is passing. We know it with our heads, but inside we resist.

Samsara. The habit of tirelessly manufacturing little zones of safety to cling to, which collapse again and again, and on whose rebuilding we spend our whole lives.

The compassionate warrior. He is not a warrior who wounds. And he does not climb the mountain to leave suffering behind: he goes down toward it. It is like climbing a mountain whose summit points toward the earth.

The four limitless qualities. Love, compassion, joy and equanimity. They are called limitless because, once trained, they have no borders.

Prajna. Wisdom; the most important of the six paramitas, because without it the others can be used to make us feel better than everyone else.

Start right where you are. There is no need to wait until you are a better person in order to practice.

Compassionate listening. When someone comes to you furious or in anguish, offering them a space of listening, without judging, can calm them down. It does not always resolve the cause —it is like the doctor who soothes the symptom without looking for its origin—, but very often it is the only door left open. I have used it, and I have also felt its limit: you cannot help someone who does not want help.

And one image that sums it all up: a woman is fleeing from tigers, reaches the edge of a cliff and climbs down clinging to a vine; below there are more tigers, and a mouse begins to gnaw at the branch. Then she sees, right beside her, a cluster of strawberries. She picks one, brings it to her mouth and savors it calmly. Tigers above, tigers below: that is always our situation. And in between there is this instant, which may be the only strawberry we ever taste.

To take in

Start right where you are. There is no need to be a better person, or to be calmer, or to have understood anything yet. The starting point is always this one, and it always works.

Up to here I have explained how I try to understand what happened to me. Now I want to turn the book around.

Because there is a reasonable objection: perhaps you will never have a regression. Perhaps you have no interest in having one. You may not even believe in past lives, in astral planes or in any of the spiritual interpretations that appear in these pages.

Even so, the teachings can be of use to you.

I needed extraordinary scenes in order to look at some things that were right in front of me: that I did not know how to set boundaries in time, that I could carry for years guilts that needed another gaze, that I sometimes confused loving with holding on, that my body gave warning before my head was willing to listen, and that my sensitivity, uncared for, could turn into exhaustion.

You do not need to see a dark ocean, a golden temple, or to become an officer from another era in order to ask yourself the same questions.

The tool can be summed up like this: situation → emotion → understanding → integration. It is the same structure with which I have learned to read my regressions, transferred to everyday life.

First layer: the situation

Begin with what is actually happening. Not with all the explanation your mind builds around it, but with the facts you can describe in the simplest possible way.

“My work overwhelms me.” “A relationship has ended.” “I have lost someone.” “I find it hard to say no.” “I have been carrying a guilt for years.” “I feel alone.” “I am afraid of making a decision.”

There is no need yet to turn the situation into a theory about who you are. First look.

Second layer: emotion and the body

Then ask what you feel. Fear. Sadness. Anger. Guilt. Shame. Loneliness. Relief. Confusion.

And, if you can, take one more step: where do you feel it? Perhaps the chest closes. Perhaps the throat tightens. Perhaps an emptiness appears in the stomach. The hands may become restless. The shoulders harden. The breathing changes.

This is not about diagnosing yourself by looking at your body, nor about assuming that every sensation contains a hidden message. It is about granting the experience a few seconds before burying it under explanations.

Very often the story starts afterwards: “I won't be able to.” “It's all my fault.” “I have to put up with it.” “If she leaves me, I'm worthless.” “If I say no, I'll disappoint everyone.”

When those sentences appear, we are already entering the third layer.

Third layer: the understanding

Here we are not looking for a spectacular revelation. We are looking for a sentence that is honest enough.

“I am accepting too much out of fear of conflict.” “I am confusing guilt with responsibility.” “I do not want to accept that something has ended.” “I am waiting for someone else to solve my fear of being alone.” “I am exhausted and I have spent months treating exhaustion as if it were an obligation.” “I want to care for others, but I am beginning to abandon myself.”

Useful understanding is usually simpler than the story surrounding it. And one precaution is worth keeping: understanding something does not mean having automatically discovered the whole cause of what is happening to us. An explanation can be provisional and still help us.

Fourth layer: integration

This is the part that matters most to me. What changes now? Not inside a theory. In your life.

Perhaps integration is asking for help. Saying no to a task. Making an appointment with a professional. Not sending a message. Apologising. Sleeping. Talking to someone. Writing down a decision. Accepting that a relationship has ended. Stopping punishing yourself for something you could not control. Putting a date on a boundary you have been postponing for months.

Integration can be small. In fact, it usually starts that way. A teaching that changes nothing may be interesting. A teaching that changes a behaviour begins to be part of life.

An example: work

Imagine you have been overloaded for months. Situation: every week you accept new responsibilities even though you can no longer sustain them. Emotion and body: fear of letting people down, pressure in the chest, tension when a new email arrives. Understanding: “I am saying yes because I fear the consequences of setting a boundary.” Integration: you document the workload, you formally ask for help and you turn down one specific responsibility you cannot take on.

None of this needs a regression. The teaching of “saying no and saying it in time” is already at work.

An example: a loss

Situation: a person who was part of your life is no longer here. Emotion and body: sadness, emptiness, a tightness in the throat. Understanding: “A part of me is still trying to make reality go back to how it was.” Integration: you allow the grief, you look for support, you keep what you want to remember and you begin, little by little, to build a life in which the bond can take another form.

You do not need to believe that you will meet that person again in another existence in order to work with the need to let go. If you have that faith, it can accompany you. If you do not, the teaching is still there.

An example: a relationship

Situation: a relationship has ended or has become harmful. Emotion and body: fear, nostalgia, anxiety, loneliness. Understanding: “I am confusing loving with getting the other person to stay.” Integration: you respect the ending, you stop carrying out behaviour designed to hold on, and you begin to rebuild a part of your life that no longer depends exclusively on the bond.

Loving without possessing then stops being a pretty phrase. It becomes a behaviour.

Several doors for doing this work

There is no single way of integrating an experience.

Psychotherapy can help us when we need to understand patterns, go through grief, work on trauma, order anxiety, review repetitive behaviours or receive support during a crisis.

Reflective writing makes it possible to separate facts, emotions, interpretations and decisions. Many pages of this book were born precisely that way.

Meditation and attention to the body can teach us to stay a few minutes with an experience before reacting automatically.

People we trust can offer listening, perspective and company. Sometimes an honest conversation prevents an inner story from becoming a closed world.

Spiritual practice, for those who have one, can provide a framework of meaning, compassion, prayer, meditation or reflection on life and death.

Sessions exploring consciousness, including the experience I call a regression, may interest some people. They are not necessary in order to use the teachings of this book, and they must not be presented as an automatic substitute for psychotherapy or for medical treatment. If someone decides to explore them, I consider it important to do so with sufficient information, with the freedom to stop, and with responsible accompaniment.

What a regression must not decide for you

An inner scene can move you profoundly. That does not turn it into external proof.

If during a session someone you know appears doing something you do not remember from your ordinary life, you should not accuse them on the basis of that scene alone. If an explanation about an illness appears, you should not abandon a medical assessment or treatment because of it. If a supposed memory arises that drastically modifies your biography, it is wise to remain prudent and to distinguish what was experienced from what can be corroborated.

Inner exploration can open questions. External facts need external verification.

When professional help must come first

There are moments when trying to understand on our own is not enough. If the suffering becomes unbearable, if thoughts of self-harm appear, if there is a significant loss of contact with reality, if the use of alcohol or other substances is out of control, if a trauma is intensely reactivated, or if the symptoms prevent you from carrying on with everyday life, the priority must be to receive professional care.

Asking for help does not contradict any spiritual search. It may be precisely the most responsible way of continuing it.

An exercise for the reader

Choose a current situation that is causing you suffering and write four sections.

1. Situation. What is actually happening? Try to describe facts before interpretations.

2. Emotion. What do you feel? Where does it appear in the body?

3. Understanding. What simple sentence seems to remain when you strip away unnecessary explanations? Do not look for a total theory. Look for something you can face honestly.

4. Integration. What small, concrete action could express that understanding over the coming days?

Then add a fifth question: do I need help to do this? If the answer is yes, that too is a teaching.

To take in

You do not need to live my scenes in order to use what they left behind. My regression may have been the place where I learned to say no. Your place may be a work meeting. I was able to find a teaching about guilt in the image of a boy and a snake. You may find it by looking at an old decision with the information you actually had at the time. I learned something about letting go by watching a girl say goodbye to her father. You may learn it by going through grief, a separation or the end of a stage.

The scene belongs to whoever lives it. The teaching can travel. And when it reaches everyday life and changes the way we treat others and ourselves, it stops being a curiosity. It begins to become a path.

You already have the keys, and you have just seen how to bring them into your own life. From here on we enter the territory, and we will do it slowly, subject by subject.

Remember one thing before continuing: you do not need to find in your own experiences a replica of mine. When you finish an experience, always return to the four layers —scene, emotion, teaching and integration— and then make the reverse movement: ask yourself what situation in your own life could benefit from that same teaching.

In the second part are the regressions, just as they happened and just as I wrote them: the ocean of darkness, the boy and the snake, the girl of the prairie; the Asian military experience where I learned to say no; and the session in which I crossed a portal and met the Shemsu-Hor.

The third part goes deep into the channel and into sensitivity: what it is made of, what strengthens it, what damages it, and why I believe it is the tool that makes everything else possible.

The fourth part develops the economy of energy: the complete model, with its functions, its absences and its recharges. It is the most analytical part of the book, and also the one that has helped me most to understand myself.

The fifth part is devoted to music: the analysis of the drums, the song as an energetic charge, and the songs that arrived as messages.

The sixth part is the most intimate. These are the meditations on love, attachment, affection and impermanence that were born during this process of recovery and healing.

One last piece of advice, and with it I let you come in: do not read looking for proof. Read looking for the teaching. The proof I do not have. The teaching, I do.

Expanded consciousness. An expression used by the author to describe the state experienced during certain accompanied sessions. It is not presented in this book as a standardised clinical category. In that state images, emotions, sensations and associations appeared whose ultimate nature the author keeps open.

Regression. The name used in this book for certain guided experiences that arose during the expanded-consciousness sessions. Some referred back to memories of this life and others were experienced as scenes from other lives or planes. The book does not presuppose that the latter constitute demonstrated historical memories.

The middle way. The author's stance toward everything he has lived through: neither claiming it is literal nor denying it; holding both possibilities and keeping the teaching.

Channel. The name the author gives to the spontaneous appearance of brief phrases, images, intuitions or symbols that he experiences as received information. The term describes his experience and does not claim to demonstrate external communication.

Recalibration. An industrial term denoting the optimization of a piece of machinery. The name given to the process of inner reordering the author passes through.

Economy of energy. A personal interpretative model with which the author organises the sense that experiences select some images, emotions or actions and omit others. It is not presented as a measured physical magnitude or as an established scientific mechanism. In its practical translation, it reminds us that attention, effort and physical and emotional resources are limited.

Optimizer. The inner logic of the experience: maximum meaning with the minimum expenditure of energy. Its principle is not completeness, but symbolic efficiency.

Integration. The step in which an experience or a teaching is translated into present life through a decision, a boundary, a change of behaviour, a request for help, an act of forgiveness or a new way of relating to what happened. Integration shows the effect of the experience; it does not prove its literal origin.

Interpretation. The explanation we give to an image, an emotion or an experience. In this book it is deliberately distinguished from the experience itself: that something is felt intensely does not automatically turn its interpretation into a fact.

Affection. The way love draws near to the other and becomes visible: showing up, accompanying, letting them know they have been seen. Without it, love can exist and never come to be recognized.

Compassionate listening. The practice of offering the one who suffers a space of listening without judgment. It brings relief, even if it does not always reach the cause.

Life-sower. An artifact seen in a regression and named spontaneously by the author; associated by him with panspermia.

Astral plane. A concept belonging to the spiritual framework used by the author to interpret some of his experiences. It is not presented as an empirically demonstrated plane of existence.

To disincarnate. To die on the physical plane; to leave the body.

Panspermia. The theory that life may have spread throughout the universe, reaching the planets in the form of embryos that would later give rise to more sophisticated forms.

Bodhichitta. Noble or awakened heart; the tender goodness that is already in every person and that is never lost.

Maitri. Loving-kindness; unconditional friendship toward oneself.

Tonglen. The practice of taking and giving: breathing in one's own pain and the pain of others, breathing out relief and freshness.

Samsara. The cycle of suffering born of manufacturing zones of safety and seeking happiness where it is not.

Impermanence. A characteristic of existence: nothing remains, everything changes.

Attachment. The need to hold someone beside you; it is distinct from love, which looks straight into the other's heart.

We are entering the territory. What follows are the three sessions, told just as I lived them and just as I wrote them down afterwards, with their doubts and their gaps.

Here you will see, now in the raw, everything the keys announced: expanded consciousness, the resistances of the body, the entities that interfere, the energy that administers itself, and the teachings that appear at the end of each experience like someone leaving a note on the table.

Remember the pact: neither believe nor deny. Keep the teaching.

Audio for this section

In this session there were three clearly distinct experiences. The first was not exactly a past life, but a strange space, like an intermediate dimension or a place of transit. The second seemed to correspond to an Eastern life, marked by guilt over the death of a mother. The third took me to a scene in the United States, during a war, where I was a girl watching her father leave for the battlefield.

First phase: the dark ocean and the denial of access

At the beginning of the session, we were explicitly denied any exploration of past lives. It was as if there were a resistance, an interference or a barrier that kept us from moving forward normally. I found myself in a kind of strange medium, hard to describe, as if I were in another dimension, another space or even another time.

To look for a simile, it was like being inside an ocean at night, but with a thick bottom, similar to chocolate. It was not a normal ocean. My feet were sunk into that dark, viscous substance, and when Puy asked me to move, I could not walk. It was as if the ground were holding me back.

When Puy asked why I was anchored in that zone of darkness, whose floor was like chocolate, the feeling I had was that I was meant to spend some time there. It had been imposed on me by a higher entity that I should remain there for a time, until something changed in my being or until I finished reflecting on something I did at some point in the past.

Every now and then I saw lights passing along the surface. They were strange lights, like flashes crossing above that nocturnal ocean, though they did not behave like normal light. Puy insisted that I try to look for a door of light or some point to move toward, but there were entities interfering with everything we tried to do.

I also had another experience linked to those attempts to get out. Every time Puy asked me to leave the very dark places I was in, and when I tried to walk, I saw an image like a mountainous skyline in which the sun began to rise, but it stopped and quickly set again. It was like linking a sunrise to a sunset over and over. Everything else was darkness, gloomy and sad. The symbolic interpretation I have found for it days later is that this represented attempts to get out of there, but without yet having enough energy to manage it. It was as if I needed someone to give me their hand to pull me out of a ditch I had fallen into and be able to climb out of it.

Every time Puy asked me something, those entities did not want to answer. Rather, they seemed to want me to abandon the session. They asked me to leave, to drop the whole thing. I am not certain whether it was in this same session that an external entity told me to open my eyes slightly in order to enter the expanded state of consciousness better, but that memory remains associated with this first phase.

In that space I was able to see a being of light. Everything around was surrounded by darkness. It was a giant being, with very, very long hair, but with no face. It was as if behind the hair there were nothing. It radiated a great deal of light, though it was not a light with flashes. It was a luminous presence, immense, silent and strange.

When Puy asked me about my sensations, the feeling of hatred appeared with great force. The answer I was given was that there were entities that fed on that hatred. I had to remain in that ocean for an unlimited span of time. It was not experienced exactly as a punishment, but rather as a kind of place of reflection or waiting. I had to let some time pass before I could move on to the next cycle of my evolution. It was not clear whether that next cycle was to incarnate again or whether it was another kind of evolution.

Then something like a sea grotto appeared. It was Puy who prompted or drove that search. I made my way into that grotto, and the grotto ended in light. Also, at some moment in this first phase, when Puy asked me to leave or to move forward, I was able to see a geological canyon. It was a sunset over the canyon, a very beautiful image. It now seems likely to me that this image had some connection with the third phase, that of the girl in the United States.

Second phase: the Eastern boy and the death of the mother

After that first phase we entered a more concrete experience. At first, as sometimes happens to me, what I saw was a still image, like a photograph.

A very beautiful woman appeared, Eastern, with very long hair. She was crouching over a pond. The water was clear and there was vegetation at the bottom. She looked at me with enormous fondness and love. I remember seeing that she had a beautiful white flower, large, with elongated petals ending in a point, pinned at her left temple. After several questions from Puy, we came to the conclusion that this woman was very probably my mother in that life.

Little by little I came to understand that I was a very young boy. I was no longer a small child, but I was leaving childhood and entering adolescence. I was dressed in a kind of kimono, with trousers and an upper part. It was black, and it did not look like humble clothing, but a rich, distinguished kimono.

The people around me looked at me with a mixture that was hard to interpret. At first I felt it as a combination of love and hatred, but afterwards it became clearer that it was not exactly hatred, but reproach. They looked at me with love, but also with a kind of silent accusation. I had been guilty of something.

Puy asked me to try to find out what I had done wrong. At that moment I was able to see the face of a man. I do not know whether he was my father or my grandfather. He too looked at me with that same expression of love and reproach. His image changed quickly: sometimes he seemed a young man and other times a somewhat older man. I cannot interpret it with certainty, but perhaps that indicated the passing of time and that his relationship with me, whether as father or as grandfather, always kept the same tone: affection mixed with reproach.

That man wore an Eastern headdress. I do not know whether it was Chinese or Japanese. When Puy asked me what that headdress was about, I told her it belonged to high-ranking officials. I do not know whether of the emperor of China or the emperor of Japan, but the feeling was clear: that male figure was a high official.

Then the central understanding of that life appeared: my mother had died, and she had died because of me.

Puy asked me to find out why. I was able to visualize a scene outside a house, perhaps a courtyard. There was a snake there. It was a dark reddish tone, and along its body it had several white marks or protrusions. As a child, I loved that kind of animal. We began to understand that my mother's death might have been related to that snake.

Afterwards I saw a burial scene. They were carrying my mother's body in something like a carriage, drawn by at least two black horses. The image was solemn, painful and charged with guilt.

Later on I was able to visualize another scene, as if it were another photograph. My mother had her back to me, or rather, her back to the point from which I was watching. She was wearing a kind of voluminous skirt. The snake had got caught on the back of her left thigh and was biting her there. The understanding was that I had brought the snake into the house as if it were a toy, without understanding the danger. My mother's death had been the consequence of that childish act.

After that I felt profoundly guilty. It had all been my fault. That guilt seemed to have marked that entire existence.

Puy then asked me to move further forward in that life. I saw myself as an Eastern old man, in a forest. I was wearing a traditional outfit, crossed over the chest. I was bald and had a bit of a beard. I felt that the moment of my death was arriving. I hesitated between dying in my house or sitting down beneath a tree. In the end I decided to sit under a tree and wait there for the arrival of death, which was very near.

Puy asked me to go to the moment of my death. She saw me as an old Oriental man and told me that I had to forgive myself. The teaching was that everything that man had been, that boy who felt guilty for his mother's death, had to stay there. That stage was already over and there was no reason for it to go on reflecting itself in my present existence.

The essential sentence was: everything that belongs to that body stays there.

As I died, the feeling was that I had to forgive myself. It had not really been my fault. It had been an accident. I was a child and I had not been fully aware of the consequences. My mother's death had been terrible, but I should not go on carrying that guilt forever.

Third phase: the girl on the prairie and the father who leaves for war

In the third phase I was a girl. To look for a simile, I was like a girl out of “Little House on the Prairie”. My house stood on a hill, surrounded by soft, pleasant grass. I wore a long girl's dress and my hair was curly, light in color. It did not quite reach blond, but it was a very, very blond brown.

At first I was glad and happy because I could see my father. My father wore a military cap. From the shape of the cap I deduced that we were in the United States and that he belonged to the army. I don't know whether he was from the Confederate army or the Yankee army, although the strongest impression was that it might be a scene connected with the Civil War.

My father would take me by the armpits and lift me off the ground, the way you lift children up for an “upsy-daisy”. He played with me and I laughed. I felt very glad, very happy, very close to him. Seeing my father made me feel good.

But suddenly a very negative feeling arrived. My father was leaving. He had to go back to the battlefield. He had come to see us, though in the scene I could only see myself. I could not see whether I had brothers, sisters or a mother with me.

Then a deep feeling of sadness swept over me. My father was going down the slope and leaving for the war again. I felt, with absolute certainty, that I was never going to see him again. And so it was. Even though I was a little girl, I knew that my father was not going to come back.

Full of rage and pain, I ran up another hill next to my house. As I climbed, I could hear the army column moving near the house. My father was going to join them. I remember that the column had a marching band. The music sounded perfectly clear. It was an army song, a melody I remember having heard in one of the many Hollywood films of the western sort or connected with the Civil War.

While that music played, it was as if the volume grew and got inside my ears. Tears poured out of my eyes. I leaned out from the hill and saw the military column advancing. I knew that my father was leaving and that he would never come back.

That is where this third phase cut off.

Final reflection on the session

This session seems to be articulated around several very powerful emotions: hatred, guilt, reproach, loss, sadness and the need for forgiveness.

In the first phase, the image of the dark ocean with a thick bottom speaks of a state of blockage or retention. No movement was possible. My feet were sunk in and the entities interfered. The predominant emotion was hatred, and the information received indicated that there were entities feeding on that hatred. The teaching of that phase seems to be related to the need to cross a space of waiting, reflection or purification before being able to move on to another cycle.

In the second phase, the core is guilt. An Oriental life appears where, as a boy, I brought a snake into the house as if it were a toy. The snake bit my mother and she died. That whole life was marked by guilt, by the reproach of others and by the reproach I directed at myself. The final scene as an old Oriental man introduces the clearest teaching of this phase: I had to forgive myself. It had not been an evil act, but an accident that happened out of a child's unawareness. Everything that belonged to that body had to stay there.

In the third phase, the central emotion is loss. I was a girl who watched her father leave for war. First there was joy, play, physical contact and love. Then, abruptly, came the certainty that my father would not return. The military music, the column moving away and the tears intensified the experience of abandonment, mourning and definitive separation.

The three phases might share a common thread: situations in which something remains emotionally trapped. In the first phase, hatred held me back. In the second, guilt held me back. In the third, loss held me back. In every case there was a difficulty in moving forward: not being able to move in the ocean, not being able to let go of the guilt for my mother's death, not being able to accept my father's final departure.

Main teachings

The first teaching is that hatred can keep us trapped. Within the session I lived it through a very concrete image: the sense that there were entities feeding on that hatred. I cannot know what nature that perception had. On an entirely practical level, I can recognise something: feeding an emotion for a long time can organise our attention, our decisions and the way we relate to the world around it.

The second teaching is that not all guilt corresponds to a real responsibility. In the Oriental life, my mother's death was experienced as guilt, but the final understanding was that it had been an accident. The adult consciousness of that life needed to forgive the child who had acted without knowing the consequences.

The third teaching is that not everything we feel has to go on governing us indefinitely. Within the regression the phrase “everything that belongs to that body stays there” appeared. Whether that scene corresponded to another life or was a symbolic construction, the teaching I carried into the present was the same: an old guilt can be revisited, understood and, when it does not correspond to a real responsibility, let go of.

The fourth teaching is that loss can become fixed not only in the fact of losing someone, but in the exact instant when one knows that this person will not come back. In the girl's experience, the traumatic moment was not seeing her father die, but seeing him leave with the inner certainty that he would not return. The experience also left me with a very intimate spiritual understanding: I felt life as a chapter within something larger, and love as a reality that was not exhausted by that farewell. I cannot know whether we will literally meet again those we lose, and I do not want to present that hope as a certainty or as a universal “cure” for grief. What I did learn is that accepting that someone does not come back in the same form does not oblige us to stop loving them. The bond can be transformed without disappearing from our inner life.

Take it into your life

You do not need to decide whether these scenes were literal in order to work with their questions.

Is there some guilt you still treat as if it were an absolute responsibility? What did you actually know when you made that decision? Is there a loss whose reality you keep trying to negotiate inwardly? What emotion has been organising your life around itself for too long? What might “letting go” mean without forgetting or denying what happened?

If these questions awaken suffering that is hard to hold, there is no need to resolve it alone. Integration can also consist in asking for help.

Audio for this section

First phase of the session: work conflict, fear and emotional origin

The first phase of this session revolved around a current work conflict that activated a very deep emotional chain in me: fear of confrontation, fear of losing my job, fear of not bringing money home, a feeling of uselessness, loneliness, abandonment, mistrust and bodily blockage.

Puy gradually led me from that present work situation toward memories of my youth, of early childhood and, later, toward symbolic or regressive scenes involving darkness, death, fire, separation from the body and an experience of unity or infinite love.

The session began with the work conflict. I was expressing my refusal to keep working with a certain person or in a certain environment. Up came the client, the deadlines, the badly shared responsibilities, the lack of communication and the feeling that something impossible was being demanded of me.

There was also the need to explain in English what had happened and to tell my superiors that I could not take on responsibilities that were not mine.

That work conflict began to turn into economic and family fear. Up came the fear of not bringing money home, of a possible dismissal, of the startup's situation, of artificial intelligence, of future clients and of how close retirement was.

The dominant bodily emotion was a mixture of bitterness, held-back rage and helplessness. Puy asked me to pinpoint when I had felt that most strongly.

Then came the memory of a previous company, with dissatisfied clients, lawsuits or software problems. That episode seemed to be linked to a deep professional fear.

Then I went back to the start of my working and adult life. Up came the memory of my first day at work, at 18, in Madrid. My father was leaving me there, in a flat with flatmates I didn't know.

The main feeling was loneliness. The emotional sentence that summed up that moment was: “I've been left alone”.

There was also sadness and a sense of being an impostor, or of not being able to finish what I start.

Next we explored a night out in my youth. This part of the original transcript was doubtful, but the emotional block seemed clear: I would go out alone, come back to a room and feel an intense loneliness accompanied by fear.

Reassuring phrases kept repeating, like “don't worry”. Although the literal detail of the scene was not completely reliable, the underlying emotion was: isolation, vulnerability and lack of support.

Puy compared those sensations with the current situation. I seemed to recognise similarities, though nuances came up too. Not everything in my life had ended badly. There had also been good things and bad things.

The session went on backwards, searching for the origin of the fear.

Then I entered childhood memories. Up came my parents, the demandingness, the fact of being held up as an example and the ambivalence between doing well and failing.

Then came family scenes and, later, specific phobias or fears: insects, spiders, bodily fright and held breath.

I recounted an intense fear of insects and spiders, even though rationally I knew they were not always dangerous.

Puy connected that pattern with my present-day fear of facing something I don't want.

Other fears came up too: heights, vertigo, looking down and the feeling of bodily danger.

Puy summed it up: there were many fears, and she proposed going to the earliest origin.

Then a regression began toward a scene as a baby or in very early childhood. I was standing up in my cot, gripping the bars tightly with my little hands. I was rocking myself back and forth. My nappy was dirty, stuck to my little bottom. It was poo and I didn't like it, but that wasn't the worst of it. The worst was the feeling of loneliness.

I had carried this memory all my life. Whenever the question “what is my earliest childhood memory?” came into my mind, this image would surface.

It was summer, in the afternoon. I was in my parents' room, alone. I had been waiting a long time for someone to come and clean me up, but above all to give me affection. I had been alone for a long time.

At the end of the session, Puy told me that this could have been the cause of a childhood trauma. A lack of care at such an early age can leave a very negative memory, one that is hard to forget.

I felt myself waiting for my father, or for my parents. The main emotional phrase was: “they're not coming” or “you're alone.”

I still remember where I was looking. I was looking toward the hallway. I could see the light on, because my house had a very long hallway and there were stretches of it without windows. You had to turn the light on to move from one room to another, even in the daytime.

Even so, I kept waiting. And no one ever appeared.

It was as if I had been waiting for hours.

That waiting was experienced as something infinite, eternal, endless. Puy asked me to merge with that sensation.

Then a sensation appeared in my throat, like something swallowed or blocked. The idea also came up of waking from a great dream, or of seeing something like a photograph. Puy was trying to get me to describe the scene without forcing an interpretation.

That feeling of choking and a tight, blocked throat has to do with the experience that happened later, in this same session, specifically with its outcome.

The body appeared as the main route of access to the information: the throat, the hands, the nerves, the dream and the image.

Puy took me back to the scene of the crib and the bars. The emotion intensified.

The metaphor of the prison appeared, the need for help, the darkness, the impossibility of getting out and the difficulty of knowing where my body was resting.

I went so far as to say something like: “I am darkness.”

Then the word “dead” appeared, or a sensation of death. Puy tried to take me to the moment before.

Later she went back to the scene of the baby and asked me to move forward until someone came.

A maternal figure appeared, but with little emotional availability. Her face was turned downward or to one side, not looking at me directly. That reinforced the central axis of a plea for help that was not received, or that was not looked at.

Words appeared such as unity, infinite love, reincarnation and many fears. The central question was what I had to learn. The clearest answer transcribed was that love “is always infinite.”

Puy tried to translate that experience into a possible healing of the anxiety. She put it that this infinite love would be what the child had needed in childhood.

The scene then shifted toward more symbolic material: an old wardrobe, burnt wood, screams, running water, smoke or a fire.

I could hear distant screams of women and children, desperate, as if some catastrophic event were taking place. I felt that I “was already dead,” or that I was watching from outside. All of this seemed to be connected to the events that would emerge later, in the regression that came afterward in this same session, with something deeply tragic.

Then I described leaving the body, a blockage, an inability to think and the sensation of being “between several worlds.”

Puy interpreted that I was in a connected dimension, a dimension of unity, and asked me to look there for a solution to the anxiety.

Second phase of the session: entering the Eastern regression

Puy asked me to enter the place where the screams of terror could be heard; that is when this experience begins.

I found myself in an open area, surrounded by rock walls. Those walls were stained with what looked like blood. There were two kinds of stains. Some were blackish, dark, covered in flies. I knew that it must smell bad, that it must be something foul-smelling, although I couldn't perceive the smell. I don't know why I couldn't smell it. The other stains were a much lighter reddish tone, like very fresh blood.

Before or during that first description of the place, sensations and images related to horses also began to appear. There were many horses. The impression I had was that the horses had a direct relationship with social status. Owning many or few horses somehow defined one's rank or position within that society.

At first I wondered whether it might be related to one of the Mongolian steppes of China, but I was never able to know for certain whether we were talking about China, Japan or some other Eastern territory. The general feeling was Eastern, but I couldn't pinpoint the place precisely.

Then the image of an empty breastplate appeared before me, with no body to fill it. It was a rather beautiful breastplate, black in color. At first I didn't know exactly what it was. It had light-colored shoulder guards, though I couldn't make out whether they were metal, silver, or some other material.

The chest section, on the other hand, I could see with extraordinary clarity. It was made up of scales layered one over another. I don't remember exactly whether they were metal, but I do remember that they ended in a rounded point. The color was jet black.

Above that breastplate, as if it were hanging from somewhere or resting on top of it, there was a helmet. The helmet was silver and from it hung a horse's mane. That mane emerged from a kind of fur on the upper part of the helmet and was a light shade, quite light.

Then I moved on to the vision of a village full of huts. There I was a kind of officer. I was with several men and we were talking to the local people. Those people had some relationship to me, though I don't know whether it was a direct or indirect blood relationship. There was tension.

Someone was demanding tributes that had to be paid. Among those tributes was the handing over of women. At that moment there was a woman clinging to my leg, specifically to my right calf, I think. She was resting her face against my calf and weeping. She was begging me not to do it.

I don't know whether that woman was a sister, a cousin or some other kind of close relative, but the sense of kinship was very strong. It felt like having someone of my own blood in front of me.

The woman wore a long dress, a poor one, light in color, made for life in the countryside. She had long hair. I remember that her hair wasn't dark, though I couldn't make out much more. She was crying a great deal.

Inside I felt a great powerlessness, because I knew that this was wrong. There were many men around me and those men had a military relationship with me. I got into a kind of argument with them. I seem to remember telling them that I couldn't hand her over, that she was part of my family. That woman was supposed to be part of the tribute demanded, but I refused to give her up.

Then I went back, or rather stepped fully into, the scene of the bloodstained stone. Puy asked me to try to find out what it meant. Then I was carried into a room that looked like an Eastern home.

Inside there was a relatively young woman, between 40 and 50 years old. She wore her hair short and struck me as somewhat attractive. She was dressed in a white top and a bottom that looked like a very long black skirt. She was sitting on the floor, attending to someone. She was listening to his explanations.

I was very keen to discover more elements or characters in the scene. I tried to turn my neck to the right to see who was there, or who that woman was looking at. But I found it impossible. The sensation was as if my neck were made of stone and I, with my brain, were trying to move it without succeeding. The movement was denied to me over and over again. Days later, and in other regressions, I understood the origin of this immobility in which I couldn't turn my neck to take in more elements of the scene, or even move to other rooms, to other places. It is intrinsically related to the energy needed to reach those places or to see certain things. It is as if your soul or your consciousness had to be recharged with energy in order to enter that scene or travel to that place; that is, as if we had an electric cable to plug into a power source so that we would be granted enough energy to carry on. But there is no doubt that sometimes it is also related to fear.

Even so, thanks to my insistence, I finally managed to turn my face and see the features of the individual she was looking at. He was a man older than me. He wasn't necessarily elderly, but he was of a far greater age than mine. I knew that he held a very high military rank.

He was wearing a kind of helmet. From just above the eyebrows, where the helmet rested, some plates emerged diagonally. There were two toward the right side and two toward the left side. I remember that the upper plates had a semicircle.

That man was looking at me with concern. His face expressed a very great unease.

At that moment I understood the matter he was discussing with the woman. It was about one of my comrades, someone with whom I had a fairly intense bond. I don't know whether it was a deep friendship, whether he was beneath me in military rank, or whether there was some other tie, but the relationship between him and me was very intense.

Suddenly I was able to visualize that woman's son. I don't know whether he was on a battlefield or simply training, though it seems to me it wasn't a battle. I saw him handling a katana. He wore a kind of white war kimono on his upper body. The visualization of this individual was limited above all to the upper part of his body.

He wielded the katana with great dexterity. He spun it in circles with one hand and then passed it to the other, showing enormous skill with the sword. He was smiling, as if to say: “I am invincible.”

Then I returned once more to the scene of the conversation between that woman, who was the mother, and the high-ranking man. He was informing her of her son's death.

Even so, I could detect something strange. The mother was being told that her son had died with great honor, but there was something that didn't add up for me. I looked at my superior again and understood that his concern had to do with what he was telling her. He was lying.

That son's death had happened for another reason, and it was not in his interest for others to know it. He looked at me uneasily, as if in fear that I might speak. He seemed to be afraid that I would reveal the truth.

I turned my face back toward the woman. Because of the emotional shock, she couldn't take her eyes off my superior. She didn't even blink. She already knew what we had come there for. The moment she saw my superior and me appear alone, she guessed it. She was left as if petrified, practically unable to blink.

After the news was delivered to that mother, Puy had me try to find out the reason for it. Then I went back to the bloodstained rock walls, and I didn't know why I had returned there.

I had to turn my head toward the right of those rock walls. They were like a kind of small cliff and there was something at the top that I didn't want to look at. My neck got stuck again, as if locked in place. I couldn't look. I felt fear, anguish, but above all sadness. Days later I understood that this was sadness and fear of acknowledging what had really happened.

The main reason for the boy's death was also related to other things that had happened on that kind of natural scaffold.

In the end I managed to turn my head and I saw an enormous number of people. They were all civilians, peasants, men, women and children. I don't know whether that officer was among them. The reason I couldn't look was that a mass execution was about to take place — or rather, was already taking place.

We had to put every one of them to the katana, as a reprimand, a punishment and a warning to the rest of the villages in the area.

I don't know the exact number of people. It was too many. I can't say whether it was dozens or hundreds. What I can say for certain is that the amount of blood flowing from there, and the two different colors I had seen on the walls, led me to conclude that the executions went on for many days, and that the victims' blood had been streaming down those walls.

That senior officer had given an unjust order. Perhaps he did it to gain some financial benefit from the slaughter, or perhaps simply for the merit of it, to make it look as though he had crushed a rebellion that had never really existed.

In any case, when I discovered this, my heart filled with sadness during the session. I had carried out those orders. I had men under my command, and both my men and I proceeded to dismember every one of the victims. Each time we put a person to the katana, the feeling of a broken heart was immense. I couldn't bear it.

I couldn't see exactly what became of that young man, but I had the sense that he must have refused to carry out those orders. Perhaps his death was connected to that refusal, to not agreeing to take part in the slaughter.

Puy then asked me to do something in order to try to find out more, though I don't remember exactly what she told me. I kept going deeper along the timeline, trying to see what would happen after that.

Then I sensed my superior giving an order. My own men grabbed me from behind, quite forcefully. One of them stood on either side of my shoulders. They took hold of my shoulder and my arm to hold me back. I tried to move, but it was impossible.

That man had given the order for my execution. What he wanted was to get rid of an inconvenient witness to something for which he alone was responsible.

I remember a vision of my own face. I was about the same age as the young man who had died. Then they placed my head on the ground, on a large flat stone. They pushed me down from the back. At that moment I had the sensation that a katana, or a similar sword, ended my life.

That was where the expanded consciousness experience stopped.

Coming back from the experience and the connection with my present life

When I came back, Puy asked me to draw some conclusion about the teaching I had received from that experience. I said that one has to know how to say no.

I told her it seemed rather mundane to come to this physical plane with a task as seemingly silly as learning to say no. You expect to come with far loftier tasks, with some higher metaphysical power or with great commissions. And yet this struck me as too simple, even absurd.

And yet, during the session I lived this teaching as a central task of my life: learning to say no in time.

At that point, Puy reminded me why I was there. I had been diagnosed with burn-out syndrome and had a medical diagnosis of major recurrent anxiety-depressive disorder. That disorder had developed after two and a half intense years of work, during which I had failed to say no at many moments.

The conclusion I drew at the end of the experience was that I had incarnated at this moment on Earth with an apparently simple but profoundly important mission: to learn to say no at the necessary moment. Not as a form of gratuitous rebellion, but as the ability to stand firm in the face of abnormal, unjust or abusive situations, even when beliefs, protocols, obligations or society itself push toward yes, presenting it as duty or obligation.

Although over the last six months I tried to steer every project I was assigned to in a way that would get me the help I needed, that help never became real. I had made formal complaints through official channels, with emails copying in all my superiors, trying to make as much noise as possible. But none of it had done me any good. It was already too late.

The teaching then made complete sense. I should have started refusing much earlier. I should have pushed back in every kind of meeting. That way my superiors wouldn't have played with me or, at least, they would have been far more cautious.

Main teaching

The main teaching of this regression is that saying no can be a life mission. It isn't about refusing for the sake of refusing, or about becoming a rebel without a cause. It's about recognizing when a situation is abnormal, unjust or destructive, and having enough strength to stand against it even when authority, custom, obligation or society push toward yes.

In the regression, the absence of the no appeared linked to several forms of suffering: the handing over of a woman as tribute, the lie about a young man's death, the mass execution of civilians, and my own silence before a hierarchical structure that imposed unjust orders.

The figure of the young man may have represented the no that I was unable to utter in time. Perhaps he did refuse, and perhaps that is why he died. I, on the other hand, stayed inside the system, carrying out orders that were tearing me apart inside until I too became an inconvenient witness.

The teaching also showed that saying no too late may not prevent the harm, and may even bring consequences that are more complicated still. In that experience, my hands were already stained with blood. Even if in the end they had executed me all the same for refusing from the start, at least my hands would have been clean.

That is why the lesson is not only about setting limits, but about setting them before the harm becomes irreversible. A late limit may have value, but it does not replace the limit that should have appeared at the beginning.

In my present life, this teaching relates directly to my working experience and to the illness that came from carrying for too long burdens I should not have borne alone. The regression showed me that the limit was not a minor detail: it was the core of the teaching.

It also showed that behind the difficulty of saying no there could lie a far older root: the child's waiting, the need for help that never came, the fear of being left alone and the tendency to endure too much while hoping that someone would appear, look, help or repair the situation.

The session seems to join three planes of a single teaching: the child who waits for help and does not receive it, the adult who shoulders work burdens that are not his, and the officer who obeys unjust orders until it is already too late. In all three cases, the lesson is the same: recognize the limit, name it and act before becoming trapped in a situation that destroys one's own integrity.

There is one last thing to say, and it is the one that really matters. That conclusion I gave Puy on coming out of the session —that I had to learn to say no— allows two readings, and neither of them weakens it.

If that experience truly corresponded to a previous life, then I would have incarnated into this one with a teaching still pending: to hold in time the limit I did not know how to hold back there. And if all of it was a reconstruction of my subconscious, the message does not change by an inch: my own mind would have chosen the harshest images it had at hand to tell me exactly the same thing. The nature of the regression may change; the teaching does not.

Take it into your life

The teaching of this regression does not require having lived through any military scene.

Ask yourself: where are you saying yes when inside you know you need to say no? What fear sustains that yes: losing acceptance, money, a relationship, an image of yourself? Are you waiting to set a boundary until you have already fallen ill, blown up or become completely exhausted? What small boundary can be set now, before the harm increases? Do you need to document a situation, ask for help, speak to a professional or request someone's support?

Saying no does not always solve the problem. Some situations require negotiation, protection, advice or outside help. The teaching is not to react impulsively, but to recognise in time what can no longer be sustained.

Audio for this section

The most recent session began in order to talk about matters related to anxiety.

Suddenly I appeared in a kind of palace. It was a palace lit by what I believed were torches, because the light was golden. To my left I could see a being with a human appearance. He was a very thin person, with very black hair and a beard that was also very black and fine. His eyes were made up.

He wore a kind of headdress that seemed to be made of cloth, though at the same time I knew it wasn't cloth. It was very narrow at the forehead and very wide at the nape of the neck. His clothing was white, a slightly bluish white, of the kind of tunics or robes that both men and women wore in antiquity.

The headdress had a sort of sky-blue strip and also, next to the neck, another band of that same shade. I insist that my perception of color may not be precise because of my color vision problem. All I could see was something that reminded me of what other people call sky blue.

That being wasn't looking at me. He was looking toward a point in the temple. That place looked precisely like a temple. I asked about that person and received a thought or sensation conveying to me that he was something between a king and a priest, someone very important.

Just after seeing that being who seemed to be somewhere between king and priest, I was able to glimpse a series of golden structures of great beauty. Among them appeared something resembling the boat of life. We had seen the boat of life on the trip to Egypt, at the entrance to one of the temples. I had already seen it before in some book or documentary. Within Egyptian culture, it was part of the grave goods buried with the pharaoh.

That boat of life was made of gold. It was not a dull gold, but a living, magnificent gold, receiving the sparkle of torches that I couldn't see directly. Those invisible torches seemed to cast rays of light that were reflected on each one of those golden structures, making every glint travel across their surfaces.

I could also see some golden wings, likewise made of gold. I tried to look at them more closely. They were a kind of replica of the Egyptian winged sun disk, but with one very clear peculiarity: the wings were arranged in the shape of an inverted V, and at the upper vertex was the solar disk. Those wings also received the flashes of the invisible torches, as if the light bounced off the gold and generated living, almost sacred reflections.

That temple was large, but it had an end. You could see darkness at the back, and that was what I interpreted as the end of the space. Everything was bathed in a golden light. There were very tall, slender columns that ended in arches. They looked like medieval semicircular arches, though they weren't exactly that. It was something more subtle and more advanced.

On the ceiling, also golden, small black strips could be seen, like dashes, all oriented in the same direction.

I tried to look in the direction in which that being beside me was looking. I had the sensation that I was carrying out the orders he gave me. On looking, I discovered that the floor plan of that temple had many more columns. To use a simile, it was something like a mosque, in the sense that many mosques have a great interior colonnade. That place was similar, though not the same.

Then I was able to perceive a retinue of people transporting something. It was something very large, enormous. They were litters. There were two litters, one on the left and another on the right. Each of them might have been carried by between twenty and thirty beings. They had a humanoid appearance and all of them were dressed exactly the same.

They wore a kind of matte platinum-colored garment. The lower part was like a skirt. They also wore footwear that came up to mid-calf and that had that same matte platinum color. I couldn't quite see the upper part of the clothing, though I did perceive that everything was harmonious in color.

What I could see clearly were their headdresses. They weren't rigid helmets, but a kind of helmet formed by multiple elongated scales that ended in a point. Each one of those scales seemed able to move. The headdress covered part of their forehead, the whole head, and extended down over part of the neck.

They all moved with an extraordinary synchronization, as if they were a single being.

I was very intrigued by what was on top of those litters, because from my angle I couldn't see it. I asked and someone told me: “It's the queen.”

I knew that I had the ability to move at any angle, as if I could fly over the scene from a point above. I decided to approach the retinue. They were moving in one direction. On hearing “it's the queen” and seeing that the litters were carrying something flat, I wondered whether it might be the dead queen. I expected to find a deceased woman.

However, when I flew over the retinue, I saw that there was a woman lying down with her eyes open. She was looking at me. She wasn't looking at me with any special feeling; she was simply looking straight into my eyes. The sensation was one of calm. It didn't disturb me.

I wondered what that retinue was doing, where it was going and why they were carrying a woman lying down. Suddenly, I turned around and saw that the retinue was heading toward something that had not been there before. Near the end of the palace or temple, a kind of door had opened.

I asked what that was, because the door had opened in the middle of nowhere. It was not in a wall or in any recognizable physical place. They told me it was a portal.

The portal had an absolute sharpness, but a completely absolute one. At the other end you could see another kind of palace, very different from the place where we were. In the initial temple, golden colors predominated.

At some point during this experience, Puy asked me: “Ask them where you are and who they are.” I asked that question and something came to me very clearly, as a sensation: they were the Shemsu-Hor.

I have to admit that I had already read quite a lot about the Shemsu-Hor. Specifically, I knew of them through a reference related to one of the last pharaohs of the last dynasties. As I recalled, that pharaoh asked his high priest, a very capable and greatly talented person, to make a description of the changes that had taken place in the Egyptian religion, in the pantheon of gods and in other aspects.

That high priest is said to have found the manifesto of Menes or Narmer —I don't remember the name well—. That manifesto came to say, in some way, that the pharaoh himself declared himself to be the first pharaoh of all the dynasties that would succeed him. Something like: “I am Menes, first pharaoh of all the dynasties that will succeed me, and I am the successor of the Shemsu-Hor, who ruled for ten thousand years on Earth.”

Since I already knew that information, I have had doubts about whether my subconscious fabricated that scene or whether I was really allowed to see something that had intrigued me for many years: who the famous Shemsu-Hor were.

When I turned my head and saw that the portal was open, I could see entities with a human appearance walking, as if they had already crossed the portal and entered that palace of light. I think Puy asked me what we were doing there, what the Shemsu-Hor were doing there, and I answered that we had already finished our work.

At that moment I felt a strong sense of belonging toward them. I want to make this clear so it isn't misunderstood: I don't believe this regression shows that my past life was that of a Shemsu-Hor. I have more the sense that, for some reason —whether my own subconscious or something beyond it— I was allowed access to know who they were, as if I had been granted the chance to live among them for an instant, in order to understand what they had come to do. When I asked myself what our mission was and why I was there, the answer I felt was that: not that I had been one of them in another life, but that I was allowed to be there to understand it.

There is another possibility that also deserves to be said. If all of that was a construction of my subconscious, then I can only bow before the capacity of the human mind to create something like it. Both the temple where I first appeared and the place I found on the other side of the portal possessed a beauty, a harmony and a perfection that struck me as extraordinary. They did not look like improvised sets or images without order: everything held a coherence that is hard to explain, as if every shape, every proportion and every detail were exactly where it had to be.

If that was born entirely inside my mind, the wonder does not diminish. On the contrary: it leaves me deeply impressed to think that the human subconscious can raise, from some place inaccessible to our ordinary consciousness, spaces of a beauty I would never have known how to imagine deliberately.

And if, on the contrary, that corresponded to a real experience on some plane I do not know, my astonishment is exactly the same. In one possibility the wonder would be within us; in the other, beyond us. In either of the two, what I beheld still seems extraordinary to me.

Then I set out to cross the portal. I crossed it before they did because I was very intrigued by what I could see at the other end.

On crossing the portal, I appeared in a place that could be described as something between a palace and a building with a special techno-scientific purpose. It also had some connotation of a temple. There were very tall columns, thicker in their middle part. Their capitals were made up of shapes resembling petals, and some of those petals were of a color I interpreted as sapphire blue, although I insist that I may not describe colors well because of my color vision problem.

In this new building there were no reflections or shadows, unlike what did happen in the earlier temple where we lived or where we were. The light was different.

As I crossed the threshold of the door, I could see a female figure to my right. I was completely certain that it was female. At the beginning of the experience, when I saw the being with the appearance of a priest and king, it had seemed to me that he bore a certain resemblance to the Egyptians, but at the same time I knew they were not Egyptians. They had some characteristics in common, but they were not exactly Egyptians.

On crossing the portal I saw that woman. I made a visual sweep as if it were a one-hundred-and-eighty-degree shot, from her right ear to her left ear. What I could see is that this woman was also dressed in sky-blue tones. Her hair was adorned, at both temples, with what looked like stones of a polished whitish color, completely round.

Her hair was a very deep jet black. It was styled with a great many braids and had a shape resembling a kind of helmet of flames. I had already seen that representation in women on the murals of the Egyptian tombs we visited.

She also wore a kind of diadem that ran all along her temple, the nape of her neck and her forehead. I could not make out the color of the diadem well. I know it was light, but I didn't know whether it was golden, white or blue.

I was making a visual sweep of that first room of the building. I could see that on both sides there were two corridors, one on the left and another on the right. These corridors were semicircular or elliptical. The floor part cut through the ellipse, but the rest was oval in shape.

Everything was flooded with circles and ellipses, both on the walls and on the ceilings. Through those circles or ellipses came an incredibly astonishing light. It was a light that did not blind you, but that allowed you to see everything with absolute clarity. There were no shadows or glares anywhere there.

In this new building, Puy asked me what we were doing there. I answered that there we created life and harmony.

To that question, someone showed me something. It was like a pipe or duct set against a white background. That duct emanated packets of light from one place to another. They were packets of yellowish-green light, according to my limited abilities to recognize colors. It was through that duct that this life and this harmony were generated and sent to other places.

At that very moment I was granted more information about who we were, beyond our specific work. I understood that there were no hierarchies or social ranks there in the sense in which we understand them on Earth. There was no power structure based on social superiority, status or dominance.

Nevertheless, there were superior entities. They were entities that gave instructions, and the rest of us entities carried them out. That superiority was not perceived as a form of imposed authority, but as a natural organization of the work and of the function each being had to fulfill.

I also understood that some techno-scientific tasks were so complex that they could not be carried out by a single being. In those cases, several beings would join together, forming a kind of single collective being, in order to be able to execute that task. It was not simply collaboration, but a real union of capacities, as if several consciousnesses were temporarily integrated into one to accomplish something that, separately, would not have been possible.

Afterward, Puy kept insisting on what my role there was, or rather, what my role and that of the others was. I strayed a little because I began to take an interest in learning personal information, without being directly guided by the therapist.

I asked about the soul.

Then I was shown a kind of book with white covers. They were not uniformly white. That book contained a series of pages, and each of the pages had a marker that looked like a transparent yellowish sphere. Those spheres moved very quickly from one page to another.

It was explained to me that the nature of the soul is not what we understand here, on the physical plane of Earth. The nature of the soul encompasses much more, and we would not be able to grasp its concept in full.

Very quickly I asked them to give me an analogy. Then they told me that each of those pages represented a kind of portion of the soul. One of them is the one living on the physical plane, but the rest represent other portions of the soul that are on other planes, other universes, or other dimensions.

I insist: it is not exactly a matter of space-time, nor of a multiverse understood in a simple way. It is a concept that is quite abstract for us.

What I managed to glimpse in a fleeting thought was an analogy. If we had the ability to travel in time and had an analog radio at hand, moving the dial forward or backward would be the equivalent of traveling forward or backward in time. But that concept was too simple to explain what they wanted to convey to me.

To understand it better, one had to imagine that the dial did not exist as a line, but as a sphere. That sphere would not have a fixed dimension: it would be infinite. It could be small enough to fit between one's hands, but also as large as a planet.

The movement of a point in three-dimensional space within that sphere would place us somewhere. There would be a point that corresponded to Earth at the present moment, and another, different point that corresponded to Earth in another age.

It was as if the ages that Earth has passed through and that humanity has passed through were continually repeating themselves, and one chose to be born at one moment or another. But also, by moving that point within the sphere, one could go to another kind of universe. I insist: not to a parallel universe in the usual sense, but to another kind of global entity of life.

From that moment on, since I felt deeply satisfied with the information I had been given, I began little by little to leave the state of expanded consciousness. I began to wake up. I no longer wanted to remain there, because I had received a great teaching, or rather, several.

One of those teachings had been that of the Shemsu-Hor: beings who came to Earth with a mission, fulfilled it, and left. Once again, I insist that it may be a creation of my subconscious or a real fact. What matters is not so much whether the experience is literal or not, but the message it contains. Perhaps the message comes from my subconscious, guided by the therapist's prompting, or perhaps it is the reality that all of this happened on some non-physical plane.

Another main teaching was the concept of the soul. The image I received —the book, the pages and the yellowish spheres— represented the soul to me as something not limited to a single incarnation or to a single plane of existence. That is the spiritual understanding I drew from it; I cannot prove it as a factual description of reality.

I was shown that one part of the soul may be living on the physical plane, while other portions exist on other planes, universes, or dimensions. It was not exactly a matter of space-time or of a multiverse understood in a simple way, but of a much broader concept, difficult to translate into human thought.

The comparison with a radio dial that turns into an infinite sphere was a symbolic way of bringing me closer to that teaching: there would not be a single timeline, but an immensity of possible positions within a far more complex reality.

I also received a teaching about the way work was done in that place. There were no social hierarchies there as we understand them here, but there was a functional organization. Some higher entities gave instructions and others of us carried them out. When a task was too complex, several beings could join with one another and act as a single entity in order to carry it out. That union was not perceived as a loss of identity, but as a temporary integration of capacities in order to fulfill a greater labor.

When I came out of the state of expanded consciousness, I spent some time talking with Puy. We went further into the subject of the soul that had come up with the analogy of the book, and I explained it to her.

At that moment a passage from a book I had read came back to me. In that book, psychologists who used regression through clinical hypnosis had their patients go back to the moment when they disincarnated, passed through the astral plane, and went toward the light. Many of them were surprised to find people there who were still alive on the physical plane of Earth.

I joined that reading with the teaching that had just been conveyed to me during the expanded consciousness, and I felt that I understood it all. Our soul would not be bound exclusively to our body on this plane, but would exist on many other planes.

In the conversation with Puy I also mentioned how curious I had found reading a book about déjà-vu. That book proposed a speculative explanation, drawn from concepts of quantum physics, according to which a déjà-vu could be a memory that reaches our present consciousness from another self in another parallel world who has lived the same experience a few seconds or a few minutes earlier. I do not present it as an established result of physics: I mention it because it was in my memory and because it influenced the way I interpreted what I saw.

According to that theory, that other self would have arisen as the result of a binary decision. For example: “Do I marry this person or not?”. The instant that question opens up, two universes would be generated: one in which a copy of me decides to marry that person, and another in which a copy of me decides not to. Both lives could cross paths at some moment in a very subtle way.

Beyond all this, there was one message that I found especially significant. In the experience, at the moment when one passes from a temple on Earth to a building located at another point in space, in time, or in the universe, a portal opens. The message seemed to be clear: spaceships like ours are not needed in order to travel through space or through time.

The transition was not made by means of a ship, but through a portal. And that image, beyond its literal form, seemed to express that there are forms of movement or connection that do not obey the physical limitations we take for granted.

Two uncertainties were left open at the end of the session. The first was the experience with the Shemsu-Hor. Since I had already read about them, I cannot rule out that my subconscious built the scene from prior information. At the same time, the sharpness, the visual coherence, the sense of belonging and the message received were so intense that neither can I deny the possibility that I was allowed to access real information, even if from a non-physical plane.

The second was the relationship between all of this and my current anxiety, tobacco and alcohol. The session began with an apparently concrete aim: to understand the loops of anxiety and the compulsive behaviours associated with smoking and drinking beer. Yet it ended up unfolding images related to astral planes, to the Shemsu-Hor, to portals, to the creation of life and harmony, and to the nature of the soul.

Perhaps all of it was part of a real experience on other planes. Perhaps it was a construction of the subconscious, therapeutically guided. Perhaps it was both things at once.

I prefer to stay on the middle path.

I don't need to declare flatly that all of it was real, nor do I need to deny it in order to feel safe. What matters is that the session produced an inner movement, a teaching, and a possibility of healing. And if those images, entities, temples, portals and explanations arose from my subconscious, then my subconscious, accompanied by the therapist, was trying to show me something necessary for my process.

Whether it was something created by my subconscious or a real experience lived on other planes, in the days following the session I observed that my urge to drink alcohol in situations of high anxiety had diminished. That temporal coincidence is part of my experience, but it does not allow me to prove on its own that the session was the cause of the change. What mattered for my process was that I began to look more clearly at a behaviour that could harm my recovery.

It's true that the idea still came up of having the chance to drink even just a couple of beers. But something had changed. Now I could see more clearly, and I could think for myself that, in my current situation, drinking alcohol, however minimal, or even drinking to excess, could harm my healing and my recovery.

Days after the session, I can indeed say that something had changed.

If someone has difficulty controlling their use of alcohol or other substances, a regression must not be used as a substitute for a professional assessment or treatment.

Take it into your life

This regression is the hardest to transfer directly, because it contains statements and images about the soul, other planes and the creation of life. You do not need to accept any of them in order to use part of the teaching.

Ask yourself: which spiritual ideas help you, and which are you turning into certainties too quickly? Can you hold on to a meaningful experience without forcing yourself to prove it? What current habit do you know is harming your recovery or your well-being? What observable change could you make even if you never resolved the metaphysical questions?

An experience can widen our questions. Everyday life is still the place where we test how we choose to live.

From here on you will enter the most interpretative part of the book. I will describe the channel, sensitivity, the failed communications and the recalibration just as I have understood them. Read them as a personal map of my experience, not as an established scientific model nor as an explanation you have to adopt. Whenever an idea can be translated into everyday life without needing to accept its spiritual interpretation, I will point out that reading too.

You already know the channel, and you know what sensitivity is made of. Now it's time to unfold it.

This is the longest chapter in the book, and I want to say so up front: it arrived this way. These are ideas that kept falling into place over months, some connected directly to the regressions and others that arrived on their own.

Here you will find sensitivity in all its forms: the schooling in knowing how to conduct oneself, the shivers, minds that do not open, hunting and repentance, and also the communications that arrive broken.

Audio for this section

1. A stage of recalibration

Throughout this stage of recalibration, a series of ideas, thoughts and teachings have kept coming to me, and they seem to be arranging themselves little by little. They don't always arrive comfortably, or at the right moment. Sometimes they appear as a disjointed succession of thoughts; other times, as a torrential downpour of information falling over my mind without my being able to stop it. I asked for some help that would define that whole experience, and a single word appeared in my mind: “Recalibration”.

Recalibration is an industrial term that describes the optimization of machinery and the like, in order to improve how it works.

All these ideas come to me on two kinds of occasion: Sometimes it happens when I get home tired after running. I shower, lie down on the bed and take a few minutes of rest before moving on to other tasks. In those moments information can also arrive, though usually not much. However, it is in moments of nervous excitement that this arrival intensifies. There it is not a single loose idea that appears, but many, one after another, as if a floodgate had opened and a throng of ideas came to me all at once.

This has happened to me while driving, while doing complex tasks, while listening to music that moves me, or while watching a scene from a film whose action provokes a nervous excitement in the viewer. In those moments a tremendous rage takes hold of me, because I know something important is arriving, but I don't have a pen, a piece of paper or a computer at hand to be able to dictate it. Then I have to make use of my memory, and my memory sometimes fails. Some ideas are lost, though others come back some time later.

The mnemonic technique I was given to store these memories works. But I can't always use it. If I'm talking with another person, or if I'm in the middle of a situation of excitement or tension, I can't start reciting out loud what has just arrived. Other people might think I have some kind of defect, an OCD or something similar. It would be a ridiculous scene, and many times, with resignation, I give that information up for lost.

Exhaustion also appears. There are days when I am worn out by mid-morning. It isn't only physical tiredness. It is as if this whole process of arrival, reception, ordering and recalibration consumed an enormous amount of energy. As if my mind and my nervous system had worked for hours before the day had even got going.

In this stage there have even appeared apparently loose flashes, like images of jokes loaded even with humor, as if trying to cheer me up and give it a touch of kindness, memories, symbols or fragments that I still don't know how to place. I don't want to force them. I leave them noted down as pending pieces, because perhaps later on I will find the exact place they occupy within the whole.

2. Not claiming more than I know

I want to make something very clear from the start. Perhaps many of the things and of the channels of communication I have described in other chapters did not really open up as a result of the regressions with Puy. She may have been the changing vector that made me reconsider and notice their existence. Perhaps they had already been open for a long time. Perhaps it isn't something that happens only to me, but something many people live through without realizing it. What Puy did was to place it in front of me, in a conscious or unconscious way. I can indeed affirm that her therapy “Made me wake up”, pulled me out of the automatism in our lives that we Western people inflict on ourselves without realizing that we enter a loop that makes our lives inert, meaningless, as if we were one of those modern production androids of an industrial system.

When we receive perceptions, we normally believe they come from our mind. We think they are normal thoughts, mental associations, work-related ideas or simple useless notions. Many times we discard them before we have even listened to them. We push them aside from our memory because they don't seem to be good for anything.

As a result of the regressions with Puy, those perceptions began to flow more strongly. But I cannot say for sure whether they were already there before and it was I who discarded them. I don't know if they are generations of my own mind, if they come from my subconscious or if someone, from another plane, is trying to communicate them to me.

That is why I can neither deny one possibility nor affirm the other categorically. I have to look at both as real possibilities. Perhaps it is my mind. Perhaps it is my subconscious. Perhaps it is an outside entity. Perhaps it is a mixture of several things. What matters, for now, is that the information arrives.

And when it arrives, I must learn to listen to it without losing my prudence.

3. Nervous excitement as a switch

One of the ideas that has come to my memory is that nervous excitement might activate the channel of communication. It is like switching on a television. You press the button on the remote control and, suddenly, the whole circuit starts working.

I remember physics classes, when they explained electricity to us and the movement of electrons from one point to another, from one pole to another, at a tremendous speed. That image came to my mind. Nervous excitement would be like the television button. The moment it is pressed, the electrons in the circuitry begin to move, everything is activated and the information starts to appear.

A very clear example is driving. You are going along a street you know perfectly well. In the distance you see that the traffic light has just turned green. You know that if you get there in time you will be able to turn into the new street, but that if you don't make it you will have to wait several minutes, because you know that traffic light and you know how long it takes to change. In that small instant of tension, of calculation, of nervous acceleration, disjointed, disordered thoughts start to appear, with no apparent relation to one another.

It also happens with music. A song I like can generate an inner excitement, a kind of opening. It happens too with some scenes from films, when the characters' action drags you along emotionally. In those moments something switches on.

I don't know whether that switching on opens a communication with my subconscious or with another kind of source. But the sensation is that there is a channel being activated.

4. A scientific gaze as a tool, not as a dogma

This chapter also has an analytical, almost technological part. I don't want everything to remain solely as an emotional or mystical experience. I try to find the why. Or, rather, I try to understand whether there is any way of improving communications in the regressions.

For that I believe we must use a scientific part. Not as the absolute basis of a method, but as an auxiliary tool. Science shouldn't replace experience, but it could help us understand certain factors.

I think of the surgeons who operate remotely using electronic arms. They can be in the United States and operate on a person in India through a secure technological system. Surgery is still surgery, medical knowledge is still essential, but technology widens the possibilities.

I want to propose something similar here. Perhaps we can use scientific knowledge to analyze how to improve regressions, or even to enhance certain factors in regressive communications. It would not be a matter of reducing the mystical to the technical, but of using the technical as a tool that helps fine-tune the channel.

As in a communication system, one would have to ask what improves the signal, what produces interference, which factors make the message arrive cleaner and which factors distort it.

5. Sensitivity as an enhancement of perception

The sensations I keep receiving around sensitivity point to one central idea: sensitivity improves the capacity for perception.

A person with greater sensitivity may find it easier to receive this kind of information. Perhaps their subconscious is less tied down and it is the subconscious itself that, in a more correct and orderly way, goes on dictating things. Or perhaps it is not the subconscious, but an outside entity. I don't know. But what matters is that the information arrives.

That does not mean that a person with less sensitivity cannot receive information. But I do believe that sensitivity makes communication easier. It is like the difference between wiring a house with high-quality cable, shielded, protected against interference, and rigging up temporary wiring hung on the wall with thumbtacks. In the second case, if you plug in a bulb, it may flicker. Not because the electricity doesn't exist, but because the channel is not properly prepared.

Sensitivity may be just that: cleaner wiring, finer, more capable of transmitting without interference.

But besides sensitivity, an open mind is needed. An expanded mind. A mind that opens itself to changes, to new knowledge and to new situations. Curiosity is needed. Not a curiosity that meddles in other people's personal affairs, but a technical, scientific, human and analytical curiosity.

A perceptive mind does not believe everything it hears, but neither does it reject it out of hand. It receives it, observes it, analyzes it and lets it settle.

6. The education of knowing how to conduct oneself and its relation to sensitivity

It has come to my mind that sensitivity may be related to the upbringing one receives. I am not referring so much to academic education, but to the education of knowing how to conduct oneself.

My parents placed a special emphasis on that education. They wanted us to be kind to others, to say hello when we walked into a place and to say goodbye when we left. I was an incredibly shy child and that cost me a great deal. Sometimes my father didn't need to say anything to me. A single look was enough to remind me that I had to greet people. Then I would react and say: “Sorry, good morning.”

With the passing of time I have learned to recognize something in people. All those magnificent people I have known seemed to follow the same pattern. They had a good education in knowing how to conduct themselves and they had consideration for others. I won't say it was always an exquisite education, but it was a deep education, respectful, attentive.

I am beginning to think that this education of knowing how to conduct oneself has a strange relationship with sensitivity. People with a true education tend to have sensitivity. And people low in sensitivity, generally, do not seem to have properly integrated that education of knowing how to conduct themselves.

Perhaps because knowing how to conduct oneself is not only a matter of social norms. It is not merely saying good morning or thank you. It is realizing that the other person exists. It is perceiving them. It is taking care with the way one enters a space, speaks, looks, listens or withdraws.

Sensitivity may also be born from there: from having learned not to take up all the room, not to run other people over, not to impose oneself without looking.

7. Sensitivity as a physical experience

Sensitivity also manifests itself physically. Until now I believed that all shivers were the same, but I am beginning to tell them apart.

There is a kind of shiver that appears when I receive a stimulus of amazement, when I come to know something incredibly unheard of or a new teaching reaches me. It is felt in the triceps and in the area of the skull behind the ears. It is an electric, pleasant sensation. It is a bodily “wow,” a discharge of positive energy. As if that new teaching were being welcomed with an inner celebration.

I have always been a curious person. I have liked to investigate, to learn, to bring knowledge into my life. Many times I didn't know what for. Now it is clear to me that much of that knowledge is like small tools that will help me at some point along my path.

There is another kind of shiver that appears when something overwhelms me. It has nothing to do with joy. It is a shiver that runs through the whole body, especially the upper and lower limbs. The discharge seems to begin in the shoulders, goes down towards the hands and then runs along the legs to the feet. It is as if I were a cable that an electrician uses to splice two ends together: they hook me by the feet to one end, by the head to the other, and the discharge runs right through me.

That shiver doesn't say “wow.” It says: this is beyond you.

There are also shivers that stay in my chest, between the sternum and the heart. They are connected to love episodes in my life. When I fell in love, I felt the typical tingling, the flutter of butterflies. As a child I fell in love easily. I don't know whether all the boys and girls of that time were the same, but I tended to fall in love with the girls who had something special about them.

When I met a girl I liked, the sensation in my chest turned in a circular direction, clockwise. But if shortly afterwards I saw that girl go up to another boy and kiss him, as though she had already formed a sentimental bond with him, the shiver reversed. It turned counterclockwise.

It was like making and unmaking. As if the body were categorizing the experience even before the mind could explain it.

A blunt remark can also cut me very deep. It may be a remark made without ill intent, but the first thing I feel is a surge in my chest that floods me. Sometimes I manage to get over it and understand that it wasn't a reproach against me, just a clumsy way of saying something. But the first reception is always physical, deep, immediate.

8. Receptive minds and closed minds

To simplify, though I know there are no blacks or whites but many grays, I believe there are two broad types of minds.

One is the perceptive mind. It is the mind that is open to new knowledge, that listens and analyzes without raising too many initial objections. That doesn't mean it accepts everything. It simply listens. It observes. It allows itself curiosity.

The other is the mind that laughs at what it doesn't understand. The mind that closes itself, driven by its convictions.

I remember that in the eighties and nineties there were few of us who thought there had to be intelligent life in the universe beyond Earth. We were the target of many jokes. Relatives and friends made mocking remarks, as if we were oddballs who believed in little green men. Today, decades later, the situation has changed. From far more serious quarters, people speak of the possibility of extraterrestrial life on other planets.

That sensibility that led us not to deny certain possibilities raised our minds a level of expanded consciousness. It made us more perceptive.

One of my favorite lines, which I remember being attributed to Gerry Spence, goes something like this: I would rather have my mind opened by curiosity than closed by conviction. That idea defines me. It defines the kind of curiosity I have and that I believe people with an expanded mind have: minds capable of absorbing information, knowledge and feelings.

Sometimes I think these minds are ready to evolve more quickly. Or perhaps they have managed to evolve across many lives until reaching a higher level of assimilation. Maybe other minds are still on a lower plane and one day will be able to evolve to another plane, though perhaps not in this life. They may need several lives for a change of that magnitude.

I have felt compassion for people with closed minds. I have tried to help them, to explain things to them, to show them solutions. In my personal experiences I remember spending an enormous amount of time trying to explain to people close to me situations that for me had a simple solution, or several possible alternatives. And yet I believe that, because of the anguish those people suffer in the face of certain episodes, they are unable to reason through what I am telling them. They cannot reach a moment of mental openness.

That has always moved me and filled me with sadness. It is like feeling that I can do nothing for them.

An idea comes to mind that I associate with a song by Joaquín Sabina: you cannot help someone who doesn't want help. That is the feeling. They don't want to receive instructions for reaching a moment of expansion. They close themselves off in an almost mysterious way.

Drawing on my Buddhist readings, expanded consciousness can be like a flower that opens in the morning and shows all its beauty. Once you reach knowledge, thanks to sensibility, that knowledge breathes strength into you, gives you heart, and shows you that there is a teaching behind life.

Those other people, on the other hand, are like a bud that never quite opens. A few petals can be glimpsed through the cracks in the calyx, but the flower never fully emerges.

Buddhist compassionate listening can help. When a person arrives full of rage or anguish, offering them a space of listening, without judging, can calm them. But that doesn't always resolve the cause. It is like when you go to the doctor and the doctor gives you medication to soothe the symptoms but doesn't look for the origin. Fortunately not all doctors do that. But something similar happens here: compassionate listening eases the discomfort, but it doesn't always lead to deep healing.

To heal you have to go to the cause. And these people seem never to want to reach the cause. That produces a deep sadness in me. It is like seeing beings who are stuck, beings who cannot manage to evolve.

9. Nervousness, excess information and the silence that follows

Another important trait of my personality is that I am an especially nervous person. When I receive a lot of information, I tend to get nervous. I think the source of that nervousness lies in the amount of information that arrives all at once.

There is something inside me telling me that this information is important, but it is still on too abstract a plane. I can't quite identify it. And that unsettles me.

Sometimes an avalanche of thoughts arrives and then everything falls silent. An absolute silence sets in. It's as if something were saying: “Goodbye, see you later.” As if I were being given room to reflect.

But that room seems minuscule to me. There are so many thoughts that I have to keep working on them days later just to put them in order. I need to write them down, dictate them or repeat them out loud using mnemonic techniques, because otherwise part of that information can be lost.

10. Sensitivity in nature: hunting, remorse and respect for life

I have always had a sensitivity toward animals, but I also acknowledge having belonged to a family in which hunting was practiced as a family rite, going back generations. I must explain the following before I comment on an answer that was given to me after the regressions with Puy; it was an answer to a question I asked after the regressions, when I was out in the countryside at dawn.

In my family we practiced two kinds: big game and small game. In small game, the animal you brought down went to the table. It was like going to the supermarket, buying chicken and coming home to cook it. With big game, however, it didn't always happen that way. Sometimes you could take the animal's meat, cut it into steaks, slice it, marinate it and have a delicious larder. But other times you didn't take the meat. You took a trophy, or not even that. And then something much harder was left: having taken an animal's life…. what for?

In recent years, especially after my Buddhist reading, I came to understand that this second kind could be a slaughter.

I remember a montería in Seville. A collera of deer appeared, which we hunters identified as a pair of males fleeing from danger. I was especially accurate and brought down both, in what is called “making a double.” One collapsed and died instantly, the way every hunter wants it to happen so the animal doesn't suffer.

The second, however, escaped wounded. The shot hadn't hit a vital spot. At first I tried to find him with my eyes among the scrub until I was able to locate him. He had fallen into a kind of natural ditch full of stones.

I ran up with the finishing knife and the rifle, to finish him off so he wouldn't suffer. But when I got there I realized that ditch had too many stones. I couldn't go in with the knife without taking an enormous risk. The deer was moving his brow and his antlers in a way that could injure me badly, even in an eye or in the ribs. His hindquarters were out of reach in that ditch, and that is the way we hunters go in to avoid a stag's goring. And if I came at him head-on, the deer would charge me.

I started to get nervous. That deer's eyes were completely bulging out of their sockets from the shot; I was using a high-caliber rifle, which almost always causes instant death, but on that occasion, instead of shortening the moment of death, it caused that beast infinite pain. He was suffering enormously. I froze. I don't know for how long.

I couldn't shoot into the ditch because the bullet could ricochet and hit me, or fly off as a stray bullet and perhaps wound someone else. But after a while, I understood that it was the only solution. I couldn't go in by the hindquarters.

I steeled myself, aimed at the heart and fired.

That experience was horrible. For the rest of my life I have seen that deer's face, his brow, his bulging eyes, trying to gather himself to flee. And my mind always said: “forgive me, forgive me, forgive me…”

I regret enormously what I did.

I never practiced big game hunting again. It seemed to me an aberration.

And yet, I don't know why, I have gone on hunting small game. I have to admit that I like cooking them. I make them a traditional stew that my mother made, and my grandmother before her: conejo al ajillo with a wine reduction. I also make caldero de conejo, a soupy, creamy rice, inspired by recipes I read in Miguel Delibes's books.

I remember a hunting day recently, at dawn, in summer, after the regressions with Puy. Suddenly I put a question out into the air, without expecting an answer. Rabbits are very endearing animals; when you bring them down and go to pick them up you take in their face, their little snout and their whiskers, they look like something out of a storybook, there is an almost childlike beauty in them.

Then I asked with force: “Even though I eat these animals, why do I hunt them? Why do I hunt them?”.

The answer was immediate: “They are your food.”

At that moment I remembered what had happened in Spain and in Europe with the myxomatosis virus. When it appeared, the rabbit was practically wiped out in many areas, and in its wake many predator species suffered, among them birds of prey and lynxes, which never recovered. I understood that the rabbit had been food for many species, not only for human beings.

That is why that answer said “your food.” Not only food for humans, but also for other animals.

I understood then the reproductive cycle of female rabbits, their capacity to breed so often, even to become pregnant again shortly after giving birth while they are still nursing their kits. It is like an animal designed with an extremely high biological efficiency to provide nutrients to other species.

I don't justify everything on that basis, but I understand better the sentence that came to me: “It is your food.”

Later my admiration for life reached, through my Buddhist readings, a point of compassion for any kind of life, even for insects: when I go out to train and I'm running, I look at the ground and try not to step on a line of ants crossing the path. I respect them as a form of life. They are doing their work. They are trying to survive.

I had also felt repulsion toward many insects before.

As a child I felt a deep repulsion for wasps. I remember one time, out in the countryside, that I threw a stone at a bush with the bad luck that the stone struck a wasps' nest head-on. All the wasps came out at me, enraged, and stung me. Maybe it was eight or nine stings. They left my face and my chest swollen, inflamed, as if my body had reacted intensely to that attack. I remember that experience with a great deal of pain.

From then on, wasps had been repulsive creatures to me. Once I told this experience to a friend, and she said to me: “They are not repulsive animals; they also serve to pollinate.” I refused to accept it. The fear, the pain and the rejection were too deeply engraved in me.

And yet now, after the experiences with Puy, a different sensation came to me, as if that memory had returned in order to be understood in another way. A small sentence came to me, simple, but very clear: “They were defending their community.”

Afterwards I reasoned through what had happened and I understood that those insects were not to blame. They simply responded to a stimulus of threat against their community. They carried out their function. The guilty one, in truth, had been me, even if I had done it without meaning to. And an insect does not have the capacity to analyze the situation.

11. Conclusion: sensitivity, communication and teaching

This whole chapter revolves around one idea: sensitivity can be a quality that improves communication.

I still don't know whether the communications come from my mind, from my subconscious, from another plane or from an outside entity. But I do perceive that sensitivity fine-tunes the reception. Sensitivity cleans the wiring. It reduces interference. It makes certain teachings arrive with more force.

That sensitivity is not only emotion. It is the schooling of knowing how to carry oneself, it is respect, it is curiosity, it is compassion, it is the capacity for wonder, it is pain in the face of animal suffering, it is sadness in the face of minds that do not open, it is nervousness in the face of too much information and it is also the desire to understand.

Sensitivity has brought me problems. It has made me suffer brusque remarks. It has led me to shoulder work that was not mine to do. It has made me live bonds, losses and memories with too much intensity.

But perhaps that same sensitivity is also a tool.

Perhaps it is an essential part of the channel.

Perhaps, thanks to it, the teachings arrive.

And perhaps my task now is not to deny what arrives nor to affirm it without prudence, but to learn to listen to it, to order it and to put it at the service of a deeper understanding of my life.

The failed communication

For a long time I have been wondering why, on some occasions, the images appear in an extremely fast, dizzying sequence. They arrive like a throng of information that I can barely make out and, almost immediately, they disappear.

The explanation that eventually made its way through me was this: it is as if a communication managed to begin, but during the process some interference or failure appeared. The channel could be disturbed by a lack of energy or by some other circumstance that I still do not know. As a consequence, the transmission would be interrupted before completing itself.

From this interpretation, those disordered, extremely fast images would be failed attempts at communication: transmissions that have begun, but that have not managed to reach me in a whole, comprehensible and stable way. It is like when you have a radio receiver and you try to tune in to a station: you only hear a sound as if someone were speaking inside a metal can, without an ounce of clarity.

At first I thought it might be a kind of joke someone was playing on me from the other side: sending me a pile of information and “there, now you sort it out.” I also considered the possibility that it was my own subconscious that produced those sequences. However, I now feel another explanation quite clearly: someone is trying to transmit the information, but, for whatever reason, it stops halfway or arrives in a faulty state.

The sensation resembles what happens when a vinyl record gets scratched and the playback becomes trapped, repeating itself or warping. It also reminds me of a cassette tape that begins to lose tension, gets tangled and ends up unraveling inside the radio-cassette player. The content was there and the playback had begun, but the medium in charge of carrying it has not been able to complete its function properly.

I cannot prove that this explanation is objectively correct. The only thing I can record is that it appeared within me as an especially sharp clarification that made sense of those bursts of incomplete images.

The alteration of perception and the readjustment

There is an episode from the first months of my sick leave that I read differently today. It is the one about the music app I told a few pages back: I would open the same app I had always used on my phone and be certain that someone had changed it completely, until, after a while staring at the screen, everything returned to its place and I understood that it was still the same. I explained it to my doctor at one of the check-ups, and I remember that she listened to me with her eyes wide open.

At the beginning of my illness my mind was going through a profound change. My perception was probably altered as a consequence of the psychological deterioration I was suffering and which I related, fundamentally, to what I had lived through in my work environment.

What I then interpreted merely as a disconcerting symptom now acquires, within my personal experience, a deeper meaning. It was as if my system of perception were being modified, readjusting itself, going through a transformation.

The sensation that comes to me is that that process could resemble a kind of recalibration. As if my habitual way of recognizing, ordering and interpreting reality had momentarily stopped working normally and needed to rebuild itself.

From my current interpretation, that transformation could have prepared my mind to perceive more clearly the information that later began to emerge, whether it came from my subconscious or from what I experience as a different plane.

But I cannot know whether a real relationship exists between the two processes. It is just as possible that the alteration was simply a manifestation of the psychological state I was going through at that moment. What I do remember clearly is the strangeness of looking at something familiar and feeling, for a few instants, that it had ceased to be so.

Today I look upon that experience as a possible phase of disorganization and subsequent readjustment of my perception: a moment in which my mind seemed to be dismantling its habitual way of interpreting the world in order to try to find, afterwards, a new way of organizing it.

In this fourth part I will use the word energy just as it appears in my experience and in my personal model. When I draw general conclusions, they should be understood as interpretation: rest, attention, activation, emotional load and physical capacity are the observable translation of what I call energy here.

This is the most analytical part of the book, and I think it shows: here I try to build a model out of what I have gradually come to understand.

I'm not interested in reducing the mystical to the technical. I'm interested in using the technical as a tool that helps to tune the channel, just as a surgeon operates at a distance with electronic arms without thereby ceasing to be a surgeon.

What you will find here is the full development of the economy of energy: its functions, the meaning of absences, stuttering as a signal, the desert planet, the sower of life and the scales of childhood.

Audio for this section

1. Purpose of the integrated report

This report gathers and orders what I have gradually come to understand about my regressive experiences, the visions that appeared after the regressions with Puy, and the clarifications that arrived later to complete scenes I had not fully managed to understand.

I write it in the first person because this is not an external theory, nor an objective claim about reality. It is a symbolic, emotional and narrative map built out of my own inner experiences. Its meaning does not lie in proving anything outward, but in ordering what I have felt, seen, remembered or tried to understand from within.

Within this process several lines appear and intertwine: the answers to questions I had been asking myself all my life, the clarifying memories that complete regressive scenes, the economy of energy that seems to organize what is shown and what is not shown, the figure of Puy as a guide or agent of activation, the teaching of learning to say no, and the need to write it all down before this source of information runs dry.

I do not want to lose any detail, but neither do I want to repeat the same thing unnecessarily. That is why this report merges the ideas into a single structure: it keeps the nuances of each experience, removes the duplications and preserves what is most important in each understanding.

2. The opening of a source of information

I do not know how long these revelations will last. I do not know whether it will be something that keeps going indefinitely in time or whether, on the contrary, it is a temporary window in which I will be given the answer not to all those questions that have arisen in me throughout my life, but to those that will help me on my path.

In any case, I intend to make the most of the answer to these memories, which I prefer to call visions, until this source of information runs dry.

When all these visions began to appear, I started to think that perhaps a channel of communication had opened temporarily. That is why I had to write it all down, to keep it from being lost forever in my memory in the end.

It was a feeling that, every time I thought about it, grew stronger.

To reach for a simile, it was like when you turn up the volume on a stereo and it begins, through its speakers, to give off a series of vibrations. If you put your hand on the speaker, you feel that vibration. But there comes a moment when, once the volume goes past a certain level, you start to feel the vibration in your chest.

That simile describes in a simple way what I was feeling around that thought. At first it was a faint idea, almost mental. Then it began to take on body. And finally it became a physical need, as if it were no longer only in my head, but in my chest as well.

That is why I feel I must write. Because if I do not, I fear that some images will be lost, that some connections will be erased and that some answers will sink back into a place in my memory that afterwards I may no longer be able to reach.

3. The origin of the visions after the regressions with Puy

After the regressions with Puy, I began to perceive answers to questions I had been asking myself all my life. They were plain, clear, simple answers, offering no long explanation.

I had been asking myself those questions since I was very young, but they were rhetorical questions: questions to which one already knows the answer, or that one simply throws out into the air, as something poetic. They were not questions formulated with any real expectation that someone would answer. They were more like queries that lived inside me, thoughts that had been left floating for years.

Later, after making the transcriptions of those regression sessions, it seemed that a new channel of communication had opened in my mind.

Through that channel, answers began to reach me to those rhetorical questions one throws out into the air without expecting an answer, either because one believes one already knows it, or because one is not looking for a direct reply, but rather for a question to think about.

The answers reached me in a way similar to how, during the regressions, the subtle replies to the questions I asked used to reach me. But they also closely resembled that help I received from entities that wanted to facilitate the expanded consciousness session.

As the days go by, it is clear to me that they are revelations. Through that strange channel of communication that has opened, whether with my subconscious or with some other entity, information is beginning to flow.

The most striking thing is that those answers do not arrive as treatises or as closed explanations. They arrive as brief phrases, images, symbols or memories. It is as if I were given just enough to be able to reason afterwards. I am not handed everything already solved. I am handed a piece, and then it is up to me to join it with what I have lived, with what I have remembered and with what I already sensed.

4. Vital answers and clarifying memories

Within these visions, I am beginning to distinguish two kinds of memories.

On the one hand, there are those that seem to answer questions I have asked myself all my life. They are old questions, almost intimate, ones I did not always formulate consciously, but that have been present in me since I was young.

On the other hand, there are other memories that do not belong to that category. They do not answer an old, vital question; instead they appear as clarifications of something I saw during a regression. They are images or understandings that come afterward, as if something inside me wanted to complete, explain or qualify a scene that had already been shown.

This nuance matters, because not all visions have the same function. Some seem to answer. Others seem to clarify.

Vital answers have something of a direct revelation about them. They respond to an old unease with a sentence or with a simple understanding. Clarifying memories, by contrast, seem to work like pieces that fit into place afterward. They come to explain a detail, a shape, a presence, an image or a scene that had been left open in the regression.

There is also a third dimension that begins to organize everything: energy. As I go back over the experiences, I begin to see that I am not shown everything, that some images appear complete and others do not, that some senses are activated and others remain blocked, that some emotions concentrate with immense force, and that some absences also seem to have meaning.

5. Energy as an organizing principle

The idea that begins to organize everything is that in these experiences there is something like an economy of energy.

Not everything is shown to me. Not everything is allowed to me to see, to smell, to feel or to reconstruct. Some images appear incomplete. Some sensations arrive with great force. Others, by contrast, seem blocked. This leads me to interpret that the experience does not work like a complete film, but like a system that selects whatever is necessary in order to understand the main teaching.

Energy is not spent without purpose. It seems to be held back for whatever carries a more important emotional, symbolic or spiritual charge.

The hypothesis that begins to take shape is this: the experience acts as an optimizer. It does not reconstruct the whole setting, only the elements that are indispensable for me to understand the emotion, the message or the central teaching.

This optimizer would not take completeness as its principle, but symbolic efficiency. It would not be about showing me everything that exists in a scene, but about showing me whatever contains the necessary emotional or spiritual truth.

That is why, in some experiences, an incomplete image need not be a failure. Nor need an absence be a lack. A blocked smell may not be an inability, but a selection. A figure shown only in part may not be badly built, but built only as far as it is needed.

The experience seems to select the main emotion, the sufficient image, the right smell, the decisive sensation. The rest is left out because it would consume energy without contributing essential understanding.

6. Absence as meaning

In these experiences, what does not appear also matters.

Not seeing the rest of a family does not necessarily mean emptiness. Not being able to smell the blood does not simply mean sensory absence. Not seeing a lower-ranking officer in full does not mean a defective image. Not being able to turn my neck in a scene does not only mean bodily stiffness. It may indicate that there is an energetic limit, or that something demands greater preparation.

Absence can be a decision of the system.

Absence can indicate that energy is being held back for something else.

That is why I must pay attention not only to what appears, but also to what is missing. Each absence can answer a question:

Why was that not shown to me?

What would it have consumed if it had been shown?

Which element did receive energy in its place?

What teaching was that omission protecting?

In this way, absence stops being a lack and becomes information.

7. The functions of energy within the experiences

So far, the model is organized into several functions of energy.

7.1. Visualization energy

This is the energy needed to build images. When there is not enough energy, or when there is no need to spend more, the image appears only partially.

One example would be the incomplete visualization of the lower-ranking officer within the experience of the East Asian officer. I could not visualize him whole. I only saw the upper part. The image would not complete itself.

Until now that might have seemed a chance limitation, a lack of sharpness, or some difficulty of mine in visualizing. But now I interpret it differently. Perhaps the whole figure was not shown to me because it was not necessary. Visualizing the entire body would have consumed energy. The experience only needed to give me enough information to recognize his presence, his rank, his function within the scene, or his relationship to the Asian officer.

The upper part was enough. There was no need to spend energy on legs, feet, the complete surroundings, or secondary details. The scene selected only what was needed.

7.2. Sensory energy

This is the energy needed to activate specific senses, such as smell.

One of the first signs of this energetic economy also appears in the experience of the East Asian officer. In that experience there were two episodes related to smell. At one moment I was indeed able to smell the burnt wood. That smell reached me. It was accessible. I was able to perceive it.

However, at another moment I tried to smell the blood, but I could not. It was as if I were trying to gain access to that sensation and something would not allow me to. It was not simply that there was no smell; it was rather that I was trying to smell it, but the experience gave me no access to it.

I now interpret that difference as a question of energy.

Perhaps smelling the blood demanded an expenditure of energy that the experience could not, or should not, allow itself. Perhaps it was not necessary for the teaching. Perhaps it would even have steered the experience toward an excess of rawness, pain, or sensory impact. The smell of burnt wood, on the other hand, was available because it served a purpose: to place me, to draw me into the atmosphere, to make me enter that other plane without wasting energy.

The provisional conclusion would be that not all the senses are activated equally. The experience decides which sensation deserves energy and which does not.

Later, after I had gone through the regression and was already in the transcription phase, I began inwardly throwing out questions of this kind again: “Why can't I read this?”, “Why can't I do this to the character?”, “Why can't I see that?”. Then visions began to come to me, different from the earlier ones. This time they seemed to be written words, as if they were appearing in a Word document with a black background and white lettering. The letters had a triangular shape, and among them a word appeared that repeated itself intermittently, like a tic: energy.

The word would disappear and appear again. Energy. Energy. Energy. That was the answer I was being given through visions. It was not a long explanation or a developed sentence. It was a visual insistence, a minimal, repeated reply. Every time I asked myself why I could not read something, see something, or act upon some character within the experience, the answer was the same again: energy.

7.3. Emotional energy

This is the energy that makes it possible to feel an emotion intensely.

The scene of the little girl whose father goes off to war introduces something fundamental: energy is not reserved only for harsh, warlike, or painful scenes. It is also reserved for happiness.

In that experience I could not see anyone else from my family. I did not see other relatives. The experience did not show me the family as a whole. At first that might have seemed like a lack, or an incomplete scene. But now I am beginning to understand it differently.

Perhaps I did not see my family because visualizing more people would have consumed energy. The experience did not want to spend energy reconstructing faces, bodies, positions, or secondary family ties.

The energy had to be reserved for something far more important: feeling what my father did with me when he played with me.

He would lift me very, very high. My little legs would swing back behind me. That gave me a tickling sensation in my chest. That tickling drew endless laughter out of me. It was an immense joy, a bodily happiness, clean, childlike, total.

That was the greatest feeling of happiness I have had in all the experiences.

Now I understand why I could not see my family. The energy had to be concentrated on that particular experience: the play with my father, my body lifted up, the tickling, the laughter, and the feeling of love before the loss.

The teaching here is very clear: the energy was not meant to show me everyone. It was meant to make me feel the essential happiness of that bond.

7.4. Narrative energy

It is the energy that organizes which elements of the scene are necessary for the inner story to make sense.

In the girl's experience, what mattered was not knowing how many people there were in the family, nor reconstructing the whole house or the whole setting. What was essential was recovering a sensation: the absolute joy of being lifted up by my father, the tingling in my chest, the uncontainable laughter.

In the officer's experience, what mattered was perhaps not smelling the blood or seeing every detail of the lower-ranking officer's body. What mattered was entering a plane of understanding, of teaching, or of confrontation with an inner truth.

Narrative energy does not reconstruct everything. It selects what is necessary.

7.5. Energy of action

It is the energy needed to respond to a request or to carry out a decision.

When Puy asks me for something, I cannot always respond fluidly. I begin to short-circuit, to stammer, to become blocked. That suggests her requests carry a special charge.

They are not trivial requests. They seem to demand an inner action, a response that commits energy, will, or decision.

In some regressions, Puy asks her patients to move from one place to another. To accompany that movement she counts to three, saying: “one, two, and three.” In my case, I have observed a significant difference. On some occasions, even before she began counting, I was already there where she had told me to go. The action happened almost immediately, as if the inner displacement met no resistance.

Other times, however, Puy would reach three and I found it very hard to get there, or simply could not. Until now I could interpret that difficulty only as a problem of refusal: perhaps I did not want to go to that place, perhaps something inside me was resisting. But it might also be related to the matter of energy.

When I get ahead of the count of three, perhaps I am heavily charged with energy and can carry out the movement easily. When the count reaches three and I have not been able to go, two things may be happening: either I do not want to go to that place because there is an emotional, symbolic, or spiritual resistance, or I am very low on energy and do not have enough charge to make the displacement.

This adds a new key to the model: movements within the regression do not depend on will alone. They may also depend on the energy available at that moment.

7.6. Energy of recharge

It is the energy I must recover on an intermediate plane when the experience demands more than I have available.

Sometimes, when Puy asks me for something, I begin to short-circuit. I find it hard to respond. I start to stammer. Until now I could not make sense of it. It was as if something got blocked, as if the required action demanded more than I could give at that moment.

Now a different image comes to me: perhaps that stammering or short-circuiting represents a need to recharge energy.

The energy would not come directly from the physical plane, nor from the regressive plane in which I am living the scene. It would have to come from somewhere else: an intermediate plane.

That intermediate plane would be situated between the physical plane and the regressive experience. It would not mean leaving the scene completely. It would be as if a part of me had to go to that place, take energy, and return to the point where I was.

I do not leave entirely. I remain connected to the scene. But a part of me moves just enough to recharge.

When the experience demands a response that exceeds my available energy, the short-circuit appears. The stammering would be the signal that I need to recharge on an intermediate plane before I can continue.

This broadens the model: there is not only an economy of energy; there are also mechanisms of resupply.

7.7. Vital energy

It is the energy of my real life, the energy I have spent sustaining suffering, and which now perhaps I must learn to reserve for my dignity, my health and my future.

Here energy ceases to be only a key for understanding the regressions. It becomes a teaching about my present life.

8. Stammering as a signal of transition

The stuttering stops being merely a difficulty.

It could be a signal. A mark of transition. A symptom that something inside me is trying to carry out an action for which it does not yet have enough energy.

When Puy asks me for something, the request may require a very intense emotional, symbolic or spiritual response. If I don't have enough energy at that moment, the system begins to fail: I get stuck, I break off, I stutter, I struggle to go on.

But that failure would not be useless. It would be an indication that an internal operation is under way.

The hypothesis would be that the short circuit appears when a part of me tries to hold three planes at once: the physical, the regressive and the intermediate plane of recharging.

That is why I don't leave altogether, but neither am I completely stable within the scene. I am at a point of tension.

This idea also connects with the experience inside the immense machinery of the desert planet, when my neck would seize up, as if locked tight, and I had to do something like stopping, breathing in oxygen and gathering strength. Later I understood that it might have to do with matters of energy: a preparation for withstanding an energy overload and managing to reach another chamber.

9. Puy as a guiding figure and an agent of activation

Puy appears as a figure who asks something of me.

When Puy asks me for something, I cannot always respond fluidly. I start to short-circuit, to stutter, to get blocked. That suggests her requests carry a special charge.

They are not trivial requests. They seem to demand an inner action, a response that commits energy, will or decision.

Puy could be working as an agent of activation: someone who takes me to the limit of what I can hold within the experience. When that limit is reached, the stuttering, the blockage or the need to recharge appears.

The relationship with Puy would stand like this: Puy does not only ask or request. Puy pushes me towards an action that requires enough energy to be carried out.

And when that energy is not available, the intermediate plane appears.

This does not diminish her role as a guide. On the contrary, it seems to make it more precise. Puy does not simply hand me explanations. She leads me to inner places where something must be seen, named or passed through. Sometimes the demand of that movement is so intense that my system needs to reorganize itself in order to continue.

10. The drums as a shamanic instrument

The first of the memories that I now clearly know are visions had to do with a musical instrument.

From a very young age I had liked two kinds of music. One of them was rock, because I saw it as music with grit, capable of lifting my being and my spirit.

In the group of friends who liked rock, the ones I used to get together with at school and at secondary school, we all talked about bands. Everyone appreciated the quality of an electric guitar, of a bass or of any other instrument. Yet what especially caught my attention was the drums.

For the rest of my life, in every band I listened to, without realizing it, I would analyse the drumming, whether it was a pop group, a pop rock group or a rock group.

I could pick out those drummers who were especially, to put it some way, harmonious.

The drums are an instrument that sets the beat of the orchestra or of the band. They are probably the backbone of the song, though not everyone understands it that way. That much I was clear about.

I remember comments on music radio shows, and on other kinds of programmes too, where the musicians in rock bands were analysed and remarks were made such as:

“Here, as good as Eddie Van Halen was, he's come in crosswise with the drums.”

Those remarks reinforced something I already sensed: the drums were not simply an accompaniment. The drums held up the inner structure of the song. They marked the body of the rhythm. They gave the music a spine.

One of the answers that came to me had to do with why I liked drums more than other instruments.

The answer was simple:

It is a shamanic instrument.

Then I began to understand why my spirit lifted whenever I came across a piece of music like Alive and Kicking, by Simple Minds. That drumming lifted my spirit and filled me with an incredible sensation. It wasn't exactly happiness, but it did resemble something very close to it.

I was only given a simple answer, as if I were being made to reason out the why of an answer that, deep down, I already knew.

I understood then that the drums did not attract me only as a musical instrument. They attracted me for something deeper: for their capacity to generate rhythm, trance, elevation, strength, inner movement. The drums did not only organize the music; in some way, they also organized something inside me.

From the model of energy, this revelation makes even more sense. The drums work with rhythm, and rhythm organizes. It orders the body, the breath, the emotion and the movement. Perhaps that is why the answer was not a musical explanation, but a spiritual one: shamanic.

Even so, I am still not one hundred percent sure why that question was answered with such a specific reply: “it is a shamanic instrument.” The answer is there, but its full meaning has not yet finished unfolding inside me.

I don't know whether this revelation has come so that I might study it more deeply and so that, perhaps, I might use the rhythmic sounds of drums or drum kits as a way of inducing in myself a state of deep consciousness. Perhaps those rhythms could help me in future regressions, or perhaps also in solitary meditations. But I don't want to state it categorically yet.

For now, this part of the teaching remains somewhat blurred. I know that the drums, the rhythm, the trance and the shamanic are joined in some way, but I still need to observe it, live it and understand it better before giving it a definitive form.

11. Childhood drawings and repetitive symbols

Another of the memories came into my mind several times. It superimposed itself on my consciousness at moments that were even awkward, when I was talking with someone else and seemed to be more distracted than usual.

The memory was based on some experiences I had when I was a small child. I was shown an image that clarified a question I had asked myself in childhood. I remember that, when I left childhood behind, I also stopped asking myself that question forever.

Like most children of that age, in the seventies and eighties, I liked to make a lot of drawings. Most of the time they were drawings with a playful purpose: I painted landscapes, cars and, above all, police cars, which I loved. With them I would then make little stories, the typical mental representations of a child imagining characters.

There were times, however, when I would start making a kind of doodles. Doodles are those strokes we make unconsciously, for example, when we are talking on the phone and have a pen and paper at hand.

These doodles were normally symbolic and repetitive. They repeated themselves continuously.

One of them consisted of drawing triangles in a linear arrangement, one with the base facing up and another with the base facing down, forming what I called a kind of snake with no beginning and no end. I realized, as I was drawing it, that it didn't make much sense, because I couldn't find either the beginning or the end.

Another of the drawings I made were the typical spirals with a square shape, instead of a round one, on the paper. As I acquired knowledge in my youth, they seemed to me something like the borders on the garments of the figures that appeared on Greek pottery.

And then there was a rather disturbing one: the Star of David.

The Star of David repeated itself thousands of times. Sometimes, instead of the Star of David, I would draw something I didn't know what it was. It was a pentacle. But whenever I finished it I would say:

“Bah, this is the symbol of the devil.”

Then I would leave it and try to make the Star of David. Sometimes it came out better, sometimes worse, but when it came out perfect, I would delight in it.

However, the memory that came to me had nothing to do with any of these symbolic drawings. It had to do with another image.

12. The scales as a memory of clarification

The memory that came to me consisted of some scales drawn by me on a piece of paper.

In my regressions I had seen two kinds of scales: some pointed ones, on the headdresses of the Ensu, and others on the Asian officer's military breastplate. These corresponded exactly to the ones on the Asian military breastplate. They were drawn in ballpoint pen, with astonishing perfection, on a sheet of graph paper.

When I set out to remember, that image would slip away from me. I knew it was something important that I had to remember. These and other images had come into my memory to give me explanations about the regressions, because they had something to do with them. It infuriated me that they were forgotten right away.

This one, however, appeared again and again.

When I said to myself, “How infuriating, I keep forgetting them,” I asked for a very subtle communication, like the ones that came in the regressions, and I received an order:

Repeat it out loud.

I understood it right away. It was like a kind of mnemonic trick for memorizing the memory that was reaching my mind.

Even so, this image appeared on its own several times. One day, when I managed to gather enough calm, I set out to remember what all of it had to do with.

I knew it was connected to some childhood drawing. Then I remembered that I used to draw something similar, but imperfect, the way the hands of a small child would do it, a child who still has no absolute precision or dexterity in his fingers for writing and drawing.

I remember that back then they made us work through the Rubio workbooks to give our hands that dexterity. I also remember that my right ring finger always ended up callused.

So I took a piece of paper and drew both shapes: the perfect one and the imperfect one. And I was able to find the connection.

That memory expanded like a zoom.

I managed to remember that I drew the imperfect shape over and over. I always remember the posture. When I made these drawings, I would rest my little left hand on the table. I would start on the drawing, close my lips and stick out the tip of my tongue, that typical gesture children make when they are given something difficult to do at school.

I remember being somewhat tense. Since my feet still didn't reach the floor from the chair I was sitting on, I would stand up and stretch my little legs. I pressed my tongue harder, pressed my lips harder, stuck my tongue out even further, and repeated continuously while I drew those waves:

“I can't get it, I can't get it, I can't get it, I can't get it.”

When I finished, I recognized that I had made a great effort. I ended up tired. I would step back from that drawing and ask myself:

“What is this?”

And then I would think:

“Bah, they're just sea waves.”

Then, as if blushing with the embarrassment of having devoted so much time to that drawing, I would throw it in the trash, since there were no wastebaskets in my house.

Now I can see clearly that those sea waves were imperfect, and that the memory that had come to me was the scales.

Here, however, I received no kind of communication. The drawing was simply shown to me, as if forcing me to reason and to think about what that was.

After this understanding, a new question appeared: what did the scaled breastplate really mean?

Then a memory from my student days came back to me. On more than one occasion, during the eternal silence of exams, the teachers would walk up and down the aisles keeping watch over the students. Sometimes they would stop to read my exam. If, with a certain benevolence, they found a mistake or something left out, they would glance briefly at the rest of the class and, if no student was paying attention, they would kindly tap a finger a couple of times on a question that was wrong or incomplete, as if trying to tell me that I had to go back over it.

That memory helped me understand the way the image of the scaled breastplate had arrived. I had not been given a long explanation. Something had been pointed out to me. It was as if that image had been the teacher's finger tapping gently on a specific question of my inner exam, telling me that I should go back over that point because there was something important there that I still had not fully understood.

After turning it over, I came to the conclusion that knowing how to say no mattered not only in my working life, but in other aspects of my life as well.

The scaled breastplate was not only an image of the Asian officer, nor only a shape tied to a childhood memory. It was also a sign. It was pointing me to something I had to examine: my difficulty in setting limits, my tendency to endure too much, and the need to learn to say no wherever my vital energy was being consumed.

In terms of the distinction between answers and clarifications, this memory clearly belongs to the second group. It was not an answer to a vital, lifelong question. It was a clarification about something seen in regression: the scales on the Asian soldier's chest and their relation to a childhood gesture repeated many times without my understanding, back then, what it meant.

13. The Eastern regression as a setting for teaching

The experience of the Eastern Asian officer seems to work as a setting for teaching.

It is not just a historical image or a strange scene. It is a plane where symbols, limits, blockages, smells, partial figures and requests from Puy are presented to me. All of it seems to organize itself around a profound teaching.

Entering that Eastern regression might have to do with a change of plane. On that plane, energy is not unlimited. It cannot be spent without discernment. Every element that appears has a cost. Every sensation that is activated requires an inner justification.

That is why the images are partial. That is why some smells are available and others are not. That is why I sometimes need to recharge. That is why the system seems to optimize.

The experience does not give me a complete scene out of curiosity. It gives me a scene aimed at a teaching.

Within that regression, the scales, the smells, the incomplete figures, the body's blockages and Puy's requests seem to be part of a single architecture. Nothing appears just because. Nor does everything appear. What is shown seems to have a function.

14. The teaching of learning to say no

Within the experience of the Asian officer, one of the teachings being revealed to me most forcefully is learning to say no.

This teaching does not appear now as a simple phrase or as a piece of moral advice. It first appeared bound to the scaled breastplate, as a sign that forced me to examine an inner question. Then it spread into my working life and, with even greater clarity, into other areas of my life where for years I had learned to keep quiet and endure.

Saying no thus becomes an action still pending, difficult, painful and momentous.

For years, in my real life, I have felt that I had to endure. I have felt that I had to sacrifice myself, that I had to sustain certain situations over my own suffering.

Now, perhaps, the teaching of knowing how to say no is revealing itself to me as a way of breathing courage into me so that I may set limits where for years there had only been endurance.

But I am beginning to see that I had perhaps confused resistance with unlimited sacrifice.

The question that arises now is a very hard one:

To what extent can sustaining a situation that harms me justify my ignoring my own inner limit?

Saying no could mean no longer holding up a very negative situation as the price of preserving an appearance.

Saying no could mean setting a limit where before there was only endurance.

Saying no could mean that my dignity matters too.

The teaching would be formulated like this:

Learning to say no means recognizing that holding on to such a negative situation can also cause pain, and that setting a limit may be necessary.

15. The relationship between energy and life decisions

Energy and learning to say no begin to connect.

For years, I have perhaps spent an enormous amount of energy holding up a deeply negative situation. I have invested energy in enduring, justifying, resisting, protecting, not breaking, not acting, not following things through to their final consequences.

Perhaps the experience is teaching me that energy should not be spent holding up what pushes me to an inner limit.

In the regressions, energy is reserved for what is essential. It is not wasted showing complete images if they are not necessary. A smell is not activated if it brings no understanding. The whole family is not shown if the emotional truth lies in the laughter with the father.

Perhaps that same teaching carries over into my life:

Nor should my life energy be consumed holding up a way of living that has stopped protecting and has become deeply negative.

Read this way, learning to say no is also a form of energy economy. It is withdrawing energy from what has become deeply negative and saving it for what I must protect: my dignity, my health, my future and my capacity to live with more peace.

16. The desert planet and the immense machinery

There is another memory that is not part of the questions I asked myself throughout my life. It is more a memory of clarification, an image that came to explain something that had appeared during one of the regressions.

In one of those regressions, I saw a completely desert planet. There was not a single leaf on the whole planet. It was a place where there was nothing but arid earth and rocks.

The vision consisted of being in a winding valley, bathed in a light similar to sunlight. I could make out the rear of an immense, gigantic piece of machinery. The image I perceived was fairly absurd, because I only saw the last part of that machine, its rear section, fully lit by the sun.

At first, I interpreted it as the stern of a ship, like the English or Spanish ships of old. But then I made out that it was something infinitely more sophisticated.

Puy told me to go inside that ship.

Then, like someone squeezing their eyes shut and clenching their hands, I made an effort without really knowing what I was doing. And I managed to penetrate that moving entity.

I reached an inner corridor, with artificial light. That small corridor ended in another one shaped like a T, but I knew that the far end of that T did not interest me. What interested me was to the right. I knew there was a door there, a room, and that I had to look inside.

But, once again, my neck got stuck. It went rigid, as if seized up.

On that occasion, like someone who stops to inhale oxygen and gather strength, I did something without knowing why I was doing it. Later I discovered that it had to do with matters of energy; it was like a preparation to withstand an energy overload and manage to reach that other room.

Then I was able to turn my head to the right.

This scene fits very well with the energy model. The difficulty in turning my neck does not seem to be only a physical resistance. It seems like a threshold. To look inside that room I needed more energy, or a different energy. Access was not free. It had a cost.

17. The human-looking being and the light of information

When I was able to look to the right, I saw a being with a human appearance.

Its hands were raised, in a V shape, and it wore a great robe. It had golden bracelets on its wrists, though I could not quite see its hands. Its head was strange. It looked human, but it was not. It had long hair and a beard.

Until that moment I had not understood that perhaps the long hair and beard were a way of concealing an inner reality.

I remember saying to Puy:

“It’s strange. It looks human, but it isn’t human.”

That being was standing in front of what could be considered a kind of well curb. That curb reminded me of solidified volcanic lava: perfect, dark, with bubbles and deep tonalities.

In the center of that structure, however, there was a bluish light. I knew it was light of information.

That being was processing millions and millions of pieces of data per second. An incredible amount. It was as if it were going over something, checking something. And it was looking at me.

The scene conveyed an enormous complexity. It was not simply a room. It was not just a machine. It was as if information were being processed there on a scale impossible to take in from an ordinary human mind.

From the logic of energy, that light of information seems to occupy a central place. The scene was not designed to show me the entire interior of the machine out of technical curiosity. It was aimed at making me understand that there was processing there, reviewing, checking, information, and a function linked to something immense.

18. The beings that appeared from behind

Suddenly I felt strange presences behind me. That alarmed me. I turned around and was able to see some beings that had arrived. I noticed that they were alarmed too.

They had a somewhat sinister appearance. Their head was oval, like the section of half a melon. They had several necks that reached down to a torso. That torso seemed to hold up some main tentacles, which were the ones they really used, and other, smaller tentacles. The smaller tentacles moved at great speed.

I couldn’t see the lower part well, but I thought I glimpsed a kind of tails, like the tails of felines when they project backward. The sensation I had is that this allowed them to gravitate.

Just as human beings, mammals or quadrupeds walk on the ground, that allowed them to move from one place to another.

They went so far as to hold me, but without hurting me.

And they were asking that entity something like:

“What’s this one doing here?”

They were telepathic thoughts.

He nodded his head, as if asking them to leave, as if indicating to them that he was letting me be there because he had to show me something. He showed a certain disdain toward me.

Afterward he asked me to leave that room with him.

The fact that those beings appeared with a much stranger and more unsettling appearance later became part of the clarification. Their presence not only produced alarm within the scene. It also made it possible to understand something about the appearance of the first being.

19. The sower of life and panspermia

On leaving that room, he showed me something infinite.

In that something infinite, he had something that looked like an artifact.

Puy asked me what it was.

And I told her it was a sower of life.

She asked me to clarify that concept a little more. Then I said the word:

“Panspermia.”

Once again, I acknowledge that I had already read about panspermia as a scientific theory: the idea that life could have spread throughout the universe, delivering to the planets embryos of life that would later give rise to more sophisticated forms.

What I saw, therefore, connected with that idea, although the image carried a symbolic and experiential charge far more intense than a mere theory read in a book or an article. The word appeared as a way of naming what was being shown to me: a technology, a function, a mission, or an artifact related to the sowing of life.

From the point of view of the energy model, this vision had an enormous symbolic cost. I was not shown a planet full of details, nor a complete machinery, nor a closed technical system. I was given the essentials: an arid planet, an immense machine, a chamber of information, a being that processed data, some alarmed beings, and an artifact that I named a sower of life.

The scene was not completed in all its elements. It was organized around a function: to show me the relationship between that machinery, that intelligence or entity, and the idea of sowing life.

20. The appearance chosen so as not to frighten me

The memory that came to me about this image was simply this:

He has shown himself here so as not to frighten you.

That was the clarification.

I understood that that being with an almost human appearance had not necessarily shown himself as he was. He had presented himself that way so that I could hold the vision without fear, so that the scene would not overwhelm me more than it was already overwhelming me.

I also remembered that those beings who had appeared from behind had a different physical aspect. I understood instantly, almost as a kind of reproach, that they had not even bothered to change their appearance.

But it could also be that it had happened that way so that I could find a reason for what I had seen.

Perhaps the difference between the being of human appearance and the other beings was, precisely, a key. The first showed himself in a way that I could tolerate. The others, on the other hand, appeared in a form much stranger, more disturbing, almost sinister. That difference allowed me to understand that appearance could be adapted, modulated, or presented in a particular way according to the needs of the experience.

Here too the economy of energy reappears, but in another sense. It is not only what is shown that is optimized, but how it is shown. Appearance can be a form of regulation. It can protect me from fear. It can allow me to access a scene that, otherwise, would have been too intense or unbearable.

21. Happiness as an energy priority

The scene of the little girl whose father goes off to war introduces an essential understanding: energy is not reserved only for pain, fear, strangeness, or difficult teaching. It is also reserved for the purest happiness.

The sensation of my father lifting me up, my little legs swinging around toward my back, the tingling in my chest, and the infinite laughter are not a minor detail. They are the core of the scene.

That joy was so important that the experience dispensed with everything else.

I did not need to see the rest of the family. I did not need to reconstruct the entire setting. I did not need to know what the others were doing. The energy had to go to one specific sensation: the greatest happiness.

This changes the interpretation of the energy system. It is not only a mechanism of saving. It is also a mechanism for protecting what is essential.

The energy concentrates wherever there is an emotional truth that I must remember, understand, or integrate.

In this case, the truth was the joy of the bond with my father before the war, before the separation, or before the loss.

The absence of the rest of the family did not empty the scene. On the contrary: it freed up the space so that the central emotion could be felt with all its power.

22. The general meaning of the visions and clarifications

All these experiences seem to be part of one and the same process.

On the one hand, answers appear to questions that have been with me since I was young, such as my deep attraction to the drums. That answer was simple, but powerful: the drums as a shamanic instrument.

On the other hand, clarifying memories appear, such as the one about the scales or the one about the sower of life. They are not old vital questions, but images that come to complete what I lived through in the regressions. They are pieces that fit afterwards, as if my mind needed time to understand what it had seen.

In the case of the scales, the clarification connected an image from a regression with a childhood gesture: that boy who drew waves over and over again, who tried until he wore himself out, who said “I can't get it right” and who then threw the drawing in the bin, thinking they were only sea waves.

In the case of the sower of life, the clarification pointed to the appearance of the being I saw. I was made to understand that it had shown itself in a particular way so as not to frighten me.

What unites all these visions is that none of them is delivered fully explained. Something is shown to me, or a simple phrase is given to me, and afterwards it is I who has to reason, remember, connect and understand.

I do not receive treatises or long explanations. I receive images, words, symbols or brief phrases.

It is as if the teaching did not arrive closed, but open. As if I were given just enough for me to be able to rebuild the meaning from within.

23. The optimizer model

The most powerful image that has appeared is that of the optimizer.

As if the experience had an internal logic similar to a system that calculates where to spend energy and where not to. It is not about showing everything. It is about achieving the maximum meaning with the minimum expenditure of energy.

This optimizer decides what I can see and what I cannot see; which smell is activated and which smell stays blocked; which part of a person appears and which part does not; which relatives remain absent; which bodily sensation must be felt with full intensity; when I need to recharge; when an answer exceeds my available energy; and why, faced with certain questions, the word energy itself appears as an insistent visual answer.

Its principle would not be completeness, but symbolic efficiency.

The central formulation would be:

The experience optimizes energy in order to show me only that which contains the necessary emotional or spiritual truth.

This model allows me to understand in an integrated way many pieces that before could seem unconnected: the impossibility of smelling blood, the possibility of smelling burnt wood, the partial visualization of a figure, the absence of relatives in a scene, the extreme intensity of the girl's laughter, the blockage in the neck, the stuttering, the need to recharge and the adapted form of certain beings so as not to frighten me.

24. Core phrases of the report

These are the phrases that condense what has been discussed:

The experience does not reconstruct everything; it selects what is necessary.

Energy is not wasted on details that do not contain the main teaching.

Not seeing something can also be a form of meaning.

The system acts as a perceptual, emotional and narrative optimizer.

Energy is reserved for that which contains the essential truth of the scene.

When I ask why I cannot read, see or do something within the experience, the answer that repeats itself is energy.

The stuttering may be a sign that I need to recharge energy before continuing.

The speed or the difficulty in moving during Puy's count to three can also indicate how much energy I have available, or whether there is an inner resistance towards the place I am being asked to go.

Learning to say no may be the vital translation of this teaching about energy.

Saying no does not mean abandoning anyone; it means recognizing my limit and acting from it.

My vital energy must not be consumed in sustaining what has become deeply negative.

Happiness can also be a priority of energy.

An appearance can be a form of protection if the whole truth would be too intense.

The clarifications do not explain everything; they hand me the piece I need in order to reconstruct the meaning.

It is best to come to the regression sessions rested, relaxed, and with the greatest energy available on this plane.

25. General conclusion

What is being revealed in these experiences is an intimate theory of energy.

Energy appears as something limited, valuable, and directed. It is not spent completing images out of mere curiosity. It is not used to activate all the senses. It is not scattered showing secondary characters if the teaching is concentrated in a single emotion. Nor is it given without limit when a request from Puy demands an answer that exceeds my immediate capacity.

Energy selects, protects, omits, concentrates, and recharges.

In the experience of the East Asian officer, this energy seems to be linked to the teaching of learning to say no. That teaching connects directly with my present life, with the need to set limits where for years there was only endurance, and with the possibility of protecting my dignity, my health, and my vital energy.

In the experience of the little girl, the energy concentrates on the purest happiness: my father lifting me up, my legs swinging backward, the tingling in my chest and the infinite laughter. There the energy is not devoted to showing the whole family, but to preserving the essential emotion of love and joy.

In Puy's requests, energy appears as something that can run out and require recharging. The stammering and the short circuit could be signs that a part of me needs to go to an intermediate plane in order to come back with enough strength.

In the clarifying visions, like the one of the scales or the one of the sower of life, the information arrives briefly, almost minimally, but enough to open an understanding. The image does not come fully explained. It comes charged with a direction. It forces me to remember, compare, reason, and find the link.

From all of this a practical recommendation for future regression sessions is also born. It is best to arrive as rested as possible, preserving as much energy from this plane as I can. If training or going to the gym happened to fall on that day, it would be preferable to leave it for another day. It is also good to sleep well the night before and to go as relaxed as possible. Even though the recharging may take place on another plane, it is worth investing beforehand in the physical and mental conditions with which one enters the session. The more available energy I preserve on this plane, the more capacity I will have to sustain the experience, to attend to what is shown, and not to exhaust myself before understanding the teaching.

All of this leads me to a central understanding:

My experiences do not show me everything. They show me what I have energy for, what I need to understand, and what can transform my life.

And now, in addition, I understand something that moves me deeply: it seems that it was almost necessary for me to have had this illness in order to get here. It is like saying that without this illness, I would not have reached this moment of mental expansion, though I will qualify this right away, because I do not want to set it out as a justification of suffering, nor as a way of making pain beautiful, but as an intimate understanding that is beginning to make its way inside me. It is as if the wisdom obtained from the experience obtained from the processes of this illness had also been part of a plan or an extremely complicated puzzle, preconceived from the moment of my birth, or even before, to which I was predestined: deep down the illness was a painful piece, difficult and almost unbearable, but necessary to push me toward this path of spirituality. A path that has opened my mind in a way I believed could not be felt. The qualification comes now; I feel that this experience could have arrived at this moment but even using another form that is not this illness in particular. That is, I believe free will can exist, so one could say that what changes is the form in which the experience appears; I will explain it with a simile; it is as if a scene from everyday life could be painted by Rembrandt or by Picasso; on looking at them we believe we would get two totally different paintings, and in part that is true, but because we use our eyes, we use a worldly sense which is our eyes, but if we look with the Spirit we perceive the similarity, we realize that the essence behind them is the same; the scene represented is the same, apparently they are two totally different paintings, but what is represented has not changed. What I mean by this is that free will can exist, but in the end the experience arrives in another form. That is, I could have shown up at Puy's practice to ask her for help for another reason, for example for the loss of a loved one instead of the real reason, which was a burn-out syndrome, and she in both cases, thus justifying the existence of free will, would equally in both cases have been there to help me; what is clear is that one way or another I had to show up at her practice, so that she would help me and initiate me into expanded consciousness. The complicated becomes simple if we look with the eyes of the spirit.

Looking back, I cannot fully separate the illness, the regressions, the visions, the energy, the learning to say no, the need to write, and the opening of this channel. Everything seems to belong to a single weave. As if each piece, even the most painful ones, had ended up settling into a position that is now beginning to show a direction.

I also feel that this is not just a series of isolated memories. It is a great journey. I have just realized that I have begun a great journey. I do not know how long it will last, nor where it will take me, nor what I will still have to understand. But the feeling is clear: I have entered a process greater than myself, an inner crossing whose depth I cannot yet measure.

As Pema Chödrön expresses in one of her teachings, it is like getting into a boat and setting out on a journey across a great ocean. One does not know where that crossing will lead. One travels with one's uncertainty, with one's fears, with one's questions, and with what one does not yet understand. But even so one gets into the boat, goes out into the ocean, and allows the journey to unfold.

That is how I feel now. Like someone who has got into a boat without knowing the exact destination. I do not travel with absolute certainties. I travel with uncertainty. But I also travel with a new sense of openness, of respect, and of trust that this path, though I do not yet know where it is leading me, is part of my healing.

That is why I must keep writing as long as the source remains open.

I do not know whether these communications come from my subconscious, from some entity, or from an intermediate space that I still cannot name clearly. But I do know that the visions are arriving.

They come as answers. They come as clarifications. They come as images that lay themselves over my consciousness even in the most ordinary moments. They come with a force that at first seems mental, but that is later felt in the body, like a vibration that stops being in the speaker and begins to be felt in the chest.

And as long as that vibration is still there, I feel I must gather everything that comes from it with respect, attention and fidelity.

Drawing by the author in a childhood notebook: the “sea waves” that, years later, he recognized as scales.

Here is the confirmation of that three-word answer: it is a shamanic instrument.

You will find the technical analysis of the drumming in Alive and Kicking, the interpretation of why it fills me with energy, and the songs that began to play in my head until I understood what they had come to tell me.

Before telling what the music awakened in me, I wanted to understand it. I am not a musician, so, humbly, I turned to artificial intelligence to help me analyze the drum track of Alive and Kicking, by Simple Minds, and to check whether what I sensed —its almost shamanic character— had any foundation.

Audio for this section

Audio for this section

Extraction of the percussion in “A&K”

Listen at least once to the original, in full, all the way to the end.

THE DRUM TRACK HAS TO BE HEARD ALL THE WAY TO THE END, IT HAS INTENTIONAL GAPS OF SILENCE made by the drummer

first it comes in with a single drum, harmonic and continuous like trance percussion, then the drummer, so as to keep building the rhythm, after a few seconds starts using two drums, a rhythmic system is reached in which they are felt with considerable impact, it is a higher level of the trance, then come the climbs toward the two peaks of trance. It is as if it had been designed to begin from a calm, to initiate the trance and to draw you in little by little as far as the zone of ecstasy I decide to turn to artificial intelligence given my scant knowledge of the musical world.

Explanation from gemini AI

Prompt:

give me synonyms for ecstasy in a musical piece that is to say when it has a part where the rhythm keeps rising and it seems to reach an ecstasy describe this process to me in a musician's language applied to only one instrument: a drum kit

The AI's answer:

On the drums, that process of rhythmic accumulation that leads to ecstasy is technically known as dynamic growth, rhythmic tension and climax.

Here are the specific terms and the description of this process explained from a drummer's perspective:

Synonyms and technical terms on the drums

• Dynamic crescendo: The gradual increase in the force of the impact (from piano to fortissimo).

• Fill / Tension roll: A passage that breaks the basic pattern in order to build up energy.

• Build-up (Rush): A rhythmic section structured specifically to raise the intensity of the track.

• Release: The opening hit of the new bar that discharges all the accumulated tension.

• Climax / Explosion: The exact moment where the drums reach their maximum volume and density of notes.

Second AI. Claude, is this shamanic?

Prompt: we have an MP3 with the drums (drums.mp3). I want your help to explain to a non-musician how it reaches the climax, and the interesting things you see. I notice that at the start an introduction is made, a single drum, In another block it uses two drums and sometimes the cymbal, then there are two blocks of ecstasy, separated by a block of silence. I want you to help me analyze this, I am not a musician, listen to the piece in the mp3 and research whether these drums can be considered a shamanic melody and what elements there are in them that make them shamanic. I want to search the web for similar music to help induce trances

AI (everything to the end):

I have measured the waveform of drums.mp3 from beginning to end. Your ear got it almost point by point — and the numbers pinpoint the exact climax. I'll translate it for you as if it were the script of a ritual.

Analysis of the drum waveform of “Alive and Kicking” (drums.mp3): volume, timbre and hits per second.

The map of the piece (for non-musicians)

Everything rests on a constant pulse of ~103 beats per minute (a mid tempo, “walkable”). The drums almost never change speed: what changes is how much drumming is sounding, and how loud. That is the key to its effect.

Section Time What happens

1. Introduction 0:00 – 1:13 A single drum growing in a “staircase”: each stroke sounds a little louder than the one before (look at it in the graph above: the peaks climb from 0:20 to 1:13). 73 seconds of hypnotic tension before the drums really come in.

2. First groove 1:13 – 1:34 The full kit comes in all at once. The cymbals appear (orange line) riding on top of the kick/tom (blue line). ~3.5 strokes/sec.

3. Mini-dip 1:34 – 1:38 A little 4-second break. The band “breathes.”

4. First ecstasy

1:38 – 3:17 The long groove, 1 min 40 s of relentless repetition. It keeps building intensity up to some strong peaks around 2:35– 3:15.

5. THE SILENCE 3:17 – 12 almost mute seconds (the big grey band in the middle).

Section Time What happens 3:29 This is your “block of silence.” It is the dramatic hinge: it creates a void that the brain needs to fill.

6. Second ecstasy = CLIMAX

3:29 – 4:37 The highest point of the whole song: the loudest (the giant volume peak at ~3:57) and the densest (4.1 strokes/sec, with a roll that spikes up to ~12 strokes/sec). This is where the piece “explodes.”

7. Fade 4:37 – 4:47 It dies away (fade out).

The 4 most interesting things I see

1. The introduction is a 73-second crescendo with a single drum. That “staircase effect” (each stroke louder) is a technique of pure tension: it puts you into a trance before the party has even started. It is the most hypnotic thing in the piece.

2. The monotony is intentional. The tempo does not budge (~103 BPM from start to finish). There is no melodic variety to “distract” you: just pulse, pulse, pulse. That is exactly what trance rhythms are after.

3. The two silences work like the two ecstasies. The 4 s one is a wink; the 12 s one (3:17) is the real thing. The longer the void, the more brutal the return feels. The climax hits so hard because before it there were 12 seconds of nothing.

4. The climax lands right in “shamanic territory.” Its ~4 strokes per second (the dotted line on the graph below) coincide with the classic rhythm of shamanic drumming for inducing trance (~4–4.5 strokes/sec, associated with theta brain waves). It is a beautiful coincidence and the perfect bridge to your question.

I am now closing out part 2 — whether these drums can be called “shamanic” (what specific elements make them so, with a scientific basis and sources) and a list of similar music for inducing trance. The web researcher is still working; I will hand it to you as soon as it finishes.

Technically, no — and it is important to say so precisely. The “pure” shamanic drum (Michael Harner’s sonic driving) is a monotonous pulse, with no structure, at ~4–5 strokes/sec sustained for 15+ minutes, designed not to be “music” but a tool. Your drum track is a song: it has a mid tempo (~103 BPM), a dramatic structure, variation, and it lasts less than 5 min. It does not meet the technical criterion.

But functionally it does pull the same trance levers — and one measurement shows it beautifully: the climax (3:29–4:37) reaches ~4.1 strokes per second, which falls right inside the classic shamanic range (4–4.5 strokes/sec ≈ theta brain band). That is to say, the moment when the piece feels most ecstatic is exactly when its stroke density touches the speed of the shamanic drum. It is no accident that it “explodes” right there.

The 5 elements that make it sound ancestral (cross-referenced with your data)

Trance lever Does it have it? What I measured

Isochronous, constant pulse (like a metronome)

Strong Fixed tempo ~103 BPM from start to finish. The brain stops “predicting” and lets itself go into the pattern.

Repetition / monotony

Strong No change of tempo; the groove repeats insistently for 1:40 straight. The absence of surprise is what hypnotizes.

Low timbre of tribal toms (“Burundi beat”)

Yes The blue line (lows: kick drum/toms) sustains the whole piece. Simple Minds belongs squarely to the 80s family of “epic drums with toms and echo” (alongside U2, Peter Gabriel) that inherited the DNA of the drums of Burundi.

Dynamics build-up → emptiness → climax

The 73-second staircase of the intro, the 12-second silence (3:17) and the climax. It is the same architecture as the famous “drop” in Phil Collins's In the Air Tonight.

Very pronounced

The climax in the theta range

~4.1 beats/sec in the final stretch: the literal shamanic wink.

Momentary

What it lacks in order to be “really” shamanic: sustained monotony. The journey drum never stops, never climbs to a climax — it deliberately avoids dramatic emotion so that your mind flattens out. Your drums, by contrast, take you by the hand to an emotional peak. That is why I would call it “tribal trance-pop”: it uses the ingredients of trance in the service of a song, not of a ceremony.

The science, no smoke (2 sentences)

• Solid: the brain does rhythmically “follow” regular pulses, and slow, monotonous drumming correlates reliably with altered/absorptive states (Scientific Reports, 2026).

• Doubtful: that this pulse reprograms your brainwaves and brings on the trance all by itself is a simplification — the 2026 study itself avoids claiming as much, and the ethnomusicologist Gilbert Rouget reminds us that cultural context rules (if rhythm were enough, “half of Africa would be in a trance all year round”). Rhythm makes it easier; it is not a switch.

Me: If cultural context rules, then as Western Europeans it can be shamanic for us

How I read this song

Beyond its sonic architecture, Alive and Kicking became the soundtrack of my process of recovery. When I listen to it, every line speaks to me of my own moment, with an almost semantic correspondence.

In the first verse I recognize the treatment I received and the pain of those years, but also that the pain left the moment I was back on my feet: that is my now. The chorus — that call to keep love alive — I understand as a plea that, even with the couple broken, some love may remain and we may go on being friends. And there is one line that points straight at me: when it says “alive and kicking,” that is me. When it sings that, when all is said and done, he is still alive and kicking, it is naming this precise instant, the one that comes after the great decision.

In the second verse I hear my old pleas for her to get treatment and come out of that loop; and when the song asks to be listened to before love runs out, I cannot help thinking: I told her that years ago. And there, inevitably, our children appear, looking up at the sky. And in the bridge, when it asks what to do when things go wrong, I hear the only sensible answer: not lawyers, but a mediator; think it over, listen to each other.

The song does not make me sad: it gives me strength. Out of respect for copyright I do not reproduce the full lyrics here; anyone who wants to can look them up and listen.

The drums as an energy charge

Listening again to the isolated drum track of Alive and Kicking, an interpretation arose that was different from the one I had held until now. At first, I perceived its rhythm as shamanic and thought it might help me enter a trance before a regression session.

On one occasion, however, while I was listening to it calmly and feeling especially sensitive, I had a more solid, more electrifying perception. I felt my body beginning to fill with energy, especially in my chest. Shivers appeared across my chest and in other parts of my body that I cannot recall precisely.

Then the idea arose in my mind that these drums might work as a kind of energy generator, capable of giving me an additional charge before facing a regression. It would not replace the energy I already bring to the session; it would increase it. Listening to this song before a regression could thus produce a double energy charge, preparing me to better sustain the experience

The complete song as a recalibration of the charge

The next day I played Alive and Kicking again, but this time I listened to the original track, with all the voices and all the instruments.

The sensation I perceived was different. Both the female vocalist who accompanies the lead singer and the other members who take part in the backing vocals evoked in me an almost angelic presence. Their voices produce a very beautiful guttural sound that, somehow, reminded me of the Buddhist mantras used to reach an expansive state of consciousness.

Then I understood the song as though it were made up of different levels. The isolated drum track would have an initial function of energy charging. The complete whole, however —the voices, the backing vocals, the instruments and the drums themselves— would act as a kind of refinement or recalibration of that charge. As if all the components of the song ordered, amplified and directed the energy originally generated by the drums.

While I was listening to the song, I was walking through the countryside and climbing a slope. At a certain moment I felt the need to accompany it with my body. First I looked around, because I felt a certain embarrassment at the thought that someone might see me, but at the same time I clearly felt that I had to do what was arising spontaneously out of me.

I began to move my arms in forward circles and to sing, not the lyrics of the song, but the guttural sounds of the backing vocals. Then I stretched out my arms as if they were the wings of an airplane and started to tilt from one side to the other, reproducing that childlike gesture children make when they run with their arms open, first leaning one way and then the other.

During those moments I experienced an astonishing surge of energy. The music, the movement, the sounds I was making and the surroundings seemed to converge in an experience of great intensity.

Afterwards, however, as I kept walking, I did not feel especially energetic. My state went back to being apparently normal, similar to the one I had before listening to the song. I still do not know what this difference means, between the enormous intensity experienced during the movement and the normality I perceived shortly after.

The charge as preparation for continuing to receive information

While I went on walking through the countryside and reflecting on what I had just experienced, a new sensation came to me, formulated in the shape of a question:

What if this recharge of energy is not solely meant to help me enter a kind of trance during the regressions?

Until now I had interpreted the drums of Alive and Kicking as a mechanism of prior charging: a way of increasing the energy I bring with me to a session. The complete song, with its voices, its backing vocals and its instruments, would then seem to refine, recalibrate or amplify that charge.

Now, however, another possibility appears. Perhaps that energy is not exclusively meant to make it easier to enter a regression. Perhaps it also has the sense of preparing me to continue receiving information through that channel of communication I perceive at certain moments.

The question that arises is whether, for that channel to be able to stay open or to keep transmitting information, a certain availability of energy is necessary. From this perspective, listening to the song would serve not only to reach an altered or expansive state of consciousness, but also to have the inner resources needed to sustain the reception, the understanding and the subsequent integration of whatever may be appearing.

I cannot yet claim that this interpretation is correct. For now, what has arisen is an intuition: the possibility that the musical and bodily charge is not only a preparation for the regression, but a form of provisioning to continue listening to, perceiving or working through the information that emerges within me.

There are songs that, at this stage, have begun to play in my head insistently and pleasantly, as if they had come to keep me company. I have gathered their lyrics and looked at them closely, because in every one of them I found a message for my process. What I keep here is my reading of each one; out of respect for copyright, I do not reproduce the lyrics in full.

“El blues del esclavo” (Mecano)

This is another of the songs that have not stopped playing in my head.

It started playing in my head along with A&K; A&K has stopped playing, from which I gather that the teaching has been received on my part, but the Mecano one keeps turning up in my head constantly (pleasantly)… I have taken the lyrics and it is fairly clear; it is encouragement for my process, they carry a message, dignity and enduring…. without limits,,, But in the end there is a rebellion in which a limit is set.

It is the strongest message of all the ones that have shown up in my head as pieces of music. I heard it while driving in the car a few days ago, and it stayed in my head from then on…

It uses humor, exaggeration and union language to tell of the awakening of a person who stops accepting his own slavery as natural. The song mixes historical and cultural references —Spartacus, Kunta Kinte, the American Civil War— with modern labor demands: wages, a weekly day of rest, vacation and retirement. There is an obvious denunciation of exploitation and of the loss of dignity.

The slave who learned to hold his head up

The emotional core of the song lies in a passage: the one that leads from resignation to the recovery of dignity. It tells the story of a man who worked for years from sunrise to sunset, owning neither the land, nor the fruit of his labour, nor even, in a sense, his own life. He had been born into that world and taught that this was natural: some gave orders and others obeyed, some were people and others tools. Until a discomfort grew within him and he understood that slavery had nothing natural or inevitable about it: it was a condition imposed by others. That was his first act of rebellion.

The song turns that rebellion into a deliberately ironic scene: the slaves begin to make demands like workers of today —a decent wage, a day of rest, holidays, a pension. The exaggeration raises a smile, but it lays bare a painful truth: what seems elementary to us today was unimaginable for someone who was not even recognised as a person. They were not asking for privileges; they were asking for something far more basic: to stop being another's property. Their struggle then ceases to be a mere escape: they no longer want only to flee the fields, but for the whips and the humiliations to disappear, and to recover the right to choose where to live, how to work and with whom to build a family.

In the end, the slave no longer appears stooped over the earth: he imagines himself free, beside his wife and his son, walking without chains and without a master to decide his fate. And what is decisive is not only that he has left forced labour behind, but that he has recovered his dignity. He can raise his head and look straight ahead; he has come to recognise himself as a human being again. The blues he sings is born of suffering, but it does not end in defeat: it becomes an affirmation of identity and a demand for justice.

Moral or teaching

The teaching of the song is that the deepest injustices can be sustained for generations when those who suffer them are forced to consider them normal.

Change begins when a person dares to say: this is not fair.

From my point of view, the song also points to not living under another person's arbitrary will.

The final moral could be summed up like this: no one should grow so accustomed to injustice as to stop recognizing it, and no person fully recovers their freedom until they can raise their head without fear and decide for themselves the course of their own life.

(I do not reproduce the song's full lyrics out of respect for copyright. What precedes is my personal reading of it: the passage from resignation to the recovery of dignity, the moment when someone stops accepting their own enslavement as natural and learns to raise their head.)

I didn't know why this scene kept coming back to my mind, again and again. It stopped resonating as soon as I found its meaning, which confirms something I had already noticed with the songs: once you understand the message they carry, these communications stop repeating themselves. It had to do with my great passion, cinema. I remembered the most emotional scene of a film, the one where one of the main characters delivers something like a verdict. That dialogue appears near the beginning of the following video.

Blade Runner — Tears in the Rain

The video opens with a line that cuts you inside: “Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That is what it means to be a slave.” I heard it and recognised something all too familiar. Living trapped in fear means, so often, carrying a tightened heart each day. And fear, once it settles in and becomes a habit, is a form of slavery.

The images belong to Blade Runner, a 1982 film that dared to imagine the world we are only now beginning to inhabit: artificial intelligence and genetic engineering living side by side with human beings.

Two characters face each other in the scene. One is a blade runner, played by Harrison Ford. The blade runners were a special police corps charged with hunting down beings created artificially through genetic engineering: the replicants.

The replicants had been built with greater capacities than ours, both physical and mental. Into their minds an artificial intelligence and implanted memories had been embedded, so vivid that they did not even know they were artificial creatures: they lived deceived about their own origin. When they found out, they rose up in the outer-space colonies. The leader of that rebellion was Nexus 6, the other character in the video.

They had come to Earth driven by a single hope: to find a remedy for the sentence they carried within them, a life programmed to last barely four years. They were not asking for anything extraordinary. They were asking for what any of us takes for granted: to go on living.

At the end of the film comes the final confrontation. Nexus 6 ends up with the man who had come to kill him at his mercy. Harrison Ford slips and is left hanging over the void, an instant from falling. And then the unexpected happens: Nexus 6, instead of letting him fall, reaches out and holds him. He pulls him up. He spares the life of his pursuer. He loved life so much that he could not bear to see it lost, not even in his enemy.

He himself had only a few minutes left. With that scrap of time —the only time he had left— he chose to save rather than to take revenge, and to say goodbye in peace. He then spoke his final words, serene and beautiful, the ones cinema remembers as the “tears in the rain” monologue, and went out in silence, like someone accepting that everything he had lived dissolves along with him.

Perhaps that is why the scene kept coming back to my mind. It says, without ornament, what matters most to me in these pages: that life is brief and fragile, that it slips through our fingers, and that precisely for that reason it deserves care and compassion, even towards those who have hurt us. And it returns, in the end, to the beginning: to the fear that enslaves, and to the quiet freedom that opens up when we stop living afraid.

“Despierta” (Enrique Bunbury)

A while ago I heard a famous popularizer of the mysterious, on his television program, analyze this song so deeply. I went on listening to it with emotion for a long time, sometimes on the radio, sometimes in my head. And it is not only the lyrics that are moving and revealing; the orchestra accompanies them too, and amplifies the feeling.

this explains it better than I can!!! :P

(I omit the lyrics out of respect for copyright. The song “Despierta,” by Enrique Bunbury, stayed etched in me as a simple, luminous message: today I feel different because I am different; what was always hidden within me is now, at last, clear. And there is a piece of its advice that I have made my own in this process: let it not matter what they say, because whatever is not nourishment should be carried off by the wind.)

This song began to play in my mind after the regressions with Puy, as if the process itself had awakened it. It did not surprise me: I had always been clear about what it means to me. “Despierta” —“Wake up”— is, above all, a call. A call to the awakening of consciousness; and not only each person's own, but that of all humanity at once.

I feel it as an invitation to open one's eyes and to think for oneself; not to let oneself be led along asleep by those who would rather keep us that way: the powers that rule without showing their face, the rules no one dares to question, the messages repeated until they pass for truth. To wake up is also to stop being manipulated.

And yet, at its core, the song does not sound like an accusation or like anger. It sounds like hope. There is something luminous in imagining a humanity that awakens together, that shakes off its sleep and recovers, all at once, both lucidity and tenderness. The music carries it and makes it larger: it lifts you from within and makes you want to believe that such an awakening is possible.

When I connect this with my Buddhist readings on the awakened one — the enlightened one, the person who has attained mental clarity — these lyrics take on much greater force. They ask me to open my eyes and see the reality of what is happening to me, the two main reasons that led me to this illness, so that I can heal.

This part no longer depends on your accepting any regression. It was born during the same process of transformation, but it speaks of entirely recognisable experiences: love, attachment, affection, loneliness, impermanence and the difficulty of loving without possessing. It is perhaps the clearest example of how an inner experience ends up being useful when it stops speaking only about the person who lived it and begins to formulate questions that belong to anyone.

We come now to what is most intimate, and also to what is most recent.

These meditations were born during the same process of recovery and healing. And here, at last, everything that came before fits together: the teaching of saying no, the economy of energy, Buddhist impermanence and compassion stopped being separate ideas.

I glimpsed a kind of three-dimensional puzzle whose pieces moved on their own, turning and searching for their place until they aligned into a perfect figure. Perhaps that is the most intimate form of enlightenment: the instant in which what seemed fragmented finds its unity.

In this process of recovery and healing, I feel that much of the knowledge about Buddhism that had been accumulating in my mind is finally beginning to make sense.

For a long time it was there as separate ideas: teachings I had read, words I had underlined, reflections I understood intellectually but had not yet managed to integrate fully into my life. Now, however, they all seem to be coming together.

I have been able to glimpse a kind of three-dimensional puzzle whose pieces moved on their own. They turned, they shifted, they searched for their place until, at last, they aligned to form a perfect figure. For me, that image symbolized comprehension and understanding: the instant in which what once seemed fragmented finds a unity and reveals a deeper meaning.

Perhaps it is an intimate form of enlightenment. Not a grandiose or definitive enlightenment, but that moment when something falls into order within us and we begin to see clearly what had remained hidden.

Thanks to this Buddhist knowledge, I have been able to reach an understanding of love that I had never had before. For much of my life I was locked inside a very specific Western conception: love understood mainly as a couple, courtship, marriage and permanence.

I thought of love as a union that had to be maintained, as a promise of continuity, as a bond that found its meaning in remaining joined to another person. Yet all of that has changed profoundly in me.

Now I am beginning to understand that love can exist beyond the couple, that it does not always demand union, that it does not always lead to sharing a life and that, on some occasions, its truest expression consists precisely in letting go.

Attachment and love

In this process of recovery and healing, many meditations arise in me around love, attachment and the way we relate to the people who are part of our life.

This experience is forcing me to look inside myself and to ask what it means to love truly. It is not a purely intellectual reflection. It is a question born of what I have lived, of pain, of uncertainty and of the need to understand what remains when a relationship changes or comes to an end.

In my Buddhist readings I have found a very clear distinction between attachment and love.

Attachment is the need to hold something or someone beside you. Within a romantic relationship, it shows itself through thoughts such as: “I need you” or “I can’t live without you.” Attachment tries to bind the other person and turn their presence into an indispensable condition for our own stability.

True love, however, looks straight at the other person’s heart.

To love can mean letting the loved one go when you understand that your relationship has ended. It can even mean accepting that this person begins a new relationship if you know that in it they will be able to find a happiness they no longer found with you.

It is a difficult and painful idea, because it forces you to let go of the desire for possession. But precisely for that reason, it may be one of the deepest expressions of love.

Loving does not always consist in staying together. Sometimes it means recognizing that something has concluded and allowing the other person to continue on their path.

Impermanence

This way of understanding love is profoundly related to impermanence.

A person can be intensely in love and yet that does not mean the relationship has to remain the same way for all eternity. Circumstances change, people are transformed and feelings can also evolve.

Nothing remains exactly as it was, because the nature of things is to change.

Impermanence does not invalidate the love that has existed. That something ends does not mean it was false. It means it had a beginning, a development and, perhaps, an end.

Sometimes we believe that the duration of a relationship determines its authenticity, but that is not always so. There are bonds that leave a deep mark even though they do not last forever, just as there are brief moments capable of transforming an entire life.

Even when two people love each other throughout their whole existence, impermanence remains present. At some point, one of them may die and the other will have to remain alone in this world.

The Buddhist teaching of impermanence can then help us understand and accept that the beloved person has ceased to live and has gone.

Accepting impermanence does not eliminate the pain. It does not prevent sadness nor erase the absence. But it can transform the way we inhabit suffering. It reminds us that to love also implies accepting that we cannot hold on forever to what we love.

Love as an energy that circulates

As I went deeper into these meditations, I have also asked myself what a person feels when they truly love another.

The experience that arose in me was very beautiful. I felt love as a kind of energy that is born within me, leaves me and travels toward the other person.

That energy enters fully into her, into her heart and into her soul. Then it returns to me carrying an even greater quantity of love.

I receive it, I nourish it and I make it grow through understanding, tenderness, the capacity to listen to the other and the willingness to help them in their difficult moments. Then I give it back again, transformed and expanded.

The other person receives it and the movement begins anew.

Love thus becomes a continuous circle: giving, receiving, understanding, and giving again.

This circulation reminds me of the yin and yang symbol. It is sometimes interpreted in a simplified way, as a representation of good and evil, but its meaning is far broader. For me, in this context, it represents complementarity, balance, and the movement of energy between the person I love and myself.

It is a constant flow. I send love, I receive love, and I send it out again. With each movement, that energy can grow deeper, more conscious, and greater.

When love is sincere, it does not stay still. It circulates. It turns into care, understanding, help, tenderness, and presence. It feeds on what we give, but also on our capacity to receive without taking possession of the other.

Affection: the closest form of love

I was the youngest of four brothers. My mother was overwhelmed by raising so many children and by the circumstances of a family that had to fight every day to get by.

Perhaps that is why she could not give me all the affection and all the attention a child needs, though for many years I did not know how to give that absence a name.

The oldest memory I keep from my childhood is of being alone in my crib, gripping the bars, waiting for someone to come.

In my memory, that wait seems to last for hours. I do not know how much time actually passed, but I do remember the feeling: staying there, waiting for someone to arrive, waiting for a presence, for hands or a voice that would make me feel I was not alone.

My father had two jobs in order to support the family, and my mother helped him with one of them. That is why I do not blame her. I never could. Before anything else, I have to thank her for giving me life.

Besides, she always had kind words for me and knew how to acknowledge my efforts in front of my brothers. I remember especially when, at barely eighteen, I left for Madrid to work.

I was still a young man just beginning to make his way, and my mother was very proud of me. That pride was also a form of love, though perhaps it was not exactly the affection I had needed during my earliest years.

And yet, when I remember my childhood, it strikes me to hear my mother speak with joy and with an abundance of detail about experiences she lived with my older brothers, especially the first two.

My other brother and I have remarked on it once or twice: it was as if we barely existed within those family memories.

I do not believe it was a deliberate absence or a lack of love. Probably, by the time we came along, my mother was already tired, overwhelmed, and consumed by too many responsibilities.

But for a child, the circumstances of adults do not yet exist. A child does not understand exhaustion, money troubles, or the weight of responsibilities. He only knows whether someone holds him, whether someone listens to him, whether someone comes when he needs them, and whether he feels he holds a real place in the hearts of others.

Now I understand just how necessary affection is for a person, and especially for a child.

We need to feel loved, but we also need to perceive that love in concrete gestures: in a caress, in an embrace, in a kind word, in an attentive gaze, or in the simple presence of someone who chooses to stay by our side.

Love that is not shown may exist inside a person, but it can hardly be recognized by the one who needs to receive it.

That is why I consider affection to be one of the fundamental components of love. It is not a secondary element or a superficial expression. It is the way love draws close to the other, becomes visible, and can be felt.

Without affection, a relationship runs the risk of becoming nothing but need, dependence, or attachment: waiting for the other person to fill our emptiness, to confirm us constantly, or to provide what we ourselves are not capable of offering ourselves.

To truly love does not consist only in feeling something inside oneself. It also means taking care of the way we treat the other person.

It means showing them that their existence matters, that their pain affects us, that their joy gladdens us, and that they are not left alone in front of us.

When there is no tenderness, no attention, no desire to make the other feel good, it is legitimate to ask whether that is really love or merely a need disguised as love.

Perhaps because of what I lacked during my childhood, I have now learned to recognize the immense value of an affectionate gesture.

That waiting in the crib, gripping the bars, is not only a distant memory. It is also an image that helps me understand the child I was and all the children who wait, in one way or another, for someone to come close to them.

Affection is coming close.

It is showing up.

It is letting the other know that they have been seen.

Perhaps that is why it is one of the simplest, purest and most necessary forms of love.

Compassion as a condition of love

I have also come to think that a truly deep love cannot exist in a person who does not sustain compassion toward everything and everyone.

As long as someone remains closed to the suffering of others, there is a part of their heart that is not yet ready to love fully.

It is as if true love remained forbidden until the person learns to be generous with everything around them: with human beings, with animals, with all living beings and with existence itself.

When someone begins to look at the world with compassion, their heart opens. And it does not open only toward a partner or toward the person they wish to love, but toward the whole of the reality that surrounds them.

Love for one particular person should not become an exception within a life ruled by indifference.

Authentic love is born of a deeper disposition: the capacity to recognize the worth of others, to feel their suffering and to sincerely wish for their well-being.

Only when the heart is open to the world can it be truly open to the beloved.

Compassion teaches us to step outside ourselves. It reminds us that love cannot be reduced to the wish to receive affection, protection or company. It also means looking at the other, recognizing their needs and asking ourselves what we can offer them without turning our giving into a demand.

Loving without knowing whether you are loved back

A true love can also arise toward a person you have before you, even if you do not know whether she feels the same for you.

At times you wonder whether that feeling will be returned. Little by little, though, you understand that this question cannot become the center of everything.

What truly matters is the other person's happiness.

So you decide to wait.

You look her in the eyes and gather your courage. The feeling is so strong that you fear it might be discovered in your gaze. You do not know whether the other person feels the same, and so you try to keep your eyes from revealing what you are not yet ready to express.

Even so, you look at her with tenderness.

You look at her with your soul.

You wish her all the best, so that she may go on walking her own path in life. You do not try to hold her back or force an answer.

You hold on to the hope that, if that person feels something similar, a moment of revelation will one day come in which you can both recognize it and begin a life together.

But that hope must be sustained from honesty: in the meditations, in the way of acting and in knowing how to carry oneself.

It must not turn into a silent demand, nor into a debt the other person has to repay.

We have to learn to wait without possessing and to feel without invading. It is the patience Pema Chödrön speaks of in her teachings: a patience that does not consist merely in staying still, but in inhabiting uncertainty without forcing the course of events.

But to love is also to know how to let go.

Sometimes the other person finds her happiness alongside someone else, and then love places you before one of its hardest tests: accepting that what you long for may not be what life has chosen for her.

In that moment you understand that loving does not consist solely in yearning for a union. It can also mean opening your hands and letting go, however much it hurts inside.

It means looking at that person, recognizing the happiness she has found, and wishing, with all the sincerity you are capable of, that this happiness may last, even if you are no part of it.

Letting go does not mean ceasing to love.

Sometimes it is precisely the purest way of doing so.

It is giving up turning the feeling into a demand. It is ceasing to think only about the life you would have liked to share with that person and beginning to think about the life that can make her truly happy.

There is a very deep inner beauty in that gesture. A silent beauty, because no one has to see it or acknowledge it.

It is born when love stops asking, “What place will I occupy in your life?” and begins to say, “I want you to be happy, even if your happiness leads you far away from me.”

Perhaps that is when love ceases to be only desire and becomes self-giving. When it no longer needs to possess, to hold on, or to be returned in order to remain true.

To love in this way is to let go with tenderness, to accept the emptiness that remains, and to go on wishing the other person all the light life can offer her.

The search for love

When I meditate with love as the object of my reflection, I also observe some of the behaviors we have normalized in our society.

One of them is the search for a partner through social networks or apps meant for meeting people.

Signing up, building a profile, selecting a few photographs and writing a description of yourself can end up filling me with a deep sadness.

At times I perceive it as a way of putting yourself on the market, as if each person had to display themselves, prove their worth and find out who is willing to bet on them.

I would like to be able to connect with all those people and remind them that this is not the only path.

The true path consists in walking through life.

Perhaps in this life you will have to spend long periods in solitude. Perhaps someone will appear with whom you can share your existence. But neither of those two possibilities should entirely determine the meaning of your life.

What matters is learning to live.

To appreciate every instant.

To relate consciously to the people who have appeared along your path.

To help them when they need it. To listen to them, to accompany them, and to recognize what each encounter can teach you.

Life should not become a waiting room where we sit until a partner appears.

Nor should we consider ourselves incomplete until someone arrives to love us.

Love may appear, but it should not be chased as though it were an object capable of completing everything we feel is missing in us.

When it comes, it will have to find us living, growing and walking our own path.

And when it appears, perhaps the most important thing is not to capture it, but to recognize it, to receive it with gratitude and to let it flow without turning it into a possession.

“Humo” (Pau Donés)

When Pau Donés, the singer of Jarabe de Palo, was diagnosed with cancer, “Humo” was born, a song of love for life. It is a hymn that carries within it a very clear, almost urgent message: “living is urgent, let's cut the nonsense, because today we're here and tomorrow we won't be.”

Learning to love

All these meditations are leading me toward one and the same conclusion: to love truly does not mean to possess, to control or to need the other desperately.

To love means to wish for their happiness.

It means accompanying without imprisoning, understanding without imposing and remaining without demanding that everything be eternal.

It also means having the courage to let go when the shared path has come to its end.

True love demands compassion, patience, honesty and acceptance of impermanence. But it also needs tenderness. It needs to become visible in a gaze, in a caress, in a kind word and in the presence of someone who chooses to come close.

Love invites us to open the heart, not only toward one person, but toward all the beings who are part of our existence.

Perhaps to love is precisely that: to allow an energy to be born within us, to give it without conditions and to accept that we will never be able to control completely the way in which it will return.

It is understanding that a relationship can end without everything we lived losing its value. It is accepting that a person can move away without our having to turn love into resentment because of it.

It is being grateful for what was shared, looking with compassion at what could not be and continuing to walk.

Because love is not a chain that binds two people together.

It is a living movement, an energy that circulates and a way of looking at the other with the soul.

Tenderness is the way that energy comes close, touches the other and lets them know they are not alone.

Compassion is what keeps love from closing itself off within our desires alone.

Impermanence is the teaching that reminds us that nothing can be held forever.

And to let go is, perhaps, one of the most painful and, at the same time, most beautiful gestures a heart that has learned to love can make.

When I began to write these pages, I did so afraid that the spring would close and everything would be lost. Today, rereading them, I understand that the fear was another one: the fear of looking at myself head-on. The illness, which I lived as a sentence, turned out to be the crack through which the light came in.

I do not know whether the regressions were memories of other lives, constructions of my mind, or experiences whose nature I cannot name. Nor do I know whether what I call the channel comes from an external plane, from the subconscious, or from ordinary mechanisms of the mind to which I previously paid no attention. I have stopped needing an immediate answer. I can keep the question and, at the same time, look at what did change: I learned to say no, I began to let go of what was consuming me, I revisited guilts, I understood my sensitivity better, and I tried to look at love with less need to possess it.

This book has no ending, because the journey is not over. I leave it open, just as the crossing remains open. And if anything I have written is of use to another person going through their own darkness, then the drop of water will not have dried in the sun: it will have fallen into the ocean, and there it will never disappear.

And there is something else I now understand better. I did not write these pages so that another person would reproduce my regressions. I wrote them because perhaps someone may recognise in them a question that is also theirs.

If my scenes strike you as strange, you can leave them where they are. Keep the method: look at what is happening, recognise what you feel, look for a simple understanding and ask yourself what has to change in your life.

Perhaps your teaching will not arrive inside a session. It may arrive in a psychologist's consulting room, during a conversation, while writing, while meditating, while going through an illness, while setting a boundary, while living through grief, or simply while recognising that you no longer want to go on doing something the same way.

The way it arrives is not what is essential. What is essential is what we do afterwards with what we have understood.

A note to the reader

This book gathers personal experiences, spiritual interpretations and reflections by the author. It does not offer medical or psychological diagnosis or treatment. Scenes arising during regressions or hypnotic states must not be considered, on their own, verified historical memories. When a question depends on external facts, health, safety or the rights of other people, it must be checked by independent means and, where appropriate, with qualified professionals.

Thank you, Puy. Thank you to those who loved me and to those who taught me, many times without knowing it. And thank you to life, which lifted me into this boat.

I will keep writing for as long as the crossing lasts.