The South Will Rise Again, Part 1: Pilgrim

By Richard Peter Spartacus

The South Will Rise Again is the fully autobiographical books that were written first: The first part of any sound healing process is to deal with your own business.
Pilgrim covers the period until a series of very defining pilgrimages in Egypt.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Aug 18, 2014
• ISBN: 9781483523507

Book preview

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HbQLKvfrCAA

Part 1: A world turned upside down

Yeshua bar Yosef (Jesus) said: A man was receiving guests. When he had prepared dinner, he sent his servants to invite the guests. The servant went to the first and said: My master invites you. The first replied: Some merchants owe me money; they are coming to me tonight. I have to go and give them instructions. Please excuse me from the dinner. The servant went to another and said: My master has invited you. The second said to the servant: I have bought a house, and I have been called away for a day. I shall have no time. The servant went to another and said: My master invites you. The third said to the servant: My friend is to be married, and I am to arrange the banquet. I shall not be able to come. Please excuse me from the dinner. The servant went to another and said: My master invites you. The fourth said to the servant: I have bought an estate, and I am going to collect the rent. I shall not be able to come. Please excuse me from the dinner. The servant returned and said to his master: Those whom you invited to dinner have asked to be excused. The master said to his servant: Go out on the streets and bring back whomever you find to come to dinner.

(Gospel of Thomas, Saying 64)

To me, what happened in the journey I chronicle in these books have seemed rather much like the fate of the unassuming man walking down a street when he suddenly receives an invitation that leaves him wondering: Why me?

Chapter 1: A child was born and grew up

Yeshua said: Recognise what is before your eyes and the mysteries will be revealed to you. For there is nothing hidden that will not be revealed. Further to the matter he said: Let one who seeks not stop seeking until he finds. When he finds, he will be troubled. When he is troubled, he will be astonished and will rule over all.

(Gospel of Thomas, Saying 5)

I was born in the countryside of Denmark - a small, obscure country in northern Europe that few people know about for anything other than the Vikings, Hans Christian Andersen, and the Little Mermaid - and it has nothing to do with IKEA. It happened in the year 1957AD, some 700 years after the Cathars made their stand at Mont Segur. That timing I was unaware of at the time, as I was unaware of everything else I now write in these books - at least at the conscious level.

My father raised pigs and the smell and the dirt went all the way into our living quarters, so in a sense I came close to being born in a stable and laid in a crib, but there is no record of special stars on the sky, or of wise men paying their tribute. Instead I grew up in an atheist home with an oppressive father and what some would refer to as a mentally disturbed mother. The atheist part was perhaps surprising in retrospect, considering that my mother in many ways was a rather strange woman. For instance, on occasions when somebody in the neighbourhood would die, she might wake up totally freaked out the night before it happened. However, the aforementioned qualities of my father led to a total suppression of anything he did not appreciate - including not least everything my mother represented.

I enjoyed going to school, starting when I had turned seven, and I took every opportunity to get away from home to be with my friends. The favourite attraction was Mother Nature, and I explored Her with a very close friend, Michael, that I found the first day in school and stayed with ever since. Together we journeyed on foot along abandoned railway tracks or rode as far away on the roads as our bikes would take us to see new sights and find animals and insects. Notably the latter was quite a passion for us, and we made our best efforts to find every kind of caterpillar that lives in our country to keep it, feed it and see how it would turn into a chrysalis and what would come out of the chrysalis - a seemingly entirely different insect. We never got the score full, though, but it was certainly fun to give it our best try.

My Love for school perhaps reflected a somewhat extreme intelligence that made it all come very easily to me (I later became a member of the Mensa society, going through the roof of the admittance test (IQ>164)).

The first two years I went to a very small local school with only two classes and five, six pupils per class. There was only one teacher and one class room, so first graders would go to school for a couple of hours in the afternoon, and second graders in the morning, finishing at noon. That way we only had half days in school the first two years.

The limited schooling did not keep me from becoming perfect at reading, writing, counting and calculating. In particular the latter was quite an obsession, and I loved shopping groceries with my mother because the shop was full of numbers I could read, add, and subtract. That way I got so good at math that when I got into high school I could out-duel the electronic calculators as long as the task did not go beyond multiplying or dividing three digit numbers, simply because my calculation was faster than the typing of the numbers on a calculator.

My eating up of everything I could practice on also lead me to a month of inactivity halfway through the second grade, when I had used up what the school had of math books, so I had to wait for the teacher to buy a new one especially for me.

In the third grade we moved to a bigger school with more than twenty children per class and a school library. After that I skipped my homework and instead raided the school library from an end, soon reading thousands of pages per week. As I repeatedly say to my children, you become good at exactly what you practice on, so my speed of reading soon exceeded a page per minute, allowing me to read a book or two per day besides going to school and exploring nature with Michael.

By the seventh grade I had read everything worth reading in that library, and as puberty crashed in with the entry into my second seven year cycle, I would soon read mostly comics.

My ability to remember what I had read was also quite something, so I became a walking dictionary that my classmates would often consult rather than ask the teacher - in particular if the question was odd enough.

The homework did not interest me - it was no challenge - and I would always deliver my reports with a significant delay, so at some point the school considered having me skip a grade. However, at that point I had the good fortune of being hospitalised for some minor surgery, and after I for that reason had missed school for some weeks the move was fortunately forgotten about - skipping a grade would not have been a good idea, as it would have removed me from my friends and put me with children I could not relate to because they were older and more mature than me. I think I could have passed some high school exams already when I was in the fifth grade, but that said nothing about social development.

I went on to high school and university, studying medicine, as I had known I would since my early childhood, going to the other end of the country for the study, so I could get as far away from home as possible. All of this I did the same way as primary school - that is with a minimum of effort, only doing enough to get the minimum grades needed to continue through the education system. Life was more interesting, and therefore more important, than stupid grades.

While this academic education was much admired by my mother and by my maternal grandparents, the prospect of seeing his eldest son becoming the first on either side of the family to make an academic career was not amusing my father. What he wanted and needed was an heir to the farm, a strong workhorse like himself. I was everything but that: A hopelessly impractical and not physically strong boy who would read books - and study insects and breed caterpillars and butterflies, rather than help with the farm: Now that failure of a son even aimed for ending up in academia!

I was always a joke at sports, not that it mattered to my father, for sports was not a way to earn a living in those days, so in his mind it was a complete waste of time and effort, but the information illustrates how perfectly useless I was. In fact, when in my late teenage years I found a physical activity, at long last, where I was better than most other people, it probably only added to the frustration, for what I did so well was long distance running, where I could outrun pretty much anyone without really training - if only the distance was long enough. For me that was a bit of a revelation, for it helped me realise that I was built for endurance and not for speed or strength - but what can you use that for on a farm?

Had my father not held such a negative view on sports, he would probably have preferred me to end up like my great-cousin Lars, who was a successful rower and became a twice world cup medallist.

For years I wondered about that upbringing. As a child I felt kind of misplaced - as if I didn’t belong with what I was growing up in. I was born for something else.

Later, when I pursued an academic career, I learned about the corruption of this world, how it is important who you are the son of, so I wondered even more. I think that things would have been so much easier for me career wise if I had had the right upbringing, rather than having to work my way up from the bottom.

I also learned that academic careers are as much about greed, ambitions, and dirty tricks, as they are about intelligence and knowledge - and that dirty political game I was not bred for.

I have brought the subject up with spiritual media more than once, getting various phrasings of a standard reply saying that I probably made a very wise choice, choosing that upbringing.

In the course of this journey to the centre of myself that I chronicle in these books I have come to understand more of this. So I know that my father is my father in this lifetime because there was another lifetime where I outsmarted him so thoroughly that he felt humiliated by it, wanting his revenge, which he then got by being put in the position of ultimate power over me that a father for a while has over his son. Given the chance to prove his case, now that he was in total command, he didn’t fare much better than he had done last time around - for all his substantial efforts - so there might be a lesson for him in that; earthly power solves nothing. For me it was a matter of clearing karma.

My mother’s family and my eldest sister were in my life by positive affiliation to me. Somehow I knew that already then, and it played out in my relationship to them - though I could at that time not put it into words like I can now.

Getting the wrong entry into academia and science was also quite purposeful, as it allowed me to see how distant the current reality is from how things really should be - academia and science should be pursued the way I pursued reading and writing in my early years; with all that joy and enthusiasm, not through dirty games, everybody fighting everybody, cheating on each other. That is not the way to bring things forward, but if it had been the only world I had known, I would have been consumed by it, never looking outside the ivory tower.

When leaving home for university I was still an atheist - or perhaps I rather refused to consider an issue that could not be resolved logically, instead claiming that if there is an Almighty God, then the important issue must not be whether I believe in Him, but whether He believes in me.

At that time I had my first psychic experience in the form of a recurring image that I knew was some sort of memory. What I saw was a woman with a donkey that carried firewood across its back. They were coming up over the top of a steep slope where I was standing on the other side of the top looking in their direction. It was all very strange for I had never travelled beyond my home area - and we have absolutely no slopes like that there - or anything else from that scenery - so it was clearly nothing from this life, but I somehow knew I was a boy of seven years when seeing this, and that it took place in the Phoenician capital of Carthage in North Africa. There was also something particular about the air I could smell, and many years later, when I visited a university in Florida, there was that same smell or sensation - so it was the smell or sensation of tropical air as it would come to Carthage when the wind was in southern directions.

The memory seemed to explain a number of oddities from my childhood, where, soon after getting to the big school with a library, I went straight for the accounts of the Punic Wars in the local library, eager to learn how it had all turned out for Carthage, having a strong Love for a certain Hannibal (who took his elephants across the Alps to beat the Romans at Cannae and elsewhere), and a strong hatred for the Romans because of what they did to us.

Many years later I have learned that I had been involved in founding Carthage, where I then had quite a few subsequent incarnations - it was somehow my city, my people. At one time I was the mentor of that certain Hannibal, and one of the memories I have had coming up is of holding his little hand over the Holy fire of Baal, saying to him: Can you feel the Power (or the Force) of the Holy Fire of Baal? - And then asking him to swear on that very fire never to become a friend of Rome, essentially making him Lord Protector of the Mother: Asherah alam, son of the Mother, do you swear this unbreakable oath on the Holy Fire of Baal?

Later I was the Phoenician cavalry commander Hamilcar Phaemeas under the third Punic War, which wasn’t really a war, but rather one of the most despicable genocides in human history.

All of these details I was happily unaware of as I grew up, so I was spared the most terrible aspects until a later point in time where I could handle them. Likewise, I will not dwell on that part of my story at this point but return to it later.

Other strange events popped up, but still I was somehow deaf and blind to the already indisputable evidence of a world beyond this physical reality. One example is that I at some point was a frontrunner in a national championship on predicting the outcome of football games, simply because I sometimes knew how a game would end before it was played, but that too didn’t make me realise that something Divine might exist.

Then, around the turn of the millennium, the Angels seem to have made a major effort to get me going with the Divine Contact on a more conscious level. It was at that time I visited Florida and understood what it was I had sensed in that odd memory. I remember the timing quite clearly because it was at the time when President Bush was elected for his first term through that suspicious vote in Florida. As the drama unfolded on TV, the university professor I visited felt that the election was such an embarrassment for USA that I felt all sorry for him.

I had somehow always felt that I was of the same kind as my mother in the sense that she had a hole through, as I put it to explain her strange sensing of things, and it is perhaps a bit peculiar that I could have these concepts and never bother about the Divine, but I was somehow able to maintain that separation within me.

However, across the turn of the millennium, at the time I entered my sixth seven year cycle, I had a Turkish girl, Nedime, as PhD-student, in my laboratory. She too had a hole through - I seemed to read it in her eyes somehow - so one day curiosity killed the cat, and I asked her about her possible paranormal sensing of things. Indeed, it turned out that she sometimes knew of things before they happened, and could sense things elsewhere in the world - notably things that had to do with her father, whom she was very deeply connected to. She also told me about a returning nightmare she had had as a child where a black panther would be lying at the foot end of her bed looking at her.

Being a Moslem, she had taken that experience with the panther to the local imam, who had told her that some of us are what he called Light souls who have the ability to develop the connection I was referring to as a hole through. Light souls are tested in their childhood through such returning nightmares before the connection is fully established.

Nedime’s story reminded me of a returning nightmare I had had as a child. In that nightmare I was standing on the earth, which started to shrink (or perhaps I grew), so I became gigantic compared to it. At the same time the earth started breaking up under me so I had to jump for my life. I would always wake up just as the earth fully disintegrated from under me. Knowing what I know at the end of my writing project, this nightmare would certainly seem like a rather literal test or a preparation ahead of what was to come later in my life.

Later that year I spent some weeks with a collaborator in Sweden. I lived in kind of dorm there, where one of the other inhabitants was a Norwegian girl. The moment I looked into her eyes I knew she had a hole through too, so one day in the kitchen I jumped on the occasion, asking her the odd question: So what was your returning nightmare as a child?

She looked at me for a second, caught by complete surprise, but then she went on to tell me that it had been about a wolf standing next to her bed. It had been standing so close to her that she could reach out and touch it - I can still remember the sensation of the fur in my hand, she said. Unlike for Nedime and I there had been no fear involved, though.

I then explained why I had asked that question, and with the contact established we got to spend some of our time off together.

One thing we did was go for a walk through the town one evening, and whenever we got to a house where one of us sensed something about things that had happened in that house, he or she would say what it was. The other was then able to pick up on the story and add more information to it.

One of the stranger things was that when we crossed a football field I sensed that the far left part of it lay where there had been a burial ground in pre-Christian times. I could sense the boundaries of that burial ground quite distinctively, and when I went back the next day to take a second look on that odd thing from the previous evening, I sensed exactly the same boundaries.

Later I have bumped into other things like that - thus, when I one day walked a street next to an open square I suddenly knew they used to execute people in that square. Quite a few people had been executed there, actually, and the souls of some of the innocent people killed came to me, complaining about the injustice.

However, on that evening in Sweden it was just quite peculiar that this girl and this guy, neither of whom had ventured into spirituality before, somehow started walking around town exploring the non-physical realms like that.

Around that time I also made a visit to Washington DC to attend a scientific conference. With a bit of time to spare I visited the Arlington cemetery. What called me there seemed to be two things. One thing was the memorial for JFK, and the other was the fact that this piece of land before the American Civil War was the property of a certain Robert E. Lee, the supreme commander of the Confederate army.

I went there on a bright sunny day as autumn turned into winter. On my arrival I found out that Robert E. Lee’s house was still standing, and that you can visit it. So I did that, and for some reason it felt like a pilgrimage.

Then I went to the JFK memorial with the eternal flame, and with still some time to spare that afternoon I sat down on a bench to enjoy the unseasonably warm weather.

As I sat there on the bench, drifting away in the wonderful sunshine, I suddenly heard the sound of iron coated wooden wheels against the gravel covering the paths, and as there was no sounds of an engine the noise would have to be from an old horse drawn carriage - though I couldn’t see any. That was whatever it was, but the sound filled me with panic and it ran through me that now I was going to die - my fear was unquestionably the fear connected with dying. That was all strange on this beautiful sunny day, and so absurd that I was able to pull myself back quickly: There was obviously no reality to that thing.

Years later I learned that there had in fact been some reality to that experience after all. It dawned on me when in a meditation I went back to my death during the American Civil War: I had always known that there was something strange there, since I somehow intuitively felt sympathy for the Confederate cause, seeing the official story of the war, a war against slavery, as a gross misrepresentation, a lie doctored by the victorious party - and now I learned what it was all about:

For a start I saw myself as a young boy in the hilly countryside, and in the first scene we were a family of seven, my mom, my dad, my sisters and brothers, and me, eating dinner. We were a very happy family. Life required hard work of us, but also gave us lots of Love and joy, and I know that more children were to follow later - all that Love had its consequences.

In the next scene I had grown up and left home to go to the city, where I first got a place with the blacksmith, feeling very much alone and far, far away from home, not really thriving there. It was also long hours of very hard work for this teenage boy - and in not very pleasant company. Later I got to work in the general store, which I liked much better, and I fell in Love with the schoolteacher, my beautiful Mary, as I referred to her, though Mary was not her real name.

We were very, very happy for a couple of years, my Mary and I, and we had already agreed to marry, but then came the war, and I had to leave for battle.

There was no other choice - we just had to defend our homes and our families, our freedom to choose our own way of life from the intruding aggressors. True, there may have been a few plantation owners and politicians on the Confederate side with other agendas - like protecting slavery - but most of us were like me, fighting for the very same reasons, and we certainly had no slaves to hold on to.

That all led to the third scene, the battlefield - a meadow in Virginia, early in May 1862. I remember us lining up, taking cover behind trees, rocks, whatever we could find. We didn’t seem like a real army, but rather like some sort of home guard, dressed in our own ragged clothes, and armed with whatever firearms we had ourselves - or had borrowed from someone else. I remember looking down on the sorry remains of my boots as we stood there waiting: We had certainly been in the field for much too long.

The union soldiers outnumbered us ten to one. They were a real army unit, complete with uniforms and everything, and they even had canons! They extended the frontline, forcing us to spread out so thinly that we would not be able to support each other: In the coming confrontation each man would have to fight for himself. Essentially we never stood a chance in that battle, but none of us wavered, we stood our ground to the end; it was a good day to die, and a good cause to die for.

I think I got to two or three of them, before one of them got to me. I remember seeing the bayonet at the end of the rifle as it was thrust upwards towards my chest, and I remember it penetrating my Heart. It was a quick and a very good death; I feel that deep in my Heart.

This memory was what the event at the Arlington cemetery four years earlier had been about: Ahead of the battle I had been out scouting, and hiding in a ditch I had seen the enemy pass, hearing the sounds of the canon wheels against the dirt road as they advanced. That sound had then become connected to my death the next day.

Next time They started knocking on my door was in the autumn of 2003, where one of our national television channels ran a series on people who under hypnosis went back to past lifetimes and now talked about what they remembered from these lifetimes.

The participants would then travel to the places they had described - places they had never visited in this lifetime - and once there they would find landmarks and buildings looking as described by them.

It was most impressive, and the TV programme helped me put my image from Carthage (and other things) into context: I was simply remembering old lifetimes (!) - Though in my case I did not need hypnosis for the purpose, but would do it while being right awake.

I guess that such experiences should have brought me to explore things beyond the physical reality more profoundly, but somehow it still did not really catch fire…

Chapter 2: The death of a wife and the awakening of a man

Yeshua said: I shall choose you, one from a thousand and two from ten thousand, and they will stand as a single one.

(Gospel of Thomas, Saying 23)

It all changed one day in February 2004 when They flat out kicked the door in to make the deaf hear and the blind see. It was a Saturday evening, and I was watching Spanish football on TV while my then wife - let us call her Helen - was putting our two daughters to bed.

It had never been a very happy marriage, to say the least, and the previous autumn I had decided to end it. Since we were married on New Years Eve, I had decided to announce the decision to my wife at that time, to complete the circle, ending things on the day they started.

That did not happen as scheduled, since Helen between Christmas and New Year developed inflammation in her left breast, and I decided to spare her the added trauma until she got well again. Reasonably, she merely had an innocent infection, which is quite common and nothing to talk about, the doctor knows, so I was just postponing things a few weeks - I thought.

However, the inflammation did not go away on the first round of antibiotics, so she went for some further tests the week before that Saturday, and the results were due the following Monday. To all intents and purposes it was just a matter of shifting her to some other antibiotics, so I was quite unsuspecting as I was sitting there on the couch, all consumed by the football game.

Suddenly it was as if I was hit on my left shoulder with so much force that my body was driven forward towards the table in front of me, and I heard a voice saying to me that now I needed not concern myself with the divorce anymore, for my wife would get a rampant disease and die within three to four months.

I did not mention anything to Helen about the event when she returned to our living room, but two days later we went to the hospital to learn the results of the new tests. The shocking news were that Helen had a form of breast cancer so rare that I, as a non-specialist doctor, had never heard about it (neither had our family doctor). Furthermore, it is the most aggressive form of the disease with a very rapid course and a poor prognosis (pretty close to a death warrant - it would be quite a miracle if she survived, though rare cases of cure had been described).

All of this was just as predicted by that voice two days before and rather shocked by it all I spent a couple of weeks trying to find my feet again. Divorce was clearly meaningless at this point - what sense would it make to drag anybody through a divorce, if they would soon be dying anyway? Somehow I also knew the reasons behind my wife’s disease, in fact they were the very same issues of fear and control that we had been struggling with throughout our marriage: She had insisted that fear was a good thing, whereas I had tried to make her accept that nothing good comes of fear, and with fear comes the need for control (of the fear), which is also not good. As I saw it, my wife had made family life unbearable through her need for control, and that strategy of hers had made me seek any opportunity to get away from home, because only when I was away from home did I feel alive.

Finding my feet again I somehow felt it natural to speak back to the messenger, letting him know that I was able to see the reasons behind the recent events, but that I thought that Helen had learned the lesson by now; that a warning shot was enough, that she needed not die to learn.

My motivation in this was first of all compassion for my wife, despite all our troubles, secondly compassion for our children, who should not suffer the loss of their mother at such a young age, and thirdly my more selfish dislike of a future as a lone parent - I had already raised my first daughter on my own, and raising the next two the same way was about the last thing I wished for myself.

It became June, the fourth month after the predictions on my wife were made. Having an inoperable cancer, Helen had been put on chemotherapy, but as it had had little effect so far, she was now shifted to a different chemotherapy. The new treatment had no obvious effect on the cancer, but quickly wiped out her immune system, virtually completely, and she was emergently hospitalised. The doctors managed so save her that time, but they seemed quite shocked by the incident, saying that she might well have died. That made me remember what had been said about her dying within four months, and it made me realise that I had somehow managed to change that fate by protesting against it so she had survived what should have killed her.

Subsequent to this event Helen was put on a