Vistas: a Theologian in Past-Life Therapy

By Paul Giurlanda and Michelle Lilwica

In this memoir, the author describes his transition from the role of Catholic theologian to that of a participant in a very different tradition. After a brief account of his struggles as a gay youth with the frustrated desire to only connect, and his entry into Roman Catholic religious life, we are quickly brought to the recent past, as the author finds himself in a moment of near-despair. More or less on a whim, he tries a past-life regression during which the powerful experience of the opening of his heart leads him to a serious study of the writings of psychic Jane Roberts. In turn, these channeled writings (The Seth Material) bring him into conversation with a community of non-traditional spiritual seekers and further adventures.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Sep 30, 2013
• ISBN: 9781493104826

Paul Giurlanda

After entering a Catholic religious community in 1964 Paul Giurlanda assumed his life path was set, but after decades of teaching theology, a startling experience of past-life regression forced an exploration into new views of life, especially those found in the writings of Jane Roberts. Roberts’s “Seth” wisdom figure provided a metaphysical perspective at once compelling and almost impossible to accept: that your will, your intent, even your semi-conscious thought patterns, fashion and form the world of your experience. In some ways this is obviously true. But how literally—and how far--can one take it? Is there nobody left to blame, ever? In a new community of spiritual seekers, Giurlanda found that, just as was true in Catholic theology, there were no easy answers.

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VISTAS

A Theologian in Past-Life Therapy

Paul Giurlanda

Copyright © 2013 by Paul Giurlanda.

ISBN:      Softcover      978-1-4931-0481-9

                Ebook           978-1-4931-0482-6

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

Rev. date: 09/26/2013

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Table of Contents

Preface

Foreword

Chapter One:   Not a Beginning

Chapter Two:   Secular Intellectual

Chapter Three:   A Path Opens

Chapter Four:   My First PLR

Chapter Five:   Noel Was My Son?

Chapter Six:   Down the Rabbit Hole, But Not Yet

Chapter Seven:   Wrestling with A New Metaphysical Perspective

Chapter Eight:   Who am I?

Chapter Nine:   The Third PLR: Choosing to be Paul

Chapter Ten:   Another Way Out of the Body?

Chapter Eleven:   The Monroe Institute

Chapter Twelve:   The Procedure

Chapter Thirteen:   What Happened to Me?

Chapter Fourteen:   What It Meant: Part One

Chapter Fifteen:   What It Meant: Part Two

Chapter Sixteen:   So What? Not a Conclusion

Bibliography

Endnotes

Dedication

To My Mother

Preface

Writing an introduction to a story about oneself seems doubly self-indulgent, but it gives me an opportunity to think about to whom this memoir is addressed and what benefit reading it might offer to them. It’s certainly not addressed to folks who regularly experience mystical transports like those of Teresa of Avila, any more than an elementary school reader would be of interest to a graduate student in English. Nor would it interest, I suspect, someone whose notion of the spiritual is pretty much set in institutional channels and sees no need to go beyond them.

If Michelle Lelwica is correct in her kind foreword, this memoir is best appreciated by people with an academic interest in religion but perhaps vaguely dissatisfied with the accepted boundaries of that academic interest. My audience then would include people who may have had or have heard a friend speak of a pre-cognitive dream or who have had or have heard a friend speak of an experience of telepathic connection with a deceased loved one, but would have no academic place to put these experiences. My audience could also include intellectuals raised in a religious tradition and even with an institutional commitment

to that tradition but who suspect in their heart of hearts that no intelligent

person can take it seriously anymore and who also acknowledge a wish that that were not so. My audience, in other words, includes seekers rather than finders, the open-minded and curious, the dissatisfied.

And what my story would offer to this audience is just an honest account (granted what we all know about the instability of personal narratives) of how one person locked in, it seemed, personally and professionally in the Catholic tradition re-oriented himself intellectually, personally, and even professionally after some surprising and powerful experiences. Perhaps such an account could be of help to people on their own, no doubt very different, journeys. Or it may not. But I offer it in that spirit.

Foreword

Academics are a funny breed. Despite the high premium we place on knowledge and our shared quest to help our students open and develop their minds, those of us committed to higher learning can easily find ourselves settling for the comfort (and the habit) of what we already know (or what we think we know) about ourselves and the world beyond us. Perhaps we are too busy—too caught up with the demands of our professional lives, our families and/or our communities—to be bothered by the questions we find fascinating in the lives of those we study. And perhaps some part of us is afraid that, if we were to take our own mantra of lifelong learning seriously, we might discover just how little we really know, and then we might have to adjust our assumptions, expand our perspectives, and maybe even transgress the norms of our own academic socialization.

My own propensity for intellectual, spiritual and personal stagnation—for settling for what I already know (or what I think I know)—makes me deeply appreciate this little book. In it, a professor of Catholic theology of thirty years standing shares his journey of self-discovery through engaging encounters with the unknown. At the age of sixty, in search of more authentic divine and human connections, he abandons the faith of his childhood and embarks on a series of metaphysical adventures that bring him face to face with some of life’s big questions—i.e., about the nature of reality and the self, the truth of experience, what happens when we die, and the meaning of it all. All along, a tension between the desire to hide and the longing to connect propels him to continue searching beyond what he already knows and assumes. What’s particularly compelling about this spiritual adventure is how Giurlanda uses—but goes beyond—his academic training as a philosophical theologian to understand it.

The theme of going beyond—of transgressing boundaries and transcending norms—weaves together several threads of Giurlanda’s quest for spiritual connection. Initially, transcendence appears disguised as failure—specifically, failure to live up to his Sicilian-American, working-class, Catholic family’s expectations of having "a real boy (i.e., the kind that likes girls and likes to play football). Already, by age 12, he has left behind—or rather, been banished from—the land of certainty, the territory called normal. In search of relationships that give his life meaning, he joins a religious community. But eventually this proves too restrictive for his sojourning spirit. And while his academic training has equipped him to contemplate questions about life’s larger purposes, it offers little solace to his weary sick soul (James) in the initial stages of his post-Catholic voyage. Spiritually homeless, Giurlanda finds himself stuck between his primal experience that God matters above all else and his recognition that quite possibly the universe is a meaningless accident." Only when he begins to explore alternative forms of