Who I Was in My Past Life

In my past life I was a French monk. As him, I was married to Mother Church and Mother Nature. My next evolutional step was to marry my inner-woman. I was reborn male with all the monk’s sensitivity and receptivity, but in a time and place where they would not flourish properly. Unlike most transsexual females, I was not born into the wrong body. Rather, I was born into the right circumstance for awakening the transsexuality that is present in all men, latent in most.

Who I was in my previous life has emerged in bits and pieces, mostly through my dreams, but also visions. The following dream is the most comprehensive I have had about who I was:

There’s an article in a magazine about a monk who recently died. It praises the monk all the way through. He lived in France. He was short and small. He was humble and very in touch with living on the Earth physically and spiritually. He was so connected to the area in which he lived that it was him. When giving sermons he liked to yell at parishioners from behind because a disembodied voice made the message more powerful.

I begin to see that the article about the monk was initially written on a wooden floor and has actually been reprinted from that. It was intended to be natural, honest and raw; its mistakes are crossed out with wax drippings. Sometimes to illustrate something the author of the article has made a small wax animal. The monk cared for these animals. All the animals face the “top of the page” (away from the reader, like the parishioners the monk yelled at from behind). At the end of the article there’s a long row of waxen animals that need to be cared for. My heart yearns for the monk’s connectedness and peace. ENERGY

The candlewax may be a reference to the delicateness of the monk as well as to his fieriness. His fire was not a Calvinist inferno. It was the unity, wholeness and holiness of a single candleflame.

The monk’s connection to place continued into this life. It is a reason I have always been sedentary, as if trying to re-experience what he had.

Everything he had – which is everything – was been taken from me in this life so that I might repossess it more comprehensively.

The French monk appears as the young man in this dream, which I had in 1998, as I was being initiated into spiritual life:

I bound across streets when I feel no cars coming. I dance across the land past a young man. He has so much feminine beauty that I have to kiss him. I do quickly and resist the temptation to make it long enough to be imposing. He's entering the church. He's talking about Christianity. He stutters a lot. He says, "Life is not a toy." Then he starts to talk in an overly complex way about institutional stuff, like "I did my catechismic biology in French." What is he talking about? Self is simple. I is complex.

Since the monk says, “Life is not a toy,” perhaps he never learned to be as playful as me. I learned to be playful because of my identification with the clown.

“Catechismic biology in French” refers to how the monk experienced divinity through nature. French is the language in which the monk spoke of nature and divinity.

In a dream from 1998 the monk is a white, round, middle-aged man named “James Brown.” He is dressed entirely in denim. Underneath the denim, his penis is flaccid.

I had this dream just as I was entering the solitude that eventually brought about my gender shift. In the years preceding the dream James Brown, the Godfather of Soul, had been something of an idol for me, and a top inspiration to me musically. As such I projected my masculine identity onto this James Brown – an identity which was nearing its end. My dream was being tongue-in-cheek, if not a little mocking to my male-self, in the figure of the flaccid, white James Brown. The white James Brown was so plain compared to the ostentatious Godfather of Soul.

In the dream, the monk’s denim – work clothing - was suggestive of the inner-work I was embarking on. Perhaps it also referred to De Nimes, the town in France where “denim” gets its name. It seems possible that the monk lived in De Nimes.

Though he was a simple monk, clothing appears to have been a love of his, and an eccentricity. In one dream he is wearing a jacket decorated with dozens of sewn-in feathers.

Growing up I rarely felt comfortable in any of the clothes my mother considered presentable. Beauty, texture, elegance and character were always my first considerations in clothing. If I was denied these, I felt terrible. I have never been unduly concerned with wearing what other people wear.

I have been dreaming of myself in ministerial roles for a long time. This dream with a sort of anti-ministerial role, suggestive of my male self’s fall from grace, came in 1993:

I tell people there are realms into which even the goodness of God won't go. Evil things happen no matter how pious you are. One of the people I am speaking to is a very pious man with a scratched up face. He can't bear to hear me talk about how powerful evil is so he leaves. I give him the middle finger and keep talking.

Ultra-sensitive detection of hypocrisy has characterized me for as long I can remember, and must have in my previous life as well. Going through the motions of being raised in the Catholic Church, incensed me. It was maddeningly clear to me that none of the people in my world who professed the spirit of Christ’s message actually lived it. I took it more seriously than any of them, including my CCD classmates and teachers.

When I was compelled to say the word “Jesus” at CCD, I am not exaggerating when I say I felt as if feces was being shoved into mouth. The underlying spirit of others’ actions has always come across as clearly to me as their conscious intent. This makes it difficult for people to lie to me, except for the types of lies kids tell each other for fun. The most egregious example of this was when I was at camp as a teenager and a couple of the other campers had me believing for a couple weeks that they were secret agents protecting me from a mafia hit. People could feel how naïve I was and took advantage of it.
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A “Tulku” is a Tibetan Buddhist lama who has consciously decided to be reborn. When I first learned of the Tulku, I thought, “Too cool!”

Having such clarity about who I was in my previous life, I feel close to the deathlessness that is the hallmark of the Tulku. I feel as if everything in my previous life is like a godlike presence around the periphery of this one.

In the below dream from 1998, Tibetan Buddhism is alluded to in the phrase “a certain, obscure religious sect.” “Obscure” was the right word at the time, since I then knew almost nothing about Tibetan Buddhism:

A great teacher tells me that everyone is looking outside themselves for a name so that they can tell the world they are one thing or another, thus fusing their identity to something solid and agreed on by everyone as perceivable. The great teacher found his own name. His philosophy and practices resemble those of a certain, obscure religious sect, but really, as he is—as everyone ultimately is—he is totally unique in the world. Religion is relative to him. There is no need for him to alter himself artificially for the sake of religion.

The dream alluded not only to my identification with the Tulku, but also to another personage of Tibetan Buddhism: the Dakini. I first learned of the Dakini when I was six months into identifying as female. I learned about her from my landlord, Fifu, a philosophy teacher at university who had studied in France under Jacques Derrida, the father of deconstructionsim.

Just after I moved in, Fifu told me a story about the “curse of the Dakini.” He first had to explain to me what a Dakini was; basically Tibetan Buddhism’s figure of the divine feminine - related to the Anima, Lakshmi, and Mary. She was the feminine principle to which I had become an avatar, and was integrating through the psychotic process.

The Chinese and Tibetan terms for Dakini literally mean "she who travels in the sky," or "sky dancer." In art, the Dakini is depicted curved in the sinuous dance poses.

The summer before moving into Fifu’s I had visions of a personification of myself/Rose Mary as the “sky dancer” aspect of the Dakini - without having any knowledge of the Dakini. The visions were quite fearsome. I felt as if I would lose myself to their reality. I could glimpse them only for a moment before having to block them out.

During the same period, in a vision I had of Jesus Christ Superstar, his countenance and manner were quite similar to those of the Rose Mary sky-dancer visions. He & Rose Mary are as essential to each other as spirit is to matter. I dreamed they married.

In art the Dakini is sometimes shown dancing on corpses, I experienced this firsthand as both the “corpse” and the dancer. In meditation, I would become as still as a corpse, allowing my female self to literally dance through me - straight from the unconscious into waking-life - so that her dance would evolve into mine. It feels right that my past life as the monk would evolve into identification as an avatar of a Dakini.
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In the curse of the Dakini story which Fifu told me, an accomplished, young monk goes to an inn for something to eat. The monk does not realize the woman serving him is a Dakini. The plate of food she gives him is “rancid” (Fifu’s word). The monk says, “Excuse me, Miss. I cannot eat this food. It’s rancid.”

The Dakini replies, “You don’t like my food? I curse you to be satisfied with what you get, and to live without choice about what is given you for the next fifteen years.”

As I survived without choice or opportunity in the years to come, and recalled Fifu’s story, I came to identify with its hapless monk and saw my feminine wholeness as his inner-woman, his personal Dakini. Her curse would shadow me until I duly synthesized my female identity.

My identification as an avatar of a Dakini has come from come from accepting my calling. The intelligence behind my story has fashioned me. I do not fashion it. I have become myself through careful observation, and in the ongoing work of balancing my psyche.

If someone were to ask me, “What are you?” I would not say that I am a tulku or an avatar of a Dakini. I would call myself a trans-religious (non-celibate) nun (who has not had sex in 11 years). I’m a human being after all, though sometimes more being than human.
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I have learned that the Dakini is the Jungian anima: the woman inside the man. In a perfect world, a man’s anima would be his wife as the Earth is Heaven’s wife. The anima is so undifferentiated from the man who harbors her that she makes up half his XY chromosomes. In the poetry of Genesis, man’s inner-woman is Adam’s rib. This metaphor implies that the concept of woman literally came forth from within God.

Imagine God as a spirit-being who wishes to fashion material beings. For the sake of edifying the consciousness of the beings, God has one embody matter (woman) & the other spirit (man). Starting from this point, God outlines the whole human drama, from Eden to the Apocalypse and beyond. In God’s scheme, giving consciousness to man’s inner-woman, the Dakini, is essential to giving material beings the perfect whole of divine consciousness, including consciousness of everlasting life.