A Past Life

Anyone who knows my academic trajectory - and there are not that many people who do - knows that I am all about the African American subject. Not only as a black person trying to recover her own history, but as an incarnated spirit, trying to understand what it is to take on the meaning of "blackness" in this world, this time and place. After years, I know that it can mean just about anything, and everything. There is no set formula.

Again, I think that few people in this reality understand this because of the fixation we have on identity.

Robert T. Browne was an African American intellectual, writer, scientist, soldier, magician, and I believe with all my heart, an Ascended Master. He was a Garveyite, so you see, he really was black. (that is kind of a little inside humor.) I discovered him a couple of days ago in a pretty good book on the history of occultism in the United States.

Browne reminded me of Franz Bardon, one of the greatest magical adepts of the twentieth century, because he was also a prisoner of war (Bardon was in the Nazi camps, Browne was imprisoned in the Japanese camps of WWII) and because he led a rather low-key, almost forgotten, life at this end of things. But as I read about this man he practically jumped out at me, I could feel his presence, and I cried. What made him so special?

I think it has to do with him being a person who lived in the third dimension of suffering, but who, remarkably, accomplished what he came here to do, regardless of who he seemed to be. That sentence really makes no sense. But Browne, you see, accomplished more than he was noted for in the brief biographical sketch. He did things that bent the curve of history and changed lives forever. For example, Browne wrote a series of books in the early 1920s on what we would call today "quantum theory." They were books that delved into the science of hyperspace, the unseen dimensions, and the notion of mind as ultimate reality. They were not particularly spiritual but they were highly mathematical. They were reviewed in the New York Times! Only Browne was not able to tell anyone who he was, because, as his good friend Arthur Schomburg said, due to his race "he did not want even his publisher to know his identity." Because of the racial and social realities of the day he remained obscure.

Browne was imprisoned in a Japanese internment camp in the Philippines some twenty years later. It was a desperate place, and according to one historian, Browne and the other inmates there were starving, with Browne himself dropping from 212 to 120 pounds in the physical body. Oral histories and interviews with the other prisoners would later reveal that Browne taught visualization and manifestation classes in order to help keep his fellow internees from starving. He called his technique "mind-power" and many of the inhabitants at Los Banos recalled these methods and training in their memoirs. In the book Fighting for America: Black Soldiers - the Unsung Heroes of World War II, it is noted:

Browne's [teachings] spread throughout the camp and may have actually helped defer or at least delay some of the intense psychological pain associated with malnutrition and starvation. The visualization technique became a camp phenomenon.

Again, this reminds me of Franz Bardon, hard at work in the miserable Nazi camps, healing the prisoners with magic, teaching people how to create their reality, and to live.

I wrote all of this about this man not only because I want to recover a life and lift it up with honor, as we should generally do with ancestors, but because his experience teaches me that the magician and ascended person still has a lot of work to do even after the initiations and ascension. In fact, the most difficult work may be the initiation. Even as we create our lives on this new Earth, who knows what kinds of service to others will be required of us? And who, if I am creating this new Earth myself, is requiring it? 

Do we ever know what we agreed to before we arrived here?

After the war Browne continued to write books on theosophy, and founded an international school of Hermetics. He passed from the physical body in 1978. I believe that he completed his initiations and became an ascended one.  

I hope to meet him one day, and thank him in person for his kindness, and the lessons he has given me.