Reincarnation
But how is it that this lives in thy mind?
What seest thou else in the dark backward and abysm of time?
Shakespeare, The Tempest
Throughout my childhood and until I was around 40 I had frequent replays of being horribly mutilated. Nowadays I recognise this as a manifestation of post traumatic stress disorder, but it referred to something impossible, something that never happened and in fact was far worse than anything that has ever happened to me in this life.
I won’t describe the mutilation. But the scene was always the same: the moments of terror before the event, then the terror, pain, revulsion and anguish of the event itself. As I grew older I also began to understand how it would have been afterwards: the humiliation of being reduced from a viable person to a nothing, and surviving for a while in the misery of a living death.
As a child I didn’t discuss this with anyone. There were no words to express it, and I accepted it as part of the nasty side of life, along with maths lessons and encounters with the school bullies. Over the years I did a lot of inner work on it, working out the symbolism along psychoanalytical lines. This helped to a limited extent. As I grew older I began to fear that the replays might be a premonition of the future. Then I met a woman who assured me that they were far more likely to be a memory of a past life.
This came as a great relief and the horror of it lifted. I can now live with the memory, which rarely troubles me, although it is best never to reopen old wounds as a weakness will always remain. It was not until I began writing this that I realised how strange my PTSD was.
Writers on reincarnation generally make two points to explain why it is that people don’t remember past lives. One is that we are protected from reliving experiences we are not ready for, and traumatic memories are likely to be the first to surface. The other is that we need to start this life as a new personality with a clean slate. If we were born with our minds already cluttered up with memories, some of which would be very unpleasant, it would prevent us from getting on with this life. In my case I spent my early childhood during the war and things were quite tough. How come, as a sensitive little girl, I got landed with this extra burden of violence? Why did the general protection of forgetfulness not apply to me?
Maybe it was karma, the law of cause and effect. It is Newton’s third law of motion as applied to human life: “Every action produces an equal and opposite reaction”. All our good and our bad actions eventually come back to us. It is said that the return of bad karma is held back until the individual is sufficiently strong not to be destroyed by it (unless of course the person has already self-destructed). People think that they may have had just one or two past lives, and in a few cases they may be right. But the majority of us have been here many, many times. We are born with a personality already formed, and with particular gifts, preferences, likes and dislikes already developed to a varying degree. In our hundreds, perhaps thousands of lives, who knows what crimes we may have committed?
Karma is the best explanation I know of for the injustices and inequalities of life, but there is one aspect of the teaching on karma that one must beware of. That is the tendency to be unsympathetic to the misfortunes of others as being the result of their bad karma from past lives. This is a prime reason why the poor have had such a bad time in India, for instance. Belief in karma has created a society in which the rich can oppress the poor without any conscience whatsoever, since they feel that as they are rich they are morally superior to the poor because their good karma has brought them wealth and status. This attitude is also sometimes found among New Age people, who feel free to tell others that they themselves are to blame for their sufferings because they must have made bad karma in the past. This sort of attitude of itself creates bad karma. What goes around comes around. We need show more tolerance and compassion for each other, especially as we don’t have total recall and none of us can be sure what karma is on its way back to us. In fact, the more spiritually advanced we are, the quicker it comes, until eventually the return of karma is instantaneous.
I think my mutilation probably happened long ago, in the Middle Ages or before, and it took a long time for that memory to surface. Why did it wait all that time and finally turn up in this life? Maybe I was finally ready to pay my debts. Or, that I had chosen to remember, strange though that may seem. A very gifted medium once told me that I had decided before birth to load my life with difficulties in order to make as much spiritual progress as possible. Maybe that was the reason. Looking back now at all the seemingly unnecessary pain of it, I wonder if the purpose of this trauma was to help me to appreciate a level of suffering which many in the third world endure, but which most Westerners are protected from in this life. So far, at any rate. Having seen evil at close quarters I understand certain things about it in a way that many Westerners these days don’t.
Often the way into remembering past lives is precisely through unpleasant memories which need healing. People are often troubled by bad memories that seem to have no relevance to the life they lead. I once worked for a short time in an office where the young and pretty receptionist, not long married, told me she was having nightmares of being broken on a wheel. Her husband was very worried about her. I was able to tell her that it was most probably a memory surfacing from a past life, after which her nightmares stopped. Her main problem then was that her husband didn’t believe in reincarnation. I can’t remember what I said at that time, but nowadays I would say that it doesn’t matter whether you believe in reincarnation or not. You don’t have to believe in it if you don’t want to.
Many children remember past life experiences, although in our society these memories are very quickly stamped out by uncomprehending adults. Carl Jung, in his book Memories, Dreams and Reflections (chapter 2) describes what are clearly past life experiences without seeming to realise it: “…it occurred to me that I was actually two different persons,” he writes. “One of them was the schoolboy who could not grasp algebra and was far from sure of himself, and the other was important, a high authority, a man not to be trifled with … an old man who lived in the 18th century, wore buckled shoes and a white wig and went driving in a fly with high, concave rear wheels between which the box was suspended on springs and leather straps …(I felt) as though someone had stolen something from me or as though I had been cheated - cheated out of my beloved past… I cannot describe what was happening in me or what it was that affected me so strongly: a longing, a nostalgia, or a recognition that kept saying “Yes, that’s how it was! Yes, that’s how it was!”
A belief in reincarnation was part of Christianity until it was removed, probably at the instigation of the Emperor Justinian in 553 AD. The story of how this happened is too long to go into here and is not very edifying. There are historical accounts in many books on reincarnation, for instance in The Case for Reincarnation by Joe Fisher. The result of expunging reincarnation from the Bible (though one or two references remain) has been negative, in that it removed people’s hope of a second chance and delivered more power into the hands of the Church.
Because past life memories are suppressed in the West, a prominent researcher on the subject, Dr Ian Stevenson, went to India and documented many cases there. He studied more than 3000 children who claimed to have had another family before the one into which they had been born. Children were taken to the place they claimed was their former home and were able to prove in dozens of ways that theirs was a true memory. Because their previous lives were so recent there was no shortage of evidence.
Many books are available now, but the towering figures of my youth and still worth reading are Joan Grant, Elisabeth Haich, and to a lesser extent Arthur Guirdham. They were pioneers. Joan Grant made a living writing novels which she claimed were simply accounts of her past lives. With her various husbands she also did much good work helping souls in distress. As a child during the First World War she helped soldiers wounded or dying on the battlefield during the night and amazed her parents by accurately predicting their obituaries in the papers.
So is it true? Some people are more drawn to their past lives than others. If the subject isn’t particularly interesting or relevant to your life you can live perfectly well without it. There are a couple of objections sometimes made which I should maybe deal with here. Reincarnation is thought to be discredited when it turns out that many different people believe they were somebody famous like Napoleon or Joan of Arc. There is certainly a temptation to believe one was somebody famous. According to Conversations with God Book 3 (chapter 12) it is quite possible for several different souls to inhabit the same past life:
“…there is only One Soul. Yet what you call the individuated soul is huge, hovering over, in and through hundreds of physical forms… There is no such thing as time… Some of the physical forms enveloped by your soul are “living now”, in your understanding. Others individuated in forms that are now what you would call “dead”. And some have enveloped forms that live in what you call “the future”. It’s all happening right now, of course, and yet your contrivance called time serves as a tool, allowing you a greater sense of the realised experience.
“… how could more than one person claim to have been the same person before? All that has happened is that several of the sentient beings now being enveloped by one soul are “remembering” (becoming members once again with) the part of their single soul which was (is now) Joan of Arc.”
On the face of it it seems preposterous, but then again, why not? We are infinitely vaster and more mysterious than we appear. We are all one, and God is experiencing life through us. So if our Higher Self chooses, we can be several people at once. We can be unlimited numbers of people, or we need not choose to be here at all. And our “past” lives are not past at all but happening right now in the Eternal Present.
This also answers the question of the disparity of numbers: the fact that there are more people alive today than in the whole of previous history. Everybody is alive now who can make it to the grand finale. Wouldn’t you want to be here at this grand cosmic moment? There is so much more happening now than in previous times. And who knows how many of us are living half a dozen lives at once to cram it all in at this time of maximum opportunity?
