Your Past Lives Revisited

Each of us has the ability to get in touch with some aspect of our past lives and this ability can be extremely useful to us if we are troubled with deep problems and phobias, or if we simply want to become more aware of who we really are.

Familiarizing ourselves with our past lives can be a very useful tool that we can use to our great benefit. Exploring our past lives fosters inner growth.

If you sincerely desire to permit your awareness to grow during this session, you will have a wonderful sense of joy as you receive guidance for your inner voyage of self-discovery.

Read on. Get familiar with your true self on your path to higher awareness.

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Throughout all of our history, the quest for understanding ourselves as eternal souls has been a major focus of seekers and philosophers. Here is a summary of the trends in Past Life systems of thought , philosophy, and ideology.

The West: Dominant Ideology

This lifetime is it!
The dominant ideology of the West, material science, has for several centuries stifled any serious or widespread interest in the preexistence and survival of consciousness beyond the present body. But throughout Western history, there have always been thinkers who have understood and affirmed the immortality of consciousness and transmigration of the soul. The major religions—Judaism and Christianity—have definite threads of reincarnation throughout the fabric of their teachings, even though the official custodians of dogma ignore or deny them.

Socrates
"I am confident that there truly is such a thing as living again, and that the living spring from the dead."

Plato
"The pure soul falls from the plane of absolute reality because of sensual desire and then takes on a physical body. First, the fallen souls take birth in human forms, the highest of which is that of the philosopher, who strives for higher knowledge. If his knowledge becomes perfect, the philosopher can return to an eternal existence. But if he becomes hopelessly entangled in material desires, he descends into the animal species and works his way back up."

Judaism
From the Zohar, one of the principal Cabalistic texts: "The souls must reenter the absolute substance whence they have emerged. But to accomplish this, they must develop all the perfections, the germ of which is planted in them; and if they have not fulfilled this condition during one life, they must commence another, a third, and so forth, until they have acquired the condition which fits them for reunion with God." According to the Universal Jewish Encyclopedia, the Hasidic Jews hold similar beliefs.

Christianity
There are many passages in the Bible itself indicating that Christ and his followers were aware of the principle of reincarnation. Once, the disciples of Jesus asked him about the Old Testament prophecy that Elijah would reappear on earth. In the Gospel of St. Matthew we read, "And Jesus answered them, Elijah shall truly first come, and restore all things. But I say unto you, that Elijah is come already, and they knew him not. Then the disciples understood that he spake unto them of John the Baptist."

Early Church
In 3 AD, the theologian Origen wrote, "By some inclination toward evil, certain souls ... come into bodies, first of men; then through their association with the irrational passions, after the allotted span of human life, they are changed into beasts, from which they sink to the level of plants. From this condition they rise again through the same stages and are restored to their heavenly place."

Eastern Roman Empire and the Middle Ages
The Eastern Roman emperor Justinian in 553 AD banned the teachings of preexistence of the soul from the Roman Catholic Church. During that era, numerous Church writings were destroyed, and many scholars now believe that references to reincarnation were purged from the scriptures. The Gnostic sects, although severely persecuted by the church, did, however, manage to keep alive the doctrine of reincarnation in the West.

The Renaissance
During the Renaissance, a new flowering of public interest in reincarnation occurred. One of the prominent figures in the revival was Italy’s leading philosopher and poet Giordano Bruno, who was burned at the stake by the Inquisition because of his teachings about reincarnation. In his final answers to the charges brought against him, Bruno defiantly proclaimed that the soul “is not the body” and that “it may be in one body or in another, and pass from body to body.”

Because of such suppression by the Church, the teachings of reincarnation then went deeply underground, surviving in Europe in the secret societies of the Rosicrucians, Freemasons, Cabalists, Theosophist, and others.

The Age of Enlightenment
In the 19th century, European intellectuals began to free themselves from the constraints of Church censorship.

Voltaire
“The doctrine of reincarnation is neither absurd nor useless. It is not more surprising to be born twice than once."

Goethe
"I am certain that I have been here as I am now a thousand times before, and I hope to return a thousand times."

Napoleon
Bonaparte Napoleon was fond of telling his generals that in a previous life he was Charlemagne.

American Indian
There is widespread belief in reincarnation in American Indian tribes. The Dakota tribe taught that man reincarnated and in between those lives he lived with the Gods and received instruction in magic and healing. Many of the Indian medicine men claimed to remember past lives.

Benjamin Franklin
"Finding myself to exist in the world, I believe I shall, in some shape or other, always exist."

Ralph Waldo Emerson
"It is a secret of the world that all things subsist and do not die, but only retire a little from sight and afterwards return again. Nothing is dead; men feign themselves dead, and endure mock funerals and mournful obituaries, and there they stand looking out of the window, sound and well, in some new and strange disguise”

Henry Thoreau
"As far back as I can remember, I have unconsciously referred to the experiences of a previous state of existence."

Walt Whitman
"I know I am deathless...
We have thus far exhausted trillions of winters and summers,
There are trillions ahead, and
trillions ahead of them."
Song of Myself

Other Authors

Honore Balzac
In his novel about reincarnation, Seraphita, "All human beings go through a previous life. Who knows how many fleshly forms the heir of heaven occupies before he can be brought to understand the value of that silence and solitude whose starry plains are but the vestibule of spiritual worlds?"

Charles Dickens
"We all have some experience of a feeling, that comes over us occasionally, of what we are saying and doing having been said and done before, in a remote time—of our having been surrounded, dim ages ago, by the same faces, objects, and circumstances.” David Copperfield

Leo Tolstoy
"As we live through thousands of dreams in our present life, so is our present life only one of many thousands of such lives which we enter from the other, more real life and then return after death. Our life is but one of the dreams of that more real life, and so it is endlessly, until the very last one, the very real life—the life of God."

20th Century

Henry Ford
"I adopted the theory of reincarnation when I was twenty-six. Genius is experience. Some seem to think that it is a gift or talent, but it is the fruit of long experience in many lives."

General George S. Patton
Believed that he had acquired his military skills on ancient battlefields.

James Joyce, in Ulysses
"Some people believe that we go on living in another body after death, that we lived before. They call it reincarnation. That we all lived before on the earth thousands of years ago or on some other planet. They say we have forgotten it. Some say they remember their past lives."

Jack London
Made reincarnation the major theme of his novel The Star Rover, in which the central character says, "I did not begin when I was born, nor when I was conceived. I have been growing, developing through incalculable myriads of millenniums. All my previous selves have their voices, echoes, promptings in me. Oh, incalculable times again shall I be born, and yet the stupid dolts about me think that by stretching my neck with a rope they will make me cease."

Herman Hesse, in Siddhartra
"He saw all these forms and faces in a thousand relationships to each other. None of them died, they only changed, were always reborn, continually had a new face: only time stood between one face and another."

Carl Jung
"I could well imagine that I might have lived in former centuries and there encountered questions I was not yet able to answer; that I had to be born again because I had not fulfilled the task that was given to me," Jung said.

Thomas Huxley
“The doctrine of transmigration is a means of constructing a plausible vindication of the ways of the cosmos to man. None but very hasty thinkers will reject it on the grounds of inherent absurdity."

Erik Erikson
"Let us face it: ‘deep down' nobody in his right mind can visualize his own existence without assuming that he has always lived and will live hereafter."

J. D. Salinger
Introduces Teddy, a precocious young boy who recalls his reincarnation experiences and speaks forthrightly about them. "It's so silly. All you do is get the heck out of your body when you die. My gosh, everybody's done it thousands of times. Just because they don't remember, it doesn't mean they haven't done it."

John Masefield
"I hold that when a person dies
His soul returns again to earth;
Arrayed in some new flesh disguise
Another mother gives him birth
With sturdier limbs and brighter brain
The old soul takes the road again."

George Harrison
"Friends are all souls that we've known in other lives. We're drawn to each other.”

The East: Dominant Ideology

Hinduism: Karma
The soul, after leaving a material body at death, enters another womb in some species of life in this or another universe, as directed by the immutable laws of karma and arranged by material nature. Only fully self-realized souls can attain the spiritual world beyond the cycle of reincarnation. This is not possible for the ordinary soul, who is conditioned by life in life in the material world. Every soul, however, has the potential to reach the spiritual world after undergoing the necessary spiritual practices.

The laws of karma and reincarnation are so perfectly ordered that when each material body dies, nature has already arranged, exactly according to the soul's cumulative karma, another appropriate material body into which the departed soul will enter and take birth anew.

As the karmic debt man recorded in his past is considerably large, a single life is not enough to consume it. Therefore, in order to attain liberation, many lives become a necessity

Buddhism: Buddha and his 500 lives
The Buddhist view of the cycle of rebirth is much the same as Hinduism’s view - rebirth is the curse of the individual who must keep returning to earth to struggle through life, learning lessons and paying back karmic debts. The goal of the student of Buddhism is the same as the goal of the student of Yoga - to achieve enlightenment and break the cycle of reincarnation.

Islam: Sufism
The Koran says, "And you were dead, and He brought you back to life. And He shall cause you to die, and shall bring you back to life, and in the end shall gather you unto Himself." Among the followers of Islam, the Sufis especially believe that death is no loss, for the immortal soul continually passes through different bodies. Rumi, a famous Sufi poet, writes:
"I died as a mineral and became a plant,
I died as a plant and rose to animal,
I died as animal and I was man.
Why should I fear? When was I less by dying?"

Soul Theories

No Soul
One Soul
Individual Souls but part of the whole
Immortal Soul: Nothing but eternity before and after

“For the soul there is neither birth nor death at any time. He has not come into being, does not come into being, and will not come into being. He is unborn, eternal, ever-existing, and primeval He is not slain when the body is slain.” Bhagavad-gita 2.20

The Soul Journey Theory

Present problems = unresolved past issues
Challenges are for the learning soul

Objections to Reincarnation and Past Lives

Objection: Can’t prove it
Rebuttal:

Laboratory tests
The work of Ian Stevenson in the United States and Peter Ramster in Australia includes carefully documented reincarnation experiments—in many cases involving independent observers to insure integrity. (See page on Xenoglossy.)
Thousands of accounts (see bibliography)
People feel better and resolve issues

Objection: Can’t see or feel it - it's just imagination
Rebuttal:

Where does someone's imagination feed itself, if not from earlier memories or experiences? Then why not from previous existence experiences?

Objection: Why can’t I remember it on a daily basis?
Reasons:

Concentration on this lifetime
Memory is faulty and brain-based in this lifetime
Short term and long term memory loss
No or very sketchy memory of early childhood ( What do you remember?)

A Proof of Past Lives: Xenoglossy

Xenoglossy is the ability to speak or write a foreign language a person never learned. The person becomes totally fluent and able to converse with native speakers sometimes in obscure dialects that have not been in use for centuries.

Dr. Morris Netherton reports one case of a blond, blue-eyed eleven year old boy who under hypnosis was taped for eleven minutes as he spoke in an ancient Chinese dialect. When the tape was taken to a professor at the Department of Oriental Studies at the University of California it turned out to be a recitation from a forbidden religion of Ancient China (Fisher 1986:202).

American medium George Valentine under trance conducted séances in Russian, German, Spanish and Welsh. The Brazilian medium Carlos Mirabelli spoke and wrote long technical documents in more than thirty languages including Syriac and Japanese in the presence of scientists and crowds up to 5,000 (Lazarus 1993: 121).

In 1977 doctors at a state penitentiary in Ohio, USA, discovered that a convicted rapist named Billy Mulligan had become possessed by two new personalities, both of whom communicated in a different language. Mulligan was born and raised in the USA and spoke no foreign languages. But when taken over by Abdul, Mulligan could read and write in perfect Arabic; as Rugen he spoke perfect Serbo-Croat with a thick Slavic accent (Lazarus 1993: 83).

Dr. Ian Stevenson is one of the most respected scientists in the United States. He has done specialized research into xenoglossy and his book Xenoglossy (Stevenson 1974) is one of the leading scientific studies in this area. In it he documents a study he made of a 37 year-old American woman. Under hypnosis she experienced a complete change of voice and personality into that of a male. She spoke fluently in the Swedish language - a language she did not speak or understand when in the normal state of consciousness. Dr. Stevenson's direct involvement with this case lasted more than eight years. The study involved linguists and other experts and scientists who meticulously investigated every alternative explanation.

Another case Stevenson investigated with equal care was reported in the July 1980 edition of the Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research. It involved an Indian woman named Uttar Huddar who at aged 32 spontaneously took on the personality of a housewife of West Bengal in the early 1800s. She began speaking Bengali instead of her own language Marathi. For days or weeks at a time speakers of Bengali had to be brought in to enable her to communicate with her own family.

Author Lyall Watson describes a case of a ten year old child, an Igarot Indian living in the remote Cagayon Valley in the Philippines. The child had never had any contact with any language or culture other than his own. Yet under trance conditions the child communicated freely in Zulu, a language he could not have even heard. Watson only recognized it because he had spent his early life in Africa (cited by Lazarus 1993: 84).

Peter Ramster, in his book The Search for Lives Past (Ramster 1990 : 227), cites the case of Cynthia Henderson whose only contact with the French language had been a few months of very basic instruction in one year of high school. Yet under hypnosis she was able to carry on a long and detailed conversation in French with a native speaker who commented that she spoke without any English accent and in the manner of the eighteenth century.

In some cases subjects under trance have communicated in languages no longer in use or known only to a handful of language experts.

Dr Joel Whitton cites the case of Harold Jaworski who under hypnosis wrote down twenty-two words and phrases which he 'heard' himself speaking in a past Viking life. Working independently, linguists identified and translated ten of these words as Old Norse and several of the others as Russian, Serbian or Slavic. All were words associated with the sea (Whitton and Fisher 1987: 210).

In 1931 a young English girl from Blackpool, known as Rosemary in the files of the Society for Psychical Research, began to speak in an ancient Egyptian dialect under the influence of the personality of Telika-Ventiu who had lived in approximately 1400 BC. In front of Egyptologist Howard Hume she wrote down 66 accurate phrases in the lost language of hieroglyphs and spoke in a tongue unheard outside academic circles for thousands of years (Lazarus 1993: 85).

Pearl Curgen, a medium from Saint Louis who was barely literate, began to write in astonishingly accurate Middle English. Under the guidance of a spirit entity she produced sixty novels, plays and poems, including a 60,000 word epic poem (Lazarus 1993: 119)

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Bibliographic references

If you do a search on the web for books on Past Lives, you will get over 119,000,000 results. This shows just how important this topic is to so many authors and thinkers. Here are my favorites:

Ian Stevenson: 30 Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation
The work of Ian Stevenson in the United States and Peter Ramster in Australia includes carefully documented reincarnation experiments—in many cases involving independent observers to insure integrity. It is noteworthy that some of their subjects spoke fluently in languages with which, it had been proven, they had little or no contact throughout their lives (Xenoglossy). Some spoke in old dialects no longer in use but which were validated through historical records. Some of Ramster's subjects led him and independent observers to remote dwellings in foreign countries never before visited by their subjects. In several cases these buildings, or their remains, meticulously matched subjects' earlier accounts of their "past-life homes," accounts that were taped in Ramster's, office before his subjects went abroad to begin the verification phase of the experiment.

Morey Bernstein: The Search for Bridey Murphy
The case of Bridey Murphy brought broad attention to the concept of past lives, reincarnation, and the use of regression to reveal hidden memories. In 1952 Virginia Tighe, the wife of a Colorado businessman, was hypnotized by Morey Bernstein. During her sessions she gave a detailed account of the life of an Irish woman named Bridey Murphy, claiming she had been born in 1798 and died in 1864.

Helen Wambach: Reliving Past Lives
Initially motivated by a desire to debunk reincarnation, Helen Wambach conducted a 10-year survey of past-life recalls under hypnosis among 1,088 subjects (beginning in the late 1960s). She asked very specific questions about the time periods in which people lived and the clothing, footwear, utensils, money, housing, etc. which they used or came in contact with. Wambach concluded found peoples' recollections to be amazingly accurate and wrote that ''fantasy and genetic memory could not account for the patterns that emerged in the results. With the exception of 11 subjects, all descriptions of clothing, footwear, and utensils were consistent with historical records.''

In Life Before Life Dr. Wambach described the results of hypnotizing another 750 people and taking them to the time between their past and current lives. One of her most controversial findings was that people have some choice in their current lives and that the disembodied consciousness or soul does not enter the body until near birth. "The soul usually enters the body near birth, and has a choice of which fetus to enter. If one fetus is aborted, it is possible to choose another. In some cases, the soul who will occupy the fetus, is in contact with the soul of the mother, and can influence her decision regarding abortion."

Dr. Wambach found that 89% of her subjects said they did not become part of the fetus until after six months of gestation. A large group said they did not join the fetus until just before or during the birth process. They existed fully conscious as an entity apart from the fetus and even after six months many reported being in and out of the fetal body. "Many subjects reported that the onrush of physical sensations on emerging from the birth canal was disturbing and very unpleasant. Apparently the soul exists in a quite different environment in the between-life state. The physical senses bring so much vivid input that the soul feels almost drowned in light, cold air, sounds. A frequent report is that the new-born infant feels cut off, diminished, alone compared to the between-life state.

Brian L. Weiss, MD:

Many Lives, Many Masters
Through Time into Healing
Only Love is Real: A Story of Soulmates Reunited
Messages from the Masters

As a traditional psychotherapist, Dr. Brian Weiss was astonished and skeptical when one of his patients began recalling past-life traumas that seemed to hold the key to her recurring nightmares and anxiety attacks. His skepticism was eroded, however, when she began to channel messages from "the space between lives," which contained remarkable revelations about Dr. Weiss's family and his dead son. Using past-life therapy, he was able to cure the patient and embark on a new, more meaningful phase of his own career.

Marge Rieder, Ph.D.: Mission to Millboro
An account of group reincarnation. Not one, but more than 35 people have been identified, most of them from around Lake Elsinore, California, who, under hypnosis, can recall in graphic detail, life in the same little town in Virginia during the American Civil War! Using the information gained during the hypnotherapy sessions, Dr. Rieder reveals the secret tunnels and hideaways she uncovered while on her expeditions to Millboro.

Thomas Shroder: Old Souls: Compelling Evidence from Children Who Remember Past Lives
American psychiatrist Ian Stevenson spent more than 30 years studying the cases of 2000 children who spontaneously remember concrete details about dead strangers who can be documented. On his two final field trips, to Lebanon and India, he was accompanied by journalist Shroder, an editor of the Washington Post. In many cases, the subjects exhibit birthmarks or extreme phobias corresponding to injuries or traumatic events in their past lives. They recognize the deceased's relatives and friends; in one case, a Lebanese boy asked the deceased's mother if she had finished knitting the sweater she was making for him when he died