Past Lives, Reincarnation and Karma

Metempsychosis 

Definition: [n] after death the soul begins a new cycle of existence in another human body

Synonyms: rebirth

Definition: The passage of the soul, as an immortal essence, at the death
of the animal body it had inhabited, into another living
body, whether of a brute or a human being; transmigration of
souls. --Sir T. Browne.

It is increasingly common to hear someone say, 'I must have been a doctor in a previous life,' where doctor could be replaced by a million different professions or types of people. Reincarnation has become an accepted part of our spirituality, something many of us take as almost a fact. The clues are being shown to us all the time; the little deja vus that we rationalise and forget about, a trip to a new place at the seaside where we've never been yet looks so familiar. Our dreams are mostly a fantasy perhaps, but the scenery has to come from somewhere; some memory, how many times do we dream of far away places we think we've never been to before? It is thought that children are able to remember their past lives very clearly for the first two years of their lives; the memory slowly fades as awareness of a new life brightens. Still, adults are able to recall the memories through hypnosis; the young children may recall their experiences without hypnosis, from standard memory.

An example of rebirth or metempsychosis is the well documented case that began in Sicily on the twelfth of March 1910 when a Doctor Samona lost his five year old daughter, Alexandrina. The doctor's wife had a dream, three days after her daughter's death, where the child appeared and assured her mother that everything was fine and that she would be reborn as a new baby inside her mother. After the dream revisited her with similar messages, Madam Samona told her friends about it; she was told it may be a true sign that a reincarnation was imminent, this confused her because she was told that it would no longer be possible for her to bear children. She gave birth to twins on the twenty-second of November; one of whom bore some uncanny resemblances to Alexandrina, being left-handed, sharing a similar eye complaint, and even sharing some of Alexandrina's memories. Not just places but actual events, things that she could not possibly have known.

A more recent interwiew regarding a past life took place in the UK concerning a young child called Graham and his mother Denise. ‘Graham was looking out of the car window,’ recalls Denise, from London, ‘when he started talking about an airship. He said he’d been grown up and he had been in an airship. There was a fire and people were screaming, and they had flames coming from them. He said he fell to the ground, then his body shot upwards.’ Graham appeared to be describing a horrific incident in which he’d died.

‘I was stunned to hear these words coming out of my son’s mouth.’ says Denise, ‘It was as though someone else was speaking. He was too young to have a conversation but suddenly he was speaking in proper sentences. Then he seemed to snap back into baby mode. I didn’t know Graham knew what an airship was, and I hadn’t let him watch such horrific images on TV.

‘He mentioned the airship once or twice after that, and if people asked him to repeat the story, he did so without adding anything to it. This convinced me he wasn’t making it up.’

Graham went quiet about his previous life after about the age of 5 or 6. And then when he was nine, Denise was watching a film about the fire that destroyed the Hindenburg, a German airship destroyed in a tragic fire on May 6, 1937 at NAS Lakehurst, New Jersey USA. She called Graham into the room. ‘He ran in and took one look at the TV,’ she remembers, ‘then he said, ‘That’s my dream, that’s what I see.”

Soon after this, in March 1994, Denise recorded a conversation with Graham about the airship in which he remembered more details. Graham said he could remember paper being on fire, falling off the airship, and people jumping out of a hole. Some people spoke in a different language, and some were English. He thought he was about 16.

Denise contacted a friend who put her in touch with Dr Ian Stevenson, whom he knew was researching past lives. When the doctor came to visit Graham shortly after his 10th birthday, the boy’s memories of the experience were fading. Dr Stevenson hypnotized Graham to try and get more information. As well as hearing the experience as already mentioned, the doctor asked Graham what his name was during the airship disaster; he replied that it was probably Graham.

The R101 was also a famous airship, it was bound for India from England on Saturday 4th October 1930. It crashed the next morning on a hillside in Beauvais just north of Paris. The passengers were Indian and English, Graham said that some of the passengers in his experience were English like himself; he also said that his name was probably Graham, there was a young cook working on the R101 with the family name Graham. The R101 did not explode in the same way as the Hindenburg but was affected by high winds and the loss of gas bags, the craft plummeted from the sky sending furniture inside the ship all over the place. It crashed nose-down into soil then exploded into flames.

This is not the only tale from beyond the grave connected with the R101, Eileen Garrett, medium at the extraordinary séance in which the spirit of the captain of the R 1 0 1 spoke through her. Two days after the huge British airship, the R101, had crashed in flames on a hillside in Beauvais, France - killing 48 of its 54 passengers - the hesitant, anxious voice of a man claiming to be its captain spoke through the lips of a medium in London. In short disjointed sentences he described the horrifying last moments before his incineration. His account of the crash included a wealth of technical information that was confirmed six months later by an official inquiry.

People have always been fascinated with immortality and eternal life; it is promised in many major religions, many cynics would say that we hanker after such dreams because we are afraid to die. Some seek solace in the fact that they can gain some semblance of immortality through their children. Is the fact that we die enough of a reason to invent immortality? If it has always been the way that we are born, grow old and die; where did the idea of immortality and reincarnation come from in the first place? Why would such a notion enter our dreams merely to taunt us? It seems likely that our dreams are there to give us clues to help us along our spiritual journey; after all, they are in no way connected with our physical bodies- they do nothing to help them grow. Perhaps children don't fear death because the residual memory of immortality is still fresh within their minds; it is also probable that the memory is in all our minds, deeper in some than others, which might go a long way to explain why we are so ready to embrace the theory of reincarnation. Not because we are afraid of death or perhaps becoming bored with religion, but because it is the closest we have ever come to the truth; the closest we have ever come to the true knowledge nestling safely somewhere in our psyche, until the time when we are truly ready to accept all its splendor.

Jonathan Malory, for Maljonic's Dreams.

Thoughts

I strongly believe that we all have lived past lives, we've all seen the programmes where people are regressed and revisit their former life, some may say 'rubbish' whilst others remain adamant in their beliefs. Its a matter of choice, whatever we do, & believe, thats our choice. However, its all mapped out and there is nothing we can do but follow our destiny.
I have many times wondered why such cruel things happen in the world, I'm sure I will in the future too, but when push comes to shove its not my decision, its the decision of somebody/something much greater than myself and something I cant control.
Things are meant to be whether they be right or wrong, its all a matter of balance, for every good deed in the world there is probably 2 bad things, I'm not sure as I didnt make the rules. What I am sure of though is that whatever decisions we make in our present life we will have to answer to in the following existance.
Our life as we live it now is what we make it, but our future is our pre-written destiny. What lies beyond nobody actually knows, but if we follow the path we are destined to then we will surely reach our goal may it be good or bad.

Helen Nicol, for Maljonic's Dreams.