In the 70s, when I lived in Northern Ireland, my mother was doing reincarnation readings as well as her usual counselings. When it comes to reincarnation, I mostly consider it something that would be a nice perk if it existed, for a whole bunch of reasons—but I don't accept it as a given. Just like an afterlife. Which begs the question, if reincarnation doesn't exist, where the hell does all that info come from? Why does a child in India remember her last life, including how to get to her village, the people she knew and loved, and how she died? How can a new Dali Lama be chosen, if he's the reincarnation of the last one, if that process doesn't exist? And how can anyone claim to tell you who you've been before?
I knew my mother wasn't making these stories up, at least not consciously. So where did she get her information from?
I do not know. But I admit it was sometimes fascinating.
When I asked Mother what she thought was going on behind the Irish troubles, she surprised me. She said people were being reborn, back and forth, from Catholic to Protestant, Irish to English, until each individual soul had learned its lesson, had enough, and dropped out of the cycle to go elsewhere. It certainly fit my perception that an endless loop was being perpetuated by blind prejudice and personal revenge: an eye for an eye, a daughter for a son, on and on. (Not that Northern Ireland ever had a corner on that type of cyclical violence; you can find it everywhere that perpetual, senseless war continues.)
Back then, I thought reincarnation explained a lot of things, like how I knew my way around a place I’d never seen before, why I had sudden attractions or repulsions toward people I’d just met, why I had affinities for certain environments. My mother had some very interesting cases: like the time she told her client that he'd been caught and convicted as a thief in an Eastern life, where the penalty was amputation of a hand or arm—only to have him hold up that same arm, withered and useless in this life. Or the woman who Mother said was thrown into a sacrificial well in an Aztec city, and who, in this life, was terrified of showers.
But I've also noticed that reincarnated lives always seem to include priestesses from Atlantis and shahs from India, but damn few truck drivers from Cleveland or dairy farmers or bank tellers. Someone once told my mother that she was Mary Queen of Scots. She was delighted, of course; her maternal ancestors came from Scotland, and Mary was a figure she could really identify with: proud, tragic, clever, with a jeweled ruff round her ill-fated neck. I read a couple books on Mary, and I found her erratic, stubborn, foolish, and a sucker for picking the wrong members of the opposite sex; so I have to say, you could make a case for my mother being her incarnation, if persistent character traits count for much.
Personally, I think Mary would have made a terrible ruler. And anyway, I bet the number of women told they were once Mary Queen of Scots (or convinced of it) would be staggering.
I knew a man whose mother was told by Edgar Cayce that he was the reincarnation of Thomas Jefferson; she named her baby after the prez and that man grew up impaired by the belief and knowledge—and a bit of a slacker, figuring his glory days gave him a ticket to goofing off this time around. I've been told I was from Atlantis, a soldier in the Roman army, a Chinese prisoner, an Egyptian ruler...I forget what all. My mother told me that my ex-husband and I were in the Roman army together, and one of us converted to Christianity and the other didn't, and that this event was the reason for our philosophical conflicts in this life. After my dad died, I had a dream where I talked to him and told him about a former life that he and I shared as family members in Virginia. I gave him the name and address of the farm we lived on in the 1800s.
When I was a youngster, one of Mother’s favorite love stories was a novella written in 1935 by Mildred Cram, called Forever, which starts: “Colin and Julie met before they were born.” I adored that book. This man and woman meet in heaven's waiting room, fall in love, and are called back to Earth to lead very separate lives. Then they end up in the same place, same time, and die in different ways and are reunited as souls again. This story has apparently been kicking around Hollywood in development hell ever since Tyrone Power took a shine to it. Yet it's never been made. People still talk about it.
Reincarnation as a method of exacting karma has enormous appeal. Everyone gets theirs, even if we don't see it happen in the Now. Evil will be punished. Good rewarded. The American version of reincarnation is a bit more appealing than the original Buddhist version and the whole coming back as a lower form of life, like a bug. I never bought into that, but isn't that typical of any ideological belief system? We change what we don't like and make it into what we want. It evolves. It splinters.
Just don't drink the koolaid and start thinking it's "the One answer." Belief doesn't make it correct. It just makes it real, as in our realities are shaped and manifested by our beliefs. That's certainly true.
