Stories
Of Reincarnation
by Jenny Smedley
What does reincarnation mean? There are many belief systems based around the theory that when our physical bodies die, our souls do not end, or go to be judged by a harsh God, but that instead we are reborn in another body, to learn more lessons. Jesus did endorse this belief. ‘Souls are poured from one into another of different kinds of bodies of the world’ (Jesus – Gnostics. The Gnostics are scriptures that were unearthed accidentally in 1945 by a peasant digging for fertilizer at a place in the Egyptian desert called Nag Hammadi. There were fifty-two separate text written in Coptic, an ancient language translated from the Greek, some of which may have been composed a generation before the first gospel was authored in AD 70.)
One theory is that we begin our existence as primitive souls; blank sheets. A new soul is clean and pure; unblemished and open, but these souls need to progress. They need to learn and be
colored by emotional experiences in order to grow, and physical existence is the only way they can do that.
Each soul starts off divided into many parts – and passes through many stages on its journey to
fulfillment; perhaps being divided into thousands of blades of grass, plants or trees, and then,
colored by its experiences, it will be ready to accept life as an animal or fish, and could next reappear for instance, as two thousand tadpoles. As each tadpole dies that part of the soul returns to its base, changed by its life. When all two thousand elements are returned, the soul will progress further through the animal chain, and eventually it progresses through higher animals, until finally it becomes divided into two dogs, two apes, two cats or two horses. If the soul progresses enough, then at the deaths of these hosts, it will become a human for the first time. If you own an animal that seems incredibly knowing and intelligent, maybe even self-aware, then it is your duty to nurture this soul on its journey. For only by being treated with compassion and understanding will this creature become unafraid of men and therefore be able to become one.
At first it will be a primitive human, a ‘grey’ soul without much depth or spirituality in the personality of its host, but after many lives it will grow and become a person who is spiritually aware. It’s said that the average amount of lives is about eighty-five, although I know people who have had many more than that.
Each time we die and enter the spirit world, we possess ultimate knowledge. We see where we’ve been, and who, and why, and we see where we’ve gone wrong, and what we’re aiming for. The path behind and the path ahead are perfectly clear to us. This is why people who say we are punished for misdeeds in the past are quite wrong, because we are not judged by some terrifying God – we ourselves do the judging, such as it is. We also understand that our physical lives are mere fragments of our being, and that life here on earth, whilst it might seem traumatic at times, is a tiny blip in our existence.
This being the case, once we’re back in spirit we’re only concerned with our spiritual growth, and to this end, after evaluating our own soul’s progress, we choose our next lifetime, which though the right one for that spiritual growth, may not be the most comfortable, either physically or emotionally.
Eventually when we’ve developed enough, we don’t need to come back here any more, and we move on…
When Jeffrey Keene was in the area of Maryland in the USA, he felt compelled to visit Antietam Battlefield Park, the scene of a Civil War battle. He felt drawn to the part known as Sunken Lane, and what happened there led him to an unshakeable belief that in a past life he had been an American General. This kind of unexpected experience, where emotions run higher than normal, and remain embedded in you, so that even the memory of the incident brings a flood of emotional connections, are spontaneous past life flashbacks.
Jeffrey says, “I walked down onto the road itself. I had only gone a few yards when something very strange happened, the likes of which I hope will never happen again. A wave of grief, sadness and anger washed over me. Without warning, I was suddenly being consumed by sensations. Burning tears ran down my cheeks. It became difficult to breathe. I gasped for air, as I stood transfixed in the old roadbed. To this day I could not tell you how much time transpired, but as these feelings, this emotional overload passed, I found myself exhausted as if I had run a marathon. Crawling up the steep embankment to get out of the road, I turned and looked back. I was a bit shaken to say the least and wondered at what had just taken place. It was difficult getting back to the car because I felt so weak. I had regained most of my normal composure on the way back and said nothing to Anna, my wife, about what had just happened. What could I say? How could I explain it to her? I did not have any answers, just questions. I would one day receive my answers, but not until more than a year later and then from a most unusual source.”
He found out later that he had walked into precise the location of the 6th Alabama, commanded by Col. John B. Gordon. Then when he saw General Gordon’s picture in the Civil War Quarterly magazine he bought at Antietam, he recognized the face as his own.
“It was totally unnerving. Many people are startled by the resemblance when they view our pictures side by side. When I arrived home I checked the photos out. Ever since the time of being shot, Gordon was always photographed from the right side because of the deep scar under his left eye (the entry point of the bullet). Anyone who knows about bullet wounds knows that the damage becomes greater as a bullet travels through flesh, striking bone, expanding and fragmenting as it goes. The photo was a 3/4 view. One of the copies was an enlargement of Gordon's face. You could just make out the indentation under his left eye. You could see where the right side of his face had been blown out. There was an area from his right cheekbone down to his jaw and back to his ear that had seen better days. Then something caught my eye, a line that started at mid-ear and zigzagged across his cheek, almost like a lightning streak. I walked into the bathroom and stood before the mirror, photo in hand. On the right side of my face starting at mid-ear is a scar, light but discernible. It moves across my cheek in a zigzag pattern. Under my left eye there is an area about the size of a quarter, indented a little with a jagged line outlining most of it. I looked at the photo again and did a double take. The mark on the left side of my face was in the same place as the entry wound under Gordon's eye. I was not only receiving confirmation of a past life; I was being beaten over the head with it.”
In the book Someone Else’s Yesterday, Jeffrey Keene chronicles his journey as he relentlessly unravels the story of his past life as General John B Gordon.
June Kydd was writing a fictional novel. She felt very inspired as she wrote, which was due to her using the ‘Silva Method’ of meditation. She knew that this method was developed to increase the person’s powers of intuition, but she still thought that her emotional story of a woman she called, Ruth, was something her imagination was creating. She didn’t know why, but she called the book,
Unshriven.
The book was set in 1963, but another storyline, which didn’t seem to fit into the book invaded June’s mind, and would not be shaken off. It involved a woman called Hannah Miller, and the injustice that befell her in August 1663. Hannah died, condemned for a wrong she did not commit. Eventually June decided to incorporate Hannah’s story within the book as a past life memory of Ruth’s. June ‘invented’ a home for Hannah in a terrace of 300 year old cottages set in an equally fictitious hamlet near Stratford-on-Avon.
Less than a month later she found herself, not only in the cottage by the shallow ford where she had placed what she had thought was a fictional character, but also in the very hamlet that she thought she had invented.
June says, “I went on to discover the reality of the 1663 episodes - what I had thought was a work of fiction. I was aware of everything around me in unbelievable detail from; a fireplace hidden behind a false wall; another with a hearth-stone and bread oven (big enough to hide a small child); part of a previous dwelling on the site; two steps leading up to a blank wall in the attic; the exact spot of an underground spring in the garden where, according to my spiritual information, someone had once been hastily buried.
I visited the Manor House where Hannah lived in the two attic rooms overlooking the remains of an abandoned village. There are no historic records of the village, but apparently the year before the outlines had been visible, and photographed from the air during a severe drought.
In the little churchyard, (once linked to the Manor by an underground passage), its peripheral decoration still sharp, was a 17th Century headstone that held no name. It marked the grave of a woman who had died unshriven.
All this and more was exactly as I had written months before I ever visited the place.
Hannah Miller’s spirit is tied to this Earth by a wicked miscarriage of justice. Her ghost is still seen on the stairs of the Manor House, and her message is this, “I will not rest until the truth of this injustice is told, and the shame lifted from my family name.”
Years ago, the worst possible thing that could happen to a person was to die unshriven - or to die with sins still not forgiven. Hannah has come back as June, to right that wrong, and this is a prime example of someone awakening to their Master Plan – the overriding reason they came back here.
This next story is incredible in many ways, partly because it involves a young boy. Children are very much better at remembering past lives, and their memories don’t start to fade until they are about 7 years old.
The story of six-year-old, James Leininger, was reported on ABC's TV show Primetime in the USA, and it caused a furore of response.
As a two year old, James only ever wanted to play with toy planes. No cowboys, no soldiers or swords or pistols, just planes. This kind of phenomena is called ‘gathering the familiar’. It occurs when people feel unnaturally comfortable with artefacts from certain times or events, or in certain places. At the same age he started to have terrible nightmares, and he would wake up screaming, “Airplane crash on fire, little man can't get out,” which was of course alarming for his parents. James was dreaming of being in a plane that was shot down.
James' Mum, Andrea, was first awoken to the possibility that the increasingly violent nightmares stemmed from a past life, by her Mother. She suggested that Andrea should get in touch with Carol Bowman, an expert on children’s past life memories. In one video of James, taken at the time, he went over toy plane as if he was giving it a pre-flight check. Another time, Andrea bought James a toy plane, and pointed out what appeared to be a bomb on its underside. James corrected her, and told her it was a drop tank, which she’d never heard of. It was these incidents that prompted Andrea to talk to Carol, despite her husband Bruce’s
skepticism, and Carol instructed her on how to question her son to discover if this was indeed a past life.
(It turned out that a drop tank was an extra petrol tank, which was strapped to the underside of the wings of an aircraft in WWII, to increase its flight range. Once empty it would be ‘dropped’.)
Once Andrea started having detailed conversations with James about his nightmares, they started to become less frequent, but he became able to talk about his past life while he was awake. This meant that ‘facts’ he came up with could be checked. It was starting to look very convincing that this was indeed a past life.
James said that his plane had taken off from an aircraft carrier, which he named as the Natoma, and that he had flown a Corsair aircraft, with a man called Jack Larson. James complained that the Corsair was always getting flat
tires. He said he had died in a plane that had been shot down by the Japanese.
Research showed that The Natoma Bay was in fact a small aircraft carrier in WWII, and that a man called Jack Larson had flown from it. However, the name ‘Corsair’ didn’t seem to be right at the time, although it was known that they were prone to suffer on landing.
At that point James’ skeptical Father, Bruce, became obsessed with trying to disprove the past life theory, but everything he did just seemed to confirm it instead. James told him that he had been shot down at Iwo Jima, and
labeled his drawings of himself as ‘James 3’. To his amazement, Bruce discovered that not only had the ship been at Iwo Jima, but that the only pilot killed from the squadron that flew from it, was James Huston Jnr. James also said that his plane had sustained a direct hit on the engine. Ralph Clarbour, a rear gunner on a U.S. airplane that flew off the Natoma Bay, says his plane was right next to one flown by James M. Huston Jr. during a raid near Iwo Jima on March 3, 1945. Clarbour said he saw Huston's plane struck by anti-aircraft fire. “I would say he was hit head on, right in the middle of the engine,” he
said.
Bruce clung to the apparently incorrect fact that James had said he flew a Corsair, because Huston had been shot down in a FM2 Wildcat fighter plane, and there was no mention anywhere of Corsairs. This apparent inaccuracy gave him hope that everything was just a series of coincidences.
Just to make sure, Bruce tried to find members of Huston’s family. In February of 2003 he made contact with Anne Huston Barron, Huston’s sister, who now lives in Los Gatos, California. Through several phone conversations, they became friends, and she agreed to send Bruce photos of her brother during his military service. The packages of photos arrived in February and March of 2003.
In one of the packages was a photo of Huston standing in front of a Corsair fighter plane – the same kind of plane James had mentioned over and over. According to declassified U.S. military records, before Huston joined up with the Natoma Bay and VC-81, he was part of an elite special squadron, which test-flew Corsairs for carrier use. When he learned this, Bruce says, all of his
skepticism vanished. He now is totally convinced that his son had a past life in which he was James M. Huston Jr. Anne Barron believes it too, and calls him James 3, while James refers to the eighty-six year old woman as his sister.
James’ vivid recollections are starting to fade as he gets older, and this is what normally happens. However he is never far away from two of his most precious possessions, which his ‘sister’ sent him; a bust of George Washington and a model of a Corsair aircraft. They were among the personal effects of James Huston, which were sent home to his family after the war.
James had three G.I. Joe dolls and called them Leon, Walter and Billie. According to U.S. Pacific Fleet records, Lt. Leon Stevens Conner, Ensign Walter John Devlin and Ensign Billie Rufus Peeler were among the fatalities from the Natoma Bay. When asked why he gave the dolls those names, James answered, “Because they greeted me when I went to heaven.”
If you have a child who consistently talks about ‘another family’, or a time before they were alive, there are, according to Carol Bowman, four classic signs that indicate if this could be past life related.
1. Matter-of-Fact Tone
2. Consistency Over Time
3. Knowledge Beyond Experience
4. Corresponding Behavior and Traits
The same of course applies equally to adults who are having memories they believe are of a past life. The emotional content is the real key, whether the memories are brought about by regression therapy or spontaneously. If you were to read a book or watch a film, or have a dream that brought out strong emotions in you, these emotional responses would fade in time, because you would know that they weren’t personal to you. However, genuine past life emotions never fade, and will be as real and as close as yesterday to you, whenever they are brought to mind.
_________________
Jenny Smedley’s latest book, Come Back to Life ISBN 186163238 – X, is available from all good bookshops or online at
www.jennysmedley.com. It explains the impact of past lives on your current ones, and features past life memories of other people and details of therapists.
Her Past Life Regression CD ISBN 5036643000294 is available at Ottakers, other shops, and online at
www.meditationmusiconline.co.uk or amazon.
Carol Bowman: http://www.childpastlives.org/
Jeffrey Keene: http://www.confederateyankee.net/
|
