Reincarnation

Apr 7

There are mountains of evidence supporting the possibility that past lives are real, that reincarnation is real.

There’s no need in bringing any of that research to your attention because there are a plethora of stories that have been well documented.

You probably even know someone who has visited an intuitive or psychic who reviewed one or more of their past lives. Most likely it is probably not in the actual experience of the individual be able to recall a past life, but it makes for a very interesting story.

The reason I bring up the concept and idea of reincarnation is that it implies something beyond death, something eternal, evolving through space and time. The implications are limitless as past lives would imply a will and a force behind them, that there is not a random but intended goal that is part of that journey.

Each life is different with the soul selecting unique circumstances each lifetime to move along the evolutionary pathway toward that intended goal…which I will discuss in just a moment. And, of course, you may not believe in such possibilities at all.

My opinion about the subject doesn’t matter but my experience does. I was about 12 years old when I started dreaming in French. I grew up in the small town of Monroe, NC, and was just a regular kid. I had never heard a single word of French. The dreams were not regular dreams but nightmares. In all of the dreams I was around 21 years of age, I was French and lived in the area of Caen. Although there were many dreams in which I was in Centreville, or downtown Caen, it seemed to me that I did not live in the city but my business often took me there.

In all of the dreams, I was French and spoke French. I did not speak German but understood most of what I heard. I dabbled in Spanish and did not speak nor understand English. I knew that what I was doing was the right thing to do and that it had to be done.

I lived in the area of Caen during the German occupation of France and I fought for the French resistance. My business was simple: I murdered German soldiers, set up assassinations, and watched the gruesome outcome unfold in all of my dreams. I lived a covert life but as the years went on, I knew that I was marked for death and that my identity had been revealed. I need only go into a few details as most are sickening and serve no purpose.

But the dreams would last until I was 27 years when the repetitive nightmare, the one in which I was caught and executed would appear one last time because, in that dream, I did something different than all of the previous times I had had the dream. I’ll touch on that in a minute.

But as a child, following one of the dreams, I woke up only to find myself hiding in the closet having urinated all over myself from the fear.

In college, I woke up one time in another dormitory that was about 5-600 feet away from my own dormitory, and as I was coming to, I was praying, please don’t let me be in someone else’s room. Fortunately, I wasn’t. I put my hands over my face and tried to calm down. I had been on the run as I was recognized in the area of Caen once again and I barely managed to escape.

But the big nightmare, the one that also took me to the edge, was the one in which I was caught. I am with a group of 3-4 other resistance fighters. We distribute weapons and move very purposely to a site several miles away from where we are waiting for a German patrol of about 7-8 men to come out of a wooded area. We are hiding behind a small slope and I am focused and ready to do my job. Suddenly, my hand reaches to my right and the weapon is not there. My head swings to the right and my weapon not there. I swing to the left and it’s not there either. My comrades are suddenly gone and I am there by myself. I know I am dead. I take off running and can hardly breathe. This time is different and there is part of me that knows that I’m not going to make it.

Like a small child, I hid in a closet in a small cottage. I hear the door to the room open and I hear the footprints come closer to the closet. I hear a German Luger pistol cocked and I know it is pointed at me. In all of the previous times, I experienced this particular nightmare, I would wake up sweating, crying, out of bed in some other part of the house, in a closet.

When they began, I was just a little kid and I didn’t know what was happening to me. I spoke to no one about what was happening to me. When I was 27 years old, the nightmare would come back for the last time but it was in that dream that I did something different.

It is the same scenario in which I am being chased and taking refuge in the closet. The German Luger pistol is cocked and I am about to die.

But this time, as I was cowering in the closet, I said to myself, “I’m so tired of being afraid. And if this son-of-a-bitch is going to kill me, I am going to face him and look right in his eyes.” I take a deep breath and use both my hands to push the two-door sides apart.

The pistol is thrust an inch from my forehead. In a quick moment, I follow the sight of the pistol up the barrel and find the executioner. It is my stepfather in a German uniform. Suddenly, I am by a stream and throwing water in my face. “There is a rumor that an invasion coming. I have to figure out how to stay alive,” I say to myself.

And I woke up. The nightmare and dreams of my life as a resistance fighter were over. I have never had them since that night when I was 27 years old.

I had 4 years of French in high school, I majored in French in college, studied at the Faculté des Lettres in Dijon and the Faculté des Lettres in Avignon, got a Master’s degree in French, have been to France over a dozen times but most importantly, I have been to the D-Day beaches 4 times.

When I am in the area of Normandy, it is as though I know where I am- everything is so familiar. But when I am in the area of Caen and near the beaches, there is a strange feeling of alarm that comes over me.

When I enter the area of the cemetery, I begin to fall apart and can have trouble keeping my composure, and have on several occasions found a private spot where I started sobbing. I was not on the beaches but I was nearby, closer to Caen.

Today, when I hear a German accent, my body turns quickly to see what is happening, a twinge of alarm is felt in my system. For me, it the residue of my previous lifetime as a French resistance fighter who died doing what I knew was the right thing to do. In this lifetime, when I was young I had a terrible ankle injury that was not fixed and as a result, my foot began to heal improperly. So much so, that when I got my draft notice in 1971 to go to Vietnam, it was that same ankle that kept me from going as it was referred to as a deformity. I had had enough of war. But when I was 27 and had the dream for the last time, I had my ankle reconstructed. I figured it was the least I could do for myself.

Now, the funny part is that once again in this lifetime, when I was nearing 40 years of age, I would once again have to go to war again with a man that was as vicious and unconscious as my stepfather had been, as savage and as heartless as the men I killed in WWII but choosing to do it because I knew it was the right thing to do. In this lifetime, just as I had done in the last one, I would die as a result of those events but it would be this death in this lifetime that would result in my awakening, in living a life that I could not even have imagined through having the courage to stand up. I make no effort to embellish or distort the story in any way. It is what it is.

I share it because it is in my experience to have experienced reincarnation and that previous lifetimes do exist. But, they do not really serve a purpose, except for the fact that I was able to see a repetitive pattern that played out in my previous life and my current one. And that was helpful to me and helped me come to terms with the events of this lifetime. It was my karma playing out.

What I was able to learn was that your birth is not the beginning of who you are and your death is not the end of who you are. In many ways, the concepts of reincarnation are meaningless, as the most important life is this one, the one you are living. Understood properly, the concept of reincarnation can strengthen your understanding of the fact that you are eternal, but it’s not an essential part in any way of grasping a greater understanding of consciousness…which my biggest interest.

My belief in it and my experience with it doesn’t really mean anything because that it is not the purpose at hand. A lifetime, no matter what the content of that lifetime, is a means to the goal and the goal is awakening, salvation, ascension, or whatever it is you want to call it.

But whatever it is you call it, no matter what, that is the purpose and responsibility of your life and whatever it is that you believe, if it is leading you to greater knowledge and conscious life, then honor those beliefs. If they don’t, abandon them as quickly as possible.

Sri Aurobindo makes the comments about reincarnation:

“But what is the soul and what can possibly be meant by the rebirth of a soul?”

Well, it means reincarnation; the soul, whatever that may be, had got out of one case of flesh and is now getting into another case of flesh. But what is it that thus "leaves" one body and "enters" into another? In the ordinary, the vulgar conception there is no birth of a soul at all, but only the birth of a new body into the world occupied by an old personality unchanged from that which once left some now discarded physical frame. It is John Robinson who has gone out of the form of flesh he once occupied; it is John Robinson who tomorrow or some centuries hence will re-incarnate in another form of flesh and resume the course of his terrestrial experiences with another name and in another environment.

Memory is the man, says the modern psychologist, and what is the use of the survival of my personality, if I do not remember my past, if I am not aware of being the same person still and always? What is the utility? Where is the enjoyment? They were not attached to the survival of the personality; they did not give to that survival the high name of immortality; they saw that personality being what it is, a constantly changing composite, the survival of an identical personality was a non-sense, a contradiction in terms. They perceived indeed that there is a continuity and they sought to discover what determines this continuity and whether the sense of identity which enters into it is an illusion or the representation of a fact, of real truth, and, if the latter, then what that truth may be.

The Buddhist denied any real identity. There is, he said, no self, no person; there is simply a continuous stream of energy in action like the continuous flowing of a river or the continuous burning of a flame. It is this continuity that creates in the mind the false sense of identity.

I am not now the same person that I was a year ago, not even the same person that I was a moment ago, any more than the water flowing past yonder is the same water that flowed past it a few seconds ago; it is the persistence of the flow in the same channel that preserves the false appearance of identity.

Obviously, then, there is no soul that reincarnates, but only Karma that persists in flowing continuously down an apparently uninterrupted channel. It is Karma that incarnates. Karma creates the form of a constantly changing mentality and physical bodies that are, we may presume, the result of that changing composite of ideas and sensations which I call myself. The identical "I" is not, never was, never will be. Practically, so long as the error of personality persists, this does not make much difference and I can say in the language of ignorance that I am reborn in a new body. Practically, I have to proceed on the basis of that error. But there is this important point gained that it is all an error and an error which can cease: the composite can be broken up for good without any fresh formation, the flame can be extinguished, the channel which called itself a river destroyed. And then there is non-being, there is cessation, there is the release of the error from itself.

So, here we see that reincarnation which Sri Aurobindo refers to as rebirth is actually the unfolding of karma and who hasn’t produced enough karma in this lifetime for many more. Karma is another topic for another time. Reincarnation or no reincarnation, it is this lifetime that you have that strives toward the birth and knowledge of its true self.

As Aurobindo reminds you in his masterpiece, “Savitri,” from which I frequently quote,

“For with pain and labour all creation comes
This earth is full of the anguish of the gods
Ever they travail driven by Time’s goad
And strive to work out the eternal will
And shape the life divine in mortal forms.”