Old Soul?
Journeys into Past Lives
“It’s clear why you have that connection,” she said with a wry smile. “It’s because you’re an old soul.”
I was talking with my friend Rupinder about my strange connection with S, the girl I discuss in my Lady with the Raven essay. Rupinder is what you might term “spiritual”. She reads tarot cards and has a sixth sense. If you’d asked me a year ago what I thought of such practices, my reply would have been rather disparaging. But meeting Pierluigi on the Camino and then some other weird coincidences have made me think about revisiting my assessment of all things occult. I’m not exactly a convert to Rupinder’s worldview, but at the same time I am open to considering it.
Which is why I was intrigued. What did she mean exactly by “old soul”? After all, at forty-five, I’m surely not that old… am I…?
“No, not old in that way. When I say, ‘old soul’ I refer to you having lived many previous lives.”
“You think I may have had past lives?!”
“I don’t think, I know. It is clear. You’re an old soul.”
Rebirth and Karma
I am, of course, well aware of the concept of past lives. No one who has lived in the Far East and been married to a practising Buddhist can be ignorant of them. Buddhism — along with Hinduism, Sikhism, and other faiths from South and East Asia — ascribes to the theory of reincarnation. We are born, we live, we die, and then we are reborn again. Buddhist doctrine describes it as a wheel, the Wheel of Samsara. When we die, we are reborn somewhere else on the Cycle of Death and Rebirth, one of six realms or worlds:
· the world of gods or celestial beings
· the world of warlike demigods
· the world of human beings
· the world of animals
· the world of hungry ghosts
· the world of Hell
Which one we end up in depends upon our karma, basically the result of our actions here in this life. In essence, good karma gets you a good rebirth and bad karma a naff one. The ultimate aim though is to achieve Buddhahood, becoming an Enlightened Being, which means you reach Nirvana and get off the Wheel forever.
Or at least, that’s the theory.
Despite my fondness for many aspects of Buddhism, I always considered reincarnation to be a load of tosh. The reason for this rather harsh judgement was simple. It was as my friend Steve once put it:
“It’s basically the ultimate Get Out of Jail Free card.”
What he was referring to was this. In traditional Vietnamese Buddhism for example, after death, the soul is taken to the other side where the Queen of Heaven greets the dead person and gives them a vial of potion to drink. This causes them to forget their former life completely and so they are ready to be reborn again in their new incarnation.
It was this forgetting that always got me. What was the point in storing up the good karma for a good rebirth (or bad karma for the opposite) if you can’t remember anything? Ultimately, the link between the two is broken and so it is as if someone else has decided your destiny in life. Which is completely unfair. Like Steve said, the ultimate Get Out of Jail Free card.
Yet Rupinder was suggesting something else. Reincarnation yes, forgetting, also yes, yet at the same time the maintenance of some sort of concrete link and, crucially, a way of perhaps exploring what you had been before.
I asked her to talk about it more and she did so. She believed that it was clear from how I lived my life, that I had lived many times previously and that the nature and depth of my connection with S suggested a past life connection. Quite what that was — friends, lovers, enemies… — she could not say, but she was adamant that we had known one another and that connection before had provided a purpose for us to meet in this life.
The romantic in me was excited; the sceptic was, well, sceptical.
However, since I had made a commitment to embrace the irrational more and see where it took me, I decided to speak to S about it and, to my astonishment, she was quite open to the idea (as an orthodox Sunni Muslim, she perhaps should not be). She asked me to think about what the past life connection could be and if I had any ideas. I replied that I did and that there were vague images in my head but that I was sceptical.
The vague scenaria in my head were as follows:
The first involved a Mediaeval scene, a village. I sensed it was to do with the Cathars and the Christians in Occitan. Maybe I was a Catholic monk, and she was a Cathar Perfect, or vice versa.
The second involved a wild Scottish island. There was a Christian hermit and a Pagan druidess. I was probably the former, but it could have been the other way round or the sexes reversed.
I was sceptical of both though, because whilst they would make sense, at the same time they could both easily be figments of my imagination. I love wild Scottish islands and have long been fascinated with the early Christian hermit saints. I had just returned from visiting Gigha and was reading a book on Druidism at the time. Also, I had watched films and read books on the Cathars in recent years and in 2007 I visited Carcassonne with my then wife and explored the Cathar stories. S herself is obsessed with the Mediaeval and so was my mind not just putting all these elements together to create a comforting and exciting fantasy?
Her response was, again, unexpected:
“You’re confused because you don’t follow your instinct, or ‘heart’. You try to superimpose a worldly scientific reasoning into it. Let the thoughts flow, no matter how ridiculous and far from the reality you know they are, let them come… Don’t try to make sense of it. It’s a waste of your time.”
I countered with the point about the books I read perhaps putting ideas into my head, to which she replied: “Maybe that’s WHY you read the books?”
Chicken and egg.
Did the books come first and plant the idea as the psychologist might argue?
Or did my past life implant the idea so that I was drawn to read books on that topic as the spiritualist might argue?
Chicken or egg?
I knew that this was something that I wanted to investigate further.
Scientifically sound or phoney fantasies?
There’s not a huge amount written scientifically about past lives, but what there is, does not bode well. It is described as a pseudo-science, all about suggestions. True, there are tales of young children remembering other realities vividly, but these have rarely been scientifically investigated.
One famous case is that of Bridey Murphy. In 1952, Colorado businessman and amateur hypnotist Morey Bernstein put housewife Virginia Tighe of Pueblo, Colorado, in a trance that sparked off revelations about Tighe’s alleged past life as a 19th century Irishwoman. Bernstein used a technique called hypnotic regression, during which the subject is gradually taken back to childhood. He then attempted to take Virginia one step further, before birth, and was astonished to find he was listening to Bridey Murphy.
Tighe’s tale began in 1806, when Bridey was eight years old and living in a house in Cork. She was the daughter of Duncan Murphy, a barrister, and his wife Kathleen. At the age of 17 (c. 1815), she married barrister Sean Brian McCarthy, who she claimed taught at Queen’s University Belfast, to which she moved. Tighe told of a fall that caused Bridey’s death c. 1864, and of watching her own funeral, describing her tombstone and the state of being in life after death. It was, she recalled, a feeling of neither pain nor happiness.
This case gripped the media for a while but when serious historical research was done, it transpired that there was no record of a Bridey Murphy matching the description ever having lived and that many of the details in Tighe’s “memories” were impossible chronologically. At the same time, investigations into Tighe’s childhood revealed many elements from her early years that could have influenced the story, the inference being that she, without realising she was doing so, created a story in her mind whilst under hypnotic regression.
However, countless people still do believe in past lives and the videos that I watched on YouTube about the topic were revealing: genuine or not, people were feeling real emotions and experiencing… something.
I knew that I had to try it for myself to be sure.
My First Past Life Regression
I went to Heavenly Treasures in Cannock for my regression. I’d chanced on the shop a month or so earlier, feeling drawn to it, and when I’d walked in, I had received a positive vibe. As part of my journey into the irrational and spiritual, I’d purchased a pack of tarot cards from there, but that journey is for another essay. However, the owner, Michelle, a Welsh lady who described herself as a “witch” made me feel comfortable and I was not too weirded out.
Prior to the regression, she explained the entire process. It would last around forty-five minutes and I would be conscious for the entire period I was under hypnosis.[1] She told me that I would be safe and would merely be an observer, not feeling the actual emotions of the former life. This confused me a little since in the YouTube video I had watched of a past life regression, the subject had clearly been feeling the emotions of her past life. Are there different techniques then? Michelle also mentioned that if I could not access a former life, then we would finish early, and she wouldn’t charge for the experience.
I began by sitting down in a comfortable chair, closing my eyes, and listening to her. She told me that I was in front of a lift, I pressed a button and the doors opened. I entered and saw that I was on the fiftieth floor. I pressed a button inside and we descended to the first floor. When the doors opened, there was a corridor in front of me with doors on either side. I was asked to exit the lift and then choose a door. The first one that I selected was on my left and labelled 4. I opened it and entered my first past life (the life is described in an independent essay accessible via the link).
After exiting that one, I was back in the corridor. Michelle asked me to pick another door. I walked down for some distance and then chose one on the right labelled 17. I opened this and entered into my second past life.
After exiting back into the corridor, we then returned to the lift, pressed the large red button and then ascended back up to Floor 50. When the doors opened, I was back in the room with Michelle and the session was complete.
So, what did I think of it all? My thoughts on the individual regressions can be read in the separate essays, but of the experience as a whole, I make the following points:
· Throughout the entire session I was fully aware. If anything, it reminded me of how I feel during a meditation or mindfulness session.
· Michelle warned me that I would feel tired afterwards and might have a slight headache which was “nothing to worry about”. I did get the headache and I was exhausted for the rest of that day, so much so that I had to go to the sauna to recuperate.
· Whether or not past life regressions are real or fake, what I can say with certainty is that Michelle believes in them and approached the entire session professionally. If past life regression is simply an easy way of making a quick buck out of gullible individuals, then it is probably not the best way of doing this. Michelle put in 45 minutes of intense work but also spent a good twenty minutes or so writing it up afterwards. The rate that she charged was comparable with that charged by a counsellor and the workload was comparable too, if not greater.
· The rational side of my mind battled constantly with the side that wished to believe in it all. Whilst in the second life in particular, I got carried away at times, all the while I was thinking, “Yeah, but am I just picking elements out of my own life to create this as one does when writing a story?” That certainly could be the case, but then with writing a story, would I get a headache and exhaustion after an hour’s mental exercise sitting in a comfy chair? I doubt it.
· Both lives felt like they were me, which is distinct from writing a character in a story. Both Jocelyn and Victoria were me, with my emotions, outlook, and feelings but in a different life situation and time.
· If the two lives that I visited were not past lives, then what were they? If I imagined them, then why? Where did the source material come from? Why a Victorian spinster and a Mediaeval monk?
And it is this last point that I wish to conclude this first essay on past lives on because, whatever the truth, they provide a potential answer to a fundamental question that we rarely ask ourselves otherwise: Why am I like this?
For several days prior to my regression, my friend Rosanne came to stay. Like Rupinder, Rosanne is a deeply spiritual individual with a firm belief in reincarnation and past lives. We were discussing my exploration of the tarot and, in particular, issues that I had had with the Pentacles suit which deals with worldly affairs and money. Going through the cards had realised that I have a very firm and negative view of money, viewing it as the root of all evil and, although necessary, something to be wary of. Rupinder had countered this and made me think about it for the first time ever. Rosanne, however, went further:
“Your attitude to money is because you have been a monastic in past lives, both in the Eastern and Western traditions. You have been a monk and also a nun. You have taken a vow of holy poverty, and this colours your attitude to money to this day. It is a behavioural trait that is unhealthy, and you need to break it.”
I was shocked. I had never told Rosanne anything about my earlier discussions with S about me believing that I was a monk in a past life. More than that though, it gave a credible reason for why I do have a deeply-engrained psychological attitude. Yes, you can blame it on childhood, but does my brother, who was subject to the same influences, have the same outlook? No. Or at least, not to the same degree.
“You think I might have been in a monastery?” I’d asked, shocked.
“I don’t think, I know. It’s why you are a socialist too. All this holy poverty, duality of good and bad. It is obvious.”
Over the following days, we explored more. I told her about the time I went to Byblos and found the ruins of the L-shaped temple there so powerful.
“You were a priestess there, that’s why. You served the goddess.”
And what about S?
“Yes, you knew her in a past life. That’s why you have the connection.”
Connection. Why do we have a connection with some things and not others? Why did I feel something so powerful at that site in Byblos, but nothing in the (equally interesting and scenically more powerful) Wadi Qadisha? Why, right from earliest childhood, have I had a fascination with trains? Why does Soviet and Balkan communism interest me but not Chinese or Vietnamese, despite me spending considerable time in the east? Why did I fail to make close connections or feel great empathy with my clients when I worked with rough sleepers, yet S’s plight really touched my heart when I first read about it? Why? Why? Why?
Past lives provide an answer. These are hangovers from previous existences. Maybe the Vietnamese are wrong about that forgetting draught; maybe we are meant to remember much in the deep recesses of our mind? Maybe it is not a Get Out of Jail Free card at all, but instead deep programming to enable us to evolve as souls?
Or maybe it isn’t. Maybe it is all hokum and auto-suggestion, believed by people who want to believe it because it comforts and gives purpose. Well, okay, that could be true, I don’t discount it. But if it is, then where do all these traits and connections come from?
If not past lives, then what?
The journey continues…
My past life exploration journey continues in Old Soul II.
Written 28–29/10/2023, Smallthorne, UK
Copyright © 2023, Matthew E. Pointon
[1] Is it hypnosis or not? I did not feel hypnotised at all and Rupinder insists that it is not, but this was the term that Michelle used and so I shall go with it.