Past Life

Continuing with my series on events and occurrences that have influenced my writing, today we investigate a phenomena that haunts millions of people around the world. Written off by mainstream media and researchers as nonsense, the concept of past lives is widely believed around the world. Follow along as we discover where this mystery started and how it affects people today…

Have you ever had the experience where you needed to try a new skill, for instance say you were going to downhill snow ski for the first time, and instead of being clumsy and awkward, you were a master at it? You’ve never had any experience skiing before, never watched or studied it on television, but yet, you somehow just know the proper motions, the body positions, and how to come to the perfect stop. Or maybe when you were in school, certain math formulas just came easy to you. Or maybe you know of a history of a certain area, or know details of a crime that happened long before your time. If something is haunting you in your dreams, you may be experiencing the memories of a past life.

Often looked upon with extreme skepticism by mainstream scholars and doctors, past life phenomena is when a subject can remember, either normally or under hypnosis, the intimate and compelling details of a history or subject. The theory stems that before you lived this life, you had a previous life. You were someone else, lived an entire lifetime, died, and came back as a new person. Some say our spirits always return to this, or other, Earths, others say that only certain people, for certain reasons, come back, but once you’re back, the memories of the past can come flooding in.

There have been many cases where someone thinks that they may have had a past life. Throughout history there have been cases of past lives. The idea is hardly new. Celtic Druids on the plains of England spoke of past lives in different realms, other ethereal plains before they experienced this existence. Writings from Greece and Ancient India, dating back well over three thousand years, also speak of reincarnation and people remembering their past lives.

Do you get the experience of Déjà Vu often? That strange, unexplained feeling that, even though you know you’ve never been in a certain situation before, you feel like you’ve been there? There’s something about it, something triggering a feeling that makes you feel certain, beyond a doubt, that you’ve experienced the same thing before. Researchers into past life phenomena say that the experience of Déjà Vu is the memories of the past life reaching into the new life. It’s recommended that when you start to feel Déjà vu you should embrace it, and try to remember as much of the experience as you can, it may lead to an amazing discovery of another life.

Other researchers say that our dreams are the keys to unlocking our past lives. A recurring dream that takes you to a specific place, in a specific town, places that you’ve never been to but yet have vivid details about in your mind, could be the past coming back to haunt you. Often, something tragic is tied to the dreams; witnessing a beating or murder. Perhaps a theft or destruction of something valuable. Many people have reported going to cities they see in their dreams and finding the places to be identical to their dreams.

When James Leininger was four years old he would awaken from dreams screaming, “Plane on Fire!” The Louisiana boy seemed to know every detail about fighter planes, not uncommon for young boys to know about planes, but he knew intimate details, know the steps for pre-flight inspections, and he claimed to know how to fly fighter planes. Eventually, James started talking about flying the planes…during World War II. He would tell his father that he would take off from a battle ship named Natoma and said his co-pilot was a man named Jack Larson. The father investigated, finding there was a ship named Natoma that fought in the Pacific Theater and there was a co-pilot named Jack Larson.

James’s nightmares of crashing in a plane increased as his knowledge of planes and World War Two history seemed to be endless. James started signing all of his drawings and papers ‘James 3’ and was always talking about planes. Eventually, his father discovered a man named James M. Huston Jr. who was shot down and killed in a plane in Iwo Jima. Could James Leininger have been the reincarnation of James Huston? His parents believe so, along with many people who investigated his case.

Another sign that you may have had a past life comes from passions. Everyone has things they love doing, but sometimes that passion goes to near obsession. Often times we can look at others, and sometimes ourselves, and ask the question, ‘what drives a person to that level of obsession?’ Could that passion we experience now be from something that we experienced in another life? Could the past, our past, be coming back to haunt us in ways that we could never even imaging? Certain people seem to think that what they did in the past is sticking with them in this life.

Take William Barnes for instance. When he was young he started drawing pictures of ships, but they were all very large ships, with four smoke stacks on them. He would tell his parents that they were his ships, that he designed it. Barnes would often wake in the night, recalling dreams of people screaming and dying, getting into a heated argument, feeling ice cold water envelope his body, and finally, dying. His parents were very concerned about him, especially when he constantly told them to call him Tommie; that his real name was Thomas.

At the age of twenty-five, Barnes had moved to Washington D.C. and decided that he’d had enough of the dreams and the memories. Barnes decided to seek out a hypnotherapist to help him with the dreams. In the relaxed hypnosis state, Barnes began speaking with a pronounced Irish accent and was engaged in an argument about the safety of a ships design. Barnes awoke and said his name was Thomas Andrews, the designer of the Titanic. With more regression, Barnes remembers details of growing up as Andrews and knew details about the Titanic. Is Barnes a case of past life or is he simply a Titanic enthusiast? Throughout the world there are support groups for people who claim to be reincarnates of people who died on Titanic. Could the designer have returned too?

As much as we humans like to talk about our hopes and dreams, it’s our fears phobias that will hold us back and control our lives. Deep inside our psyche is the collection that makes up our lives, but what if other lives are in there? Could a fear of swimming mean that you drowned in a past life? What about fear of flying? Could you have been a passenger on a plane that went down? There was a case in England of a young girl who was so afraid of clowns she would shriek in fear, running away at the very sight of a clown. Through hypnosis, they discovered that in a past life the girl and her twin sister were murdered by a clown. Did the hypnosis bring up real memories of a past life or was it all the delusional fantasies of a child?

What are other indicators of past life? Some claim that birthmarks are the death marks from a life past. In the case of a three year old boy from Golan Heights, near the boarders of Syria and Israel, a birthmark might prove to be the clue to solving a murder. Parents of the young boy noticed a red birthmark that ran the length of his head. When the boy was three years old, he told elders around him that he was killed with an axe blow to the head. Parents dismissed the story at first, thinking it childhood fantasy, but as time went on, the boy knew more strange things.

The boy confronted a man on the street one day, saying how they use to be neighbors and how the man killed him with an axe. The man on the street was said to have turned white as a sheet. Even more astounding, the boy lead police to a pile of rocks which underneath held human bones, with a skull that was fractured in a manner consistent with an axe blow. When the boy led police to the buried axe, the murderer confessed to the crime. Did this boy really solve the crime because he was killed in a past life or did he overhear conversations about the crime somewhere else? How else could someone so young have known the details of such a grizzly crime?

As technology develops faster and faster, humans struggle to keep up with the pace of the world. Debate will always rage if there is a true soul or spirit within each of us, and what happens to that spirit when we die. Does it go to Heaven or Hell? Does it simply vanish into the ether? Or does it come back, to inhabit another body for another go around on this planet known as Earth? Whatever the case may be, the next time you experience Déjà Vu, have a nightmare, or experience a strange fear, ask yourself, is the reason this is happening because of something that happened to me when I was young, or because of something that happened to me in a past life…

To see how past lives has influenced my writings head over to www.leifericksonwriting.com and check out my books today.

Sagan, Carl (1996). Demon Haunted World. Random House. ISBN 978-0-394-53512-8.

Edwards, Paul. (1996, reprinted in 2001). Reincarnation: A Critical Examination. Prometheus Books. ISBN 1-57392-921-2

Wagner, S. (n.d.). 9 Signs of Your Past Life. Retrieved August 23, 2015.