Living In The Past

I’m a sceptic and like to judge things based on evidence and not just a belief.

There is one exception to this – and that is God – and the reason for that is fear. I was raised in a Catholic environment with a Catholic priest and teachers who basically told me that if you I dismissed God then I would burn in Hell for eternity with Satan himself using me his demonic plaything.

So let me just say this up front: God exists (I think) and I want to apologise to him (or her) for anything I have done or said against him (or her).

But I digress. For this post, I want to discuss reincarnation.

Believe me, I would absolutely LOVE it if we are incorporeal beings who occupy a human body from the moment of your inception to the moment it gives up, at which point it releases you ready to find another unblemished embryo to occupy.

While I find the idea of reincarnation fascinating, I simply cannot bring myself to take it seriously.

I can imagine that there may be a person reading this who actually believes in reincarnation to the point where they are looking forward to their next life with enthusiasm. If you are such a reader then I welcome your belief and I genuinely hope you are right.

I was reading about a form of hypnotherapy that allows people to regress to past lives, basically accessing the memory of your soul that remembers your previous incarnations. People have, apparently been kings, queens and emperors in past lives and described their lives to such detail that others are convinced of their authenticity.

I tried this.

I was so curious about the idea that I found a past life regression video on You Tube, lay on the bed and followed the instructions.

I fell asleep.

I did have an idea in my head that I was wondering around a village with weird shoes in medieval England and sitting by a blazing fire in a shit-filled hovel.

No fucking throne and palace filled with gold for me. How disappointing!

I woke up and realised that I had actually had a dream. I don’t believe for a second that I was a medieval tramp, living in a flea-ridden squat with only shit and a fire for company.

I then realised that I had been watching an episode of Blackadder II the night before and my dream had cast me in the role of Baldrick, a dumb dolt from Elizabethan times:



If I had watched Braveheart no doubt I would have been William Wallace, a skirt-wearing England-hating vagabond.

A young Plastic Mancunian?

Usually when you hear tales of people somehow tapping into their hidden soul-memory, there is always a something wonderful. They were princesses in Egyptian times or advisors to King Henry VIII. Such people rarely confess to being slaves clearing out the latrines in the middle of a dark-age forest in the pissing rain or native Americans wandering the plains of America or even simple carpenters living in a small town in 18th Century Ireland.

Nevertheless, I live in hope. I am fascinated by the future and I would love to be reborn in fifty years’ time and grow up in a world of technology.

What proof is there that reincarnation is real? Here’s what I found.

(1) 50% of the world’s population believe in reincarnation. The problem I have with this fact is that, really, this means that 50% of the world’s population don’t want to die and, like me, love the idea that we will all be reborn. Belief in something doesn’t make it fact.

(2) People have given names and dates of previous lives, having somehow tapped into their soul-memories, and that evidence has proved to be true. Is this coincidence? Or is it something to do with the fact that the people have somehow “cheated” or, like my hypnotherapy experiment, are really tapping into something they have seen or read? I think the latter. I believe that people are simply remembering something from their past about a person they have encountered in a book or in a movie. As was the case my Baldrick memory above.

(3) One American child, who was two years old, had nightmares about a plane crash, stating that he had been shot down by the Japanese during World War 2. He named the aircraft carrier from which he had taken off and lots more information about the pilot from whom he was reincarnated. When investigated, the two year old boy’s claims were proven to be correct and a person was discovered who fit the description. The boy’s father was an evangelical Christian who simply didn’t believe in reincarnation. Wow! Compelling, eh? But is it just a con or an elaborate hoax?

(4) Still with children – some have been known to speak in languages that they have never learned, supposedly because they spoke that language in a past life.

(5) Children have been born with bullet wounds, supposedly inflicted on the previous human who accommodated their soul.

To be honest, cases (2) to (4) above do make me think that there might be something in it and there are thousands of similar cases. Yet I am still sceptical. If we are all reincarnated, then surely our minds will be full to overflowing with our past lives, including what happened when we died, no matter how horrific that was.

The more I think about this, the more questions I have. For instance, our souls that have travelled through time for centuries, finding a new body every so often, must have been “born” somehow – and by the same token must “die” sometime, unless our souls are immortal.

Presumably, before humans existed we must have lived in the bodies of animals.

Do you think I could have been a Tyrannosaurus Rex in a previous life?

I really hope so. That would have been a fantastic adventure.

However, the thing that has convinced me more than anything that reincarnation is impossible is the belief of one person.

Yes – that’s right. David Icke believes in reincarnation and he is as mad as a bag of badgers. He believes that reincarnation is a slavery program and our souls are transferred from one slave to the next by “gods”. His view is that we are like the batteries in the Matrix with these nameless “gods” feeding off our souls.

Trust Mr Madman to apply his lunacy to reincarnation. Perhaps he took the Matrix too seriously. Perhaps he thinks he is Neo – or “The One”. Who knows?

Over to you, dear reader.

Do you believe in reincarnation?

If you do I would love to hear from you – either in this life or the next.

The Meaning of Life - The Grim Reaper

The fourth part of my mini-series on the meaning of life was going to cover happiness, leaving death until the end. However, Christmas is approaching faster than a speeding Santa so happiness is a fitting topic to finish on.

Sadly this means I have to discuss death now.

Death is a nasty part of life – which is kind of weird really because death means the end of life. Some people become preoccupied with death in the later stages of life and become obsessed with it.

I hope that doesn’t happen to me.

I have faced death in a major way, as regular readers may know, when I watched my father die at the tender age of 44. Obviously that was a traumatic event which time helped to cure. The problem was that because his death was so unexpected and so sudden that it planted a seed of anxiety that lay dormant until I approached the same age.

Reason was cast aside and for a whole year, a part of me expected my own life to come to an abrupt and meaningless end. The feeling was totally irrational and while it didn’t dominate my life, I found my thoughts drifting towards the Grim Reaper more times than I would have hoped for.

My 45th birthday was a great day because to me it meant the end of what I described as the year of death. I felt like I had reached the finish line of a great race.

Looking back now, some seven years later, I have no such fears and I can’t believe the thought ever crossed my mind. Furthermore, I really ought to be worrying about it more because I am older and, realistically, closer to the day when the Grim Reaper comes knocking to collect me.

And I can’t help but wonder why that is.

Death is the inescapable conclusion to life and, unless you have discovered the secret of immortality or are a vampire, it will happen to you.

Why worry about it?

There is no reason.

Life is great and when the time comes, it will come; there is nothing you can do about it.

What’s more, death may not be the end. The premise of most religions is that death is merely a transition to a higher plane of existence – or possibly even the chance to pop back to Earth as another person or another creature.

As a Catholic, I have been indoctrinated by the premise that when I die, I will be judged and, having been a naughty boy (and I have been a naughty boy), I will suffer the consequences in Purgatory before joining the legions of the dead in Heaven in eternal happiness.

I could go to Hell of course and spend the rest of eternity being tortured and tormented by demonic forces. My punishment would almost certainly involve being locked in a cell with Piers Morgan with diabolical pop music blaring out of speakers at a high volume.

Reincarnation seems a reasonable option – if options are available. Wouldn’t it be fantastic to be born again as another person and live another life? Of course, it might already have happened and I may have been a slave in Pompeii, or a jester in the court of Henry VIII or an explorer sailing towards America with Christopher Columbus.

Apparently it is possible to be hypnotised and drift back through your past lives. I am tempted to have a go at this but I am too sceptical and realistically I imagine my “past life” will come from a historical novel I have read or a blockbuster movie.

Other options exist; what about the science fiction concept that death is just a way of entering a new plane of existence? When we shuffle off this mortal coil, do we shed our old bodies and float off into space in an alternative reality?

Or the idea that we all drift off and continue to prevail in death? In the Necroscope series of books, when people die, they exist in a different form and continue their life’s work in death.

Apart from Hell with Piers Morgan, most of the alternatives sound appealing in one way or another.

And being a positive person, I would like to think that there is something more. The scientist within me is very sceptical and informs me that we will simply cease to be. After all, we don’t remember anything from before we were born do we?

I have no memory of anything before October 1962, my birth month. I suspect the reality is that I will return to that emptiness.

But I may be wrong.

Death could be the beginning of a brand new adventure.

Finally, please excuse the morbid tone of this post but people can’t talk about death without some negative overtones.

To cheer you up a bit, here are a couple of funny videos relating to death: