A hospital pharmacist once told me that when she was four years old, her family took her to a museum exhibition. There she saw a display of mummies from ancient Egypt.
‘It made me so angry,’ she said. ‘They’d been moved from their sacred places. It was all wrong to show them like this.’
As she grew up she forgot about that incident. Then one day, just out of curiosity, she came for a past-life regression. It brought back her childhood reaction to the museum exhibition – and made it clear why she’d been so angry.
In ancient Egypt she’d been a priest, in charge of mummification rituals. This was a highly important and holy task. The Egyptians believed it made a major difference to the afterlife of the departed spirit.
In that life she’d done a lot of research into the healing power of animal secretions. This was potent knowledge, which she said is now sadly lost to the world.
She realized that this was why she’d chosen pharmacy as a career. In her clinical white coat she was continuing the sacred work of an ancient Egyptian priest.
It’s not unusual that her strongest inkling about that past life came to her at the age of four. Through the breakthrough research of the Canadian-American Psychiatrist Professor Ian Stevenson, who carried out extensive studies about reincarnation, we know that children often can be in touch with their past lives.
Young children chat about their past lives in casual ways that are easy to dismiss as fantasy. In the twentieth-century Western world, if a child of four mentioned his old job, or his wife and children, it would usually be ignored as childish prattle.
But Professor Stevenson found that parents in India took this kind of chatter more seriously. As a result, he was able to verify several cases that began with a child talking about their ‘other’ family.
Those children were quite clear that they were talking about real people who lived elsewhere. They often had a good idea exactly where that was. They could help to direct the search and would recognize their old home when they got there.
Sometimes they pointed out real changes that had taken place since they were last there. For example, when little Swarnlata saw her old house again, she asked what had happened to the veranda and the neem tree. The amazed family said that both had been removed some years ago.
One of the old men in the house was Swarnlata’s husband from her previous life. She immediately recognized him. To prove it really was her, she reminded him of the box of 1200 rupees that she’d once given him. Astonished, he said that only the two of them had ever known about that.
In another case, it was the cushions that did it for young Mallika. As soon as she saw them, she declared, ‘I made those!’ They had been made by a woman called Devi – who had died 10 years earlier.
Professor Stevenson’s research confirmed that children can provide real and verifiable information about their past lives. This not only tells us a lot about childhood – it also validates reincarnation itself.
Children may also remember how they died. Sometimes this gives them a phobia about it. For example, Parmod had died in a bathtub and now hated being in water. Children’s games can be their instinctive way of healing that kind of phobia.
Edward told me that when he was a little boy he liked turning his bed into a ship. He’d then fight off imaginary attackers in a desperate sea battle. He said that at around the age of six or seven he played this over and over again.
A few years later, he became fascinated with seafaring tales. On a school trip to Madame Tussaud’s in London, his classmates couldn’t pull him away from the ship-board scene of Admiral Nelson’s death. Old-fashioned schooners still sail through his dreams now and then.
‘I’ve since found out that I had a past life as a sailor,’ he said. ‘I died in a sea battle. But I’ve never felt bothered about ships or water or gunfire. I think my little ship game somehow got all that out of my system.’
Many games that children play may have a similar hidden purpose. When put together with other clues they can tell us a lot – not only about our own past lives, but those of our children as well.
Past-life memories usually start coming up between the ages of two and four, and fade between the ages of five and eight.
When children are in touch with a past-life memory:
The following case ticks enough boxes to sound real.
‘My nephew Jake is four years old,’ said Vivienne. ‘We were doing some sightseeing, and we came across a well. As soon as Jake saw it, he rushed up to it, and said “Uncle Rick was in here! I had to throw him a rope. I pulled him out.”
When the family later returned to the same place, Jake had exactly the same reaction to the well. The adults asked him at different times if this is like one of his dragon stories – a fantasy.
‘No!’ was his adamant reply every time. ‘This is real.’
Vivienne said the unusually mature and consistent way he talked about this incident convinced her that he was telling the truth. In a previous incarnation, it seemed that he really had saved his uncle’s life by pulling him out of a well.
Socrates said that genius is no accident. Outstanding abilities come from many lives of training and practice. The definition of a prodigy is a pre-teen child with a talent as good as or better than adults in the same field. The world usually gets to hear about the outstanding ones, such as Mozart. But there are probably countless children with all kinds of abilities from past lives that don’t necessarily lead to world fame.
Kathleen told me that when she was three years old she used to draw a line on the floor, and then try to walk along it. It felt important to keep doing this. When she grew up, she discovered that in a past life she’d been a tightrope artist.
Her strange little childhood game finally made sense. The importance of keeping in practice had been so deeply instilled in her that she’d kept it up even in the early years of her next life.
Researcher Joe Fisher wrote about the day Mr and Mrs De Felitta of Los Angeles will never forget. Relaxing by their pool, they were puzzled to hear ragtime music coming from the house. When they went inside to investigate, they were shocked to find their six-year-old son, Raymond, playing the piano like a professional. He had never even touched the piano before. ‘My fingers are doing it by themselves!’ he cried. ‘Isn’t it wonderful?’
At the time, his parents felt too disturbed to agree. His father said it was as weird as if they’d found their son suddenly flying around the room.
With his parents’ eventual bemused encouragement, Raymond grew up to become a successful jazz musician. His style was similar to that of Fats Waller – who had died in 1945.
When Beccy told me that she’d had a twin brother, I remarked that twins are sometimes people who were very close in a previous life. She said that was certainly true about them, and poured out the following tale:
‘When I was about 12, I became obsessed with the Minoan culture. I mean, really obsessed. I ran out of children’s books on the subject and started using the teachers’ library. They got worried about me and told me to drop the whole thing. That was tough. But I did what I was told.
‘Maybe it was just as well they didn’t know what my twin brother and I used to play at! It was always horse tricks. I’d climb up a tree. He’d then get the horse to come under the tree. When it was just below me, he’d yell, “Jump!” and I’d jump down onto the horse.
‘When he grew up, he joined the Royal Navy. One day he announced that he was going to fight in the Falklands War. Before he left, he said he might not come back. He put all his affairs in order. And he was right – he didn’t come back. It was very hard for me to lose him.
‘Years later I was on a meditation retreat. One of the men there – someone I’d never met before – suddenly said, “You had a twin”.
‘We went into a quiet room to talk. He told me that my brother and I had lived in ancient Minoa. We were part of a team that did acrobatic acts riding on the bulls. Our lives depended on getting it right. The bulls’ horns were deadly, so it was all about split-second timing.
‘One of our tricks was for the girl – me – to be thrown straight at the bull’s horns. The man riding the bull – my brother – would then catch me just before I reached the horns. That always thrilled the crowd.
‘Well, one day he didn’t catch me. The horns did instead and I died of the injuries.
‘The man said that in this life my brother had come back to be with me to make up for that accident. It’s also why we played those dangerous horse tricks when we were kids – we were re-enacting the bull riding. Doing that somehow healed the effects on both of us of the terrible accident we’d had in Minoa.
‘I have no idea how a complete stranger could have known about that. But it made perfect sense. Everything fell into place at last.’
Pregnant mothers sometimes dream about their baby’s past lives. An American woman, Martha, told me that when she was pregnant she dreamed that in a previous life her baby was a Mafia mobster. He was coming to her because she was his best hope of returning to a happier way of life that he’d known with her in a much earlier time.
The dreams showed her that in this life he needed to do team activities with strong and positive role models that he could emulate. After some trial and error – he soon became bored with sports that weren’t dangerous – he got into white-water rafting and rodeo riding.
Martha said her son is now settled in a happy career leading groups on eco-conscious safari trips. She feels sure that this is thanks to the dreams she had about him just before he was born.
A mother’s dreams about her children can be so strong that they go beyond one lifetime. In her book Yesterday’s Children, Jenny Cockell described how a past-life drama spilled into the present.
It began with a recurring childhood dream. She kept dreaming that she was a grown woman called Mary, lying in bed, dying of a fever. After those dreams she’d always wake up crying. Her grief wasn’t for the dying woman, but for her eight children who were about to be left alone in the world.
Those dreams haunted Jenny for so long that she became convinced she’d once been that dying woman. In some of the dreams she saw her past-life village so clearly that she could draw maps and pictures of it. She said it felt like somewhere in Ireland.
One day, she decided to find out. She scoured the records, eventually tracking down a woman called Mary Sutton, who’d died of a fever and left eight children.
Mary had lived in a small village near Dublin in the first half of the twentieth century. When Jenny went there, she said it was like her dream had come to life. The village was exactly like the maps and pictures she’d drawn of it.
With so much confirmed, her next step was to contact the eight orphans with her amazing news. Much older by then, they were doubtful at first about this stranger’s tale, but they gave it a fair hearing. To their surprise, they found that Jenny knew private family details that no one but their late mother could possibly have known.
It looked as if their long-lost mother had indeed returned – and Jenny was able to put a lifetime of anxiety about them behind her at last.
Can you remember what you knew about your past lives when you were very young? That may not be so easy to recall now. But if you go through the following exercise, you may begin to unearth the past-life clues that your inner child has for you.
Our childhood memories are full of clues about our former lives. Dressing-up games, our favourite periods in history, our unexpected skills and our loves and hates – all are rich sources of information. Following these clues can open up a pathway taking us back to the past-life awareness that we had when we were very young.
Choose a time when you can forget the demands of the world, and relax somewhere comfortable. Focus on one of the 10 key questions listed below. Let them waft you gently back to your childhood – and beyond. There’s no need to rush this. One topic per session is probably enough.
When it feels like enough for one day, keep a note of whatever came up. As you progress, you’ll be able to piece together all kinds of past-life clues from the secret garden of your childhood memories.
