In another life…

I wonder which side of the fence you’re on.

‘Past Lives’ is one of those subjects that tends to divide people pretty squarely into those on the one side who roll their eyes and mutter, “Oh yeah – always Pharaohs or Native American chiefs.  Why never a road sweeper from Luton in the 1920s?”, and people on the other side who are more than eager to discuss their latest regression to a lifetime in days of yore.

Me?  I’ve been on a knife edge between sceptic and believer.  I’ve always had sympathy with the non-believers, and their point is a valid one.  You never DO find mystics who regress you to road sweeping or pig-farming days, and statistically, there must have been far more of these over the centuries.  On the other hand, I’ve been convinced by too many personal experiences and trusted channelled messages.  I do believe in reincarnation and while I don’t go off hunting my other lives out, they do tend to find me, once in a while.

In the last week, it finally dawned on me why the ‘past’ lives we hear about take place at some pivotal and celebrated point in the world’s history.  It’s so blindingly obvious, I can’t believe it’s taken me this long to figure it out.  Never mind, I’m there now, so what follows is my explanation.

Edgar Cayce (1877–1945) was a psychic of the 20th century and made many highly publicized predictions.(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I recently bought a slim and elderly book entitled Edgar Cayce on Atlantis.  It was written by his son in the 1960s and claims to bring together all his comments on the fabled land, mostly from his ‘entity life readings’ – what would now be called channelled past life information.

The sceptic in me raised a quizzical head when I read in the introduction that over 50% of the people he did readings for had – according to Cayce – past lives in Atlantean times.  As I read on through the book, I noticed that almost all these lives were said to take place around times of huge upheaval – just prior to, during or after one of three cataclysmic events in which vast parts of the Atlantean lands were destroyed, apparently by weaponry or technology invented by the inhabitants.

Cayce’s subjects all seem to have belonged to one of two warring factions.  A sizeable proportion were priests or priestesses, while most of the rest were what would now be seen as engineers, technologists or scientists of some kind – many personally associated with the building or maintenance of the weaponry which caused the destructions.

Obviously we have all heard the legends of the sinking of Atlantis and some will have read other accounts of scientific experiments or technology being tragically misused in various ways in those far-off times.  It seemed to me rather odd, though, that all these people – living in the first half of the 20th century – should have such similar past lives.

Then I thought on.

Has everyone had other lives? How many have we had?  This is the reply Neale Donald Walsch received in Conversations With God, Book 1:

“It is difficult to believe there is still a question about this. I find it hard to imagine. There have been so many reports from thoroughly reliable sources of past life experiences. Some of these people have brought back strikingly detailed descriptions of events, and such completely verifiable data as to eliminate any possibility that they were making it up or had contrived to somehow deceive researchers and loved ones.

You have had 647 past lives, since you insist on being exact. This is your 648^th. You were everything in them.  A king, a queen, a serf. A teacher, a student, a master. A male, a female. A warrior, a pacifist. A hero, a coward. A killer, a savior. A sage, a fool. You have been all of it!”

That makes sense to me.  Given this plethora of past lives to select from, then, and the era in which Cayce was working, it’s unsurprising that these particular lives were pulled out of the psychic bag.  In the twenties, thirties and forties, weapons technology was developing at an alarming pace.  The first WMDs were created.  Of all the lives these individuals had experienced, surely the cataclysmic destruction of a civilisation provided them with exactly the warnings they needed.

There is no way for us to know whether some of the people Cayce spoke to in his ‘sleep’ went on to avert another series of catastrophes, but I like to think they did.

If there is any value in hearing about our past lives, surely it is to find the events that can help us to make positive and informed decisions in our current lifetime.  That has certainly been the case for me.