Past Lives of the Rich and Famous

PART ONE

The How and Why of Past Lives

I don’t ever want you to take my word for it, or anyone else’s, when you’re exploring and arriving at the fundamental beliefs that resonate in your soul and, most of all, when those beliefs answer more questions than they raise. I want you to keep an open mind, educate yourself on a variety of philosophies, and pay attention to what makes sense to you.

In other words, as you read these pages, I want you to think.

How can a child, from a perfectly normal, unremarkable family, suddenly begin playing the piano with the skill of a virtuoso and composing music at the age of five?

How and why does a three-year-old child born and raised in Alaska develop what turns into a lifelong, passionate curiosity about the American Civil War?

Why are there specific places on earth that you’ve yearned to go for as long as you can remember, and languages you’ve yearned to learn, while other places and languages are of no interest to you at all?

How can you land in a strange city you’ve never been in before and find that, impossibly, you not only feel at home there, you actually seem to know your way around?

Why are there certain people you meet for the first time and have to fight an urge to say, Hello again! Where have you been?

Why were you born with your own unique set of preferences and aversions to things that, by definition, you’ve never been exposed to in this life?

Why, without warning or logic, do you suddenly develop a mortal fear of something you’ve never been afraid of before, from flying to water to darkness to choking to heights? For that matter, why were you born with any mortal fears at all?

What would prompt a six-year-old child to thank his mother for breakfast by saying, You’re the best of all twelve moms I’ve ever had?

Where would a ten-year-old girl come up with a voice and an affinity for singing opera?

Ask those questions to any number of scientists, theologians, psychologists, and other experts on human behavior. They’re likely to reply with either a blank stare, some double-talk that makes no sense at all, or that common, meaningless response, It just happens. Wouldn’t I don’t have the first clue be a lot more honest?

I do have the first clue. I have an explanation that answers every one of those questions, and thousands more, and I will never understand why there’s such reluctance among so many to embrace and celebrate that explanation, because it confirms the promise God made to all of us at the moment our souls were created—very simply, that we are eternal. It doesn’t just mean that we always will be from now on. It means we always have been. So, accepting the fact that we’ve always existed, where have we been since the beginning of time? And what have we been doing to occupy ourselves? Nothing? Lying around on clouds playing harps? Really? I don’t believe that for one second, and neither do you.

We’ve each been living life after life after life, in our Home on the Other Side and here on earth as well, on a perpetual, sacred journey toward our spirit’s greatest potential, in joyful service to our Creator. He didn’t create a random, imperfect, haphazard universe for us to occupy. He presented us with an infinity of perfection and logic. His creation makes sense. It’s cyclical, and it’s orderly. To suggest, as many theologians do, that at the end of our one and only lifetime, God assesses our performances and decides whether we should be rewarded or punished is to suggest that God, who adores us unconditionally as His own beloved children, gives us one opportunity to please Him, and if we fail, He throws up His hands and banishes us to an eternity of hell. Does that really make sense to you?

Me neither.

I’ve actually had any number of people say to me, through all these decades of readings, lectures, salons, and television appearances, Of course I don’t believe in reincarnation. I’m a Christian. To which I say, as a fellow (Gnostic) Christian, "So am I! So, think!"

Please don’t ever get the idea that my absolute belief in reincarnation is arbitrary, something I decided to embrace because that’s just how goofy we psychics are. I was brought up in Catholic school. I minored in theology and world religion in college. I’ve spent my life passionately devouring every religious and spiritual book I can get my hands on, from the teachings of Buddha and Muhammad, to the Tantras, to the Egyptian Book of the Dead, to the Talmud and the Koran, to the Bhagavad Gita, to Elaine Pagels’s The Gnostic Gospels, to the life of Apollonius of Tyana, a Greek spiritual healer and teacher who was a contemporary of Christ. I’ve studied with priests, yogis, ministers, rabbis, nuns, Tibetan monks, and Zen masters. And I can honestly tell you that as a result of all that and much, much more, my belief in past lives has grown stronger, to the point where I no longer think of it as something I believe; I think of it as something I know.

I was especially intrigued to discover that most of the world’s great religions—including Christianity, until Pope Constantine restructured it in the sixth century—embrace the truth of reincarnation. It inspired me to return to the Bible and look for the references to reincarnation that I was sure had to be there. I refused to believe that Pope Constantine, no matter how determined he might have been, managed to get his hands on every copy of every translation of the Holy Scripture and toss out everything he didn’t agree with.

This search, this insatiable show-me curiosity common to us Missouri natives, led to my becoming a tireless, rabid student of the Bible, all twenty-six versions of it. And as thorough as I’m sure Pope Constantine tried to be, I was delighted to discover that, even in translations of the Bible written after his death, several references to reincarnation remained intact, if you spend a few extra moments looking at them more closely than just giving them a passing glance.

The ninth chapter of John, for example, tells the story of Jesus and his disciples happening upon a man who was born blind. The disciples asked Jesus, Master, who did sin, this man, or his parents, that he was born blind?

The disciples, in other words, were curious about the possibility that the man’s blindness was a punishment for sins he’d committed. But since he had been blind since birth, what possible opportunity would he have had to commit sins if it weren’t in a past life, unless he’d been creative enough to find a way to sin in the womb?

In Matthew 17:11–13 there’s an even more obvious reference to reincarnation, during a talk Jesus has with three of his disciples, Peter, James, and John: ‘Elijah is indeed coming and will restore all things; but I tell you that Elijah has already come, and they did not recognize him, but they did to him whatever they pleased.’ Then the disciples understood that he was speaking to them about John the Baptist.

Now, if Elijah was still coming but had already come, obviously Jesus was referring to two separate incarnations. And they did not recognize him as Elijah in that previous incarnation, but the disciples understood that Elijah’s previous incarnation was a lifetime as John the Baptist, who was imprisoned and beheaded by Herod, the king of Judea. I can’t think of a clearer example of they did to him whatever they pleased than imprisoning and beheading someone. But more to the point, if Jesus Christ himself accepted reincarnation as the truth, as he clearly did, who are any of us to doubt him? Which brings us back to my original question: Why is there such a common perception that you can be a Christian or you can believe in reincarnation, but you can’t do both?

I don’t think I ever doubted that we live several lifetimes on earth; I just didn’t understand, when I was very young and just starting to wonder about this kind of thing, what difference it would make whether or not I’d lived before, especially if I didn’t remember. If I were a geisha in Japan in the 1800s, or the person who invented shoelaces, or the maid of honor at Queen Victoria’s wedding, beyond having something new to talk about at cocktail parties, or unless that information is of some use to me in my life today, who cares? Like many people, I read a book about an actual past-life case, entitled The Search for Bridey Murphy, and found it fascinating. But again, even if it were true, so what?

For those of you who are too young to remember, in 1952 a woman named Virginia Tighe, in Pueblo, Colorado, volunteered one night at a dinner party to be part of a casual demonstration by a hypnotist named Morey Bernstein. To the shock of Bernstein and all the other guests, the minute she went under, Virginia Tighe began speaking in a thick brogue and identifying herself as Bridey Murphy, a nineteenth-century woman from Ireland. Throughout the course of subsequent recorded hypnosis sessions in Morey Bernstein’s office, Tighe, in the persona of Bridey Murphy, sang Irish songs, told Irish stories, and related intricate details of her life in Cork a hundred years earlier with no prompting or coaching from Bernstein whatsoever. The recordings were eventually translated into more than a dozen languages, and The Search for Bridey Murphy hit bestseller lists around the world.

Of course there were efforts to discredit the claims of Morey Bernstein and Virginia Tighe, but they were never very successful. Bernstein, rather than being a notorious fraud, was actually a highly respected businessman who’d been practicing amateur hypnosis for years, purely as a hobby, and was clearly as shocked as everyone else at this new identity his hobby had seemingly unearthed. Virginia Tighe was a twenty-seven-year-old mother of two when the Bridey Murphy sessions began and, rather than leaping at the opportunity to use up every second of her fifteen minutes of fame, she insisted that her real name not be used in Bernstein’s book and rejected countless opportunities to get rich from the phenomenon she’d inadvertently helped create.

It was an enthralling story, and I was as fascinated as everyone else. By then I was a master hypnotist with a thriving hypnosis practice, helping clients with everything from weight loss to quitting smoking, so the hypnotism aspect was frankly more interesting to me than the past life the Bridey Murphy sessions seemed to have accessed.

Many of you are already familiar with where this discussion is headed. I’m not about to presume that everyone who is reading this book is familiar with my previous work so, those of you who aren’t newcomers, please forgive the repetition. But it’s impossible to discuss past lives in depth without sharing the firsthand experiences that proved to me beyond all doubt—at a point, I should add, when I wasn’t even looking for proof or thinking about past lives at all—that reincarnation is a very real, very logical part of our eternity.

A bright, personable accountant came to see me one day for a hypnosis session about a weight problem that had plagued him throughout his adulthood. He went under easily, and I was preparing to give him a number of posthypnotic suggestions that had always proved successful with comfort eaters, as I knew he was, when he began casually telling me in the present tense about his work building pyramids in Egypt. Then, without warning, he lapsed into a stream of nonsense syllables that sounded a lot like Martian to me, and I jumped to the same conclusion you would have: I decided that he must be having a psychotic breakdown of some kind, which was far beyond my areas of expertise. When I eased him out of his hypnotic trance and said goodbye, he seemed perfectly normal again, with no memory of what had happened.

Believing with all my heart that this man needed more help than I could give him, I sent a tape of the session to a friend of mine, a psychology professor at Stanford, for his objective evaluation. When my friend called three days later, I was fully expecting him to suggest rushing my client in for psychiatric help as soon as possible. Instead, to my complete shock, he told me he’d played the tape for three of his colleagues who specialized in linguistics. Working separately and without comparing notes, they’d identified those nonsense syllables as a fluent, well-spoken monologue in an ancient Assyrian dialect that would have been common among pyramid builders in ancient Egypt.

If any one experience inspired me to learn the art of hypnotic past-life regressions, it was that accountant pyramid builder. By then I’d established the Nirvana Foundation for Psychic Research, the primary purposes of which were to teach psychic development and to explore and prove the survival of the spirit after death. And what more effective way to establish and underscore the fact that the spirit survives deaths than to confirm the existence of past lives?

I worked and studied regressive hypnosis with an excited passion, and soon I was almost overwhelmed with clients eager to explore their past lives as part of the psychic readings they’d booked. I didn’t consider any of these past lives valid until my staff and I had confirmed them through extensive research. If someone claimed to have been a Montana rancher named Clifford Underwood in 1895, for example, we weren’t satisfied until we’d established that a Clifford Underwood really did own a ranch in Montana in 1895. Mind you, this was long before computers and Google were at anyone’s disposal, so our research involved a whole lot of hours at a whole lot of libraries, public records facilities, and the invaluable San Bruno National Archives. But sooner or later we were able to establish, about 95 percent of the time, that the past lives my clients had revisited had actually occurred. That was, in a way, discovery number one. Discovery number two turned out to be that I’d only begun to scratch the surface of the potential impact of past lives on the clients who experienced them through regressive hypnosis.

A man named Jason came to my office for a reading about a possible career change. He was walking stiffly and wearing a brace to ease the chronic neck pain and spasms he’d been suffering since his early thirties, the cause of which was still a mystery to a parade of doctors to whom he’d paid many thousands of dollars. With his permission I hypnotized him, partly for his relaxation and pain relief but also to add yet another name to my growing list of confirmed past-life regressions, which intrigued him very much when I offered the invitation.

Before long, he was giving me a detailed description of his life as a soldier, blue uniform and all, in the French Revolution in the 1790s. He was a young widower with no children and nothing to lose, which made him a notoriously fearless zealot. After several bloody but victorious battles, he was finally captured and executed at the guillotine when he was thirty-three. Jason was especially moved by his discovery that the wife he’d loved and lost in that life had been the same woman to whom he was happily married in this life, which explained why they’d known from the moment they’d met that they were meant to be together.

A few weeks later I walked offstage from a lecture to find Jason waiting to say hello. He looked wonderful, healthy, and smiling, with his neck brace nowhere in sight. The day after our session, he was eager to tell me, he’d noticed his pain beginning to diminish, and by the fourth day he felt so completely healed that he and his wife had ceremonially burned his neck brace in their fireplace.

I didn’t catch on. It took my Spirit Guide, Francine, to piece it together for me. Chronic neck pain, starting in Jason’s early thirties. Doctor after doctor unable to find its source, let alone heal it. A previous life that ended at the guillotine when he was thirty-three. Once those facts had been unearthed in Jason’s subconscious, where the spirit mind lives, and brought out into the light of day, where they could be explored and dealt with, the pain had disappeared.

Finally I got it, the reason why past lives were so well worth delving into, beyond their proving that our spirits survive death and that we really are eternal beings: by remembering and revealing the source of many seemingly inexplicable physical, mental, and emotional challenges, we can be healed.

I found that realization thrilling when the lightbulb first clicked on for me in the 1970s. I couldn’t wait to share it with my close colleagues in the medical and psychiatric communities, all of whom were as intrigued as I was by anything and everything about reincarnation, from whether or not it existed to its potential significance. By then there was enough public interest in the idea of past lives and the soul’s survival that, when my colleagues and I decided to conduct a weekend-long seminar to discuss it and exchange ideas, we found ourselves blessed with a standing-room-only crowd numbering in the hundreds.

I was eager to demonstrate a live past-life regression to this enthusiastic crowd. If it didn’t work, oh well. If it did, how exciting for everyone in that auditorium, including my colleagues, who were as curious as the audience to see it. I asked for a volunteer and chose the least enthusiastic of the many people who had raised their hands—the last thing I wanted was an attention junkie who was simply leaping at the chance to show off. The attractive, well-dressed, rather shy man I chose looked as if he were curious but also wondering if he should have opted for going to a movie that day instead—in other words, an open-minded skeptic, my favorite kind of volunteer. His name was Paul, and after a brief explanation to him and the audience of what to expect during the hypnosis process, I asked him if there were any physical or emotional problems he’d like to address while he was under. He mentioned two: a recurring pain in his right foot, which had never been properly diagnosed despite more trips to more podiatrists than he could count, and a lifelong belief that no matter how outwardly successful he might appear to be, he was simply disguising the fact that he was, in fact, inadequate and destined to be a disappointment to those who loved and counted on him. He’d worked with a couple of highly respected psychologists in an effort to overcome these feelings, but therapy had never seemed to produce lasting results.

His honesty was touching, apparent, and admirable, which I deeply appreciated. It was obvious to me and to the audience that he would tell the truth no matter what happened on that stage, even if, in the end, he found me and this whole regression thing to be as phony as a two-dollar bill.

He was responsive and easy to hypnotize. As always during regressive hypnosis, I gently guided him back through this life, his death in a previous life, and then into the heart of that life itself, at which moment he slumped and seemed to shrink into his chair, and his right foot twisted and turned in.

The life he described in great detail took place on a Virginia farm in 1821. Born with a clubfoot, he had been more of a burden than a help to his parents and mercilessly teased or completely ignored by his schoolmates. As a result, he had been unable to make friends, no matter how hard he’d tried and through no fault of his own. He had died of pneumonia at the age of fifteen.

I eased him back to the present and, before I woke him, added a prayer in the form of a posthypnotic suggestion, which I used to end every past-life regression from that day forward: And whatever pain or fear or negativity you might have carried over from a past life, release it and let it be resolved in the white light of the Holy Spirit. We ask this in the name of our Lord and the Mother and Father God, amen.

Paul left the stage looking normal again, if a little dazed, and he reported several weeks later that not only had the pain in his foot never returned but he’d also, for the first time in his life, begun to experience a peaceful sense of self-confidence and worthiness, which he’d never dreamed were within his reach.

One of the points I think I had trouble understanding about past lives before I began studying them was a basic principle that confuses a lot of people: basically, that a past life isn’t someone else’s life. Each of us has a spirit of our own, utterly unique and divine, and that spirit inhabits a variety of personas throughout a variety of incarnations. Whoever we are right this minute is a sum total of the wisdom and experience our spirit has gained during the lives it’s lived before, both here and on the Other Side. We were no more some other person in any of our past lives than we were some other person when we were in diapers, or in first grade, or when we graduated from high school, or on the first day of our first job. Again, think. Without those cumulative experiences, whether we consciously remember them or not, we’d be un-potty-trained, uneducated, and unemployed.

Past lives work exactly the same logical way. If some other spirit than our own lived and learned from those lives, those lives would have no purpose. They’re all ours, for better and worse, to enrich us and challenge us and add more steps along our eternal journey toward our own singular definition of perfection. Whoever you’ve been since time began and wherever your passions lie on the Other Side, where you live your real life, are all a part of who you are right now, whether or not you’re consciously aware of your wealth of accumulated knowledge. Your spirit is holding it safe for you and sharing it with you when you open your mind, open your heart, and take the time and prayer to access it.

Remember, God created an orderly universe. There’s nothing haphazard about anything that came from Him, including the amazing mechanisms that are our bodies and our minds. Things don’t happen without a good, sound explanation. And there’s a good, sound explanation for why our bodies and minds react to what’s happened to us in lives that we’ve lived before. That reason is a phenomenon called cell memory.

I’ve written about cell memory in depth many times before, so I’ll simply offer the abbreviated explanation here: