Past Lives

I’m running. My legs ache while they pump their way through the knee length dried grass. It’s dark. My heart pounds deeply and strongly in my chest and my breathing is laboured. I have to get away from them. I have to escape.

I break from the trees and run into the clearing in front of a church building. Sanctuary at last, somewhere I might find help to rid myself of my pursuers.

I approach the doorway and frantically reach for the latch. The coolness of the metal sits hard in my hand as I squeeze and turn. The heavy oak door creaks open and inside I find the high vaulted arches of sandstone. I breathe. I sigh. To my left I see a font, carved in sandstone, its bulbous belly pregnant with holy water. I reach out my left had to stroke the curves, the texture gritty under my fingers.

“The font, the font” I whisper. I fall to knees and begin to cry. At last I begin to feel safe, secure and home.

I feel a pain in my back. Rather like being punched. Then the sharpness hits me. I try to breathe in, but I struggle. I breathe in and can’t quite catch it. Slowly, for what seems like an age a blackness covers my vision. I am no longer breathing.

I wake up, gasping for breath. My heart pounds. I feel the sharp pain in my back again. My awareness returns and I realise that I'm lying in bed. The pain is due to an elbow which has found its way into my back and the very position where the stabbing occurred. The revelation begins.

“Grae?” I ventured. “You awake?”

“Hm, yeah.” A muffled sound emerges from the slightly awake body lying next to me

 “This is going to sound really weird, but you stabbed me in the back”

“I did what?” Suddenly he’s more alert.

“I just had this strange dream, only I wasn’t fully asleep.” I described the ‘dream’ to Graeme, who lay there somewhat bemused. “It was definitely you and you stabbed me in the back”

“You’re just dreaming, just because my elbow was in your back, doesn’t mean I stabbed you.”

I described the girl who I was in the dream. I was around twelve, with dark curly hair that was shoulder length. I was running away from some men. I saw the church and knew I’d be safe. However, he had found another way in, or was also hiding from something. I told him that this took place in the Second World War and that he, Graeme, was a Nazi soldier who stabbed me because I must have startled him; or perhaps he stabbed me because it was dark and he didn’t know who it was. An almost accidental killing.

I arms slid around me and gave me a hug. Finally after a few years of feeling uncertain, of wondering why I always felt so insecure, I finally found out why I felt this way. I was reliving a moment in a past life.

I have had other past life experiences down the years, some very clear, some not so clear. I’ll discuss them later.

If we believe that we’re all connected, that we’re all one interconnected soul then this might go some way to explaining people's experiences of past lives. If we have past lives, past experiences that can’t be explained by the current definition and perception of life, then being part of a greater whole might be some way of explaining this. If we are all one soul, a universal conciousness, experiencing life on an individual basis, who can say whether past life experiences are real or not? It might be that by this one soul creating individual human experiences there is some overlap. Perhaps the greater soul needs to experience some things more than once and brings together groups of souls to relive experiences together. If Karma is bought into the equation then the whole experience of past lives begins to make sense.

According to the freedictionary.com site Karma is defined as:

Kar·ma  (kärm)

n.

1. Hinduism & Buddhism The total effect of a person's actions and conduct during the successive 

phases of the person's existence, regarded as determining the person's destiny.

2. Fate; destiny.

3. Informal A distinctive aura, atmosphere, or feeling: There's bad karma around the house today.

So, if Karma is the total effect of the actions of someone during their life/lives and is also determining of someone’s destiny, then Karma has already decided the path we must take.

In order to negate Karma we have to be aware of it. Kind of like being aware of any mistakes we are making or have made and taking appropriate action to put them right. However, this isn’t always possible in one life time. According to Hinduism and Buddhism, any mistakes made in past incarnations need to be resolved in this life time, or in coming life times in order to negate the effects of the Karma. If we don’t seek to correct the mistakes we’ll be caught in the endless cycle of life, death and rebirth until we put it right.

If only it were that simple. In our own day to day lives we make choices. The choices we make often informed by our current level of experience. We also won’t be aware whether we make a good choice or a bad choice until we have experiences that are either positive or negative. Sometimes the negative experiences give us vital skills in survival that we might not gain from positive experiences and vice versa. Only by making choices and experiencing things can we then make better informed choices down the line.

With regard to past lives if we make a mistake, or do something horrible in that life, we can choose to put it right in this life, or not. Either way the choice is ours. We have free will. We can choose whether experiences are going to be bad or good for us.