A Past Life Memory

This is a short essay on the topic of past lives. When I was a teenager I learned about the theory of past lives from reading books by Alan Watts and others on Zen Buddhism, and Theosophy by a variety of authors. The philosophy was that we have a soul that incarnates in the physical world to experience physicality and to learn soul lessons, and in each lifetime we create karma. In these Eastern philosophies they claim that we come to earth thousands of times as both males and females, but we never regress to animal forms from the human.

Westerners often misrepresent the theory of reincarnation as to humans being punished by reincarnating as lower life forms. This is a means that Western people use to demean the beliefs of Buddhists and Hindus. Reincarnation is about a soul learning process: if we act in one lifetime from a place that is not of love and oneness, in the next lifetime we experience what it was like to be in a victim position-- although we can never assume that is the reason that someone is victimized.

While this belief system has its positive aspects it has proven to be very negative in some Asian countries where people passively accepted their lot in life and there was less movement to reform social conditions. You were told that things would be better in your next life.

It was in 1975 when I was on vacation with some colleagues from work that one of them taught me a technique of past life regression, and encouraged me to lead him through it. It was a method of light hypnosis where the participant was fully conscious but in a very relaxed, dream-like state of consciousness.

Using a soft voice, I instructed him to relax, close his eyes, and gently rise up through the ceiling and drift away from planet earth, seeing it beneath him getting smaller and smaller until it was a blue marble that became a small blue dot in space. I asked for his soul to guide us to a time and place where he had a past life that was relevant to this life. Then I reversed the images and had him see the planet slowly getting bigger, and turning beneath him, as he slowly drifted down to it. I instructed him to look around and to look down at his hands and feet and tell me whether he was a male or a female.

He gave me a short story in which he was a male being attacked by large frightening extra-terrestrials and he was firing at them with advanced weapons. Well, I did not find this very convincing at the time, and when he changed places with me and regressed me I was even less convinced. In my regression I was a male living in the modern era, and traveling to visit my brother, after I came back from the military. I did not see how this could be about a past life.

So a few years later I was living among a group of people who not only believed in past lives but talked often about them. They motivated me to be more intrigued about the subject and desiring to remember my past lives.

I used the regression technique on myself while in meditation and I became totally immersed in a past life memory. At this point I should say that I was a short, thin, woman of about thirty when I performed the meditation, so it was really surprising to me to discover that I had been a gunslinger in the Old West!

I saw myself as a very young man living with my parents on a small farm somewhere in the Western United States back around the time after the American Civil War. I saw a group of about four former soldiers come to our farm, ransack it, and kill my parents while I was away doing something, like fishing, so they did not kill me. I was devastated, and found my father’s six gun, and started to practice shooting at glass bottles. I saw myself spending lots of time becoming very good with a gun.

What I learned in this reverie was that the guns back then were not at all as they are portrayed in western movies about cowboys: they were very inaccurate and you had to be almost at point-blank range to actually hit someone. The further away that a person could fire a gun accurately, the greater the edge they had over their opponent.

Another thing that I found was different from the old television westerns was that the local small town did not have a sheriff with a big tin star, or a marshal, or a jail cell. There was no law and order at all in the town, and innocent settlers were victimized and bullied by rough men with guns. I was in a rage about the death of my parents so I hated to see weak God-fearing people being bullied, threatened and robbed.

I saw myself getting into altercations with bullies and shooting them. Then I had to move on to a new town. I usually got jobs on ranches working mending fences, or putting up fences, or driving cattle. Any time I killed someone, that someone would have a whole host of male relatives who would come looking for me.

Then I had a vision of myself walking down a main street, with a man behind me about to shoot me, and the man that I had recently married in this lifetime, on a roof, with some sort of long gun like a rifle or sawn-off shotgun -- shoot the man behind me. He saved my life in that lifetime. So I saw that we were two men in that lifetime that struck up an acquaintanceship, and had some sort of bond, as he had saved my life and I was a stranger to him. I learned that he was a card sharp, and gambled to win, and that he could play the violin. He was also very quiet. We traveled together to the next place and camped out. I did not see much more but I knew my mental state was that I did not enjoy my life and wished that someone would shoot me, but no-one ever did.

Well, imagine my surprise when just yesterday I saw the listing for The Outlaw Josey Wales posted on Netflix and the description was just like the beginning of my past life recollection! I had always thought that lifetime had seemed like a B rated movie. Of course, the movie was not exactly like my past life but it began in a very similar fashion. Josey Wales was a farmer whose wife and child were killed by union soldiers because they lived in the South. In my regression my parents were killed by soldiers after the Civil War who were penniless and hungry, and robbing innocent settlers.

So I watched the movie and I could not turn it off. I was mesmerized by the Clint Eastwood character. I was looking for any more evidence that supported my regression memories, but the story took off in a different direction than my past life.

In the movie Josey Wales was being hunted by the military and bounty hunters. In my regression I was being hunted by angry male relatives of outlaws and bullies. In the movie Josey saves some female settlers from bandits and goes to live with them in Native American territory. In my past life I just wandered aimlessly further and further west, working on ranches. I did not marry or have relationships with women because there were hardly any out there who had not come out there with their husbands. There were no saloon gals and saloons were miserable little places with sawdust on the floor and lots of old men getting drunk.

Since my regression I have had several very vivid dreams of my past lives and there is very little continuity between them, but there is someone in them that I have met again in this life. It also seems as if the lives are back-to-back, and as soon as one life finishes I come back in another.

Theosophy, which is a western philosophy based on ancient eastern religious teachings, tells us that a higher part of ourselves, the soul, has memories of all of the past lives, and all of the skills that we learned in those lives.

Since 1980 when I remembered my gunslinger life, I recall having been a Highlander in Scotland who was press ganged into the British Navy to fight in the Napoleonic war; an old Irish woman waiting hopelessly to hear about her son in the Americas; a Danish woman who married into British nobility and was a nurse in WWI; and a German woman in WWII who was half Jewish.

Hypnotherapists who perform past life regressions maintain that fears, phobias, recurring negative patterns in romance, illnesses, and other problems stem from situations and traumas that happened earlier, whether in childhood or a previous lifetime, and that hypnotic regression can help to mitigate these current life problems.