"Do you believe in reincarnation?" is a Seminar question that was posed to me. Here is the gist of my reply and a little extra for those who read as well as listen.

Reply: A very wise ant guru was once asked the same question by a devotee ant and he replied, “No!” Then as the dejected devotee began to crawl away the guru called after him, “I used to, but that was in another lifetime.”

The exact answer to your question is also “No.” I don’t believe I had breakfast this morning. I know I had breakfast this morning. I do not believe in reincarnation. I know that reincarnation occurs.

Watch the word ‘believe’ very carefully if it drifts into your area. It is usually attached erroneously to the word ‘faith.’ When those two words are joined in a conversation there is very little chance of finding truth. Belief automatically implies doubt or ignorance. Faith in the sense used by many fundamentalists I have spoken to seems to mean ‘Believing in what you know ain’t so,’ as Mark Twain said. I don’t have that ability, and I hope that those of you who do will trade it in for the attitude, ‘I don’t believe in anything. I either know it or I don’t yet.’ It’s a great tool for dissecting out your programmed stuff from your experienced stuff.

Don't be like the fundamentalist lady who replied to a question about Jonah. "Yes, I believe that Jonah was swallowed by the whale because it's in the Bible. And if it said that Jonah swallowed the whale I'd believe that too." With such invincible ignorance there is no discussion possible.

The personal reasons I have for knowing that reincarnation has occurred in my case, and therefore by analogy and correspondence has undoubtedly occurred to many others, is not based merely on visions of other lives. I am not someone who has visions. These can be created or invented easily by competent novelists or by frustrated sentimentalists, most of whom seem to have been Cleopatra or some Pharaoh or other.

If you are going to try to pull back details of various lives for some reason make sure that the reason is other than curiosity. There are several time honored occult techniques for doing this. Runists will know the ones associated with the rune NOD of the Armanen set. And make sure that you have established a firm criterion that you will apply to what seems to be evidence of a previous existence as a human. I will share mine in a moment.

There is a good reason that life usually pulls a veil over previous memories. I was once a member of the British Society of Psychical Research, and met many people who had pretty unchallengeable data from a previous life or lives.

More often than not they stopped living this one effectively, if the previous life had been one of greater power or prosperity than the current version. They focused entirely on the one in the past and spent their time mourning it. Sometimes the previous life contained such misery and unresolved conflict that the current one, which had a different focus was totally misaligned, and the problems of neither life were resolved.

And keep in mind always that there is no evidence whatever that will convince someone who doesn’t want it to be a fact that reincarnation occurs. One of the people I met in the Society was like that.

Some of the myriads of cases in the Society files were almost interminably documented sets of memories correlated with old parish records, history books, and archival material, and sometimes from languages unknown to the current personality.

Cases occur frequently in India where children don’t get slapped alongside the head for saying they used to be somebody else. Children have identified their previous village, their still living husband, their old toys and friends and much else. None of this is evidence to the skeptic who pretends he is being scientific when he’s just being prejudiced.

In one case there was a transcript from a woman who used to contact what she thought were previous incarnations in a trance state. On one such occasion, that was taped with her previous permission, she sang and spoke what seemed to be a complete ritual of some kind in a language that nobody recognized. The performance was transliterated into phonetics and shown around the universities. A professor from the Oriental Institute of the British Museum recognized it as being Egyptian from the Middle Dynasty. But he didn’t know all the words. There were a few, I seem to remember three, that he had never come across. And of course nobody living had ever heard the language spoken.

The ‘investigator skeptic’ I referred to previously had been sure that this speech was just glossophalia, the kind of thing that happens in highly emotional prayer meetings where people speak in tongues. Analysis of many such speakings has shown none of the patterns of language, merely connected sounds made by human voices. When the professor came up with his translation of speech from classical Egyptian vocabulary his attitude ranged from ‘collusion’ and ‘reading the professor’s mind’ through ‘Why did she lie about her education?’

This person was adamant that mind reading was fake, no matter the evidence. He was obviously hard pressed when he used something he didn’t believe in to explain something else he didn’t believe in. Nobody bothered to point out that the professor was nowhere near the area when she did her piece, and didn’t know about it until the transcription was shown to him days later. His attitude was transparent.

The final blow came about a year later when the professor was delighted to find the three words he hadn’t recognized in an uncovered inscription of an invocation to Isis by a high priestess for the benefit of votaries. Their context made their meaning clear.

The production by a person untaught in Egyptology of perfect sentences in a language that had not been used by anyone for thousands of years, and containing words that no living scholar knew, still was not evidence enough to convince the skeptic. He couldn’t explain it himself, but he just knew that reincarnation was superstitious nonsense.

At a meeting later I asked him, if as a senior member, he would tell the rest of us “What evidence would you accept as proof that reincarnation occurred in any specific instance?”

There was an indescribable expression on his face as he suddenly struggled with the insight that there was no evidence that would convince him. He was not an investigator, as he had sincerely believed, he was merely a debunker of anything outside his comfort zone. His task was actually to prevent truth from being uncovered, because he feared it. There are many such left brained people, often with the highest scholastic credentials who use their valid authority in one area to debunk material in another area in which they have no actual experience.

Now this is not an invitation to accept as evidence something you cannot immediately understand. The occult writer Shaw Desmond ran a Psychic Research Society in which most of the members had experienced the supernormal. One bit of research he did showed the amazing powers of the human mind to produce evidence that was tough to see through.

The Society met in London, near Piccadilly Circus, a maelstrom of hookers after dark. One of the male members went out and picked up a prostitute with an offer of a hundred pounds, many times her usual nightly take, if she would take part in an experiment in which she would not have to have sex with anyone, or suffer any physical harm. She agreed.

This woman was not a high class American call girl with a Yale summa cum lauda to her credit. She was a very poor, unattractive, uneducated woman whose only way of putting food on the table was selling her sexual favors on the street.

She was hypnotized by a professional member of the audience and it was suggested that she was a priestess of an unspecified goddess who would give an eagerly awaited talk to the assembled devotees.

Something amazing happened. This pitiful scrap of humanity straightened up, and grew in presence like a bud opening into a rose. In a perfect BBC accent she gave a talk as a priestess of Isis, pointing out how, whenever the trials of the world became overwhelming, the goddess would return to Earth and incarnate as a woman for the benefit of all. She mentioned gods and goddesses and customs of Ancient Egypt as if they were common knowledge to everyone present.

She ended her talk after about half an hour with a prayer so beautiful that many male members of the audience had tears in their eyes. The whole audience was totally captivated by the gigantic presence of the speaker.

She was brought out of her trance by the member, knew nothing about what she had done and could hardly be understood because of her impenetrable Cockney accent. Off she went, very happy with her hundred pounds, leaving the members with a definite problem.

Even the skeptics had to agree that nobody knew of a major actress who could have pulled off the projection of authority and power that this insignificant person had done. But how did it happen? Was it evidence of a previous incarnation shining through the gloom of the current one?

Her talk had been recorded, and a transcription was sent to all those present with the single penetrating question, probably from the brilliant Shaw Desmond, “How much of what the speaker said was already known to you as a reader or scholar?”

A couple of months later it was ascertained that there was nothing in the content of her speech that was totally unknown to everyone. Whatever facts she said or assumed were known by some member or members. Not like the three unknown words of the other example.

It became clear that what had happened was a tour de force of the subconscious of the woman concerned. She had totally accepted the suggestion of the hypnotist and was at a different level of consciousness in which her own subconscious was in contact with the minds of everyone in the audience, which was very diverse and contained scholars of many religions and languages ancient and modern. The speech she used was that accepted by everyone as standard English. She knew it from listening to the radio, though in her conscious life it was certainly not an accomplishment.

This experiment, if uninvestigated could have been touted as as example of reincarnation. It wasn’t. It was an example of mind to mind contact under alpha or theta conditions of the mind of the subject.

Think your alleged memories through with great subtlety. It is VERY easy to deceive yourself if you are not satisfied with the current incarnation.

Christianity used to accept reincarnation as a fact of life until it was officially removed as doctrine at the Second Council of Constantinople in 553. There are several references to it as a common belief of the time in the current New Testament. It was removed as a permitted belief by the religious mind police, because the priests knew they would have more power over people who thought they only had one life in which to attain perfection. The sin and guilt trip that they put on people after that to make them conform has destroyed the original foundation of Christian magickal work entirely for current generations.

So, what makes me sure enough to say ‘I know,’ instead of ‘I believe’? This is the criterion that I use. Did I, after my contact with an alleged previous life or lives have a skill or power that I did not have before it happened. The prostitute didn’t. She was back in her ordinary miserable existence again.

This is not an original idea. The criterion evolved when I was studying Tarot and Kabbalah with Builders Of The Adytum many decades ago. Its founder, Paul Foster Case was a Los Angeles musician interested in the occult.

Over one amazing weekend in New York he added the memory of his previous life as a scholarly rabbi to his current memory. He came back to LA knowing Kabbalistic Hebrew and was also an expert in gematria, the application of numbers to the Hebrew scriptures. He just had an extended memory that went back through the previous one. Incidentally, in the same weekend he also acquired a knowledge of alchemy and astrology that took him years to write out in his courses for occult students.

The memories of three of my previous lives brought back into the current incarnation skills and knowledge quite new to my experience, and they stayed as a permanent feature of the life lived after the memory occurred. A Sufi reader of the Akashic records also picked up on those same incarnations, among others, several years after my own experience. He asked my permission by letter to check the Akashic records of my line of evolution because he found me interesting in that regard.

Of course I was flattered as a young and arrogant magician that someone like the Sufi Abduhrahman even bothered to notice my existence. But I was very surprised when he described exactly the same incarnations from which I had drawn previously unknown skills. He added incarnations that I knew nothing about, and that I haven’t contacted. To perform his investigation he asked for a written request signed by me. I typed the request on someone else’s typewriter and signed it left handed. It made no difference apparently.

That is the criterion I use. New skills or knowledge that stays with you. Have some other if you wish, but have one. Be skeptical but not prejudiced. Don’t become one of the weirdos who is convinced on Thursday that she was Cleopatra and by Sunday it’s expanded to become the Virgin Mary. The masculine counterpart of such people usually seems to be an ineffective who tries to make up for the failure of this life by the invented magnificence of a previous one.

Nobody in mental homes thinks they were John Doe in a previous life. It’s Napoleon or nothing. I know personally two people who are convinced that they were Jesus in a previous incarnation. And they know each other!

If you are contacting a previous existence and it seems to be incredibly important and prestigious, check it out very carefully, and look at how content you are with the current life. You are probably deceiving yourself. Remember the ingenuity and power of the uneducated prostitute’s subconscious. Yours is equally competent.

Most of us have been ordinary people life after life, though on a gradually elevating spiritual path. Look at the numbers. How many people have been Emperor of China in the last thousand years compared with the millions of those who were peasants? Those are your odds of being someone important in the mundane sense.

Blessings,
Douglas