Practical Reincarnation – The Real World Importance of Knowing your Past Lives

When I was a child, I use to ponder why we are here and where we come from. All these years later, I still don’t have a complete answer but I do have some clues.

When I was seven, I got extremely ill with pneumonia. I was in the hospital for 4 or 5 days. When I went in, I felt so bad, I didn’t even notice the major painful IM penicillin injections for the first couple of days. As I got better, I began to notice and rebelled against them. My rear end looked like seam on a piece of cloth from a sewing machine.

It was an awful experience and one that took me a long time to recover physically. My lungs were not normal for months afterwards and I wondered if they ever would be but finally, they felt normal again.

However, this experience caused a very odd thing to happen to me. My mother was really wrapped up in religion at the time and was always dragging the family to church every time the doors were open; twice on Sundays and an evening killer on Wednesdays. She was always harping on saying prayers before bed so, I would repeat the Lords Prayer before bed:

Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul shall keep, if I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take.

A simple prayer that at seven, I was using every night at bedtime. However, after the experience in the hospital, something happened to me when I repeated the prayer. When I came to the part, if I should die before I wake, a brilliant, vivid scene came into my mind. It was if I was looking at an old style hospital room, much like the old hospital I had been in with pneumonia recently. All I could see of the scene was looking towards a hospital bed. The upper half of the bed was hidden by a white pleated cloth screen on a white metal frame. I could see the other half and it looked like a person was in the bed. I could see the sheet covering feet and legs, the legs of an adult.

This image came to my mind for years every time I would say the Lord’s Prayer. It was like a snapshot in my mind. I really didn’t know what it meant at the time.

I would intentionally trigger the image because as a child, I thought it was neat. At that time, I had been on television on a local children’s program and all those brilliant lights reminded me of how this image was illuminated. I didn’t discover until 17 years later, when I was exploring reincarnation for myself that this was a scene of my death in a previous life. It was actually good that I didn’t know what that scene was because it showed me years later, how previous lives affect the present one.

Here is what I discovered 17 years later and how it affected me before I knew what it was. In the life that the scene was from, I was a German. The lifetime was from 1903 to 1941. In this life, I was an academic teaching English literature at the University level. As a young academic in a rigid system, I only got the University position when the Nazis came to power and got rid of all the established academics.

I did not like the Nazis and joined the underground movement against them. Yes, there were many Germans risking their lives to defeat the Nazis. During the war, this group of brave Germans, did what they could, including helping allied POWs escape and sending vital information back to the allies. The Nazi gestopo was all the time working to catch the underground members and there were many close calls. They had suspicions but no evidence. However, in early 1941, I became ill with diphtheria. The Nazi controlled doctors were not allowed to treat and I suffocated from my windpipe being blocked by the illness. So, how did this life affect me in the present one?

A fear of suffocating. When I got pneumonia, my lungs filled with fluid making it hard for me to breathe. This is what triggered the image in my mind. The ancient hospital I was in, built in 1916, looked like the hospital of the past life further reinforcing the recall. Although for many years, I didn’t know it was a memory.

I became fascinated with WW 2 movies involving the allies fighting the Nazis. I watched them every chance I got. I enjoyed seeing the Nazis defeated.

When I went to high school, while others were picking French and Spanish, I went with German. Only a few weeks into the first year course, I had a vivid dream. In this dream, I was in an old style European Railway Station. It was if I was watching a movie where a young man, probably in early 20s was talking with an older woman with two boys. The young man, who knew this woman, was trying to borrow some money for train fare back to Frankfurt. Apparently the train station was in Munich. The woman was scolding the young man about spending all his money at the Oktoberfest. I felt I was watching but also WAS the young man. The entire conversation was in fluent German. At some point, my mind said, I don’t now how to speak German and the dream faded.

So, past lives do influence the present. By knowing your past lives, you can understand and be in better charge of your current life.