I WAS IN THE CIVIL WAR
by Robert M. Stone, M.S.

The concept of reincarnation had always intrigued me since I first read about it in Jane Robert's, The Seth Material in 1972. I did a great deal of reading that summer but nothing I read allowed me to explore the topic personally. It wasn't until 1976, when I was a Graduate Student that I was told about Leslie Lecron's, Self-Hypnotism, It's Use in Daily Living by a fellow Graduate Student that the tools, subconscious communication and hypnosis, presented themselves.

I read all the books the University had on hypnosis but they weren't as helpful as Lecron's. Using his techniques, a friend and I started trying to track down our previous existence's.

The pendulum made it simple to start gathering information on previous lives. Using the questioning techniques suggested by Lecron, we quickly began to pin down details of other lives, some of which we had shared together.

My friend had a flare for being hypnotized and we gathered information in this manner. But a side-effect that we discovered in using the pendulum to ask the subconscious questions about past lives was that we began to have past life dreams. At various times, both my friend and I would have the same sort of dream with the same details.

When this began to happen, I realized that I had several of these types of dreams at various points in my childhood. I had never understood the significance of them until, as an adult exploring reincarnation, the same thing happened.

The most vivid dream I had I still remember after all these years. The dream was in full color with all the senses involved.

It was early morning, almost dawn. There was a low ground fog. There was a camp with tents and stacked rifles. Men were beginning to stir. My attention was drawn to a tall man with white blond hair shoulder length. He had on his pants and boots but had not put on his tunic.

This was a Union Army camp. I quickly realized that the tall man was me. Although he was about 5 inches taller than I am and I've never had should length hair. Also, my hair is brown.

It looked like the preparations for breakfast were beginning with coffee pots on stones around the campfires.

The camp appeared to be on the edge of a large cornfield. The air was chilly and damp. I noticed that I was picking up glimpses of the world through his eyes. He was standing by a campfire looking out over the cornfield. As it began to get light, he noticed that there was a huge gray line at the other edge of the cornfield with a few dots of crimson breaking up the line.

At the same time he could see the line, there was a massive shout and the line began to surge forward. The shout is hard to describe. It was almost a continuous drone. The trademark Confederate battle cry. I had never seen nor heard anything like it. There is a serious difference between being in the middle of something like that as opposed to watching it on a movie or television. There is no comparison.

When the line was set in motion, it was ME looking at it trying to assess the situation. Everyone was scrambling to move as this camp was in no way defensible and would be quickly overrun.

I found myself having a moral dilemma. Should I escape or try to fight. I quickly decided that getting killed would serve no purpose and ordered a retreat.

We headed for the river. There was this steep ravine that led down to the river and we stumbled down it. The river was gigantic. We swam across it.

As this was happening, my current consciousness was watching somewhat confused. So I heard myself yell out, "Where is this?" and the answer came back like an echo, "SHILOH."

I wasn't familiar with Shiloh so I looked it up at the University library and discovered it was a Civil War battle in April of 1862. That the Confederate forces had launched a massive, SURPRISE attack on the Union forces. Well, I can personally vouch for that !

Twelve years after the dream, I decided to go to Shiloh. It was in a part of Tennessee that I had never been to. Of course, the battlefield is now a National Park.

To make a very long story short, I had a number of flashback memories surface on the trip to Shiloh. The next day when I went to the park, I found the field of my dream. Then in moving around the park, I discovered that side of the river had a high cliff, at least 75-100 feet high. The river of course, was the Tennessee and it was wide as the Mississippi at that point.

In driving around the service road, I came to some Indian mounds that overlooked the river. I stopped and climbed them to look at the river. When I returned to the car, I looked down the road which looked straight from my vantage point and said, "The ravine to the river is around a corner not far from here."

I got in the car and in less than 50 yards, the road took a 90 degree turn which could not be seen from the mounds and moved at a sharp angle down the RAVINE which led to the river. It was the ONLY access to the river for miles in either direction. That is, unless you wanted to jump off 100 foot banks.

I can't tell you the feelings that walking this ground generated in me. But finding the field and finding the ravine clearly demonstrated to me that I had been there in April 1862.

Critics of reincarnation can say that all fields look the same which is probably true. However, how did I know there was a ravine that was the only feasible access to the river?

Reincarnation is a fact for me. Knowing that you lived before helps to understand the self of the present.