Karma
Karma refers collectively to the many principles of cause and effect that govern the evolution of human consciousness. Karma literally means “act” or “deed.” Since its linkage to reincarnation in the Hindu Upanishads (in approximately the sixth century B.C.), karma has meant “action which causes [rebirth].” According to the philosophies of karma, our evolution through many life cycles is guided by the interaction of making choices and experiencing the consequences of these choices. This is how all learning takes place. We make choices and then we experience conditions that result from these choices. In this new context we make new choices, which then generate new conditions, and so on. It is not a deterministic system because it begins with and constantly recycles through our own choosing, which is to varying degrees free.
The esoteric spiritual traditions teach that we incarnate on Earth in order to develop ourselves through specific challenges. As one subject of past-life therapy put it, “I know we have to be given obstacles in order to overcome those obstacles – to become stronger, more aware, more evolved, more responsible.” Thus Earth can be thought of in certain respects as a school we enter for the development and perfection of our souls.
With repeated incarnations, however, our choices in this school tend to become increasingly conditioned by our previous choices. Our perception of events becomes less neutral and more colored by our experience here. Each life adds another layer to our conditioning, further eroding our capacity to make genuinely free choices. Eventually we come to exist in a maze of self-programming, unaware of who and what we are outside this programming. Karma and vipaka. Cause and effect. Making choices and inheriting the consequences of these choices. We have chosen our way step by step into this labyrinth of conditioning but we can choose our way back out again. Choices that weaken or neutralize conditioning are described as generating “wholesome” karma, while choices that reinforce or deepen our conditioning are said to create “unwholesome” karma.
The esoteric spiritual traditions view human beings as embodied spirits trapped in repetitive cycles of human existence, struggling to extricate themselves from the conditioning they have created for themselves. They view the religions of the world as beacons on Earth, calling souls back to their spiritual home and back to the freedom of spiritual existence. It is not that earthly existence is inherently evil, but it is limited and should not become permanent. We do not want to be trapped here indefinitely. Thus the esoteric teaching on karma is largely a teaching of return. It is a teaching designed to help us extricate ourselves from entanglements that do not reflect our deepest nature. It is a teaching that refocuses us on our ultimate objective.
Most frequently, karma is described as the principle of moral reciprocity: “Whatever you give is what you will get back.” How you treat others is how the Universe will treat you. If you steal from them, you will sooner or later find the Universe stealing from you. If you are generous to others, you will sooner or later find the Universe being generous to you. The ethical recommendation that follows from this principle is universally represented in the world’s religions: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” Though self-sacrifice is recommended as an antidote to chronic self-interest, at a broader level we are recommended to value all persons as equals, including ourselves, and to act accordingly.
Each religious tradition has a word for this kind of spiritually grounded egalitarianism. The Christians call it agape, the Taoists tz’u, the Jews hesed. In a word, it is love in its highest form. It is compassion, to “feel with” someone, to crawl inside that person’s experience of a situation and choose your course of action taking both your interests into account. The Taoists call acting in such a selfless but not self-deprecating manner wu wei. Sometimes mistakenly translated “nonaction,” it is rather “non-self-motivated action.”
As we shall see below [in Case Histories], karma actually encompasses a much broader range of cause-and-effect relationships than just moral reciprocity. Nevertheless, this emphasis on moral reciprocity is perhaps justified because the principle of moral reciprocity is central to our efforts to return to spirit. To understand why this is so, we must introduce a second belief that runs through the esoteric traditions.
These traditions teach that the innermost essence of every human being is nothing less than the Divine Essence itself. Beneath our different surface identities, we all participate in a single Divine Identity. We were all formed not only by God but from God. We are all crystallizations of the Divine Field. The appearance of separateness is said to be an illusion created by the conditions of time/space.
Moral reciprocity in this context takes on a new significance. We are encouraged to treat other persons as we ourselves wish to be treated because, in point of fact, they and we are different manifestations of a single, underlying Reality. By treating others as we wish to be treated, we gradually weaken the bonds that tie us to this illusion of separateness and strengthen our awareness of the underlying oneness. We are advised, therefore, to follow the Golden Rule not for idealistic reasons but because through it we can rediscover the primary truth of our existence.
Now, from the physical perspective, the claim that we are all one is obviously false. In the physical world, we exist as distinct and separate entities. We are born separately, we squabble for our daily bread separately, and we die separately. If anything is clearly true about us, it is that we are not all one, however much we are encouraged to behave as if it were so. Because of this separateness, I can pursue my individual well-being at your expense. I can undermine your career to advance my own, and my net result is that my life is genuinely enhanced. I will make more money and move into a more satisfying position at the office, and these improvements are real despite the fact that I’ve crippled your career. Idealism notwithstanding, pursuing my individual good at the expense of others appears to work.
From a spiritual perspective, however, this sense of separateness is an illusion, not ultimate reality. Not only is all of life interconnected, it is all a manifestation of a single reality. In those moments when life splits open to reveal its most profound truths, we consistently discover that our deepest and truest identity is an identity we share equally with all beings. In this identity, there are not two of us but always One. For this reason I can never advance myself for long by excluding you from my heart. It will not work because my actions run against the grain of reality. This truth no one can teach another. Each of us must learn it for ourselves – through karma and rebirth.
While Christianity has not officially adopted reincarnation, this idea of an underlying or encompassing reality that unites us all into a larger whole is an important Christian theme. Jesus used metaphors derived from family life to describe these matters. He taught that this reality, God, was our Father, the source of each of our lives. Because we all come from this common divine source, we are all brothers and sisters in one spiritual family, despite our different biological parents. Thus we must care for each other as brothers and sisters care for one another. Paul pressed this point even further when he said that all Christians were one in the body of Christ (I Cor. 12:12 – 30). Each part of the body depends upon all the other parts for its own well-being. There is no health for individual parts separate from the health of the whole.
According to the esoteric traditions, the illusion of separateness is actually created by the conditions of material existence itself. To exist on Earth is to exist in separateness; there is no other way aboard. Yet while we exist here as separate beings, we are learning oneness. By systematically inheriting the consequences of choices made on the assumption of separateness, we are led step by step to penetrate this illusion and to discover the Divine Identity that binds us all into a single Being. We inherit our treatment of others because when we injure someone out of self-interest, we are in fact injuring ourselves. Likewise, when we help someone, we are helping ourselves. Life reflects back to us our treatment of others in order to teach us that we and these others, though physically distinct, are of one essence.
The drama generated by this feedback process unfolds across many centuries. The principle of karma teaches that our present is not an independent moment in time but part of a causal chain that has its roots deep in history and its completion in tomorrow. Karma is a conditioning set in motion through countless choices we have made. It is the momentum of these choices in our lives. Energy started in motion must complete itself. What we gather to ourselves must eventually express itself. At any point in time, history has a momentum so large that it must project itself into tomorrow. This is true at all levels of existence. History is the intertwined momentum of individuals, families, communities, nations, races, and planets, all meaningfully, causally connected. Choice and the effects of choice, all for our awakening.
So much for generalities. When we press for specifics as to exactly how one life impinges upon a subsequent life, we find we have more questions than answers. The lines of causality are so diverse and so complex that our attempts to catalog them have barely begun to skim the surface. The Hindu Upanishads taught reincarnation as an empirical fact of life, yet they cautioned us against ever hoping to understand it all: What is one’s thought, that he becomes; This is the eternal mystery. Nevertheless, ever since karma was first recognized as a law of nature we have tried to understand how it worked, and our understanding has evolved through several phases.
Early on, for example, karma was usually described in terms of retributive justice, an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. If you killed someone, in another life he would kill you; if you stole from, cheated, belittled, or demeaned someone, in time you would find yourself receiving the same treatment from the same person. Later, this principle was supplemented by the principle of compensation. You might not later be killed by those you killed, but you must eventually compensate them in some way for their loss. If you stole their life in one place, for example, you must restore it to them elsewhere.
In time karma came to be thought of less in terms of a strict balancing of accounts and more in terms of learning, allowing the principle of compensation to be applied more broadly. If you do not end up compensating your original victim, you may compensate other victims of similar crimes. If you kill someone, you may in a subsequent life work on behalf of the families of murder victims, thus confronting indirectly the consequences of your act. The point is to learn from your mistakes. While we often learn our lessons in the company of our original partners, we can also learn from surrogates.
Sometimes karmic learning does not require the involvement of another person at all. Sometimes karma operates through the simple transfer of a particular attitude, emotion, or habit intact from one life cycle to another. Whereas it may have been appropriate to the circumstances of the first life, it only causes pain in the second. Deserved guilt rejected in one life, for example, may be carried over intact into a subsequent life, undermining that life’s self-esteem and wreaking all manner of psychological havoc until it is resolved.
The trend in contemporary descriptions of karma is to emphasize the necessity of learning from one’s previous experiences and to recognize that this learning can take many different forms. It is important, therefore, that we break our habit of thinking of karma strictly in terms of retributive justice. The ties that connect our lives are too subtle and too ingenious to be captured by such a narrow concept. All the forms of learning listed above show up in the case histories taken from past-life therapy, and surely there are many causal patterns that we have yet to discover.
As important as the principle of moral reciprocity is for our spiritual evolution, our lives are linked by many causalities other than moral reciprocity, and all of these are karma. Chronic hunger in one life may result in compulsive eating in a later life. Death by a fall may lead to a phobia of heights. Years of practice at the piano may emerge as a “natural aptitude” for the instrument in a different century. Karma includes the full range of cause-and-effect relationships that orchestrate human experience, and that range is broad indeed. In fact, everything that we commonly take to be innately “us” has roots somewhere in our history.
Contemporary discussions of karma are being influenced by the many case histories of past-life recall being reported in the psycho-therapeutic literature. There are hundreds of cases in print in which individuals have recalled experiences ostensibly from another time in history with dramatic therapeutic results. By studying these cases, we can identify patterns of karmic inheritance and slowly deepen our understanding of how effects are tied to causes across lives. The three case histories that follow, therefore, will illustrate a few of the patterns showing up in the literature. As most of us have a tendency to think of karma in terms of moral reciprocity, these cases will present, as a counterpoint, examples of nonmoral karmic inheritance.
Case Histories
One problem that arises from using case histories is that not all of them can be counted on to contain genuine memories of former lives. Here, however, we are helped by the sheer volume of cases being reported by reputable and conscientious therapists. Even if not every case can be taken as a genuine instance of former-life recall, there is some safety in numbers. By restricting ourselves to patterns of inheritance that occur in many cases and not just a few we are more likely to be tracking actual karmic patterns, not just spurious psychological artifacts. The three cases that follow, therefore, represent a larger body of evidence. Each case represents a class of cases, any one of which might have served equally well to demonstrate its particular karmic pattern.
In Chapter 7 of You Have Been Here Before, Dr. Edith Fiore reports the case of Joe, a man in his mid-thirties who came to her suffering from severe insomnia. Under hypnosis Joe returned to a life on the American Western frontier as Dale. When Dale is seventeen, his father, a marshal, is gunned down in a shootout. Three years later Dale (who is himself quite handy with a gun) joins a wagon train and heads for California to seek his fortune. One day the wagon train is ambushed by Crow Indians, forcing the settlers to take shelter in some nearby trees. Dale is the only competent fighter among them. Many are killed. They spend the moonless night in complete darkness, watching and waiting, hoping to steal away one by one before light. They are stalked all night and more die screaming. Dale kills two Indians in hand-to-hand combat. Unable to help the group any more, he slips away a few hours before dawn, but is pursued. For three days he runs for his life, forced to stay alert each night, catching quick catnaps during the day only when he is sure those trailing him are far behind.
Dale is quick and resourceful, and he eventually escapes his pursuers unharmed. After a brief flirtation with being an outlaw, his ability with a gun earns him a living as a guard. Eventually he follows in his father’s footsteps and takes a job as a sheriff in Kansas. The lawlessness of the times and his reputation with a gun force him to kill many men through the years. He does so with regret but resignation. Later he moves on to a larger town in Colorado, where he is a marshal. Here as before, most of his work is at night when most crimes are committed and most drunks get rowdy. Thus his job requires him to spend his nights alert and on edge. He keeps to the shadows as he walks the streets and checks around each corner before showing himself. There is always someone looking for a quick reputation at his expense.
Eventually Dale is gunned down while playing pool with friends in the local pool hall. Caught by surprise by a shotgun blast through an open window, he immediately knows he is dying. He is angry for letting himself get caught off guard in a lighted room with the blinds up. Years of relentless attention to such details had saved his life, until tonight. He was careless for an hour and look what it got him.
After reexperiencing Dale’s life in great detail, Joe’s insomnia disappeared. Had it actually been caused by all those years of life-threatening, nighttime tension so long ago, or was Dale simply a projected fantasy Joe’s mind created? As we ponder, we should note that after his regression Joe recognized a few other traits he shared with Dale. Like Dale, Joe was basically a loner who did not let people get close and who also had a knack for spotting people’s weaknesses. Finally, it turns out that shooting has been Joe’s favorite hobby ever since he was a kid. “And I’m damn good at it!”, he reported.
In this example, the karmic inheritance from Dale’s life appears to be morally neutral. Fiore’s report of the case is brief, but Joe’s insomnia does not appear to result from any moral debt incurred in Dale’s life. Dale does not appear to feel guilty either for the settlers he could not save or for the men he had to kill while a law officer. The problem carried over appears to revolve around the stress of constant vigilance, and especially from the conviction emblazoned in his memory during his last waking minutes. Joe’s insomnia reflects the fact that Dale did not appear to learn to manage the stress created by his chosen life-style. He never learned how to take advantage of or create opportunities to truly relax. Instead, he keeps himself always “on,” always alert. Such an approach to living is unhealthy and counterproductive. It appears to have created an imbalance that had to be redressed in a later existence.
Joe’s talent with guns demonstrates another common karmic pattern. Talents developed in one life are frequently passed along as “natural aptitudes” in another. Sometimes a skill is carried over and refined through many lives. It makes intuitive sense that a great statesman, philosopher, military tactician, or artist does not simply pop into existence overnight, but develops the required skills slowly and with considerable practice. Indeed, in some case histories we find instances of people setting out to accomplish great things in a particular life but failing because they are unprepared for the task.
The second case comes from the files of Dr. Morris Netherton and can be found in his book Past Lives Therapy, written with Nancy Shiffrin. One point that should be made at the outset is that while his patients often enter deeply experiential states as they relive events from their previous lives, Dr. Netherton does not use hypnosis in his work. Instead, he identifies key phrases patients use in presenting their problems and then asks them to lie down, close their eyes, and repeat these phrases until some sort of mental picture emerges. Once begun, the scenarios that come forward unfold according to their own inner logic and resist attempts to alter their content in any way.
Carl Parsons was in his mid-thirties when he came to Dr. Netherton suffering from an incipient stomach ulcer. He was in charge of a failing electronics/engineering firm and obsessed with the prospect of losing everything. For several months he had been bothered by loss of sleep, constant indigestion, and a pain just below his solar plexus that he described as feeling “like a hot poker being run right through me.” In addition, he was frequently impotent, a symptom that did not fit Carl’s otherwise typical ulcer profile.
Using the “hot poker” phrase as a starting point, Carl found himself in a primitive village, possibly somewhere in Africa or South America. The following is an edited transcript of his experience:
I had been trying to win this girl, a thirteen- or fourteen-year- old . . . for a wife, but my . . . rival, my sworn enemy, he took her instead. The tribal fathers decided. He took her and they have a hut near mine. I hear them moaning in the night, whining and insulting me with their . . . noise. But now he’s off . . . to the hunt? To a war? I really don’t know. He’s not here and I’ve lifted up the flap to the door and she’s in there. . . . We don’t wear any clothes, I guess, at least we don’t wear any at the moment. She’s not . . . I guess she doesn’t know how to object . . . women just don’t here. I’m, uh, mounting her and we’re rocking back and forth on some skins on the floor. But now . . . the light! Someone’s opened the door – the flap – and I’m being pulled off. He’s come back! With his spear, his hunting spear. He is shouting, “You son of a bitch!” in the . . . it’s a different language but that’s the exact phrase! “You son of a bitch, you’ll never make love to another man’s woman!” And he . . . he pushes me across the room. He hurls the spear right – !
. . . He’s got me, right here in the gut, right here, and I’m . . . it went right through and I’m pinned to a post holding up the hut. Now he’s reaching down and, oh my God, he’s cutting it off. My penis, he’s… but I can’t feel it, I’m . . . I guess it’s shock. Oh, I’m paralyzed. The pain is all in the gut. I can’t feel anything below. I’m slumping now and I can’t feel, I . . . I guess . . . death is coming now. It’s . . . I’m so surprised by everything. I’ve lost the pain.
This session established the connection between Carl’s sexual impotence and his stabbing stomach pain, a tie that was repeated in a subsequent session that uncovered a life with strikingly similar themes. In this life Carl was a fetus. From within the womb he experienced his mother having extramarital sex with another man when they were suddenly discovered by his father. Enraged, his father pulled the man off his mother, stabbed him, and than ran his mother through with a sword, killing both the mother and her fetus. As she lay dying, she heard her husband scream “You’ll never do that to me again!”
Still missing from the picture, however, was the connection between these two symptoms and Carl’s business and financial problems. This piece of the puzzle was added in yet another session in which Carl found himself living as an aristocrat in an English mansion. He was sneaking up the back stairs away from a costume party to engage in illicit sex with another man’s wife.
Now we’re in my bedroom and she makes me watch her get undressed, earring by earring, it takes so long. . . . Women wore . . . so much clothing, layers and layers of crinkly stuff beneath her dress. Now we’re in bed and I’m on top of her; I’m naked too . . . and she says something in my ear . . . “What does it feel like to screw another man’s wife?” And, God, suddenly, I’m doubled up on myself, like a knife going in. That’s my first instinct – she’s stabbed me – but it’s not true, it’s just me. The pain, the pain.
Dr. Netherton suggests that this is a case in which a past life is itself controlled by an even more remote past life. His lover’s question in the English mansion appears to have been answered quite literally by the unconscious replaying of the experience internalized from Carl’s earlier tribal misadventure – as if to say “This is how it feels to screw another man’s wife.” Carl’s English life pivots around this event and quickly goes downhill. The woman leaves, not wanting to get caught with Carl. A doctor is called and diagnoses Carl as having a perforated stomach and a mild heart attack. He remains bedridden for a long time and is unable to control his financial affairs during a critical period. By the time he is out of his sickbed he is close to ruin. He becomes obsessed with rebuilding his wealth and consumes increasingly large doses of belladonna, which his doctor had prescribed for him. His mental health deteriorates, as does his estate. Large portions of his mansion are eventually closed off to avoid heating costs, and only one servant remains. In the end, he commits suicide by drug overdose.
As Carl worked these events through in therapy, his sleep improved and his stomach pain eased. Despite the connections he had uncovered between his sex life, his business affairs, and the stomach pains, final resolution of his difficulties continued to elude him. He continued to be stressed by the perilous financial condition of his electronics firm and was increasingly haunted by a feeling that someone was “coming to get me.” This phrase eventually unfolded into a story that Dr. Netherton notes was one of the most detailed and complete ever told him by one of his patients. Dr. Netherton summarizes it as follows:
He described a Mexican plain, where he had lived for many years as a foreign-born national. Through a life of nearly ceaseless industry he had built up enormous ranch holdings and had become very powerful. He described an elaborate, teasing courtship with a woman who seemed to love him obsessively. They were married, and suddenly she turned cold, refusing to have sex with him, closeting herself with her brother for long periods of time. Carl became instantly suspicious of this woman, but he took no action, except to look for sexual satisfaction elsewhere. He found himself with a prostitute in an expensive hotel somewhere in an urban area. As he engaged in the sex act, he realized that his wife had somehow followed him or arranged to be present.
“My wife knows, doesn’t she?” he asked the woman. The response was silence, a turning away of the head. At this moment Carl experienced a sharp pain in his upper abdomen identical to the one he had suffered in England in his aristocratic past life. He made no connection between the two as he described the experience in Mexico, but I pointed out that he was describing similar patterns. . . .
His infidelity in Mexico proved just as disastrous as it had been in his English lifetime; his wife and her brother rushed into the room following his painful attack and, finding Carl in an adulterous sex act, had him taken to prison. Eventually, by bribing government officials, they arranged for his transfer to a mental hospital. In the process, they managed to take over all of Carl’s holdings, and he was left destitute.
Carl spent years in this institution, the days blending meaninglessly into each other, with only his death standing out distinctly. This event he recounts in his own words:
I’m in a room, a dark little concrete cell and the dawn comes. There’s a man, he brings me food and water. He opens the door this morning, like any other morning. He sets the stuff down – he gives me a horrible look. I haven’t seen myself in God knows how long, there’s no mirror or anything and I can’t. . . . I don’t even know what I look like . . . but he screams, “Oh, my God . . . the plague!” and slams the door. I don’t know what’s happened, I feel all right, but I sit thinking . . . they’ve done this to me, they’ll come to get me yet, to finish me off. I know this isn’t over . . . they’re coming to get me. . . . I’m blinded by the light! It’s midday and the door swings open. They’re stuffing hay into my cubicle – unbaled, loose hay keeps coming in, and I know . . . they’re doing this to me. My wife and her brother. Someone says, “We have to, you know . . . it’s plague.” And they touch a match to it and close the door.
As he died, Carl’s mind was fixed on one thing – how he had lost everything through the intrigue surrounding his sexual infidelity. This death-thought had profoundly shaped the configuration of his current life. As Carl processed and integrated these and other similar events into his conscious awareness in the following weeks, he began to realize that he did not even want to own a business. He began to see that he had created for himself the tension-filled life of owning his own business simply because he had needed to repeat these deeply ingrained patterns of worry and loss, hopefully bringing about a better resolution this time around. As he finished his therapy, Carl sold his firm and took a less stressful position with a large corporation. His health improved and his potential ulcer never developed. The cycle had finally been broken. The juxtaposed experiences from his earlier lives – illicit sex, stomach pain, and financial ruin – that his consciousness had internalized together as an unconscious script had finally been separated from one another.
In the two cases presented thus far, the karmic problems pressing for resolution have primarily affected only the individual concerned. As the next case demonstrates, however, many karmic carryovers involve relationships. This case is taken from Chapter 9 of Life Between Life by Joel Whitton and Joe Fisher.
Gary Pennington was a successful forensic psychologist, the proud father of two children, and an exceedingly happily married man. His relationship with his wife, Elizabeth, had begun when they were teenagers and had only deepened and intensified through sixteen years of marriage. Their warm home and rich family life was the envy of many of their friends, and Gary had never been seriously tempted by outside sexual adventures. Never, that is, until he met Caroline at a Christmas party in 1982. Gary and Caroline’s immediate and overwhelming attraction to each other quickly developed into an intense and passionate affair. “It was like being welcomed home,” Gary said.
From the start Gary informed his wife about Caroline, expecting her to tolerate his obsession. She did her best for three months but eventually could no longer handle the continuing erosion of her marriage. She tried to commit suicide. Though the attempt failed, Gary was so badly shaken that he immediately ended the affair with Caroline. Devastated, Caroline jumped into another relationship. When this relationship did not develop as she had hoped, she attempted suicide but was discovered and thwarted. Those around her knew that the true cause of her desperation was her doomed relationship with Gary.
Meanwhile, Gary’s marriage, though badly shaken, was on the mend. He had truly returned to Elizabeth, and trust between them was slowly being restored. Gary was able to forgive himself for what he had done and for the chain of events he had triggered, but he was at a complete loss to understand what had come over him. Why had Caroline been so irresistible to him that he had been willing to jeopardize everything he held dear in life just to satisfy his yearning to be with her? It was to answer this question that he eventually came to Dr. Whitton.
In hypnotic trance, Gary returned to 1944 and the life of Pilot Officer Peter Hargreaves, an RAF intelligence officer stationed near Salerno, Italy. Though trained to fly, he is not officially a pilot. Yet today he is going to fly an unarmed P-51 Mustang low over enemy territory. Aerial photographs have indicated the possibility of German preparations for a counterattack nearby, and he wants personally to inspect the area involved. Some of his fellow officers are trying to talk him out of going on what they see as a reckless and foolhardy mission, insisting that he should let air reconnaissance do their own work. But Hargreaves disregards their warnings and takes off. His plane is intercepted by German fighters behind enemy lines, and he is badly wounded in his left leg. Unable to control his plane, he crash-lands in a field, is captured and taken to an SS interrogation center. There he is repeatedly beaten in the attempt to extract intelligence information from him. Though deprived of food, sleep, and medical attention, he holds out. In a final attempt to break him, his interrogators pull out his fingernails. He dies a terrible but heroic death.
Several things fell into place for Gary after the recall of his life as Peter Hargreaves. Though born and raised in Canada, as a young child Gary used to speak with a convincing British accent, fooling more than one teacher into thinking he was adopted. He also had a lifelong phobia about breaking his leg which had kept him off ski slopes. He was similarly anxious about traveling anywhere by plane. He had once considered taking flying lessons to overcome this fear but then thought better of it. Though he felt instinctively that he already knew how to fly a small plane, he had stopped himself out of fear of being reckless, a curious reaction he never understood until now. In addition, he saw Hargreaves’ work in intelligence as quite similar to his work in forensic psychology. And perhaps now he had an explanation for his almost perverse fascination with torture.
In a subsequent hypnotic session, Gary’s relationship with Caroline was added to this list of missing pieces in his life. Because Hargreaves is fluent in Italian, he is called upon to work with the local resistance movement when the Allies enter Italy. In Salerno, where he is stationed, his principal contact with the resistance is a young woman named Elena Bocchi, Caroline’s previous incarnation. While working together under extremely dangerous conditions, they fall in love. Elena’s father has been recently killed in combat, and Hargreaves does what he can to provide for her family. Their love is deep, and he promises to marry her as soon as the war is over – a promise he is not to keep. Soon after learning of Hargreaves’s death through her connections in the underground, Elena commits suicide by jumping off a cliff. Gary learned that Hargreaves continued to feel terribly guilty even after his death for not being able to keep his promise to Elena and was tormented by his inability to prevent her from committing suicide (which he witnessed in his spirit form).
Gary and Caroline’s love, however, reached back even farther than World War II. In still another session, Gary uncovered a life as Sevastjan Umnovy, an emissary of Czarina Elizabeth Petrovna to the court of Louis XV in the eighteenth century. Given the unstable relationship between Russia and France at this time, his major responsibility is counterintelligence. Caroline is Sevastjan’s younger sister, Lisenka, with whom he has a loving, incestuous relationship. Lisenka worries constantly during Sevastjan’s long diplomatic travels abroad that he is taking up with other women. Her fear is groundless, however, because Sevastjan’s love for her is as deep as hers is for him. Nevertheless, disturbed by a rumor about her brother’s behavior, she impulsively marries a suitor. Several weeks later, regretting terribly having ended the one relationship she truly treasures in life, she hangs herself. When Sevastjan learns of her death, he is devastated and never again returns to Russia. He eventually dies of natural causes, alone and unhappy.
In addition to adding a deeper layer to Gary and Caroline’s relationship, this session brought forward two other interesting bits of information. Once again, Sevastjan’s professional skills and interests are similar to Gary’s. Second, Caroline has a history of using suicide to deal with her problems.
If Gary had a previous history with Caroline that helps explain their attraction, what of his ties to Elizabeth, with whom he shares an even stronger bond in this life? Was their love similarly rooted in previous lives together? Not surprisingly, the answer was yes. Subsequent sessions revealed that they too had shared several lives as lovers. Their pattern was to find themselves in situations where their love was forbidden and thus carried out in secret. In their most recent life together, Gary had been Jeremy, a mathematics lecturer at Oxford University in the nineteenth century.
Jeremy leads a double life. His weekends are spent with his wife and family in the countryside outside Oxford, while his weeks are spent in town in the company of his mistress – who is Elizabeth in this life. Jeremy cares deeply for his mistress and illegitimate children and repeatedly promises to take good care of them. Unfortunately, he dies unexpectedly of pneumonia in his late thirties, his promise unfulfilled. His wife is well taken care of from Jeremy’s estate, but his mistress is penniless and falls on hard times. Though well-intentioned, Jeremy lacked the foresight to plan adequately for this eventuality. (Now Gary finally understood his exaggerated anxiety over the financial security of his family, and why he had felt compelled to take out large amounts of life insurance just in case he should die unexpectedly.)
While Gary and Elizabeth had loved each other in many lives, their present life was the first time their love was lived openly and with public sanction. After so many centuries of clandestine meetings, no wonder their marriage was so fulfilling to them. Their life together had been carefully planned before their births, while Gary and Caroline’s had not. This planning, it turned out, was the key to their enduring relationship, and why, despite its intensity, Gary and Caroline’s relationship had no real future in this life. “It felt,” Gary said, “as though we were two actors who simply ran out of lines.”
Both these relationships demonstrate a recurring karmic pattern. Deep love relationships more often than not have roots in previous lives together. The relationship between a man and a woman is potentially so rich and inevitably so complex that it typically takes many lifetimes to develop fully. When we see couples absorbed in overpowering infatuations, or embittered conflicts, or mutually supportive co-creativity, we are probably witnessing pairs of souls at different stages of love’s long journey. This journey can be lengthened, and made more interesting, if the couple chooses to switch sex roles at various points in order to experience both sides of the partnership.
Excerpt from Life Cycles: Reincarnation and the Web of Life