I have never had a full-immersion past-life memory flashback of the completeness of, say, Capt. Robert Snow, or the woman interviewed in "In Another Life" who revisited her past-life wedding in India. However, I have had a few brief, less complete ones. The first time I heard this bagpipe tune I was transported immediately in my mind and emotions to an experience in a previous lifetime--or just after it. I can get a sense of it every time I hear this piece, but the first time was the most vivid. I have the feeling that it was played exactly as you hear it in this sample. Perhaps the musical style and interpretation is maintained as a tradition, though I don't know that as I write this. Here is the memory as best I can convey it.

I am standing at attention at what is probably a funeral. There are people lined up sideways next to me. I am feeling intensely blissful from the music, in an altered state. There is, however, a sense of confusion. It is like a dream where some part of me knows that there is something momentous I am about to realize, something with a strong sense of finality about it.

That is all I ever get. I surmise that either I was a child and didn't realize who had died and didn't entirely understand what a funeral was all about--or, more likely--because I feel like an adult, not a child--I was newly-dead and didn't realize it. It was about to dawn on me that I was dead, and the funeral was for me (or included me, if it was for several people).

I sent a clip of this recording to a friend in England, and he wrote back that the lyrics go, "There was a soldier, a Scottish soldier, who went a-wandering, went a-wandering..." He said it is quite possible that this tune was used for military funerals. I do know that I have loved bagpipe music since childhood, and an early inclination like this suggests a past-life connection to that culture.

Although I haven't researched the origin of this tune extensively, someone in the Children's Past Lives Forum commented, as I recall, that it was written fairly recently, in the 1800's. That would conflict with my idea of who I think I may have been during this time-period (something I discovered after first writing this page.) What people do when faced with these kinds of contradictions is interesting. No, I personally don't think "parallel lives" is a good explanation, I think it's a cop-out. But these past-life glimpses are surprisingly accurate, and as often as not with further research they turn out to be correct, while the historical information turns out to have been incorrect. So my guess in this case is that the tune predates the lyrics. The words may have been put to an older tune in the 1800's; but because tradition is sacred in many of these older cultures, the tune itself would have been preserved and played verbatim as it was in previous centuries.

I am not, as you might think, blithely ignoring the possibility that it could simply be imagination. But having studied quite a few of these cases, what's emerged for me from this study is that, logically, imagination is often not the best explanation. If you are to be truly logical, then you must admit, when faced with enough of this kind of evidence, that resorting to "imagination" to explain all cases is not due to the exercise of logic at all, but is a function of psychological denial due to prejudice. What appears to be objective logic in that case is actually a distortion of logic.

For the skeptics--and I encourage honest skepticism--I just tried listening to the most popular Scottish funeral bagpipe piece, "The Flowers of the Forest," and it doesn't do anything for me. This recording, on the other hand, never fails to elicit at least a little of the aforementioned response.

See my Update for June 6th, 2005, for a discussion of the 19th-century proposed past-life match.

Here is also a revealing note closing a letter from John Greenleaf Whittier to Ralph Waldo Emerson: "I feel guilty in respect to the 'Bhagavad Gita': but it is too late to repent: and I will even keep it until I restore it to thee personally in exchange for Geo Fox. It is a wonderful book--and has greatly excited my curiosity to know more of the religious literature of the East."

And in "Reincarnation: A New Horizon in Science, Religion and Society" we read, "Sanborn says that for years Emerson was one of the very few Americans who owned a copy (of the Bhagavad Gita), and that his was even more widely used than that in the Harvard Library." In the same text, we also read Thoreau's comments: "In the morning I bathe my intellect in the stupendous and cosmogonal philosophy of the Bhagvat Geeta, since whose composition years of the gods have elapsed, and in comparison with which our modern world and its literature seem puny and trivial..."