Updates

I am going to continue in "blog" mode, but specifically with regard to my personal experience of past-life memory and reincarnation. In the previous entry, written not so long ago, I reported that my girlfriend of six years ended our relationship. This isn't enough of a blog for me to go into that in detail, because, believe me, I would bore you very quickly, long before you got to paragraph 17 or 25 or 35...

But, something else has come up as an interesting sideline. I have mentioned in previous Updates that for quite awhile I thought I might have identified a past incarnation of my own, as Matthew Franklin Whittier, younger brother of poet John Greenleaf Whittier. I won't go into all that again; the relevant Update is 6/6/05, below. Then, a couple Updates ago, I reported that I had finally obtained a copy of a portrait of Matthew as a young man, and also a copy of a photograph of his second wife, and that neither portrait "rang a bell" to me, and I concluded I must have been wrong. That woman has something of the same body type as the girlfriend who just left me, but I would rather be inclined to think that even if I was Matthew, it was a recaptulation of karma with someone who looked and acted somewhat similar, rather than being the same actual person reincarnated. Still, it was yet one more interesting parallel in a sea of deep parallels with this historical person. And it would make sense, because Matthew left his second wife.

But, that's not the new information. What's new is that I came across Xerox copies of a letter that Matthew wrote as a young man, which I had obtained some months earlier. At that time I felt his handwriting was too different from mine, although his predicament, his tone, his naivete, the way his thoughts turned and progressed--all of it was exactly as I might have written today. But I didn't feel anything viscerally.

All that changed the other day. Because, after a relationship breakup, for awhile I go into a kind of altered state of extreme sensitivity. I can barely stand to hear music; I am keenly aware of every nuance of people's states or attitudes. And in this state, as I re-read that letter, I knew that this was me writing. Even the handwriting now looked familiar, and it even has the tendency to drop off at the end of words, making the letters smaller or not finishing the word, as I do now. Moreover, I could have written that letter today in my present situation. At the time of writing the letter, he had had some kind of personal tragedy or hardship in his life. He was near-destitute, despite his prodigous talents, and he was writing a farmer who his brother had introduced him to, to ask about employment possibilities in the "West," which at that time to him, meant (as I recall) Michigan. He was in Maine. And he was pouring his heart out to this stranger, relating thoughts exactly like what I am thinking today about God and not making too much of his own troubles when others in the world are suffering more--assuming the man he was writing to was a fellow-abolitionist, when he didn't really know. Downplaying his own talents, trying to get just an ordinary farm-hand job, even though he had the capacity to be as good a writer, I believe, as any of the "Fireside Poets". This is me to the last inch.

But this time it wasn't the parallels I was interested in, nor which I need to report here. It was that I felt that this was really me writing this. It means that nothing has changed in, what, 150 years or more. You can get a new body, but karma changes much more slowly, and here you are, still, after all that time, in a new body and in a technologically transformed society, in almost exactly the same situation, expressing the same thoughts, and by-and-large, making the same mistakes.

Because, championing the cause of reincarnation has roughly the same effect on one's social acceptance now, as abolitionism did then. So if you are going to be an abolitionist in the mid-1800's, you would do well not to assume the person you are writing to for help and advice is, also, and you might not want to trust them to the point of pouring your heart out to them. Likewise, if I choose to be a reincarnationist, I might do well not to make it possible for prospective clients and/or employers to be able to Google my name, or at least my company name, and immediately come up with a link to this website. Finally I did manage to sever the connection online between my company name--which I won't repeat here!--from this website. It wasn't easy after nine years of promoting them together.

But that was Matthew all the way. He wrote and published scathing commentary on the social and political foolishness of his time, exposing hypocrisy--and then wondered why they were trying to force him out of his job, and why they made his job a living hell and kept his pay low, despite stellar performance. They actually killed him in that job, I think, given how he died--they burned him out. He was too naive to realize it. He was proud of the watch they gave him at retirement, when his health was failing and he had to retire.

So, anyway, I felt I should report this as new data, as grist for the mill. I don't have a firm belief about it one way or the other, it's just that I definitely had the subjective experience.

As of 4/26/07, when I am not so much in that raw state, I don't have the same intense feeling of identification with the writer of the letter. I do, however, feel that the writer is very much a parallel personality in a similar situation. So I continue to suspend judgement on whether it's a genuine reincarnation case. Some of the parallels are subtle, and would only be apparent to someone who knows me well. There is a "poor me" aspect to the writing, and also a nobility. There is a naivete inasmuch as he is opening his heart to a stranger, assuming, but not knowing, that the other person actually shares his passion for abolitionism (a deadly assumption, in terms of finding employment, if he was wrong). There is the clear irony that an extremely bright, capable, dedicated person is scraping by on farm labor, along with the effort not to make too much of this irony while hoping that someone with the ability to hire him will notice. And various other traits besides. If you substitute "reincarnation education" for "abolitionism," and update some of the language and writing conventions, you will get a fair approximation of how I tend to present myself, and if you want, you can compare it in tone to some of my previous Updates.--Stephen S.

Music opening this page: "High Landrons," Eric Johnson (Ah Via Musicom album)
All I can say is, if you have a chance to see Eric in concert, don't pass it up...
sell the car and hitch to the concert if you have to.