Updates

There are absolutely no developments to report with the documentary "In Another Life" or this, its supporting website. I had the whim to bring back the cyber-character "Reverb" for awhile on the "News and Announcements" page, but I have no idea if site visitors like him or don't like him, as I don't get feedback. I like him, which has always been enough for me in this endeavor, in general...

I have not heard back from my contact for "Paranormal TV," the online TV station project headed by former TriStar Pictures exec., Jeff Sagansky. Perhaps online TV in general was found to be financially unsound; or perhaps it was ill-timed with the recession. Their efforts to promote my film probably introduced it to at least a small Asian and European audience, though I will never know the specifics. This is fairly typical.

I spent some time and effort trying to validate my own possible past-life match with Matthew Franklin Whittier (younger brother of poet John Greenleaf Whittier). I'm still not 100% convinced, myself, one way or the other. Some years ago I returned to Tallahasee, Florida, where I'd gone to college, some 20 years after I'd lived there. I had trouble finding my way around. It brought home to me, forcefully, the problem with remembering past lives. How can you expect to remember details of a past life, when even your memory of the city you lived in for 10 years is full of holes?

Still, I underwent three hypnotic regression sessions and did some research, contacting a volunteer at the family homestead museum.

Predictably, they were polite (even when I reminded them that John Greenleaf Whittier wrote about reincarnation and had waxed eloquent about the copy of the Bhagavad Gita that Emerson had loaned him, citing the reference), but provided only the barest minimum cooperation, which eventually led me to obtaining Xerox's of nine letters penned by Matthew, housed at Harvard. None of these letters corroborated any of the "facts" or "memories" I'd unearthed during hypnosis. What they did was to stimulate a surge of feelings and put me in an emotional state parallel to Matthew's for several days. Which is not objective proof at all, but is a known side-effect of encountering past-life places or objects (see Bruce Kelly's description of his reaction to boarding a submarine like the one his past-life personality drowned in).* Emotionally, I felt that I understood Matthew deeply--and I also feel that he was almost entirely misunderstood by his family and his biographer (who was a son-in-law, husband of Matthew's daughter who probably had little use for him after he "abandoned" the family when she was a teenager--hence his lack of objectivity).

Believe it or not, I can feel what that was all about, and it was not the picture that the son-in-law biographer painted. If my feelings are accurate, Matthew was pressured into marrying a practical woman after the death of his first wife and their two children; but it was a mistake. It wasn't Matthew's lack of practicality that was the primary problem--it was his fierce (and sometimes aggressive) dedication to truth, in a society which covered over a lot. So he still wasn't able to support a family in that society. It was not due to lack of industry, as he kept pointing out in his letters to his brother as regards how his employer was treating him. But the "hard-headed woman" he had been encouraged to marry kept at him, essentially destroying the marriage and the family. It was, I feel deep in my gut, the family that abandoned Matthew, in the sense of losing faith in him, rather than the other way around--which is why, according to the history, he built a house on Peak's Island and used to spend nights there to fight his insomina (which I have, also). He was still in love with his late first wife, I feel--and when he married his much younger third wife, he was trying to recapture her. I am guessing, therefore, that the third wife looked physically rather like the first. I have not been able to find photographs of any except the second wife. But enough of that, I won't go into it further here, except for one aspect.

Under hypnosis--and I will make an aside here that I do not recommend hypnotic regression except for therapy and for legitimate research--I saw Matthew working as a clandestined ghost writer for political causes, i.e., his writing was pulled for use in political speechs, tracts, etc., and he was paid a small sum, but never met the people he was actually working for, as a precaution. I also felt that he used to write serious works, and get them published through established authors, by giving them away. Essentially, that he influenced events from behind the scenes by giving away powerful ideas for free to influential or prominent people. He believed that if you scrap the personal desire for fame, you can serve the world and even have an impact on world events by giving away "high octane" concepts to just the right people. They, wanting fame for themselves, would take them and use them, not realizing that they themselves were, in a sense, being used--not in a selfish way, but as vehicles. It was a form of symbiosis, one might say. In short, Matthew allowed himself to be ripped off, for the greater good, but subtly, perhaps, to wield influence. Because one's motives are rarely free from some dark element or other if you look closely. Basically, though, he wanted to help and this was the practical way he could do it, since he could not achieve prominence or position himself.

Now, what fascinates me is that this is precisely what I have been doing, even before I stumbled across this possible past-life match. And it is really an ingrained tendency. I've been doing it, but I never really saw it in this light until I started investigating Matthew's life. Matthew was, in effect, a kind of unsung hero--outwardly a "loser", unappreciated by his family. He "lost" in the game of social and financial success for two reasons: his cynical verbal attacks on people and institutions, and his fearless dedication to truth at all costs. Coupled, paradoxically, with his naivete, a trait for which he was teased within his family, and which I also share. I think he had more trouble being responsible than I do, because a recent past-life as a sailor impinged more immediately on him than it does on me. For me, it's just a fun side of myself--for him, it was overwhelmingly close and created a dissatisfaction with being tied down in any way. I also feel that it caused him to be attracted to seafaring people and their music, including, and especially, hammered dulcimer music. The only suggestion of that in the history that I have found, is that his third wife was the daughter of a sea captain. I think he went down regularly to hang out with them, enjoyed their music, and perhaps picked up a few of their habits. I was, of course, hoping some of this might emerge in his personal papers. (If it turns out to be true, no, I did not extrapolate it backwards from reading that he had married a sea captain's daughter.)

In short, if I wasn't Matthew, I am so similar in temperament that I feel I understand what made him tick better than any of his biographers. That much is certain.

So, "In Another Life" has been purchased by some 65 universities or university professors. That means that at least some religion and philosophy classes see this film each year. We don't know what future leaders of society may be seated in those classes; but the influence of that film may be far disproportionate to its social popularity. Recently a colleague sent a link to a blog in which the topic of skepticism about afterlife studies was being addressed. A portion of my documentary was reproduced (i.e., without my knowledge or permission) in that blog. I was very pleased. One of the first philosophy professors to purchase the film was also being quoted in it.

So, it would seem, to me, that Matthew continues his work in his own style. When I say that I have the gut feeling that Matthew sent Charles Dickens a rough draft, which Dickens then used to blast out "A Christmas Carol" within a month and a half primarily to pay off debts, and suddenly found himself the author of a huge hit, without taking any of the profound, embedded metaphysics seriously (all of this but Matthew's part in it is known history)--this is the context in which I make a seemingly grandiose claim like that.** It is not the magnitude of the thing that interests me as much as the continuing pattern. Personally, I think "In Another Life" can, potentially, have as big an impact.

I did find out, after I'd already expressed and documented my gut feeling that Matthew could have had some contact with Dickens, that Dickens had, in fact, written him a letter--but, only the signature was in Dickens' hand, preceded by "Yours Faithfully". Which is to say, apparently Dickens sent Matthew a form letter--and authors generally send people form letters to acknowledge receipt of a submitted manuscript. I've explored all of this in depth in another "Update," including the timing of the letter and the publication date of "A Christmas Carol", which are consistent with such a scenario. Incidentally, the name "Bob Cratchit" is a clever play on words--"Bob", meaning, a shilling or 1/20th of a pound; "Crat" which refers to "bureaucrat" (but literally means, "a ruler" or "member of a ruling body"), and "chit", meaning a note, especially, a note for money owed. Literally, decoded, this name would have meant a person with power or influence who is penniless and owes money. It would have been typical of Matthew's writing style, to build hidden meanings into words and spellings; whereas I don't think it was so typical of Dickens' style. Matthew's writing, in his published "Ethan Spike" letters to the editor, was, I feel, often subtly autobiographical; and so, my gut feeling is that he similarly modeled the Bob Cratchit character after himself and his frustration with his circumstances as a clerical worker (which is clearly expressed in his personal correspondence). So I would guess that the name of that character was retained by Dickens. More typical of Dickens' writing would have been the "Tiny Tim" character, which I feel was his own invention and not part of the original story.

Of course nobody takes this seriously, and that's just fine. In fact, it's probably necessary...

Addendum, 7/24/09
I just finished reading the first few chapters, and skimming the rest, of the biography entitled: "John Greenleaf Whittier: A Biography by Roland H. Woodwell." It is discouraging and embarrassing that so little of it rings a bell for me, at least, on the conscious, intellectual level, with one exception. Keep in mind I am just trying to report this exactly as I experience it as grist for the mill--whether it is confirmed, disproven, makes me look right, or makes me look ridiculous. There is an engraving of a "view of Boston from the South Boston Bridge, c. 1835" which struck me as though I had gazed on the scene many times. John Greenleaf Whittier seems deeply familiar, with many conflicting emotions arising; the family homestead kitchen photograph seems familiar, though the drawings do not; winter scenes of the family homestead from a distance do not seem familiar; the summer one, perhaps; mostly the stone wall, for whatever reason. The portrait of their mother evokes nothing short of fear. The photograph of MFW's daughter Elizabeth, grown, evokes a kind of admiration; the sense is, a secret admiration that she carried on his own traits of fierce independence, despite the fact that she may have turned those very traits against him in misunderstanding him.

The young portrait of Matthew, reproduced in this book...the first time I saw it 2-3 years ago I didn't feel I recognized it and threw the whole case out in my mind. Gradually, it began to wake something up in me--there are traits in it I have worked hard to mitigate. There is sensitivity; their is an intellectual fierceness. There is nobility; at this age, Matthew still had high hopes for his future, I think. He had not yet found that the world shuns the truly honest.

A couple of the portraits of John Greenleaf's contemporaries seemed familiar. John C. Fremont--I don't know as I write this who he was or what his connection with John Greenleaf Whittier was, no less with MFW--seems familiar. Joshua Coffin, the boys' first teacher, who should be familiar, is not. Caleb Cushing looks familiar and I feel an instant dislike, or, perhaps, a markedly divided feeling of like and dislike.

I don't know who he was, either, as of this writing. Annie Fields is, and there is a feeling of sexual attraction; as there is to two of John Greenleaf's beaus. There is something not very flattering there, in terms of inappropriate attraction to the women John Greenleaf was attracted to or friends with; as though Matthew was not responsible in this area, another trait I have mitigated. My sense about the women is that John Greenleaf never consumated any of these attractions, but Matthew certainly would have liked to. It is possible that in at least one such instance, he did, which although never disclosed, put an irrevocable wall between him and his brother. It's just a feeling. Mostly all I seem to have to go on is emotions.

The "East View of Lowell" is interesting, not because I recognize it, which I don't, but because my paternal grandfather in this lifetime (Nicholas G. Sakellarios), upon immigrating from Greece, established a liberal newspaper there in 1906 called "Henosis," which translates to "union with God" in neoplatonic terminology; but which he may have meant in a political sense, i.e., as "unity" or "solidarity".

He lost the paper, according to family history, when he ran editorials against child labor, and his advertisers pulled their ads. This is quite like Matthew's pattern, as I see it. Such coincidences do apparently crop up in past-life matches (see Jeff Keene's case). It's not proof, it's just interesting.

Finally, this author, Roland H. Woodwell, is the only one who substantiates my gut feelings about John Greenleaf Whittier. I'll be very brief about this because it's negative and it's by no means the whole story about him, but my gut sense--and my gut seems a lot more active in remembering than my conscious mind--tells me that Matthew was actually the deeper truth seeker and perhaps even the better writer. I don't think that the "Nathan Spike" letters were all he wrote; and I don't think that even those letters deserved the left-handed compliment that John Greenleaf gave them, of being merely "clever". The author of this book suggests, though doesn't come right out and say, that John Greenleaf was a superb wordsmith, but that he was not the deepest person, and that he was, admittedly, concerned with fame, and success, and not ending up poor. So while he championed causes, he was careful to leave himself allies. He rose within the ranks of his allies, and I think he was careful not to insult them too much (a precaution I ignored while promoting "In Another Life"). He borrowed quite a bit from other poetic sources. He was not above writing popular literature as an additional source of income. Basically, he impressed certain people with his poetry, who got him editorships of newspapers, and in that capacity he was able to get his poems published, and things went on from there. He championed abolition, and rose within the ranks of the abolitionists, but in at least one source the author quotes him as not necessarily liking negroes, at least based on one incident of mob violence where negroes were the perpetrators (page 44).

There's one extremely interesting bit of history as regards Matthew Franklin Whittier in this biography. Matthew married a woman outside the Quaker faith.

At this point, he was barred from Quaker meetings. (One wonders if it couldn't have been partly an excuse, if Matthew spoke his mind as freely as I think he did.) At this point, also, Matthew stopped working on the family farm. Because John Greenleaf couldn't do the work alone--something inside me says, Matthew was doing most of the work, anyway, and the biography describes John Greenleaf taking time out to read or write poetry, but it doesn't mention who was taking up the slack while he was doing that--the decision was made to sell the farm, whereupon John Greenleaf Whittier, his mother and his sister bought a house in Amesbury. I gather this was something of a tense time in the family.

Now. My question is, this was prejudiced nonsense on the part of the Quakers, to ban Matthew from meetings because he married a non-Quaker. If John Greenleaf Whittier were loyal to his family; and if he were a man of principle, one would have thought he would have left the Quakers in protest. Why does this matter to me? I can feel it. I feel that Matthew was deeply in love with this first wife; I felt, in one of the regressions, that he was amazed she accepted his proposal. He needed his brother's support, and so far as I see in the history, while he was offered help later on, he didn't get it at this point. I seem to recall reading in one of the letters that John Greenleaf mailed him a jacket, or something like that. Matthew was not able to support the family, and he had to watch his two children, and finally his wife, die of illnesses I suspect might have been prevented if he had been able to provide for them adequately. He had, I feel, paid the ultimate price for his idealism--though I know full-well this is not the view that has gone down in the history books. He is seen in the history as the ne'er-do-well younger brother, the partying, irresponsible fellow who didn't try hard enough. I feel that, as the younger brother of a rising star, he did find himself in that role to some extent--but his greatest problem was that he was too forthright, naively so--what a late friend of mine called "stupid honest." I think, in short, that like myself, Matthew was "stupid honest," and society spurned him, to such an extent he couldn't even support his family. And that made him bitter--the hopeful young man became embittered, and began writing his satirical "Ethan Spike" letters. But the idealist in him remained, so--if my wild hunch ever turns out to be right--he penned at least the basic plot outline that Dickens dashed off as "A Christmas Carol," hurriedly, to pay off some debts.

I'll repeat here what I've said in earlier Updates, that from a study of the history of how Dickens wrote "A Christmas Carol," it is impossible that Dickens was inspired to write it in a month and a half, the way that, for example, Handel dashed off "The Messiah". Dickens was "inspired" at the time primarily by mounting debts, and he admittedly had no respect for metaphysics. His attitude toward metaphysics was literally akin to Scrooge's famous attitude about Christmas, "a bit of undigested beef." Which is why he titled the original version, "A Christmas Carol in Prose, Being a Ghost Story of Christmas." There is a published draft of this work which shows Dickens' corrections, complete with photographs of the original pages. That would seem to disprove my theory. But I have studied metaphysics for about 35 years now. Whoever created the plot for this story both knew the field of metaphysics and respected it. A man who didn't respect it simply could not have created a powerful story incorporating real metaphysical principles (the life review, earthbound spirits, karma--"I wear the chains I forged in life..."--"turning" or conversion, and demi-gods or celestial beings) in a month and a half as a "potboiler" to pay off debts. He could, however, have taken someone else's story or plot outline and fleshed it out in a month and a half without understanding the depth of what he was dealing with (and without ever being able to repeat the performance in subsequent Christmas seasons). So, once again, if Matthew didn't do it, somebody did. Dickens stole it from somebody and when it became a hit, to put the most charitable face on it, we can say he was too embarrassed to give them credit.

Incidentally, my hopes for this bit of past-life verification sunk when I read in this biography that Quakers didn't believe in celebrating Christmas, and so it wasn't even a part of Matthew's childhood. But then, in his first marriage, we find him as a Baptist (presumably, because his new wife was a Baptist). I think Matthew would have made Christmas the symbolic backdrop of his story partly just to get back at the Quakers! I have long felt that the story was not, actually, about Christmas. It was designed, as much literature then was designed, to walk the reader through a conversion experience, to change the world through literature. Christmas was, again, the symbolic backdrop of the resurrection principle. But he may also have felt, "Okay, I'll show them with their hypocritical ban against celebrations." It would have been just like him, and he had plenty of cause. If Matthew actually pulled this off, the result was two-fold. "A Christmas Carol," according to some writers, almost single-handedly created the Christmas we know today, which has focused many people's attention on the Christmas Story itself. But Christmas has also become grossly commercialized, which means, in a sense, the Quakers were also right...

I will say that all this is exploration. If it turns out to be wrong, well, I always did have a bit of a gambler in me. Recently I found out that a person in a film, who I thought was someone I'd known many years earlier, was actually someone else. It was embarrassing and sobering. Speculation is speculation--the scientific approach is to say you're certain when you're certain; and to say that you're speculating when you're speculating. If something I'm speculating about turns out to be wrong, that has nothing whatsoever to do with something I say I'm certain about. As far as this case is concerned, more information is needed. Mostly all I get are strong feelings and very little by way of verifiable facts. Matthew could simply be a parallel personality onto which I'm projecting my own complexes.

It's possible I could be dimly remembering the life of another New Englander in the 1800's, who knew of some of the same public figures and had gazed on some of the same scenes. If so, it would have to have been someone deeply alike to Matthew in psychological makeup and in talents. Not to blow my own horn, but objectively, not everyone could do what I've done with this website, or the documentary it supports, single-handedly. Nor would everyone have marched to his own drummer so persistently as to almost guarantee worldly failure. I will also say that I have seen many men who seem similar to myself, and I can understand them, but I wouldn't eat off their plate or use their toothbrush, if you get my drift. The sense of identification didn't go that deep. In this case, I would eat off Matthew's plate or use his toothbrush without hesitation, without any gut sense of revulsion. That's oversimplifying things, but there is something, subjectively, that goes beyond what you feel when you see someone of your own type.

More on this if I get more...otherwise I'll probably let it rest, because I'm aware it's probably not helping my credibility (what credibility?).

*Kelly remarks, "I do remember when first seeing the (submarine) Pampanito feeling very sick."

**During one of the regression sessions, the therapist asked me, "What was the happiest moment in your life?" Now, in the hypnotic state, or, at least, in the relatively light trance I was in, one is aware simultaneously of being your ordinary self in the office, and also of being the past personality, of feeling their feelings. So as my ordinary self in the office I knew, of course, that I would like to be able to say "when Dickens came out with my story," but I also was determined to be 100% true to what I was feeling and sensing. So what came to me, bubbling out of the depths so to speak, were two things--"When my first wife accepted my proposal for marriage, which I didn't expect; and when something important got published." That was what I felt--it was as though the facts were dim, while the emotions were still clear. I couldn't get any further facts about what it might have been that was published, just the strong feeling of satisfaction. "Suggestive" and consistent but not conclusive.

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.