YouTube: Have We Lived Before?
I have encountered many people in Unity who believe they have had previous lives. Though I have no recollection of past lives, it seems spiritually logical to assume we’ve all had several. Accepting that the soul survives the death of the body, it is not a huge leap to entertain the notion of preexistence. Whether we have lived before is not a question I will seek to answer, but one we will merely explore.
The late Dr. Ian Stevenson, a pioneering researcher on children who claim to remember former lives, relates the story of Maria, from Brazil, whose father drove off her young lover who then committed suicide. Maria was so distraught that she gave up her will to live, intentionally exposing herself to cold and wet weather and dying of tuberculosis. Before she died, she told a friend, Ida, she would come back as her daughter. Months later, Ida gave birth to a girl she and her schoolteacher husband named Marta. When Marta began talking, she recalled many incidents from her former life, which her father wrote down and corroborated. The authenticity of the case is what drew Dr. Stevenson to it.
Stevenson and now Dr. Jim Tucker have documented thousands of such cases, so many that even the most skeptical would find it difficult to deny the possibility of reincarnation. Concerning Maria’s case, a point that fascinates me is that she made the choice to come back as the daughter of her friend, something she simply wanted to do. I tend to think this is true for us all. We are here because we wanted to come.
I also think we do not know all the twists and turns this life would take. We put our canoe in the river not knowing where the rapids or the quiet stretches will be. Think about all the many phases of your life that have had a beginning and an end. You were born into that particular role, and you died to it. It is now a memory of a previous phase, a previous life. But you are still you. You put your canoe in at one place in the river and you beached at another. How many times does this happen in one life? Many. A microcosm of the macrocosm it would seem.
I have no desire to return to any former period of this life, nor do I care to explore previous incarnations. What inspires me is the role of choice, that I’m not being driven by a need to be something other than I am. It’s all mine to do with as I wish.