This week on Dreamland I interview Bruce and Andrea
Leininger about what I believe to be the most convincing
reincarnation story ever told. Their book,
Soul
Survivor, is
about their son, James, who at the age of two began saying
peculiar things that they gradually came to realize involved
events in a past life.
When he began to mention specifics, they found that they
were actually able to look up the names, for example, of a
ship he remembered being on in World War II. It was not a
famous ship. In fact, it took some doing to find it, and it
is impossible that a child could ever have known it.
In his past life as James Huston, their son had died in a
fiery plane crash while fighting the Japanese. Not only did
he know the name of his ship, he also remembered many other
details, and they actually took their son to meet
still-living members of the ship's company. Bruce Leininger,
who did what eventually became a herculean, obsessive job of
research, eventually was able to use information from his
son to actually find James Huston's still-living sister. In
the description of today's Dreamland, there is a photograph
of nine-year old James Leininger with his sister from a
former life, truly a remarkable picture.
I might still have my doubts about reincarnation--largely
because I am so stubbornly skeptical--but this is not the
only superb case in the record. Some years ago, I
interviewed Captain Robert Snow of the Indianapolis Police
Department about his book,
Looking
for Carroll Beckwith.
Captain Snow had been given a past-life regression at a
party, and had experienced a shockingly vivid memory of
being an artist in the 19th Century.
It was so vivid, and so startled him, that he carefully
wrote down every detail he could remember about the artist,
his habits, the paintings that had been in the studio, and
everything else he could recall. He did not, however,
remember the name.
A search for the paintings turned up nothing until, one day
seemingly by chance, he and his wife stepped into an art
gallery while on vacation in New Orleans and there--to their
absolute amazement--were most of the paintings.
They had been painted by a forgotten artist called Carroll
Beckwith and the reason Snow had been previously unable to
find them was that they had been privately owned for 40
years and had just been put up for sale by an estate.
In other words, he could not have seen them anywhere
because
there were no prints, no catalog copies, nothing at all
prior to their appearing in the gallery.
It could be argued that paintings would be too vague a
subject. One written description might fit many portraits or
landscapes. But there was one painting in particular, a
portrait of a female dwarf, that Snow had seen in Beckwith's
studio that was, because of its subject, completely
unmistakable. It was in the art gallery.
Now, if just one of these two books existed, somewhere in
the back of my mind there would be a little voice saying,
maybe they did the research and worked backward, faking it
that way.
But not two, and one of them by a police detective with a
reputation to protect and the other about a little boy who
is not going to be able to maintain the complicated lies
that would be necessary to bring off a subterfuge.
No, the books are true, and, to my mind, they prove that
reincarnation, at least sometimes, does happen. Understand,
they do not suggest it. They don't actually leave the
question open. It is real.
Does it happen to everybody? I have no idea. But it DOES
happen. On August 13, I published a
journal
detailing why I
think that the afterlife is real. My reasons were personal,
but they were also compelling.
Now, in this journal, I am going to say that not only do I
think that the soul is real and can persist after death, I
also think that reincarnation takes place, at least at times.
Long ago, the visitors indicated to me that the primary
difference between us and other conscious species is that we
are soul blind and they are not. They do not think in terms
of death, but rather are fully integrated in and out of the
time stream, and are on truly extraordinary journeys through
life that are just radically different from our own.
In part, they are here as, in a sense, doctors who are
attempting to cure us of our soul-blindness. I have
understood that this was a big part of my own mission, to
not only help others become aware of the reality of our
visitors, but also to indicate what is different about us
and what their aims are with us.
The book I am publishing in June, the Omega Point, is about
the veil between the worlds dropping at the end of time,
when there is a winnowing and harvest of souls, with a
certain group going on in the physical world, while most of
us meet our final ends as physical beings, either ascending
or descending, depending on how we have lived.
This week's Dreamland goes to the core mission, then, of my
life, of this website and of all my public efforts: to do
what I can to help in the great work of removing the veil of
denial that conceals our truth--and our dead--from us.
It is time to wake up to what we truly are, and leave the
imaginings of the long human childhood behind--among them
that we do not have souls, that there is no afterlife, that
there is no such thing as reincarnation, and that life has
no consequences.
In death, we see ourselves as we truly are, something most
of us are running away from in life. Indeed, this is so
incredibly hard that we are literally unable to do it. It is
why the visitors appear so fearsome, and why Ranier Maria
Rilke said in his
2nd
elegy
about angels, "every angel is terrible."
They appear terrible to us because we see ourselves
reflected in their eyes. We are all like this, all of us,
but there is a cure for our fear of ourselves. It could not
be more simple. We need to do the one thing that is the most
obvious, the most natural and the most difficult: we need to
find in our own hearts compassion for ourselves. And I don't
mean compassion for one small life, but for the whole
vastness of our long time.
Mankind may be a child, but we are not an innocent child.
Facing the reality of the soul, the afterlife and
reincarnation is the beginning of facing one's own truth,
the truth about mankind, and finally accepting ourselves as
we are, and joining the others in the only journey that
really matters, which is toward the holy center, where
ecstasy abides.
