John Barrowman: Have I Been Here Before?...

Yesterday I watched another one of those TV programs I wouldn't normally have been watching, except that John Barrowman was the guest star on it. The show was Have I Been Here Before?; it was an episode from last year.

In this show, they put a celebrity under hypnosis and use regression therapy to get them to remember and talk about a past life. They tape them talking about it under hypnosis, and then show them the clip onscreen, and discuss it with them before getting a historian to check into the plausibility of the apparent past-life memory.

Barrowman remembered being a clown named Oliver, who worked as a young man in 1817 in a circus in Bucharest. His parents and brother were trapeze artists; the circus was in a tent, and they lived in a brightly-painted wood caravan. They were travellers - "you might call us gypsies," he said. Oliver was happy at the circus until one day his brother fell from the trapeze. The family lost their circus job and scrounged for money until Oliver eventually supported the family by thievery. That part was particularly cute: he lowered his voice and confided with a mischievous grin, "I like being a thief." He ended up in prison for stealing a woman's purse in the 1860s, if I understood correctly. He described one of the bills he had stolen.

Historically speaking, some of the things Barrowman said checked out - clowns of that time dressed as he had described, circus tents were just starting to be used, there were Russian influences such as he described in Bucharest at that time. On the other hand, the trapeze was unlikely, and caravans would ave been made of canvas siding, not wood. The money he described could have been a 5 rouble note.

All in all, the show was more entertaining than one would think, and Barrowman said he could believe it, though he didn't know anything about 19th century Bucharest.

So I ask myself: what do I think about this, or any other story of reincarnation? I have no religious reasons to believe in it as a general thing. Logically, I think it possible. Intellectually, I think there's no reason to believe that any one single thing happens after death - different things may happen to different people, and be simultaneously possible. Or nothing at all. Or reincarnation may not be what it appears to be - perhaps it's a bit of psychic interaction not bounded by space or time. Emotionally speaking, I don't like the idea of reincarnation at all: I don't want it to be true. But whether I want something to be true or not has nothing to do with the external reality.

Which is just to say: I don't know.

I'd be totally skeptical, except I think I have two memories of past lives - and yes, it could be simple imagination, or some sort of dream, or imagination, but it feels more like memories. One memory - which surfaced in regression therapy rather like that in the TV show, conducted by my friend Beulah - is particularly vivid, strong, and terrifying. It's difficult to believe those could be anything but memories. The other is inconsequential. Both are enough to remove my certainty of disbelief.

Twice, I have had past-life readings from professional psychics, and both were totally unimpressive. One said I had been a Celtic priestess living on an island in the south of England in prehistoric times - I can't say I wasn't, it sounds in character well enough, but I have no sense of memory or identification with the idea. The other seemed even less like me: a story of a Philadelphia merchant with a ship in colonial America. I can't imagine any life I am less likely to identify with, and wondered if the time whether the psychic was picking up walkingowl's past life instead, which she agreed was possible.

So: I believe more in reincarnation than I do in psychics, it seems.

The thing is: how do we define the self, or the soul, or identity, or whatever it would be that would make me that person with those memories? I believe we are as much bodies as mind and spirit: which is to say that it's our chemical composition and genetic heritage that makes us what we are, gives us our personalities, determines the way we think. That, and our experiences and choices. If I were another person in another place and time, what links that person with me now? What kind of carry-over is possible? And why?

Perhaps we are just seeing bits of the universal consciousness, randomly accessible by the subconscious in a confused and fragmentary state. And that is amazing enough.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Teacher's Pet...

I watched this a week ago, but haven't got around to posting about it yet. And now... looking at my notes... ( looking at my notes... )