How many fascinating lives have there been in the past?

The question is not, were you once someone rich and famous; and, even if you were, it probably wouldn’t help you with your present life – although, famously, General Patton realised how to fight the German counter-offensive of 1944 by remembering his retreat from Moscow with Napoleon’s army in 1812. The question is; what can we learn from the past?

There are already quite a few people involved in past-life regression therapy – have a look at Michael Newton – and solving the personal problems brought forward from the past is entirely desirable.

What may need more work is what past-life regression can tell us about the History of the times in which past lives took place.

Can work on this be encouraged?

Is there already published work out there? Maybe you know of historians acting as therapists, or therapists acting as historians, who could give that extra dimension of personal recollection to what we know of times before the 20^th century.

How does my previous post relate to this? Or, indeed, to “History and Reincarnation”?

In fact the novel I referred to, that no-one has yet looked at, was precisely about this. What I found from past-life regression was certainly personal but it was also solidly factual about major figures and events – it put early Tudor history into a totally new perspective, one that historians didn’t know or ignored. My experience is not unique; the Imperial War Museum learned how ‘slow matches’ were kept alight in Nelson’s navy from one of Arnall Bloxham’s regressed clients, while other stories concern World War II.

Unless what is published is driven by reader interest, and what can be more interesting than who we were and what we did and why, we run the risk of being trapped in a two dimensional world – a world in which we suppose the way we think is the only way to think and that those who created past ages might as well be living in the 21^st century.

You will have seen many novels of this “history as current affairs”; novels, sold in supermarkets and newsagents’ shops. Many famous writers have been inspired by past-lives, whether they knew it or not, but too many have written or accepted representations of the past without the depth of experience.                                                 

I welcome your thoughts.