There are, however, a few clues to what I may have been like or what may have happened to me in a previous life.

When I was a child, I was an inoffensive little boy who wouldn’t harm anyone. When I was bullied, for instance, I just would not fight back, no matter how provoked I was or how much I was hit or punched by other boys. I would just roll up in a ball and take the beating without retaliating. Even as a little boy of five or six, I believed it was wrong to fight and to hit people and hurt them.

One day, I ran into the house crying to my father that this boy had been hitting me. My father strode out of the house and grabbed the boy and pinned him against him securely by his arms, so that the boy could not move out of my father’s very strong grasp. “He can’t harm you now”, said my father. “Go on, hit him! Hit him as hard as you can and keep hitting him!” Well, I just stood there, looking at this strange scene. But I could not hit the boy, even though he was totally defenceless and, physically speaking, it would have been easy for me to do so. My father just looked at me kind of disgusted and eventually let the boy go, who ran off, laughing. That was what I was like back then. These days, I would have killed the little swine. So my ideas in this respect have changed a great deal since I was little. What drove it out of me? Well, maybe life has dealt me just one blow too many since those days. But, if I did have a previous life, maybe one of the things I brought into this world this time around was that I didn’t want any more to do with fighting and violence. I’d had enough of it. Maybe such things that happen in our early childhood indicate that, although we may carry no conscious memories of a previous life into this one, we carry into this life the emotions we felt in the previous one

Ever since I can remember, from infancy, I have never been able to go to sleep when somebody else is in the same bed with me. I believed that if I was to fall asleep, they would kill me. Now where did that strange idea come from? Naturally, this has ruled out my ever being married or being in any relationship where I am required to go to sleep when someone is sharing the bed with me. By definition, it also prevents me from undergoing past life regression therapy, for I could never trust the therapist not to harm me while I was in a hypnotic trance. Also, on the subject of trust, which I believe is connected to the above and relevant to it, I have never known what it is to have complete trust in anyone but myself. I trust absolutely no one but me…no, not even God. So, if this complete lack of trust is connected to a previous life, or the end of a previous life, quite obviously something very traumatic must have happened to me back then for me to be the way I am now.

It’s a strange thing to understand, but I have had great difficulty becoming a so called adult. I feel myself to be no older than ten to twelve years old, even though I am 64. Someone I was talking to who reckons he knows a lot about reincarnation told me that I feel this way because in all my previous lives, I have died as a child no older than ten or twelve years and that this life I am living now is the first life I’ve had in which I have grown physically to adulthood…that this is something I’ve been unable to get used to and that it will take quite a few more lifetimes of growing into an adult for me to come to terms with it. Isn’t that strange?

There is just one other thing that I should have added that has bugged me all my life. It may be connected with a previous life and it may not…but I have a strong gut feeling that it is.

When I was five years old in 1952, we first had a television set installed in our front room. One summer evening in that year, I remember I was left alone in the room watching a play on the television. I can’t remember what the play was called now, but it was set in Russia during the revolution. For some reason while watching this play, I became very, very upset and began sobbing bitterly. My mother came into the room and hugged me and tried to comfort me and asked me what was the matter. But I couldn’t tell her why I was so terribly upset.
Twenty-one years later, in 1973 at the age of 26, I went to see the film “Nicholas and Alexandra”, an epic about the Russian revolution and the murder by the Bolsheviks of the entire Russian royal family, the Romanovs. In the last few minutes of the film, where the murders took place on screen, I became terribly upset in exactly the same way that I had done at the age of five and broke down and sobbed bitterly as the end cast rolled and the haunting ending music by Richard Rodney Bennett played. Even today, whenever I watch that film, I become very upset by the ending and I can hardly bear to watch it. I feel particularly drawn to Alexei, whom for some reason, I feel very deeply for and who was only 13 when he was shot to death by the assassins. What does it all mean? I really wish I knew.

I believe the things I described above are far more emotional memories than conscious ones. You feel them more than you think them. Sometimes, these emotional memories can be from more than one past life and are traumatic baggage we’ve carried forward to this present life in our personality and in our soul. I don’t know why the connection with Russia. I have no interest in the country; I’ve never been there in this life and I have no wish to go there (in fact, I was born in England and have never left this country).

Images of the type described above may be upsetting to me not because of what they are or where they’re geographically set, but because they represent something very similar that happened to me in a previous life and disturb me because they awaken very painful emotional memories in me. There is obviously a feeling of terrible loss and heartbreak associated with these feelings. Whether these things did happen in Russia at the time of the revolution, or at least in the First World War, is difficult to say. But there is clearly some connection.

I’m quite sure that reincarnation is a fact for some people (maybe not all), but it does appear to be some kind of natural phenomenon without a purpose and sometimes it goes wrong. I don’t think there is any kind of divine design behind it and we should disregard the popular image of a gray-bearded God in flowing white robes sitting on some celestial marble throne, speaking in Elizabethan English as being behind it all, because that doesn’t make any sense. After all, the popular idea of reincarnation as being one of a soul living many lives on the Earth plane until they are perfect enough to meet God seems very odd, when God could have cut out all the pain and suffering and heartache of our many lives on Earth by making us all perfect in the beginning…rendering reincarnation redundant. At any rate, the present state of affairs is a funny way to run things. It certainly makes no sense to our kind of logic. Then there is the question What am I here for? If I made some promises to someone high up in the spirit realms before I started out on this present lifetime to do certain things and learn certain lessons, what would be the point, as the main process of reincarnation has us forget such promises, as well as previous lives and the interval in between them? So, if anyone out there can tell me what on earth I’m doing here, I’d be obliged if they would inform me, as I’m damned if I know.