Thomas G. Shafer, MD

In this article, Dr. Shafer discusses his recollections of two of his past lives and then goes on to offer opinions and speculation, largely based on Jewish Hassidic thought, regarding the actual nature of the eternal existence of the soul, the reason for successive incarnations and the role of Past-Life Therapy in the process of spiritual evolution.

Bernie was born in 1925 in Omaha, Nebraska. Creighton University wouldn’t take him because he was Jewish but he did get a scholarship to study engineering at the University of Omaha. And the one thing he wanted to do more than anything else in life was to fly P-38 Lightnings.

He did become an aviation cadet but an accident in advanced training disqualified him for fighters and he ended up flying a Stinson L-5, a puddle jumper. When he was shipped to England he made the best of this and flew some missions extracting downed pilots from France while he was affiliated with a British covert operations squadron. Then, after the invasion, he was assigned as liaison pilot to a U.S. Army hospital unit.

His short life ended when he was not quite 21 years old. He flew a mission during the Battle of the Bulge in which he landed and extracted two wounded soldiers. He was shot down on a return mission and later killed by an SS unit, shot in the back of the head.

The Buffalo Sergeant was born around 1845. He left his native home in West Virginia to join the Union Army in 1863 and caught up with them in Pennsylvania, just in time for the Battle of Gettysburg.

He was the type of person who makes history but no one ever remembers. He was a crack shot and distinguished himself as a sniper and, later in the war, as a combat infantry Sergeant.

He decided to go back in the Army after the war. His background raised a problem then because the Army had become totally lily white and he was 1/4 Native American. He was assigned as a Sergeant to a “Colored” infantry Regiment, one of the Buffalo Soldier regiments in the west. While the U.S. Army does not like to officially admit they did it, he and his fellow soldiers trapped an Apache War Chief named Victorio down in Mexico and annihilated him and his band.

In the 1880s, the Buffalo Sergeant retired from the Army. He lived near Ft. Riley, Kansas, and worked as a gunsmith. He never married and lived in a room by himself, sometimes having drinks after work with some of his active duty and retired Sergeant buddies. He lived like this for a few years, then committed suicide one morning when he realized he had woken up in the midst of a major stroke.

So, those are the stories of two soldiers who lived in two centuries. But what do they have to do with me? Quite a bit, in point of fact. They both were me. Or perhaps I should say I was each of them.

The story of each of these men developed gradually over a period of about a year. The facts of their lives were retrieved through a few hypnosis sessions but mostly came to me spontaneously in the form of vivid “day dreams” and dreams at night. While I don’t intend this to be a “Search for Bridey Murphy” type article, historical details were checked. I was unable to obtain completely airtight proof or even exact names but there were many verifiable details regarding aircraft types, military unit designations, descriptions of geographic areas, etc. that I developed over the course of a couple of years. I recovered enough data to convince my rather skeptical self that the psychic events relating to these “lives” were, indeed, memories of past events I had experienced in two other incarnations.

But, going back to my question: Who am I? Right now, I define myself as a 52-year-old white male physician who writes some articles for journals and magazines and hopes to get a novel published soon. And my conventional Western religious background tells me that, after death, a hopefully much older white male physician will continue to exist intact with all his personality characteristics and memories. (Of course, if said physician attends the right church, said eternal existence will be a pleasant one and he will not need to buy any asbestos underwear).

But, how can this be? Perhaps Bernie and the Buffalo Soldier had hopes of such an eternal existence also. Where do they fit into the scheme of things? Are they going to exist only in my memory? Does that mean they are dead?

One explanation is that there is a difference between the personality and the soul. The personality is made up of all the things which make us unique individuals, such an earlier memories, education, bodily characteristics, etc. The soul is a pure essence of life which exists separate from these things and is the part which is eternal.

According to this theory, one of our major tasks is to realize that all these external trappings are unimportant and perhaps even illusions. The goal is to slip back to a sort of a pure soul-centered consciousness which becomes an enlightened eternal state.

But, I would ask, why bother if this is the case? Why go to all the trouble of reincarnating and learning lessons in life after life if the end point is simply to forget everything? And, is not this returning of our separate consciousness to be merged with a Higher Consciousness from which it sprang – a form of death in that all the things which it made us individual and unique cease to exist?

An alternative theory is one of a sort of universal remembrance. Between lives and at the end point where we finally cease reincarnating, we recall all of our past experiences. This gives us an opportunity to make the classic 12 step group “fearless moral inventory” and choose which lessons we need to learn in the next life or eventually decide that we’ve learned enough on the earthly plane and it is time to stop coming back.

This would leave our eternal soul something made up of many different individuals. The external trappings such as race and height and gender would still be insignificant but all the memories would be there. But does that not mean that each individual incarnation actually died, living on only in the memory of some sort of master data record?

I believe the key here is continuity. I am certainly a much different person in terms of thought processes, education, height, weight and overall appearance than I was when I was six years old. And I recall very little of that time in my life. Yet, even though I once existed as a human being with vast differences in intellectual processes, physical characteristics and memories, I am still the same. Those past thoughts, actions and bodily shapes are simply part of a continuous process of growth and evolution to my current state.

The physical and mental experiences of past lives would be the same. Six-year-old little Tommy was, in many ways, as different from my present self as Bernie the Aviator or the Buffalo Sergeant, yet we are all one and the same and these two “previous” individuals are really sort of child-like earlier forms of my continually evolving soul. (Though I suspect, if I went back and told the Aviator and Sergeant that they were simply “soul children” of a somewhat fat middle-aged doctor presently sitting on his couch dictating this essay into a computer, Bernie would have poured himself a stiff drink and the Buffalo Sergeant would probably have bopped me one).

And why all the secrecy? While we have developed psychological and meditation techniques to access information from past lives, most of these memories spend very little time in our consciousness. There is an ancient Jewish legend that the fetus in the womb receives the total soul and spends its nine months contemplating all the actions of all its previous existences. Then, right at the moment of birth, an angel touches its upper lip. That is why we all have a small cleft above our lips and why we forget our past lives.

This forgetting process would, at first glance, seem arbitrary and almost cruel. What sort of Higher Power would allow us to repeat the same mistakes over and over with no knowledge of what has not worked for us before? As a matter of fact, this very image of an endless cycle of repetitive rebirth and suffering we need to escape from is a basic tenet of Hinduism and many forms of Buddhism. It is referred to as the “Wheel of Suffering”.

But this doesn’t leave our Higher Power on a very good moral level. Said Power would be the equivalent of a State Trooper who goes to work each morning and removes all the speed limit signs on his stretch of highway. So the only way you learn what is your limit is to experience bad Karma in the form of fines, court costs and increased insurance rates. Hardly a fair system, is it?

The Jewish Masters of Kabbala have an answer for this. They believe the most important characteristic of each individual soul is its free will. If each of us re‑entered this earthly plane with full knowledge of the mistakes we had made 50 years before and what we need to do to rectify them, would this not interfere with our ability to make a free choice when confronted with similar circumstances? And would we not be making our choices out of a fear of consequences rather than out of a desire to evolve into a more loving, compassionate soul?

There was a fascinating episode of the old Twilight Zone series in which a woman was a bit of a New Age charlatan and swindled people by giving them false past-life readings. She went to sleep one night and woke up a century later, sort of like Rip Van Winkle. She found herself in a world where everyone remembered every detail of every past life. People came up to her and shouted at her and attacked her for terrible things she had done to them centuries before. She saw people sitting around in horrible shape doing nothing because they knew they were being punished for something they had done in a previous life. Finally, she had a very difficult session with an employment agency counselor because she listed work experience from one lifetime only and it took at least a good century worth of previous experience in this world to qualify for a job.

The extreme case of the need for forgetfulness would involve a person who had performed particularly evil acts in a preceding life. How can they undo the damage they have done if they are continuously beset with memories of this past behavior?

Yet, people do benefit from doing past-life therapy. There are multiple articles in this Journal and other sources documenting that recollection of past-life incidents can be quite useful, especially in dealing with relationship problems and phobias.

Personally, I don’t see any free will violation involved in a person going to a past-life therapist or meditation instructor. In that case, the individual is making a conscious choice to retrieve past-life data and learn from experience. To use my old example, it’s sort of like their stopping at the rest stop and asking the traffic cop what the speed limit is.

So, I would conclude this essay by saying that continuity is the essence of our existence with our present self being the sum total of all of our previous experiences, remembered or not. I believe there are times when a lack of recollection of past-life data is important for growth and also times where it is equally important that we do begin to remember.

Finally, I don’t present these ideas and concepts as some sort of rigid, inflexible dogma. Rather, I would like the reader to consider this article to be a springboard for discussion and I would be interested in all of your thoughts.