Famous Past Lives
12 Reasons
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This piece by Karen, who recalls the lives of Alexander the Great and Sir Thomas More, sums up why having a famous past life isn't all you'd imagine it to be. Enjoy!

An Update:
 
Update by Karen, Feb 17, 2007: I wrote "12 Reasons" about four years ago, and now it seems unforgivably gloomy, discouraging and defeatist; my healing work in the interim has eased my attitude.  1) is not strictly true; I've actually been surprised at the number of people who believe me.  5) is not categorically true; career-minded historians won't shout it off the rooftops, but I know three people with FPLs (Laurel Phelan, Sandra Sparks, and William Barnes) who have taught academics things they know from past-life memory.  6) is no longer in the slightest bit true, for me; I have found my fellow travellers, there is a support group, and in fact now there is even a book: Breaking the Code of Silence by Laura J. Adams, aka Phoenix, formerly Himmler -- with an introduction by Rabbi Yonassan Gershom.  It's a step-by-step guide to healing a life in which you've done wrong, but it applies very much to FPLs too.  12) isn't strictly true either; many people do understand it's no fun to have such a life in your collection.
 
8), alas, will probably be true forever.
 
But I also want to add one.  Reason 13) is aptly numbered.  And it doesn't apply to every FPL -- just those of power.
 
13. If you became famous by doing nasty things, you have to accept that you did them.  If you had any kind of worldly power in a past life, it's almost certain you did other people the dirty, probably repeatedly, because that's generally how you acquired and retained power in the past.  Because we carry the same soul, the "I", you can't get out of it by saying it was someone else who did these things; it was you.  And that acceptance is crucial to healing the soul-wound left by past-life wrongdoing -- even if the wrongdoing seemed totally justified at the time, or reasonable by the standards of the time.  Facing past badness, and remembering it, can seriously suck.

Twelve Reasons Why Remembering A Famous Past Life
SUCKS
 
A litany of complaint in twelve paragraphs
by Karen
 
 
1. Other people won't believe you.  Even people who believe in reincarnation won't believe you.  People who'd believe you totally if you said you were a one-eyed ditch digger in Mesopotamia will scoff at a claim to have been royalty or the like, even with evidence.  People who don't believe in reincarnation will use your case as ammunition against reincarnation, repeating the old saw, "Everyone claims to have been someone famous."  Because of that, people who want reincarnation accepted on a scientific basis, whom you feel are your greatest allies, consider you a traitor who will discredit their arguments, and they will try to talk you into locking yourself in an attic.
 
2. YOU don't believe you.  You read a book about your past incarnation, look at yourself in the mirror an think, "No way!" on a regular basis.  Even after you've put together mountains of evidence, you are plagued with doubts every moment; you forget it, you minimize it, you figure you're just imagining it or exaggerating the significance of evidence, you want nothing to do with it.  You think, "But I'm so ordinary, how could I have been that?"  Your friends who are in on it (if you have any) get tired of hearing your self-doubts.  And the worst is: for all the evidence you turn up, you can never get the crucial piece, because there is none.  You can never absolutely prove or disprove it, never know for sure that it's real and not something else.
 
3. People tell you you are crazy or a liar.  Perfect strangers feel it's their right to be rude to you these ways.  People with no mental health qualifications whatsoever feel permitted to make impromptu mental health diagnoses of you, share them with you and anyone else listening, and expect you to accept them.  (You tell them your genuine mental health diagnosis, made by a genuine professional, in vain.)  Others take it as their sacred duty to expose you as a fraud.  You are faced directly and personally with the question of whether it's worse to be considered misled and thus incompetent, or to be purposely misleading others and thus evil.
 
4. People don't want to hear about the real person behind the legend.  This is where the perils of past-life memory intersect with the perils of fame itself, of having a public image.  People's impressions of your past incarnation are based on their own projected yearnings, fantasies, fears, prejudices and agendas, rather than truth.  Those who want to believe you were a perfect apotheosis of all virtue don't want to see you as you actually were, a mere human with actual warts.  Those who imagine you were evil incarnate due to bad press accuse you of white-washing if you tell the truth, usually citing the bad press as evidence.  Both dismiss your account with equal fervour.
 
5. You know historically significant things that only you can know, but no one will listen.  You feel like Cassandra of Troy -- knowing the truth, and believed by no one.  If they value their academic reputations, historians will have nothing to do with you.  Or else they'll insist on continuing to present you in your past incarnation as they think you ought to have been, not as you actually were.  Historians critical of you in your past life will write about you as they never would about someone still alive, because they'd be sued in an instant for defamation of character.  But you can't sue them.
 
6. You are alone with it.  There are no self-help books on how to deal with remembering a famous past life, no therapists who specialize in helping deal with it (except to "cure" you of it), no support groups full of people who tell you, "Hey, me too!  You're not alone!"  Even people who believe you don't understand your experiences, because they've never had similar.  Mostly you can't talk about it with family and friends, even those who believe in reincarnation.  Unless you're Buddhist or Hindu, you sure as heck don't want to go to your cleric.  Psychiatric professionals can be even more dangerous, because they can have you locked up.
 
7. Some people who believe you turn out to be fakes themselves.  People with delusional past-life claims create mutual delusion-acceptance societies, where they happily support each other's claims, but in time it comes clear that they are never really talking about anyone but themselves.  Because they see no difference between you and them, they'll include you, and be wonderfully kind and supportive, which feels like a perfect balm to the soul.  But then you realize, after having believed and been supportive in return, that some or most of them are a few cans shy of a six-pack.  You feel like a sucker and you wonder if you're really just the same as them, since you yearn for support also, and your search, not to mention the book you're probably writing, is making you rather self-involved.  The people who want most to believe you are the least likely to.
 
8. Other people, many of them lunatics, claim the same past life as you.  You find out your past incarnation is also being claimed by the guru of a cult in Sedona who think that aliens are going to rescue them from Armageddon and then bring them back to rule the world (this example not made up).  People explain the multiple claims away by saying a life so important required several souls collaborating to make it possible, but you have a sneaking suspicion this is bosh, a means for people to avoid flaming each other on Internet forums.  Sometimes you wish that you an all the other claimants could be given weapons appropriate for the time period, locked in a steel cage and allowed to settle the question permanently (or at least for this life).
 
9. People expect you to look, think, act the same and have similar abilities to your past incarnation.  People think that if you don't create timeless masterpieces or conquer nations in this life, that proves you didn't in a previous one.  They don't take changing nature or nurture into account; they forget that excellence in any endeavour requires not just talent but intense, early-starting training, and later, opportunities which you did not receive in this life.  They don't realize that you might have been incarnated into a different physical build, sex, sex role, culture, moral climate, socio-economic level, set of innate talents, and degree of family dysfunction -- or that you might have a different life purpose.  They forget that souls change, grow, and think, "Been there, done that."
 
10. You probably have soul-traits that look like those of fakes.  If you have a famous past life, chances are you have desire for fame, need for achievement, egotism, and the insecurity that underlies these things, as soul traits -- that's what propelled you to fame in the first place.  So people will say, "See, you're just making it up to impress people."  Even intelligence will seem to some people like showing off.  Because of this, you'll be inclined to drive to drive every trace of egotistical impulse about the life out of yourself.  But because we are mere human beings, this is impossible and the attempt doomed.
 
11. You can't really blame anyone for any of the above.  You can't get angry and object, because all these reactions are perfectly natural.  You can't make people believe you; you can't make people change their paradigms; you can't blame them for believing what they've been raised to believe, and having a difficult time changing their beliefs, because we all do.  You can't tell people there's no such thing as fake past-life claims, because there are.  People know that, by the law of averages, the odds are a few billion to one that you're telling the truth, and they act accordingly.
 
12. And finally, the twelfth reason why remembering a famous past life sucks: no one thinks that remembering a famous past life sucks.  Everyone figures the ego-glow of having been someone whose name is still known is going to put you permanently on Cloud Nine.  Everyone thinks, "I'd be so happy in your place!" without actually trying it.
 
Because of this, you're not allowed to complain.