A Past Life Recall

The First Opening of the Flood Gates

This astonishing first experience came not as a dream, I was wide awake; not as an intimation – nothing like a déjà vu episode, nor a vague hunch emanating from something observed in a fleeting moment. It was as real as anything could possibly be. All my senses were engaged. It was a total physical experience. I had my first past life memory on a warm and quiet spring evening, along about twilight time. This was in 1972.

I and my wife, Margot, and our infant son were living in a small ground floor apartment in Berkeley, California. Sorrel, our son, was asleep in his crib in the other room. Margot and I were resting in our bed, a tiny alcove in the living room, half enclosed by a colorful batik cloth she had sewn together. A slight breeze wafted through the front window, stirring our makeshift bedroom curtain.

We were casually talking about the day, making our plans for the weekend. Suddenly, I felt an excruciating pain on the bottom of my left foot. It felt as if I had been running barefoot on ground strewn with stones, and had landed with my left foot on a hard, pointed rock.
I literally screamed, ouch! And looked down to see what had actually caused so much pain. And when I looked, I was in another place, not in my bed in my house on Shattuck Avenue. I was in a wild place running along a narrow ledge above a deep ravine. I was in another time and another place. And I was as vividly there as one could be in any place in the real world. All my senses were plugged into that time and place.

Margot, startled by my outburst, quite naturally screamed, “What’s wrong?”

I turned to tell her, and when I did, I was back in our bedroom-living room. I told her that I had been running, and that I had landed on a jagged rock.

She looked at me with wide opened eyes.

“What rock?”

“There,” I said, and looked back. My foot still hurt very much. My brain, however, registered not only the pain, but also a strange feeling of exhilaration. For when I looked down again, I was back in that other time and place, and I was excited by a sense of adventure, a wild experience was opening before me.

Alternately, looking down at my foot and looking over to her, I found myself in these two worlds. The one, my usual world; and the other, this exotic landscape I had never seen before.
The cliff I had been running along was on a mountainside covered with giant outcroppings. Below the cliff, tall trees reached up from the ground, perhaps about twenty feet above the cliff’s edge. Everywhere I looked, I was surrounded by wilderness.

Margot kept prodding me to tell her what was happening. She too seemed to be caught up with this strange adventure, willing to go along with what I was telling her, not questioning me so as to be convinced, merely asking for details so she could be in on the story from beginning to end.
I had been chasing a wild creature, I told her, a creature somewhat resembling a cow or a steer. And I had cornered the animal at the end of the cliff. The cliff stopped abruptly at the foot of a sheer rock-faced wall. The creature had nowhere to go to escape me.

Then…I looked over to Margot to see how she was absorbing all this strange information, and was back in our house. She ran her fingers back and forth through her black, curly hair with frantic motions, as if what I was saying had to be massaged into her brain. She had an excited look in her eyes.

Then, I repeated, I used my mind power and psyched the animal into diving off the cliff and to his death. It seemed to be for me my usual way of hunting. Margot wanted to know where this place was and what time in history was this happening.

I couldn’t say. I had never given any thought to past lives and reincarnation. It didn’t occur to me until she asked that question that I was having a past life memory.

It seemed to me that I was in the body of a pre-European man, alive somewhere on that continent in an early age of human history. I was wearing a fur skin wrapped around my waist. And that was all the clothing I had on.

What’s happening now? She asked.

I’m running back to the cave to get help. The others are excited to hear about the dead animal. We need to cut the creature open, gut him and remove his entrails.

I tell Margot she is there among the people, stirring something like a brew of roots in a crude clay pot sitting on flat stones over an open fire. She has long, black, greasy hair, a fur skin around her waist.

I tell her that all the others in the cave are women. I am the only man in the group. We are about fourteen in number. I didn’t count the people, just guessed.

There is only one other man, and he is useless. He is young, slightly older than a boy. But he is helpless. He has a huge dent in his skull running from his forehead to the crown of his head. His head had been smashed by a rock. His faculties are gone. He cannot talk; only make odd noises. He can barely do anything. He is of no use. But we take care of him anyway. He is one of us.
Margot wants to know what happened to the boy.

I tell her we first must fetch the cow and skin the animal and start to smoke the meat. Tonight, we will feast. All eyes are gleaming. It’s been a long time since we have eaten much meat.
The intensity with which I was caught up with this living experience spilled out into the quiet night. I paused in my account to look around the room, re-orient myself to my actual life. But which existence was more real? Both were equally real to me. I could see, smell, hear, and touch everything in that cave. The smell was very strong. Human bodies, caked with sweaty grime. Oily, stringy hair. Smoke from the fire. Black soot on the cave wall by the entrance where a fire was kept alive, smoking. A fire to keep animals from entering the cave at night.

Looking back and forth from one reality to the other, I was beginning to feel woozy. I was losing a sense of being in a place in a solid way, as if I were more a spirit being, floating as it were in a vacant atmosphere outside of time and space. I felt as if I were a traveler, entering the physical world through an invisible portal of some kind, stepping into a physical reality, experiencing it, but not actually belonging to it.

I had drifted off into this sort of reverie, when Margot pulled me back. She insisted I tell her what had happened to the boy, to the other men.

I continued my story. Now, the memory of what had happened flooded into my mind. Rapidly, I told her the circumstances.

We had been on a hunting trip, all the men out together looking for food. My psychic antennae were totally alert. I sensed the coming of a great avalanche. I yelled to the others not to go that way. That way lay danger. I shouted to them to follow me in the opposite direction.
But they ignored me. They always ignored me. None of them ever listened to my psychic insights. I was a prophet to the group, whom no one ever heeded.

This, obviously, was a sore point for me. And still was in this, my current life. From early childhood, I had always been beset with premonitions, intimations of things – particularly of things not quite right. But no one paid any attention to me. I was just a kid. What did I know? This was the prevailing attitude of my family, my friends. Somehow, whatever I had to say was looked upon as sheer nonsense.

I grew up steadily becoming introverted. I learned to keep my own counsel. I became something of a cynic, ignoring the people around me with increasing indifference, hating the institutions that controlled me, despising their irrational rules and dehumanizing injunctions.
And sure enough, the avalanche came. It roared. It thundered down the mountainside. Huge boulders, rocks, sand, trees, everything tumbled down burying all the others. I raced forward just in time to snatch the one who was now the crippled young man dwelling in our cave. I pulled him back from the avalanche just in time, but not far enough away to avoid his getting smashed by the edge of a boulder.

And now I was the only man, the only one to hunt and bring in the meat. None of the women would go with me. For some reason, they seemed to blame me for the loss of the other men. I felt alone, abandoned, tolerated only because I was essential to our group’s survival.
With this last thought coming through to me, the scene, so vivid and real, vanished. Margot and I were alone again in our bed. Twilight had shifted to darkness. The streetlights outside our window glowed bringing into our space the only means to see by.

We looked at each other, dumbfounded. What to make of all this?

We talked for several hours, but reached no real conclusion. It was Margot who labeled this experience as a past life memory. This was actually a new concept to me. I had heard about such things in passing, as it were, listening to other people’s conversations. Reincarnation had never entered into my thinking.

And now this spontaneous event had made my ears alert. Everywhere I went, it seemed, people were suddenly talking about reincarnation. After all, I was living in Berkeley, one of the birthing places, you might say, of the New Age.