A PERSONAL STORY
Early on in high school, I discovered the 1960s political fiction of Pulitzer Prize-winning author Allen Drury, reading in quick succession the first four novels of his famous Advise and Consent series (Advise and Consent, A Shade of Difference, Capable of Honor, and Preserve and Protect). Showcasing the intricate machinations of America’s politicians in federal government, he drew his characters boldly and starkly while centering on the ideological divide between nationalist conservatives and internationalist liberals in the Cold War era when the Soviet Union posed the preeminent menace to world peace and individual freedom everywhere. The struggles these characters endured were energizing to anyone who had the conservative, pro-America worldview, and I took away from them a lifelong maxim annunciated by his favored protagonist, the anti-communist Senator Orrin Knox: “Fear not what life may bring, for men of character have the strength to do what must be done.”
But before his later novels in the series came to be published (Come Nineveh, Come Tyre and A Promise of Joy), I sought to read other works written by him. The one work I found in my school’s library was a nonfiction book he had authored, titled A Very Strange Society: A Journey to the Heart of South Africa. This volume recounted the author’s time spent in the Republic of South Africa in 1966-67 at the height of the white-nationalist regime’s power, interviewing political, social, and religious leaders of all races and viewpoints concerning apartheid and interrace relations there in general. At once poignant and insightful, the account had me enamored of the country and its peoples, its long pioneering history, its beautiful landscapes, and its seemingly insoluble problems. I hoped to be able to travel there myself one day for some direct exposure to it all.
I ultimately got my chance much later in 1983, just after I had graduated from law school and was undecided about which state’s bar exam I would study for in order to practice law. Knowing that South Africa’s summer weather commenced in early November, I planned a trip there for the last two months of that year. Till then, I continued to work as a law clerk at the patent law firm that had employed me during my final school year. The money earned would help pay for the trip, as well my acquisition of a newly introduced American Express credit card that, amazingly, would provide no-interest payments on a balance for six months.
So off I went, with only one night’s hotel reservation booked in Johannesburg, but with a large pocketful of names, addresses, and telephone numbers of numerous relatives of friends, friends of relatives, and relatives of relatives and friends of friends in several cities in the country. With a rental car at hand, I proceeded to tour the nation for two months, going where my interests and curiosities guided me, and stayed mostly with local residents. And, from Jo’burg to Pretoria, down to Pietermaritzburg and Durban, and across to Port Elizabeth, the Garden Route, and on to Cape Town, every South African I met of whichever race and ethnicity was unfailingly gracious, kind, and helpful to me. I was touched by people’s generous hospitality towards me, and I was awestruck at the exquisite topographical beauty of the country everywhere. I was not at all unmindful of the harsh political oppressions of apartheid and the third-class living status of all nonwhites, especially as I spent some time in the all-black townships of Soweto and Imbali. But, through both observation and conversation, I found myself in empathy with all of the hardships of blacks, mixed-race “Coloureds”, and Indians and the fears and insecurities of whites, both English- and Afrikaans-speaking. A very strange society for me too, surely, even as a mere visitor.
Indeed, late on my first night spent at the “international” hotel in Jo’burg (so-called because it was a rare place where all races could congregate socially without the usual strictures of petty apartheid), I wandered into the bar and was invited to join a small group of black men who were drinking at a table. As we were talking, me feeling very comfortable amongst them, I noticed a table of white men nearby, one of whom asked me who I was – presumably because he overheard my American accent. By my reply, it opened up a broader conversation between the other whites and blacks seated at their tables – a little hesitant at first and then testy at moments, but nonetheless civil as I posed some open-ended questions to the overall group. But what made this “group encounter” particularly poignant was that all the white men were Afrikaners who had once been members of the South African Police. As such, they had been the hated enforcers of petty apartheid, which included the pass laws that controlled all blacks’ movements in the cities outside of the ghetto slums (aka “townships”) where they were forced to live.
After about an hour, everyone needed to take their leave, as all of them were working men and the next day was a weekday. The “disbanding” was equally civil, and I left the event wondering how it was that I seemed to have been a minor catalyst in getting two profoundly estranged cohorts of South Africans to have a peaceable interaction with each other, for one evening at least. I felt good about it in any event and ruminated about whether this would be a portent of good things to come on the trip that was about to begin the next day.
There were many good things to come, but the most enduring was this deep sense of familiarity I had with everywhere I travelled in the country. Whether hiking in the Tzitzikama forest and down to Die Eiland near Knysna, standing atop Table Mountain in Cape Town, walking the beaches at Plettenberg Bay or strolling along the Durban waterfront, listening to the hyenas’ shrieks in Sabi game park at night, or just ambling around the rustic towns of Paarl and Stellenbosch, I had this persistent feeling of really being home. Most particularly the Cape province, but the entire country sang to my soul. No place I have lived or travelled in the United States or Canada, or later western Europe, has ever evoked such a deep sense of connection, before or since. (Only once, in the stone ruins of an old Crusader fort called Belvoir in Israel have I been filled with such strong feelings – but that, a story for a later retelling.)
Perhaps because of my American origin, I was able to have many deep and candid conversations with South Africans of all races, instigated by sincere questions from me asked from a place of open, curious inquiry. When I queried people without any prejudgment on my part about South Africa’s issues and dilemmas, I received what I felt to be honest answers, spoken with a range of attitudes that varied from sadness, regret, compassion, cynicism, and anger. Whether at the beginning or the end of every such interaction, each person wanted to know what I thought of their country and its “very strange” society.
In his 1987 book Your Past Lives: A Reincarnation Handbook, Michael Talbot posited that one broad if imprecise indicium of a person’s past life is if he or she has a special attraction to or resonance with a color, a fashion, an animal, a time period, a country, or anything else. In other words, everything can have potential significance of a past lifetime, but what any single thing means in a more concrete sense requires other tools of exploration and discovery to discern. Techniques such as dream interpretation, guided meditation, hypnotic regression, Akashic Records readings, and psychic or channeled information transmission of various sorts are the usual such tools.
While I have experienced dramatic past-life recall via hypnotic regressions and direct remembrances, a most striking event happened in the fall of 1986 when I was introduced to a trance channel in Denver by the name of Janet Pfister, also later known as Janet Laurel. Janet was a music teacher by profession and betrayed a very pixie-ish appearance; short, lean, and sporting short dark-blond hair, she was very down-to-earth and unassuming. Her channeling began quite spontaneously about a year before, the entities (yes, plural) coming to her in a meditation and asking if they could speak through her. At first, I was told, the verbal transmissions were stilted and rather fragmentary, but by the time I had met Janet, these entities were speaking fluidly and sonorously. Her early followers had dubbed the entities “The Critters” because of Janet’s great affection for her terrestrial dog and cat; this affection was carried over neatly to the entities by these attendees at Janet’s sessions.
By the time I first encountered the Critters in November 1986, a protocol for interacting with them had been established: In her basement with the lights dimmed, Janet would sit cross-legged on the floor in front of a semicircle of at most six other people, one of whom would be the “Critter-sitter”—the person designated to work a tape recorder so that each attendee could receive a cassette tape of the session or at least those parts of it that pertained to him or her, at the end. Upon closing her eyes, Janet would start by drawing several deep breaths and then briefly pause. Whereupon, she would begin to speak in a voice unlike her own — soft, sonorous, evenly paced, and with a diction that seemed somewhat formal.
“Good evening, we are pleased to be with you this evening and happy that you are here”, is how they would typically begin. The Critters would then start a short oration of about 10-15 minutes concerning an issue or a spiritual ideal or principle that was apparently applicable to all the persons in attendance that particular evening (virtually all sessions were conducted after nightfall). Having never been in physical form themselves, they would talk about “people in your world” being, behaving, or acting in ways that either aided or impeded spiritual growth and awareness; they said that they were learning from us what it meant to be physical beings as we were learning from them what it meant to be an ethereal being. At no time did they ever (in my own experience of them) evince any judgment or raw emotions about any person or situation presented to them; their communications were always marked by compassion and objectivity. Their words were unfailingly wise and paternal without a hint of being paternalistic.
Following the introductory talk, each attendee serially would then have a period of personal interaction that would last from 20-40 minutes, depending on the quantum of learning that needed to be imparted to each person. Questions proceeded from every component of human life, from health and wellness matters; financial and job concerns; to family, business, and romantic relationship issues. No issue was off limits, and the information conveyed was often very specific – and decidedly transpersonal in nature. That is, the Critters related how many life challenges emanated from past-life experiences, both for the person themselves and in connection with others they knew in the current incarnation.
In one instance, a woman related that she was having interminable difficulty in quitting smoking and wondered why, even though she was seriously motivated. The Critters explained that she had died of exposure in a jail cell in a previous life, and her attachment to smoking in this incarnation was her way of keeping warm air in her lungs. They opined that if she worked on healing that past life’s physical trauma and came to recognize that she no longer needed that “insurance” of warmth, she would be able to let go of her unhealthy habit more easily. Another, younger woman complained in despair of being unable to get pregnant even though her physician saw nothing wrong with her anatomically or physiologically. The Critters told her that in her last life, her children had been taken from her in the Holocaust by force and killed; thus, her seeming inability to conceive was a psychological defense against any possible recurrence of the theft and sacrifice of her offspring. Again, she was advised to work through the emotional trauma that attended the earlier life’s atrocity and that her attempts to conceive a child would then eventually be rewarded. In both of these cases, as well as others I heard, I was in no position to adjudge whether what was told to these women by the Critters was authentically true. However, if “hearing truth” and reacting emotionally are an indicator of its veracity, these women’s subsequent outpourings of crying tears in response to the Critters’ pronouncements speaks loudly in their favor.
On an early occasion with the Critters, when my own turn came to dialogue with them, I chose to avoid any cues or other substantive hints about what I wanted to ask about. In this way, I would honor my innate skepticism and obviate any obvious opportunity for them to confabulate in their monologue answering me.
And so, three years back from my two-month sojourn to South Africa and Zimbabwe in November-December 1983, I asked the following question on January 25, 1987: “I have this strong affinity for a certain place in the world. Can you please tell me what that’s all about and what I am to do there, if anything?” In so doing, I relayed no clues about where that place might be, and so there was none of what modern remote viewers would call “frontloading” of details that might aid in the answering by the Critters. They replied, in synopsis, as follows:
I interacted in past lives there with extraterrestrials, tens of thousands of years ago, and sought to have those experiences again to achieve a certain level of centered awareness and spiritual completeness. That’s why southern Africa felt so much like home to me. During those contacts, I worked with seeing and dealing with energy and participated in time-travel experiments that went awry: Instead of moving a few years into the future, I instead moved several thousand, encountering a “transoceanic trading and exploration society”, but as neither a white man nor a black man. Nonetheless, I had affinity for those who were more technologically advanced, who presumably were white. Thousands of years later still, in another lifetime, I had been an English explorer.
Hearing all of this, I was stunned. Having prefaced my question with no substantive cues or clues about what geography had intrigued me, any of my paranormal interests, or my predisposition towards the notion of past lives, I was tantalized by how the Critters seemed to be reading my soul’s history, and so effortlessly so. It was though they were scanning a computer diskette or, in more modern search argot, doing a Google search of the Internet. The Internet being my soul’s history.
Here’s why: As a child growing up in Canada, I studied British history in primary school. In the 5th grade, I recall studying the east African nation of Tanganyika (later Tanzania) and even made a plasticine figure of a native tribesman, with a large bald head and small frame. I was attached to that figurine and was upset when it somehow got lost. The next year in 6th grade in another school, we studied the history of European exploration of Africa. I thrilled to the oceanic seafaring exploits of Prince Henry the Navigator, Bartholomew Diaz, and Vasco da Gama, but as I read of the expeditions of the English explorers Burton and Speke, and later David Livingston and Henry Stanley, in particular, I experienced déja vu. They all seemed so personally familiar, as if had lived them myself. The determination to find the source of the Nile River, the heat, the humidity, the disease, the unsuitable attire for the tropics, support and supply issues, and financing challenges – it all seemed like memory to me. All very anomalous for a 10 year-old kid who had never travelled outside of North America to that point in his life.
I had also developed an early interest in both time travel and the UFO/ET phenomena. As a preteen, I watched the prime-time television series The Time Tunnel and when I heard of the H.G. Wells novel The Time Machine, I quickly acquired a copy and read it through voraciously. My interest was much less in the story than in scouring the pages for a description of how to build the machine itself. None such existed therein, of course, and so I was greatly disappointed. Similarly, the series The Invaders, about a man bedeviled by UFO and ET sightings and the reluctance of anyone in officialdom to believe or protect him, fired my young imagination. And so I began reading about real-life anomalous encounters in Flying Saucer magazine and in topical books such as Incident at Exeter and Flying Saucers: Serious Business. The several books by alleged ET 1950s “contactee” George Adamski also caught my attention, but I was never inclined to believe his accounts for some reason. In any event, my interest in these matters has persisted to the present day, especially the latter, and I have attended many conferences and related events over the years. I even befriended for a time a man who credibly claimed to have had many direct encounters with ETs, for which, unfortunately, despite some modest fame he ultimately paid a terrible price vis-à-vis his privacy, his health, and his ability to lead a stable life.
But the piercing question remains: How did the Critters know what they knew? If my personal life stories serve to validate the authenticity of all they related to me, even if just circumstantially, their transcendental discernment beggars the imagination. They claimed to come from the 5th (and later the 6th) dimension and, having never taken physical form, they declared that they were learning about us as physical beings in much the same way we were learning about them as discarnate sentient entities. It was a fascinating and very transformative period in my life, but which lasted only a year and a half, to my and many others’ deep regret.
(In 1988, Janet Laurel, the Critters’ channel, was told by her spiritual teacher, John Roger, head of the Movement for Spiritual Inner Awareness (MSIA) in Los Angeles, on a visit to Boulder, Colorado that she was more spiritually evolved than the Critters and so should desist from channeling them any longer. She acceded to his request and thereafter began a spiritual counseling practice based on her training in spiritual psychology from an academic program affiliated with MSIA. After a short time, she became ill with cancer and passed on a few years later, at age 54.)
In December 2018, I sought further validation of the Critters’ assertion that I had had a past life as an English explorer on the African continent at some time in the last two centuries. Having heard of the famed channel Kevin Ryerson (who figured prominently in Out On A Limb, actress Shirley MacLaine’s book-length account of her mystical experiences, later made into a made-for-TV movie), I was able to enlist him for a personal reading. He channels a discarnate entity called Atun Re, who purportedly lived as a human being in ancient Egypt as a wise high priest. When I asked him what he could tell me about a previous life as an English explorer, he related the following:
“You were amid a small group of people . . . an explorer, and entrepreneur too. You went to South Africa to explore the area and its potential. You did map some trails but only led so far up to Zululand [in east South Africa]. You had some past military experience but more as a mercantile individual. You were among a group who established a colony in Zululand, as an attempt to establish contact with the Zulu to set up trade; you met with Shaka Zulu [the Zulu king]. Through the period of his reign, his successors did establish some ties with British trade interests. You witnessed some of your fellows [be] executed by the Zulus, but you survived these incidents. You were involved in establishing diplomatic relationships with that nation for the brief time that it survived as an empire.”
After my reading with Atun Re, I did some research on Shaka Zulu, which yielded some very tantalizing information: Shaka Zulu had been the founder of the Zulu kingdom, ruling it from 1818 – 1828. As the most influential chieftain of the Zulus, he consolidated many communities and reorganized his military into a formidable fighting force. Britishers Nathaniel Isaacs, Henry Fynn, and Francis Farewell were the first whites to penetrate Shaka’s Zulu kingdom in 1824; Fynn and Isaacs’s published diaries later became the main source of information about the Zulu leader. The goal of Farewell, a former British Royal Navy officer, was to travel to Bulawayo, the Zulu capital, to open up ivory-trade links with Shaka. Joined by Fynn, a determined adventurer, and Isaacs, an ambitious teenager, Farewell convinced Shaka to grant Farewell and company a vast parcel of land for the establishment of a trading post at Port Natal. On a later expedition in September 1829 to the area, Farewell first visited Nqetho, chief of the Qwabe, who had fled south after rebelling against Shaka’s successor. Once there, just before dawn on the next day, Farewell, two other white men with him, and five native servants were unexpectedly massacred by the Qwabe chief. Another white man in their company, John Cane, a Port Natal settler who had been left to guard their wagons some distance away, was apprised of the treachery by one of three escaping native servants, and so he had time to flee and fortunately escape a similar end.
The synchronicities between Atun Re’s account of my reputed past life as an “English explorer” and the established historical record concerning Britons’ exploration and settlement of southeast South Africa are truly startling. If, as Atun Re asserted, I witnessed and survived an execution of my “fellows” by the Zulus, it may suggest I might have been that man named “John Cane.” While not literally a witness to the slayings of Farewell, et al., he did, as the only other Britisher present there, survive the grisly event that happened nearby and live to return to Grahamstown, an established town in western coastal South Africa.
More research is needed to determine what role, if any, John Cane may have played as an “explorer”, “entrepreneur”, or facilitator of “establishing diplomatic relationships” with the Zulu nation during the reign of Shaka Zulu and his successor in the years spanning 1824 – 1829. It is possible that there was another historical personage who better fits that biographical sketch, and I hope that further research yields that identification. For the time being, I pay a nod of tribute to the pluck and courage, save the greed, venality, and amorality, of the man who led the first expedition to Zululand with the goal of new, peaceable commerce in a then uncharted land.
As for the Critters, I still continue to marvel at their preternatural ability to read me and others as souls having multiple human experiences, lifetime after lifetime, whose essential purpose appears to be an ethereal “program” of individual soul growth through evolutions in awareness and consciousness. My realization of this fundamental paradigm has aided me immeasurably in understanding not only my own life but in contextualizing so much of what happens to people everywhere in our world. With a bigger context in which to view life, a lot more of what happens to any of us becomes not only more bearable but potentially inspiring. At the very least, it serves to induce greater compassion, trust, and faith. And hope, even love, for both one’s self and others. Just maybe.
ADDENDUM
Here is the transcript, in relevant part, of my Critters Session on January 25, 1987:
“First of all, it is going to sound silly to you at first, but we want to put this into some perspective for you.
For the last 150,000 years, that place on the globe has been one of energy and one of strategic importance. There is part of your being that has dealt with this area in terms of both of those things previous to this life. One very specifically had to do with the sense of extraterrestrials; the other sense, the other times that we observe have to do with physicalness and human beings and “gateways to power.” It has been all of these within your experience.
There’s a part of your being that believes that if you go back there you get to interact with extraterrestrials again, which was exciting and bewildering to your human being, but acceptable to your spiritual being. There’s a part of your being that says that those who have lived upon the land for centuries do not know the value of their own land, and you have made some very discreet and indiscreet judgments about that in your being. And problem being that, in the overview, there’s nothing that you in particular are going to do to shift your inner belief systems into a place of nonjudgment by going there. In fact, probably, by going there you will increase your sense of judgment.
With that, then, in mind, it is to recognize that if you were to go there, it would be to re-experience that centeredness of energy and the centeredness of calling upon those parts of your being that have recollections of dealing with those outside of human experience in that place and coming to a certain sense of validation — that is what we would see in a spiritual quest, what would be the most important aspect of going there. That is, there are parts of your being that know exactly where to go and how to be of mind to attract energies that are not of this world, so to speak; and only in that aspect would it be likely that you would find a sense of spiritual completeness there. We say that there are other places upon the earth that you could also go for those kinds of experiences, but this is something that is definitely recorded within your being. The largest of permission coming from the cognitive mind to say that this could be so, hmm?
Q: But I like that place a lot!
Yes. And it feels like home, so to speak. That’s all we have to say on that . . . . Your perception that you might come to harm in going there if you were to bring up a sense of political issues and so on, we say would be fairly accurate; there are a few that owe you karmically, so to speak, but not necessarily that you need to work through it in a physical manner — that can be worked through in energy once you come to identify a little more what it is you are connected with there. And we see that as being a time process for you. (To work things out karmically does not require one’s physical presence because karma has to do with the sense of judgment that you have upon yourself first and primarily, and once you come into an understanding of what grace and love and acceptance are, then you don’t have to go by those rules so to speak, and you can release yourself from them in the midst of them.)
Q: The extraterrestrial connection is intriguing, but I felt I had an affinity for the people there.
Well, some of the natives had quite elaborate dances to deal with the extraterrestrials. That is, until, as you know it, the white man came in, most natives of the area saw energy quite well. They didn’t always deal with it well, but they saw it quite well, and part of the aspect was that they had many native dances that dealt with extraterrestrial energy. That they basically lost because of the change in tribal structure, etc.
Q: Then why would I have any affinity for the whites today?
It is not necessarily that they are with those. In a similar pattern that no longer exists in terms of any archaeology that could be dug up, but in a similar pattern to the Egyptians — prior to that, probably 45,000 years before that — you participated in that which is called “time experiments” — movement across time structures as the human illusion has been. These had to do with the movement of your place — your body, time, etc. -‑ into the future and back. They did not perfect it very well and you moved more than what you would say the next few years; you moved several thousand years into a place when there was first a sense of transoceanic trading and exploration, into a time when you weren’t exactly a white man at the time, but there were white men around you. You were at odds with both the natives of the area and the others that were there, but your affinity was for those who were, relatively speaking, more technologically advanced. That is the only sense of connection that we can find in your energy, and that you were an English explorer later on -‑ thousands of years apart.
Q: That tantalizes me! I’d like to know more.
If you would write some short stories about the subject, you might come to know some more information from within yourself, for, in fact, it does lie within yourself. It may seem to be fantasy, but then look at it with another “I”, so to speak.”