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 5^th 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 6^th 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 5^th (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.”

Pluto and its largest moon Charon superimposed on Earth.

Credits: NASA

From a mundane, objective perspective, the next two years will probably be very tumultuous for the world socially and demographically, economically, politically, and even militarily. The world is rife with evidence of big disruption. Based on what has notoriously transpired in just the last several years, it is not too far a stretch of imagination to prophesy major changes that will be truly paradigm-shitting for many, if not all, of the world’s peoples.  For those of us with esoteric bends, astrology presents an extraordinary tool for gaining deep insights into, and over-the-horizon expectations and understandings of, such changes. The planets and other celestial bodies are in motion all the time and, according to the metaphysical wisdom of the ancients, “As above, so below.” Indeed, there is a veridical spiritual science behind life as we know it here.

What follows is an astrological profile of one major planetary transit in the near offing. There are significant others at work too, but this one will be particularly notable.

Astrology tells us the United States is set for its “Pluto Return” during the years 2022-24. Just like individual people have their own unique birth chart, so do countries.  The birth chart of a country highlights its energetic vibrations and the themes that can be expected to unfold over time.

The issue with developing a birth chart for any country is knowing what date to use for its origin.  The birth chart used by many astrologers for the United States is cast using the data of July 4, 1776, at 5:10pm LMT, in Philadelphia, which reflect the alleged date and time (and place) when the Declaration of Independence was signed, our nation’s founding document.  As such, they could also be construed as sourcing the birth of the key memes, drives, and values of the United States as a nation.

According to this commonly used chart, the United States will be having its “Pluto Return” from 2022-24, which means that Pluto will be returning to the exact same position in the solar system that it occupied on July 4, 1776.  Because a Pluto Return takes about 247 years to occur, this will be the first one that the United States has ever experienced.

Understanding Pluto

Pluto is the planet associated with death and rebirth. It is the force that destroys in order to build anew. As the Lord of the Underworld, Pluto exposes hidden truths, dark secrets, and all shadowy stuff.  It brings the dark, the hidden, and the taboo up to the surface in order for it to be dealt with and faced.  But Pluto is also highly creative, in that whatever is destroyed will give rise to something new, purer, and beneficially transformative coming to the surface. Pluto rules this overall process of transformation. Dark-night-of-the-soul moments will lead into a spiritual awakening and then ultimately a rebirth.  Pluto’s energy is subtle and slow-moving, but when it is through with whomever or whatever it is working its potent magic on, we feel reborn, renewed, and recreated in some way.

America’s Pluto Return

Although our nation will officially experience its Pluto Return from 2022-24, it is already feeling the effects. Pluto will bring a revolution of sorts.  Whatever intention was set for the country back on July 4, 1776, it is going to be revisited.  The core questions will be: What needs to change, to be transformed, and to be honored?

We will be forced to look back to see whether the original intentions set for this nation are still being upheld or if anything needs to change.  Readjustments will be required in one or more ways before we can move forward in a positive way. Americans may even have to revisit some of the energies that brought about the very need for the Declaration of Independence in the first place. And, because this Pluto Return is occurring in the sign of Capricorn, the spotlight will be on government, big structures, authority figures, and essentially anyone in a position of great power. A Pluto Return in Capricorn may manifest as the crumbling of a government or any established hierarchy, and then the building of a new one.  It can lead to deep and lasting changes in the way that this country will be run and governed, and the rules and structures by which its citizens choose to live.

This energy will challenge the nation to face up to its dark side and expose any corruption of its highest values, best institutions, and ideal aspirations.  While a Pluto Return can expose the shadows, it is also an incredibly powerful transit that can help a country to rise up and blossom into its fullest potential. While America will complete its Pluto Return by 2024, due to this planet’s slow movement it may take until 2028 to truly see what and how the metamorphosis has taken shape. That is when Pluto officially leaves the zodiacal sign of Capricorn for good on its eternal sojourn around the solar system.

Pluto Return Predictions for America

Based on what has unfolded in other countries that have experienced their own Pluto Returns, Americans can expect to see, among the following:

• Exposure of deep corruption, betrayals, hidden deals/secret dealings, and injuries/injustices
• Major changes in laws and shifts in governmental structures
• Power struggles, even open civil conflict
• Conflicts with other countries
• Changes in national allies
• New agreements/partnerships with other countries and/or breakups in same
• Changes or even overhauls in banking, economic institutions, business & labor organizations, and education
• Emergence of unconventional leaders, and the death or deposing of existing leaders

Ultimately, a Pluto Return is a very eye-opening, transformational, dark-night-of-the-soul experience. While it is likely to stir and provoke changes that may be uncomfortable, it can pave the way to the creation of a more balanced, free, fair, open, just, and safe country for all, in many tangible ways. Our times to come will certainly tell, and likely soon.

A PERSONAL STORY: Im Letzten Leben (In My Last Life)

Since my late teenage years, I have been on an earnest quest to clearly understand who I am — more specifically, why I had the unusual interests, feelings, notions, and frustrations that I did.  Together, they all seemed incongruous with my nominal identity as the only child of modestly middle-class, religiously liberal, Jewish parents from New York City and rural Ontario, growing up in peaceful urban Toronto in Canada.  As a young adult, after graduating from a local university and a short career as a systems engineer, I decided to move to Denver, Colorado to attend law school and there begin a new profession.  My ultimate aim was either federal elective ofiice or a civilian career in national security.

Just over a year after graduating, exercising an additional long-time interest in paranormal phenomena, I began to meet and get readings from various psychical practitioners, primarily astrologers and psychics, and later a remarkable “trance channel” — a person through whom an unnamed discarnate sentient entity ostensibly spoke.  Being naturally inquisitive and sharp-minded, and seeking core truth, I measured all they told me about myself with what I already knew objectively — and regularly came away astounded.  My astonishments stemmed not just from what they said about my life and personality but also what was revealed about my deeper motivations, core traits, and the wellsprings of my various moods and predilections. 

One major disclosure in particular, given to me in April 1988 by a voluble and keenly insightful astrologer, Phyllis Firak, really “rocked my world.”  Without any prompting by or “frontloading” from me via spoken clues or cues, this lady informed me thusly:

“Looks like you popped [into this life] right out of a ‘mass death’ situation in other incarnations – some kind of a Gestapo chief or very intense militaristic lifetime (maybe World War II).  And what you’re learning about is self-forgiveness.  Incredible judgment there . . . .  [T]here’s a deeper core that goes back to a previous lifetime that deals with a fundamental betrayal of an authority to you.  Maybe a World War II lifetime; also, some Atlantean things where a lot of people were affected by decisions that you had made, and it was an incredible dilemma on your part between the honor of the position and the sabotage that was occurring.”

Later, she emphasized to me again, “You left that [previous] life with incredible self-judgment, feeling less than a maggot, and so a big part of what you are learning in this current life is self-forgiveness.” 

I was stunned.  Apart from immediate reactions of shock and revulsion, I instantly grasped that if these assertions were true, they would go a long way towards accounting for most, if not all, of the numerous anomalies I experienced as a child and teenager, to wit: (i) I had been fascinated by Nazi uniforms and German small arms (particularly the P-38 pistol and MP40 submachine gun), as well as submarines, Tiger tanks, and Stuka dive bombers, which I doodled regularly while attending school; (ii) I was very attracted to feature films about the Second World War era (from The Sound of Music to The Battle of the Bulge) and to speaking German, even though no one I knew spoke the language; and (iii) I was very interested in studying modern German history, beginning with the rise and reign of Otto von Bismarck in the 19^th century. 

But most discomfiting to me was my conscious ambivalence towards, and sometimes even palpable discomfort at, being Jewish.  I tended to gravitate towards the gentile kids at school, making friends with them more easily than the Jewish kids.  Too, I was consciously attracted more to blond looks than dark looks in both boys and girls, regardless of ethnicity; I myself was auburn-haired, blue–eyed, and not obviously ethnically Jewish.  And once, most strangely, when I was just 6 years old and walking on the playground heading to school, I wondered out of the blue what it would be like to commit suicide; thankfully, this notion was merely fleeting; what sparked it then remains a mystery to me to this day.  Later, at age 8, when my mother first told me about the Holocaust (in even tones) in response to questions I had about the war, it impacted mightily, causing me to cry uncontrollably.  I was especially pained that even young children had been murdered. with my emotional state being more intensified by the realization that one of those destroyed children could have been me.  A striking reaction, to be sure.

(Much later, once in high school, I eagerly chose to study German as well as the required French, and quickly developed an easy facility for the former language, scoring the highest grade in all my classes throughout my entire educational experience there. Apart from being able to readily memorize German’s nouns, their genders and plural forms, and its complex verb forms, the close sound-symbol congruence (one pronounces German the way it is written, according to uniform rules), my primarily visual learning style, and my capacity for mimicry combined to enable me to speak it with near-native pronunciation early on. Truly, I spoke better German after only two years of study than I did French after having studied it for five.)

After the astrologer’s gripping revelation, I became determined to try to validate it, if that were even possible.  My motivation led me to seek out “past-life regression therapy”, which at the time was not a technique widely practiced in conventional psychotherapy circles, at least in my state.  My first stop was a private session with a trance channel, Janet Laurel Pfister, in Denver with whom I had begun having very compelling and insightful semi-private sessions in November 1986. (Some of my experiences with “the Critters”, a collective of discarnate entities that appeared able to “read” me and others with astounding precision, will be detailed in a follow-on posting.) In that 2-hour session, which took place in the late spring of 1988, I was regressed to the last days of my most recent past life, with the aim of exploring my state of mind and emotions before I made my transition to the next realm (i.e., “died”). In short order, I was engaged in high catharsis, wracked with great pain at being in a concentration/extermination camp as an SS officer, agonizing over what I had been doing, participating in the ideological mass murder of men, women, and children and constant brutality there. Engulfed in a level of anguish unknown to me in my current life, I heard myself cry out internally, “But what else can I do?! I don’t know what to do!!” with great sobs. I did not hear myself answer these plaintive cries with words, but I somehow mentally knew that I decided to kill myself out of raw desperation. As emotionally riveting as the session was, I saw no images or “mental videos” nor received any cognitive information about who I was or what had happened before or afterwards. And so, my many substantive questions remained unanswered.

More promisingly, in early 1991 I met a cutting-edge clinical psychologist and regression-therapy trainer who agreed to regress me hypnotically as a subject in a training session for aspiring past-life therapists.  Paul Hansen, Ph.D. of Longmont, Colorado was then the official training director for the Association for Past-Life Research and Therapies (APRT). I attended his training session in Boulder, Colorado in April 1991.

I was a very good hypnotic subject, easily placed into trance.   In that session, on a cold black night in a Nazi concentration camp, I saw myself standing “inside the wire” clad in the warm greatcoat of an SS officer; in the near distance and also outside of the inmates’ barracks lit by floodlights, a trio of fellow Germans was huddling against the cold, smoking cigarettes and talking amongst themselves, paying me no mind; the ground beneath us all was laden with a shallow layer of snow.  Suddenly, I noticed an inmate on his knees tugging at my greatcoat, crying and babbling at me tearfully and fearfully in a language I did not know (it sounded like Polish).  I saw his visage clearly under his little cap: a shaved pate, pale blue eyes, a round face, chin stubble, and half circles under his eyes.  Under the rules of the camp that all knew, inmates were prohibited from making physical contact with any German unless ordered to do so; the penalty for any first infraction was instant execution.  Aware of my fellow guards standing nearby, who only seemed to fleetingly notice what was occurring, I did what my training and “duty” obligated me to do:  I drew my P-38 service pistol from its belt holster and shot the erring inmate point-blank, the bullet striking him in the head through his left eye. He died instantly.

I then saw another scene: This personal act of murder has shaken me apparently because I saw myself “looking the other way” when I spotted a young inmate stealing or hiding food, another camp offense punishable by death. I perceived that I was starting to have doubts about what I had been doing at the camp.

I then saw another scene: Viewing from above and looking down, I saw myself sitting on a military bunk, elbows on my knees with my head in my hands, sobbing, my pistol lying on the bunk to the right beside me. My jacket is off, and I am clad in gray riding-style pants, black boots, and a gray sweater. I am in emotional agony, not knowing what to do. I know that I cannot resign, for that would result in my being shot or sent to the Eastern Front for combat — and could bring shame (and perhaps worse) to my family. I also know that I cannot escape to the east because the Russians, upon capturing me and identifying me as being SS, would torture me and then kill me. Facing the inevitable, so riven with guilt, shame, and self-loathing, I saw myself pick up the P-38, place its muzzle in my mouth, and quickly pull the trigger, killing myself.  The bullet entered my head at the bottom of the skull.  

Earlier in that regression session, I had viewed episodes from other incarnations, seemingly unrelated to the above scenes; still, while none were so intensely lurid, all were of males in different cultures and eras — a coastal Viking raid as a young teenager and a Native American “trust fall” rite of passage as a chief’s son — all themed around developing masculine courage.  However, in the days following my first session, several discrete daytime memory flashes occurred that related only to the riveting life as a Nazi SS officer:

• I am in a full-length leather coat with a peaked military cap standing in the middle of a wide street (in a country not my own; Poland?) at a short distance while some men (Jews?) are being herded up and onto the bed of a truck at rifle-point by two soldiers.  I catch a glimpse of myself watching this scene: sandy hair, gray-green eyes, a young man with a thin, slightly angular nose. 

• I am sitting on a train, in black SS dress uniform with swastika armband (and my peaked cap off), watching the countryside roll by; I am emotionless. I see my face: sandy hair, gray-green eyes, a thin, slightly angular nose.

• I see an oval-framed photograph of my father in military uniform hanging on a wall in my family home; he wears red collar tabs that suggest an Imperial German Army officer, perhaps a general, presumably from the World War I era. He looks a lot like my father as a middle-aged man in my current life: spare dark hair combed back, pale blue eyes, with a thin, straight nose. His face betrays no emotion.

All of the above occurred while I was going about my mundane daily business, awake and calm, and not in any state of emotional concern or distress about anything. They seemed to be authentic afterthoughts to what had been revealed in my regression session.

I entered into conventional talk therapy to work through the startling, conflicting emotions that my remembrances evoked and stoked in me.  My paradigm immediately shifted to include the reality of reincarnation and deepened my drive to better understand the nature and purpose of all of earthly human experience, not just my own.  In the years following, I encountered two different women at separate social events who, without any verbal clues from me beforehand, communicated to me or a mutual acquaintance that their meeting me triggered their own past-life memories of being in Holocaust camps in their previous lives. 

Later still, in this present life, I met and had an enigmatic, emotionally tortuous romantic relationship with a woman whom I much later came to learn (via a psychic) had had a personal “encounter” with my former self in the camp, which both started and ended atrociously.  Her contemporary personal history had compelling echoes of that horrific time and place in terms of sexual and physical abuse, but unrelated to me and our time together as a couple. Our relationship in this life ended unhappily, and she passed away suddenly less than two years later in the midst of an even more challenging personal liaison for her with another man.  Last, just two years after my regression session, in 1993, I met and briefly befriended a Russian-born Jewish man on a trip to Israel, ten years my junior, who, I later realized, bore a striking facial resemblance to the man whom my previous persona had shot in the vision I had in my regression.  Although born in Moscow twenty years after the end of World War II, and his parents spared the direct horrors of the Holocaust while there, he was reluctant to watch modern films that re-enacted any aspect of that horrific atrocity.  Whether he too had unconscious memories from that time, I do not know.  We never discussed it, and for some reason I did not make the possible connection consciously until many years later.

On January 31, 2001, I went to see my physician for a vision complaint I had in my right eye.   LASIK surgery had been performed on me in Toronto in April of the previous year, which corrected my eyesight to virtually 20/20 in both eyes, a wonderful result that allowed me to dispense with the wearing of glasses.  However, during the early weeks of 2001, I began to experience some fuzziness of vision in my right eye, both close-up and at distance, with some occasional lateral distortion as well.  This was all very distressing, needless to say.  I recalled that, back in September 2000, I would awaken on several separate occasions in the morning with a very light soreness on my right temple, which would radiate around to the back of my head and then refer to some light soreness in my shoulders and middle back.  Not feeling any real discomfort at all due to this, and, attributing it to just daily stress or perhaps my sleeping posture, I did not seek medical help for it. 

On that late January morning, my physician was savvy enough to peer into my eyes and notice what appeared to be pressure on the optic nerve at the back of my right eyeball; he called it a “papilla edema.”  (Later, he related that, in his 30 years of looking into patients’ eyes medically, mine was the first viewing that had possibly signaled any serious problem.)  Calmly, he suggested that “checking my brain” was the “first order of business” and therefore scheduled me for a diagnostic MRI imaging session the very next morning.  I attended it and visited a neurosurgeon in the early afternoon of the same day to receive a prompt interpretation of the results.  

While I was in the waiting room there, I called my family doctor to check in; sounding very agitated, he informed me that a staff radiologist had already preliminarily reviewed my results and had seen a large tumor that “has to come out.”  My own physician was equally insistent, “It has to come out, so you need to schedule a surgery as soon as you can!”  Inexplicably, I felt quite nonchalant at hearing this news and offered him no resistance; I was actually a bit taken aback by his vehemence.  Why my nonchalance?  I really cannot say, because he had not opined on the nature of the tumor, whether it was benign or malignant.  So, whether this notification was a signal that I was facing a serious threat to my life, I had no idea or any intuition at that time. 

Soon I was visiting with the neurosurgeon, viewing the MRI films from the diagnostic session earlier that day.  He explained that my tumor was very large, occupying about a quarter of my cranium.  He opined that it was almost certainly a “meningioma”, a benign tumor, the second easiest to remove — with cranial surgery, of course.  By its size, he further asserted it had been in my head for between two and ten years — a slow grower — and perhaps even as long as twenty.  Why it was there and how it got there, he couldn’t say.  He claimed that no one in the medical community knew these answers (the “etiology”), but what was known is that many people are living their lives with tumors they are unaware of having.  Many of such are only discovered, in fact, once a given person dies and a postmortem, performed for other reasons. discloses it.          

My MRI images disclosed that my benign tumor was located in the right sphenoidal wing at the base of my skull; it appeared to be the size of a small, balled fist.  (After its removal, it would later be measured as being 6 cm x 8 cm x 6 cm, about the size of a hackysack ball.)  Clearly it needed to come out; otherwise, other, more noticeable symptoms would start to develop and then worsen over time as it continued to grow.  I was told I could expect the eventual onset of dizziness and nausea and, if it were not then attended to, past that point it would ultimately compress my brain and kill me.  Still feeling no fear or any resistance at all, I readily agreed to surgery, which took place three weeks later, on Wednesday, February 21st.  The neurosurgeon announced the prognosis to be very good, particularly given my otherwise excellent health and long habits of clean living.  

The very next day, I awoke early and went for a walk to consider this new development in my life.  An air of surrealism was now enveloping me, even though I felt no palpable fear and my body felt fine.  Was I in shock or just fatalistic?  I don’t know.  As I walked, it swiftly came to me that this tumor represented a little sack into which my mind had decided to deposit all the bad memories and outmoded beliefs that had been running in my subconscious mind for many years — owing to my most recent, morally challenging past life and the harshly negative self-image engendered by the severe judgments that I apparently had made about myself while in it. 

By 2001, I was well and truly convinced that reincarnation was real and likely a feature of every human being’s Earth experience.  But what made my belief even stronger, however, is what happened over the next ten days when I went on three separate walks in a local park with three different friends of mine, all of them female and consciously spiritual.  During our discrete times together, when I asked each for their opinion of my situation without first offering my own, they each, independently and spontaneously, voiced the same notion to me as I had first thought to myself!  And none of them knew at that time of my personal belief that I had lived before!           

In the surgery, it took my doctor a full 12 1/2 hours to excise the tumor from my cranium, using three consecutive surgical teams to assist him and four different extraction techniques of varying sophistication.  At the end, he had to make use of a dental mirror and a little handheld tool to scrape the last remnants of the tumor from inside my head.  This medical marathon was made necessary by the fact that my long-resident tumor was so well entangled, even encrusted, in the vasculature of my brain that it needed to be teased out very carefully so as not to harm or disrupt the surrounding blood vessels.  My doctor related all of this detail to me at my bedside at 8 AM the very next morning, a scant 7 1/2 hours after I had been wheeled into the intensive care unit for post-operative care.  Wrapping up, he noted that he felt confident that he had “gotten it all,” such that the tumor was totally removed from my skull.  By this time fully awake and lucid, I was roundly impressed by all of his relaxed demeanor, apparently indefatigable focus, and evidently amazing skill.     

Having undergone a preoperative procedure to try to stanch the bloodflow to the tumor before the actual cranial surgery began, I was under general anesthesia for a total of 16 hours.  Still, mirabile dictu, I emerged from my long slumber on Thursday morning totally awake, fully lucid, with all of my muscular strength and neurological functioning intact.  Possessed of a truly ravenous appetite too, my energy level was high.  Over the next four days, I slept but two hours each night and ate five full meals (plus snacks) for the first two days.  At no point did I ever feel any pain or experience headache, dizziness, nausea, or other overt discomfort.  My head, very thickly and largely bandaged, didn’t even begin to palpably swell from the surgery until late in the evening on the day after the event.  From then on, I managed the painless swelling with handheld cold packs until I was ready for sleep. 

After just two days of post-operative hospital stay, I announced – quite sincerely and without hubris — that I felt quite fine and was ready to go home.  My neurosurgeon conveyed to me that he was taking the weekend off and would like to examine me next on the following Monday morning, and so asked if I wouldn’t mind staying in the hospital till then.  I assented, knowing my insurance would fully cover my stay and that I would have an easy time of it, keeping daily company with my father and his wife, and various friends who would come to visit.  Reading, watching television, and some occasional journaling would round out the rest of my time.     

Upon Monday’s arrival, true to his word, my neurosurgeon returned to examine me and quickly pronounced me fit to leave the hospital.  While still fully bandaged and now quite chubby from the anti-seizure steroidal drugs I was taking, I nonetheless felt robust and, upon being discharged, walked unassisted to my car, got into it, and then drove my father and his wife back to their hotel to have lunch.  Just a week later, still bandaged and now looking bruised in the face from dried internally seeping blood, I went dancing in the evening for a couple of hours, my usual Wednesday-evening activity from before.  Gentle meditational dancing and singing, to be sure, but dancing nonetheless.  I knew I looked very odd, but I truly felt fine.     

I felt great gratitude for this experience overall — not just because of the blessedly easy, if lengthy, surgery and uneventful recovery but due to the transcendental spiritual validations that it provided me.  First, the “direct knowings” granted me ahead of the surgery about my tumor’s purpose, and the intuitive assurances I would be protected and emerge alive and in good health.  Again, these “knowings” has been corroborated by sensitive friends with whom I spent time on three separate occasions in the first many days after I had been diagnosed.  Mercifully, at no time did I ever experience any anger, dread or disabling fear, self-pity, or doubt about the positivity of the outcome.  With these clear awarenesses, my perspective on living shifted tangibly, causing me to see “a bigger picture” about my life’s significance and to become more consciously heartfelt and compassionate towards others in general.  

Second, most vitally, I became convinced of the power of positive healing prayer, as it turned out I had been the beneficiary of a lot of it, both from my personal circle of friends and from several organized healing prayer groups, some of whose loving support ahead of time had been solicited unbeknownst to me.  Apart from my wondrous result, what evidence was there that such prayer support had worked?  In the afternoon of the first day after my surgery, a young day nurse began to enter my room and stopped suddenly at the threshold.  Her eyes wide as saucers, she scanned the room and exclaimed, “There’s so much positive, loving energy in this room and all around you, it’s incredible!”  We had not met before, let alone talked about any notions of spirituality, and so her spontaneous outburst was quite inspiring — and confirmatory that something special had indeed been happening to and for me.   

Was all of this merely coincidental?  Perhaps, but two events occurred afterwards that dispelled that notion and suggested that my tumor truly had an antecedent provenance.  A year after its surgical removal, I related its reveal and location to another hypnotist with whom I had worked after my initial past-life session with the clinical psychologist in 1991.  When I mentioned its location as having been in my skull’s right sphenoidal wing, it was she who made the correlation with my recall in trance of where the fatal bullet had entered my head in my previous life.  That was a veritable Eureka! moment, for sure.   

Soon thereafter I had my own “explosive” epiphany:  When I was a boy of about age 10, my mother remarked to me that, strangely, I had a very small circle of gray hair in my otherwise then all light-brown head of hair, at the center back of my head!  So, if indeed my recalled earlier-life’s ending by a self-inflicted gunshot were true, this “new” fact from my present life would be consistent with a past-life rear-exit wound caused by a bullet fired into my head from the front.  While I never visualized an exit wound in my past-life recollections, I had learned from study in the years since that the past-lives research literature of several decades is replete with instances of objective correlation of certain, odd physical features (viz., port-wine-colored birthmarks and limb deformities) that people possess in their present lives with physical traumas they recall, via regression, having experienced in their past incarnations.  

But my own story was not yet done.  Several years later, in 2006, the vision in my right eye (having earlier returned to normal after my craniotomy in 2001) developed a new vertical-line distortion that impelled me once again to seek medical advice.   Upon examination, an abnormal membrane was found to have developed on the retina’s surface, which accounted for the visual distortion I was having.  I was referred to a retinal specialist, who examined my eye and determined that some surgery was needed to, at the least, address some capillary bleeding he perceived to be happening in it.   

While I was in surgery and under general anesthetic, however, the surgeon discovered that my retina’s abnormal membrane was highly vascularized.  Claiming later that he feared its blood vessels might grow into the retina proper and ruin my vision, he decided – without any prior notification and permission from me — to surgically peel away the membrane from my eye’s retina.  In so doing, the peel damaged the underlying retinal tissue, with the result that my right-eye vision, theretofore clear, became badly degraded: It lacked sufficient clarity and acuity for me to be able to read or drive with it.  In effect, my right eye was now disabled from any practical use, forever. 

So, of what transcendental significance might this medical mishap (and perhaps instance of malpractice) be?   During my initial past-life regression with the clinical psychologist, I had witnessed not only my own demise by my own hand but a dramatic preceding episode in that life that may have prompted it (or at least begun a process of “soul searching” that culminated in it).  This involved the murder of a imprisoned man by shooting him in the eye.

I do believe that this single event of direct, personal murder precipitated a crisis of conscience within the psyche of that German man, for whatever reason, which culminated in his later suicide.  Once his soul had “erupted” with guilt, I imagined (or perhaps recalled?) that neither his overt tendering of an official resignation to his superiors from his gruesome evil “duty” nor his making some clandestine escape to the enemy’s lines would have been a life-saving option for him. Why? For the seemingly self-evident reason that brutal execution would have been his almost-certain fate either way.  After all, I believe it to be well known that the Nazis viewed any abandonment of “sacred service” to the Fuehrer and Fatherland due to “unmanly weakness” just as coldly, remorselessly, and viciously as the Russians viewed all SS cadres per se because of what they were specially purposed to do against the enemy’s civilians — and in fact did, coldly, remorselessly, and viciously.  Thus and so, the notion of terminating one’s own self would actually be the least painful and burdensome, and certainly the quickest, way out for such a man, I daresay.   Because of the Germans’ general cultural odium towards suicide while in military service, the SS could be expected to cover up the cause of the man’s death so as not to disgrace the reputation of the man’s family gratuitously.   

Is my right eye’s badly compromised visual acuity truly a karmic result and consequence of one murder committed by a former personality of my soul in a prior incarnation?  There’s just no rigorously conclusive way to tell — there could be another reason not readily determinable but which might make greater sense based on some other calculus of spiritual evolution that I am unaware of.  The question must thus perforce remain open for the time being.                      

But to what can I attribute the extraordinary ease of the cranial surgery I underwent to excise the tumor and my following recovery, apart from the prayer support that was rendered me?  Had I by that time in fact performed sufficient psychical or psychological healing work, gained enough cognitive insight into my soul’s history, become enough of a “good person”, or just “burned off” enough bad karma for this existential event to be so successful and ill-effect-free?  Again, I have no objective way to tell, and no reason has manifested itself to date with any captivating clarity.  All I can report is that my mundane life has not changed in any notable way since 2001.

I have learned, at the very least, via the totality of these experiences that suicide is not a viable escape option from the many, even severe, challenges of human living.  Why? If my experience is any indicator, one is likely to return to physical life on Earth sooner and with the added karmic burden of one’s self-destruction — due perhaps to the culpable abrogation of some sacred soul contract made before one’s incarnation here.  Positively, I know clearly that my current life’s personal lessons include self-forgiveness, the release of relentless, harsh self-judgment, and heaps of compassion for both myself and others, much as I would expect the loving Almighty G-d of Judaism and Christianity to grant me at some point.  

If that is indeed true, then several generalized purposes of earthly life may have also been illuminated here:  To evolve personal conscious awareness of the need to work on healing one’s imperfections; to grow one’s capacity for both self-love and to honor, love, and treat others with loving kindness; and to develop a deep sensitivity to the impacts each of us has on others — intentional or not — by our individual actions or omissions to act.  These, in sum, may well be the Almighty’s greatest opportunity-gift to every soul in every incarnation, each time the choice is made to live a life in human form on the Earth.     

POSTSCRIPT

I have had several unusual encounters with women since April 1988 that seem to militate in favor of the notion that my most recent incarnation on Earth was as an SS Totenkopf division officer serving in a Nazi concentration/extermination camp during World War II.  In an effort to marshal all the possible evidence as comprehensively as possible, I recount them here, in chronological order, to the best of my memory. 

A. In 1989, I was introduced to Marilyn M. by a mutual female friend who was her roommate.  She was reputed to be a very good psychic medium, and I was anxious to have a reading with her to determine who I might possibly have been during World War II.  Because I was working as a lawyer at the time, I initially fancied that I might have been Hans Frank, Hitler’s lawyer prior to World War II and the head of the Government General of Poland after that nation had been conquered by the Nazis in September 1939; a defendant at the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal, he was convicted and hanged in 1946 for his crimes against humanity.  In our time together, on a walk around a nearby park, Marilyn disabused me of that notion, stating that I had “not made the history books” in that lifetime.  She said, however, that I had been a middle-grade Nazi officer in a camp and that many people had wanted me dead — inmates in the camp where I had “worked.” At some point, she said, something happened and I changed my behavior towards them — for example, by “looking the other way” at inmate infractions (such as returning with hidden food from work details outside the camp) that would normally be cause for harsh beatings or even execution.  Such behavior, she said, was noticed by the inmates and served to ameliorate their hatred towards me a little bit.

B. In 1990, I attended a psychical practice circle organized by a woman I knew and to whom I had earlier confided my supposition that I had been a Nazi officer in World War II.   Upon entering the circle before our session began, I sat down in the low-lit room beside a woman I had never met before, and we both nodded a quick greeting to each other.   Her facial features struck me as being unusual, looking almost “melted” in appearance.  Throughout the session that followed, however, we never spoke to one another.  One exercise that all of the dozen attendees performed that evening was to silently amble around the semi-darkened room looking at each other’s faces while soft music played, seeing if we could discern a past-life visage in the faces of anyone we encountered.  I had no such experience.  Chatting with the organizer (Autumn), the next day, however, she mentioned to me that after the circle had concluded the previous evening, the woman whom I had sat down beside at the start had come up to her and said:  “When he [meaning me] sat down beside me, I remembered that before they killed us, they shaved out heads.”   That was all — a cryptic memory apparently from another lifetime that was untethered to any other interaction we shared that evening, before or afterward.

C. In January 1994, I took a sabbatical from my employment and lived in Naples, Florida for nine months. Before I left, a friend of mine with psychic gifts, Jane R., told me that I would meet a woman there with whom I could have a relationship; she mentioned that this lady had two kids and was a bit overweight. When I replied that that did not sound appealing, she responded with, “But she’s rich!” I knew, though, that that quality alone would not move me to be with someone whose appearance and life circumstances did not comport with what I idealized in a mate. In June, as I was about to leave Naples for a short trip overseas, I did indeed meet a woman, Bonnie, who fit Jane’s description perfectly: Divorced with two kids, she was plain and overweight and yet the heiress to a Midwest papermill fortune. As a courtesy to me in wanting to get to know me, she let me stay overnight in her large home, in my own bedroom, before I left on my trip the next day. As she was also interested in paranormality, I shared with her what I had learned in my April 1988 astrological reading with Phyllis Firak. As we sat across from one another talking in her sunny living room the next morning, she paused for a while after hearing my story, looked at me without affect and said levelly: “I think you did a lot of raping.” Needless to say, I was stunned at such a terse declaration, delivered matter-of-factly and yet fraught with so much emotionality. I asked if there was anything else she “picked up” about this revelation, but she just gently shook her head.

When I returned from my trip overseas and found a new place to stay in Naples, I called Bonnie to thank her again for her hospitality before my departure. We chatted amiably, but neither of us was motivated to see one another again. I never encountered her again at the Unity church where we had first met, for the rest of my time in Naples.

D. In 1995, I met a woman, Deborah, on a flight that I had been predicted to meet four months earlier by two psychics, one a gifted astrologer, the other a gifted palmist.  One told me the exact week of the exact month upcoming that we would meet, which happened exactly as predicted: on the second last day of the second week in September of that year.   I was told that the attraction would be strong and mutual – for me it was quite irresistible in fact, as she was all of white but dark-haired, dark-eyed, dark–complected, and very shapely – and quite immediate, but that the relationship would be fraught with mutual illusion as well, and so would not last. (All of that came to pass as well.)  Still, the many synchronicities we quickly discovered upon talking soon after we met while flying on a commercial airliner from Salt Lake City to Denver quickly amplified our mutual attraction: She lived and worked in Toronto, Canada — the city I had been raised in; she worked for AT&T there – the selfsame company I then worked for in Denver; her father had served in the British Royal Navy during World War II – my father had served in the U.S. Navy during that same conflict; her mother had lost a brother in land combat in Europe fighting for Canada – my mother’s Canadian fiancé had perished on D-Day just before his landing on Juno beach in Normandy; her mother was reputedly psychic – as was my mother; and her parents and I shared the very same street address and apartment numbers at that time — 1210 and 301.       

Nonetheless, after a year together as a couple (once she had moved to Denver to be with me, six months after our meeting), we separated at my instigation, neither one of us having ever meaningfully connected with the other either emotionally or mentally.  Despite ongoing efforts to communicate with her, her mien towards me became catatonic, verbally mum and with a blank affect all of the time. (Only later did I piece together why she was like that, sourced in this life and likely the last one.) It was a very painful experience for us both, leaving me wondering why our romance had ever happened at all – so much initial attraction, yet so little true compatibility!  Yet even more grievously, only 19 months on she died suddenly of a brain aneurysm, apparently triggered by the cumulative stresses of a subsequent relationship that she found to be mentally abusive.  Much later, in the summer of 2018, I had occasion to query another gifted psychic/ palmist, Jan Main Born, with whom I had consulted many years earlier, about the reason for our unhappy relationship. She related the following, without any “frontloading” of details by me: My late lover and I had met in the Nazi death camp in our last lifetimes — she as an inmate and I as a guarding officer.  Returning from a work detail outside the camp, I caught her trying to escape and then raped her.  Despite it being a rape in both fact and appearance, it was a passionate encounter for us both, and so I decided to “keep her around”, presumably for ever more bouts of sexual activity.  Ultimately, however, I “tired of her” and then had her “dispatched” – that is, murdered — again, presumably, without any remorse.  Thus and so, our unexpected and sudden encounter, mutual attraction, and subsequent relationship in this lifetime appears to have been a kind of karmic “return engagement” of some sort, likely for some spiritual purpose having to do with learning, balancing, releasing, or healing — or, all of the foregoing.  Regrettably, by my measuring, it did not go well at all, and I continue to carry remorse about it to this day, a quarter of a century later. 

Much later, in 2006, I saw a Dutch film titled Swarte Boek (Black Book) set in Nazi-occupied Holland during World War II. The story focused on the experiences of a young Dutch Jewish woman whose family, together with other Jews, is betrayed and then massacred by SS troops while attempting to flee under cover of darkness via a canal boat. Jumping ship immediately once the shooting starts, she is the sole survivor of the mass murder and soon finds refuge with the Dutch Resistance. There she is asked to go undercover and use her sultry good looks and background as a cabaret singer to win the affections of a senior SS officer — even, if necessary, becoming sexually intimate with him. The purpose being to enable Dutch Resistance fighters to locate and liberate several of their members who had been captured while attempting to smuggle guns and were then being brutally interrogated to denounce their comrades. The woman is successful in her seduction very quickly and what follows is an intimate liaison that becomes as emotionally charged with empathy as it is steamy sexually — despite all of the agonizing trauma she had personally undergone at the hands of his savage cohorts only weeks before. Needless to say, watching this wrenching drama unfold was deeply poignant for me even though I had no conscious memory at that time of the gross similarities it shared with what was revealed to me in the summer of 2018. Sadly, as with my own apparent past-life experience, the film story ended rather sharply — albeit this time with the “better” SS officer being denounced upon Holland’s liberation by the now-freed Dutch, but then summarily dispatched after betrayal not by them but by his own superior officer! The Jewish woman survives the overall ordeal emotionally distraught, but then she redemptively goes on to have a happy Jewish married life with children in Israel. A sharply riveting tale it is, in many ways.

In 2020, a documentary was released spotlighting an actual love affair between a Slovakian Jewish woman imprisoned in Auschwitz and one of her SS overseers there. Titled Love It Was Not, the film consists of interviews and photographic re-enactments that detail the SS man’s infatuation with the attractive dark-haired, dark-eyed woman with a magnetic singing voice. Risking execution if found out, he protected her from being abused and murdered from the time of her arrival in the camp in late 1942 until liberation in 1945, and even — at her insistence — saved her sister (but, hauntingly, not the sister’s small child and baby) from the gas chambers just before the doors were closed. All three of them survived the war, the sisters immigrating to Israel and the SS officer presumably returning to his native Austria (although his interviewed daughter speaks with a South African accent). All were married after the war’s end and raised children, the sister starting a new family after the loss of her first. Equally poignant with all that had gone before, however, the Jewish woman, Helena Citron, in 1972 received a letter in German from the wife of Franz Wunsch, her loving SS protector, asking her to come to Austria as a “return favor” to testify in his defense at a war crimes trial in which he was the defendant. How to resolve an impossible dilemma: Will she help a man who brutalized so many people but saved her own life and that of her sister out of a personal love? She decides to attend the trial and tell “both the good and the bad” and let the case take its course with that additional evidence. How much her testimony helped determine the verdict is not known, but, like only three other Austrian SS officers tried for war crimes after the war in Austria, he was acquitted. He died in 2005, and Helena and her sister both died in 2007, all of natural causes it seems.

E. In 2004, I dated a woman, Gabi, who had been born in Germany to a German mother and a Greco-Syrian father; dark-eyed and dark-complected, she was nonetheless naturally blond.  Orphaned at 4 years old, she was adopted by a U.S. Army nurse in Germany and later raised Roman Catholic by her in New Jersey.  When I met her, she was not at all religious but was in fact seeking to explore metaphysical spirituality.  While we were dating, she expressed interest in attending a Jewish religious service, particularly one in Boulder, Colorado that was led by a very liberal, feminist, and otherwise avant garde lady rabbi.  That one experience with liberal Judaism did not sit well with her, and so she decided to explore further.  Without me attending, her explorations eventually led her to the Orthodox Jewish community in Denver, where she quickly felt that she had found her home – and not among the modern Orthodox but the traditional ones!   She ultimately decided to undergo an Orthodox conversion and, upon visiting Israel in 2005, soon decided in “make Aliyah” – that is, immigrate to Israel as a Jew – despite not speaking any Hebrew and leaving her two grown children and two grandchildren behind in America.  This she all did with great zeal, to a very religious town in the Galilee, and in 2012 she married a younger Orthodox immigrant from Poland with two small children – her fourth marriage.  Whether and to what I extent I may have played any role — karmic or otherwise — in this unique train of events is completely mysterious and thus opaque to me. 

F. In 2012, I met a blond woman, Kristen, ten years my senior and happily married, at a spiritual meetup group we both belonged to in a mountain suburb just west of Denver.  Born into a ranching family in rural Colorado, she was of German Catholic descent and very sensitive psychically, a gifted and very successful oil painter.  That same year, having only met once before and on friendly terms, I casually remarked to her that I believed I had lived before, during World War II.  Upon hearing that claim, she immediately became very teary-eyed and told me that she remembered my face:  I had “been there” when she had been gassed as a 3-year old Jewish child in the Nazi death camps during the war; she remembered no other details. Happily, she and her husband, Gary, have been good friends with me since that time, her tragic memory of a supposed prior “interaction” between us having been released.      

ADDENDUM

In my long efforts to understand, validate, and process the possible reality of a previous lifetime as a Nazi SS officer during World War II and then being reborn as a Jew, I have encountered a double brace of books by two authors that lend credence to such lurid notions.  All four books make for bracing reading, and each has served to bolster my realizations that, first, reincarnation is a genuine fact of human existence, and second, and most compellingly, my most recent, known past life has been the prime shaping — nay, driving — influence in my current incarnation. 

The first two books, written by Orthodox Rabbi Yonassan Gershom, detail encounters he had with people he regressed hypnotically while working in a Minnesota town as a psychotherapist.  These individuals, despite being raised Christian and appearing typically non-Jewish in their looks (viz., light-colored hair, skin, and/or eyes), all reported having strong affinities for one or more aspects of Jewish life (ethnicity, culture, religious ideals/ritual observances, music). When hypnotically regressed, they surprisingly all reported having been murdered as very young Jewish children in the Holocaust, believing their dispatch was caused because they possessed dark hair and brown eyes.  When I asked the rabbi in early 1996 via telephone if he had ever encountered anyone claiming the obverse situation (that is, an “Aryan” German reincarnating as a Jew), he answered in the negative.  Later that same year, I met and heard him speak about his work at a conference on past-life research and therapies but decided against relating my personal story to him. Because I understand that Orthodox Jews believe in the existence of a “Jewish soul”, such that Jews incarnate and reincarnate only as Jews each and every time they do, I chose to avoid any potentially contentious discussion.

Beyond the Ashes: Cases of Reincarnation from the Holocaust (1992)

From Ashes to Healing: Mystical Encounters with the Holocaust (1996)        

The second two books, written by then Ph.D. candidate and later history professor Bryan Mark Rigg, detail the true stories of Germans of mostly partial Jewish descent who clandestinely served in the armed forces of the Third Reich during World War II, always with conscious knowledge of their Jewish heritage and its liability for them and their kin; some, in fact, served with temporary official authorization given to them pending the successful (Nazi) outcome of the war.  Their service spanned all uniformed branches of the Wehrmacht, including one man who served in the Waffen SS, but no man profiled by the author ever claimed service in the SS Totenkopf division units that manned the apparatus of the concentration/extermination camps. 

Hitler’s Jewish Soldiers (2002)

Lives of Hitler’s Jewish Soldiers (2016)          

In a psychic reading I had in 2018 with famed psychic Kevin Ryerson, his channeled source-entity Atun Re suggested the likelihood that my earlier SS-officer personality was in fact of Jewish descent, either in whole or part. This has led me to believe that that factor may well have figured in that personality’s decision to commit the suicide that I saw occur in that lifetime via hypnotic regression in 1991.  Deep guilt can be a very powerful motivator, and that emotion may account in the largest part for the psychological stresses that induced that man to take his own life.  It is this later revelation that may also validate the assertion first made to me by an Orthodox rabbi in Israel in 1993 that there are “Jewish souls” and, as such, they only incarnate as Jewish persons on Earth.  But, as I posed before, who can know for sure?  

Finally, in January 2019, I had a first reading with a medium named Valerie Allen.  Among the many things she said, without any cueing or spoken clues from me, she inquired whether I had German ancestry; what the city of Munich (Germany) meant to me; and whether I was Jewish in this lifetime.  Once I had answered all these questions as accurately and succinctly as I could, she stated, “You came back [to life on Earth] to see how what you did to others, how it can affect people this time.  Have you learned the lessons? Those lessons are: First, you’re no better than the rest of the world. And, second, you need to take and honor people for who and what they are.  For example, don’t judge why street people are the way they are; you don’t know their stories.” She emphasized the importance to me of learning these specific precepts.  In summary, from all of the above experiences and my own analysis of my astrological natal horoscope, it appears that at least one primary purpose of my lifetime this time around — a mere 11 years after my self-initiated exit and release from my earlier one — is indeed one of karmic atonement, as a matter of my soul’s agreement, if not its absolute choice and decision.

For me now, there is no doubt about this whatsoever.

It has certainly felt like it was so — and for a very long time.