One of the most fascinating tales narrated by Rosemary Ellen Guiley in
her Tales of Reincarnation is that of Gail Bartley. Gail was an
attractive young woman who worked as an advertising professional in New
York. Soon after her marriage ended in divorce, she fell in love with
Roger. As an advertising executive she had ample opportunities for
meeting other attractive young men, she did not really like Roger, her
mother took an instant dislike for him and a voice in Gail’s head kept
screaming all the time, “Get away. He hates you. He is trying to destroy
you!” In spite of all these Gail felt irresistibly drawn toward Roger.
And he abused her constantly, hurt her emotionally and did not hesitate
to beat her up occasionally; once he even tried to choke her to death
during one of the fairly frequent violent outbursts between them. The
relationship had wrecked her personal life, drained her emotionally,
destroyed her self-esteem. However, in spite of all this, Gail found
herself unable to get away from the man – and she completely failed to
understand her love-hate relationship with this man, as did the other
people around her.
It was this riddle of her relationship with Roger that eventually sent
her to a past life regressionist. Upon regression and reaching her first
past life experience, Gail found herself standing in a bedroom with high
ceilings. She was now a twenty-three year old woman called Joyce in the
1920s. The experience, completely new to Joyce, was strange and eerie:
she was at once the woman Joyce and Gail, who was watching her. Gail
experienced that Joyce was shaking with fear, fear caused by a man who
was with her in the room, lying on their bed – and that man was none
other than Joyce’ s husband and the man Gail knew as Roger.
And then Gail experienced the man getting up from their bed and walking
towards her. Joyce was now shaking in terror and Gail’s breath changed
as she watched it, and she began to hyperventilate. The regressionist
asked Gail what was happening and she told her the man was strangling
her. Joyce fell on her knees at the violence of the attack and then
collapsed on the ground as the man continued to throttle her. However,
Joyce did not die. Before that could happen, the man released her throat
and walked away, leaving her on the ground, struggling to breathe.
In a later part of the regression, Gail once again felt Joyce’s terror.
Joyce was in their room again, that same night, and she hears him
approaching her, climbing the stairs leading to their room. As he comes
near, she sees he has something in his hand, which he is hiding behind
him. His eyes are cold and she breathes in the hatred that emanates from
him.
He rips open her gown with the knife he was hiding behind him, and
brutally stabs her with it. Gail feels choked, her breath escapes her
and she realizes she is experiencing the last moments of her life as
Joyce. Coming out her body and hovering in a corner of the room, Joyce
watches what is happening. One of the things she witnesses is her
husband’s utter shock at what he has done, his complete disbelief and
intense remorse.
Further regressions reveal a sad tale of revenge and guilt spanning
across life times, centuries and continents. It all started in ancient
Rome where Roger and Gail in a long ago lifetime lived as brothers. The
two of them loved each other deeply and thoroughly enjoyed their life as
Roman citizens. In her regression, Gail sees herself as the younger
brother, a blond young man filled with raw energy and impatience to win
a chariot race that is about to begin. The race begins and his chariot
takes off like a storm, another chariot keeping abreast with him. And
then the tragedy takes place. His chariot swerves violently, hits the
other chariot, the man driving that chariot thrown off his balance and
falls, his head hitting his own chariot wheel, causing an instant death.
In the middle of his shock he realizes the saddest truth: the man killed
by his mistake is none other than his beloved brother.
This life follows a series of lifetimes revealed by the regression, in
each the elder brother is violent and vengeful, and the younger brother,
Gail of this lifetime, is his victim. In one of these, Gail is a boy of
seventeen, George, who lived in the Old West of America with his ill
tempered, hateful, domineering father and his mother who was terrified
of him. On one occasion his father catches George with his girlfriend, a
girl who had grown up with him as his playmate. The two were together in
the barn and they were kissing and feeling each other. The father orders
George back into the house and then he rapes George’s girlfriend. One
night the boy is asleep in his tent while camping out with his father in
the wilderness. He wakes up hearing repeated dull thuds and realizes his
father is digging something in the night. His father has been furious
with him that evening about some small thing, maybe he hadn’t tied up
the horses properly. Sudden realization comes: his father is digging a
grave for him! And then the father hits him on the head with a shovel
and he is dead and out of his body. He sees his father dragging his body
to the pit he had dug and burying him in it.
~*~
Transactional analysis [TA], a branch of psychology/psychiatry born in
the 1960s, speaks of what are called scripts.
Speaking of scripts, transactional analysts say that “in the life of
every individual the dramatic life events, the roles that are learned,
rehearsed, and acted out, are originally determined by a script.”
These psychological scripts are very much like theatre or film scripts.
As Muriel James and Dorothy Jongward say in their best-selling book Born
to Win, “Each has a prescribed cast of characters, dialogue, acts and
scenes, themes and plots, which move toward a climax and end with a
final curtain. A psychological script is a person’s ongoing program for
a life drama, which dictates where the person is going with his or her
life and the path that will lead there. It is a drama an individual
compulsively acts out, though one’s awareness of it may be vague.”
According to transactional analysis, these scripts begin to be written,
or programmed, in early childhood, based on the transactions between
parent figures and children. Depending on the nature of these scripts,
children become “heroes, heroines, villains, victims and rescuers and –
unknowingly – seek others to play complementary roles.”
Eric Berne, one of the founders of the transactional analysis movement
says: “Nearly all human activity is programmed by an ongoing script
dating from early childhood, so that the feeling of autonomy is nearly
always an illusion – an illusion which is the greatest affliction of the
human race because it makes awareness, honesty, creativity, and intimacy
possible for only a few fortunate individuals. For the rest of humanity,
other people are seen, mainly as objects to be manipulated. They must be
invited, persuaded, seduced, bribed, or forced into playing the proper
roles to reinforce the protagonist’s position and fulfill his script,
and his preoccupation with these efforts keeps him from torquing in with
the real world and his own possibilities in it.”
Explaining how these scripts are formed, transactional analysis explains
that children are amazingly sensitive and pick up messages about their
self-worth right from the beginning. The first experiences of the infant
are extremely important in this. From whether they are touched and
hugged or ignored, from whether they are given warmth or left coldly
alone, and later from other forms of behavior of the significant people
around him, like whether they are crooned to or spoken to without
affection, from the messages in the eyes of these people, from their
smiles and frowns and other facial expressions and so on, the child
makes conclusions about himself and his self worth. These initial
conclusions he forms become powerful scripts in his unconscious and they
influence his future behavior powerfully. In later stages, when they are
grown enough to understand, children write scripts based on the verbal
messages they get from their parents and other significant people. For
instance, a mother’s comment watching her child explaining something to
her doll that she would make an excellent teacher one day can become an
unconscious script in her that eventually leads her to choose teaching
as her profession. Or it could be a visiting relative’s unthinking
comment that that the little boy is going to be a terror when he grows
up that takes the shape of a script.
In whatever way they are formed, these imprints on our psyches are
non-verbal and are hidden deep in our unconscious. That is, they are in
the form of images, feelings and so on, and not in words, and are hidden
from the light of our consciousness. And they exert powerful influences
on us and shape us and our lives. These scripts decide what we become,
what our strengths and weaknesses will be, how we act and react, whether
we will be winners or losers, whether we will derive success and
happiness from life or defeat and unhappiness, whether we will be
persecutors, victims or rescuers, whether we will be heroes and heroines
or villains, whether we will be the Beauty or the Beast, Cinderella or
Narcissus, whether we will be healthy, balanced and effective or suffer
from anger-proneness, assertiveness problems, communication problems,
relationship problems, sexual problems, violence, manias, phobias,
neurotic behavior and so on.
~*~
Indian
mythology refers to what transactional analysts call scripts, the
unconscious imprints on the psyche, by several names. One of them is
what all Indians understand as Chitratgupta, the accountant of Yama, the
lord of death. According to Indian mythology, Chitragupta keeps an
account, much as Gabriel does in Semitic mythology, of every deed we do
on this earth and of every thought we think. And when we die and go to
the other world, Chitragupta opens the pages containing our account in
his book and depending on whether we have done good or bad, depending on
whether we have acquired punya [merit resulting from virtuous
thoughts and deeds] or papa [sin], or it is a more or less equal
balance of the two, he sends us on our onward journey, to heaven to
enjoy or to hell to suffer or to the earth to be reborn.
What the myth of Chitragupta tells in short is that our future life will
depend on our present actions and thoughts. Indian mythology is
absolutely right: it is indeed Chitragupta that decides our future.
However, he decides our future not merely after our death, but does so
at all times. It is Chitragupta that has decided what we are now. For,
our present is a result of these hidden pictures generated in our dark
depths by our past thoughts, actions and reactions. And what we will
become in the future is being written now – in the same dark depths of
our psyche, by our present thoughts, actions and reactions.
Chitragupta literally means hidden [gupta] picture/s [chitra].
He makes us what we are at all times. Our hidden scripts make us what we
are at all times.
Indian philosophy uses other words to describe the transactional
analyst’s scripts. Karmas, vasanas [psychological dispositions]
and samskaras [more or less the same as vasanas] are
nothing but TA’s scripts. Karmas are the deep imprints that we write on
our psyches through our thoughts, actions and reactions. It is these
karmas that form our vasanas and samskaras.
However, there is a major difference between the approach of TA,
essentially a product of western thinking, and Indian philosophy. While
transactional analysts say that scripts are decisive in shaping our self
perceptions, behavior patterns and life events, they say that the
earliest scripts are formed in our early infancy, or, according to some,
in our pre-natal state. According to Indian philosophy, however, we
carry these scripts [karmas/vasanas/samskaras] with us from life
to life.
Study of karma is as old as Indian thinking and the Indian mind has
studied it in great depth. Indian philosophy classifies karmas into
sanchita [accumulated], prarabdha [‘begun’ or currently
active], and agami [future, yet to become active]. Sanchita
karmas are an individual’s total karmas that he has acquired through the
several lifetimes he has lived. Prarabdha karmas are those that
are active in this lifetime – the psychological dispositions we are born
with in this lifetime, which are of course subject to modification due
to our thoughts, actions and reactions. The prarabdha karma is
part of our sanchita karma. The remaining part of sanchita
karma that is waiting to be lived out in future lifetimes is called
agami karma. Just as transactional analysis speaks of re-scripting,
of wiping out bad [negative] scripts and writing fresh, positive scripts
in their place, through the swish and other techniques, Indian spiritual
traditions describe several ways of eliminating negative [bad] karma and
creating positive karma in their place, and these are universally known
and have been practiced by the common man in India for millennia.
Indian philosophy differentiates between an individual’s personal
scripts [vyashti karma, vyashti in Sanskrit meaning an
individual] and a groups, or family’s or society’s or community’s,
collective karma [samashti karma, samashti in Sanskrit
meaning total or collective] which is a sum total of the karma of all
the individuals involved in the group or family or society or community,
as the case may be.
Life events that happen to us, people we attract or repel, associate
with or keep away from, are all decided by a combination of the
vyashti karma of each of us in association with the samashti
karma, says Indian philosophy.
~*~
Gail
Bartley’s tale of successive reincarnations from Tales of
Reincarnation narrated briefly at the beginning of this article
speaks of karma/scripts being carried across lifetimes because of their
immense power.
In her lifetime as the younger Roman brother, though it was not an
intentional act of hers that caused the elder brother’s death, she, as
the younger brother, concludes she is responsible for the tragic death.
The deep love between the brothers gives birth to an intense feeling of
guilt with which she, her psyche, is branded. An almost indelible script
of guilt is written, the power of the script so alarming that she
carries it in her psyche across lifetimes and centuries and continents.
Hers is a victim script, which will make her vulnerable to suffering and
pain, until the power of the script/karma is exhausted. And the elder
brother who lost his life blames his younger brother for the accident
and, in his dying moments, vows vengeance, perhaps unthinkingly and
unconsciously, thus writing a powerful script of revenge, a persecutor
script, in his psyche. Through his several lifetimes across two thousand
years, as father, as husband and possibly through many other
relationships, he persecutes his younger brother, killing him again and
again, raping the younger brother’s girlfriend, and committing the
numerous other crimes some of which Gail’s past life regressions take us
to.
~*~
The
Mahabharata tells us the story of Amba, who carries her persecutor
script across three lifetimes. When we first meet her in the epic, she
is a beautiful young princess, one of the three nubile daughters of the
king of Kashi. According to the Indian custom of the day, a
swayamvara has been arranged for all three sisters, in which each
would choose a husband for herself from the kings and princes who have
assembled there from all over the land. However, while the swayamvara
is in progress, Devavrata Bheeshma, the Bharata prince who has renounced
the throne, the most renowned warrior of the day, a living legend whose
name has by then become a synonym for integrity, valour and duty,
arrives there in a single chariot. He announces, following the ancient
custom, his intention to carry away all the three princesses who had
been declared veeryashulkas by their father – that is, to be won
through valor, a very common and highly respected custom among the
warrior class of the day. He, as custom required, challenges the
assembly of warrior princes and kings to stop him if they could, and
then boards the chariot with the princesses. The assembly challenges him
and a fierce battle ensues with Bheeshma alone on one side and all the
other princes and kings together on the other. Eventually they are all
forced to retreat before the Bheeshma’s might, and Bheeshma carries the
princesses to his capital, Hastinapura, where he hands them over to his
[step-]mother, Queen Satyavati, so that the princesses could be given in
marriage to his half brother Vichitraveerya.
However, when the marriage is announced, the eldest of the princesses,
Amba, informs Bheeshma that she wouldn’t be willing to marry Prince
Vichitra since she has already given her heart to another king. She
tells Bheeshma she and King Shalva have been in love for a long time and
they have pledged themselves to each other. Respecting her wish,
Bheeshma, after consulting his ministers and priests, sends her to
Shalva.
Shalva is one of the kings who was present at the swayamvara. He
too had fought Bheeshma and had been defeated. When Amba comes and
requests him to marry her, a request she makes overcoming her maidenly
modesty with great difficulty, Shalva refuses, saying that she now
belonged to another and he cannot have her. Amba begs repeatedly, but he
does not relent. Eventually she leaves. Shalva will not have her, she
cannot go back to her home now, for that would be shameful, and she
cannot go back to Bheeshma either for the same reason, and since there
is no other place she can go to, she goes to an ashram to live a life of
asceticism there. She does not know whom to blame for her fate –
herself, for not revealing to her father her love for Shalva and also
for not jumping out from Bheeshma’s chariot when he was carrying her
away, Bheeshma for abducting her though it was done according to
perfectly acceptable customs of the day, or Shalva for rejecting her, or
her father for announcing to the world that she could be had with valor,
without finding out about her love for Shalva.
In the ashram, however, an ascetic convinces her that her all suffering
is because of Bheeshma – had he not abducted her, she would have been
fine. Soon she meets in the ashram the great Parashurama who is on a
visit. Parashurama is Bheeshma’s teacher in the martial arts and an
unsurpassed warrior, though very, very old now. When he asks Amba the
reason for her sorrow, promising help, she tells him that her sorrows
are because of Bheeshma and Bheeshma should pay with death for his
crime. Parashurama goes to Bheeshma and asks him to have Amba back, or
accept his challenge for a battle. Bheeshma accepts the challenge since
he wouldn’t on any account now have Amba back and a fierce battle that
lasts for many days ensues between the guru and the disciple. In the
battle neither is victorious, and when they come to using all-powerful
weapons that could destroy the world itself, great sages appear on the
spot and stop the battle. Parashurama goes back to continue his
austerities, apologizing to Amba for his inability to fulfill his pledge
to her.
Finding no other solution, Amba now decides to do tapas,
austerities, by herself. For years she stands in water and performs
tapas, for more years by standing in water and for still more years
without eating. According to one version of her story, she dies and part
of her becomes the crooked, seasonal river Amba [because her tapas
had evil intensions] and the other part is reborn as a princess in the
country of Vatsa. She continues her austerities in this life too and
eventually Lord Shiva appears before her and asks her what she wants.
When she expresses her desire, Shiva blesses her that she would be able
to have her vengeance by killing him in her next birth. She then
immolates herself in a funeral pyre and is reborn as Shikhandini, the
daughter of the Panchala king Drupada.
She has a long way to go still, before her desire for vengeance that she
has been carrying with her from two lifetimes ago is fulfilled. Since
she is born a princess and since princesses do not fight battles, she
gets herself transformed into a male and becomes Shikhandi. It is as
Shikhandi that years later she becomes the cause of Bheeshma’s death in
the Mahabharata war – Bheeshma, of course, has become very, very old by
then.
Amba carries
her will to vengeance, her prosecutor script, through three lifetimes
before the power of that script, the power of that karma, is exhausted
through fulfillment.
~*~
We have in
the Mahabharata story of Nalayani yet another story of scripts lasting
over lifetimes, though the script here is entirely different and the
course it takes is at the very core of the story of the immortal epic.
Nalayani, also known as Indrasena, was the wife of an old ascetic called
Maudgalya. He was a leper, impetuous, lustful, jealous, and prone to
furious anger. His body was skin and bones, it was crooked and stank,
his skin was wrinkled, his head bald, and, because of leprosy, his nails
and skin had begun to fall off. But in spite of all this, Nalayani
serves her husband devotedly. Pleased with her devotion, Maudgalya
reveals his true form to her – he is none of the things he appeared to
be. He is neither a leper, nor impetuous or lustful. He is not aged, nor
is his body crooked or ugly. In fact, he is a great sage with amazing
spiritual powers who can do anything he wishes. The sage asks Nalayani
what he can do to please her. And Nalayani tells him that he should
assume five different forms and pleasure her sexually, for she is filled
with lust. The sage does that and a long, long time passes, during which
they plunge into erotic pleasures assuming different forms and living in
different worlds. Eventually the sage tires of the sexual games they
play and decides to go back to his spiritual practices. But Nalayani’s
voracious sexual hunger is still not satiated and she begs Maudgalya
again and again to continue their games and not to go back to his
austerities. When she insists on this repeatedly, the sage curses her
that in her next lifetime she will have five husbands, for no one man
can satisfy her boundless sexual hunger.
It is this
Nalayani, according to the Mahabharata, that is born as Draupadi
in her next birth and she gets the five Pandava brothers as her
husbands. Draupadi’s powerful sexuality is legendary in the
Mahabharata, and in some of the epic’s numerous folk versions and
regional retellings, she becomes sexually insatiable.
There are several other stories about Draupadi’s past lives. According
to one of these, she was the daughter of an ascetic and though she was
extremely beautiful, she did not get a husband. Unhappy, she performs
austerities to please Lord Shiva and to ask a boon from him. Shiva
appears at the end of her austerities and in her excitement, she repeats
five times that she should get a husband. Shiva blesses her that she
would have five husbands in her next lifetime. And it is this young
female ascetic that is reborn as Draupadi.
The Mahabharata also tells us that in one of her earlier
lifetimes before she became Nalayani, Draupadi was a woman called
Shaibya Bhaumashwi Ausheenari, an extremely beautiful woman with a
voice as sweet as that of the veena, which made you swoon when
you heard it. In her swayamvara, in which she had the choice of
marrying anyone she wanted from the assembly of princes and kings
present, she chose five brothers as her husbands: Salveya, Shoorasena,
Shrutasena, Tindusara and Atisara, all sons of King Nitantu. Shaibya was
the only wife of these five men whom the epic calls ‘bull-like’, and she
had a very happy, contented life with her five husbands. According to
this story it is possible that her powerful sexual script was written in
this lifetime. It is also equally possible, however, that her choice of
five husbands in a swayamvara was itself dictated by a powerful
sexual script she carried from a still earlier lifetime, and her
lifetime as Shaibya reinforced this script.
Incidentally, Amba and Nalayani, whose stories we have discussed here
are both eventually born in the same family, and as sisters. Amba is
born as Shikhandini, daughter of King Drupada and subsequently becomes
Shikhandi through a gender transformation. And Nalayani is born as
Shikhandini's younger sister Krishnaa, popularly known as Draupadi.
~*~
Several other
stories of reincarnation, contemporary and old, talk of people carrying
their scripts across lifetimes. These scripts/karmas could manifest in
the form of psychological tendencies or needs, phobias or physical
illnesses, and in many other forms.
A striking case is that of a woman called Pat from New York, who
suffered from chronic headaches. She had tried several doctors and they
had all failed her. She had tried a CAT scan and acupuncture, but
nothing helped. Her chronic aches that began on her neck and moved onto
her head continued. Eventually she tried past life regression, which
took her into a lifetime in medieval England, in the Warwick castle near
Shakespeare’s birthplace, Stratford-on-Avon. To her horror she realized
that in that lifetime she was the hangman of the castle, who had been
forced to hang several innocent people during a time of strife against
the castle. What had happened was that Pat developed a script of
powerful guilt in that lifetime as the hangman and this guilt was
carried over to her present lifetime. She was eventually freed from her
guilt and the chronic headaches after the regression experience and the
realization of the cause of her suffering.
Dr Brian Weiss, in his best selling Through Time into Healing
talks of a woman who was in a past lifetime an extremely beautiful
Native American woman. Because of her beauty she was singled out by a
member of an enemy tribe. He kidnapped her, and then raped and mutilated
her, making her suffer all her life. The reason why Dee had gone for
past life regression was her obesity. From her regressions she realizes
the reason for her obesity. She realizes that she has a deep-seated fear
of being beautiful and attractive, resulting from the lifetime as the
Native American Woman, and to avoid becoming attractive, she eats so
much that she develops obesity. Dee’s is another case of a script, this
time of the fear being attractive, written in one lifetime affecting her
in another lifetime.
While discussing past life and regression with a group, a young lady
once told me of her hydrophobia, which, she believed, had resulted from
a past life in which she had drowned in the sea. The young lady had
graphic memories of being on a beech, of a rather violent sea and of her
getting into water – all from what she believed was another life time,
since they did not correspond to her present life time experiences.
All scripts are not negative. There are good scripts and bad scripts,
good karmas and bad karmas, good samskaras and bad samskaras.
Most of the scripts discussed tend to be negative because these are more
dramatic and striking in their effects. But good scripts/karmas/samskaras
create powerful good effects too. The Buddhist Jataka tales
deal with the Buddha’s past life incarnations and his noble acts in each
of those incarnations, which develop such positive scripts or karmas/samskaras
that he is eventually led to Buddhahood and freed from all
scripts/karmas.
~*~
And that is perhaps what all
this should mean to us: that whatever we are, is what we have made of
ourselves. Which means that while other forces and other people and
events do have an influence on us and our lives, to a very large extent
what we are and what we shall become are in our own hands. For, while
the scripts are powerful, their power on us is only so long as we are in
the grip of our unconscious. As we awaken and learn to live consciously,
they lose their power over us.
During one of my recent sessions on Mind Management
and Self Mastery to a group of trainee officers from a leading national
bank, I quoted the Dhammapada saying
“All
that we are, is the result of what we have thought: It is founded on
our thoughts, it is made up of our thoughts.”
I proceeded
to elaborate on the implications of this statement to each one of us
today and discussed how our unconscious scripts make us susceptible to
certain events. Subsequently a young lady from the group wrote to me
asking how a victim could be blamed for what happens to her or him.
Well, no one is absolved from responsibility for his or her negative
actions – no persecutor is, no criminal is. The victim script of the
victim is no justification for the persecutor’s evil acts. At the same
time, our psychological, social, cultural and spiritual scripts do have
a powerful influence on what we are, what we do and what happens to us.
We have all seen around us people who attract love and adoration
wherever they go. We have also seen around us people who are victimized
in job after job, get into relationship after relationship in which they
are exploited, or end up suffering and grieving wherever they are.
May 18, 2008
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