A Past Life of My Father's

[Shiftkitty]

I'm sure he'd want me to share this:

We were at a museum when I was little and they had a diorama of slaves stomping straw into mud to make bricks. Later that evening he talked about the memories it brought to him. He remembered the god awful hot sun and how tired his legs and feet were. The only relief he got was the water when it was poured in. It was still cool and provided some bit of comfort. He knew he was Hebrew, but didn't know if the guys calling the shots were Egyptian or Roman. "I suppose it doesn't matter," he said. "One tyrant's as bad as another." He distinctly remembered going blind in that life.

Unrelated, he also always felt a pull towards Caligula. He said the first time he ever saw a bust of Caligula, he knew who it was without reading the name. He was kind of confused by this. Half of him wanted to say he felt about Caligula the same way you would about a raunchy good friend (assuming you aren't offended by raunchiness). You know, "Haw-haw! That's sick! Just... uh... keep it to yourself, eh?" But a deeper part had him thinking that he honestly might have actually been Caligula. Of all the Roman Emperors, Caligula was the only one he felt any connection to.

 

[deborah]

Thank you for sharing your fathers experiences. I love reading about the little things, the ah ha moments and the "knowing" of something you had no way of knowing in this life.

 

[usetawuz]

Shiftkitty, his memories sound really interesting. Was there an event that turned these things on for him or had he always had a sensitivity to recognizing them for what they were?


I wonder if he might actually have been Caligula...I've had some odd thoughts about people that I have issue with only to later wonder how far separated I actually was...and the further sense that despite what was written and apparent, there were natually other perspectives and different matters at work forcing the actions taken.

 

[Shiftkitty]

Thanks. He had first learned about reincarnation during WW2. One of his shipmates was a firm believer in it, and it made a lot of sense to him. It also, he once said, made some of the things his grandmother would say make sense. She was apparently also a believer, but in a traditional Mexican Catholic family she kept it to herself, reading tea leaves and whatnot as an open secret. (Old superstitions die hard no matter what the church does.) He had a lot of problems of his own at the time (besides the Japanese trying to kill him, he was from a broken home and had a lot of emotional baggage), and kind of pushed it to a back burner. After the war, though, he did a lot of soul-searching and began to realize things about himself that he felt were most closely answered through reincarnation. From that point on he was very open to it as a possibility.