Angie: I know I read somewhere that you haven't had past life memories yourself, has that changed?
What are your thoughts and feelings on reincarnation?
Steve: It's true; I haven't had clear past life memories. I tried regression a few times in the beginning, but got nowhere. Now I'm content to not press the issue. Plus, it feels almost necessary for me to strike a balance with Carol's full involvement with regressions and past lives--she has an active practice and does 3 or 4 past life regressions a week. I joke that somebody in the family has to be grounded.
I'm weird in my own ways. I listen to intense music and like intense art, and create musical and visual works of sorts. I see things in the mundane that most other people don't see. But I've never been able to experience independent visions or full-bodied imagining.
It works well for our partnership. I ground Carol, if that makes sense. I'm the logical one; she is free to do, say, or think whatever she wants, but occasionally I'll put up boundaries, borders, to keep her from going too far and deflect her back to the center. And I help her structure her communications.
The books are a good example of our collaboration. The research, the ideas and insights, the heart-felt words and stories are all hers. The strong outline and organization, both on the macro and micro level, are mine. I helped her plan it out, and I did a lot of hard-core editing to sequence the ideas and give it a logical flow and pull the reader from one page to the next. To some extent that's how we live together.
Do I believe in reincarnation? I like to tell my buttoned-down business colleague that I was raised and trained to be rational and logical, especially at Harvard, but the evidence for reincarnation, after working with it for a while, has convinced me that it's true. Since getting together with Carol, I've always given her wide berth in her ideas and refrained from saying much about her constant synchronistic happenings, neither swallowing nor denying the things she thought or had happen to her, keeping a cool head. When the past life memories happened to our kids (as described in the book), my reaction was, "Well, that's interesting. Could be; maybe not." But after spending a lot of time with Stevenson's books (months and months!), and seeing new case after case coming over the transom, I'm convinced there can't be any other explanation. As we've said so often in the books, it's a natural phenomenon, it happens, it has all the patterns of a real phenomenon, it's consistent, it happens to people despite their beliefs. All the cases are in some ways the same, but always in some ways different in the details. After spending time with them, it feels real and honest and normal.
So I've arrived logically to the same place that Carol came to emotionally and intuitively.
How does it feel? It feels right and obvious, like watching the sun rise. It gives me peace to know that death is only a revolving door. Without having visions or experiences, I still can attribute certain patterns and proclivities in my life to past lives. For example, I've always been attracted to Chinese philosophy and art; I wrote masses when I was younger--and I'm not Catholic; I feel an indescribable intimacy with complicated music, such as Bach or Renaissance counterpoint. And I love to pack up the car and take very long solo road trips across the country, feeling very much like a trapper who packed his canoe to go into the wilderness to trap and hunt. I also surprise myself at my ability to intuit structure, in music or in writing, as if I've done it many times before. Although much of the structure of CPL was planned and calculated, I also felt it, sensed it, dancing with the meaning and shapes until it all fell into line.
Steve
