Past Lives: My Fifth Past-Life Memory via Self-Hypnotism

Recalled July 20th, 1988

This man comes to call, dressed very plain, unlike the musician. To match, he says only what is needed in public, is quiet, thought of as a kind of odd, unsociable, knowledgeable, businesslike person. His clothes are plain, pale colors, his hair is blackish and loosely wavy, short, and he wears high boots instead of the high-heeled dandy shoes (Carter) wears. He wears a sword. All I can see of his face is that it is thin, and he has a nose that is somehow remarkable, I can't really tell why. He has come to see my father. I am sure in a very polite, civil way he is courting me, or has intentions of marrying me. We don't really like each other – maybe we don't know each other at this time, only speak politely in public.

The identity of the Napoleon-like man is uncertain, but he might be Mary Wells's neighbor in Cookham, George Monck Berkeley. George owned a large library, wrote and published several books, received a bachelor degree in law from the University of Dublin, and was a member of the Inner Temple, London. His mother spoke several languages and his grandfather was a noted philosopher, so one would expect George to be a bit of an odd duck, although Mary’s father was on good terms with the Berkeleys (as evidenced by a letter in the British Library’s collection ). Given all these things, it would seem fitting that George Monck Berkeley might propose to Mary Wells.


Bishop Berkeley (George Monck Berkeley's grandfather) and his family c1731.

If you are looking for instructions on how to recall your own past life via self-hypnotism, please see my page on do-it-yourself past-life regression.

Past Lives: Finding the People You Recall

I vividly remember several unidentified people during my past-life regressions. There's an older gentleman, whom my husband and I visit in a rich, Adamesque-decorated house in London. There's a younger gentleman, whom I am greeted by boisterously as he comes in our house saying, "Where's Carter?!" And there's a young woman of whom I am terribly fond, a woman who is with the young gentleman and waiting for me at New Wardour Castle before a musical party.

How do I figure out who they are? Well, I've discovered that, of all the scores of scenes I could see from my life with these people, I am shown something very specific. Something that, in just the right combination, will lead me to these peoples' identities. I just have to put the pieces together.

Easier said than done.

The older gentleman, for instance, has a paternal feeling for Thomas, my husband. He's at least 50 years old, fat, probably tall, has bushy eyebrows, and what looks like a bulbous nose. The front of his house is on a wide street or square, and when you enter the front door, you can see a staircase rising beyond the entry hall. If you turn to the right (staying on the ground floor), somewhere in his house you will find a room with at least three windows, and this room will have sparing, Robert-Adam-like decoration and a dark-colored carpet.

How many people match these specifics? That Thomas Carter knew? Not many. I've currently got a short list which includes the likes of East India Director Sir Theophilus Metcalfe, the Marquess of Buckingham, and Lord Chancellor Edward Thurlow (among others). For the moment I've settled on Thurlow because, not only does he have the big, bushy white eyebrows, but he had a house on St James's Square that was situated at the corner of King Street. Thurlow loved music, and was the main patron of R.J.S. Stevens, one of Carter's good friends and musical colleagues. Thurlow also knew Edmund Burke pretty well, and Burke himself was a best friend of Carter's father, the Earl of Inchiquin, and Carter's mother, Abigail Aston. In addition, Thurlow was fond of the Margravine of Anspach, who was the hostess for Carter's friends at Brandenburgh House; and the Margravine's son, Keppel, matches precisely the personality and image of the boisterous young man who would visit us, saying, "Where's Carter?"

In 1781, Lord Thurlow was described this way: "In his person Lord Thurlow has an air of dignity, and a formidible appearance, when dressed in his senatorial robes, and attended by the pomp of office. But when relaxing from public business he throws off the trappings of state, he looks like a Kentish yeoman, or the master of a coasting vessel, so unfavorable is his external aspect, having a saturine complexion, large black eye-brows, a stern look, strong muscles, and a stature above the common size." Thurlow's eyebrows are reported by Stevens to have turned snow white soon after the clandestine elopement of his favorite daughter. The word saturnine, according to Johnson's famous dictionary, means gloomy, grave or severe.

Here are my memories of the mystery man (separated here from the other memories that were recorded on these dates):

January 24th, 2003
Then, out of nowhere, a vision: a man, seemingly small and corpulent and flat-nosed, with bushy brows and moles, a man sitting at a writing desk in a London room. Rich house. Sash windows to the floor and covered with sheer curtains to dim the day outside. A turkey carpet under his feet of primarily red and blue, and he's wearing a frock coat that won't meet in the front, buckled shoes, hose, waistcoat, feet splayed out on the carpet in front of him. He's turned toward Thomas beside me (to my right), calling him "my boy." He hands him something. The room is fairly large, and nothing else is visible to me except the wooden chair and writing desk he's sitting at, a small desk. Thomas is taller than me, wearing hose and heels and maybe a green coat. His hair is pulled back. I'm wearing dark colors. I could see the man handing a piece of paper to Thomas. The man's hair was grey and a little unkempt.

April 13th, 2003
In the room with the old, fat man again. Thomas wearing green. The man is writing something on a piece of paper. "Give this to him, my boy, and you'll be admitted..." Or something like that. Definitely a paternal feeling from the man. Bushy eyebrows. Messed, white hair, short on top, and a squidgy, wide nose. We're excited when we leave. We are in a London carriage with the piece of paper between us somewhere, or it's in our thoughts, and we're thrilled about what lies ahead. Something about the Prince of Wales enters my thoughts at this point.

November 27th, 2010
Saw the house of the older man, and it either took up a corner of a block, or it occupied the whole block, in front of either a wide street or a square. The front door was reached upon ascending about three or four steps, and it seemed to have white columns on either side of the front door, or something white, while the building itself seemed yellowish gray. Inside, there seemed to be narrow corridors, and the room where we met the older man was to our right upon entering the house, not facing the street from which we’d just come, but the cross street. The room seemed extraordinarily bright, which didn’t seem right to me, given the windows we were facing (a row). I could see no details at all about the room. The man himself seemed to have white hair, very messed and short on top, and his nose seemed big, his eyebrows bushy but not overly so. He seemed to be wearing a medium blue-colored frock coat, very plain, and white hose and shoes. He was pretty large, and when he was standing, he seemed taller than me and Thomas. He shook Thomas’s hand. I was reminded of the King’s advisor in Amadeus, only with white hair. He sat down to a writing desk on the right side of the room facing the windows.


Kappelmeister Bonno in Amadeus


Edward Thurlow by Thomas Lawrence, 1803, painted for the Prince of Wales.

Since having these memories, I've learned that the Prince of Wales was a great friend of Lord Thurlow's. The Prince used to ask Thurlow to dinner often, and solicit his advice, which the Prince never took and Thurlow always resented. Thurlow never hesitated to give his opinion to the Prince, even if it made the Prince angry, and he somehow got away with putting the Prince of Wales in his place on more than one occasion. If anyone was to provide a letter of introduction for Thomas Carter to the Prince of Wales, Lord Chancellor Thurlow would be that someone. And as it happened, the Prince was renting Crichel House in Dorset, not far from Encombe, where Thomas and Mary Carter went to aid in Carter's recovery from his worsening liver disease. The Prince was at Crichel on and off between early 1797 and early 1799 -- which exactly corresponds with my memories of a musical party within a carriage drive's distance from Encombe at the time my children were three and four years old.

See how these specific things shown to me in my self-regression have led me to one specific person? For Lord Thurlow must be the elderly gentleman of my visions. I might not have gotten all the details right, but certainly most of them. I find it interesting that I have been shown exactly the configuration of facts and images that will lead me in the right direction, if only I dig far enough.

If you are interested in finding out about your own past lives, you can follow my instructions for self-regression here.

Past Lives: My Fourth Past-Life Self-Regression

Recalled June 5th, 1988

First, a man dressed like Napoleon in light colors, white and royal, wide lapels, cloth buttons, high boots, and a tricorn, dark, short, curley hair, more unkempt than anything. Vague image to begin with. I think he might be French, but that may be due to the initial resemblance to Napoleon.

Reach down and look at HIS music, hand-written very neatly, on the piano while he's not around. Still wearing the big, rose-colored, flat-chested dress of heavy taffeta or silk. A dog comes into the hallway, light-colored wolfhound, a peacock is in the yard. It's a dark house with many little smatterings of light falling from windows, the outlines of the panes of glass on the dark hardwood floors. All the walls seem dark, maybe wood also. I see members of the household sort of talking/meeting in an entry hall, four or five people, and I'm watching. The cook is a mean woman. The lady of the house is a little older, and she has a calm, cool cruelness to her, very cold -- nothing comes to mind horrible that she's done, still she is not someone you would like. The father, or lord of the household, likes to hunt -- deer or anything else? There are children in the house, mostly they are kept upstairs, but they do run about, chaperoned, two or three of them, all between four and ten. I don't know if I have any special bond to any of them. I see HIM swagger down the hallway with a sword at his side that is just for show, part of his attire.


Henry Angelo

Verification of my memories:
That Thomas Carter carried a sword when the fashion had long gone out of style (verified 11/2004). This was verified by learning Carter's best friend, Samuel Maynard, was a regular companion of Henry Angelo. This fellow owned a fencing academy in London and shared many interests and friends in common with Thomas Carter. It would be reasonable to assume Carter attained the habit of wearing a sword in Naples, then continued wearing it in the company of fencers such as Angelo.

As for the memories of the house and the various people in it, this would probably be a memory of Taplow Court. Lord Inchiquin liked to hunt with the King in Windsor Park, and Inchiquin's house at Taplow was described by a contemporary as being very dark inside. Inchiquin's wife, Lady Orkney, was a deaf woman, and so could possibly come off as aloof or cool because of her inability to communicate. And Inchiquin's grandson, Lord Kirkwall, would've been ten or eleven years old in 1789; he is the only child I know of who could possibly be at Taplow Court at that time.

If you'd like to try your hand at remembering your own past lives, take a look at my instructions for self-hypnotism.

Past Lives: Animal Reincarnation

I know this is going to sound absolutely bonkers-crazy, but I'm going to say it anyway: my cat is the reincarnation of my previous and now passed-away cat. Yes, I know I sound like one of those strange cat ladies who believes they are the reincarnation of an Egyptian princess. I'm well aware of how off-the-charts nuts this sounds. And yet I find it's an inescapable deduction: my Mickey is the reincarnation of my dear, late Rowdy. Here's why.

Rowdy was only four years old when he developed all sorts of horrible medical problems. He had kidney stones. He had an immune response to his regular distemper booster shot which caused his whole body to break out in sores. He had a stroke. Then he developed pancreatitis, and that was the final straw. My dear, sweet little boy had to be put to sleep. He was in so much pain, it was the right thing to do, as there was no hope for him to recover. It broke my heart. And the night before we took him to the vet to end his misery, I told him: you have to come back to me. You simply have to, because four years just isn't enough.

Rowdy

After Rowdy was gone, we started to look for a new kitten right away in an attempt to dull the pain of missing our poor little boy. We even found one. It was a rambunctious Abyssinian from a backyard breeder about an hour from our house. We took home this waif of a thing, and discovered he was taken too soon from his mama; our vet said he was underweight, bloated, and could possibly have F.I.P. Wanting to do the right thing for this baby, we took him back to the breeder where he would have the best chance of getting well with his family. And we went back to looking for a kitten.

We looked on the internet -- it seems most of my life happens online -- and found a breeder in California whose queen had just been bred...the day before! Of course it would be 65 days before our new baby was born, but we didn't care. The daddy cat (or stud cat) was the very image of our poor Rowdy! Now that turned out not to be such a big coincidence. We learned, upon writing to the breeder, that Daddy was a cousin of our Rowdy; they shared a grandfather. Naturally, missing our departed "son," we couldn't help but sign up for whatever treasured kittens this Daddy would produce. About two months later, we got to watch as our new family member took his first steps in the queen's nest, as the breeder had everything on camera for her potential kitten homes to see via internet.

Eleven weeks later, and we arrived at the breeder's home to meet our new baby. She had seven kittens, all spoken for, all running around our feet in a blur, playing with each other and ignoring us visitors. As we talked to the breeder about cat-related topics, watching the "children" playing on the living room floor, one kitten came and sat down at my mother's feet, as if to say, "I'm going home with you." All the other cats and kittens were oblivious. This kitten, chosen by us at birth via webcam from two states away, we learned was our kitten. We named him Mickey.

Now here are reasons I am so certain Mickey is actually Rowdy reincarnated: Rowdy's favorite person was my mother, and when he stopped running and playing, it was my mother's lap he would land on. He loved to play fetch, and would play for hours if you kept the game going. We have a box of cat toys at our house, and of all the scores of different toys to choose from, Rowdy preferred one toy over all the others, e.g. "The Fetching Toy." This he would dig out of the box, put at your feet, and wait for you to throw it for him, as he was a very busy cat, and had lots of energy to burn.

Rowdy also had a second favorite toy. This one was a piece of sheep's skin, which basically amounted to a huge ball of fluff that no other cat was interested in; Rowdy alone liked this toy, and would pack it around in his mouth.

Another of his quirks was that he'd try to eat your food, and when he couldn't, he sit on the back of your chair and put one paw down on your shoulder, as if to say, "Remember me?" When he slept, he would always find a spot backed up to a wall or under a chair, as if he were afraid of being surprised or stepped on; often this would be a cold, hard place, such as a cement floor (and we don't live in a warm climate). If he was scared by something, he'd dive into the back of my mother's closet where he could not be reached.

Mickey came home with all of these quirks in place. Right away, he decided that my mother was his favorite person; his habitual spot was right under her chin (but only as long as he remained small enough!) When he discovered the cat toy box, he gravitated right for the Fetching Toy and the sheepskin. He was fetching on his fourth day with us with no prior training whatsoever, as if he already knew the game. If you don't believe me, here's a video I took of our eleven-week-old kitten playing fetch. Please note that, although he loved the Fetching Toy, it was really too big to fit in his mouth for fetching, so we used a tiny puff ball instead; when he got bigger, we graduated to the Fetching Toy.

When he came to us, our two other cats acted as if they knew him, and that it was no big deal he'd come into their space. Here's a video showing Mickey on his third day eating off the same plate as his new brother, Jack. Usually it takes weeks for my eldest cat to accept a new kitten, but with Mickey, not a problem.

Mickey will perch on the back of your chair if you're eating, and put just one paw on your shoulder, just like Rowdy would. He sleeps against walls, under chairs, and on the cold cement bathroom floor, and when he's really scared, he'll dive into the back of my mom's closet. I have had nine cats over the years, and only one cat did these things. Only Rowdy.

Mickey has one trait that Rowdy didn't: he's scared to death of every little noise. Understand, he was raised by the most loving kitten home one could imagine, as his breeder spent her whole life caring for her cats with no other distractions; I could see this loving attention every day on the webcam as Mickey was growing up. And yet Mickey will run and hide at the most inane of noises. This could be genetics, as his daddy is also prone to hide in the kitchen cupboards when scared. But it could also partly be because of the horrible last week Rowdy spent on earth. Having had a stroke, Rowdy was taken to the emergency vet hospital, where they insisted on keeping him for days, doing an MRI and taking blood for tests. All the while, unbeknownst to anyone, he had developed pancreatitis, which is just about the most painful thing a cat can endure. If I had gone through that, I might run and hide at the slightest noise, too.

Do I think of Rowdy when I look at my little Mickey? Hardly ever these days. Mickey has become his own little person, and the memory of Rowdy has faded just a bit. I love Mickey for who he is, not as a replacement for my dear lost boy. But somewhere deep inside, I do feel that Rowdy has come back to us, and that I don't need to mourn him quite as much when he's tripping me, weaving between my legs, the way Rowdy used to do.

Mickey