I. Jack

​

“Ramana would sometimes admit that reincarnation existed. In replying to such people he would say that if one imagined that the individual [small] self was real, then that imaginary self would persist after death and that eventually it would identify with a new body and a new life. The whole process, he said, is sustained by the tendency of the mind to identify itself with a body. Once the limiting illusion of mind is transcended, identification with the body ceases, and all theories about death and reincarnation are found to be inapplicable.”

​

 —David Godman, Be As You Are: The Teachings of Sri Ramana Maharshi

 

​*

​

“Where’s Uncle Alden and Auntie Iris?” Jack asked, tugging at his mother’s sleeve.

​

At first, his parents thought it was something he had seen on YouTube, or from the dozens of other media channels our children are exposed to these days. They thought perhaps it was a kind of fantasy world Jack was creating, based on characters he picked up from somewhere. However, it was unusual that little Jack would take fancy to using names that sounded more like they came from a Jane Austen novel than a Disney movie. After all, he was only four. “Uncle Woody” and “Auntie Ariel” would have been more in line with their expectations.

​

“Mom, when are they coming over? I want to show them my new toys.”

​

What began as an interesting quirk of Jack’s soon turned into a source of quiet dread for his parents.

​

“Jack, honey, who are Uncle Alden and Auntie Iris?” his mother asked one day as she was looking for her keys so she could take little Jacky to daycare and go to work. “Are they characters you saw on the internet, or in a book somewhere?”

​

“You know, Mom!” Jack replied. “Uncle Alden and Auntie Iris!

 

They live on our street. Why don’t they visit us anymore?” Followed by, “Can we go to the Ingathering again this year?”

​

“Ingathering?” she echoed, stopping to make sure she’d heard her son correctly.

​

“You know, the harvest festival. We used to pick loads of apples, and then Auntie Iris would make her famous apple pies, and Uncle Alden would eat his with cheese on top and tell us it’s the proper way to enjoy apple pie. Proper!” Jack said, laughing to himself at the choice of words.

​

But Jack and his family lived in Phoenix, Arizona—miles away from any apple orchards, let alone any “Ingathering.” As Jack got older, he would reveal more details about Uncle Alden and Auntie Iris—including how Uncle Alden was a colonel in the war, lost an eye, and still carried shrapnel in his “bum.” And how Auntie Iris lost her wedding band once while washing the dishes and suspected that “the substandard pipe fitter she called to fetch it stole it, and lied about it not being found”—details and phrasing that were peculiar for such a young child to remember from any story.

​

Eventually, Jack’s parents grew frustrated, not knowing whether their son was a creative genius or had an extreme case of confabulation. They feared that his symptoms could be the effect of a more serious underlying disorder, such as schizophrenia, or even a brain injury. Just to be on the safe side, they had a psychologist examine him. In the end, they were told that little Jacky was a healthy and very imaginative boy, who was probably just looking for some extra attention.

​

Nevertheless, Jack’s stories about Uncle Alden and Auntie Iris persisted, and now he was adding new characters into the mix: a nosy neighbor named Mrs. Hopkins, two cousins named Edward and Florence, and an Airedale named Oakley. At a certain point, Jack’s parents discouraged him from mentioning any more of them. His mom in particular thought she might have a nervous breakdown if he didn’t stop—which is what eventually happened.

 

The stories were too much for her to bear any longer. Instead of Jack focusing on present-day reality, like a normal boy, his thoughts were far away with some other family at some other distant time and place. Trying out various doctors, Jack was later diagnosed as having obsessive compulsive disorder and recommended weekly counseling. He was even prescribed medication along with his mother, who couldn’t possibly understand what could have possessed her dear child.

 

Beginnings

​

“It happened slowly, and then all at once” was the catchphrase the media liked to use when introducing the topic. Children around the world were being born with what could only be described as “distant memories.” At first, it was easy for doctors to write it off. As with Jack, they claimed it was children just looking for attention in an attention-starved world where both parents worked all day to make ends meet. But as reports multiplied, so did the questions. How could thousands of children across the glove be fabricating the same kinds of intricate stories—detailed memories of places they had never seen, languages they had never learned, people they had never met? It was, as one doctor put it making the Sunday morning news circuit, “a remarkable turn in human evolutionary events.”

​

Society was completely upended. The impact was felt everywhere, and the world would never be the same. Given a subject that had fascinated people since the beginning of time, nobody could stop talking about it.

​

Suddenly, scientists and academics in all fields, from psychology to biology, were expressing their “expert” opinions in the area of metaphysics, and specifically, on reincarnation—concepts that until recently would’ve been dismissed as pseudoscience.

​

Psychologists, who had already been in short supply before, were now stretched to their breaking point as people no longer sought help just for the burdens of this life, but for wounds they carried from past lives before.

​

Like a wildfire, the phenomenon spread. Almost overnight, everyone was claiming to have a past life. “I always knew my pug was once Napoleon” was the running joke heard on late-night comedy shows. All the celebrities now had a past life, which they took every opportunity to make public. Donald Trump had to confess that he was once Abraham Lincoln, while Madonna claimed she had once been Cleopatra. It was rumored that even the Pope believed he might have been one of the original apostles.

 

For those unable to remember any of their previous lives, a booming industry sprang up, offering a dizzying array of products and services that would help induce such memories. These included various pills and topical applications, psychedelic micro-dosing, guided meditations, hypnosis, iridology, and even special helmets that stimulated the memory region of the brain using electrodes, along with other offerings too numerous to mention.

​

In the US, Gwyneth Paltrow led the charge by being one of the first to offer an online curated list of “memory products” that ran side by side with her existing lineup of beauty supplies, wellness brands, and vibrators.

​

Other online businesses began to crop up, claiming to be able to read people’s past lives. For twelve hundred dollars, Deepak Chopra™, in partnership with Ancestry®, would assign you a “vetted reincarnation specialist” to build an online catalog of your Life Tree™ dating back centuries. This allowed people to share their Life Tree with others and boast of such amazing past achievements as having built the pyramids, ruled entire nations, discovered whole continents, or invented such random things as calculus, eyeglasses, and even bread.

​

Dating apps also got into the game. It was no longer good enough to know what kind of person your date was in this life. Curious minds wanted to know what kind of person they were in their past ones. Prospects who claimed they had no recollection of their past lives were immediately written off as hiding something, perhaps at one time being a serial rapist or killer. Established relationships were also affected. Suddenly, couples everywhere demanded to know what their significant other had done in their former life. Such inquiries sometimes even resulted in divorce when the other half refused to cooperate, or when a “legitimate third party,” as their lawyers called them, had discovered unscrupulous events about their past.

​

The phenomenon was also a boon for job seekers looking to get an edge. LinkedIn extended everyone’s online resumes to include a section on “Past Life Achievements,” while ambitious young men and women, still in their early twenties, would claim that their previous banking experience stretched all the way back to the Romans and that they should be seriously considered for a VP position (and the four-hundred-thousand-dollar salary commensurate with it).

​

Not to mention, religious and spiritual leaders everywhere began to come out and gather their flock. To have a “Jesus complex” was no longer considered anything unusual. Any doubters would be “damned to hell’s gates,” according to one walking-and-talking Jesus from Wichita, Kansas. Several pot-smoking spiritual types, upset that no one until now had recognized their importance, claimed to be the real Dalai Lama. In San Francisco, for a small fee, you could easily hook up or have coffee with Saint Francis of Assisi, Confucius, or the Buddha. In some quarters, it even began to look like a battle for dominion over all mankind when, in Houston, Texas, multiple Jesuses stepped up onto a podium to literally “box it out,” as the Chronicle reported, “to assert their right to their God-given throne.”

​

Meanwhile, governments were having to adjust. The People’s Republic of China was one of the first countries to outlaw any mention, promotion, or commerce related to having or inducing memories originating from alleged past lives. Other authoritarian governments soon followed, out of fear that the trend could mushroom into a significant movement. In the PRC, and many Muslim countries too, children found to have past life knowledge were swiftly taken away and sent to reeducation camps.

 

There was all this and much, much more that ensued.

 

But for the children who actually did remember, the effect was something very different.

​

Continue to Part II: Oliver

​

​

​