101 Things #26 - Living in the Past

Are you terminally gullible? Do you hold that any idea nobody can explain or substantiate must therefore be true? Have you got nothing else to do this afternoon? If all this is you then you should certainly add to your lifetime bucket list an idea propounded by the Pick your goals website to

Get a past life regression session

and while you are handing over your credit card details, I shall be adding this inane suggestion to my anti-bucket list 101 Things I Refuse To Do Before I Die.

Perhaps you believe that you (and what is understood by "you" in this context is a very slippery concept indeed) were someone else previously, and that when they died "they" in some sense became the "you" that was to born later on, and that the identity of this spiritual ancestor can be ascertained by consulting someone in a dimly lit consulting room with a big notice on the wall saying "No money refunded".

How does that work, then? What is the link between the dead and yourself? Is it anything physical, made of molecules and subject to the known laws of our universe? Or a mysterious "soul" that you just know is there (because you are deeply spiritual, aren't you) and so it must be true and how that soul survives after one death to influence the mind of another person is a detail that can be safely skipped over.

It's always fascinating to see the number of people who were important in a past life; there must be hundreds or thousands of reborn Cleopatras, for example. And they all speak perfect English too, these spirits who inhabit our minds. Remarkable that, does it mean that when you die your soul has to go to some sort of language school in the afterlife so that, when it is your turn to pop into the mind of a newly-born, you will be all set to go?

What of the overwhelmingly vast majority of ordinary folk who have lived and died without record over the past few hundred thousand years? Do they live again? Is our fascination with elephants the result of a dim memory of frying up a tasty mammoth steak by a campfire long ago? Do our fast bowlers at cricket relive the moment when Ug, the caveman, hurled a flint at the head of Ug, the other caveman (not very big on imagination when it came to names, these cavemen)? As a pole-vaulter springs herself elegantly 6 metres into the air, is she channelling the gleeful thoughts of an ape-like being flying through the jungle and contemptuously dropping unwanted bits of fruit on the heads of the plodding beasts far below?

You will gathered by now that I do not believe in reincarnation or the transmigration of souls or anything remotely similar. Our brains and minds are an integral part of our bodies and die when our bodies die. Now, it may be that in the future the complete state of a brain can be downloaded and stored to a computer and that our personalities will continue to exist, in a digital sense, when activated. But that still is not in any sense the same as having a past life. It would be a continuation of the present life.

Consequently I can only feel contempt for anyone offering past life regression sessions. Like all the mediums and fortune-tellers of yore, they feed off the clues given to them by their victims clients. Tell them you feel a bit Slavic and guess what? The blood of the Romanovs runs in your veins. Enjoy music? Welcome back to earth, Wolfgang Amadeus. Nothing they say can be contradicted. If they tell you that in a past life you were Napoleon then how can you disprove it?

Of course, I happen to know that you were not Napoleon because (whisper it), I am. My genius smashed the Russians and Austrians at Austerlitz. I was the man who remade the map of Europe and who modernised the laws of France. Get your filthy hands of my tricorne hat, I shall need that when I saddle up and ride out to impose EU membership on all who stand in my way, Ha Ha, Vive L'Empereur!