by Rosemary Ann Guiley

BILL (A PSEUDONYM) is a college student in New England. A native of California born in 1968, he has since early childhood been fascinated by war and the military, and also has felt an affinity with the name “John.” It was neither his real first nor middle name, yet as a child he adopted it as a second middle name and called himself by it.

His family moved around the country while he was growing up, and in Texas, where he finished high school, Bill met a friend who introduced him to reincarnation, metaphysics and other topics of the New Age. Just before he entered college, Bill decided to undergo hypnotic regression as an exploration of himself. The night before, he and his friend meditated together as a way of preparing for it.

Three key, related lives appeared in the regression the next day, two of which involved deaths in wars: the American Civil War and the Vietnam War, one soul group and one emerging soul group. The entire experience was intense and emotional, with Bill reliving what he encountered rather than merely observing it.

At the start of the regression, Bill told the hypnotist that he wanted to discover information relating to his back problems, which he had suffered for quite some time. Bill’s first scene was a Civil War battle:

I found myself wearing an officer’s uniform and leading troops in a hill entrenchment alongside what appeared to be a river. The regressionist asked me to look at the aftermath of the battle from a detached point of view. I saw the hill littered with bodies, and found myself still alive and struggling on my back—evidently I had been wounded in the fighting, which had left most, if not all, of my men dead.

The regressionist asked me to remove the officer from the battle scene to a place where he would be warm and comfortable, and to tell him that I was from the future. She told me to thank the officer for that life and all that he had learned and done in it. In addition, I should tell him that the injury was in the past and he could let it go so that I could be freed from it in the future. The two of us had something to discuss, she said, and would come to an understanding.

I said I sensed there was a bayonet in the officer’s stomach. She told me to remove it and take the officer away from the battle scene. ‘There is something else that Bill in the future needs to know,’ she said. ‘What is it?’

After a few moments, I shouted out, ‘What a waste!… My men…!’ and I broke into tears. The regressionist reminded me to take the officer away from the scene and tell him that the incident was in the past and that I was going to set him free. I had come back to earth in a different life with different options, and so had all the officer’s soldiers. ‘Thank him for what he went through,’ she said. I still felt very anxious. She said, ‘There is something else, isn’t there?’

I screamed, ‘I was abandoned! They left me!’ I went on to say that I had never forgiven myself. The regressionist asked me to forgive myself now, but I cried out that I could not. She then took me to a deeper level to find out why this was so.

I saw I was in the Arctic Northwest and was a logger or hunter. I got caught out in the cold when my dogsled overturned. I seem to have broken some ribs and injured myself internally, because I was spitting up blood and couldn’t go anywhere. It was very cold. Once I had eaten up all my food, I ended up eating my dogs. It was a very cruel and painful thing, and all kinds of emotions popped out that I never realized I had. I was responsible for and loved those dogs, and yet they had allowed me to eat them. I was raging about how faithful they were, because they’d had a chance to get away. They didn’t have to stay with me but they did, and they gave themselves to me freely. I was overwhelmed. The connection to the war scene made me feel very cruel, and I could not see how I could ever forgive myself.

The regressionist said I did not need to go through that experience with the dogs anymore, but that I could rescue the man and his dogs. She said the man no longer needed to be angry or blame himself. I still wanted to know why he had done what he did. I felt very confused. She asked me if I now understood about the Civil War experience and being abandoned, and about forgiving. I said that I did, that I knew I had to forgive myself. I let out one final, biting emotion, crying out, ‘They were all so young!’

‘Forgive yourself for setting yourself up and forgive the men for doing what they had to do,’ the regressionist said. I did that. Then she told me, ‘See him [the officer] fill with light, strong and whole and healthy, and tell him that you are going to release him and watch him go up into the light.’ I did, and I felt that I experienced a very definite healing.

As an interesting footnote, after the regression, I asked my friend if he had sensed anything when we’d meditated the night before. He said, ‘You know, I could hear the sounds of dogs and I could taste raw flesh in my mouth.’ That was quite a shock. I then told him about the man in the woods.

The experience was so powerful that Bill decided to undergo more regressions to learn what lay in his past. In a subsequent session, his regressionist asked if there was another life related to the Civil War life. Bill, who was but a small child when the United States finally pulled out of Vietnam, suddenly found himself in Vietnamese jungles, an officer or a noncom leading a small group of about ten soldiers:

We were dropped off by a boat onto a bank. We wanted to go to some village to set up a school or orphanage for children. I don’t think there were any orders for it; it was something I thought was important. We got nailed. We didn’t get very far into the jungle before we were attacked. My adrenaline shot up. The next thing I knew, I think all my men were killed, and I was lying on my back in pools of blood. It was shocking. I experienced gut-wrenching emotion from fear to hatred to regret. At one point, I blurted out, ‘I goofed. We didn’t need to do this!’ It was the same feeling of uncommon duty toward my men that I experienced in the Civil War life.

In the end I just drifted off. Later I had an eerie feeling that I may have survived for some time, maybe I was rescued and they got me onto a helicopter and tried to stitch me up, and I didn’t make it.

While he was hypnotized, Bill was able to read his dog tag number. He thought his name was either “John” or “Tom.”

Intrigued, he delved into that life in additional regressions in order to recover more details. He decided to try to verify whether or not the man he saw in Vietnam had actually lived. The dog tag number led him to a name and a Social Security number of a soldier who was killed in Vietnam in 1965. The man’s name was John — and his name appears on the Wall, the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington, D.C. Bill was uncertain whether or not he would contact the man’s family; such a situation could go off like an emotional bomb.

Bill also discovered that about five members of his Vietnam detail had reincarnated and were among his friends in high school in Texas.

I think in many respects, the purpose of my being here [in the present life] was to come back and check up on them and make sure they were all right. Again, there’s that sense of uncommon obligation…

I had a dream one night that I was back in our old house. I was very young and was being chased by a spirit. It wasn’t evil. The gist was that I had done what I had come to do: check up on these guys, and having fulfilled my end of the bargain, it was time for me to ‘go home.’ In the dream I said, ‘No, I want to stay.’ I was having a tantrum. I did not want to leave. I said, ‘There are things to be done here, I’m excited by the challenge.’

That’s the way I feel. Life is exciting. I want to put my two cents in and leave this place better than when I came. So I stayed.

Bill did not discuss reincarnation with his friends, feeling that he should not push the matter with others who might not be ready for it. Months after his first regression, he came across information which shed light on his Civil War recall. It seemed like coincidence, but Bill knew it was synchronicity:

I was flipping through a Yankee magazine and found a story about a colonel in the U.S. Army during the Civil War who was in charge of a Negro regiment from Massachusetts. They led an attack on an entrenched beach facility in North or South Carolina in about 1862 or ‘63. Most of the men in the regiment were killed, including the colonel. This made sense with what I had seen. The colonel was buried in a mass grave with his Negro troops. Evidently his body was desecrated by the Southern soldiers because he had led blacks. In the official Southern account, the colonel was found lying dead next to his color sergeant. Evidently these two had managed to hold out for a while before they were overwhelmed.

The colonel was the son of a very wealthy Northern man. At the end of the war, the Army approached the father and said they had located the mass grave where his son was believed to be buried and offered to try to find his body and bury him properly. The father said no, because he felt that his son would be honored to be buried with the men he led. Abraham Lincoln said at the end of the war that the one thing that gave the ultimate edge to the North was the Negro soldier, because of his numbers, his courage and his fighting spirit. I think there is a lot of credibility to that.

I have always had a tremendous respect for blacks and have felt an affinity with them. I think it comes from the respect that I earned for them then.

Bill said that although he could see that in the past, he had enjoyed making war—and still had a fascination with war—he was dismayed by the growth of the war machine in the modern world.

We have pushed our war-making capacity to the limit. There is no need for armies that are so big, missiles that are so powerful. There is no need to turn to genocide and wholesale slaughter to solve political differences. It is wrong. There are always alternatives to killing each other…

The regressions made me look at the ‘third’ side of every story that is so rarely observed, which is the side of the people who get swept up in the events of history: the soldiers, the civilians, the maimed. As the saying goes, there are those who make things happen and those who watch things happen, and then there are those who wonder what happened. As things unfold in this next century, it’s important that we all have an understanding of the significance of the New Age.

If I got anything out of this, it was a unique exposure to the human spirit. So long as it remains strong, so will we.

Excerpt from Soul Journeys

See Part II here.