Reincarnational Context
How coincidences and a story of Haitian revolution in 1791 and an execution in 1792 led to a life change for me in 1980.© 1997 Mike Strong
Return to: Image Bin Home Page, Spiritual Origins
E-Mail to: dancer@kcdance.com
The Circumstances
Chance meetings can have consequences. In January 1980 I was just beginning to explore psychics, pendulums, charts and anything I could sink my teeth into. On an evening in the middle of that month I ran into someone I had never met before, have never seen since and who had a very odd and distasteful reaction to me. More importantly, the events of that day and evening marked a profound shift within me.
1 - Afternoon, A Chance Occurence Reading a Book
Among the books I owned I had acquired a few years earlier a large set of books on black history. Among the books was an 1855 publication of congress giving the status of slavery in the United States at that time and giving a history of slavery up to that time. Earlier in the day I picked up the congressional book.
I opened to a chapter about the first slave revolt in Haiti which occurred in 1790. I read about a man named Vincent Ogé (o-zhay), a mulatto, and son of a mulatto mother who was a plantation owner. Ogé‚ had been to France and was influenced by the French revolution and by the Amis de Noirs (Friends of the Blacks). Ogé‚ had returned to Haiti and started the revolt to gain a vote in the parliament. (The mulatto class could own property, including slaves, as did his mother, but mulattos had many restrictions and no vote.) His supporters included Jean-Baptiste Chavannes and Vincent's brother Jacques. Chavannes was a close friend who had participated as a soldier in our own revolutionary war.
This first Haitian revolution was squelched in short order by French troops. Ogé‚ and his co-revolutionary were put to death on February 25, 1791 on the rack. Although promised by the French that their lives would be spared if they gave up the names of others in the conspiracy, Chavannes gave the French no information before death. Ogé‚ broke and gave the names of other conspirators, including his brother. The French killed Ogé‚ anyway. As I read this I felt a wave of nausea then curled I up and passed out for awhile. For merely reading a passage in a book that was a very strange reaction for me, to say the least.
2 - Meditation Class That Evening
Back to that meditation class. Following one of the meditations the man I'd never seen before this class said that he saw himself as a French lieutenant in Napoleon's army on the retreat from Moscow. He said that felt the cold and the snow and the distance. At some point in this class he said to Leah that he had feelings about me. Leah asked him about those feelings. He noted that he had never seen me but that he felt I was rebellious toward authority and also a coward and that he didn't like me at all.
I was puzzled. My own feelings toward him were neutral. I had already forgotten what I had read earlier in the day. It wasn't until later in the evening, after I had gone home, that the memory of what I read hit me. I phoned Leah and told her. She reminded me that this man had also seen himself as a Crusader knight in the middle ages and that I had seen myself as a Moslem cleric in a mosque in Turkey at that same period in time. She claimed that we had been opponents a number of times through history. She then scheduled me for a reading two days later.
3 - Two Days Later, a Psychic Reading
In the reading she told me that all sorts of fear had dropped out of my life. I was blank. I told her I didn't know what that would be. Within the next couple of days I realized she was right and that a great deal had indeed changed within me. My entire way of remembering events in my past had changed. It has never changed back to the old way.
4 - Growing Up
I should detour to very briefly explain that my childhood, to understate it was painful and dysfunctional to the point that I really didn't have much of a childhood. As a result I developed few social skills and I had an enormous inner anger and bitterness toward my parents. I have few memories of childhood and most of those are at best unpleasant or painful. School was a daily terror for me from third grade through twelfth.
It is hard to explain how intense and bitter an experience the act of remembering could be. Any kind of remembering is more a reconstruction than a recall. Remembering for me had not been an accounting of something long gone. I was heavily invested in painfulness and accusation. To remember was to create anew all the pain and bitterness I could muster.
5 - Change in Life Attitude
What dawned on me after Leah's reading was that suddenly the pain-creation and bitterness part of remembering was gone. Just gone. It was as if I had been pounding my head against a stone wall for years and years until one day I looked around to find out not only that I was through the wall but that in turning to see where the wall had been I discovered no trace of the wall, as if it had never really been there. The bitterness has never returned. At this writing (end of 1976) it has been almost 17 years.
The realization of not having that weight of pain creation, emotion creation (in the present) to accompany the memories was so relieving, so lightening that it was several months before it began to dawn on me that my life had not been solved. There were what I call "artifacts" still left. Skills not learned when growing up. Mostly social skills, the learning of which is such a terribly important part of being a child.
6 - Reincarnation: Was I Ogé?
This is all from an experience that I term "reincarnational" as opposed to reincarnation. I can't claim any sense of having been Vincent Ogé‚. Perhaps so, but then how many people could find their earlier selves written about in history books? I suspect it is more on the nature of a psycho-drama only in this case a psychic-drama. A role-playing drama designed to help us work out inner issues in much the same way any sort of role-playing drama is designed to help. An available historical drama which provides an analogy for the present. But I don't really know that either. So I remain neutral on what I think this may have been in terms of any reincarnation.
7 - Flags Marking the "Reincarnational" Events as Spiritual to Me
Another piece of "coincidence" to go along with this is that after reading the word mulatto I decided to look it up. I didn't need to check the meaning. I knew it meant half black and half white. But I decided anyway to look up "mulatto." Here a few physical details are important. My dictionary was a 1967 Random House unabridged edition. One of those huge library-sized things. It was placed wide open at the top of my book case just high enough that I almost had to stand on tip toes to read it.
When I decided to look up "mulatto" I was not standing and as I did stand I reached above my head, to the book and, as it happened, with a finger on a location on the page. I had not intended to "look" for anything with that finger but in standing erect I noticed where it was pointing. As I recognized the word I really noticed. My finger was on the word "quadroon!"
Had it been on the word "mulatto" I certainly would have been surprised but to be on the word "quadroon" was flat out eye-opening. I figured that meant Ogé‚ was quadroon (one quarter black). I also believe that finding "quadroon" in the dictionary is a kind of certificate of validation assuring me that this something beyond what I can see and reason about but that I should trust.
Imagine how hard it would be to sightlessly stick your finger in a huge book and have it pointing at a word which is so directly related to the very word you intend to find. Even though both words would have been somewhere in the middle of the book which is the natural place to leave open such a dictionary the odds are hugely against this specific find.
The book with Ogé's story was a very thick 1855 report to congress on the state of slavery in this country. I had purchased it about 1975 as one of several hundred books which had been used by someone in putting together a Ph.D. in black history. The section I happened to open to was very small. It was hard for me to find it later when I went looking to refresh myself about the details of the story.
The man who didn't like me was unknown to me then and I haven't known him since but I do know that he was in the process of moving to another state which he did a few days later. He knew Leah from before and had simply dropped in that evening as he was driving through that day.
Along with this I experienced a personal transformation. I feel the most important part of the reincarnation drama is the effect it has on our present life. Just as it is sometimes helpful to the present for us to understand our earlier life sometimes it may be helpful to see ourselves in a previous life. If concepts of reincarnation were merely another way to keep ourselves stuck in a past then it would not be very helpful.
A Few Links to Ogé :
For a journalist it is also interesting to note some variance in dates and facts. The dates above are correct but I suspect some of the authors were without full information and made some assumptions about dates of the revolt, the arrest and the execution. This is most common in the Google-search links.
Google Search: http://www.google.com/search?q=%22Vincent+Og%C3%A9%22&hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&start=10&sa=N
Motion by Ogé to the Younger Assembly of Colonists in 1789: http://chnm.gmu.edu/revolution/d/288/
Heroes of Haiti: http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/43a/168.html
Napoleon, Europe, Haiti and the Americas to 1815: http://www.fsmitha.com/h3/h34-np.html
Bio-Type entry: http://www.famousamericans.net/jacquesvincentoge/
Another Person's Event That Evening
There was a another coincidence that evening. I had brought along another of the books from the Black history collection. It was a book on the Fort Pillow massacre in the Civil War. The book was an 1864 (or 1865?) verbatim transcript of a congressional hearing about that massacre. A black man was also at that meditation meeting, Richard Byrd. Later he went on to participate in Unity Village as a solo singer with a beautiful voice.
At that time he had been having both physical and mental problems regarding his skin. During one of the meditations that evening he saw himself as a white overseer during the Civil War period. He looked at my Fort Pillow book and asked whether he could borrow it. He also experienced a personal transformation in terms of attitude which positively affected his attitude toward his own color and which cleared up his physical skin problems.
So What Is It Worth?
As far as reincarnation itself goes I think most of the theories are probably limited. What is clear to me is that our souls do exist and that we do go on after death. From that I infer that souls existed long "before" our bodies. I further infer that what we normally consider to be life is some relatively brief interlude, detour, trip, drama, stage play, lesson, fill-in-your-own-word, which the soul engages in for its own purposes.
My personal change that day in January 1980 may seem like an "abra-ka-dabrah." But there is no magic formula. Like any accomplishment, we work at something for a long time and finally it bears fruit. This "new fruit" only seems sudden.
The way the "new fruit" shows up may help us to realize that we really are spiritual. It gives us a perspective from which to view our lives. They don't give us magic cures for heartache, or any other pain. The work we do to alleviate those pains and to live life becomes part of what we take back with us when we die.