F. P. Dorchak

Speculative Fiction Author

past lives

The Reincarnation of F. P. Dorchak

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Bull Run, Virginia, Battlefield Cannon (© F. P. Dorchak, April 22, 1990)
Bull Run, Virginia, Battlefield Cannon (© F. P. Dorchak, April 22, 1990)

I believe in reincarnation…or, more specifically, in the living of simultaneous lives that appear to us in this physical existence as reincarnational.

This belief has led to more than a story or two. The strongest past life is my Civil War existence. This is the one that seems to come up the most. Has the strongest effect on me. It led to the short story “Etched In Stone” (to be posted Feb 26, 2016, on my other blog site). I feel I was part of a Zouave regiment, perhaps the 5th New York. Another life that greatly impacts me is my Titanic life. I feel I died while in the steerage section of that ship. That lead to “The Death of Me.” Existences as a WWII tail gunner and a Ronin/Samurai lead to the short story “Tail Gunner” and a character, “Kioshu,” in The Uninvited. The curious thing about the WWII tail gunner existence is that I also feel I may have been an American ground troop in that war as well. Not only do images of B-17s rattle my bones, but many scenes with ground troops stir my soul quite a bit, too. So, I figure I must’ve had dual counterparts in WWII. But there’s more “military”…

Someone once told me they “saw” me as a Roman soldier. And a chiropractor I used to go to had muscle tested me and came up with 14 past lives…including yet another military life: a WWI life, which was interesting, because I’d never really felt that existence. He might have been confusing it with my WWII lives and his own “filters”…but, in any case, it was interesting (muscle testing can be influenced by the one doing the testing). Yet another World War counterpart. Clearly I’ve dabbled in the military end of things a bit. And I’m quite over it, to tell you the truth. Enough with war.

Another life I haven’t looked into much was one as a witch. A “kid witch.” In early 1984, a woman (a witch) told me she thought I’d been a kid-witch of 12 or 13 years old and had been pressed to death. She also told me that she’d been the cause of my death. I later found this in a letter I’d written to the late Jane Roberts and Rob Butts in 1984. In it I’d written that this present-day witch:

“…keeps seeing me as a coven member, and I tell her that she’s probably just seeing a probable self of me. She also says that we knew each other in a ‘past life.’ That I was a little kid-witch, about 13, and she was the death of me. Interestingly, [while with her one day] I saw an image of a young kid, about 12 – 13, being pressed to death–an agonized face. I told her this after she told me what I told you.”

Curiously, I could find no instances of a teenager being pressed to death over the Internet, so who knows what we’re really picking up on…or maybe it was done “in private”…you know, once you get past believing in any of this….

Interestingly, as a teenager I did have a weird thing happen to me that relates to the above: one day while looking for something in the Lake Clear, N.Y. garage, I had pulled some upright sheets of plywood toward me, away from the garage wall (the wall closest to the house). As I did so, I felt the plywood (this is how I thought of it then) seemingly take on a life of their own and fall into me. I pressed with all my might and was utterly helpless…and it raised a fear in me I had not experienced at that time. The entire “pile” knocked me over onto the gravel floor, all 10 or 15 or however many sheets there were, on top of me. Those suckers were heavy! It was the first time I’d felt so utterly helpless…and it felt so damned weird. I managed to get out from under them no worse for the wear, but that moment remains etched in my mind. I thought back to that later, after the witch told me the above. Also as a kid, I’d read up on the history of witchcraft, but it never really held much interest to me after reading about it…though I did get into it as an interest (not a practitioner) for a while, reading several books on it….

While visiting Maui, in 1998, with my wife, I had the following experience (taken from my diary):

“Nov 14, 1998, 1:36 p.m.

Note: While driving around, had a particularly spiritual experience, like the Manassas one, north of where we were staying [in Maui]. Laura and I drove north, to just inside that one-laned road, and we both felt that this drive felt “weird”! It was overcast, and late in the afternoon, but it was more than that. I again felt like I was straddling two worlds, and I got to thinking: oh boy, am I treading on ground I treaded before? Had Laura and I been alive in another life, past or future, here? Maybe had I been a spiritual kahuna? Had I died here in some ritual or war? It was verrrrrrrry weird….”

As much as I very much loved visiting Maui…I have absolutely no desire to  permanently live there (though am perfectly willing to go back as many times as possible!). Whatever the reason…it seems to stem from the above “weirdness” and finally made total “sense” to me.

Another interesting one is seeing images of me walking in monk-like robes over sand in a far-away (barren) land. I wonder if it’s Australia. I haven’t gotten much from this imagery.

There have been a couple of other possible lives I’ve glimpsed, but none of them are as strong and emotional as the ones mentioned above.

Now…as fascinated as I am by the lives I feel I’ve lived/am living in other realities, I don’t focus my energies so much on finding out all I can about them (i.e., “reliving” them) as in acknowledging them, listening to them when I need to, but focusing my conscious thoughts and efforts to my current existence. Those lives…those consciousnesses are elsewhere…being focused upon by the me that is there…and I need to focus on the me that is here…but acknowledging that my other selves do still exit elsewhere and are every bit as important and real as the me I am, here, writing this. Some of those lives I really don’t want to revisit anyway.

If you keep focusing on the past (or “elsewhere”), you’re never really living in the present.

I feel the important thing about learning about our past lives is that we have them and acknowledge them when we become aware of them. Send them positive energy. I feel in doing this we can enhance their lives…change them, even. Remember I believe in simultaneous lives…not so much past lives. All our lives are ongoing…and this being my belief, I feel we can all help each other out. Make our collective lives better…which therefore helps out our individual “present” lives as well. It’s all energy…and all energy is connected. As we help ourselves out…we’re also helping out everyone else.

So, while it’s cool and interesting to learn about the other lives we live…we still need to focus on our present-day lives (“Over Now,” by Alice in Chains has been playing just now, and “Say Goodbye” just popped up from Theory of a Deadman…). I feel that’s also why many of us cannot remember much about our other lives. Or why we only get bits and pieces. I feel we have built-in filters. We only get what we can “handle”…or only enough “bleed throughs” to remind us who “we are”…but not enough to cause us to focus so heavily on these other lives so as to ignore our current focus. The purpose of having a life is to live it. Live and focus on the things in front of us. That, in turn, helps us all in our overall experience of Life and growth of our soul.

And each of you all have this ability. I bet you’ve all had some weird imagery or experience you can’t readily categorize that fits into the realm of reincarnation or simultaneous lives but have dismissed it as fantasy.

Well, don’t.

Acknowledge it…send it positive, constructive energy when you get such images…and move on. It’s okay if you do ignore it/them…they happened/are happening whether or not you believe it/them…or acknowledge them (you know, given you believe in this stuff…). But they pop into your consciousness for a reason. So, why not give them their due? No one else has to know! It’s just between you and…you. And it doesn’t even matter if you’re misinterpreting what you’re “getting.” Just acknowledge the thought…the idea…it.

So this post is not just about the reincarnation of F. P. Dorchak…it’s also about the reincarnation of you.

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My Civil War Life

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Me, Bull Run (Manassas, VA) Battlefield, and Zouave Reenactor (April 22, 1990)
Me, Bull Run (Manassas, VA) Battlefield, and Zouave Reenactor (April 22, 1990)

Around the age of six, my mother tells me, I began to write (and draw) because I thought I’d had been a soldier in the Civil War. Some of the surviving artwork from my childhood shows (among the “normal” dinosaur and spaceship stuff) Civil War battles. Several of those battle scenes are labeled “1862” and deal with soldiers and bayonets.

Now, let me tell you about a dream I had as a kid, one of which I still remember: that of being bayoneted in the side during a Civil War battle.

It was your basic, being bayoneted-in-your-side kinda dream, you know, battle, violence, that kind of thing, is all I remember. I think it was my right side, but am no longer sure.  But, I’d awoken from said dream in intense agony, clutching my side—so much so that I actually fell out of bed. There, on the floor, the intense pain persisted for many minutes after waking from that the dream and I remember writhing and grunting as I clutched my side, my back against the bed. It wasn’t until years later that I’d told anyone about it. In adulthood I finally told one of his brothers, Chris. To both our astonishment, Chris told me he’d had the exact same dream as a kid.

In 1990, I left the Air Force and Colorado and moved briefly to Alexandria, Virginia.

While there, I’d visited the Civil War battlefield Bull Run (aka Manassas). I had already visited several Civil War battlefields before (and since), but, at this one I’d begun to experience what I’ve come to describe as my “Twilight Zone experience”: though I couldn’t name fields or the units that had fought there, I had had the most unnerving experience of literally feeling torn between two worlds: that of being both in the present, but also in the past—in the Civil War—there, at that battlefield. Throughout the entire tour of that battlefield, I felt as if I’d been there before.

Died there.

It felt as if the battle had just happened yesterday. My body felt electrified, “shifting,” almost “vibratory” as my then-girlfriend and I

The Stone House, Manassas Battlefield, VA (April 22, 1990)
The Stone House, Manassas Battlefield, VA (April 22, 1990)

toured the battlefield. My girlfriend thought I was crazy…but went along with me and my sudden weirdness. I simply could not shake it. It was the coolest feeling. Such feelings are not uncommon. While some can remember intimate detail, others just get these little weird feelings. I was much older (29) when I experienced this, so there is a lot of mental filtering that can go on (e.g., perhaps one’s soul or “greater entity” doesn’t want you focusing too much on the minutiae of previous lives—again, for whatever reasons, maybe we’d get too caught up in the “grass is greener” syndrome, or wax too nostalgic—but allowing you to remember you had other lives is fine). Were I younger when this happened, I might have been able to recall more, but the older you get, the more “barriers” there are to reincarnational memories, apparently, no matter how “enlightened” one may be (again, see previous “e.g.”). But this feeling was so stark, startling, and real to me it was no different than being repeatedly hit in the gut with a sledgehammer.

And, curiously, these feelings of mine all revolved around the second of the two battles, the one fought in August of 1862.

Now, all my childhood drawings show the typical “blue and gray” uniforms, never the colorful display of the Union Zouave, but the Zouave uniform does seem to hit a “mark” in me, though I’ve never really liked that uniform. Maybe I fought alongside them? So, was I part of the 5th New York (this link is an incredible, tragic account of the decimation of the 5th New York), or some other unit, I’m not sure, but I know that in one Yankee uniform or another I fought and most likely died somewhere on that battlefield. And speaking of uniforms, ever since childhood, anything Civil War, uniforms, weaponry, just the mention of the war or its years, all strike a chord in me. It feels like I’m still wearing those uniforms, every time I see one. It feels like I’m still holding a Springfield rifle, every time I see one. I mean, why would the Civil War hold such sway over me—or anyone, for that matter? WWII holds similar sway, but but not nearly as intensely as the Civil War does, except for B-17s. Where would such an “interest” arise? Most women I know don’t seem to have much interest in wars, so why does my writer friend Teresa Funke have such an intense interest in WWII? As a kid, I lived and breathed the Civil War, my room totally done up in all things Civil War: walls painted gray, royal blue carpet, blue-tan-and-gray-striped curtains, stars-and-stripes light fixture. Flags up on my walls, maps. I could rattle off battles and campaigns like nobody’s business, the major players on both sides. Why? To me, “just an interest” doesn’t cut it—why the interest? Why not in Rome or flowers? Cars? There was something inside of me that drove my desire to study the Civil War so damned intensely, to visit the battlefields, read the history. I don’t believe in coincidences. There’s always a reason for why things are.

Henry Hill (I believe), Manassas Battlefield, VA (April 22, 1990)
Henry Hill (I believe), Manassas Battlefield, VA (April 22, 1990)

And it’s not that every leaning or interest of ours is from a reincarnational life, but some are, and we need to internally examine our own thoughts and feelings to make these determinations. I do not let any other lives—previous or otherwise—rule my life. I do not pine for them nor romanticize them. I am firmly in my current existence. But I am amazed and curious about the other lives I feel I’ve lived. I know I meet others from other lives in my current one, but it doesn’t mean we have to be best buds or even stay in contact. Sometimes it’s just enough to pass by and simply say “Hi,” and move on. But some lives were quite intense and had nasty outcomes, like my Civil War, Titanic, or WWII B-17 tail gunner experiences. I think we do attract experiences and “things” from other lives into the current life, because it’s a matter of energy having a Venn Diagram-like effect, and it’s a good thing that not everything transfers from one life to the others. But, I do try to share the positive energy between my lives, learn from them, and move on.

I’ve been back to Manassas two more times in this life, and in none of the other visits had I behaved as I had on that first trip. I have been to other battlefields, Gettysburg (twice),  Ball’s Bluff, etc., and never felt like I had during the first trip to Manassas. But, that’s okay…and is as it should be. I’m now aware of what happened and growing from it. I even wrote a supernatural short story that was inspired by visiting one of the Manassas grave sites.

In the end, I love my current life and, as I understand things, realize all our lives are going on concurrently, though we perceive them linearly (those of us who perceive them at all), living in corporeal existence. I’m not interested in retreating back into any of these lives (Are you kidding? I certainly don’t want to relive dying on a Civil War battlefield, being shot out of a flak-ridden sky as a WWII tail gunner, nor again going to my watery grave with the Titanic!), but I am interested in what seems important enough to percolate back into my consciousness from these other existences (I was once muscle tested by a chiropractor to find out how many lives I was supposed to have lived; I didn’t know what he was doing as he rattled off “random” numbers. He came up with 14). Though it is the present that is always the point of power, the focus in which we should be in life, do pay attention to the odd little predilections you have, the so-called incongruous thoughts you might have. Where might they come from? Do you seem to lean toward the Prohibition Era? Ancient Egypt? Allow the thoughts, images, or feelings to come through…acknowledge them, then send some positive energy back to them. Positive energy permeates all Time, and, therefore, can change the past or the future…and make life a little better for everyone.

Henry Hill (I believe), Manassas Battlefield, VA (April 22, 1990)
Henry Hill (I believe), Manassas Battlefield, VA (April 22, 1990)

All photos are my own, taken April 22, 1990, and scanned into digital format.

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The Ghost Inside My Child

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http://youtu.be/ED0HAoPumqc

“Airplane Crash! Plane On Fire! Little Man Can’t Get Out!”

I read about James Leininger (now, a full-fledged Eagle Scout teenager) years ago (around 2000, or so), when the story about the young two-year-old reincarnated from the downed WWII pilot, James M. Huston, Jr, first came out, and have been following his progress ever since. Read the book, Soul Survivor,  his folks published.  The other two stories of reincarnated children on this video are new, and I’d never heard of them before but are just as riveting. I don’t want to say anything about them, so you can enjoy the discovery on your own, in the above, 41-minute video, which was just posted on the Leininger blog.

Not shown in this video, because it’s about children, is another pretty incredible story, involving Jenny Cockell. I highly recommend checking out her and her books, one of which is titled, Across Time And Death, A Mother’s Search For Her Past Life Children.

The thing about reincarnation is that everyone does it. It’s not just those who’ve died nasty deaths…but those who have died nasty deaths are probably more apt to recall past lives, because the circumstances had been so horrible upon their deaths. I’ve also read that some souls, upon death, immediately turn around and jump back into physical life—that doesn’t mean they’re reborn in the same year, that next second, but that they just don’t take any time to “relax” or assimilate their deaths…and jump right back into physical reality in whatever time period they chose (and in James’s case, he describes a little about that briefly in Soul Survivor…about how he, essentially, “floated around” for a period of time looking for the right parents, and observed them for a little before choosing them—note, I said choose).

And, as you watch the above video, consider this…those personalities who have reincarnated into our time? They were also reincarnated in their lives.

Ever consider that?

We all “reincarnate” throughout all our lives, in that (in my humble opinion) we all live multiple—and simultaneous—lives. Life is far too intricate and wondrous to be limited to one, single life. We all have far too much to learn, and we just can’t fit it into one life. I’ve talked about this before in other posts.

It’s disheartening that situations like these arise and the parents involved are not equipped to deal with them. Need to “make it better” or can’t “fix” it. There’s nothing to fix…only to understand. And in understanding, it’s not about the previous personality taking over the current one’s life. It’s simply a matter of understanding what’s happening, fully addressing it, helping the child understand…but also understanding that your life is yours…not anyone else’s…not even that previous personality’s. One should not be worried about a child talking about “another mother”…or that that “other mother” will take over your affections. Don’t you see this can be Daisy-chained ever farther backward, with each previous person’s reincarnational lineage? To everyone? What matters is your present life. What matters is you as a parent or uncle or friend schooling the children with these memories that it’s okay and natural to have them. It is…but you’re in a new place now, those memories cannot really hurt you. Children cry and wail for all kinds of reasons, and we soothe them. Sooth them, here, too. I know there haven’t been tools or guidelines out—until recently—on how to deal with this kind of behavior, but with an open mind and a little research you can understand what’s going on through venues like this, books like Soul Survivor, and so many others. A past life does not have to take control of your child…reliving its memory is one thing, and is healthy to the greater understanding of who we are, why we behave as we do…why we’re afraid of flying, or water, or have  a penchant for music, alcohol, or wide, open plains and Mongolian barbeques. We need to understand these things, not stomp them down into our unconsciousnesses, where they will never really go away, but breed and fester and somehow manifest into symptoms we can never truly understand and end up medicating for the rest of our lives.

Reincarnation also shows how we are all so intimately connected.

Maybe a parent in one life is our spouse or child in another. It should give us a far greater appreciation of each other, that we are all not that different, no, not at all, not even all that separated from each other, no matter that we live on different sides of the planet. That death is not permanent. Life situations are not permanent. That our souls actually do survive beyond death and that, hey, here’s a shocker, we not only choose the lives we live…but also our parents…our family members.

Reincarnational memories usually happen before six years of age, usually around ages 2 or 3. For many, these memories eventually fade after 6 years of age…unless one makes an effort to keep them. I have one instance when I was about six years of age that involved the Civil War, but have had other feelings and predispositions, like an interest in B-17s.  The problem with getting these later is that they’re more filtered by your current life’s beliefs and minutiae, so the memories are not as fully developed, not as complete.

Don’t let reincarnational memories frighten. Be smart about them and learn from them. Be open to them…and be open to your children about them. If you think children can’t handle them, consider what they’re already going through…what they’ve been through in a previous life. Be a parent and guide them through it. If they’re already talking about “my other mother,” describing gruesome death scenes, it’s probably a pretty sure bet they can handle the conversation you control. It’s probably a pretty sure bet that all the good you tell them they can handle. If you don’t understand it, tell them you’re not sure, but together you will both find out what it is, what’s going on, and explore what your child is trying to tell you…but that memories cannot hurt them. Ignoring them, stomping them down can.

Be a parent.

Apply the same techniques you would with any other situation that children are having a hard time with, or are afraid of. Just don’t ignore it. There’s so much to learn and grow from.

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