Years ago, when I was an undergrad at my first college (a small private that proved to be inadequate for my proper theatre training—hence my transferring to a real theatre program at a real school), I heard this crazy metaphysical thing: how to see what you looked like in your past lives.
The method was as follows: in a completely dark room, you hold a lighted candle to the left side of your face. You then stare at your face in a mirror, and watch as your appearance changes into the visages of the people you were in your past lives.
I tried this one night with my good friend, Mindy, whose bass-playing boyfriend was out at a music gig. I can’t recall which of us went first, but we saw similar things: in turns I was (I imagined?) a Russian aristocrat, a British aristocrat, a Russian peasant (with a lush and full head of hair obscuring my eyebrows!), and then a Neanderthal or Homo Erectus cave man.
Interestingly, Mindy, during her turn, also saw British and Russian aristocratic women, and the same type of cave dweller. Even more interestingly, since I had always had a psychic link with Mindy (later fading as we grew apart through time and distance), when I stood behind her, I saw the same images she described playing about on her face.
Years later, I used this as a basis for a writing exercise in my Playwrighting class. After explaining the procedure, I would have all of my students (in pairs, well-separated) sit in the upstairs dressing room of the theatre; I’d light their candles and stand off to the side, waiting for them both to blow out their candles, which was a sign that they were finished. Along the way, I might also hear some sort of verbal exhortation (such as a Keanu Reeves’ “Whoa!”) from them, as they saw something notable.
On occasion, over the years that I taught Playwrighting, I occasionally had religious students who didn’t believe in past lives and who saw nothing. But most of the students, who played along in good faith, did report seeing things. In one case, a student with whom I had a very close connection, I repeated what I had done with Mindy years earlier, standing behind her and seeing her changes.
Of course, I have a perfectly scientific explanation for this. In the dark room, the rods in our eyes that detect things in dim light played tricks on the students’ perceptions. Or, equally likely from my perspective, it really was a window on our past lives.
I also suggest that past lives might account for certain “affinities” we have in our present life. For example, why do I feel a real connection to the Victorian era? This would suggest that I was in fact around at that time.
Give this a try and let me know what you see
MUSOFYR 