One of the most fascinating tales narrated by Rosemary Ellen Guiley in her Tales of Reincarnation is that of Gail Bartley. Gail was an attractive young woman who worked as an advertising professional in New York. Soon after her marriage ended in divorce, she fell in love with Roger. As an advertising executive she had ample opportunities for meeting other attractive young men, she did not really like Roger, her mother took an instant dislike for him and a voice in Gail’s head kept screaming all the time, “Get away. He hates you. He is trying to destroy you!” In spite of all these Gail felt irresistibly drawn toward Roger. And he abused her constantly, hurt her emotionally and did not hesitate to beat her up occasionally; once he even tried to choke her to death during one of the fairly frequent violent outbursts between them. The relationship had wrecked her personal life, drained her emotionally, destroyed her self-esteem. However, in spite of all this, Gail found herself unable to get away from the man – and she completely failed to understand her love-hate relationship with this man, as did the other people around her.
It was this riddle of her relationship with Roger that eventually sent her to a past life regressionist. Upon regression and reaching in her first past life experience, Gail found herself standing in a bedroom with high ceilings. She was now a twenty-three year old woman called Joyce in the 1920s. The experience, completely new to Joyce, was strange and eerie: she was at once the woman Joyce and Gail, who was watching her. Gail experienced that Joyce was shaking with fear, fear caused by a man who was with her in the room, lying on their bed – and that man was none other than Joyce’ s husband and the man Gail knew as Roger.
And then Gail experienced the man getting up from their bed and walking towards her. Joyce was now shaking in terror and Gail’s breath changed as she watched it, and she began to hyperventilate. The regressionist asked Gail what was happening and she told her the man was strangling her. Joyce fell on her knees at the violence of the attack and then collapsed on the ground as the man continued to throttle her. However, Joyce did not die. Before that could happen, the man released her throat and walked away, leaving her on the ground, struggling to breathe.
In a later part of the regression, Gail once again felt Joyce’s terror. Joyce was in their room again, that same night, and she hears him approaching her, climbing the stairs leading to their room. As he comes near, she sees he has something in his hand, which he is hiding behind him. His eyes are cold and she breathes in the hatred that emanates from him.
He rips open her gown with the knife he was hiding behind him, and brutally stabs her with it. Gail feels choked, her breath escapes her and she realizes she is experiencing the last moments of her life as Joyce. Coming out her body and hovering in a corner of the room, Joyce watches what is happening. One of the things she witnesses is her husband’s utter shock at what he has done, his complete disbelief and intense remorse.
Further regressions reveal a sad tale of revenge and guilt spanning across life times, centuries and continents. It all started in ancient Rome where Roger and Gail in a long ago lifetime lived as brothers. The two of them loved each other deeply and thoroughly enjoyed their life as Roman citizens. In her regression, Gail sees herself as the younger brother, a blond young man filled with raw energy and impatience to win a chariot race that is about to begin. The race begins and his chariot takes off like a storm, another chariot keeping abreast with him. And then the tragedy takes place. His chariot swerves violently, hits the other chariot, the man driving that chariot thrown off his balance and falls, his head hitting his own chariot wheel, causing an instant death. In the middle of his shock he realizes the saddest truth: the man killed by his mistake is none other than his beloved brother.
This life follows a series of lifetimes revealed by the regression, in each the elder brother is violent and vengeful, and the younger brother, Gail of this lifetime, is his victim. In one of these, Gail is a boy of seventeen, George, who lived in the Old West of America with his ill tempered, hateful, domineering father and his mother who was terrified of him. On one occasion his father catches George with his girlfriend, a girl who had grown up with him as his playmate. The two were together in the barn and they were kissing and feeling each other. The father orders George back into the house and then he rapes George’s girlfriend. One night the boy is asleep in his tent while camping out with his father in the wilderness. He wakes up hearing repeated dull thuds and realizes his father is digging something in the night. His father has been furious with him that evening about some small thing, maybe he hadn’t tied up the horses properly. Sudden realization comes: his father is digging a grave for him! And then the father hits him on the head with a shovel and he is dead and out of his body. He sees his father dragging his body to the pit he had dug and burying him in it.
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Transactional analysis [TA], a branch of psychology/psychotherapy born in the 1960s, speaks of what is called scripts.
Speaking of scripts, transactional analysts say: “In the life of every individual the dramatic life events, the roles that are learned, rehearsed, and acted out, are originally determined by a script.”
These psychological scripts are very much like theatre or film scripts. As Muriel James and Dorothy Jongward say in their classic Born to Win, “Each has a prescribed cast of characters, dialogue, acts and scenes, themes and plots, which move toward a climax and end with a final curtain. A psychological script is a person’s ongoing program for a life drama, which dictates where the person is going with his or her life and the path that will lead there. It is a drama an individual compulsively acts out, though one’s awareness of it may be vague.”
According to transactional analysis, these scripts begin to be written, or programmed, in early childhood, based on the transactions between parent figures and children. Depending on the nature of these scripts, children become “heroes, heroines, villains, victims and rescuers and – unknowingly – seek others to play complementary roles.” Eric Berne, one of the founders of the transactional analysis movement says: “Nearly all human activity is programmed by an ongoing script dating from early childhood, so that the feeling of autonomy is nearly always an illusion – an illusion which is the greatest affliction of the human race because it makes awareness, honesty, creativity, and intimacy possible for only a few fortunate individuals. For the rest of humanity, other people are seen, mainly as objects to be manipulated. They must be invited, persuaded, seduced, bribed, or forced into playing the proper roles to reinforce the protagonist’s position and fulfil his script, and his preoccupation with these efforts keeps him from torquing in with the real world and his own possibilities in it.”
Explaining how these scripts are formed, transactional analysis explains that children are amazingly sensitive and pick up messages about their self-worth right from the beginning. The first experiences of the infant are extremely important in this. From whether they are touched and hugged or ignored, from whether they are given warmth or left coldly alone, and later from other forms of behaviour of the significant people around him, like whether they are crooned to or spoken to without affection, from the messages in the eyes of these people, from their smiles and frowns and other facial expressions and so on, the child makes conclusions about himself and his self worth. These initial conclusions he forms become powerful scripts in his unconscious and they influence his future behaviour powerfully. In later stages, when they are grown enough to understand, children write scripts based on the verbal messages they get from their parents and other significant people. For instance, a mother’s comment watching her child explaining something to her doll that she would make an excellent teacher one day can become an unconscious script in her that eventually leads her to choose teaching as her profession. Or it could be a visiting relative’s unthinking comment that that the little boy is going to be a terror when he grows up that takes the shape of a script.
In whatever way they are formed, these imprints on our psyches are non-verbal and are hidden deep in our unconscious. That is, they are in the form of images, feelings and so on, and not in words, and are hidden from the light of our consciousness. And they exert powerful influences on us and shape us and our lives. These scripts decide what we become, what our strengths and weaknesses will be, how we act and react, whether we will be winners or losers, whether we will derive success and happiness from life or defeat and unhappiness, whether we will be persecutors, victims or rescuers, whether we will be heroes and heroines or villains, whether we will be the Beauty or the Beast, Cinderella or Narcissus, Rama or Ravana, Sita or Draupadi, whether we will be healthy, balanced and effective or suffer from anger-proneness, assertiveness problems, communication problems, relationship problems, sexual problems, violence, manias, phobias, neurotic behaviour and so on.
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Indian mythology refers to what transactional analysts call scripts, the unconscious imprints on the psyche, by several names. One of them is what all Indians understand as Chitratgupta, the accountant of Yama, the lord of death. According to Indian mythology, Chitragupta keeps an account of every deed we do on this earth and of every thought we think. And when we die and go to the other world, Chitragupta opens the pages containing our account in his book and depending on whether we have done good or bad, depending on whether we have acquired punya [merit resulting from virtuous thoughts and deeds] or papa [sin], or it is a more or less equal balance of the two, he sends us on our onward journey, to heaven to enjoy or to hell to suffer or to the earth to be reborn.
What the myth of Chitragupta tells in short is that our future life will depend on our present actions and thoughts. Indian mythology is absolutely right: it is indeed Chitragupta that decides our future. However, he decides our future not merely after our death, but does so at all times. It is Chitragupta that has decided what we are now. For, our present is a result of these hidden pictures generated in our dark depths by our past thoughts, actions and reactions. And what we will become in the future is being written now – in the same dark depths of our psyche, by our present thoughts, actions and reactions.
Chitragupta literally means hidden [gupta] picture/s [chitra]. He makes us what we are at all times. Our hidden scripts make us what we are at all times.
Indian philosophy uses other words to describe the transactional analyst’s scripts. Karmas, vasanas [psychological dispositions] and samskaras [more or less the same as vasanas] are nothing but TA’s scripts. Karmas are the deep imprints that we write on our psyches through our thoughts, actions and reactions. It is these karmas that form our vasanas and samskaras.
However, there is a major difference between the approach of TA, essentially a product of western thinking, and Indian philosophy. While transactional analysts say that scripts are decisive in shaping our self perceptions, behaviour patterns and life events, they say that the earliest scripts are formed in our early infancy, or, according to some, in our pre-natal state. According to Indian philosophy, however, we carry these scripts [karmas/vasanas/samskaras] with us from life to life.
Study of karma is as old as Indian thought and the Indian mind has studied it in great depth. Indian philosophy classifies karmas into sanchita [accumulated], prarabdha [‘begun’ or currently active], and agami [future, yet to become active]. Sanchita karmas are an individual’s total karmas that he has acquired through the several lifetimes he has lived. Prarabdha karmas are those that are active in this lifetime – the psychological dispositions we are born with in this lifetime, which are of course subject to modification due to our present thoughts, actions and reactions. The prarabdha karma is part of our sanchita karma. The remaining part of sanchita karma that is waiting to be lived out in future lifetimes is called agami karma. Just as transactional analysis speaks of rescripting, of wiping out bad [negative] scripts and writing fresh, positive scripts in their place, through a variety of techniques, Indian spiritual traditions describe several ways of eliminating negative [bad] karma and creating positive karma in their place, and these are universally known and have been practiced by the common man in India for millennia.
Indian philosophy differentiates between an individual’s personal scripts [vyashti karma, vyashti in Sanskrit meaning the individual] and a group’s, or family’s or society’s or community’s, collective karma [samashti karma, samashti in Sanskrit meaning total or collective] which is the sum total of the karma of all the individuals involved in the group or family or society or community, as the case may be.
Life events that happen to us, people we attract or repel, associate with or keep away from, are decided by a combination of the vyashti karma of each of us in association with the samashti karma, says Indian philosophy.
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Gail Bartley’s tale of successive reincarnations from Tales of Reincarnation narrated at the beginning of this article speaks of karma/scripts being carried across lifetimes because of their immense power.
[To be continued in Part 2.]
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