Gail Bartley’s tale of successive reincarnations from Tales of Reincarnation narrated briefly at the beginning of this article speaks of karma/scripts being carried across lifetimes because of their immense power.
In her lifetime as the younger Roman brother, though it was not an intentional act of hers that caused the elder brother’s death, she, as the younger brother, concludes she is responsible for the tragic death. The deep love between the brothers gives birth to an intense feeling of guilt with which she, her psyche, is branded. An almost indelible script of guilt is written, the power of the script so alarming that she carries it in her psyche across lifetimes and centuries and continents. Hers is a victim script, which will make her vulnerable to suffering and pain, until the power of the script/karma is exhausted. And the elder brother who lost his life blames his younger brother for the accident and, in his dying moments, vows vengeance, perhaps unthinkingly and unconsciously, thus writing a powerful script of revenge, a persecutor script, in his psyche. Through his several lifetimes across two thousand years, as father, as husband and possibly through many other relationships, he persecutes his younger brother, killing him again and again, raping the younger brother’s girlfriend, and committing the numerous other crimes some of which Gail’s past life regressions take us to.
The Mahabharata tells us the story of Amba, who carries her persecutor script across three lifetimes. When we first meet her in the epic, she is a beautiful young princess, one of the three nubile daughters of the king of Kashi. According to the Indian custom of the day, a swayamvara has been arranged for all three sisters, in which each would choose a husband for herself from the kings and princes who have assembled there from all over the land. However, while the swayamvara is in progress, Devavrata Bheeshma, the Bharata prince who has renounced the throne, the most renowned warrior of the day, a living legend whose name has by then become a synonym for integrity, valour and duty, arrives there in a single chariot. He announces, following the ancient custom, his intention to carry away all the three princesses who had been declared veeryashulkas by their father – that is, to be won through valour, a very common and highly respected custom among the warrior class of the day. He, as custom required, challenges the assembly of warrior princes and kings to stop him if they could, and then boards the chariot with the princesses. The assembly challenges him and a fierce battle ensues with Bheeshma alone on one side and all the other princes and kings together on the other. Eventually they are all forced to retreat before the Bheeshma’s might, and Bheeshma carries the princesses to his capital, Hastinapura, where he hands them over to his [step-]mother, Queen Satyavati, so that the princesses could be given in marriage to his half brother Vichitraveerya.
However, when the marriage is announced, the eldest of the princesses, Amba, informs Bheeshma that she wouldn’t be willing to marry Prince Vichitra since she has already given her heart to another king. She tells Bheeshma she and King Shalva have been in love for a long time and they have pledged themselves to each other. Respecting her wish, Bheeshma, after consulting his ministers and priests, sends her to Shalva.
Shalva is one of the kings who was present at the swayamvara. He too had fought Bheeshma and had been defeated. When Amba comes and requests him to marry her, a request she makes overcoming her maidenly modesty with great difficulty, Shalva refuses, saying that she now belonged to another and he cannot have her. Amba begs repeatedly, but he does not relent. Eventually she leaves. Shalva will not have her, she cannot go back to her home now, for that would be shameful, and she cannot go back to Bheeshma either for the same reason, and since there is no other place she can go to, she goes to an ashram to live a life of asceticism there. She does not know whom to blame for her fate – herself, for not revealing to her father her love for Shalva and also for not jumping out from Bheeshma’s chariot when he was carrying her away, Bheeshma for abducting her though it was done according to perfectly acceptable customs of the day, or Shalva for rejecting her, or her father for announcing to the world that she could be had with valour, without finding out about her love for Shalva.
In the ashram, however, an ascetic convinces her that her all suffering is because of Bheeshma – had he not abducted her, she would have been fine. Soon she meets in the ashram the great Parashurama who is on a visit. Parashurama is Bheeshma’s teacher in the martial arts and an unsurpassed warrior, though very, very old now. When he asks Amba the reason for her sorrow, promising help, she tells him that her sorrows are because of Bheeshma and Bheeshma should pay with death for his crime. Parashurama goes to Bheeshma and asks him to have Amba back, or accept his challenge for a battle. Bheeshma accepts the challenge since he wouldn’t on any account now have Amba back and a fierce battle that lasts for many days ensues between the guru and the disciple. In the battle neither is victorious, and when they come to using all-powerful weapons that could destroy the world itself, great sages appear on the spot and stop the battle. Parashurama goes back to continue his austerities, apologising to Amba for his inability to fulfil his pledge to her.
Finding no other solution, Amba now decides to do tapas, austerities, by herself. For years she stands in water and performs tapas, for more years by standing in water and for still more years without eating. According to one version of her story, she dies and part of her becomes the crooked, seasonal river Amba [because her tapas had evil intensions] and the other part is reborn as a princess in the country of Vatsa. She continues her austerities in this life too and eventually Lord Shiva appears before her and asks her what she wants. When she expresses her desire, Shiva blesses her that she would be able to have her vengeance by killing him in her next birth. She then immolates herself in a funeral pyre and is reborn as Shikhandini, the daughter of the Panchala king Drupada.
She has a long way to go still, before her desire for vengeance that she has been carrying with her from two lifetimes ago is fulfilled. Since she is born a princess and since princesses do not fight battles, she gets herself transformed into a male and becomes Shikhandi. It is as Shikhandi that years later she becomes the cause of Bheeshma’s death in the Mahabharata war – Bheeshma, of course, has become very, very old by then.
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Amba carries her will to vengeance, her prosecutor script, through three lifetimes before the power of that script, the power of that karma, is exhausted through fulfilment. We have in the Mahabharata story of Nalayani yet another story of scripts lasting over lifetimes, though the script here is entirely different and the course it takes is at the very core of the story of the immortal epic.
Nalayani, also known as Indrasena, was the wife of an old ascetic called Maudgalya. He was a leper, impetuous, lustful, jealous, and prone to furious anger. His body was skin and bones, it was crooked and stank, his skin was wrinkled, his head bald, and, because of leprosy, his nails and skin had begun to fall off. But in spite of all this, Nalayani serves her husband devotedly. Pleased with her devotion, Maudgalya reveals his true form to her – he is none of the things he appeared to be. He is neither a leper, nor impetuous or lustful. He is not aged, nor is his body crooked or ugly. In fact, he is a great sage with amazing spiritual powers who can do anything he wishes. The sage asks Nalayani what he can do to please her. And Nalayani tells him that he should assume five different forms and pleasure her sexually, for she is filled with lust. The sage does that and a long, long time passes, during which they plunge into erotic pleasures assuming different forms and living in different worlds. Eventually the sage tires of the sexual games they play and decides to go back to his spiritual practices. But Nalayani’s voracious sexual hunger is still not satiated and she begs Maudgalya again and again to continue their games and not to go back to his austerities. When she insists on this repeatedly, the sage curses her that in her next lifetime she will have five husbands, for no one man can satisfy her boundless sexual hunger. It is this Nalayani, according to the Mahabharata, that is born as Draupadi in her next birth and she gets the five Pandava brothers as her husbands. Draupadi’s powerful sexuality is legendary in the Mahabharata, and in some of the epic’s numerous folk versions and regional retellings, she becomes sexually insatiable.
There are several other stories about Draupadi’s past lives. According to one of these, she was the daughter of an ascetic and though she was extremely beautiful, she did not get a husband. Unhappy, she performs austerities to please Lord Shiva and to ask a boon from him. Shiva appears at the end of her austerities and in her excitement, she repeats five times that she should get a husband. Shiva blesses her that she would have five husbands in her next lifetime. And it is this young female ascetic that is reborn as Draupadi.
The Mahabharata also tells us that in one of her earlier lifetimes before she became Nalayani, Draupadi was a woman called Shaibya Bhaumashwi Ausheenari, an extremely beautiful woman with a voice as sweet as that of the veena, which made you swoon when you heard it. In her swayamvara, in which she had the choice of marrying anyone she wanted from the assembly of princes and kings present, she chose five brothers as her husbands: Salveya, Shoorasena, Shrutasena, Tindusara and Atisara, all sons of King Nitantu. Shaibya was the only wife of these five men whom the epic calls ‘bull-like’, and she had a very happy, contented life with her five husbands. According to this story it is possible that her powerful sexual script was written in this lifetime. It is also equally possible, however, that her choice of five husbands in a swayamvara was itself dictated by a powerful sexual script she carried from a still earlier lifetime, and her lifetime as Shaibya reinforced this script.
Incidentally, Amba and Nalayani, whose stories we have discussed here are both eventually born in the same family, and as sisters. Amba is born as Shikhandini, daughter of King Drupada and subsequently becomes Shikhandi through a gender transformation. And Nalayani is born as Shikhandini younger sister Krishnaa, popularly known as Draupadi.
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Several other stories of reincarnation, contemporary and old, talk of people carrying their scripts across lifetimes. These scripts/karmas could manifest in the form of psychological tendencies or needs, phobias or physical illnesses, and in many other forms.
A striking case is that of a woman called Pat from New York, who suffered from chronic headaches. She had tried several doctors and they had all failed her. She had tried a CAT scan and acupuncture, but nothing helped. Her chronic aches that began on her neck and moved onto her head continued. Eventually she tried past life regression, which took her into a lifetime in medieval England, in the Warwick castle near Shakespeare’s birthplace, Stratford-on-Avon. To her horror she realised that in that lifetime she was the hangman of the castle, who had been forced to hang several innocent people during a time of strife against the castle. What had happened was that Pat developed a script of powerful guilt in that lifetime as the hangman and this guilt was carried over to her present lifetime. She was eventually freed from her guilt and the chronic headaches after the regression experience and the realization of the cause of her suffering.
Dr Brian Weiss, in his best selling Through Time into Healing talks of a woman who was in a past lifetime an extremely beautiful Native American woman. Because of her beauty she was singled out by a member of an enemy tribe. He kidnapped her, and then raped and mutilated her, making her suffer all her life. The reason why Dee had gone for past life regression was her obesity. From her regressions she realizes the reason for her obesity. She realises that she has a deep-seated fear of being beautiful and attractive, resulting from the lifetime as the Native American Woman, and to avoid becoming attractive, she eats so much that she develops obesity. Dee’s is another case of a script, this time of the fear being attractive, written in one lifetime affecting her in another lifetime.
While discussing past life and regression with a group, a young lady once told me of her hydrophobia, which, she believed, had resulted from a past life in which she had drowned in the sea. The young lady had graphic memories of being on a beech, of a rather violent sea and of her getting into water – all from what she believed was another life time, since they did not correspond to her present life time experiences.
All scripts are not negative. There are good scripts and bad scripts, good karmas and bad karmas, good samskaras and bad samskaras. Most of the scripts discussed tend to be negative because these are more dramatic and striking in their effects. But good scripts/karmas/samskaras create powerful good effects too. The Buddhist Jataka tales deal with the Buddha’s past life incarnations and his noble acts in each of those incarnations, which develop such positive scripts or karmas/samskaras that he is eventually led to Buddhahood and freed from all scripts/karmas.
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And that is perhaps what all this should mean to us: that whatever we are, is what we have made of ourselves. Which means that while other forces and other people and events do have an influence on us and our lives, to a very large extent what we are and what we shall become are in our own hands. For, while the scripts are powerful, their power on us is only so long as we are in the grip of our unconscious. As we awaken and learn to live consciously, they lose their power over us.
During one of my recent sessions on Mind Management and Self Mastery to a group of trainee officers from a leading national bank, I quoted the Dhammapada saying “All that we are, is the result of what we have thought: It is founded on our thoughts, it is made up of our thoughts.” I proceeded to elaborate the implications of this statement to each one of us today and discussed how our unconscious scripts make us susceptible to certain events. Subsequently a young lady from the group wrote to me asking how a victim could be blamed for what happens to her or him.
Well, no one is absolved from responsibility for his or her negative actions – no persecutor is, no criminal is. The victim script of the victim is no justification for the persecutor’s evil acts. At the same time, our psychological, social, cultural and spiritual scripts do have a powerful influence on what we are, what we do and what happens to us. We have all seen around us people who attract love and adoration wherever they go. We have also seen around us people who are victimised in job after job, get into relationship after relationship in which they are exploited, or end up suffering and grieving wherever they are.
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