REINCARNATION

The following piece appeared in 'So You Think We're Alone', a book published in 2007. It was written by friend Peter Haines and me. Written in the third person from Pete's perspective the book follows my psychic life experiences and perspective

Birch introduces a modern perspective and extracts from his past lives.

There are many ways of looking at reincarnation. It would be surprising, even disappointing, if Birch didn’t have some perspectives on this emotive subject.

Throughout the East the concept of each human being living lifetime after lifetime, is part of everyday belief. It pervades philosophy, religions, and social contexts. In the West it is for the most part disregarded, derided, spun as a belief of ‘backward people’. Myths are spread concerning the beliefs and practices of those using reincarnation ideas in their lives. For instance, one lie commonly aired is the idea that humans can reincarnate as animals and, as such, is backward and abhorrent. This myth is most certainly not one shared by the believers. Birch questions why these lies and deliberate misunderstandings have been propagated?

For an answer let’s go back to the Council of Nicea in 325 AD. This Council was an early meeting of the Christian Church to propound its dogma and theology. Before that date, reincarnation was an accepted element of Christian teaching. During the Council it was written out of Christian belief. Why might this have been so?

For any possible illumination on this we must examine a central tenet of the workings of reincarnation theory. A central plank of any such belief is that in each lifetime we have the opportunity to right the wrongs in our characters and personalities. Each birth is an opportunity to progress further along the path towards spiritual development and complete self-realisation.

We come into each lifetime with a ‘shopping list of experiences’ that we wish to go through. We choose our parents and place of birth that will best facilitate these experiences. As we move from the spirit world to this physical existence we forget the decisions previously made and have free will to follow the path previously set out; or not, as the case may be. Nevertheless we have set the vibratory pattern of our life to come, and the experiences will present themselves to us whether we have awareness and realisation or not.

Now, this causes a problem for Western religions. In this scenario we are totally responsible for ourselves. This is our spiritual journey mapped out by us, for us. Good experiences, or bad, develop our soul personalities and characters. Thus there are no divine interventions, no retribution from a stern discarnate being pointing the finger at our weaknesses and failures, and no moral code laid out by a God for all others to follow. We are living out our own moral code, minute by minute, and certainly no need for a human intermediary between us and the divine source. We are our own priests.

What are we to believe the church fathers thought of that? What, no specialist priest, no archdeacons, no archbishops, bishops, cardinals, or popes? It would rather stifle career development. No control over the masses. What about the church building programmes, church investments, power over kings, princes, and we commoners? No hell, or threats and punishments to be perpetrated upon ordinary folk by self appointed clerics. All these constructs would disappear into thin air, at a stroke.

Thus throughout the last 1800 years reincarnation has been suppressed as a belief system in those countries heavily influenced by Western religions, Christianity and Judaism. The exquisite simplicity and harmonious nature of the ideas of reincarnation are seeping into Western thought, more and more. People become more open and questioning about the nature of reality. As people become free from the dogma imposed by those seeking to continue to dine at the table of imposed power over others, belief in this system gathers momentum.

Some may find the prospect of reincarnation perplexing, others reassuring. Good or bad, this is Birch’s perspective. How have these ideas shaped his life? What affect does he perceive that these other lifetimes are having on him now? How have they contributed to his development?


Birch tries to shed some light on some of these questions. By the very nature of being human and living in this three dimensional reality, we attract those experiences that will contribute to our development. If we fail to learn the first time round, then these events and people will be re-presented to us time after time until we take the lesson on-board in our march towards spiritual perfection. This re-presentation time after time can be extremely frustrating for many people; those who don’t have the insight that it is they who are attracting conditions to themselves. They may blame fate or a vengeful God.

However, in Birch’s way of looking at reality there is no fate, no luck and no accidents. All the while we are attracting the conditions to ourselves that we face in this life. It is our responsibility to solve them and move on; this is the opportunity we have been given. It may be that we will live hundreds of lifetimes. There is much to learn. There is no end time by which we are required to attain perfection. All is in our hands.

This can be very scary for many people. Birch has a very dear friend whom he describes as being intelligent, articulate and mature. She simply cannot accept Birch’s viewpoint. Her rejection is nothing to do with logical argument. She has told him that she has an emotional need for someone else to tell her what to do; for instance, the local priest. She needs another to comfort her and reassure her that she has value as a person.

Birch finds this really sad. In his friend’s case, her feelings of self worth are so fragile she cannot think for herself or make up her own mind. Birch does not suggest that she should take his perspectives lock, stock, and barrel. It would be beneficial for her, he believes, if she could formulate her own perspectives. After all, we all have a slightly different view of reality. This unique view, person by person, is part of the genius of the human race.

Before the Chinese invaded Tibet, over the lintel at the entrances to the monasteries was the admonition, ‘A thousand monks, a thousand religions.’

The major Western religions don’t like reincarnation because this belief helps create a self assured, self responsible person. A thinking adherent is no adherent at all when all the rules and regulations are laid out for them to swallow wholesale, or be banished to hell as a heretic by structured religions. It is Birch’s view that a major failing of the Western religions is the attempt to shoehorn us all into a more or less one world view of spirituality. This is doomed to failure given that we have all had the opportunities of many experiences and are at different places in our spiritual development.

Birch likes to compare the soul personality (the sum total of talents, characteristics, preferences, and abhorrence’s,) to a diamond. Each lifetime we present another facet to be polished on the wheel of experience until all are shining and the wheel of re-birth is no longer necessary. That could be some way off. One would need to be a Gandhi figure to have resolved most of life’s vicissitudes. In adversity and danger we can reach back into ourselves, discovering talents that we had no idea we possessed. In this way we re-explore other facets of the diamond.

Many lives are simple and mundane much of the time, but all the while learning opportunities are presented, no matter the nature of our existence. Sometimes lives of simple service are as valuable as ones of excitement filled with happenings.

Those who see themselves as Cleopatra or Bonaparte in previous lives are, for the most part, kidding themselves. The current ego is most likely over inflated in these cases.

So these are the personal perspectives of Clive Birch. He seeks to convert no-one to a belief in reincarnation. There have been enough ‘conversions’ on this planet to last until eternity. He presents his thoughts as a model with which he is comfortable. He hopes that those who are unfamiliar with the concepts, and those who have an open mind, enjoy these ideas. Birch has described some stories extracted from some of his previous lives. Most have come from insights to these lives, extracted by his dear friend and spiritual sister, Audrey. It is she with the ‘direct line’ to the Akashic.

Some years ago he had a visionary experience from ancient times. In this vision he was a central character moving from scene to scene, much as actors do in a film or TV drama. He felt so emotionally drawn into the experience, during and after the vision, that he believed it to be a past life experience. This belief was reinforced later. He was a spear carrying soldier, marching in a cohort with other spear carriers. They were lightly clothed and lightly armed. The landscape was dusty desert terrain. Marching next to him was his great friend at that time.

On one occasion, as a group, they slept in a room with very bright white-washed walls. Some illness or accident befell the friend for in the next marching scene his face was covered in a mask of cloth with eye holes covering the disfigurement. This mask flapped as they walked.


In the final scene the friend and Birch had been captured, or were being disciplined within their own army. He saw and felt that they were surrounded by threatening men, at least three. There, before his eyes, the friend was killed. Birch went into great shock and grief inside the vision and, significantly for him, still felt the shock and the grief as he emerged from the altered state. For him, this was a real life experience, just as valid as any that he experiences in his day-to-day life now, in the 21^st century. For the time being this was where the vision rested. The year of the vision was 1997.

In 2007 Birch contracted an attack of shingles. The painful spots appeared on his right chest, just below and to the right of the nipple. The discomfort extended around his body and terminated in the right shoulder. He believes that shingles follow nerve ganglia wherever they are on the body.

Prior to this he had been very healthy. He was taken aback by the sudden arrival of the malady. He went into meditation to try to ascertain the cause or background information concerning the attack. In the meditation he saw a spear of light entering his back where the discomfort ended. It emerged from his chest where the shingle spots were located. His intuition made an instant connection with the lifetime experience mentioned above. This was somewhat of a surprise to him. There had been such a time lag since the first connection with the spear carrier life.

One of the nurses who looked at the rash on his chest said, “This is the strangest shingles I’ve ever seen. It looks more like a wound.” Birch’s version of the stigmata perhaps?

The story appeared to become stranger and stranger. As he didn’t receive any further vision he determined to ask Audrey to look into the Akashic to attempt to find out more. Audrey saw him in the spear carrier life, as part of an army besieging a castle or ancient city with high protective walls. Rough ladders were thrown against the walls by the besiegers in an attempt to scale them. The defenders threw missiles down in attempts to dislodge the attackers. He climbed a ladder, reached the top, and scrambled over the parapet.


At that precise moment, before he could gather himself, one of the defenders speared him from the side. The spear entered and exited his body precisely where he saw the spear of light in his meditation and where the shingles had manifested.

In Birch’s way of looking at reality, somehow the suppressed memories had been released from the unconscious into memory and into the cells of the body, as far as the shingles were concerned. This was in order to be cleared out with healing methods. So in this case he was clearing, or having cleared, the trauma from a past life.

In Niamh Clunes book ‘The Coming of the Female Christ’, she speaks of the spear representing ‘intuition’ in the archetype of ideas. She also says that in the grail myth, the spear that wounds is the spear that heals.

Birch suggests that a message here is to give intuition even more credence over intellect in negotiating one’s life path, day-by-day. To some extent he does this. He claims he needs to do it more. In addition, the healing of the wound, for him, is most profound.

There were at least two lives in the Christian religion. Birch does not doubt that these lives have had a significant impact on his current beliefs concerning this religion. In one he was an official in the Vatican. He was born into a wealthy Italian family. Being the third son he was not entitled to inherit the family estates. This would pass to the eldest son under the law of primogeniture. The second son would go into the military as was the tradition. The third son, Birch, was packed off to the church, again according to tradition. He was sent as a young boy.

Eventually he attained the rank of cardinal. The role was primarily political. He was obliged to take part in a certain amount of religious ceremony. However, he would not equate this situation with a spiritual one. It was very worldly and emotionally empty. One very bright spark entered this life in the form of a young priest. He became Birch’s ‘good friend’. This relationship did not last as the young priest died at an early age. Birch was devastated. The only thing that he had ever loved was taken from him.

He carried out his duties with a broken heart and, to ease the emotional pain, he started to drink alcohol heavily. In the end the booze killed him releasing him from a miserable life. The last scene was of the funeral in the Vatican, carried out with all the pomp of that religion.

. In the next example Birch tells of other lifetimes with his wife, Jaqueline.

They were in Atlantis together as partners. She was pregnant at the time of the final deluge and sinking of that continent. Although they were not part of the priesthood, they had been warned by them that the end was near. They knew that the final destruction was close. Because of the pregnancy they left it late to attempt to make their escape. After the baby was born they did make their way to one of the last ships leaving. Too late; the final deluge came. Birch’s wife, standing near the edge of the boat, experienced the horror of the baby being washed out of her arms and over the side. Sadly they were not destined to escape either. The force of the terrible inundation caused the boat to sink. All were drowned.

Birch detests wearing uniforms, particularly military ones. Perhaps the next two life experiences explain why? At the time of the American Civil War, he was the son of a mill owner in Georgia. The mill was situated near a river. Although of ordinary artisan background, his family owned a black slave. He and the slave were great friends and companions. In larger social environments this would have been frowned upon and disallowed. The social division between black and white was total in the South. Because of the social environment, he needed to be very careful concerning his friendship with the black friend, especially so when visiting the local town. Birch has the strong intuitive impression that this friend is one of his sons in this life.

Sadly the Civil War erupted. Birch joined the forces of the Confederacy. He was, after all, loyal to his state of Georgia and to the South. This decision to fight was not out of commitment to the slave industry which he was against. He took part in skirmishes, seeing horrible sights of mangled and dead bodies.


 His greatest comrade choked out his life next to him in the fields. He wasn’t injured physically, but greatly traumatised by his experiences. This psychological damage was almost too much to bear. The war was lost and the army disbanded. He was simply demobbed and told to go home. He walked many miles back to his home in Georgia. There was no food. He scavenged what he could, coming across others doing the same.

He found his way back, subsequently managing to eke out a living as a clerk. He married a woman who would have been above his station before the war. Her family had lost everything. Beggars can’t be choosers, particularly after being on the losing side of the war. She and her mother looked down on him. He was little more than a necessary evil. He could never hope to fulfil their expectations and was soon past caring to try. He had a dog that was his loving companion. They would escape to the wild together to try to soothe the pain in his mind and heart. Then one day, his beloved dog was killed violently by a pack of wild dogs. This was the final straw. His heart was broken by his experiences. It was at this point that he vowed never to open his heart again.

It is only now, in this life in the 21^st century, that Birch is working to reverse that commitment. He had lived a simple, carefree life, and was thrown headlong into the hell of slaughter. He died pretty soon after. Interestingly, he believes his wife’s mother in that life was his mother in this one.

Throughout this life, and long before he was shown this life experiences by Audrey,

 he would become extremely upset by TV and film presentations of the War from the Confederacy side. So much so, he couldn’t watch for long, the emotional discomfort being too great. Another ‘bleed through’ to this life?

Bill Bryson in the ‘The Lost Continent’ talks of his surprise at visiting the University of Mississippi and finding that the black and white students were living and working happily together. 25 years before there had been a riot at the enrolment of the first black student. This resulted in the death of two journalists and the wounding of 30 Marshals.

A possible reason for the illogical hatred of black people by certain sections of the white community in the south of the US occurred to Birch in an intuitive flash. Could it be that they blamed the black people for their part in the Confederacy losing of the Civil War. This is a totally spurious reason of course. Nevertheless their unconscious reaction would be passed on through the genetic sequencing down the generations.

It is fascinating and extremely sad that each generation is incapable of dealing with its own negative issues. Awareness of them, and the realisation that they do not serve positively, would help with resolving them individually and at the social group level.

In fact the Confederacy never had a prayer of winning the Civil War. The North was overwhelmingly powerful in manpower and resources. By the standards of the day, its manufacturing capability was astounding. There is something about the tide of history here that the eighteenth century society in the Deep South, with its slave culture and rural attitude was missing. This approach to society was finished. It was just that the South did not realise it. The industrial nineteenth century, right or wrong, was the way forward for the Western societies, despite its manifold weaknesses.


The Confederacy was really the last bunker of the old. Its time was gone. It is such a waste that so much pain and suffering was a by-product of this tide of history.

Birch feels able to express the above because of his life in Georgia and his time in the Confederate Army. It is part of his being, part of his history. He believes that he has the right.

The last life, chronologically speaking, saw him being born into a ‘respectable’ burgher family in Bayreuth, Germany. His father was a banker. His upbringing throughout childhood and young adulthood was extremely strict. At a very young age he was sent off to military academy where martial discipline was rigidly applied. Although respectable on the outside, there were pressures on the inside. One time he caught his father in the bedroom of a young woman who lived in the house. He was not sure if it was his sister, a servant, or a relative.

This was not the behaviour of a respectable, middle class pillar of society. He and his father fought on the staircase as he sought to defend the honour of this young woman. His relationship with his father was fractured by this event. He never spoke to his father again, such was the rage of the youth. Even when the father lay on his deathbed, the son refused to go and see him. He supposes that this incident would have been covered up in ‘respectable’ society.

Time marched on. As he entered young manhood, he joined the army and, because of family connections, he became an officer appointed to the general staff. It seems that one of his uncles was a general in the Prussian elite of the army. He tried to find happiness with a partner and once there was a young woman around. Perhaps because of his stiffness and buttoned-up personality, happiness never quite happened.

On one occasion as the staff stood around a map table during military manoeuvres, the Kaiser joined them. The First World War came. He commanded men on the Western Front. He witnessed more terrible slaughter, this time on an industrial scale. At one point he prayed on his knees in church, seeking a meaning to all this horror. The almost inevitable happened. He was shot in the back, and died.

He is certain that he has had enough of martial lives. The unnecessary and futile nature of it appals him now. Perhaps that’s the point. In the development opportunities presented to him, he has seen violence in its true light. Someone once said, “Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent”. As Churchill said, “Better jaw jaw than war war”.