In my spare time I have finished reading everything I could find about James, and I have selected the most interesting excerpts so that I have them well-placed in my records. I was considering writing an entry dealing with what one feels when someone speaks of one of your past life personalities, but it was being really hard for me to find the words to express it, until, talking with a user of Military Past Lives, I told her: “I’m dying of nostalgia and I want it all back”. I think this sums up my feelings quite well.
Doubts and more doubts. Doubts gnaw at us reincarnationists, at least those of us who keep a bit of sense. But, as so well a friend told me not long ago, there is something we can’t doubt: our emotions. We can’t make them up. Emotions arise on their own, they arise for a reason. They are there from the moment we are conscious, and many times their origin is unexplainable... unless we take into account the existence of past lives.
I smile when my boyfriend becomes so insistent that I must watch a series of three documentaries about the Invincible Armada. He thinks I will be interested, as, without his own memories, he can’t understand how we reincarnationists feel in regards to our past lives. I am not interested in the Invincible Armada in the least. I am not interested in the Spaniards of 16th century. It is an era totally indifferent to me. Neither do I like current ships or sailing. I haven’t lived it as a child. What interests me, what moves me, what makes me vibrate, is 18th century England, the Royal Navy of that time, not even Nelson’s, but the one of Cartagena de Indias, the one of Minorca, the one that was in full development —the first school of officers didn’t even exist when I started off my naval career—, with its major defects and strategy failures due to lack of experience in maritime warfare.
I have been “reliving” (either by my own memories or reading historical records) my death as James in the naval battle for some weeks now. It is turning out very curious and somewhat disconcerting that I don’t feel the same as in other deaths at all. In other deaths I felt the need to grieve for my own death, to pass through a time of mourning in order to accept that death and above all, process the emotions that surrounded it during the previous days or months. With James I feel a certain sadness, besides a lot of rage when I read how my colleagues behaved during and after the battle, but despite being a traumatic and quite fast death (perhaps that is the reason I don’t need to pass through that mourning process), what I feel is more than anything like: “Man, it is such bad luck to die so early in the battle, how could I miss all that? I should have been there!” It is as if I had failed in my duty, as if I had transferred my command before due time. More than in any other of my past lives, I wished I had gone on living, doing what I was doing, be a witness to how the war with Spain and France ended. Then I have to remind myself that I was killed... and that wasn’t something that could be avoided. But as often happens to me, I wanted to keep fighting. I don’t know... it was like leaving a book halfway. How the hell could it happen?
I started to watch the bonus documentaries on the DVD of the movie Master & Commander, and my eyes filled with tears seeing how the ships where they were going to film were built, basing on the plans of a frigate that existed for real. Those plans had been kept in a museum. The difference of size between a frigate and a 90-gun warship, as the Marlborough was, is considerable, but even so, the feeling is very similar. I was also getting emotional seeing how the actors, all with a marked British accent, were characterized as sailors and officers of the time. It was like seeing my crew returning to life. The action takes place in 1805, over sixty years after my death, and I suppose some things changed, but still, I think it reflects very well the reality I lived in my own skin. Seeing how they shot the cannons, and how fake blood was spilt on actors that pretended to have been injured or killed in action, broke my heart. All those emotions are there, I don’t know if still encrusted, with the need to be expressed, but it is certain that, as I have felt in many other instances before, time seems to have stopped in that precise instant in which we all were fighting for our lives... and some of us lost it. When you see it is impossible or enormously difficult to validate your memories, when you suddenly understand there are times you can only trust your intuition and your memory, strong emotions are there to remind you that it makes no sense feeling this way for events that happened in another country and in circumstances we can’t even imagine, unless we accept we have lived before, in another body and another time.
In other cases I have needed to mourn for my death. A death at the wrong time, a traumatic death, unfair perhaps; an unexpected death in the bloom of my youth... James died in a traumatic way, at the wrong time, when I could have gone farther in my naval career (though I doubt that was my desire). And however, I am not grieving for my death. I grieve for the magnificent life I had, one that will never, ever, be back again, no matter how much I want it to.