We human beings are specialists evading moral issues. We manage to ignore them as much as we can one way or the other, so that they don’t bother us, so that we don’t have to acknowledge to ourselves that we are doing something wrong and we should change it. We have examples everywhere, any time of the day, wherever you look. I am no one to judge anyone, and I must accept whatever there is out there. But recalling my past lives has made me realize that we can’t stand aside. It is often complicated to find the best way to do it, one that doesn’t incur in undesirable forms of violence. But, above all, the revolution must begin in oneself. We are responsible of everything that happens in the world. We create the world around us. And if we want to change it, the first thing we have to do is changing ourselves.
The truth is sometimes it is very hard for me to understand why people behave in such a selfish way. And these people are usually the first to complain about how much evil there is in the world. But at heart I can’t blame them, as we all are like that to some extent. Most of us are not heroes. Most of us are not even capable to show a bit of compassion for the sentient beings that surround us, human or nonhuman. And if they feel a bit of sympathy, they won’t take action. They will look the other way. They will set up higher walls, as if the events in our home, the Earth, are not their business.
Nowadays, when I think about which should be my way of proceeding when facing a moral question, I always remember those moments in which my inaction caused a suffering in other people that perhaps I could have avoided. In particular, I remember when I was a British Navy officer and I took part, more or less “obliged”, in slavery, auctioning negroes after a transatlantic journey that I would have preferred to forget. But I have already talked about this in my book Pandora’s Box, so today I focus on another one of my lives that brings me this kind of regrets. I am referring to the life in which I was a Roman praetorian. Part of the job, at least in an early period, was to be an executor of the law. Or, in other words, an executioner.
I don’t know why but the scene of the execution of sentences repeats itself a lot. This time it is somewhat different because I am not executing them myself, but rather supervising, it must be that I had been promoted or something. I am sitting in front of a wooden table that is in what seems to be the courtyard of a stronghold or something like that. The rolled parchments on a heap at my right stand out. When I unroll them they are not exactly like paper, but rather like leather, very flexible and they roll and unroll very easily. I don’t get to see the writing but I think it is Latin. When the sentence is executed, I myself stamp it. I think I do it putting a glob of wax from a red bar that I heat near the fire and I use a stamp similar to the current ones but with a longer and finer handle, and the stamp itself is very small, square or round. I don’t get to see the design.
It is a moment of tension right before opening them, wondering what will come out this time. Most of them are mutilations, but there are also floggings, pulling out nails and teeth, cutting tongues. They bring the prisoner from the cell, they drag him between two or more soldiers up to the place of the execution, and I watch how soldiers do it, sometimes wishing not to look, and for them to finish quickly. Sentences are usually the same for man, woman or child. If it is a child, I wish deep inside that the soldiers will measure their strength and won’t be too brute... The soldiers are at my left waiting for me to read the sentence. Children sometimes cry less than adults, perhaps because they don’t expect what is going to happen and get blocked. One in particular comes to my mind, he is around twelve, light brown and wavy hair, wears a kind of ragged shirt like beige linen, knee-length. They drag him, hold him to two posts and whip him.
We have been taught to be cold, to be quick, not to think, and that is the same thing I teach to the soldiers. “If you think, you are lost”, I tell them. We start with all the instruments perfectly clean and placed on the table (as I saw it in another regression), we finish with blood all around, one way or the other blood always ends up splattering you. At the end I see myself trying to wipe off the blood with a cloth, but it gets stuck. I see there is a pipe at home from which water is always flowing, and when I arrive I have to end the washing up there. This is not daily, but it is one or two mornings per week, and clearly it is the worst part of our job. At the end we have a bag full of pieces of human bodies that end up being food for the animals (dogs). This came to me as a flash one or two days earlier, but I wished it was my imagination.
I feel awful while I do all this, of course, but I can’t show it. I only obey orders. Sometimes I wish judges themselves were the ones who execute the sentence, but when I come across them they look down on me as if we were no better than the scumbag of criminals... the majority of which are just poor fellows trying to survive. Sometimes I would also like to go to the judges and tell them some of their sentences are disproportionate, but once again, it is not my function to question the laws. In the army you are taught from a young age we must obey our superiors. If we don’t do that and incur in acts of disobedience, we are punished in a number of ways too, it doesn’t matter if we are just kids. One of them is locking us up in some kind of cubicles that are like a round stone house with hardly an opening, the door is wooden I think. It is very hot in summer and very cold in winter. We are left there with no food or water. A kind of isolation cell.
Sometimes I also have to bear witness of how some men begin to enjoy what they are doing, they make fun of the prisoners or are merciless with them. I don’t know if they do it as a way of self-protection or because they are really sadists, but I despise them.
The people that end up mutilated go back to the streets and end up being a victim of stronger thugs. This form of justice solves nothing.
And, sometimes, the sentence is DEATH. Then my hearts sinks. Several types of execution come to me, I don’t know how veridical they are. The first is some kind of garrote. The prisoner sits down and we strangle from behind with some kind of belt. It is fine because this way you don’t have to look at his face. The second is laceration, a few cuts are made, I suppose in specific points so that he bleeds to death. We don’t behead routinely, I think it is because you can’t do that with a normal Roman sword, which is used to prick rather than cut, though I think sometimes we do use knives to slit throats, though it is not too frequent. There is also dragging by horse.
There I always have to participate, help the soldiers. I always wish it is quick. I stare at the eyes of one of the men sentenced to death, but I am unable to say anything.
I use to think it is good these people enter the army. This way we send them to work, for example to build walls. So they earn a salary and stop wandering the streets.
At the end I saw a bag of coins falling down before my eyes. It is the payment for my work. This is the value of that bag of human parts. It fills me with disgust... or perhaps I wouldn’t say that much. It is unpleasant, but it is my job, this is all there is.
(Regression 12-12-2017).
One of the reasons I started to remember past lives was the deep depression I felt due to the constant disappointment in my profession. More than once I found myself in a situation in which, again, I had to do things that were against my moral principles, against the only reason for which I had decided to study a college degree: animals. I recalled the same had happened to me in other lives. The difference is that back then it was more complicated for me to get out of the system, the consequences could have been quite worse. That is not a justification in itself, but it can somewhat alleviate guilt. In my current life I had no excuses, and even so a few years went by until I finally stood my ground and said to myself: “Enough. No more excuses. You know what you want, you know what is morally correct. You have no other choice but to do it and lead by example.”
It has been hard, but the truth is I feel proud I have taken the step. This time I am not going to regret my actions or inaction. I am not going to wait to die to realize our moral decisions do matter. I am not going to wait for the world to change, as alone it will never, ever, change. We are the ones who change the world, no one else.