Past and Future Lives, Part 2

When I was about twelve our neighbor got a book about Bridey Murphy. Has everyone heard of that? She was talking about it with my Mom and referring to past lives and I thought that is it! That makes sense to me. This really struck a chord and from that moment on I believed in reincarnation. Then my Dad, who was an inventor, invented this kitty litter and in 1956 he sold everything he had and invested it all in this kitty litter plant. Customers bought a kit that had a cardboard litterbox and a bag of kitty litter. You open up the kit and you throw the bag of sand in the box and when it was used then you throw the box and the sand away and buy a new one. He and my uncle put everything they had into this and everything looked good and they began to sell everything locally and were ready to go national. Sears placed a large order and they put every penny they had into producing as many of these as they could. The printer that was printing these boxes did a bad job and so they had to have all the boxes reprinted. But they had spent all their money and did not have enough money to reprint the boxes and so they went under. If not for that one little fluke then I would probably have a really big inheritance today. Because kitty litter is a really big business today and my Dad was the one who invented it.

So he lost everything. At that time we had a 1956 Studebaker Golden Hawk and it was the best looking sports car around and everywhere my dad went people would gather around to take a look at it. Well that was repossessed and we got this old 1936 Ford pick up that was about on its last leg. We moved over to the big city of Letha, Idaho in between New Plymouth and Emmett. I found out that I made up about 2% of the population there and that is where I met Wayne. His dad owned half the town and was still a poor man.

Audience: Laughter

JJ: But anyway we went from just being on the verge of living the good life and making millions to losing everything almost instantly. In Letha is where I kind of got some influence from the church because my grandmother thought, ah Joe is moving here and I can get him going to church. My grandmother loved the church very much. She was a very sweet gal and everybody that met her thought she was the most wonderful person in the world and my dad liked her too. When my dad was growing up she always hauled him off to church and he could not say no to her because she was so sweet. When my mom married my dad she thought she was marrying a religious guy who always went to church. But right after they got settled into the marriage she says to dad, lets go to church and he said, I am never going to church again as long as I live. And she says, what I though I married a good Mormon here! And he says, no, my mom hauled me off to church every Sunday since the day I was born and I could not say no to her and now that I am away from her I am never going again! So my dad became a notorious drinker and partier for pretty much the rest of his life. He was an interesting guy to be around but he was not really religious or anything.

JJ: So anyway my grandmother had her sights set on me when we lived there and she used to drive by and pick me up for church. I would look through the window on Sunday morning and if I saw her driving by (we lived near a prune orchard) I would hop out the back window and run off in the orchard and hide.

Audience: Chuckling!

JJ: But sometimes when she drove up I was asleep and she just caught me and she was so sweet that you just couldn’t say no to her and I could understand why my dad could never say no to her. She was just the sweetest little gal you ever met. So when she caught me I went to church. When we went to church me and this other kid, Larry Larson – who Wayne will remember – in Sunday school we were the best behaved and the teacher would always point out to the rest of the class how much Joe and Larry over here were so nice and paying attention and why could not he rest of the kids be more like us. Larry and I would look at each other and say, that is because we are bored stiff!

Audience: Chuckling!

JJ: These other kids were throwing candy and erasers and we were just bored with this whole church thing. Then one day it was Easter and I was feeling a little guilty and I thought I should go to church since it was Easter and so by this time my mom had moved about a block away from the church and I was walking over to it. I was thinking to myself, lets look at this church thing logically. According to religion if I am a good guy and go to church every Sunday then when I die I will go to some heavenly bliss for all eternity. I thought that is really not a bad deal if the heavenly bliss is what they build it up to be. After all, a snap of a finger in relation to a lifetime is like a lifetime in relation to eternity.

I began to reason within myself that it is kind of like taking a test for an hour to determine the quality of the rest of your life. I thought why would I not endure a test for an hour even if it were boring if the reward was so great? So I thought maybe I should try this out logically and I made a deal with myself to attend church for six weeks. The only trouble was I didn’t know if I could handle the boredom.

Interestingly, a few weeks before that the bishop called me and he says how come you do not go to church regularly? I told him because it is really boring. And he says, boring!!! He acted like he had never heard anybody say that before. He says what could it possibly be boring? I said the songs; the hymns are just so boring and they put you to sleep. He says they are lovely hymns and everybody loves them! I said not me, now Elvis I like him, and rock and roll is fine and I am sorry but it pains me to listen to the hymns. He says what else bothers you? I said the speeches and sermons; they are just so boring. The speakers say nothing new and they just drag along. He says we have some wonderful speakers in our church and I don’t understand for everybody loves them. I said well not me they are just boring. Anyway, a few weeks later I was walking along and I thought if I decide to got to church the only thing that I am not sure that I can handle is the boredom. So I will make a deal with my self and go for six weeks and if I can handle the boredom for six weeks then I will go the rest of my life and if I can’t then I will be like my dad and eat drink and be merry.

So I started going for six weeks and thanks to friends like Wayne and others that were like him in the group of guys I seemed to have handled it.

Wayne: We taught him how to be rowdy!

JJ: They taught me how to enjoy myself but rather than just follow I took the lead and I started these contests as to who could bring the most outrageous thing to eat and the biggest thing to drink during the Sunday meetings and not get caught. Well our friend John Cannon won the contest; he brought a quart bottle of Pepsi and drank the whole thing during the Sacrament meeting without getting caught. That was pretty hard thing to do! I brought pork chops and eat them.

Audience: Laughing!

JJ: All the kids thought that was the most outrageous thing they had ever seen. Then I learned to join in with the rest of the kids in doing some hellraising and it kind of broke the monotony.

The bishop hauled me in one more time and said I heard you believe in reincarnation and I said well yea and he said let me read you a scripture, “it is given in a man once to die and after this the judgment.” And I read it and thought; it does seem to say that doesn’t it. He said yes there is only one life. Then he said I also heard you drink and smoke. I said well, sometimes! I was only twelve!

Audience: Laughing!

JJ: He says you are not supposed to drink and smoke. I said really I did not know that! So he committed me to not drink and smoke. So I was a pretty good guy for quite some time and obeyed all the rules. Then my brother in-law who was interested in a bunch of oddball stuff, came by one time and he and he left this book on hypnosis. In those days, around 1959, you could not even find a book on hypnosis, and now these books are widely available. He had gotten this book written by a stage hypnotist and I read all the way through it and then at the end it finally told you how to hypnotize someone. So I studied it over carefully and experimented with a couple of my friends and it seemed to work and then I started doing it at school and at church and it seemed to work at the time and after church I would take people into a room that nobody was in and hypnotize them. And then at school during the lunch hour I would take some kids out on the lawn and then have them do crazy stuff. Then I got it from two different sides, the bishop calls and says you are not supposed to be hypnotizing people and I said does it say anything in the Bible about that?

Audience: Laughter

JJ: He says well no and I said I would just keep doing it then. (Laughter) He really did not have a good answer for me and he said well you just be careful because that could be dangerous.

The same thing happened in high school. My teachers all pointed me out right in the middle of class and said, you should not be hypnotizing people! I said, why not? Is it illegal? The teacher answered, Well, no I don’t think so. Is it against school rules? Not that I know of. They did not have anything in the school rules about it so I said well I guess I will just keep doing it then. Laughing! I had a couple teachers that were really negative on me but there was no rule against it so I just kept doing it.

So we had a lot of fun things happen and I will tell you about one in particular. This one guy comes up to me and says I hear you can hypnotize somebody to eat an onion and it will taste like a peach or something like that. I asked him if he wanted to do that and he said yes. So I started to put him under and there is one thing I discovered about hypnosis at that time, is that nothing takes a person out of a trance faster than laughter. As a matter of fact, people will not laugh under deep hypnosis unless you tell them to laugh, So I was putting him under and it was going well, well enough so that he could eat an onion and it would taste like a peach and then someone cracked a joke and everybody started to laugh. The guy came partially out of his trance and he started laughing too. I was not positive how deep I had him under because the laughter kind of broke the atmosphere but I thought had him deep enough and so I told him after I wake you up we are going to go down to Brownies, the local grocery store, and get you an onion and you are going to eat it and it will taste like a peach. So I woke him up and a big crowd of us students goes down to the corner local grocery store and there is nobody in it but one clerk. There was big box of onions next to the counter and the guy goes up and says, I want one onion please, and he grabs the onion and looks at it and the clerk looks at him like, what are these high school kids up to now. The kid then takes a bite out of the onion and begins chewing and then all of a sudden he spits it out all over the floor. Laughing! Apparently I did not have him under deep enough!

Audience: Laughing!

JJ: That was one time I lost a little bit of credibility with that group. I had done this many other times where I had them do stuff like that but that laughter must have broke the trance and suggestion. Hypnosis kind of led me to discover past lives and the first time that really got me going was when Wayne and I were double dating. That is Wayne from the book right over there, and to break the monotony Wayne tells the gals that my friend here is a hypnotist and would you like to be hypnotized and the gal says yes.

She was a pretty good subject and I had taken several people back to the day they were born and it was kind of interesting to see them re-live their first few hours. Some people say they can’t see hardly at all for a couple days and it takes a while for their eyes to adjust and almost everybody says they really feel and sense their mother’s love, so anyway I took her back to the day she was born and as I said she was a pretty good subject. As a Mormon we believed in pre-existence but not reincarnation and the Mormons believe in only one life but you did live before you were born in heavenly spheres. So I wondered what would happen if I took her back to before she was born and what she would say. So I told her to go back before she born and then she began speaking with an English accent and gave her name – that she lived in northern England. What was interesting about this was when I was a young Mormon I went on a 2 year mission to northern England exactly in the area where she said she lived in a past life.

What is interesting about England is that accent is different in different parts of the country just as the accent is different for people in different parts of the south or in Boston and so on. It is the same thing in England where there are different variations of accents in northern and southern England. Most of what we hear is what they call the Queen’s English or the James Bond accent but in northern England they speak a lot faster and it is a lot harder to understand. But anyway in her past life she had lived in northern England and I had spent 2 years in northern England so I knew the accent well but what really got my motor going is that when regressed she spoke with a perfect northern British accent that hardly anybody here would recognize. I thought wow she speaks with a perfect northern British accent, this is amazing. That was the first scientific evidence that made me really doubt the one life idea.

Then I had this girlfriend over in Portland and we were attending a party after church and it was at a member’s house. It was kind of boring so I told everybody there that I was a hypnotist and that I could take people back to the day they were born if someone wants to go back. Everybody said, oh really, they seemed to have doubt that this was possible. Then the lady of the house said put me in a chair and take me back. Now about this time as I was getting ready to take her back her husband had to run out for snacks so he took off to the store. Then I took her back to the day she was born. Then I thought lets try going back to the previous life and see if anything materializes again. Now this was only the second time I had tried to take someone back beyond their birth.

So I took her back to before she was born and she went back to the days of the Roman Empire and said that she was married to a Roman senator named Marcus Aurelius, not the emperor but another guy with that name in the senate, and another interesting fact about that life is that he was killed in battle. Then I took her back to an even earlier life in prehistoric primitive times and she described different types of animals than there are today. Then her husband returned and I brought her back to the present and everybody says take him back. He did not know what was going on so he said, back where? So we sat him down and took him back with the same procedure and I said what is your name?

He said Marcus Aurelius, a Roman senator. You should have seen all these Mormons because they were not supposed to believe in reincarnation! So I quizzed him and I said how did you die and he said I was killed in battle. He gave the same story she gave and then I took him farther back and he went back to prehistoric times as well and I said was your current wife your wife in prehistoric times? He said yes, we did not have an official marriage back then but we spent our lives together. I asked him, when you met in this life did you seem familiar to each other and he said yes, he proposed about a week after they had met and they knew immediately that we were supposed to be together. So we had discovered two lifetimes they had together and that explained why they immediately recognized each other in this life and being good Mormons they thought that it was from the heavenly spirit world that they knew each other but by taking them back we discovered it was reincarnation.

The interesting thing is that it shook up a lot of people there and people came to me said, this shakes my testimony and I said I do not want to destroy anybody’s faith and this could be like a genetic memory and there a number of explanations for it. And even though I had seen all this proof myself I still did not believe it 100% and I did not believe it 100% until I had several other unusual experiences.

Copyright 2011 by J J Dewey

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