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Past Lives?
I don't believe in past lives personally, but here's another weird one: James Merrill as some readers may know is a world-renowned poet who also happens to be from the Merrill of Merrill-Lynch family, and so supremely sensitive he can't stand to watch the news or keep up with current events. In the 1960s he and his partner were playing with a Ouija board when they made contact (or so they believe anyway, I remain agnostic) with a rather chatty spirit named Ephraim who claimed to have once lived in Phoenicia as a local literati. Ephraim told them all kinds of stories over a long period of time, some of which are collected in Merrill's poetry collection "The Book of Ephraim". In one section, they get to discussing great composers. Ephraim tells them that although most humans have to reincarnate over and over before they can ascend to higher levels, composers generally make it in one lifetime, *except for Mozart*. Mozart, apparently, keeps coming back to make music on Earth because he loves it so much. This was 1968. So they ask Ephraim who Mozart is now, and EPHRAIM says (remember Merrill's ignorance of pop culture) "A BLACK ROCK STAR, WHATEVER THAT IS". Now, it could be Otis Redding, but another famous musician wrote these words at the time: "I'm looking through my belly button window/ All I see are a whole lot of frowns / I'm looking through my belly button window / things will be different next time around." Admittedly this was in the persona of a baby about to be aborted, but consider the life of the author, the great musical genius Jimi Hendrix, so short, so wild, like Mozart's. Strangely too, a few years later a prodigy opera composer appeared on the scene, who wrote an opera about the prison break in France in which prisoners escaped by way of helicopters, but in the opera, the helicopter pilots were portrayed as Buddhist Bodhisattvas -- enlightened beings who keep returning for love of humanity and all sentient beings. OK, weird enough, right? So one day listening to straight ahead jazz it occurred to me to check the death date of that other great improvisational electric guitar player, the one who invented the medium, Charlie Christian, who also died very young. Guess what. He died the same year Jimi Hendrix was born. Still don't believe it though, of course. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, not just amazing guitar work and operas.— September 25, 2011 5:51 p.m.