One Lifetime? Or Many?
Every human being develops skills during a lifetime. A carpenter learns woodworking. A physician learns medicine. A musician masters an instrument. We generally accept that expertise grows through years of study, practice, failure, and experience.
But occasionally we encounter an individual whose range of abilities seems to ignore those normal boundaries.
This has led me to ask a simple question:
Can one ordinary lifetime really account for everything we become?
Looking back over my own life, I have accumulated practical experience in an unusually wide variety of disciplines.
Among them are:
- consciousness research and transformational teaching
- drawing – graphite, charcoals, pastels, ink & wash, crayons
- painting – acrylics, oils, watercolor, inks
- sculpture – wood, metal, glass, acrylic, bronzes
- dollhouse design, building, miniature art, exhibitions at Jacob Javits Center
- printmaking – typesetting, printing lithography etching
- photography & darkroom skills
- exhibition designs and building
- museum installations, gallery installations, miniature train installations
- fine art identification, authentication, conservation & museum style framing
- goldsmithing, silversmithing and coppersmithing high-end jewelry.
- rare antique bead collector/trader/dealer, authenticator
- jewelry design and fabrication
- antiquarian book collecting
- rare prints and graphic arts
- specialist: early printed books (incunabula)
- manuscript studies
- bibliography
- professional curator of antiquities & fine art
- author over 100 books in print
- illustrator sci-fi authors: Bradbury, Asimov, Sheckley
- book editor/publisher
- magazine editor
- science fiction writer, member SFWAA
- television script writer
- performed choreographer and playwright
- songwriter
- lyricist
- book designer
- typographer
- typesetter
- A.B. Dick offset press operator
- calligrapher
- graphic designer
- serious Shakespearean actor
- stage magician and comic
- professional storyteller in modern and middle English
- university lecturer credited classes UCLA, USC,
- professional modern and ancient cultures dancer
- choreographic staging in ancient and modern dance
- movie and TV prop designer & builder
- theatrical production Players Ring Theater L.A.
- recording producer RCA, Elektra
- radio producer, DJ and program director KNX-radio L.A.
- multimedia producer in several categories
- 50 foot miniature railway design, build, operate
- educational 3D game designer
- workshop leader
- photographer
- filmmaker
- video editor
- computer graphics pioneer
- artificial intelligence explorer
- electronics experimenter
- radio communications
- Morse code operator
- cryptographic analysis and decryption
- U.S. Army recognized expert in specialized military disciplines
- sailboat handling and navigation
- tarot symbolism
- stage magic
- hypnotic methods
- remote viewing research
- comparative mythology
- historical languages
- fluency in Middle English
- educational methodology
- auctioneering
- community building
- organizational leadership
This list is probably still incomplete. I also turn pottery on a wheel and have sold hundreds of sculptural ceramics, not to mention the many bronze sculptures, wood sculptures … and I can build and operate elegant multi-coil powerful crystal radios.
Some of these fields require years to master. Others are so different from one another that they ordinarily attract entirely different kinds of people. Fine art and military communications. Jewelry fabrication and computer graphics. Medieval language and offset printing. Consciousness research and cryptography. Theater and electronics. Rare books and artificial intelligence.
One explanation is that an unusually curious person simply spent a lifetime learning.
That is certainly possible.
Another explanation is that aptitude itself accumulates—that experience survives physical death in some form and becomes available again in future lives. According to this view, each lifetime adds new competencies to an already growing reservoir of understanding.
This idea is hardly new. Variations of it have appeared in many cultures over thousands of years. What interests me is not tradition alone, but observation.
When a person repeatedly demonstrates proficiency across dozens of unrelated disciplines, we naturally ask how such diversity developed. Conventional education can explain part of the story. Exceptional curiosity explains another part. Yet there may still remain something unaccounted for.
I do not claim that my own life proves reincarnation.
You can use my life as an example of how you could “prove” reincarnation, but I suggest that to the modern scientific mind, it presents an interesting question: If mastery normally requires time, and if one lifetime offers only a finite amount of time, how do we account for lives that appear to contain the work of several or in my case, many, lifetimes?
Perhaps the answer lies entirely within the biology and psychology of a single existence.
Or perhaps we are each continuing a much longer journey than we remember.
I leave that question to the reader.
For my own part, the simplest explanation is that the education of consciousness does not begin at birth and does not end at death. Each lifetime becomes another semester in a very long curriculum, and what appears to be “natural talent” may simply be yesterday’s hard-earned experience returning in a new classroom.
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Hey, here’s the Bardo bus already!
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See You At the Top!!!
gorby