"Joe, you sound like Edward Bellamy. you must have read Looking Backward."

"No, I don't think so." I paused to think a moment. "No, I haven't read Looking Backward and I've never heard of Bellamy."

"Well, you sure do sound like him. You'll have to get his book and read it."

That conversation with Merle Randle, an old friend, gave me the key that I had been looking for. He and I were talking about the country's political problems, especially with regard to the money system. Merle is about 15 years older than myself. While I had no knowledge of Bellamy's work, he had studied Looking Backward in one of his college courses because the book was still quite current in the middle 1930's. It was a Utopian Novel in which economic equality was the basis for political equality and the money system was drastically altered.

That incident occurred in the early part of 1964. About six years earlier I had become intensely interested in the study of reincarnation. A series of experiences with dreams, meditation, intuitive flashes and a great deal of introspection had given me some detailed memories or possibly hallucinations about having lived before. Names, dates and places were not among those details but rather events that had had a great emotional impact upon me. Dying by suicide, by drowning, by tuberculosis, by pneumonia, by infanticide and other death and dying experiences came in more clearly than anything else.

By carefully examining the faintest memories and filing them away, so to speak, I built up an elaborate picture of the processes involved in dying and being reborn. During one very unique experience in deep meditation I witnessed a series of faces appear before me, all of which I knew to be my own. It seemed to me that the first of them were nebulous, but they gradually took more and more definite characteristics. As the series progressed, I saw faces in sharply etched detail. Each tiny line, each proportion, each and every aspect of these faces instantly revealed a facet of the personality of the human being behind them. While the personalities varied widely on the surface, pirate, galley slave, alcoholic, cruel slave master, monk, nobleman, sailor, missionary, writer, there was an inner character that was also written in the face which changed very little over thousands of years.

Regardless of the circumstances of birth and life, I saw that the physical resemblance of the face was similar to a startling degree for a series of several consecutive lives and noticeably similar over many centuries, especially around the eyes.

At that time, I had never encountered this information from any of the wide range of material that I had read on the subject of reincarnation. Through introspection and observation, I had learned that sometimes in a conversation, or when looking at a picture, or perhaps getting a telephone number, I'd make a connection with a related detail in a former life. This procedure had been going on for several years. One set of memories suggested a life as a newspaper man and author who had lived between 1850 and 1898 and died of tuberculosis. Many personal feelings and character traits of this man I had found to be still near the surface in my present life.

A few days after my conversation with Merle Randle, I got a copy of Looking Backward from the public library. It was an old edition, had no biographical data, not even a date, except in its context. Before I'd read two chapters, I realized that I had written it. It was actually my own book and Bellamy was that writer and newspaper man I remembered having been. Since there are several biographies of Bellamy, very shortly I was able to confirm all the biographical data which I had remembered. The physical resemblance was so close that one acquaintance thought a picture of Bellamy that I'd had framed was actually one of me until informed otherwise. My son eventually read Looking Backward and afterwards said, "Dad, he sounds just like you!"

A few of the more unusual examples of similarities between myself and Bellamy may be worth mentioning because of the implications they have. While Bellamy spent his whole life as a writer, my own education included no college and only one semester in high school in journalism. My standing was near the bottom of the class. After practicing meditation for several years and awakening the memory of having been a newspaper man, I found I had a gift for writing in the style of a newsman and doing book reviews. (Book reviewing was a forte with Bellamy.) My first professional writing was a one hour news documentary about Unidentified Flying Objects for WBT RADIO, America's third oldest radio station. The documentary was broadcast with no editing by the studio and won first prize in its class and the sweepstakes award for WBT of Charlotte, North Carolina, in 1964 in a statewide competition sponsored by the Associated Press.

Because of his obsession with the idea of economic equality, Bellamy had certain pet dislikes. It is on record that he disliked the use of diamonds as jewelry so strongly that he would not buy one for his wife's engagement ring. My own sentiments were the same. When we were engaged in 1964, I gave my wife an amethyst instead.

Bellamy was so fluent in Latin that his daughter said he could read it almost as easily as he read English. Almost without studying, I made straight "As" in school in Latin and wondered why anyone found it difficult.

Bellamy worked in the time when reporters signified the end of a story by the number -30-. As soon as I was old enough to do any sort of papers in grammar school, even spelling tests, I ended them with the reporter's -30-.

Bellamy was a good swimmer, but especially preferred salt water; the same is true of myself. He enjoyed skating a great deal as a boy and was a very good rifle marksman. There was no ice in Oakland, California, where I grew up, but I roller skated from one end of that city to the other taking my lunch and leaving the house on Saturday mornings to skate all day long. In the Armed Services in WWII, I qualified as expert in every piece I fired, carbine, M1 rifle and automatic pistol.

Bellamy was able to study on his own, went to college for less than a year, and took no regular courses, but only a literature study program. He planned his own course with some guidance from the faculty. He acquired on his own the education to become an editor and became fluent in French, German, Latin and could read Italian. His family had available the resources to send him to college, but he was unwilling to accept financial support from anyone.

My own family lived quite close to the campus of the University of California and were glad to support me if I wished to go. The tuition for the University was very nominal at that time. My oldest brother had graduated there and my next oldest brother was attending when I got out of high school. However, I wished to pay my own board at home and be financially independent and so went to work in a ship building yard. (Bellamy took a keen interest in boats of his day.)

Two years later, in October of 1942, I enlisted in the Air Force to avoid being drafted into some other branch of service not of my choice. After my discharge four years later as an aircraft engineering officer, I was eligible for four years of college financed by the government but chose not to accept. In the ten years that followed, I studied engineering on my own and passed all the written examinations in the State of North Carolina to become a professional engineer. In more than twenty years since then, I have not learned of another registered engineer who passed the written examinations without first attending college.

Even before he was in his teens, Bellamy was intensely concerned with political inequality and social injustices and had written short essays on such things. At the same age, I can remember talking to friends about these conditions and how they might be corrected. During this age period both Bellamy and myself had a deeply moving conversion experience and resolved to spend our lives in dedication to serve the cause of social justice.

Since there are excellent biographies of Edward Bellamy (and I have read them), there is little to be added by trying to list all of the countless parallels in our lives. It would be possible to fill an entire volume with the details about our similarities; but, the fact that I have become intimately familiar with Bellamy's life would seem to discount my ability to make an impartial evaluation of them. For me, the question of whether or not I am the rebirth of Bellamy no longer exists. Yet, there are many obvious differences in our personalities. The reality for me is that the inner man, the I Am, the underlying identity which I think of as my true self, is the same as for Bellamy.