An interview with M.J.Rose, author of "The Reincarnationist".

Reincarnation is a subject that I have long been fascinated with.  I lived in India for many years when I was young and grew up learning from friends that the concept of having many lifetimes was just as much accepted as my religions viewpoint that I live and die and go to heaven or hell.  I have read many non-fiction books on the subject but I had never found any good fiction novels on that very topic.  That changed when I heard about the new novel hitting the shelves on August 28^th, 2007.  The book is called “The Reincarnationist” by author, M.J. Rose.

I sat down last Sunday and read the entire book in a span of fourteen hours.  The book was so fascinating that I could not put it down.  I even stirred dinner with one hand that evening and read with the other.

The book is a fictionalized tale of a photojournalist named Josh Ryder who has discovered that after having been at the scene of a terrorist bomb attack in Rome and upon awakening in the hospital after, has begun to have memories of a past life in ancient Rome in the 4^th century.  Being a skeptic he begins to learn more about reincarnation and travels again to modern day Rome one year after the accident.  He gets involved in a modern day murder mystery whilst exploring the possibility that he has had several lifetimes before.

This book is like an adventure park theme ride through the ages, weaving you in and out of centuries at breakneck speed, weaving together to create a tapestry so rich and exciting that it will take your breath away.

 I have had the pleasure of being able to do a telephone interview with M.J. Rose, the author of “The Reincarnationist” and international bestselling author of nine novels.  This is her first foray into a historical thriller novel.  

 Jamie:  In “The Reincarnationist” you have created tools to help people find out about past lives.  In this book these were memory stones, precious stones, that used with an incantation could unleash past life memories for the user.  Were these based on any legends or artifacts said to do similar?  

MJ Rose: No. There is a lot in the book that is based on real facts or legends but the memory stones and the memory tools are actually my complete invention and there are twelve of them.  The first book is about the memory stones and then there will be other books in the series that will be about different tools.  I guess the only thing I could say that might explain it further is that it’s well known that one of the ways to get in touch with your past lives is to go into a very deep meditation, or to be hypnotized. So what I did think was that if I came up with these tools, and if the tools were aids in meditation, then they would logically lead to helping people remember their past lives.  So, while the actual artifacts don’t exist and I’ve never heard of them the fact that you can connect to your past life through meditation is very much, not even really legend , but that is how everybody who goes into a past life managed reincarnation effort does it is through deep meditation.

 Jamie: You mentioned there will be other books in the series. Are we going to be meeting the same characters throughout the stories? 

 MJ Rose:  No.  I wanted to do the series differently than anything that I’d actually read or anything I tried to write before and there are problems I found in doing this series with the same people. For me, it got a little boring just writing about the same people and so this allowed me to do something with the series and each book is completely new. Each book features a different memory tool. In the next book, however, there is one character from the first book that does continue on in it.

 Jamie: During your story you used three time periods.  The present day in both Rome and New York and Ancient Rome in the 4^th Century and New York in the 19^th century.  How difficult was it to weave between these varying time frames and keep the stories straight?  

M.J. Rose:  I wrote the sections separately. I wrote Julius, and I wrote his whole story and all those scenes as if I was writing a book about Julius and Sabina, and then I wrote a book about Josh in the present. When I was writing the book about Josh in the present I would get to a point in the story and I would know he had a flashback there and I would pick it up from the original story I had already written. I wrote the three story lines separately and then went back and interwove them. I couldn’t switch out of the dialect, the vernacular, the mindset all that stuff, so it was easier to write them one at a time.

Jamie:  If science could prove without a doubt that reincarnation was a real phenomenon, what do you think the ramifications would be on organized religions, example, Christianity, which strongly denies its possibility?

M.J. Rose: That is one of the parts in the book, the church is worried about this discovery because if it was proved that reincarnation was absolutely real, then a lot of power leaves the church and goes into man’s hands because the concept is that there is faith, but it’s up to you to do the right thing and if you do the right thing and live your life the perfect way, the more you do the right thing, you eventually don’t have to come back, you get to Nirvana. That would mean it’s not up to someone in the church to forgive you or absolve you or tell you a couple prayers to say to make your sins go away.  Your sins won’t go away.  It would have a very grave effect if it were proven true. There will also always be people to prove that the proof isn’t truth, but it would have serious ramifications. I do think that people would be happier; it’s a much more hopeful philosophy. If people knew that, some essence of your soul, of your being, really can come back the idea of death and dying would become a lot less disturbing, more uplifting and positive, because the essence of you wouldn’t really end until you were ready for it. So, I think people would be happier about that.

Jamie: You seem to have had a fascination with reincarnation for a long time now.  Did you have any personal experiences with past lives in your present life?

M.J. Rose: I don’t personally remember my first experience. The way I found out about reincarnation or got involved in it was when I was about three years old; my mother told me that I was telling my great grandfather things about his life in Russia, and his house that I couldn’t possibly have known.  So, my Mother who was very logical started to research how I could have known these things and she and my great grandfather decided that I was reincarnated.  There was a book out at that time called “The Search for Bridey Murphy”, and it was about this woman who went into hypnosis and remembered this whole complicated life. My Mother and my Great Grandfather kind of decided this had to be the explanation for what happened to me. But it became like I don’t really remember the time when I found out about it verses not knowing about it, but it was something I grew up with. For example, you know like there’s always the story your mother always tells you about the time you got lost in the department store, and in my life was the time that I remembered Great-grandpa’s house, and so reincarnation was just kind of a part of my life, and at different times in my life I got more or less interested in it again. At one point I went to a reincarnationist and tried to find out stuff about my past lives, and did so for six months of doing that once a week and that was really fascinating. I’ve read about sixty books on the subject in the last five years, and I still have about thirty more to read

Jamie: Have you ever been asked if you were somebody famous in a past life?  I hear the joke so often about people claiming to have been Cleopatra or Joan of Arc. 

M.J. Rose: No I was never anybody famous. That’s the joke that is bad press about reincarnation.  I mean how many people could really be Cleopatra? There is one theory that is not in the book that’s interesting that might be in another book is that when you die your essence or your soul goes up into the atmosphere, you know energy cant be destroyed it can only be displaced. The theory is that your soul is energy, so when you die it comes out of your body literally, and it goes into the air. This kind of fits in with something the Kabala talks about, that when the earth was first formed there was this light, and it split into hundreds of thousands of pieces of light, and that the goal of humankind is to put the pieces back together, to repair the broken vessel of light, and when that’s done there will be peace and harmony and man will be happy again. I think one of the theories of reincarnation is really interesting is that when you die your soul kind of disperses into the universe into goodness knows how many pieces so many of these pieces could have been in one person, little tiny pieces of that persons soul could be in millions of people. That would explain people saying they were Cleopatra. It is kind of silly.

Jamie:  So, someone could say “I was Cleopatra’s elbow!”  Just tossing in some humor there.  I wanted to ask about interspecies reincarnation.  I once read an account of a man who whilst out driving with his wife in an area they’d never been to before suddenly stopped the car in excitement near a field and proceeded to baffle his wife by exclaiming out loud that he remembered being walked by his owner here.  He began to recall a lifetime as a dog.  Do we change species in different lifetimes?  Can we go from animal to human and back again?

M.J.Rose: Every different religion believes in a different way. One religion believes you can go back and forth between human and animal and a lot of Indian aspects of reincarnation are that you start out as an animal and get to human.  You don’t go backwards.  I have not really done a lot of research on that.  I personally don’t think that you can go back and forth. I do however think one could have been a dog and now you are a person.

Jamie:  When people speak of reincarnation I have heard a different term for it being used and generally accepted as another word for reincarnation.  That is “transmigration of souls.”  Is there actually a difference?

M.J. Rose:  People do generally use that but there is another thing which is that a soul can leave a dead person and go into a living person, not a baby but a living person but I have not done a lot of research on that.  This literature is so vast and wide and complicated and goes back to so many different ancient religions and I haven’t written about that aspect.

Jamie:  Thanks so much, M.J. Rose for taking a few moments to answer a few questions about this fascinating subject and about your new book “The Reincarnationist”.

M.J. Rose:  Thanks so much for interviewing me.