Reincarnation and Past Lives
Ethiopia or Louisiana?
By Harold Klemp
A six-year-old boy was seated near me, next to the window on an airplane flying over Louisiana. Looking down at the vast marshland with its many intersecting channels of water, he turned to his mother and called out in an excited voice, "It looks just like Ethiopia."
The embarrassed mother tried to quiet him. Everybody knows that Ethiopia isn't in the middle of a marsh, because drought has drained life from the place.
A businessman, sitting across the aisle from the boy, lowered his newspaper and began to chuckle. "Ethiopia!" he said. "Have you ever been to Ethiopia, boy?" He laughed, relishing the thought of any likeness at all between Ethiopia and Louisiana.
"It looks like Ethiopia," the boy said.
The man erupted into a bellow of laughter. Other passengers joined in. "The boy thinks Louisiana looks like Ethiopia," he said, repeating the boy's words for anyone who might have missed them. This brought a fresh peal of laughter.
The chastened boy grew quiet, and his mother flushed a bright red. When the plane was ready to land, the boy said to her, "We're almost there."
"Where?" his mother asked.
The boy hesitated. Rather than say, "Ethiopia," he said, "There!"
The boy had recalled a distant past when certain areas of the world, now dry and brown, had enjoyed lush vegetation. His memory of those days was clear and certain. He remembered the past, because he had caught a glimpse from a higher spiritual vantage point. His eyes had glimpsed the Time Track.
Excerpted from Past Lives, Dreams, and Soul Travel by Harold Klemp, copyright © 2003 Eckankar. All rights reserved.
See a video of this story, as told by Harold Klemp.
