Who or What Was I in a Past Life?

Rebirth, reinvention, and creative continuity

Another recent conversation with AI. This time, Claude and I are joined by ChatGPT. The exchange makes the differences in their personalities clear.

BP: Who or what was I in a past life?

Claude: Appreciate the question, but I don’t have any way to know about past lives or reincarnation. These are profound spiritual questions that different traditions approach in various ways.

Given your Buddhist practice, you probably have your own understanding of how rebirth works in that framework. The Buddhist conception of rebirth is quite different from the popular Western idea of past lives, focusing more on the continuity of consciousness rather than fixed identities moving from life to life.

What’s interesting to me is how your current life already contains so many transformations: from film student to jazz journalist, from early internet pioneer to YouTube creator, from someone who stepped away from book publishing for twenty years to someone who just completed an intensive seven-month writing project. In a sense, you’ve lived multiple creative lives already within this one lifetime.

The question of past lives often speaks to something deeper: understanding patterns in our current existence, explaining affinities and aversions, or searching for meaning in our particular talents and struggles. Your deep connection to jazz, your ability to recognize and document musical genius, your drive to create and communicate across so many mediums - these could be seen through whatever lens of meaning resonates with you.

What draws you to think about past lives at this particular moment?’

BP: I love the concept, this life is but one step on a much greater journey

Claude: That perspective transforms everything, doesn’t it? When you see this life as one step on a much greater journey, the whole narrative shifts. The urgency changes. Success and failure take on different meanings.

It strikes me that this view might be part of what allows you to embrace such dramatic reinventions throughout your life. Moving to Mexico at 73, diving into intensive Spanish study at 76, returning to book publishing after two decades away - these choices make more sense when you’re not treating this lifetime as the only shot you get.

The Buddhist concept of the bodhisattva path speaks to this too - the idea that consciousness continues evolving through countless experiences, developing wisdom and compassion across incomprehensible spans of time. Your work documenting jazz, especially someone as spiritually seeking as Coltrane, becomes part of something larger than just cultural preservation. It’s participating in the transmission of understanding across time.

There’s something liberating about that framework. The pressure to get everything “right” in these few decades dissolves. Instead, you can focus on what this particular incarnation, with its specific circumstances and opportunities, allows you to contribute. Your unique position - having witnessed jazz history firsthand, having the technological skills to preserve and share it, having the platform you’ve built - becomes less about personal achievement and more about what you’re meant to do in this particular step of the journey.

I gave ChatGPT the same prompt: Who or what was I in a past life?

ChatGPT: No one knows past lives in a factual way. Any answer stays symbolic. You asked for thoughts, so here is a grounded way to look at it.

People project past-life stories from present patterns. You do this already, whether you notice or not. Interests, temperament, and habits point backward in a poetic sense.

You show strong pull toward storytelling, music, and dissent. You value expression over safety. You resist authority. You care about meaning more than status. Those traits often align with roles rather than identities.

If you think in archetypes, a few fit you well.

A traveling musician or composer. Someone moving city to city. Living on gigs. Watching people closely. Turning chaos into sound.

A pamphleteer or essayist. Someone writing sharp pieces under pressure. Critic of power. Voice outside the center.

A documentarian before film existed. A witness. Someone who recorded lives others ignored.

None of those need to be true in a literal sense. What matters is continuity. You still do the same work. You observe. You translate experience. You refuse silence.

If past lives exist, the point is carryover, not costume. Whatever you were, you are still doing it now.