Here’s a quote from Hay Fever, the Noël Coward play I’m currently in with United Players at Jericho Arts Centre:

Sandy: It seems too good to be true – sitting here and talking as though we were old friends.

Judith: We are old friends – we probably met in another life. Reincarnation, you know – fascinating!

Sandy: You do say ripping things.

Judith: Do I?

I’m interested in reading what other people think of reincarnation. The following group all believed in it, approaching it from their own perspective.

• Walt Whitman (1819-1892 – American essayist, journalist, and poet – Leaves of Grass),
• Helena Petrovna Blavatsky (1831-1891 – co-founder and loudest voice of the Theosophical Society),
• Henry Ford (1863-1947 – founder of the Ford Motor Company), and
• Noël Coward (1899-1973 – playwright, actor, composer, singer, director, and wit

Henry Ford said this during an interview with the San Francisco Examiner that was published on August 26, 1928, just three years after Coward’s Hay Fever.

I adopted the theory of Reincarnation when I was twenty six. Religion offered nothing to the point. Even work could not give me complete satisfaction. Work is futile if we cannot utilise the experience we collect in one life in the next. When I discovered Reincarnation it was as if I had found a universal plan I realised that there was a chance to work out my ideas. Time was no longer limited. I was no longer a slave to the hands of the clock. Genius is experience. Some seem to think that it is a gift or talent, but it is the fruit of long experience in many lives. Some are older souls than others, and so they know more. The discovery of Reincarnation put my mind at ease. If you preserve a record of this conversation, write it so that it puts men’s minds at ease. I would like to communicate to others the calmness that the long view of life gives to us.

As Coward says, “Reincarnation, you know – fascinating!”