I have made a distinction between what we call past lives and reincarnation on the sole premise that a past life is generally only recalled while under hypnosis, but a reincarnation can be recalled consciously, and is in some cases an identical replay of the previous existence such as being born to the same parents, inheriting character traits and even dying at the same age in similar circumstances, and a past life is usually one lived years, and often centuries earlier.
Some religions believe in reincarnation as a matter of faith and this is especially so in Islam where it is believed that those who have led a good and honest life will return to earth in a higher existence, or caste, until they have reached the top of the spiritual ladder and achieved the state of “Nirvana” while other religions will shudder at the thought of such a “ridiculous” notion. The notion doesn't seem so ridiculous though when faced with some of the evidence and it is with some reluctance that people even consider the possibility of reincarnation as it goes against everything they have ever held to be true, and everything they expect or believe death to be. Is death really the end or is it merely one step on the ladder of existence that we all must climb?
It is often children who will dumbfound their parents by making a comment that obviously seems quite innocent to them, and many are the stories of mothers berieved of a child walking down a road with another child (born after the death of the first) and the child saying something like "This is where I was run over by that car" or while walking past a cemetery they will say "This is where I was buried and you were all crying" and they describe the death or funeral of their late sibling who died before they were born, and speak in the first person as though it was they themselves and that they have returned.
One such case of a young boy remembering a previous incarnation is that which occurred in 1962 to Professor Ian Stevenson when he was told by a young Lebanese boy that a number of children in his home village of Kornayal talked about past incarnations, and he wrote a letter of introduction for Stevenson to give to his brother. It was two years before Stevenson was able to visit Lebanon and follow up the story, and he found enough evidence there in the village of Kornayal to publish an article in 1966 called “Twenty cases suggestive of Reincarnation” and one of those cases was that involving Imad Elawar.
Imad Elawar was born in Kornayal in 1958 and no sooner was he able to talk than he began mentioning the names “Jamile” and “Mahmoud” though nobody knew of the two people that he was talking about. He would also talk about a village called “Khriby” which was thirty kilometres away from Kornayal across the mountains.
One day when Imad was two years old, he was out walking with his grandmother when he rushed over to a man in the street and hugged him. The man asked Imad if he knew him and Imad replied "Yes, you were my neighbour." The man didn't know Imad but said that he was from the village of Khriby.
Imad's father didn't like the idea that his son was a reincarnation and so Imad would only talk about his past existence when his father couldn't hear him but he continued to tell his mother and grandmother about his past life and about the beauty of Jamile. He told them of a man who had had his legs crushed beneath the wheels of a truck and died soon afterward. He said that he could recall the accident vividly but he hadn't been able to see the man's face. As he grew older he would often express delight at being able to walk and begged his family to take him to Khriby but his father would flatly refuse to do so. This is where Stevenson came in, and he collected all the information he could from the boy, who was by now five years old, and he then travelled to the village of Khriby to see if he could verify any of the details that Imad had given him.
He found a local family called Bouhamzy and one member of the family, Said Bouhamzy, had been run over by a truck and had his legs crushed by it, dying shortly afterward despite an operation. Stevenson was shown the house that Said had lived in but he found that it didn't match the house that Imad had described to him and nor did any of the details he had been given about Imad's life. Never the less Stevenson continued to investigate and found that Said had had a cousin named Ibrahim Bouhamzy who had caused an uproar in the village by living with his mistress, a young and beautiful woman named Jamile. Ibrahim's life had been cut short when he died in 1949 of tuberculosis at age twenty five and, for the final six months of his life, Ibrahim had been bedridden and unable to walk which had caused him great distress. Ibrahim, like Said, had been a truck driver and had been involved in minor accidents but he had been devastated by Said's death, and the Mahmoud that Imad had mentioned was found to have been an uncle of Ibrahim.
Stevenson found that Ibrahim's house matched that described by Imad and the man living in the house next door was the same man that Imad had hugged in the street. In total, Stevenson was able to verify forty seven facts that he had been given by Imad about his former life, and forty four of them matched details of Ibrahim's life.
On his return to Kornayal he managed to persuade Imad's father to let his son go to Khriby and on the journey there Imad was able to give seven details about the journey, a journey which he had supposedly never made before, and on arrival at Khriby he gave a further sixteen facts about Ibrahim's life, fourteen of which turned out to be true, and perhaps the most amazing of all Imad said that he had owned two rifles and so they went into the house that had been shut up for several years and Imad was able to go straight to the hiding place where one of the guns was still hidden.
Professor Stevenson's first published work was called “Twenty Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation” and was published in 1966, but over the years he has collected over a thousand cases like this, though few are so strongly convincing. Also impressive is the almost accidental way in which he stumbled upon it. Much of his work was done in India and not so surprisingly as Hindu and Buddhist religions are supporters of reincarnation, and, during one stay in the village of Rasulpur in Uttar, Pradesh, he was able to collect details about a possible case that had occurred in 1954 to a child called Jasbir Lal Jat who fell ill with smallpox and apparently died aged three, but as preparations for his burial were being made, Jasbir began to show signs of life and soon recovered fully. It was a number of weeks before the boy could talk again, and over the ensuing weeks his family began to grow very concerned about him, feeling that his personality had changed. He now said that his name was Sobha Ram and that he was the son of a Brahmin family (a higher caste than his “real” family) called Shankar Lil Tyagi who lived in Vehedi some twenty miles away from Rasulpur, and he would also speak words used by the Brahmin caste and he refused to eat the food his family prepared for him.
His plight was heard about by a Brahmin woman who volunteered to cook the Brahmin food that he insisted on for him. It was several years before a Vehedi woman shed any light on the matter, albeit unwittingly, when she returned to her home village of Rasulpur for the first time since 1952 when Jasbir had been just eighteen months old, yet he was able to recognise her and she was told his unusual story. She reported the tale to her family on her return to Vehedi and the family of the late Sobha Ram came to hear about it. They were so interested that they visited Jasbir who was able to greet them upon their arrival and refer to them all by name, and he gave details about their relationship to Sobha Ram Tyagi and some details about their lives in Vehedi. He was also able to give an accurate account of how Sobha Ram had died after falling from a carriage during a wedding procession. Jasbir was allowed to go to Vehedi to stay with the Tyagi family where he was much happier than he had recently been in Rasulpur since his recovery.
Stevenson was able to compile a list of thirty nine facts about Sobha Ram's life that Jasbir mentioned before his visits to Vehedi, and thirty eight of them he was able to corroborate. The one fact that he was unable to corroborate was the most intriguing of all, that Jasbir said Sobha Ram's fatal fall was as a result of him being poisoned by some doctored sweets and he was also able to name his murderer. The Tyagi family had no way to prove this but they had always felt that Sobha Ram had been murdered, and quite unbelievably the time of Sobha Ram's death had coincided exactly with Jasbir Lal Jat's fatal bout of smallpox. Had Sobha Ram replaced him in his body after dying from his fall?
It is in a large percentage of cases that the alleged reincarnate has died a violent or sudden death and, as well as leaving mental scars and memories, it can also leave scars on the physical body. These are usually in the form of birthmarks on the “reincarnated” person's body where there were fatal wounds on the body of the dead person in question.
Stevenson thought he had found the "perfect example of a reincarnation case" when he found a french village boy who had several birthmarks and who spoke of a former life and being killed by bullets hitting him where his birthmarks were. The boy was able to name his killers and said that one of them had accused him of cheating at cards beforehand. He was able to give his former name, the names of his parents, those of his siblings and that of a girlfriend. He also gave the name of the place where he had lived and where he had ultimately been shot. The boy would not learn the French language but spoke in a foreign tongue. He ate with his hands, but not the food prepared for him as he would ask for rice and hot curries. He wouldn't wear pants but wore a kind of sarong and he was extremely agile when climbing trees, claiming that he was once a coconut picker. He wanted to play cards and would ask for his favourite drink “arack”.
His parents called in outside help and they found that the language he was using was Sinhalese, and the village he talked about was found to exist in Sri Lanka, and there had indeed been a coconut picker by the name he had given who had indeed been shot and killed before the French boy had been born.
Stevenson said that this case satisfies three important criteria, and they are;
We have seen some of the evidence for reincarnation but perhaps the finest example of it being alive and well today is to be found in Tibet, where the Dalai Lama is believed to be the reincarnation of the Chenrezi, the Buddhist God of grace, and this has been the belief since 1391. So far he is believed to have been reincarnated fourteen times.
Dalai Lama means “greatest teacher” and upon his death the Lamas of Tibet have the task of finding his reincarnation, which is a male child born after the death. When the thirteenth Dalai Lama died in 1933, he was three days dead on the throne when he turned his head to the north east. A star shaped fungus grew on the north east wall of his mausoleum and in the monastery's main court yard, a dragon flower grew by the east wall, and so the Lamas began a search in this direction, a search that would take them six years. In order to help them find their new leader they used Astrology, dreams and omens and finally they centred their efforts on a house in China and, when they finally entered the house, the boy they were seeking asked one of the Lamas for the Rosary that he was wearing beneath his disguise and he was also able to recognise other Rosaries, a drum and a walking stick that had belonged to his predecessor. They checked him for the birthmarks and moles that all the Dalai Lama carry and they were found to be in the right places and so he was taken from China to Tibet to begin his training. Is the Dalai Lama continually reincarnated and found by the Lamas, and if so, why?
It is, of course, based on religious belief but these same religious beliefs state that a soul need only return until it has attained a state on Nirvana. Has the Dalai Lama not yet achieved this state in over six hundred years? Could a suitable child always eventually be found to fit the necessary criteria if the search went on for long enough?
The basis of the Hindu belief in reincarnation is based on the “Wheel of Sansara” which, like the universe, has no end and no beginning and man can influence his “births” upon the wheel by his spiritual self or ”Karma.” A good man will have a good Karma and be reborn in a higher caste and therefore be a step closer to his Nirvana. It is however not only the Hindus and Buddhists that believe in reincarnation but some two thirds of the world's population and a recent survey in the U.K. found that 25% of Britons also believed in it, and this dates back to the depths of time as it was not uncommon for the ancient druids to lend money in the understanding that it would be paid back in a future incarnation.
Professor Stevenson has found a familiar pattern in the majority of the cases that he has looked at, usually a child of about two years of age will behave strangely and claim that he or she is somebody else and they will have vivid memories of a violent or sudden death. Other memories will include their previous name, address, occupation and the names of their family members, and these memories will reach a peak at the age of five or six and then begin to fade, until by the age of ten they are all but forgotten. The previous life is very often lived in the same locale as the present one or not far away, though there are a few cases of international reincarnations. Ninety percent of the statements made about the previous life will prove to be true and all of them are made while in a wakeful state.
There are curious examples of such inexplicable memories as thinking you have seen something before or a feeling that you have visited a place before. These continue into adulthood and are experienced by 70% of people and we refer to this phenomenon as “Deja Vu.”
Deja Vu experiences cover a wide spectrum and may vary from this sense of familiarity with a place to having a detailed knowledge of it, such as the lady who was visiting a house in Worcester and found an old doorway that had been covered up because she “knew” that it was there, or the French nurse who claimed that she knew of a sealed room at the top of a staircase in the castle's turrets at St. Germaine En Laye before she had ever visited the building. She was only proved to be correct after city documents were checked. Though very strange indeed these experiences are not necessarily proof of the existence of reincarnation which is generally taken to be a conscious recollection of a previous existence, but there are many more cases of subconscious recollections which we refer to as past lives, and which are recollected when the “patient” is under hypnosis. The most famous case, without which any talk of past lives is incomplete, is that of Bridey Murphey.
There have been countless reports of past lives dating from as early as 100 years ago, and some of which, from 1956 onward, were conducted live on television by Emile Franckel on a Los Angeles programme called “Adventures in Hypnotism” but by far the most famous and detailed case is the one which brought the phenomenon of past lives to the attention of the public at large. It was the work of American amateur hypnotist Morey Bernstein of Colorado whose book “The Search For Bridey Murphey” wetted the public's appetite.
The “patient” was a lady called Virginia Burns Tighe, though she also used the name Ruth Mills Simmons, and she was at the time a twenty nine year old native of Madison, Wisconsin who had lived in Chicago from the age of three. She had never been to Ireland nor mixed regularly with Irish people and though this allegation was levelled at her she strongly denied it.
Virginia Tighe was regressed under hypnosis to two previous lives the first of which was almost impossible to verify as it was that of a child who had died while still in babyhood but it was the second life, that of Bridey "Bridget" Murphey, which was the ground breaker, and one which became a test case that possessed all of the typical features of such cases. They are that some of the facts recalled are confirmed as true while some are found to be incorrect, there are memories of insignificant, trivial details while major events of the time are forgotten and the patient undergoes a complete, and convincing, change of character to “become” the person they claim to have been.
Bridey Murphey was born on December 20th, 1798 to Duncan, a barrister and cropper, and his wife Kathleen who was granddaughter to Bridget. The Murpheys were a protestant family living at The Meadows, Cork. Her brother Duncan Blaine was born in 1796 and he later married Aimã´e who was the daughter of Mrs. Strayne whose day school Bridey attended when she was fifteen years old. Duncan was also a cropper of flax, hay, tobacco and corn, and one day he had cut himself with a scythe, the name of which Bridey could not remember. When she was ten years old she went on a trip to Antrim. Her friends were Mary, Katherine and Kevin Moore. In 1818 she married Sean (she pronounced it Se-an) Brian Joseph Maccarthy who was a catholic son of a barrister, nephew to a Mr. Plazze (the proper spelling of Blaize) who married an “orange” and was also the grandson of Mrs. Delilinan Maccarthy.
The newlyweds then travelled to Belfast by carriage through Carlingford, Mourne and Balings (Bailings) Crossing (the latter two of which did not appear on any map but which did exist), the glens of Antrim and Doby (possibly Dovea or Dopy) a village on the old coach road not found on modern maps. Brian wrote about law cases in the “Belfast News Letter” and so he would have signed his name. Though she wasn't able to give her Belfast address she remembered that she had worshipped at St. Theresa's church in a street off Dooley Road whose priest was Father John Gorman and the church would have kept records of Bridget Murphey Maccarthy because all family details had to be put on the church board. Bridey did her shopping at Caden (Cadenns) house for women's clothes, Farrs (for food), John Carrigan's greengrocery and she paid with pounds, sixpences, tuppences and copper halfpennies and she also knew of a big rope company, a tobacco house and described Belfast as being lit by "poles with lights on them." She also remembered three men at Queen's University, William Mcglone, Fitzhugh and Fitzmaurice. Bridey Murphey died on a Sunday in 1864 aged 66 after a fall downstairs that broke her hip, and she remembered that at her funeral a man played Uilleann pipes.
As the sessions of hypnotic regression continued Mrs. Tighe's Irish accent improved and she would use Irish words such as “brate” (properly “quait”, a small toasting cup), “Ditch” (for bury which some experts questioned, but others maintained that it was used for mass burials after the 1845 -7 famine), “tup” (for fellow, which had no connection with Ireland in the 1800s), “slip” (for a child's pinafore or frock), “linen” (for a handkerchief made of linen, a word now obsolete in this context) and she used the word “lough” to describe rivers (a word now used only for lakes but in the 19th Century it was used for rivers as well).
Bridey was a good dancer and had learned the art at Mrs. Strayne's day school. She mentioned a dance called “The Morning Jig” and on one occasion when she was aroused from a trance but before she was fully conscious she danced The Morning Jig which ended with a yawn. She played the leer (lyre) but not very well and she knew songs like “The Londonderry Air” which was popular at the time and she also claimed to have read “The Sorrows Of Deirdre” which was published in both English and Gaelic (Erse) in 1808 and she also knew in great detail the procedure for kissing the Blarney Stone which was done in Bridey's day but seldom now apart from daring tourists.
Verification of facts as obscure as some of these is extremely difficult, for instance Bridey remembered her father being angry with her for pulling straws out of the thatch on the barn, and obviously this would be impossible to check on. Registers of births, deaths and marriages were not kept in Cork before 1864 and so such records would be kept in the family bible which has never been found, so subsequently there is no record of a Bridey Murphey in Cork in 1798, however we can verify many of the details such as the tobacco grown in Cork and the act passed in 1793 which enabled Catholics to enter the legal profession. There is no known St. Theresa's church in Belfast at that time nor a Father John Joseph Gorman though there is a record of Carrigan and Farr in the Belfast city directory for 1865-6 but not any other year despite them being the only traders in food stuffs at the time. Though Queen's University was a protestant university no student or instructor was barred on religious grounds and there was in fact a Fitzmaurice and a Mcgloin (not Mcglone) there at the time, and the Uilleann pipes were customary at funerals due to their sombre tones.
When Morey Bernstein's book was published in 1956 it instantly became a best seller and started a craze of “Come As You Were” parties which people would attend wearing the garb that they would have worn in their former lives. Even worse was the tragic case of a young boy from Shaunee, Oklahoma who shot himself and left a suicide note which read; “They say curiosity kills a cat and I'm very curious about this Bridey Murphey story so I'm going to investigate in person."
The newspapers became filled with in-depth reports of the facts that were confirmed and those that weren't, and they began to suppose that though the facts were true she may have learned them in this existence and stored them subconsciously rather than recalled them from a previous incarnation, and so they began to delve into Virginia Tighe's past in order to try and discover from where she may have gleaned this information.
She may have read a book about it, she may have been in a room while the television was switched on and unwittingly picked up what was being said on it and stored it deep in her mind until she was hypnotically regressed. They found that Tighe had a childhood friend whose maiden name was Bridie Murphy, and also Tighe's aunt, who was called Marie Burns had at some point lived with her. The “Chicago American” tried to show that Tighe had got her accent and information from her aunt and Burns was described as being "As Irish as the lakes of Kilkenny" but Mrs. Burns was born in New York of Scottish-Irish descent and in his rebuttal Morey Bernstein wrote "You could say that she was as Irish as the lakes of Kilkenny in as much as there are no lakes in Kilkenny."
An interesting epilogue to this story is that Virginia Tighe was also able to describe what had happened to her after she had died. She says that she remained in her home until the death of Father Gorman whom she could talk to, she was however unable to talk to her husband Brian who did not join her after her death, nor was she able to talk to her brother when she returned to Cork. She could travel from place to place simply by willing herself to be somewhere else and she met many people, some of whom she didn't know and others whom she did, including her little brother who had died while still young. Though relatives didn't always stay together her father and mother did meet. There was no difference between men and women but one knew the difference intuitively. There was no insanity, sleep, day, night, heat, cold, war, disease, old age, grief, pain, love, hate, family or marriages, senses, (except sight and sound) just "satisfaction.” She was able to tell the future for people on the earth, and when it was time for her to be reincarnated she was told by "some woman."
It was found that at the time most of the information Tighe disclosed was unavailable across the Atlantic but it was still felt that she may have found it somewhere and “stored” it in her subconscious mind until she was hypnotically regressed. Would it be possible for somebody to unwittingly store this much detailed information and recall it years later under hypnosis? Apparently so because there was one case of a Canadian psychologist who put a patient through hypnotic regression, and while the patient was under he would write in a strange language which was found to be Oscan, a precursor to Latin, but when he was in a wakeful state he was unable understand what he had written or write anything further. When the case was looked into it was found that one day the gentleman had sat next to a man in a library who had been reading a book that was open at a page with an ancient Oscan curse on it and, with just one glance, he had memorised it subconsciously and was able to recite it under hypnosis, this process is known as “Cryptomnesia.”
This ability is also used on occasion by the police in solving crimes where perhaps a witness may have seen a getaway vehicle and glanced at the number plate but failed to memorise it properly. When they are put under hypnosis they will be able to recall the number in full, and also remember any distinguishing marks on the vehicle such as scratches in the paint or spots of mud on it. The problem with hypnosis though, as in the cases of alleged alien abductions and the stories the victims recount, is that while hypnotised the witness will say not what is necessarily the truth but what they believe to be the truth, and so it is possible that everything they say about their past life is just a figment of their imagination, and the correct details they give are perhaps just pot luck or could be something they have learned somewhere and then apparently forgotten all about. Should somebody be interested in, for example, the history of the Roman empire, would they then be likely to recall a past life as a Roman Centurion?
There was an experiment done in America by the psychologist Robert Baker on a group of people who had never been lost as a child. They were hypnotised and then asked if they remembered the time that they had been lost in a shopping mall and helped by an old lady. None of them had ever been in such a situation and yet they all recounted detailed stories of how they had become separated from their parents lost and they even came up with a description for the old lady. They had convinced themselves on some level that this was perfectly true.
So we know that our memories are not “fixed,” they can be altered in time, and another good way to show this is known as the “metronome experiment.” This is where you take a metronome that is ticking at a rate of once every second, and then tell somebody under hypnosis that it is ticking once every minute. When they are woken from their trance they will experience sixty ticks (one minute) as one hour and if you ask them what they were doing for that one hour they will come up with an hour's worth of fantasy. So if the conscious mind is able to create such intricate tales, then so too must the subconscious mind, and these pseudo memories can be so emotionally intense and so powerful that they are able to reduce the patient to tears or a state of panic.
The average person will have up to seven dreams every night, most of which will only last for a few seconds, and we will only usually be able to recall the first and the last, but the subconscious mind will be able to recall all seven of them and perhaps fill in some of the details itself and maybe then you can recite them under hypnosis as if they were true.
There are other, more easily confirmed, cases, such as more recent past lives than those in the Roman Garrisons or in 17th Century Ireland, but the irony with this is that the more recent the past life, the more freely available the information on it will be to those who will recall it, so it is far easier to stumble upon it in every day life which rather defeats the object. The question then becomes; how much information can the mind hold, because rarely do patients experience just one past life but many of them spanning many many years and many eras in history.
It is interesting though that they always seem to have suffered from a violent or an unnatural death, and this is sometimes evident in their present life, for example, a person with a fear of water may well recall a past life in which they had died from drowning. Could this really be a lingering memory they have retained or is it just the brains way of coping with such an irrational fear, i.e. by trying to rationalise it through giving it a justifiable cause? There is an argument to say that rather than adopting such a fear from a past life we could be born with it by inheriting our memory as well as our genetic make up, for example could a person who has had a past life as a woman come back as a man and live as a homosexual? A similar argument is “retrocognition” or E.S.P. and says that we aren't genetically made with these memories but we store them while we are still in the womb, or telepathically from people around us, though this cannot explain the cases that have no connection with family or area. It is far more likely though that to some extent we will inherit our own parents' phobias via a far more down to earth cause. For example we will as a child copy our parents' behaviour in many ways, it is the way that we learn whether or not most things are good or bad, and if we constantly see our parents shying away from water or being reduced to a quivering wreck when confronted by a spider then we will automatically come to see these same things as dangerous or frightening.
However skeptical we are there is a case which would seem to cross all of the boundaries. It concerns an American girl who had a fear of water and was regressed to a past life during which she had been a young girl who lived by the banks of the Mississippi river, and she would sit by the water with her fiance and watch the paddle steamers float by. She suffered death by drowning in the waters she had sat next to so many times. In another part of America completely independently of this, a man was hypnotically regressed and he recalled the life of a boy who had seen his fiancee drown in the waters of the Mississippi. The two were brought together for a television programme having never met and continued to give details of their former lives as lovers which were confirmed by the other. Could this be the proof? It is certainly more convincing than cases in which there is only one person, but what we have to look at is the manner in which the information is taken, for example, we know that people can be misled under hypnosis into, to name but one trick, eating onions because they think that they are apples, and many experts believe that the Bridey Murphey case should be discounted because of the way that the questions were asked. Rather than regressing Tighe to anywhere in particular, Bernstein said to her, "Go to some other place in some other time" and if Tighe was suggestible enough she could have easily taken this to mean that she should make up "some other place in some other time" rather than the one she may have been present in.
We've seen the most famous case of a past life, but there are many many more, one Welsh housewife, Jane Evans, recounted several past lives. One of them was that of Livonia, the wife to the Tutor of Constantine (later to be Emperor of Rome) in Britain in the year 4AD. During these sessions she gave many details which turned out to be taken, almost word for word, from the novel “The Living Wood” by Loius De Wohl which she claims to have forgotten reading. She also spoke of the life of a young Jewess in 1190 in York during the massacre of the Jews, in which she gave a wealth of information about York in the 12th Century, but which unfortunately turned out to be false and was in fact taken from a play which had been broadcast on B.B.C. radio. Jane Evans' past lives, though at first perfectly convincing were picked apart by researcher Melvin Harris who described them as "Looking more like a highly aerated Swiss cheese than evidence for reincarnation" so many were the holes in them.
So we can see the problems we have when looking for proof of past lives, but hypnotist Joe Keeton thought he'd found that proof when he regressed a woman called “Jan” and she became Joan Waterhouse, an eighteen year old who was tried for witchcraft at Chelmsford Assizes, Essex in 1556. She gave many accurate facts that were verified, including the existence of Joan Waterhouse and her appearance in the dock, however she gave the name of the reigning monarch as Queen Elizabeth I, when the monarch in 1556 was in fact Queen Mary I. The only place that Jan could have gleaned this information from was a contemporary pamphlet of which the only surviving copy was in the library of Lambeth Palace where Jan said she had never been, nor she said had she ever seen the document. However, the pamphlet had undergone a reprint and there was one mistake in it, the reprint gave the year of the trial as 1556 (the year given by Jan) but the original document gave the year as 1566 by which time Mary I had been replaced on the throne by Elizabeth I for some eight years.
So it turned out that Jan had read, registered and forgotten the reprint until she was regressed and had recited it under hypnosis. So again we see the difficulty in trying to use the mind, a thing we don't fully understand, to probe its depths to prove that a phenomenon exists when we have yet to learn its powers and the way in which it works, and so until we do understand the mind we cannot prove without doubt whether past lives are genuine or not.
The essence of the question of reincarnation and past lives is, what is it that happens to us when we die? Can we somehow return and try again or not? If we take the part of us that would return and occupy another body as being the “soul” then we have to consider at what point around or after conception does a sperm and an egg require a soul? Is the soul present already in the sperm or the egg and merely evolves as the pregnancy develops? Surely not because the foetus must surely have a brain to be able to possess any kind of intelligence, i.e. its personality or soul, so where does the “soul” come from and what is it? Is there a “pool” of souls which somehow inherit a body while it is still in the womb or is a soul borne of physical matter where the physical and psychological meet? In this case there would be no pool of souls as such, as each pregnancy, be it miscarried, aborted or carried full term, would “create” a new soul at some point.
The other end of the cycle is of course death, the point at which the physical body, the “shell”, ceases to function. Does the soul also cease to function at the same point, or can the soul leave the body at some point around death, perhaps on a spiritual plain and continue its quest for Nirvana? If we believe that a soul is borne out of physical matter at early pregnancy then we must surely also believe that it dies when the physical body dies, unless of course this is the first life in one of many in which case the soul may become spiritual at the end of the physical body's life. Or if we believe that a soul is “adopted” by a physical body, or vice versa, in the womb then can we at the same time believe that the soul dies along with that physical body? Is conception the beginning of a souls existence or is it merely one stage along the way, a kind of transition, and is death the end of a soul's existence or is it a part of the same transition? In short is it the end of the beginning or the beginning of the end?
It seems that to answer one question is to create five more to answer, and this part of life, and our opinions on it, is a very personal thing and an individual thing. Nobody can say who is right and who is wrong, what we can do though is give a considered opinion on it and this may tie in with a persons personal and religious beliefs or it may be entirely independent of them. We must bear points like this in mind when we are giving thought to our opinions and beliefs. If a soul does survive death then where does it go to, and more importantly can it go back to the womb? It is interesting that cases of reincarnation tend to concern people who have died violently, suddenly or unnaturally, and have come back as though they have yet to finish what they started on earth.
As I said earlier this is a very individual thing and my opinion is that reincarnation can and sometimes does occur, but when studying the evidence for or against the phenomenon it is very difficult to sift the wheat from the chaff, that is, can we say absolutely that the genuine cases are those that centre around young children who remember a former life when they are very young, but outgrow their memories as though they are not really meant to remember them at all? However, these cases are made all the more convincing when the child has birthmarks that correspond to injuries they sustained in their previous existence, and I believe that the criteria set by Professor Stevenson i.e. memories, character traits and birthmarks are not necessarily “vital” ingredients, but a case would have to be considered to be very dubious if it did not possess at least two of them.
The cases that I distinguished from reincarnation, i.e. past lives that are recalled under hypnosis, I do not believe are genuine and could be created in the mind in any number of ways, such as dreams about characters we would like to be, favourite historical periods and false truths such as the old lady in the shopping mall, and it is these situations in which we are most likely to forget relevant details but fill in trivial ones while convincing ourselves that it is true.
I don't believe that we can be born with an inherited memory although we are born with a certain amount of knowledge, or rather instinct, such as the awareness to suckle at the breast or to grasp with the fingers, or it may go slightly deeper than this. In his book “Reincarnation” David Christie-Murray makes the point that we may be able to learn to ride a bike more quickly than our great grandparents or we may be better able to master technology such as computers, though it is very unlikely that this would go far enough for us to be able to inherit a complete set of memories, and though these past life cases often seem baffling at first glance there is often an alternative explanation, and one that is far more probable than having lived on earth, possibly several times before and being able to recall the details of those lives while under hypnosis. I believe that most cases we have seen are caused by cryptomnesia, a forgotten memory, and this would seem to be the most likely cause.
As for “genuine” reincarnation cases, I believe that the “reborn” soul takes possession of a body at some point (in the case of Sobha Ram who took over Jasbir Lal Jat's body it happened at age 3 when he apparently died of smallpox), though in the natural process I believe that a soul, or rather a personality or “awareness” is created, and that reincarnation is a fluke and a flaw which is not meant to happen, and yet does do so when the right circumstances are present. This would also mean that I don't believe in the spiritual journey of birth and rebirth on the Wheel of Sansara, or even the wheel of life, and the quest for Nirvana.
I think that in the "normal" process each new life creates a new personality (soul) and that this soul lives on after the physical body dies, and wherever it may go to, and that must be somewhere, it is meant to stay there and not return.
Some religions believe in reincarnation as a matter of faith and this is especially so in Islam where it is believed that those who have led a good and honest life will return to earth in a higher existence, or caste, until they have reached the top of the spiritual ladder and achieved the state of “Nirvana” while other religions will shudder at the thought of such a “ridiculous” notion. The notion doesn't seem so ridiculous though when faced with some of the evidence and it is with some reluctance that people even consider the possibility of reincarnation as it goes against everything they have ever held to be true, and everything they expect or believe death to be. Is death really the end or is it merely one step on the ladder of existence that we all must climb?
It is often children who will dumbfound their parents by making a comment that obviously seems quite innocent to them, and many are the stories of mothers berieved of a child walking down a road with another child (born after the death of the first) and the child saying something like "This is where I was run over by that car" or while walking past a cemetery they will say "This is where I was buried and you were all crying" and they describe the death or funeral of their late sibling who died before they were born, and speak in the first person as though it was they themselves and that they have returned.
One such case of a young boy remembering a previous incarnation is that which occurred in 1962 to Professor Ian Stevenson when he was told by a young Lebanese boy that a number of children in his home village of Kornayal talked about past incarnations, and he wrote a letter of introduction for Stevenson to give to his brother. It was two years before Stevenson was able to visit Lebanon and follow up the story, and he found enough evidence there in the village of Kornayal to publish an article in 1966 called “Twenty cases suggestive of Reincarnation” and one of those cases was that involving Imad Elawar.
Imad Elawar was born in Kornayal in 1958 and no sooner was he able to talk than he began mentioning the names “Jamile” and “Mahmoud” though nobody knew of the two people that he was talking about. He would also talk about a village called “Khriby” which was thirty kilometres away from Kornayal across the mountains.
One day when Imad was two years old, he was out walking with his grandmother when he rushed over to a man in the street and hugged him. The man asked Imad if he knew him and Imad replied "Yes, you were my neighbour." The man didn't know Imad but said that he was from the village of Khriby.
Imad's father didn't like the idea that his son was a reincarnation and so Imad would only talk about his past existence when his father couldn't hear him but he continued to tell his mother and grandmother about his past life and about the beauty of Jamile. He told them of a man who had had his legs crushed beneath the wheels of a truck and died soon afterward. He said that he could recall the accident vividly but he hadn't been able to see the man's face. As he grew older he would often express delight at being able to walk and begged his family to take him to Khriby but his father would flatly refuse to do so. This is where Stevenson came in, and he collected all the information he could from the boy, who was by now five years old, and he then travelled to the village of Khriby to see if he could verify any of the details that Imad had given him.
He found a local family called Bouhamzy and one member of the family, Said Bouhamzy, had been run over by a truck and had his legs crushed by it, dying shortly afterward despite an operation. Stevenson was shown the house that Said had lived in but he found that it didn't match the house that Imad had described to him and nor did any of the details he had been given about Imad's life. Never the less Stevenson continued to investigate and found that Said had had a cousin named Ibrahim Bouhamzy who had caused an uproar in the village by living with his mistress, a young and beautiful woman named Jamile. Ibrahim's life had been cut short when he died in 1949 of tuberculosis at age twenty five and, for the final six months of his life, Ibrahim had been bedridden and unable to walk which had caused him great distress. Ibrahim, like Said, had been a truck driver and had been involved in minor accidents but he had been devastated by Said's death, and the Mahmoud that Imad had mentioned was found to have been an uncle of Ibrahim.
Stevenson found that Ibrahim's house matched that described by Imad and the man living in the house next door was the same man that Imad had hugged in the street. In total, Stevenson was able to verify forty seven facts that he had been given by Imad about his former life, and forty four of them matched details of Ibrahim's life.
On his return to Kornayal he managed to persuade Imad's father to let his son go to Khriby and on the journey there Imad was able to give seven details about the journey, a journey which he had supposedly never made before, and on arrival at Khriby he gave a further sixteen facts about Ibrahim's life, fourteen of which turned out to be true, and perhaps the most amazing of all Imad said that he had owned two rifles and so they went into the house that had been shut up for several years and Imad was able to go straight to the hiding place where one of the guns was still hidden.
Professor Stevenson's first published work was called “Twenty Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation” and was published in 1966, but over the years he has collected over a thousand cases like this, though few are so strongly convincing. Also impressive is the almost accidental way in which he stumbled upon it. Much of his work was done in India and not so surprisingly as Hindu and Buddhist religions are supporters of reincarnation, and, during one stay in the village of Rasulpur in Uttar, Pradesh, he was able to collect details about a possible case that had occurred in 1954 to a child called Jasbir Lal Jat who fell ill with smallpox and apparently died aged three, but as preparations for his burial were being made, Jasbir began to show signs of life and soon recovered fully. It was a number of weeks before the boy could talk again, and over the ensuing weeks his family began to grow very concerned about him, feeling that his personality had changed. He now said that his name was Sobha Ram and that he was the son of a Brahmin family (a higher caste than his “real” family) called Shankar Lil Tyagi who lived in Vehedi some twenty miles away from Rasulpur, and he would also speak words used by the Brahmin caste and he refused to eat the food his family prepared for him.
His plight was heard about by a Brahmin woman who volunteered to cook the Brahmin food that he insisted on for him. It was several years before a Vehedi woman shed any light on the matter, albeit unwittingly, when she returned to her home village of Rasulpur for the first time since 1952 when Jasbir had been just eighteen months old, yet he was able to recognise her and she was told his unusual story. She reported the tale to her family on her return to Vehedi and the family of the late Sobha Ram came to hear about it. They were so interested that they visited Jasbir who was able to greet them upon their arrival and refer to them all by name, and he gave details about their relationship to Sobha Ram Tyagi and some details about their lives in Vehedi. He was also able to give an accurate account of how Sobha Ram had died after falling from a carriage during a wedding procession. Jasbir was allowed to go to Vehedi to stay with the Tyagi family where he was much happier than he had recently been in Rasulpur since his recovery.
Stevenson was able to compile a list of thirty nine facts about Sobha Ram's life that Jasbir mentioned before his visits to Vehedi, and thirty eight of them he was able to corroborate. The one fact that he was unable to corroborate was the most intriguing of all, that Jasbir said Sobha Ram's fatal fall was as a result of him being poisoned by some doctored sweets and he was also able to name his murderer. The Tyagi family had no way to prove this but they had always felt that Sobha Ram had been murdered, and quite unbelievably the time of Sobha Ram's death had coincided exactly with Jasbir Lal Jat's fatal bout of smallpox. Had Sobha Ram replaced him in his body after dying from his fall?
It is in a large percentage of cases that the alleged reincarnate has died a violent or sudden death and, as well as leaving mental scars and memories, it can also leave scars on the physical body. These are usually in the form of birthmarks on the “reincarnated” person's body where there were fatal wounds on the body of the dead person in question.
Stevenson thought he had found the "perfect example of a reincarnation case" when he found a french village boy who had several birthmarks and who spoke of a former life and being killed by bullets hitting him where his birthmarks were. The boy was able to name his killers and said that one of them had accused him of cheating at cards beforehand. He was able to give his former name, the names of his parents, those of his siblings and that of a girlfriend. He also gave the name of the place where he had lived and where he had ultimately been shot. The boy would not learn the French language but spoke in a foreign tongue. He ate with his hands, but not the food prepared for him as he would ask for rice and hot curries. He wouldn't wear pants but wore a kind of sarong and he was extremely agile when climbing trees, claiming that he was once a coconut picker. He wanted to play cards and would ask for his favourite drink “arack”.
His parents called in outside help and they found that the language he was using was Sinhalese, and the village he talked about was found to exist in Sri Lanka, and there had indeed been a coconut picker by the name he had given who had indeed been shot and killed before the French boy had been born.
Stevenson said that this case satisfies three important criteria, and they are;
- Memories of the dead person's life.
- Inherited traits.
- Wounds and birthmarks.
We have seen some of the evidence for reincarnation but perhaps the finest example of it being alive and well today is to be found in Tibet, where the Dalai Lama is believed to be the reincarnation of the Chenrezi, the Buddhist God of grace, and this has been the belief since 1391. So far he is believed to have been reincarnated fourteen times.
Dalai Lama means “greatest teacher” and upon his death the Lamas of Tibet have the task of finding his reincarnation, which is a male child born after the death. When the thirteenth Dalai Lama died in 1933, he was three days dead on the throne when he turned his head to the north east. A star shaped fungus grew on the north east wall of his mausoleum and in the monastery's main court yard, a dragon flower grew by the east wall, and so the Lamas began a search in this direction, a search that would take them six years. In order to help them find their new leader they used Astrology, dreams and omens and finally they centred their efforts on a house in China and, when they finally entered the house, the boy they were seeking asked one of the Lamas for the Rosary that he was wearing beneath his disguise and he was also able to recognise other Rosaries, a drum and a walking stick that had belonged to his predecessor. They checked him for the birthmarks and moles that all the Dalai Lama carry and they were found to be in the right places and so he was taken from China to Tibet to begin his training. Is the Dalai Lama continually reincarnated and found by the Lamas, and if so, why?
It is, of course, based on religious belief but these same religious beliefs state that a soul need only return until it has attained a state on Nirvana. Has the Dalai Lama not yet achieved this state in over six hundred years? Could a suitable child always eventually be found to fit the necessary criteria if the search went on for long enough?
The basis of the Hindu belief in reincarnation is based on the “Wheel of Sansara” which, like the universe, has no end and no beginning and man can influence his “births” upon the wheel by his spiritual self or ”Karma.” A good man will have a good Karma and be reborn in a higher caste and therefore be a step closer to his Nirvana. It is however not only the Hindus and Buddhists that believe in reincarnation but some two thirds of the world's population and a recent survey in the U.K. found that 25% of Britons also believed in it, and this dates back to the depths of time as it was not uncommon for the ancient druids to lend money in the understanding that it would be paid back in a future incarnation.
Professor Stevenson has found a familiar pattern in the majority of the cases that he has looked at, usually a child of about two years of age will behave strangely and claim that he or she is somebody else and they will have vivid memories of a violent or sudden death. Other memories will include their previous name, address, occupation and the names of their family members, and these memories will reach a peak at the age of five or six and then begin to fade, until by the age of ten they are all but forgotten. The previous life is very often lived in the same locale as the present one or not far away, though there are a few cases of international reincarnations. Ninety percent of the statements made about the previous life will prove to be true and all of them are made while in a wakeful state.
There are curious examples of such inexplicable memories as thinking you have seen something before or a feeling that you have visited a place before. These continue into adulthood and are experienced by 70% of people and we refer to this phenomenon as “Deja Vu.”
Deja Vu experiences cover a wide spectrum and may vary from this sense of familiarity with a place to having a detailed knowledge of it, such as the lady who was visiting a house in Worcester and found an old doorway that had been covered up because she “knew” that it was there, or the French nurse who claimed that she knew of a sealed room at the top of a staircase in the castle's turrets at St. Germaine En Laye before she had ever visited the building. She was only proved to be correct after city documents were checked. Though very strange indeed these experiences are not necessarily proof of the existence of reincarnation which is generally taken to be a conscious recollection of a previous existence, but there are many more cases of subconscious recollections which we refer to as past lives, and which are recollected when the “patient” is under hypnosis. The most famous case, without which any talk of past lives is incomplete, is that of Bridey Murphey.
There have been countless reports of past lives dating from as early as 100 years ago, and some of which, from 1956 onward, were conducted live on television by Emile Franckel on a Los Angeles programme called “Adventures in Hypnotism” but by far the most famous and detailed case is the one which brought the phenomenon of past lives to the attention of the public at large. It was the work of American amateur hypnotist Morey Bernstein of Colorado whose book “The Search For Bridey Murphey” wetted the public's appetite.
The “patient” was a lady called Virginia Burns Tighe, though she also used the name Ruth Mills Simmons, and she was at the time a twenty nine year old native of Madison, Wisconsin who had lived in Chicago from the age of three. She had never been to Ireland nor mixed regularly with Irish people and though this allegation was levelled at her she strongly denied it.
Virginia Tighe was regressed under hypnosis to two previous lives the first of which was almost impossible to verify as it was that of a child who had died while still in babyhood but it was the second life, that of Bridey "Bridget" Murphey, which was the ground breaker, and one which became a test case that possessed all of the typical features of such cases. They are that some of the facts recalled are confirmed as true while some are found to be incorrect, there are memories of insignificant, trivial details while major events of the time are forgotten and the patient undergoes a complete, and convincing, change of character to “become” the person they claim to have been.
Bridey Murphey was born on December 20th, 1798 to Duncan, a barrister and cropper, and his wife Kathleen who was granddaughter to Bridget. The Murpheys were a protestant family living at The Meadows, Cork. Her brother Duncan Blaine was born in 1796 and he later married Aimã´e who was the daughter of Mrs. Strayne whose day school Bridey attended when she was fifteen years old. Duncan was also a cropper of flax, hay, tobacco and corn, and one day he had cut himself with a scythe, the name of which Bridey could not remember. When she was ten years old she went on a trip to Antrim. Her friends were Mary, Katherine and Kevin Moore. In 1818 she married Sean (she pronounced it Se-an) Brian Joseph Maccarthy who was a catholic son of a barrister, nephew to a Mr. Plazze (the proper spelling of Blaize) who married an “orange” and was also the grandson of Mrs. Delilinan Maccarthy.
The newlyweds then travelled to Belfast by carriage through Carlingford, Mourne and Balings (Bailings) Crossing (the latter two of which did not appear on any map but which did exist), the glens of Antrim and Doby (possibly Dovea or Dopy) a village on the old coach road not found on modern maps. Brian wrote about law cases in the “Belfast News Letter” and so he would have signed his name. Though she wasn't able to give her Belfast address she remembered that she had worshipped at St. Theresa's church in a street off Dooley Road whose priest was Father John Gorman and the church would have kept records of Bridget Murphey Maccarthy because all family details had to be put on the church board. Bridey did her shopping at Caden (Cadenns) house for women's clothes, Farrs (for food), John Carrigan's greengrocery and she paid with pounds, sixpences, tuppences and copper halfpennies and she also knew of a big rope company, a tobacco house and described Belfast as being lit by "poles with lights on them." She also remembered three men at Queen's University, William Mcglone, Fitzhugh and Fitzmaurice. Bridey Murphey died on a Sunday in 1864 aged 66 after a fall downstairs that broke her hip, and she remembered that at her funeral a man played Uilleann pipes.
As the sessions of hypnotic regression continued Mrs. Tighe's Irish accent improved and she would use Irish words such as “brate” (properly “quait”, a small toasting cup), “Ditch” (for bury which some experts questioned, but others maintained that it was used for mass burials after the 1845 -7 famine), “tup” (for fellow, which had no connection with Ireland in the 1800s), “slip” (for a child's pinafore or frock), “linen” (for a handkerchief made of linen, a word now obsolete in this context) and she used the word “lough” to describe rivers (a word now used only for lakes but in the 19th Century it was used for rivers as well).
Bridey was a good dancer and had learned the art at Mrs. Strayne's day school. She mentioned a dance called “The Morning Jig” and on one occasion when she was aroused from a trance but before she was fully conscious she danced The Morning Jig which ended with a yawn. She played the leer (lyre) but not very well and she knew songs like “The Londonderry Air” which was popular at the time and she also claimed to have read “The Sorrows Of Deirdre” which was published in both English and Gaelic (Erse) in 1808 and she also knew in great detail the procedure for kissing the Blarney Stone which was done in Bridey's day but seldom now apart from daring tourists.
Verification of facts as obscure as some of these is extremely difficult, for instance Bridey remembered her father being angry with her for pulling straws out of the thatch on the barn, and obviously this would be impossible to check on. Registers of births, deaths and marriages were not kept in Cork before 1864 and so such records would be kept in the family bible which has never been found, so subsequently there is no record of a Bridey Murphey in Cork in 1798, however we can verify many of the details such as the tobacco grown in Cork and the act passed in 1793 which enabled Catholics to enter the legal profession. There is no known St. Theresa's church in Belfast at that time nor a Father John Joseph Gorman though there is a record of Carrigan and Farr in the Belfast city directory for 1865-6 but not any other year despite them being the only traders in food stuffs at the time. Though Queen's University was a protestant university no student or instructor was barred on religious grounds and there was in fact a Fitzmaurice and a Mcgloin (not Mcglone) there at the time, and the Uilleann pipes were customary at funerals due to their sombre tones.
When Morey Bernstein's book was published in 1956 it instantly became a best seller and started a craze of “Come As You Were” parties which people would attend wearing the garb that they would have worn in their former lives. Even worse was the tragic case of a young boy from Shaunee, Oklahoma who shot himself and left a suicide note which read; “They say curiosity kills a cat and I'm very curious about this Bridey Murphey story so I'm going to investigate in person."
The newspapers became filled with in-depth reports of the facts that were confirmed and those that weren't, and they began to suppose that though the facts were true she may have learned them in this existence and stored them subconsciously rather than recalled them from a previous incarnation, and so they began to delve into Virginia Tighe's past in order to try and discover from where she may have gleaned this information.
She may have read a book about it, she may have been in a room while the television was switched on and unwittingly picked up what was being said on it and stored it deep in her mind until she was hypnotically regressed. They found that Tighe had a childhood friend whose maiden name was Bridie Murphy, and also Tighe's aunt, who was called Marie Burns had at some point lived with her. The “Chicago American” tried to show that Tighe had got her accent and information from her aunt and Burns was described as being "As Irish as the lakes of Kilkenny" but Mrs. Burns was born in New York of Scottish-Irish descent and in his rebuttal Morey Bernstein wrote "You could say that she was as Irish as the lakes of Kilkenny in as much as there are no lakes in Kilkenny."
An interesting epilogue to this story is that Virginia Tighe was also able to describe what had happened to her after she had died. She says that she remained in her home until the death of Father Gorman whom she could talk to, she was however unable to talk to her husband Brian who did not join her after her death, nor was she able to talk to her brother when she returned to Cork. She could travel from place to place simply by willing herself to be somewhere else and she met many people, some of whom she didn't know and others whom she did, including her little brother who had died while still young. Though relatives didn't always stay together her father and mother did meet. There was no difference between men and women but one knew the difference intuitively. There was no insanity, sleep, day, night, heat, cold, war, disease, old age, grief, pain, love, hate, family or marriages, senses, (except sight and sound) just "satisfaction.” She was able to tell the future for people on the earth, and when it was time for her to be reincarnated she was told by "some woman."
It was found that at the time most of the information Tighe disclosed was unavailable across the Atlantic but it was still felt that she may have found it somewhere and “stored” it in her subconscious mind until she was hypnotically regressed. Would it be possible for somebody to unwittingly store this much detailed information and recall it years later under hypnosis? Apparently so because there was one case of a Canadian psychologist who put a patient through hypnotic regression, and while the patient was under he would write in a strange language which was found to be Oscan, a precursor to Latin, but when he was in a wakeful state he was unable understand what he had written or write anything further. When the case was looked into it was found that one day the gentleman had sat next to a man in a library who had been reading a book that was open at a page with an ancient Oscan curse on it and, with just one glance, he had memorised it subconsciously and was able to recite it under hypnosis, this process is known as “Cryptomnesia.”
This ability is also used on occasion by the police in solving crimes where perhaps a witness may have seen a getaway vehicle and glanced at the number plate but failed to memorise it properly. When they are put under hypnosis they will be able to recall the number in full, and also remember any distinguishing marks on the vehicle such as scratches in the paint or spots of mud on it. The problem with hypnosis though, as in the cases of alleged alien abductions and the stories the victims recount, is that while hypnotised the witness will say not what is necessarily the truth but what they believe to be the truth, and so it is possible that everything they say about their past life is just a figment of their imagination, and the correct details they give are perhaps just pot luck or could be something they have learned somewhere and then apparently forgotten all about. Should somebody be interested in, for example, the history of the Roman empire, would they then be likely to recall a past life as a Roman Centurion?
There was an experiment done in America by the psychologist Robert Baker on a group of people who had never been lost as a child. They were hypnotised and then asked if they remembered the time that they had been lost in a shopping mall and helped by an old lady. None of them had ever been in such a situation and yet they all recounted detailed stories of how they had become separated from their parents lost and they even came up with a description for the old lady. They had convinced themselves on some level that this was perfectly true.
So we know that our memories are not “fixed,” they can be altered in time, and another good way to show this is known as the “metronome experiment.” This is where you take a metronome that is ticking at a rate of once every second, and then tell somebody under hypnosis that it is ticking once every minute. When they are woken from their trance they will experience sixty ticks (one minute) as one hour and if you ask them what they were doing for that one hour they will come up with an hour's worth of fantasy. So if the conscious mind is able to create such intricate tales, then so too must the subconscious mind, and these pseudo memories can be so emotionally intense and so powerful that they are able to reduce the patient to tears or a state of panic.
The average person will have up to seven dreams every night, most of which will only last for a few seconds, and we will only usually be able to recall the first and the last, but the subconscious mind will be able to recall all seven of them and perhaps fill in some of the details itself and maybe then you can recite them under hypnosis as if they were true.
There are other, more easily confirmed, cases, such as more recent past lives than those in the Roman Garrisons or in 17th Century Ireland, but the irony with this is that the more recent the past life, the more freely available the information on it will be to those who will recall it, so it is far easier to stumble upon it in every day life which rather defeats the object. The question then becomes; how much information can the mind hold, because rarely do patients experience just one past life but many of them spanning many many years and many eras in history.
It is interesting though that they always seem to have suffered from a violent or an unnatural death, and this is sometimes evident in their present life, for example, a person with a fear of water may well recall a past life in which they had died from drowning. Could this really be a lingering memory they have retained or is it just the brains way of coping with such an irrational fear, i.e. by trying to rationalise it through giving it a justifiable cause? There is an argument to say that rather than adopting such a fear from a past life we could be born with it by inheriting our memory as well as our genetic make up, for example could a person who has had a past life as a woman come back as a man and live as a homosexual? A similar argument is “retrocognition” or E.S.P. and says that we aren't genetically made with these memories but we store them while we are still in the womb, or telepathically from people around us, though this cannot explain the cases that have no connection with family or area. It is far more likely though that to some extent we will inherit our own parents' phobias via a far more down to earth cause. For example we will as a child copy our parents' behaviour in many ways, it is the way that we learn whether or not most things are good or bad, and if we constantly see our parents shying away from water or being reduced to a quivering wreck when confronted by a spider then we will automatically come to see these same things as dangerous or frightening.
However skeptical we are there is a case which would seem to cross all of the boundaries. It concerns an American girl who had a fear of water and was regressed to a past life during which she had been a young girl who lived by the banks of the Mississippi river, and she would sit by the water with her fiance and watch the paddle steamers float by. She suffered death by drowning in the waters she had sat next to so many times. In another part of America completely independently of this, a man was hypnotically regressed and he recalled the life of a boy who had seen his fiancee drown in the waters of the Mississippi. The two were brought together for a television programme having never met and continued to give details of their former lives as lovers which were confirmed by the other. Could this be the proof? It is certainly more convincing than cases in which there is only one person, but what we have to look at is the manner in which the information is taken, for example, we know that people can be misled under hypnosis into, to name but one trick, eating onions because they think that they are apples, and many experts believe that the Bridey Murphey case should be discounted because of the way that the questions were asked. Rather than regressing Tighe to anywhere in particular, Bernstein said to her, "Go to some other place in some other time" and if Tighe was suggestible enough she could have easily taken this to mean that she should make up "some other place in some other time" rather than the one she may have been present in.
We've seen the most famous case of a past life, but there are many many more, one Welsh housewife, Jane Evans, recounted several past lives. One of them was that of Livonia, the wife to the Tutor of Constantine (later to be Emperor of Rome) in Britain in the year 4AD. During these sessions she gave many details which turned out to be taken, almost word for word, from the novel “The Living Wood” by Loius De Wohl which she claims to have forgotten reading. She also spoke of the life of a young Jewess in 1190 in York during the massacre of the Jews, in which she gave a wealth of information about York in the 12th Century, but which unfortunately turned out to be false and was in fact taken from a play which had been broadcast on B.B.C. radio. Jane Evans' past lives, though at first perfectly convincing were picked apart by researcher Melvin Harris who described them as "Looking more like a highly aerated Swiss cheese than evidence for reincarnation" so many were the holes in them.
So we can see the problems we have when looking for proof of past lives, but hypnotist Joe Keeton thought he'd found that proof when he regressed a woman called “Jan” and she became Joan Waterhouse, an eighteen year old who was tried for witchcraft at Chelmsford Assizes, Essex in 1556. She gave many accurate facts that were verified, including the existence of Joan Waterhouse and her appearance in the dock, however she gave the name of the reigning monarch as Queen Elizabeth I, when the monarch in 1556 was in fact Queen Mary I. The only place that Jan could have gleaned this information from was a contemporary pamphlet of which the only surviving copy was in the library of Lambeth Palace where Jan said she had never been, nor she said had she ever seen the document. However, the pamphlet had undergone a reprint and there was one mistake in it, the reprint gave the year of the trial as 1556 (the year given by Jan) but the original document gave the year as 1566 by which time Mary I had been replaced on the throne by Elizabeth I for some eight years.
So it turned out that Jan had read, registered and forgotten the reprint until she was regressed and had recited it under hypnosis. So again we see the difficulty in trying to use the mind, a thing we don't fully understand, to probe its depths to prove that a phenomenon exists when we have yet to learn its powers and the way in which it works, and so until we do understand the mind we cannot prove without doubt whether past lives are genuine or not.
The essence of the question of reincarnation and past lives is, what is it that happens to us when we die? Can we somehow return and try again or not? If we take the part of us that would return and occupy another body as being the “soul” then we have to consider at what point around or after conception does a sperm and an egg require a soul? Is the soul present already in the sperm or the egg and merely evolves as the pregnancy develops? Surely not because the foetus must surely have a brain to be able to possess any kind of intelligence, i.e. its personality or soul, so where does the “soul” come from and what is it? Is there a “pool” of souls which somehow inherit a body while it is still in the womb or is a soul borne of physical matter where the physical and psychological meet? In this case there would be no pool of souls as such, as each pregnancy, be it miscarried, aborted or carried full term, would “create” a new soul at some point.
The other end of the cycle is of course death, the point at which the physical body, the “shell”, ceases to function. Does the soul also cease to function at the same point, or can the soul leave the body at some point around death, perhaps on a spiritual plain and continue its quest for Nirvana? If we believe that a soul is borne out of physical matter at early pregnancy then we must surely also believe that it dies when the physical body dies, unless of course this is the first life in one of many in which case the soul may become spiritual at the end of the physical body's life. Or if we believe that a soul is “adopted” by a physical body, or vice versa, in the womb then can we at the same time believe that the soul dies along with that physical body? Is conception the beginning of a souls existence or is it merely one stage along the way, a kind of transition, and is death the end of a soul's existence or is it a part of the same transition? In short is it the end of the beginning or the beginning of the end?
It seems that to answer one question is to create five more to answer, and this part of life, and our opinions on it, is a very personal thing and an individual thing. Nobody can say who is right and who is wrong, what we can do though is give a considered opinion on it and this may tie in with a persons personal and religious beliefs or it may be entirely independent of them. We must bear points like this in mind when we are giving thought to our opinions and beliefs. If a soul does survive death then where does it go to, and more importantly can it go back to the womb? It is interesting that cases of reincarnation tend to concern people who have died violently, suddenly or unnaturally, and have come back as though they have yet to finish what they started on earth.
As I said earlier this is a very individual thing and my opinion is that reincarnation can and sometimes does occur, but when studying the evidence for or against the phenomenon it is very difficult to sift the wheat from the chaff, that is, can we say absolutely that the genuine cases are those that centre around young children who remember a former life when they are very young, but outgrow their memories as though they are not really meant to remember them at all? However, these cases are made all the more convincing when the child has birthmarks that correspond to injuries they sustained in their previous existence, and I believe that the criteria set by Professor Stevenson i.e. memories, character traits and birthmarks are not necessarily “vital” ingredients, but a case would have to be considered to be very dubious if it did not possess at least two of them.
The cases that I distinguished from reincarnation, i.e. past lives that are recalled under hypnosis, I do not believe are genuine and could be created in the mind in any number of ways, such as dreams about characters we would like to be, favourite historical periods and false truths such as the old lady in the shopping mall, and it is these situations in which we are most likely to forget relevant details but fill in trivial ones while convincing ourselves that it is true.
I don't believe that we can be born with an inherited memory although we are born with a certain amount of knowledge, or rather instinct, such as the awareness to suckle at the breast or to grasp with the fingers, or it may go slightly deeper than this. In his book “Reincarnation” David Christie-Murray makes the point that we may be able to learn to ride a bike more quickly than our great grandparents or we may be better able to master technology such as computers, though it is very unlikely that this would go far enough for us to be able to inherit a complete set of memories, and though these past life cases often seem baffling at first glance there is often an alternative explanation, and one that is far more probable than having lived on earth, possibly several times before and being able to recall the details of those lives while under hypnosis. I believe that most cases we have seen are caused by cryptomnesia, a forgotten memory, and this would seem to be the most likely cause.
As for “genuine” reincarnation cases, I believe that the “reborn” soul takes possession of a body at some point (in the case of Sobha Ram who took over Jasbir Lal Jat's body it happened at age 3 when he apparently died of smallpox), though in the natural process I believe that a soul, or rather a personality or “awareness” is created, and that reincarnation is a fluke and a flaw which is not meant to happen, and yet does do so when the right circumstances are present. This would also mean that I don't believe in the spiritual journey of birth and rebirth on the Wheel of Sansara, or even the wheel of life, and the quest for Nirvana.
I think that in the "normal" process each new life creates a new personality (soul) and that this soul lives on after the physical body dies, and wherever it may go to, and that must be somewhere, it is meant to stay there and not return.
Copyright © JamesOnline.net. All rights reserved.