HAVE YOU BEEN HERE BEFORE? Mystery of Many Lives

Everyone wonders what happens after death. The fascinating topic of the concept of reincarnation, rebirth or transmigration of the soul remains a central belief today in certain Asian religions. There are many stories across the globe where people claim that they have lived before, even recalling how they died in their previous lives. It is believed that child prodigies like Wolfgang Mozart (1756-1791), an Austrian, who composed simple music at the age of four and French mathematician Blaise Pascal (1623-1662), who outlined a new geometric system as an eleven-year-old child, may have been reincarnations of talented people from an earlier time. Despite the vividness of the cases of reincarnation, science has failed to reason out its existence. 

Some classic cases of reincarnation

*Shanti Devi was born in 1926 in Old Delhi to a middle class family. She grew up faster than the children of her age and when she was just three years old, she began to prattle on about a family living in Mathura (a city in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, about 145 km from Delhi). She said that she was the wife of a man named Kedar Nath and she died ten days after giving birth to a child. As she provided extraordinary details about her past life, her family members got interested and plunged into action. Her teacher and headmaster succeeded in locating a merchant by the name of Kedar Nath in Mathura who had lost his wife, Lugdi Devi, nine years ago, ten days after giving birth to a son. Shanti Devi recognised her husband and son named Navneet Lal when they visited her in Delhi. The little girl not only acted as a dutiful wife but a loving mother to her son too. The case was blown up in almost all the national dailies of India and the story travelled far and wide throughout the world, Shanti Devi being in the spotlight in a short time. Indian political leader Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (1869-1948) set up a 15-member commission to investigate the matter. Scientists and laymen visited Delhi and Mathura either to support the case or to debunk it altogether. Bal Chand Nahata published a booklet in Hindi, entitled Punarjanma Ki Pariyalochana (Critique of Reincarnation), arguing that the story did not prove reincarnation despite whatever material available, but this argument was disputed in a later article by Dr. Indra Sen, a Punjabi psychologist and educator. Sture Lönnerstrand, another sceptic, came all the way down from Sweden to expose it as a hoax. But, after investigations, he confirmed that this was the only fully explained and proven case of reincarnation there had ever been. Lönnerstrand is the author of Shanti Devi: En berättelse om reinkarnation (written in Swedish, meaning “A Story of Reincarnation”) (Stockholm 1994).

* Dorothy Eady, born near London in 1904 to Irish parents, suffered a terrible fall down the stairs and was pronounced dead when she was three years old. But Dorothy regained consciousness miraculously and sat up in bed within one hour. When she was at the British museum in 1908 her parents noticed her strange behaviour as she became obsessed with the Egyptian artifacts. She began kissing the feet of the statues and sat down at the foot of a mummy enclosed in a glass case, refusing to leave it. After this visit, the child had recurring dreams of ancient Egypt. When Dorothy came across some photographs of ancient Egypt, she showed her mother the hieroglyphics, saying she knew that language. On stumbling upon the photo of the “Temple of Seti I at Abydos”, she ran to her father, proclaiming that this was her home where she used to live. In 1933, Dorothy married an Egyptian, moved to Cairo and she became known as Omm Sety who, in a trance-like state, began producing “automatic writing” which disclosed that she was born in ancient Egypt with the name Bentreshyt and raised as a priestess at the Temple of Kom El Sultan. By the age of 14, the Pharaoh Seti fell in love with her and she became pregnant. As Bentreshyt made a vow of virginity as a priestess, she committed suicide to prevent implicating Seti in this crime.

* In 1970, Mrs. Dolores Jay from Ohio, USA, began to have visions of her past life, telling that she was Gretchen Gottlieb who had lived in Germany during the 19th century. One day her husband, Rev. Carroll E. Jay, a Methodist minister, was applying hypnotherapy to ease her back pains when he heard a strange alien voice in German. The minister later got used to conversing with the entity who perceived herself as Gretchen, daughter of Hermann Gottlieb, mayor of the town of Eberswalde in north-eastern Germany. Mrs. Jay replied in German to the queries of research workers and psychiatrists who went to Germany but returned with little success. Finally, the Jays themselves travelled to Germany and did succeed in finding correlations between the names of local places and the family names, mentioned by Gretchen. The Gottlieb family was not in the good books of the Federal Council of Germany, as their daughter was murdered. 

* John and Florence Pollock, who lived in Hexham, England, had two girls: Joann, 11 and Jacqueline, 6. In 1957, the two children were killed in a car accident. The following year Florence got pregnant and gave birth to twin girls: Gillian and Jennifer who were identical twins, but they had different birthmarks. Jennifer had a birthmark on her waist that matched a birthmark that Jacqueline had. She also had a birthmark on her forehead that resembled a scar that Jacqueline had. When the twins were three months old, the family moved to Whitley Bay. Two years later, the girls started asking for toys that had belonged to their elder sisters though they had never seen the toys before. On returning to Hexham, the twins pointed out landmarks their old sisters had known. They also began to panic and shriek when they saw moving cars. After they turned five, the memories of their previous lives faded and the twins went on to lead normal lives. 

Proponents of the phenomenon of reincarnation present the above stories, among others, as prime examples that reincarnation is as much a part of life as birth and death. Although some argue that the Greek ideas of reincarnation were adopted after communication with India, the transmigration of the soul was a tenet of restricted groups in Greece and appeared first at the end of the 6th century B. C. It was probably a native development and there was no communication between Greece and India at this early date. Greeks entertained the idea that the soul of a dead person can pass into an animal, and the belief that the soul is divine, and therefore immortal and preexistent. (This, however, posed the question where the soul comes from.) The Greek historian Herodotus (484-425 B. C.) supposed that his people learned of reincarnation from Egyptians, but this doctrine hardly occurred in the religion of Egypt. However, Greek Philosopher Plotinus (204-270 A. D.) called it a dogma recognised throughout antiquity. He believed that the soul expiates its sins in the darkness of the infernal regions and afterwards passes into new bodies, there to undergo new trials.

Reincarnation is a core belief of the Indian religions such as Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism and Sikhism, as well as Taoism of China, but this concept is rejected by the monotheistic Abrahamic religions, namely, Judaism, Christianity and Islam that believe in only one God. Karma, a concept of action, work or deed and its effect or consequences, is closely associated with the idea of reincarnation. The term refers to a principle of cause and effect. Good intent and good deeds contribute to good karma and happier rebirths while bad intent and bad deeds contribute to bad karma and less desirable rebirths. The monotheistic religions, conversely, teach a linear concept of life wherein a human being has only one life and upon death he or she is judged by God and rewarded in heaven or punished in hell. The idea of reincarnation also occurs in prehistoric societies, certain pagan religions, and beliefs of the indigenous peoples of the Americas and aboriginal Australians. 

Hypnosis as a medium to evoke memories of past life

Nowadays hypnosis is the medium by which researchers analyse the psyche of a person who claims to remember past lives. Dr. Morris Netherton wrote in his book Past Lives’ Therapy that almost invariably his patients had found that their mental anguish in this life could be pinpointed to a physical situation in a past life. Elucidating his findings, Netherton cited if someone suffered from an acute fear of heights, chances were that in the previous life he must have succumbed to falling off a height. Netherton, however, did agree that such feelings could result from “creative daydreams”, but the scholar admitted his personal belief in the theory of reincarnation. 

Psychologist Helen Wambach of Walnut Creek, California believed that hypnotic regression was the most appropriate means of discovering and studying accounts of earlier incarnations. She examined 2000 subjects and concluded that 90 percent of her hypnotised subjects could successfully recall scenes of their past lives. Wambach also believed that earlier incarnations helped to account for existing emotional disturbances. She found through her research that people who committed murder in a previous life often felt emotionally disturbed. “Once their past is revealed and they see the reason for their trauma, they lose their feeling of guilt and can lead a normal life”, she wrote.

Dr. Jamuna Prasad, Deputy Director of Education for Uttar Pradesh, the most populated state in India, reported that a man whose case he had studied, remembered dying in a previous life by choking on milk curd. It had been his favourite food then, but in this life he disliked milk curd intensely. 

Dr. Edith Fiore, in You Have Been Here Before, wrote that she was convinced that her patients’ memories were not mere fantasies. She equally cautioned that memories of past lives might affect marital harmony and family relationships. 

Dr. Ian Stevenson’s work in the field of reincarnation

Dr. Ian Pretyman Stevenson (1918-2007), a Canadian-born American psychiatrist and a professor at the University of Virginia School of Medicine for 50 years, may be considered the best authority on the subject of reincarnation. Stevenson became known for his painstaking research into cases suggestive of reincarnation. Travelling around the world, he studied about 3000 cases of children from Alaska, India, Sri Lanka, Brazil, Lebanon, and other countries, who claimed to remember past lives, and he posited that reincarnation might be a contributory factor to certain ‘phobias’ (an irrational fear of or aversion to something), ‘philias’ (an abnormal love for a specified thing: the very opposite of ‘phobias’), unusual abilities and illnesses of people that could not be explained by genetics or the environment. Similar to the notion of Netherton, Stevenson theorised that people who were drowned in previous lives were particularly frightened of water in their present life. 

Stevenson also recounted the case of a newborn girl in Sri Lanka who screamed whenever she was carried near a bus or a bath. When the child was old enough to talk, she narrated a previous life as a girl of eight or nine who drowned after a bus knocked her into a flooded paddy field. Later investigation proved that a family of just such a dead girl was living four or five km away, but, according to Stevenson, the two families had had no contact with each other.

The cases, studied by Stevenson, showed some typical features: A child spontaneously begins recounting details of a previous life at an age between two and four. Until the ages of five or six, the child speaks about this increasingly and with greater clarity. Then the child speaks less and by the age of eight, generally stops speaking about the past life.

Stevenson finally drew the conclusion in these words: “We can never show that it does not occur, nor are we ever likely to obtain conclusive evidence that it does occur. All the cases I have investigated so far have some flaws, many of them serious ones. Neither any single case nor all the investigated upon cases together offer anything like a proof of reincarnation. They provide instead a body of evidence suggestive of reincarnation that appears to be accumulating in amount and quality”.

Detractors and supporters

American psychologist and neurologist Terence Michael Hines (born in 1951) said that the major problem with Stevenson’s work was the inadequacy of methods he used to investigate alleged cases of reincarnation to rule out simple, imaginative storytelling by the children claiming to be reincarnations of dead individuals. 

Robert Allen Baker (1921-2005), an American psychologist and investigator of paranormal phenomena, wrote that many alleged past-life experiences could be explained in known psychological factors like “cryptomnesia” (returning of a forgotten memory without its being recognised as such by the subject who believes it is something new and original) and “confabulation” (a production of fabricated, distorted or misinterpreted memories about oneself or the world, generally associated with certain types of brain damage).

T. K. Chari of Madras Christian College in Chennai, a specialist in parapsychology and the most prominent among contemporary Indian philosophers, said that Stevenson was naive and his case studies were undermined by his lack of local knowledge.

American philosopher Robert Todd Carroll (1945-2016) wrote in his Skeptic’s Dictionary that Stevenson’s results were subject to “confirmation bias” which means the tendency to search for, interpret or favour information in a way that confirms one’s prior beliefs. 

But, in 1977, Harold Lief (1917-2007), an American psychoanalyst and an advocate of sex education, writing in the Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, described Stevenson as a methodical investigator, adding either he was making a colossal mistake, or he would be known as ‘the Galileo of the 20th Century’. 

Lee Irwin, a professor at the College of Charleston, South Carolina, USA, wrote in the journal Religions that in many ways, Stevenson’s research marked a watershed in the theory of reincarnation. 

In an article published on the website of Scientific American in 2013, Stevenson’s work was reviewed favourably while German metallurgist Doris Kuhlmann-Wilsdorf (1922-2010) surmised that Stevenson’s work had established that the statistical probability that reincarnation did in fact occur was overwhelming.

Ian Wilson (born in 1941), prolific British author of history and religions and one of Stevenson’s critics, acknowledged that Stevenson had brought “a new professionalism to a hitherto crank-prone field”. Paul Edwards (1923-2004), another critic and an Austrian-American moral philosopher, said that Stevenson had written more fully and more intelligibly in defence of reincarnation than anybody else, saying Edwards had the highest regard for Stevenson’s honesty.

Xenoglossy

Although Stevenson mainly focused on cases of children who seemed to recall past lives, he also studied two cases in which adults, under hypnosis, showed rudimentary use of a language they had not learned in the present life. He called this phenomenon “xenoglossy”. In the case of Shanti Devi, also studied by Stevenson, the girl had used some words of the Mathura dialect. In the 1960s a three-year-old boy, son of an Israeli man, began to speak in the Hebrew of Biblical days, exhorting his men to follow him into battle. The boy also played the harp, as King David had done. A Hebrew scholar said that the child spoke the ancient tongue more fluently than any adult he had ever met. 

Although linguists Sara Thomason, William Samarin and William Frawley were critical of the claims of xenoglossy, the linguist Paul Meara said that the arguments put forward to support this phenomenon in the final chapter of Stevenson’s book Unlearned Language are not easily dismissed and even the most sceptical reader would find that this book provided food for a good deal of thought. 

Stevenson and other researchers studied many cases of birthmarks that could be traced to a physical body in a previous life. Meanwhile, geniuses seem to know their art without being taught and require very few lessons before they outdistance their teachers. Advocates of the reincarnation theory believe that for such persons a course in music, painting or mathematics is merely a ‘brush-up’ course to revive memories and talent from earlier lives. But some, contrarily, attribute reincarnation to spirit possession, telepathy, racial memory and even poltergeist activity-the physical disturbance due to a restless or mischievous spirit. In addition to these theories, some researchers have ascribed these cases to religious and cultural beliefs also. Furthermore, there are many people who claim that they have dreamed of scenes in their former lives.

Waiting period

In some schools of Buddhism, bardo (a term in classical Tibetan) or antarabhava (in Sanskrit) is an intermediate, transitional or liminal state between death and rebirth. One theory suggests that the soul when released from a dead body immediately enters another embryo or infant body. Many of Stevenson’s cases point out that there is little or no time between death and rebirth. However, this waiting period seems to vary from culture to culture. The state of liberation from the shackles of samsara, which refers to the infinite cycle of birth, death and rebirth, is called nirvana in Buddhism (Eternal Bliss) and moksha in Hinduism (union with the Supreme Being).

Gina Cerminara (1914-1984), the American author on parapsychology, spirituality and reincarnation, writes in her book Many Lives, Many Loves that souls who were closely related in one lifetime tend to meet in other lifetimes. “If the relationship was one of love, the love persists; if one of enmity, the enmity must be overcome”. The members of a family often were in the same family in previous lives. Cerminara and other researchers believe that sometimes men come back as women and vice versa. Men with pronounced feminine qualities and women with masculine tendencies may be merely expressing what they were in a previous life. Transsexuals-those whose sex is changed through an operation-claim that they were born in the wrong body and really belong to the other gender. 

Dr. Jim Tucker carries on Stevenson’s work

Chester Floyd Carlson (1906-1968), the inventor of xerography-a dry photocopying technique-left at his death $ 1,000,000 to the University of Virginia to continue Stevenson’s work which is being carried on now by Dr. Jim B. Tucker, an American child psychiatrist at the University of Virginia School of Medicine and the author of Return To Life. Though raised as a Southern Baptist, Tucker does not subscribe to any particular religion, and claims to be sceptical about reincarnation, but sees it as providing the best explanation for the strongest cases investigated to date. 

Tucker says that there is good reason to think that consciousness can be considered a separate entity from physical reality. Quoting Max Planck, a leading scientist and the father of quantum theory, Tucker says that Planck viewed consciousness as fundamental and that matter was derived from it. “So in that case, it would mean that consciousness would not necessarily be dependent on a physical brain in order to survive, and could continue after the physical brain and after the body dies. It seems-at least, on the face of it-that consciousness has then become attached to a new brain, showing up as past life memories”, he claims. Max Ludwig Planck (1858-1947) was a German theoretical physicist who won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1918 for his new theory.

God and reincarnation

Why is there a lot of suffering, poverty, injustice and incurable maladies in the world if it was created by an omnipotent and benevolent God? This is a logical question frequently asked today by most atheists and non-believers alike, but there are those who argue that God cannot be held accountable for this situation, as everything would depend on the karmic cycle: the positive or negative deeds of human beings in their previous lives. God is thus acquitted of His involvement in the affairs or situation of humankind who uses free-will: ability to act at one’s own discretion. Thus, someone who is born blind or poor or suffers from a physical disability may have brought these problems on himself by thoughtless behaviour in another life. A somewhat similar concept is shared in Jainism as well. It teaches that God has no role to play in an individual’s destiny; one’s personal destiny is not seen as a consequence of any system of reward or punishment, but rather as a result of his or her own personal karma.***