What nonsense, said [Teddy]. “All you have to do is remove the fence when you die. My God, everyone has done this thousands and thousands of times. Even if they don’t remember, it doesn’t mean that they didn’t. What nonsense. - JD Salinger "Teddy".
Laurel Dilmet could not hide from the memories that swept over her. She remembered that in the sixteenth century her name was Antonia Michaela Maria Ruiz de Prado. She insisted that Antonia was born on the island of Hispaniola in the Caribbean and later moved to Spain, and her life was full of love and romance.
She spent several months in the dungeons of the Spanish Inquisition, fell in love with one of the inquisitors, became his lover, followed him to South America, and, eventually, drowned on a small island in the Caribbean. Antonia's gruesome death was buried in Laurel's mind. She remembered how Antonia's lover tried to save her and how she died in his arms. Antonia realized that she was dead only when she no longer felt his tears flooding her face.
It would have sounded like an intricate fantasy or a romantic novella if it weren't for the hundreds of facts Laurel mentioned that would not have been known to her had she not lived in sixteenth-century Spain.
Psychologist Linda Tarazi spent three years testing Laurel's story that developed before her through a series of hypnotic regression sessions in 1970. Checking the facts, Linda Tarazi spent hundreds of hours in libraries, consulted with historians and even visited Spain. While she was unable to establish whether a woman named Antonia Ruiz de Prado ever lived there, she was able to find confirmation of almost every detail of Laurel's story.
Antonia gave the exact names and dates that were found in documents written in Spanish in the city of Cuenca in Spain, for example, the names of two inquisitors from Cuenca - Jimenez de Reinoso and Francisco de Arganda - and the names of spouses arrested on charges of witchcraft, Andreev and Maria de Burgos. Laurel had never been to Spain, and her knowledge of Spanish was limited to a set of travel phrases learned during a week of vacation in the Canary Islands.
Where did Laurel get this information? Genetic memory is ruled out as Laurel, a German by birth, had no Spanish ancestors. Possession Possession of a disembodied spirit is a far more incredible idea than reincarnation. And she could hardly have learned specific details in childhood or during her studies.
Schoolteacher from the Chicago area - she was raised in Lutheranism. Laurel attended a regular school (not Catholic), a specialty received at Northwestern University, was an educator and could hardly be a criminal or a fraud. She could not make anything from history that went beyond academic journals, and was forbidden to use her real name. Isn't it surprising that Laurel knew in which building in Cuenca the court of the Inquisition sat in 1584? Even the state tourism department did not know about it. Laurel described this building as an old castle towering over the city. The tourism department reported that the Inquisition was located in a building located directly in the city. However, from a little-known Spanish book, Linda Tarazi learned that the Inquisition was transferred to such a castle in December 1583,shortly before the time Laurel said Antonia arrived in Cuenca.
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Could Laurel have concocted "memories" from romantic literature she has read? Linda Tarazi asked her about the books, films and TV shows she watched, and even checked catalogs of historical literature. She found nothing that resembled Antonia's story.
Antonia's case seems incredible, because it is very much like a novel - Tarazi admitted that “in part it may be so,” - however, he is much closer to life than fiction. For example, despite the fact that inquisitors are usually portrayed as villains in novels, Antonia described one of them as more human.
Taratsi found confirmation of this characteristic. She found that while Laurel said Antonia was living in Cuenca, the Inquisition was tolerant there. No one was burned alive during Antonia's time, although one man was quartered. The historical accuracy of Laurel's information is more than extraordinary.
Laurel's case is just one of thousands of attested past life memories that support the widespread belief in reincarnation of souls in the West. When people hear stories like Laurel's stories, it often fosters a dormant belief in reincarnation.
Other confirmations of it can be their own memories of past lives, experiences of leaving the body and experiences of clinical death. In this chapter, we will look at all three types to better understand why people tend to believe that they have lived before.
Obsessive memories
Much of the documentary evidence of past lives has been collected by Ian Stevenson, the most prolific researcher in the field. A psychoanalyst who previously headed the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Virginia School of Medicine, Stevenson has devoted all his time since 1967 to the study of the past life.
That year, Chester F. Carlson, the inventor of the technology used in Xerox copiers, set up a foundation to continue the work of Ian Stevenson. The scientist left his position in order to head the department of parapsychology at the university's faculty of psychiatry.
Stevenson tries not to deal with hypnosis, saying that it rarely produces "really valuable" results. (He mentions Antonia's case as one of the rare and noteworthy ones.) Instead, he prefers to work with people who have spontaneous memories of past lives, mainly children. He questions them, records their memories, and then tries to independently verify the details of their past existence. Stevenson has recorded more than two and a half thousand cases, most of them from India, Sri Lanka and Burma.
Some skeptics criticize Stevenson's information because it mainly comes from Asian countries, where the belief in reincarnation is widespread and it is likely that parents are encouraging children to remember past lives. However, many Asian parents discourage this. As Stevenson points out, they believe such memories are unfortunate and lead to early death. In fact, in 41 percent of the cases Stevenson recorded in India, parents tried to prevent their children from talking about past incarnations, even using techniques such as flogging and mouthwash with dirty water.
Stevenson suggests that the reason he has fewer "Western" incidents is because people in the West don't know what to do with these memories when they arise. Their belief system does not give them any general outline. One Christian woman whose child claimed to be the embodiment of her older sister told Stevenson:
"If my church knew what I am telling you, I would be kicked out."
The memories of some of his respondents are surprisingly reliable. They remember names, places and circumstances and are even able to demonstrate skills, such as drumming, that were not trained in this life, but which their personality possessed in a past incarnation. While Stevenson does not believe that any of this evidence can be considered conclusive scientific evidence of soul reincarnation, he believes that somewhere there must be perfect evidence that will become such. One recent case in England seems pretty compelling.
A mother's love never dies
“I know it must sound very strange, but I remember my family because of dreams,” Jenny Cockell told the woman on the other end of the telephone line.
It was April 1990 and she was speaking to the daughter of Jeffrey Sutton, an Irish man whose mother died in childbirth on October 24, 1932. She was embarrassed to talk. This was her first contact with the family, whom she believed she had been separated by death about sixty years ago.
It wasn't just dreams that brought them together. Memories haunted her in dreams and in reality, starting from early childhood. She first spoke of them when she was not yet four years old. Instead of fading away, the memories continued and became more detailed as she grew older. Jenny was haunted by an unrelenting sense of the need to make sure her children were all right.
While attending school in England, she got hold of a map on which she found the place where she knew she lived. This is the Malahide hamlet north of Dublin. Although she had never been to Ireland, Jenny drew a map of the area, marking the house where she lived with her husband and seven or eight children.
She knew that her name was Mary and that she was born around 1898 and died in the thirties of the twentieth century in a white room with high windows. She believed that her husband had participated in the First World War and that his work was associated with "timber and work at high altitude." She retained joyful memories of married life before the birth of children. But later memories became dim, and a "sense of quiet alertness" came to mind.
Jenny grew up, attended college and became a podiatrist. She got married and gave birth to two children: a son and a daughter. As the children grew, she was haunted by the past again, and along with it, the desire to find out what happened to another family that she remembered. In 1980, she bought a more detailed map of Malahide Village and compared it to a map drawn as a child. They were very similar.
By eliminating the genetic link, she was convinced that her memories were real. Her only Irish relative was her great-grandmother, who was born on the west coast of Ireland (Malahide is on the east coast) and who spent most of her life in Malta and India. Thus, it could not be a source of memories of twentieth century Ireland.
Jenny became convinced that she was “living a past life again in reincarnation,” as she wrote in her 1993 book Through Time and Death. She wrote that it was the “power of feelings and memories” that made her believe in the reality of her past life. She decided to undergo hypnosis, which helped her remember specific incidents.
She remembered that she often passed by some church, the image of which was so vivid that she could later draw it. Then the episode came to mind when the children caught a rabbit in the snare. They called her. She said, coming up: "He's still alive!" This memory helped the Suttons' eldest son, Sonny, to believe that she was in fact his reincarnated mother.
In June 1989, she spent a weekend in Malahide and received some startling endorsements. The church she painted really existed and looked remarkably similar to her drawing. The appearance of Sods Road, on which, according to her memories, their house was located, has changed significantly. She did not find any building where the house was supposed to be. However, the stone wall, stream, and swamp were exactly where she spoke.
The trip gave her the confidence to keep looking. She wrote to the owner of the old house she saw on Sods Road. He told her that he remembered a family living in a neighboring house with a large number of children, whose mother had died in the thirties. His next letter brought her the family name - the Suttons - and painful news: "After the death of their mother, the children were sent to orphanages."
She realized that there were indeed reasons to be concerned about their well-being. "Why didn't their father keep the family?" she asked. She began an intense search for the Sutton children. From the priest of an orphanage in the Dublin area, she learned the names of six children, and then began to write to people named Sutton with these names. In her search, Jenny found Mary's marriage certificate and, more importantly, her death certificate. She died at Rotunda Hospital in Dublin, where there were indeed white rooms with high windows.
Finally, in response to one of her many inquiries, Jeffrey Sutton's daughter called her. Despite the fact that Jeffrey did not show much interest in her story, his family gave her the addresses and phone numbers of his two brothers, Sonny and Francis. The boys lost touch with their sisters after they were sent to shelters.
She summoned all her courage to call Sonny and he responded. He confirmed that the house was where she spoke, and said that he wanted to meet with her and talk.
When Jenny met Sonny, she was immediately relieved. She wrote, "I discovered how accurate and detailed these memories were." She told him about the incident with the rabbit. “He just stared at me helplessly and said, 'How did you know about this?' He confirmed that the rabbit was alive. “It was the first detail that shocked him with its authenticity,” wrote Jenny. "The incident was so much about the privacy of the family that no one else could know about it."
Sonny also confirmed Jenny's worst fears about Mary's husband. John Sutton, the roofer, was a drunken drunkard, sometimes violent. He beat his wife and flogged the children with a "wide belt with a copper buckle." After Mary's death, government officials took all the children away from her father, except Sonny, as Jenny wrote, "because they believed he was incapable of caring for them." Sonny was the only one left at home. John became increasingly violent, regularly beating his son until he fled into the army at the age of seventeen.
With Sonny's help, Jenny found traces of the rest of the eight Sutton children. Three died, but in April 1993 the five surviving children met Jenny while filming a documentary in Ireland. “For the first time since 1932, the family got together,” wrote Jenny. Although Sonny has said he accepts reincarnation as an explanation for Jenny's memories, the other kids don't go that far. Daughters Phyllis and Elizabeth agreed with the explanation given by a certain cleric - that their mother acted through Jenny to reunite the family.
Jenny is glad to have investigated her memories. "The feeling of responsibility and guilt disappeared," she wrote, "and I felt a peace unknown to me until now."
Invalid memories
Memories like those of Jenny and Laurel help maintain belief in a past life in Christians. But they are rarely confirmed in a similar way. For each series of confirmed ones, there are hundreds of others, which cannot be confirmed. Some of them are simply fuzzy and unavailable for verification. Others turn out to be unreliable or, worse, interfere with scenes from novels and films. Consequently, many people treat them like fantasy.
The potential falsity of hypnotic regression memories is clearly visible in a study by Nicholas Spanos of Carleton University in Canada. His assistants put one hundred and ten senior students into a state of hypnotic trance and told them to recall a past life. Thirty-five of them gave their names in a past life, and twenty were able to name the time and country in which they lived. But most of the reports were unreliable. “When they were asked to name the head of state where they lived and say whether the country was in a state of peace or war, one and all either could not name the head of state, named other names, or were mistaken about whether the country was at war in a certain year or not., or they reported historically incorrect information,”wrote Spanos.
One of the test subjects, who claimed to be Julius Caesar, said that it was in AD 50. and he was a Roman emperor. Caesar was never proclaimed emperor and lived before Christ.
This study highlights some of the weaknesses in hypnotic regression. But false memories do not refute the very fact of reincarnation. People do not always accurately remember the events of their current life. Like all other abilities, people's ability to recall events under hypnosis varies. Most of the subjects recall the events that caused strong feelings better than dry facts, such as names and dates. Others succeed in panoramas, but overloaded with details.
Although many past life memories are historically untrustworthy, more and more psychologists are using regression to treat patients. They claim it helps in treating all diseases, from phobias to chronic pain, and helps improve relationships.
Although hypnotic regression is rarely useful in proving soul reincarnation, its growing popularity says a lot: people are not satisfied with the Christian orthodox view of life. They look to alternatives like reincarnation because they are looking for better answers.
Out-of-body experience
Several years ago I received a letter from a person describing an experience he had in a state of near-death. It happened in 1960 as a result of an accident on the football field and lasted seven minutes. “During this time,” he wrote, “I was carried along a dark tunnel to a bright white light. In that light, I saw the figure of a bearded man who told me that I still had work to finish. Soon after these words, I woke up on the operating table to the amazement of the doctors and nurses who were there.
I recognized in this description a typical near-death experience, or PSS.
Since 1975, when the physician Raymond Moody published Life After Life, medical science has taken PSS seriously. In a huge number of books and television programs dedicated to this topic, people described how they were enveloped in the light, brought closer to the light, saved and transformed by it.
Raymond Moody discovered several common elements of PSS, such as loud noise, moving through a tunnel, meeting a being of Light, and viewing life. But the consequences are almost more interesting than the experiences themselves.
Since 1977, Kenneth Ring, a psychologist at the University of Connecticut, has consistently endorsed most of Moody's findings. And one of the lesser-known discoveries is that people who have had near-death experiences seem to become more receptive to the idea of reincarnation. Thus, the PSS is one of the factors contributing to the spread of the belief in the reincarnation of the soul.
In 1980-81, a Gallup poll found that 15 percent of American adults, on the "brink of death," felt confident about "continuing life or awareness after death." Based on the figures provided by the Gallop Institute, Kenneth Ring claims that 35 to 40 percent of people on the brink of death experienced near-death experiences.
Kenneth Ring also found that these people became "more receptive to views of life after death in the light of the idea of reincarnation." A study led by Ringa by University of Connecticut alumnus Amber Wells documents the shift in their views. Wells interviewed fifty-seven people who went through their near-death experiences about their belief in reincarnation. She found that 70 percent of them believed in reincarnation of souls, although among the bulk of people, such views were held by 23 percent, and in her control group - 30 percent.
Why do people who have experienced near-death conditions tend to accept the idea of reincarnation?
Kenneth Ring found that many subjects attributed the change in their views to special information given to them by the being of Light. For example, one of them told the scientist that the creature he saw in his near-death experience told him that the eldest son of this man had 14 "incarnations in female physical bodies." He said that this made his belief in reincarnation a "subject of personal knowledge." Some of those interviewed stated that they saw souls awaiting incarnation. Others attribute the shift in their views simply to their susceptibility to new ideas in general as a result of near-death experiences.
Perhaps PSS leads people to embrace the idea of reincarnation because they experience a state of being outside the body. This allows people to naturally conclude that they are not identical with their bodies. And from here it is easy to move on to the idea that one can leave one body and continue life in another.
The out-of-body experience I had in college helped me to solidify the understanding that although my soul resides in this body, I am more than it. I went to work at the Christian Science Monitor in Boston. It was four and a half or five in the morning and the streets were empty. Suddenly I realized that my soul had taken off to a great height. It was getting light, and I looked down at my body walking down the street. I could even see myself stepping over with my feet, shod in light leather shoes.
Viewing everything from such a vantage point, I knew that I was a part of God and looked at my lower self, the transitory “I,” being one with the imperishable self. God showed me that I have a choice: to be one with my imperishable Self - the Higher Self, or to remain imprisoned in the lower self with all its worldly affairs. I made the decision to walk the higher road and submit to that part of myself that is real and eternal. From that day on, it became impossible for me to forget that I am part of God.
Memories of past lives, near-death experiences, and out-of-body experiences show us that we don't need to immerse ourselves in thoughts of death. These are gifts that allow us to enter other dimensions within ourselves. They guide us along the path of seeking the ultimate reality, the only thing that really matters. They can show us a detailed meaning of our destiny not only on planet Earth, but also in many spheres of Divine consciousness.
The ability of the soul to become one with God will be a constant theme in our reincarnation research.
The material was prepared and taken from the book: “Reincarnation. The lost link in Christianity."