It seems that for a modern unchurched person there is no idea more attractive than reincarnation - numerous incarnations of the immortal human soul in corporeal mortal shells. Even Vladimir Vysotsky sang with irony: "A good religion was invented by the Hindus, that we, having given up our ends, do not die for good!" Indeed, how wonderful it would be to know for sure that in the future you will visit our beautiful planet more than once, walk on green grass, fall in love, kiss your children … Many works of the ancients confirm that people have thought about reincarnation from time immemorial. One of the oldest Vedic texts says about a deceased person: "May he join his own descendants, clothed in fleeting life … may he unite with the body."
The idea is as old as the world
The belief in reincarnation is one of the very first on Earth, it underlies the entire human belief system. Originating in the East more than six thousand years ago, this faith has become widespread in many countries, giving rise to such important world religions as Hinduism and Buddhism. According to them, each person is an eternal being who, over many millions of years, is incarnated again and again in a new body in order to achieve his spiritual salvation (enlightenment).
Reincarnation is mentioned in the Indian Bha ga wad-gita, in ancient Egyptian texts, in Greek and Roman written monuments. In the "Book of the Dead", in a dialogue between a deceased person and the god Thoth, the wheel of life is spoken of and the concept of karma is given. Karma is a word from the Sanskrit language. It can be defined as a consequence of our actions in previous lives. All human misdeeds are karma, it is it that affects how a person lives in the present. Karma empowers people with consciousness, and if they have not paid for their mistakes today, they will have to pay for them in their next lives.
In the 19th - early 20th centuries, the doctrine of reincarnation was developed in the works of Russian theosophists and philosophers Helena Blavatsky and Nicholas Roerich. According to these works, the soul in subsequent lives can acquire not only a human body, but also other material shells of the animal, vegetable and even mineral world. According to N. Roerich, having reached its spiritual perfection on Earth, the soul migrates to other planets and incarnates there in beings of a higher order that no longer belong to the sphere of the material (physical) world …
Buried memories
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The middle of the 50s of the last century was marked by a surge in Western public interest in the idea of reincarnation. So, in 1952, the attention of the US population was riveted on the sensational case of Bridey Murphy, who made a statement in the press that, after an injury sustained in a car accident, he remembered how he lived fishing in Ireland in the 19th century. Around the same time, the English hypnotist Arnel Bloxham gave an interview to the BBC, in which he spoke about patients who, during hypnotic sessions, recall their past lives in great detail. In particular, one of the patients, while under hypnosis, told how in the 18th century he served as a gunner on a British frigate under the command of a certain Captain Pierce. Talking about my past lifethe man used a variety of nautical terms and obsolete words that were most likely used by the sailors of the time. The Gunner described the sea battle in detail, during which he died. The patient came out of hypnotic sleep so unsettled that Bloxham did not dare to conduct additional sessions with him.
In the mid-60s of the XX century, a two-year-old boy, Imad Elawar, a resident of a small Lebanese village, became famous all over the world. He suddenly told his parents that he used to live in a neighboring village, was engaged in hunting, had several small cars and looked after a beautiful girl. The parents, who at first perceived the son's revelations as amusing baby talk, nevertheless decided to go with him to a neighboring village and check the boy's story. They easily found the house that Imad had described, and after talking with the head of the family living there, they found out that the man's adult son had died of tuberculosis in 1949. During the conversation of the adults, Imad climbed onto "his" bed - a young man once slept on it, and then showed the place where his dog loved to sleep for almost two decades. In addition, the boy remembered his cousin who had been hit by a truck. This actually happened in 1943.
Ban on memory
In the Soviet Union, such cases were not made public, and people who claimed to remember their previous lives were declared mentally ill and were often placed in psychiatric hospitals.
So, in 1979, thirty-year-old Svetlana Kruglova entered the Sverdlovsk Regional Psychoneurological Dispensary for treatment. Six months earlier, a young, educated woman had received a head injury.
And soon she began to gather in Moscow, wishing to visit one of the capital's cemeteries. There, her mother was allegedly buried, to whose grave the woman did not have time to go. Surprised relatives, who knew that Svetlana's elderly mother was living in good health with her son in a village near Sverdlovsk, began to doubt the woman's mental health. When she told that in a past life she was a nun and learned about the death of her mother shortly before her death in a fire, her relatives decided to seek help from psychiatrists. It was the doctors who were able to establish that everything told by the woman was true!
Another case occurred in the mid-1990s with a resident of Vladivostok Igor T. A guy who suffered from drug addiction, after an overdose, was taken to the intensive care unit of the hospital in a state of clinical death. The doctors managed to save Igor, who soon fell into a deep depression. A specially invited psychiatrist, during long conversations with a patient, managed to find out that the guy remembers how in the 30s-40s of the XX century he lived in the village of Bugryanka, Vitebsk region. The war broke out, and soon invaders came to their village. Once he - a ten-year-old boy - punctured the wheel of a fascist motorcycle, and when the Germans began looking for a pest, he blamed his older brother, who was immediately shot. Soon the boy tried to escape from the village captured by the Nazis to the partisans, but was blown up by a mine. The overflowing memories of his past life shocked Igor so much that after being discharged from the hospital, he stopped using drugs, parted with his former friends and joined the ranks of volunteers.
The past under hypnosis
Hypnosis - proven for decades, an effective therapeutic treatment for many neuropsychiatric disorders - sometimes allows you to look into the patient's subconscious and awaken in him dormant memories of his previous earthly incarnations. Western psychotherapists began to actively use this technique in the second half of the last century. In particular, the hypnotic sessions of Dr. Forier and Stevenson, who, however, considered such memories to be a manifestation of certain paranormal abilities, such as clairvoyance and telepathy, gained great fame in the 70s and 80s.
Many Russian psychiatrists are more skeptical about such experiments. In their opinion, pictures of past lives allegedly experienced under hypnosis arise in the minds of people under the impression of books or films, refracted through the prism of the human psyche.
However, already at the beginning of the 21st century, more and more supporters of the incarnative theory began to appear among Russian psychologists and psychiatrists. They assume that a person's subconscious, like a computer hard drive, stores information about all previous incarnations of a person. According to one of these researchers - the Irkutsk psychologist Andrei Kustevsky, - the impetus for the appearance in the human mind of such pictures can be the transferred mental or physical trauma, the use of narcotic or psychotropic substances. The safest and at the same time effective way to return a person to past lives is hypnosis, which allows the patient not only to remember the experience in other guises, but also to participate in his own numerous births and deaths.
Sergey Kozhushko. Magazine "Secrets of the XX century" № 35 2010