Transmigration of the soul
There are religious and philosophical concepts in which reincarnation (reincarnation), that is, the transmigration of the soul of a deceased person into another body, a person who was just born after him, is taken for granted. There are times when what is considered to be the reincarnation of the soul, reincarnation, is nothing more than a mental regression. But it should be noted that there are other cases that do not fall into this category. A different approach is needed to explain them. Let's start with examples.
Reincarnation - cases
Niels O'Jacobson gave an example of reincarnation, taken from Stevenson's book.
“A two-year-old boy and his grandmother were walking on one of the streets of the Lebanese village of Cornayel. A man was walking towards them. Suddenly the boy ran to him and hugged him. “Do you know me?” The stranger asked in surprise. The child replied: "Yes, you were my neighbor."
This child's name is Imad Elawar, he was born in December 1958. As soon as he started talking, he started doing strange things as well. He assured that he had lived before and described his past life, talked about the people he knew. The first names named by him were not borne in the family. The names "Jamil" and "Mahmud". In particular, he often talked about Jameel and compared her beauty with the more modest beauty of his mother. He related the incident of a man hit by a truck and crushed his legs, and said that he died at speed. Imad claimed that he was a member of the Bugamzi family from Kirby, a village located at a distance of 30 km from Cornayel, which must be reached by a bad mountain road, often impassable. The boy annoyed his parents, demanding permission to go there. He became even more inspired by learning to walk.
The Imad family was part of the Druze Ismaili sect living in Lebanon, Syria and in some villages in Israel. Belief in reincarnation is an integral part of their religion. Therefore, his parents easily perceived the meaning of their son's words. But his father did not approve of his thoughts and reproached for such inventions. Imad stopped talking about this with his father, and with his mother, grandfather and grandmother he continued to talk about these things. And in his dreams he also experienced his "memories". The man, the stranger he hugged in the street, was actually living in Kirby, which raised concerns among Imad's father. But his parents did not seek to check the boy's story.
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Imad named many people he knew in a past life, and his parents made a family of them. They found out that their son was named Mahmud Buhamzi, his alleged wife's name was Jamil and that he died after being hit by a truck. But Imad did not speak of himself as a victim of an accident: he only described the incident in detail. He also did not claim that Jamil was his wife: he only talked about her. Eventually, Imad's father went to Kirby for the first time in December 1963. Then Imad was five years old, and from the age of three he talked about his "previous life". But his father was unable to locate any of the Buhamzi family members in Kirby.
Stevenson accidentally met a young Lebanese in Brazil in 1962. He told him that in his native village of Cornayel, many children remember their past lives. He gave Stevenson a letter in Arabic addressed to his brother, who was still living there. Arriving with this letter in Cornayel on March 16, 1964, Stevenson learned that the addressee lived in Beirut. When he outlined the purpose of his visit, he was told about Imad and he learned that Imad's father was the addressee's cousin. That evening he was invited to the Imad's family, and then Stevenson learned everything that Imad had told, and what conclusions his parents had come to.
An investigation in the village of Kirbi confirmed that in fact there were people in the village with names called Imad, and a man named Said Buhamzi died in July 1943 after being hit by a truck. He was operated on, but after the operation he died. But Imad's stories did not coincide with Said's life, and the house in which Said lived was not the house that Imad described as “his”.
One of the Buhamzi family noticed that Imad's descriptions of his “former life” coincide with the events of the life of Said's cousin and friend, Ibrahim Buhamzi. Ibrahim lived illegally with his beautiful mistress Jamil, which caused a big scandal in the family. After the death of Ibrahim (at the age of 25, in September 1949), Jamil left the village. A year before his death, Ibrahim, unable to walk, was bedridden. He was a truck driver by profession and was involved in at least two road accidents. The death of his cousin Said in an accident left a deep impression on him.
One of Ibrahim's uncles bore the name Mahmud, there were also his parents, whose names were called Imad. The Kirby man whom the child hugged in the street was one of Ibrahim's neighbors. On March 19, Imad, his father, and Stevenson returned to Kirby, where they visited Ibrahim's home. It turned out that Imad knows everything inside this house very well and could answer questions about his behavior at the time of Ibrahim's death. The house has been locked for many years and is now hastily reopened for this visit. Therefore, Imad's good knowledge of the interior of a house cannot be attributed to quick observation. No, he already knew the interior of the house well in advance.
Before visiting Kirby Stevenson counted 47 different signs of the “inner life” at home. 44 of them were correct. Other signs also coincided. Imad recognized this house. During his visit, he named new details. He even remembered the last words spoken by Ibrahim before his death.
Imad and Ibrahim also had a similarity of characters, as described by the parents of the former and the relatives of the latter. Imad said that Ibrahim had two guns, one of them with two barrels. He showed the place near the house where Ibrahim hid him. Ibrahim was a good hunter and 5-year-old Imad was also very interested in hunting. Ibrahim served in the French army and spoke French very well, and no one in their family spoke this language. Imad was choleric by temperament, like Ibrahim, and easily got involved in quarrels. Until the age of 14, Imad was afraid of trucks and buses."
Stevenson describes a number of such compelling examples of reincarnation in his writings. Following him, considering such cases, Nils O'Jacobson comes to the conclusion that after the death of a person, a certain spiritual essence remains of him, a clot of his personality, which after some time, resonating, enters into some new fertilized egg, which does not yet have a personality of its own. This personality of the deceased receives an outlet through the body and actions of another (new) individual. And this new individual experiences the presence of another personality in himself in the form of memories of his past life. It is believed that the time interval between the death of a person and his incarnation in a new body (i.e., a new birth) is no more than 10 years. The likelihood of reincarnation of the deceased increases in the case when his death was accompanied by difficult experiences. For instance,if a person is killed, it is more likely that his soul, a clot of his personality, will enter the body of a new person, most often a newborn child or even an embryo.
Thus, there can hardly be any doubt that everyone lives many lives. It can be assumed that the souls of the dead enter the body of new people and the given in them of other personalities is experienced in the form of memories of past lives.
But if this is so, then I will allow one more hypothesis. I believe that the problem of reincarnation also has an ethnopsychological aspect. As you can see, most often "by inheritance" we get the souls of our deceased relatives - representatives of our ethnic group. If this is so, then we have thereby discovered another channel for the transmission of ethnopsychological information.
Niels O'Jacobson rejects the widespread belief that everyone who considers themselves reincarnations of people who lived before them believes that his predecessors were outstanding people. No one wants to consider themselves the reincarnation of a slave. But there are many cases when people feel in themselves the presence of the soul of a mere mortal, experiencing only vague memories of a past existence.
Other authors also describe curious cases that seem to indicate the possibility of reincarnation. Several such cases are described in Frank Edwards's book "Strange People", which, by the way, contains many examples concerning the most mysterious aspects of the human psyche.
• The story "The Incredible Story with Lurancy Venn" tells how the soul of the deceased girl Mary Roff entered Lurancy Venn. In this state, she behaved like Mary and even moved to her parents' house, considering herself their daughter. So she lived "with someone else's soul" for 15 weeks, after she acquired her own again, returned to her parents and grew up as a normal woman. She became the mother of eleven children.
This all happened in the 19th century, but the author claims that detailed reports and publications have survived.
• Then F. Edwards described a case that is closer to us in time. The story "The Obsession of Maria Talarico" tells how in 1939 the soul of a murdered young man, Pena Veraldi, entered the 17-year-old girl Maria Talarico in Italy. For more than half a month, she lived the life of a person whom she did not know before and only on the day of his death, in 1936, looking down from the bridge, saw his corpse lying under the bridge. A detailed description of this case was published in the journal "Larizer Psychic" in June 1939.
Such facts lead to new ideas. One can, for example, ask the question: what is the similarity between these cases and the phenomenon of multiple personality, many times described in the psychological and psychiatric literature? In the case of Maria Talarico, the peculiarity is that the soul of the deceased Pepe lived in her, trying to displace her own "I", for only half a month, whereas in cases of multiple personality, different "I", settling under the shell of one individual, alternate in time as dominant mental forces that determine the behavior of the individual. But it is probably possible to assume that in this case there is a transmigration of the soul of another person into the psyche of the individual. At least the ego is also a possible way of understanding this very complex phenomenon.
• The transmigration of souls has also attracted the attention of writers. For example, Edgar Poe, in his short story Morella, tells the story of a woman interested in mystical questions. She died suddenly, but just before her death gave birth to a daughter. The father loved his daughter immensely, but she “developed strangely,” and the father was stunned: “Could it be otherwise if I daily discovered in the words of a child the thinking and abilities of an adult woman? If the mouth of an infant spoke out observations of mature experience? And if every hour I saw wisdom and passions of a different age in her big pensive eyes? …
Is it any wonder that I was possessed by an extraordinary and eerie suspicion that my thoughts turned with trepidation to the incredible fantasies and amazing theories of Morella, resting in the crypt?” soul, but also the mother's body.
“And as the years went by, and day after day I looked at her holy, meek and eloquent face, at her forming camp, day after day I found in my daughter new features of similarity to her mother, sorrowful and dead. And every hour the shadows of this resemblance deepened, became deeper, more distinct, more incomprehensible and full of chilling horror. I could bear the resemblance of her smile to that of a mother, but I shuddered at their identity, I could bear the resemblance of her eyes to those of Morella, but more and more often they looked into my very soul with an imperious and unknown meaning, as only Morella looked … Words and the expressions of the dead on the lips of her beloved and alive nourished one persistent thought and horror - a worm that did not die!"
And when her father unwittingly, at baptism, gives her the name "Morella" - the name of her mother, she immediately dies. And it turns out that in the crypt the body of the deceased mother disappeared.
A. Nalchajyan