Past-life recall as modern proof for reincarnation
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Past-life recall as modern proof for reincarnation
Many people who accept reincarnation in the West today claim that it can be scientifically proven. They usually ground their belief on so-called past life recall experiences, which represent the ability of certain persons to recall facts of alleged previous lives. There are two categories of this phenomenon. One is observed under hypnosis, while regressing certain persons beyond the date of birth. The other is produced by some children who spontaneously remember a previous life identity, amazing their neighbors with specific details that match with the life of a deceased person. Could these experiences really be proofs for reincarnation?
Spontaneous past life recall by children as proof
Another category of experiences credited as proofs for reincarnation are the cases when certain people, almost all children under the age of 10, spontaneously recall events of alleged past lives, insisting to be someone else who lived in the past. The details they mention concerning places, persons and happenings of the past, about which they could not normally know anything, prove to be true when investigations are performed in the indicated area. The extensive research of Dr. Ian Stevenson and his books on this topic are well known. Although the cases of spontaneous past life recall by children are much fewer than testimonies produced under hypnosis, they seem to be more convincing. The cases of the Indian girls Swarnlata and Shanti Devi are two of the most famous. At the ages of 3 (Swarnlata) and 4 (Shanti Devi) they both started to claim that they had lived a previous life as wives and mothers of two children, in a distant village. The most astounding element is that they mentioned specific facts about their alleged previous lives that have been verified by investigators. Imagine how surprised the sons of the deceased mother were when visited by a 4-year-old girl that claimed to be their mother (or other relatives in similar cases). Emotional disturbances often develop in such cases. Stevenson comments: “These children become embroiled in divided loyalties. In many cases children have rejected their parents, saying they are not their real parents and have often started down the road toward their so-called real homes. In other cases, they insist on being reunited with their former husbands, wives, or children. One Indian boy was passionately attached to the woman he said had been his former mistress and was trying to get her back, causing himself and her real distress” (Omni Magazine 10(4):76 (1988)).
However, there are other possibilities to interpret them, overruling the reincarnation explanation. One alternative explanation is the possibility of these children's contacting external spirits, through channeling. In this case the medium would be the child, without necessarily being conscious of it. However, this explanation is not too convincing, especially because the children do not seem to be skilled in communicating with spirits.
A better explanation would be the possession of these children by external spiritual entities. This phenomenon is related to channeling, but this time the human person is forced to transmit the messages of a spirit without having any conscious contribution to the whole process. In other words, possession implies that the invading spirit enters the body and takes over entirely the control of human consciousness, acting as if a past life personality would be manifesting itself. This explanation is more likely to be valid for the following reason: Almost all cases of spontaneous past life recall experiences are produced by children who manifest them between the age of two and five, when their spiritual discernment is almost nonexistent, especially concerning spirits. This situation makes them easier to be manipulated by external spirits. As the child grows up, the entities lose their power of influence upon him, which could explain why the past life memories are lost after the age of 10. Again, one argument against this explanation is the presupposition that such external spirits have no reason to lie about their true identity. Another argument is the fact that the child does not manifest the classic symptoms of violent possession. However, acting violent is not the only possible form of manifesting spiritual possession.
A confirmation of the possession hypothesis is the cases when the possessing spirit enters the child’s body a long time after he was born, and then produces the past life recall experience interfering with the actual personality of the child. There are enough such cases described in literature. Here is a brief description of two mentioned by Ian Stevenson, a famous researcher of this phenomenon, in his book Twenty Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation:
First, there is the case of an Indian boy named Jasbir, aged three and a half, who was very ill and lapsed into a coma which his family temporarily mistook for death. He revived a few hours later, and after several weeks displayed a completely transformed behavior, claiming to be a Brahmin named Sobha Ram, who died in an accident while he (Jasbir) was sick. As Sobha Ram died when Jasbir was already three and a half years old, his "past life recall" obviously cannot be a proof of reincarnation. More than that, it is likely that the "reincarnation" of Ram’s soul took place even before he had physically died, according to the timing of his accident and the illness of Jasbir. For the previous 3.5 years both persons lived physically in nearby villages. While speaking through Jasbir, the "reincarnated Mr. Ram" said that he was advised by a saint to take cover in Jasbir’s body. So at a certain moment there were present two personalities in Jasbir’s body: the one of the child and the one of Mr. Ram. This suggests that it cannot be a case of reincarnation here, but rather a possession of Jasbir’s body by the so-called spirit of Mr. Ram.
Second, there is the case of Lurancy Vennum, a one-year-old girl who began to display the personality of Mary Roff when she (Mary Roff) died. This situation lasted several months, while Mary Roff claimed to have occupied the vacated body of the little girl. After this period Mary Roff departed and Lurancy Vennum resumed control. The overlapping of personalities and messages displayed during that period are strong indications of possession, excluding any possibility for reincarnation. Ian Stevenson admits in his book that "other cases of the present group of 20 cases may be instances of similar ‘possessing influences’ in which the previous personality just happened to die well before the birth of the present personality’ body" (p. 381).
Third, there is the case of a Buddhist monk, Chaokhun Rajsuthajarn, who was born a day before the death of Nai Leng, the personality he claimed to have been in his previous life. Stevenson commented in an interview: “I studied this case with much care but couldn't find an explanation for the discrepancy” (Omni Magazine 10(4):76 (1988)).
Spirit possession could also explain another “proof” for reincarnation that is becoming increasingly popular: the correspondence between wounds that caused a person to die and birthmarks on children that claim to be the rebirth of that particular person. Not that a spirit influence could induce such physical abnormalities, but it could “suggest” a special origin to those who are born naturally with birthmarks and birth defects, especially in cultures where most physical and behavioural peculiarities are attributed to happenings in past lives (Southern Asia, the Druze in Lebanon, or Indians in North America). Not many cases need such an elaborate explanation as spirit possession. Most can be discarded as having no scientific proof (a precise medical report on the wounds of the deceased) or as being induced by the adults, who taught the children to have had a previous life as a certain family member. An important factor that could confirm spirit possession is cases of reincarnation prediction by people who strongly believe in it. Here is a case discovered by Stevenson among the Tlingit tribe in Alaska:
I recall one in which a man had predicted to his niece that he would come to her and he pointed out to her two marks on his body. They were scars of operations. One was on his nose. He had had an operation at the corner of his eye (right) at the upper part of his nose, and another on his back. I don't know what that was from. Anyway, he said to his niece: "You will be able to recognize me because I will have these scars reproduced on my body as marks." So he died and about 18 months later his niece had a baby boy who was born with birthmarks precisely at these places. I remember seeing and photographing these birthmarks. This boy was about 8 or 10 years old when I first saw him. The birthmark on the back was especially clearly seen. It had small round marks at the sides that looked exactly like the stitch marks of a surgical operation (Venture Inward Magazine, September/October, 1995).
A further indication for understanding spontaneous past life recall experiences by children is the fact that they are culturally dependent. Most cases are reported in India and other South Asian countries, where reincarnation is fully accepted. The Asian cases are always richer in details than the Western ones. Western children who have such experiences give only poor details that could permit verification. When checking some verifiable details is possible, they usually turn out to be past experiences of other members of the family. Cultural conditioning certainly plays an important role in these phenomena.
For this reason Ian Stevenson, the well known researcher of this phenomena, was forced to admit in his book Twenty Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation that the cases he studied, as the very title of his book indicates, are only suggesting reincarnation and cannot be considered proofs for it. Stevenson admitted: “All the cases I've investigated so far have shortcomings. Even taken together, they do not offer anything like proof” (Omni Magazine 10(4):76 (1988)). If this is the case, they could be also suggestive of spirit possession.
However, there are other possibilities to interpret them, overruling the reincarnation explanation. One alternative explanation is the possibility of these children's contacting external spirits, through channeling. In this case the medium would be the child, without necessarily being conscious of it. However, this explanation is not too convincing, especially because the children do not seem to be skilled in communicating with spirits.
A better explanation would be the possession of these children by external spiritual entities. This phenomenon is related to channeling, but this time the human person is forced to transmit the messages of a spirit without having any conscious contribution to the whole process. In other words, possession implies that the invading spirit enters the body and takes over entirely the control of human consciousness, acting as if a past life personality would be manifesting itself. This explanation is more likely to be valid for the following reason: Almost all cases of spontaneous past life recall experiences are produced by children who manifest them between the age of two and five, when their spiritual discernment is almost nonexistent, especially concerning spirits. This situation makes them easier to be manipulated by external spirits. As the child grows up, the entities lose their power of influence upon him, which could explain why the past life memories are lost after the age of 10. Again, one argument against this explanation is the presupposition that such external spirits have no reason to lie about their true identity. Another argument is the fact that the child does not manifest the classic symptoms of violent possession. However, acting violent is not the only possible form of manifesting spiritual possession.
A confirmation of the possession hypothesis is the cases when the possessing spirit enters the child’s body a long time after he was born, and then produces the past life recall experience interfering with the actual personality of the child. There are enough such cases described in literature. Here is a brief description of two mentioned by Ian Stevenson, a famous researcher of this phenomenon, in his book Twenty Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation:
First, there is the case of an Indian boy named Jasbir, aged three and a half, who was very ill and lapsed into a coma which his family temporarily mistook for death. He revived a few hours later, and after several weeks displayed a completely transformed behavior, claiming to be a Brahmin named Sobha Ram, who died in an accident while he (Jasbir) was sick. As Sobha Ram died when Jasbir was already three and a half years old, his "past life recall" obviously cannot be a proof of reincarnation. More than that, it is likely that the "reincarnation" of Ram’s soul took place even before he had physically died, according to the timing of his accident and the illness of Jasbir. For the previous 3.5 years both persons lived physically in nearby villages. While speaking through Jasbir, the "reincarnated Mr. Ram" said that he was advised by a saint to take cover in Jasbir’s body. So at a certain moment there were present two personalities in Jasbir’s body: the one of the child and the one of Mr. Ram. This suggests that it cannot be a case of reincarnation here, but rather a possession of Jasbir’s body by the so-called spirit of Mr. Ram.
Second, there is the case of Lurancy Vennum, a one-year-old girl who began to display the personality of Mary Roff when she (Mary Roff) died. This situation lasted several months, while Mary Roff claimed to have occupied the vacated body of the little girl. After this period Mary Roff departed and Lurancy Vennum resumed control. The overlapping of personalities and messages displayed during that period are strong indications of possession, excluding any possibility for reincarnation. Ian Stevenson admits in his book that "other cases of the present group of 20 cases may be instances of similar ‘possessing influences’ in which the previous personality just happened to die well before the birth of the present personality’ body" (p. 381).
Third, there is the case of a Buddhist monk, Chaokhun Rajsuthajarn, who was born a day before the death of Nai Leng, the personality he claimed to have been in his previous life. Stevenson commented in an interview: “I studied this case with much care but couldn't find an explanation for the discrepancy” (Omni Magazine 10(4):76 (1988)).
Spirit possession could also explain another “proof” for reincarnation that is becoming increasingly popular: the correspondence between wounds that caused a person to die and birthmarks on children that claim to be the rebirth of that particular person. Not that a spirit influence could induce such physical abnormalities, but it could “suggest” a special origin to those who are born naturally with birthmarks and birth defects, especially in cultures where most physical and behavioural peculiarities are attributed to happenings in past lives (Southern Asia, the Druze in Lebanon, or Indians in North America). Not many cases need such an elaborate explanation as spirit possession. Most can be discarded as having no scientific proof (a precise medical report on the wounds of the deceased) or as being induced by the adults, who taught the children to have had a previous life as a certain family member. An important factor that could confirm spirit possession is cases of reincarnation prediction by people who strongly believe in it. Here is a case discovered by Stevenson among the Tlingit tribe in Alaska:
I recall one in which a man had predicted to his niece that he would come to her and he pointed out to her two marks on his body. They were scars of operations. One was on his nose. He had had an operation at the corner of his eye (right) at the upper part of his nose, and another on his back. I don't know what that was from. Anyway, he said to his niece: "You will be able to recognize me because I will have these scars reproduced on my body as marks." So he died and about 18 months later his niece had a baby boy who was born with birthmarks precisely at these places. I remember seeing and photographing these birthmarks. This boy was about 8 or 10 years old when I first saw him. The birthmark on the back was especially clearly seen. It had small round marks at the sides that looked exactly like the stitch marks of a surgical operation (Venture Inward Magazine, September/October, 1995).
A further indication for understanding spontaneous past life recall experiences by children is the fact that they are culturally dependent. Most cases are reported in India and other South Asian countries, where reincarnation is fully accepted. The Asian cases are always richer in details than the Western ones. Western children who have such experiences give only poor details that could permit verification. When checking some verifiable details is possible, they usually turn out to be past experiences of other members of the family. Cultural conditioning certainly plays an important role in these phenomena.
For this reason Ian Stevenson, the well known researcher of this phenomena, was forced to admit in his book Twenty Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation that the cases he studied, as the very title of his book indicates, are only suggesting reincarnation and cannot be considered proofs for it. Stevenson admitted: “All the cases I've investigated so far have shortcomings. Even taken together, they do not offer anything like proof” (Omni Magazine 10(4):76 (1988)). If this is the case, they could be also suggestive of spirit possession.
Metaphysical reasons for rejecting past life experience
Even if hypnotic regression and spontaneous recall of past life by children were free of any contradiction, there still would be another major argument against their veracity: According to the classic doctrine of reincarnation, the entity which reincarnates is the impersonal self (atman or purusha), accompanied by karmic debt. Any psycho-mental element that defines personhood does not belong to the self or to the subtle body, and therefore ceases to exist at physical death. Memory is such an element. It acts only inside the limits of a physical life and vanishes at death. If things were different, if memory could pass to further lives through reincarnation, it would have the same ontological nature as the self, which is absurd, because memory belongs to the psycho-mental realm of personhood.
Usually it is said that the vehicle that carries the psychic impressions from one life to another is the subtle body (sukshma sharira in Vedanta) or the karmic deposit (karmashaya in Samkhya-Yoga). Although some say that these two elements act as a kind of unconscious memory of previous lives, they cannot represent a third ontological nature (different to both the self and the psycho-mental realm), which could play the role of a transmissible personal memory from one life to another. Karmashaya and sukshma sharira are a mere expression of the way karma records the debts of the past. As karma represents an impersonal and mechanical law which functions with mathematical precision, karma itself cannot justify one’s state at a certain moment. In other words, man cannot communicate with his karma. Karma is simply pushing the self into a foreordained scenario, without communicating which debts are to be paid from previous lives.
Even though some special meditative techniques are mentioned, which could render some limited information about past lives (for instance Yoga-Sutra 3.18 mentions the possibility to know the previous birth through practicing samyama), they are available only for the advanced Yogi. Even so, the veracity of the information gotten in altered states of consciousness is doubtful.
One’s karmic debts could at best be imagined intuitively. For instance, it is supposed that a man who was murdered took his just reward for a murder he did himself in a previous life. Not even the past life recall experiences give any information about the "sins" one did in his previous life, but only figure out cases when he was a victim or a simple observer of life around him. These kinds of experiences do not attempt to prove the justice of karma, but only that past lives are real. In other words, the "recalled" scenarios do not indicate which facts of the previous life produced the present incarnation, but only try to prove that we lived previous lives, that reincarnation is true and has to be accepted in our belief.
Because of the metaphysical considerations mentioned above, most Eastern gurus do not consider experiences of past life recall as valid proofs for reincarnation. At the time Stevenson was carrying out his studies among Indian children that remembered previous lives, he met an Indian swami of the Ramakrishna order. He commented on these cases: “Yes it is true [meaning reincarnation], but it does not make any difference, because we in India have all believed in reincarnation and have accepted it as a fact, and yet it has made no difference. We have as many rogues and villains in India as you have in the West" (Venture Inward Magazine, September/October, 1995). These stories are appreciated mostly by Westerners, probably as a result of misunderstanding the original doctrine of reincarnation and also because of their pseudo-scientific outlook. The main argument for reincarnation in the East has another nature and will be analyzed next.
Usually it is said that the vehicle that carries the psychic impressions from one life to another is the subtle body (sukshma sharira in Vedanta) or the karmic deposit (karmashaya in Samkhya-Yoga). Although some say that these two elements act as a kind of unconscious memory of previous lives, they cannot represent a third ontological nature (different to both the self and the psycho-mental realm), which could play the role of a transmissible personal memory from one life to another. Karmashaya and sukshma sharira are a mere expression of the way karma records the debts of the past. As karma represents an impersonal and mechanical law which functions with mathematical precision, karma itself cannot justify one’s state at a certain moment. In other words, man cannot communicate with his karma. Karma is simply pushing the self into a foreordained scenario, without communicating which debts are to be paid from previous lives.
Even though some special meditative techniques are mentioned, which could render some limited information about past lives (for instance Yoga-Sutra 3.18 mentions the possibility to know the previous birth through practicing samyama), they are available only for the advanced Yogi. Even so, the veracity of the information gotten in altered states of consciousness is doubtful.
One’s karmic debts could at best be imagined intuitively. For instance, it is supposed that a man who was murdered took his just reward for a murder he did himself in a previous life. Not even the past life recall experiences give any information about the "sins" one did in his previous life, but only figure out cases when he was a victim or a simple observer of life around him. These kinds of experiences do not attempt to prove the justice of karma, but only that past lives are real. In other words, the "recalled" scenarios do not indicate which facts of the previous life produced the present incarnation, but only try to prove that we lived previous lives, that reincarnation is true and has to be accepted in our belief.
Because of the metaphysical considerations mentioned above, most Eastern gurus do not consider experiences of past life recall as valid proofs for reincarnation. At the time Stevenson was carrying out his studies among Indian children that remembered previous lives, he met an Indian swami of the Ramakrishna order. He commented on these cases: “Yes it is true [meaning reincarnation], but it does not make any difference, because we in India have all believed in reincarnation and have accepted it as a fact, and yet it has made no difference. We have as many rogues and villains in India as you have in the West" (Venture Inward Magazine, September/October, 1995). These stories are appreciated mostly by Westerners, probably as a result of misunderstanding the original doctrine of reincarnation and also because of their pseudo-scientific outlook. The main argument for reincarnation in the East has another nature and will be analyzed next.
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