Eternity is a terrible thought. I mean, where’s it going to end?
Tom Stoppard
IAN Stevenson’s work on birthmarks and birth defects is important because, whether it succeeds or not, it is a valiant attempt to forge a scientific link between persistence of memory and persistence of personal identity—something which is essential if “proof” of reincarnation is ever to be found. Without such a link, all we are left with are memories. Can these ever be evidence enough for the persistence of individual identity? Martin Gardner examines the question of persistence of identity in The Whys of a Philosophical Scrivener and quotes John Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding:
For Locke, persistence of memory is the basis for persistence in time of a person’s identity, and this is independent of whatever material substances make up the body. If he could recall Noah’s Ark and the Flood as vividly as he recalls having seen the Thames overflow its banks last summer, Locke writes, he would assume it was he himself who had once occupied a body in Noah’s time.
This sounds persuasive, and yet Locke’s assumption fails on two counts. First, we have seen how untrustworthy even the most vividly recalled memories can be, and, secondly, even if we accept that these are genuine memories of a past life, does persistence of memory inevitably imply persistence of personal identity?
The experiences described in this book are memories. The people who have them seem to be aware of past events, usually through “visions,” sometimes in dreams. Often the vision is evoked by an encounter with a particular person or place. Sometimes these events can be explained rationally; occasionally they seem to be beyond the range of any existing scientific explanation. But even if we look for a possible paranormal explanation, does that explanation have to be reincarnation?
Apparent past-life memories may or may not have anything to do with reincarnation. Alternative, non-scientific theories might explain the phenomenon of past-life memories equally well, though this is not to say that they would confirm that reincarnation is a fact, let alone suggest a mechanism for it.
There is now considerable scientific evidence ( summarised very well in Dean Radin’s book The Conscious Universe) that parapsychological—psi—effects such as telepathy (the effect of mind on other minds), psychokinesis (the effect of mind on matter) and precognition (the ability of mind to gain information across time) do occur. As yet we can’t understand or explain them, let alone fit them into any coherent model of the human mind. At present they still remain outside the main body of scientific knowledge.
It is never satisfactory to explain away one set of phenomena we don’t understand by invoking another set of phenomena we don’t understand. Nevertheless, philosopher Stephen Braude has argued that an equally plausible explanation for the fact that some people seem to remember past lives is that they are people who have very special paranormal abilities. They acquire their memories through a form of “super-psi,” that is, through a combination of parapsychological effects such as telepathy and precognition.
Parapsychological experiments have recognised characteristics. To begin with, they are not repeatable in the way that is usually demanded by science. Quite often an experiment starts positively and then the effect decays with repetition. This is not surprising because parapsychological experiments involve consciousness, and one of the important aspects of consciousness is motivation. As people become bored or their motivation changes during an experiment, the results of the experiment are likely to alter. Secondly, the experimenter has an effect on the experiment. And, thirdly, there is what is known as a “sheep/goat” effect—that is, some people can and others cannot carry out the experiment successfully. If parapsychological phenomena are involved in past-life memories, these characteristics might provide one explanation for why it is that only a few people (usually those who already have some belief, or motivation to believe, in reincarnation) experience these memories.
Psychic phenomena are well known to occur independently of time. It is possible to influence an event that has already taken place, providing the outcome of that event is not known to anybody. For example, it is possible to change the distribution of numbers generated by a computer after they have been generated, providing they have not been looked at. From our scientific knowledge of parapsychological events, we can postulate that memories of a past life are nothing but the picking up of events that have already occurred in the past and experiencing them in the present. Reincarnation need not enter the picture. And this theory does seem to fit the fact that such memories don’t seem to be available as continuous experiences over long periods of time but as a series of highlights picked out of a life.
Another explanation that is often advanced for people’s apparent ability to acquire knowledge of the past is telepathy. Telepathy was suggested as an explanation for the strange collective memory of Arthur Guirdham’s group of reincarnated Cathars, for example, with Guirdham himself unwittingly transmitting his own knowledge of the Cathars to other members of the group.
In the case of the Cathars, at any rate, several things make this improbable. Even if we assume for the moment that there is unequivocal evidence that telepathy exists (and there is accumulating evidence that it does) it is still a pretty ineffective means of communication. Among the Cathars a great deal of information was accurately transmitted. It would have necessitated mind-reading on a heroic scale to achieve quite so many telepathic buff’s-eyes—more than even the best telepathic subjects have managed to produce. Telepathic information seems most usually to be transmitted as flashes, or images, often only approximate. The acquisition of such a wealth of detailed knowledge as the Arthur Guirdham group displayed is so far unprecedented in psi research.
Secondly, we would have to assume that the Guirdham Cathars, as a group, had astoundingly good telepathic ability. Not everybody has, and in fact those laboratories that have carried out serious experiments on telepathy have found that people who are consistently successful ESP subjects are very rare. To find a whole group of people who could communicate happily in this way stretches credulity to snapping-point.
Ian Stevenson has considered the possibility that some of the children he has studied who feel they have had past lives might have picked up information about a previous personality through ESP, but he has found no evidence that they have done so. He argues that if it were through ESP that these children had picked up information about a previous personality, there is no reason why their ESP should be limited only to this. One would expect them to show evidence of telepathy or precognition in their ordinary, present life, and they do not.
Nevertheless, the majority of convincing past-life memories are experienced as the kind of isolated flashes of imagery which are characteristic of telepathy. There is certainly some evidence of a link between belief in reincarnation and psychic experiences. Haraldsson and Houtkooper, in a multinational survey of human values, found that a belief in reincarnation was one of the best predictors of psychic experiences. Certainly, of the adults in our own sample who remembered past lives, a great many also believe that they are psychic or sensitive in other ways. Kathleen Cliff, for example claims that she often sees events before they happen as did her mother and grandmother. K. Holsman had precognitive dreams about Gandhi’s assassination on two consecutive nights, five days before the assassination took place. Mrs. Elizabeth Royce has had two very detailed past-life experiences. She is a healer who has had psychic experiences since she was a child and says that many of the healers she knows have also had past-life memories. Barbara Conduitt, an American who has lived in England for twenty-five, has often experienced episodes of thought transference with her sister in America. If thoughts can be transmitted between two people separated by 4,000 miles (6,450 kilometres), might this not, she wonders, happen also across time? She feels that some of her own past-life memories might be explained in this way. Barbara has memories of two past lives, the first of which is described on page 23. Of the second, she says:
My second life is that of a man living in London. He’s a fat, happy man, wearing a wig (with lice or fleas under it), riding down a busy street in a carriage. There are crowds of people on the streets and he’s excited and happy about his journey. He sits in the corner of the carriage, which is open-topped, leaning his right arm on the top of the carriage and waving his left about. I know he’s fat because I can see his pudgy legs, crossed, and see a red ribbon tied around the top of his trousers, which end at the knee. He is wearing white hose and shiny shoes.
Bless him, he’s a cheery soul, and I meet him almost every time I go to London! There are certain areas of the City (mostly around the Embankment) that I can feel the lice itching under my wig, and I find myself sitting in the exact way he sits. That’s how I became aware of him. It has happened so many times—each time in a little more detail. He is so happy. I’d love to know why—and where he is headed.
Researching the family tree, Barbara’s sister discovered an ancestor, one Thomas Larkin, periwig-maker, who lived in London in the seventeenth century. Was this, Barbara wondered, her “cheery soul”? And if so, might her apparent memories of him be due not to reincarnation but to thought transference?
Stewart Paxton often has strong flashes of a previous life as an eighteenth-century French landowner (his final memory is of seeing the sun glinting on the guillotine blade that was to end his life). He, too, says that he has some psychic ability: “I can see, psychically in some people, their past lives, their anxieties, and can offer psychic help.”
Sarah David (pseudonym) says that she is a spiritual person who likes to look into all aspects of the unknown, and is psychic in the way she senses things and gets premonitions. She has often felt that she has met someone or been to a particular place before:
One such strange incident was when I was visiting a friend in Fulham. I met him at his office, which is on the corner of a road which felt familiar. The actual interior of the office felt even more familiar. I kept getting a peculiar feeling about the place having been something like a shop before and that I had been there many times. But the oddest thing was a familiar warm, musky, delicious smell that I seemed to catch from time to time (sort of downwind) but that no one else could smell. I couldn’t really work out what it could be and forgot all about it.
A couple of weeks later I went into a baker’s in Wimbledon Village with my sister and recognised the same smell. I told my friend when I saw him again what the odour I had experienced in his office had been like. He told me that at one time many years ago there had been a baker’s shop there, where they had baked all their bread on the premises all day and night long. After making some enquiries I found out that the shop had been built some time early this century and was knocked down some twenty years ago. It was quite the strangest thing.
Heather Charles had a past-life experience and also recounts the following experience which she had one morning in 1987:
I sensed a terrible earthquake one morning as if it were about to happen in my bedroom. The hair on the back of my neck stood up. I looked at the window and felt as if a pressure wave were building up and the window would implode. I thought the house may be about to be hit by lightning, and I decided to dash downstairs quickly. As I moved, the oppressive atmosphere and the shaking of the floor ceased. I looked out and all was normal. I questioned my neighbours about thunder and any strange sensations they may have had in their homes that morning: everything was normal to them. It worried me all day, and later that day we heard on the news about the earthquake in Los Angeles and the descriptions of the earthquake with windows imploding was the same as the sensory experience I’d had that morning.
For many people ideas of “super-psi” or telepathy are probably easier to believe than the idea of reincarnation. A. J. Ayer writes in The Concept of a Person and Other Essays (page 127):
. . . even if someone could convince us that he ostensibly remembered the experiences of a person long since dead, and . . . this were backed by an apparent continuity of character, I think that we should prefer to say that he had somehow picked up the dead man’s memories and dispositions rather than that he was the same person in another body: the idea of a person’s leading a discontinuous existence in time as well as space is just that much more fantastic.
A different approach to the puzzle of past-life memories is to postulate a kind of cosmic memory bank in which all life experiences are recorded and into which any living mind can tap. If this were done without the person being consciously aware that he or she was doing so, the memories would seem to be personal memories of a previous life.
This is an attractive theory, as it fits in with our everyday perception of time as flowing only one way. Again, the problem is that we lack a mechanism. We can’t explain how the memories of thoughts, feelings, emotions are stored, as these are usually considered to be evanescent and transient. Neither do we know of any way in which events long in the past could be accessed and extracted from the memory store. We need a theory that could explain the possibility that mind can exist or memories be stored outside brain processes.
Such theories do exist. The first group are the “field theories,” which suggest that there is in the universe some “field force” that links individual minds. Jung’s concept of the collective unconscious is one such field theory. He suggested that part of the mind exists beyond individual brains and is a reservoir of human experience inherited from ancestors and contributed to by the current generation, independent of time and place.
A universe with this kind of structure has also been suggested by biochemist and cell biologist Rupert Sheldrake in his theory of morphic resonance. Sheldrake’s theory has the advantage that it does not differ violently from our current world view. He suggests that there is a field, which he calls the morphogenetic field, which interpenetrates the universe, is beyond time and space, and exists everywhere at once. Matter in widely separated areas can therefore be influenced by the field. He suggests that information relating to a pattern of behaviour can be transmitted from the brain to the morphogenetic field and modify it. The field in turn will modify other, similar brains so that they become more likely to reproduce this particular pattern of behaviour. The more similar the forms, the greater will be the resonance. Morphogenesis could explain why scientists in different laboratories who have no contact with each other often tend to make the same discoveries at more or less the same time.
Morphogenesis would also provide a mechanism whereby individual experiences in some way come to modify the structure of the morphogenetic field. If memories (information) are held in this way they would exist independently of the brain and therefore be accessible to another brain which “resonated” with them. Although this theory does not suggest that personal consciousness need necessarily continue, with a slight modification of the theory it is likely that a mechanism for the continuation of personal consciousness after death could be postulated.
Is this theory (which at the moment is just a theory with no real evidence to support it) any more successful than a theory of reincarnation in accounting for apparent past-life memories? It could explain how it is that occasionally more than one person remembers the same past life (though such duplicated memories are usually those of some famous or notorious person, which makes them dubious). It could also explain why most young children who remember a past life remember it only as a child, not as an adult. There is considerable structural difference between the brains of a child and an adult, and it seems unlikely that the brain of any two-year-old can have such “structural similarities” with the brain of a deceased adult as to induce “morphic resonance.” Presumably, a child’s brain “resonates” more easily with the brain of another child, although we don’t know what “resonate” really means.
The theory would also explain why most past-life memories have a “snapshot” quality. It would certainly explain telepathy, because if past-life memories are accessible via a morphogenetic field, memories from living individuals should be accessible in exactly the same way. Telepathy seems particularly to exist between people who are empathic to each other and whose brains might therefore be supposed to “resonate” with each other.
However, it wouldn’t explain why only a very few people pick up memories in this way, or why some children (Shanti Devi, page 11, for example) who have past-life memories do remember life as an adult. Neither would it satisfactorily explain the very few cases such as Laurel Dilmen, the Spanish Antonia (page 129), where the past-life experience has continuity and detail which give it the quality of a continuous life rather than of isolated random snapshots of memory. For the “best” cases of past-life memory, reincarnation is probably a better explanation than morphic resonance.
One serious problem about accepting telepathy as an explanation for acquired knowledge is that telepathy requires a sender as well as a receiver. The knowledge has to be transmitted by someone living, unless one takes a further step away from rationality and postulates possession by a dead person in the form of a discarnate personality. In essence, invasion by a discarnate entity is the same as reincarnation, except that the “invasion” of the body takes place after birth rather than at birth or before it. There is no logical reason to consider possession as a quite different phenomenon from reincarnation.
If we assume that some part of a human being, which we call “soul” or “spirit,” exists independently of the physical body, then memory of a previous existence can be attributed to this “spirit” rather than to the physical brain of its current human body. But in making this assumption we enter tiger country, tracking anecdote rather than evidence. There are many anecdotal accounts, for example, of out-of-body experiences during the near-death experience, when people feel that “they” (their soul or spirit) have separated from their body and been able to see themselves and their surroundings from some vantage-point outside their body. Several prospective studies are taking place to test this in hospital theatres or intensive-care units to see how many patients who have been resuscitated after being near death report leaving their body, and whether those who do can indeed gain information that they could not have got through their ordinary senses. If they can, it would strongly reinforce the concept that mind and brain are separate although interconnected.
More unusual is the following account by a New Zealand friend, a doctor who has seen many deaths, but on one particular occasion is convinced that he was aware of the moment a soul actually left the body.
I was . . . on the golf course about eight years ago when I was called over to the next foursome to someone who had collapsed. He had probably arrested after an MI [heart attack] and his colour was initially OK, although he had no pulse. I then “saw” something leave, starting from his legs and travelling up his body. It was harder to define what happened at his head. I have always regretted not doing CPR [cardiopulmonary resuscitation] at the time, as it may of course have brought him back. I have seen other deaths but nothing like that.
If we accept the concept that a soul or spirit does indeed leave the body at death, it opens up the possibility that memories of past lives are nothing to do with reincarnation but are simply communicated by these discarnate spirits, in much the same way as it is claimed that they communicate with spiritualist mediums. Mediums do not claim the memories they receive as their own, but they are quite clear that they are being used only as a channel through which these discarnate souls communicate. If we could prove that mediums are able to communicate with discarnate souls, it would offer no proof of reincarnation, but it would certainly prove what one might call the first principle of reincarnation—that a soul can survive the death of a physical body and carry the memories of that physical body within it.
The problem is that the history of mediumship, is littered with self-deception, frauds and charlatans. However, there have also been a few men and women whose paranormal abilities as well as their personal honesty are widely regarded as being above suspicion. If we can show that one human being is able in some way to pick up information from the dead, even if we can offer no explanation about how they do it, then we have also to accept that because nothing in nature occurs singly, this may be an ability that other human beings also have to a greater or lesser extent, even though they may not be aware of it. As William James, Professor of Psychology at Harvard University, memorably said: “To upset the conclusion that all crows are black, it is sufficient to produce one white crow, a single one is sufficient.”
The one white crow of the spiritualist world is usually considered to be Leonore Piper of Boston. Born in 1859, Mrs. Piper discovered her own ability as a medium when she went into a trance state while attending a seance conducted by a clairvoyant, J. R. Cocks. In the history of mediumship Mrs. Piper stands head and shoulders above the rest, a medium so successful that she could have earned a personal fortune, but who instead chose to devote her career to assisting psychical research. She was investigated both by Professor William James, on behalf of the American Society for Psychical Research, and then by Richard Hodgson. Richard Hodgson, a confirmed sceptic, was a founder member of the British Society for Psychical Research and had already investigated, and exposed as fraudulent, other mediums, including Madame Blavatsky, founder of the Theosophical Society and at that time the best-known mystic in the world.
In 1887 Hodgson went to Boston with the expressed intention of unmasking Mrs. Piper, and he tried every trick in the book to do so. He invited strangers off the street into her sittings at the last moment; he introduced all her sitters as “Mrs. Smith”; he hired private detectives to intercept her mail and read her letters; he had members of her household followed to make sure that they were not collecting useful information or setting up sittings. During her sittings he held lighted matches against her arm to see if she was genuinely in a trance state (she did not flinch, though her spirit guide, a Dr. Phinuit, complained of a slight feeling of cold). It was all to no avail. Mrs. Piper continued, through Dr. Phinuit, to tell her sitters intimate details about themselves and enabled them to speak with dead friends and relatives. Even when she was persuaded to visit England, where she knew no one and had no contacts who might have helped her gather information, her sittings were said to be equally astonishing.
Eventually, after four years of research, Hodgson put in his report to the SPR. He was forced to acknowledge that Mrs. Piper was not a fraud. At this stage, however, he still did not accept that she was in touch with the spirits of the dead, and he did not believe that her spirit guide, Dr. Phinuit, was genuine. Instead, he concluded that she was obtaining information about dead people telepathically from the minds of her sitters, and then unconsciously impersonating them.
Mrs. Piper apparently accepted Hodgson’s conclusions without complaint—she herself didn’t know what happened during a trance, so this seemed as good an explanation as any. Dr. Phinuit, however, was said to be furious, and at his next appearance insisted: “I am real. I once lived in a body and if those cranks weren’t so stupid they could find me.”
For Hodgson this was not quite the end of the matter. In February 1892 George Pellew, a Bostonian lawyer and a friend of Hodgson’s, was found dead outside a house. According to newspaper reports he was suffering from an eye infection that affected his vision and led to his accidentally falling down the area steps and striking his head.
Within a few weeks of his death. “GP” appeared at one of Mrs. Piper’s sittings, introducing himself to an old friend (“Mr. Smith”) who happened to be there. Asked if he could produce any proof that he really was Pellew, Mrs. Piper’s hand wrote a message that convinced the sitter of his identity. Hodgson immediately started to introduce Pellew’s old friends into the sittings, all under the name of Smith. Pellew recognised and spoke to 30 of them, picking them out from at least 150 other people who attended these sittings. What he said about his death confirmed the newspaper reports. He told his father he was alone when he died, and at one sitting said: “I fell down the steps, you know, accidentally. You know how I passed out . . .”
Hodgson was at last convinced, not just of the psychic ability of Mrs. Piper but of the ability of the human soul to survive death. In 1897 he produced a second report for the SPF, and this time his conclusions were unequivocal. He wrote: “I cannot profess to have any doubt that the chief communicators are veritably the personages they claim to be, and that they have survived the change we call death, and that they have directly communicated with us, whom we call the living, through Mrs. Piper’s entranced organism.”
Hodgson’s conversion was complete, but like many converts he abandoned immediately his critical faculties. He does not seem to have taken account of the fact that by the time “GP” first appeared, a few weeks after his death, Mrs. Piper could have picked up a good deal of information about Pellew simply from reading his obituaries. In his second report he mentioned that “GP” had been hesitant in his recognition of only one sitter—a young woman who had been a child when Pellew had last seen her. He failed to mention several other nonrecognitions, including someone who had been one of Pellew’s closest Harvard friends. Security surrounding these later sittings also appears to have been pretty lax. Many sitters knew each other, or knew Mrs. Piper in her non-trance state. It was no secret to Mrs. Piper, for example, that Hodgson was bringing friends of Pellew to the sittings to meet “GP.” And by this time Mrs. Piper was mixing socially with at least one of the sitters, Lilla Perry, who attended nearly all the sittings involving “GP.” Pellew had boarded with the Perrys for three years while he attended Harvard Law School, and there is strong evidence that he and Lilla had been in love.
But probably the most significant relationship was between Mrs. Piper and Hodgson himself. At first this had been at best uneasy, probably even hostile. Hodgson distrusted Mrs. Piper; she was said to be furious when she discovered she was under surveillance. By the time of his second report to the SPR in 1897, however, they had known each other for ten years and their relationship must have changed considerably as she gradually earned his respect. She would not have been human if she had not wanted to build on this respect, and the death of George Pellew may have provided her with just such an opportunity. Did she, perhaps unconsciously, want both to please him and to offer him irresistible proof of her mediumistic powers?
There seem to have been plenty of opportunities during the seances themselves for Mrs. Piper to have acquired information. Mrs. Piper’s hearing was acute, but people who were not sitting near her tended to whisper among themselves, assuming that they would not be overheard. Sitters were also advised to treat “GP” as if he were a living person, and indeed often seem to have fed him information. The transcripts of sessions during October and November 1896, for example, reveal Hodgson himself chatting informatively away to his dear departed friend, confiding that he had received a letter from Tom Perry to say they had changed their minds and were “not coming over now . . . Edith is here in Boston staying with some friends, but I haven’t seen her yet”.
Hodgson: Just before you go, George, I want to tell you that I’ve seen Edith and will bring her, not the next time nor the time after, but the time after that.
GP: Good, good, good.
RH: You’ll be surprised to see her. She’s an enormous great thing . . .
RH [two days later]: You’ll be ready for Edith tomorrow?
GP: You bet!
And with that amount of priming, you bet he would be.
Even more intriguing are the facts surrounding Pellew’s death. His death certificate showed that he did not die where his body was reported to have been found, but in a far less salubrious area of the city, outside one of the gambling dives he was in the habit of frequenting. The coroner’s report gave as the cause of death “dislocation of axis [that is, a broken neck] and Haemorrhage into Brain.” No autopsy was performed on the body, and without an autopsy there is no way the examining doctor could have known either whether the axis was dislocated or whether there was any haemorrhaging into the brain unless there was some obvious external injury to the skull. The report does not, however, mention any such injury. Why? James Munves, in a reassessment of the transcripts and the circumstances surrounding the whole Pellew affair, has pointed out that the Boston coroner’s office at that time was notoriously corrupt. Charles Pellew, George’s brother, led a life more respectable and far less louche than George. The sordid circumstances of his brother’s death might have been so potentially embarrassing to Charles that he persuaded the coroner to issue a false report, concealing both the location where the body was found and the existence of any head injury that might indicate foul play. The newspapers did not know this. The sitters at the seances did not know this. Most significantly, even “GP” himself did not appear to know this, or if he did he wasn’t prepared to share the information with anybody else.
So where does this leave our one white crow? Mrs. Piper was undoubtedly a remarkable woman, and by all accounts an honest one. She had hundreds of sitters, many of whom returned only a few times, sometimes with intervals of several years. And yet in her trance state Mrs. Piper would be able to pick up with them just where she had left off, remembering trivial personal details about them. One possibility is that she was able to pick up what was in her sitters’ minds through telepathy, though it is claimed that often sitters themselves were unaware of things she told them. But it is also feasible that in her trance state Mrs. Piper was able to access a wealth of stored information in the same way as cryptomnesic memories are accessed under hypnosis. We’ve seen how impressively cryptomnesia can operate in the pastlife regressions of, for example, Blanche Poynings and Joan, the Chelmsford witch. Imagine a state of consciousness in which could be recovered not just one particular set of forgotten memories but virtually any impression, any fact that has ever been registered in our memory banks. If Mrs. Piper’s memory operated in this way while she was in a trance state, it is no wonder she was so often able to astonish those who attended her sittings.
But was she truly able to communicate with the spirits of the dead? Certainly, before Hodgson’s conversion, he had carried out a thorough assessment of Mrs. Piper and was unable to find any glaring evidence of fraud. But from the evidence of the George Pellew sittings (which are, after all, the ones that made a convinced spiritualist of the sceptical Richard Hodgson) there has to be real doubt about this. It does look as though there are at least a few black feathers in the plumage of our one white crow.