Several years ago, and this was before I started researching reincarnation, I was very intrigued when I read about a young man in Sri Lanka who as a child, although he was being brought up as a Christian, recited unusual Buddhist chants. When he was a little older, his parents took him to various Buddhist monasteries and he remembered living in one of them in his past life with his teacher. The child's parents recorded his childhood chants, and experts have said that his pronunciation of Pali (a derivative of Sanskrit used in early Buddhist texts) was quite different from contemporary pronunciation. Even though I did not at the time believe for a moment that we can develop a science of reincarnation, I also had no doubt about the authenticity of the story. It prompted me to read more reincarnation data.
Such stories as above are not that uncommon even in Western culture. Even more common are stories of near-death experiences (NDE). I personally know several people who had such experiences and were deeply affected by them. But many scientists remain deeply skeptical, entrenched in a Newtonian belief system. The physician Raymond Moody, the first researcher to write about NDE, tells a revealing anecdote that I will paraphrase. Once Moody was giving a talk on his work and somebody from the audience, a surgeon, stood up and chastised Moody. “You are citing so many of your revived heart patients having near-death experiences. I, too, have performed many such life-saving operations. No patients of mine have ever reported having any such experience.” But then right from behind him, somebody else said, “We didn't tell you because you would not believe our experiences.”
This reminds me of a story. A young boy drew a picture. When he showed it to adults, they praised him for drawing a fine picture of a hat. “But it's not a hat,” said the young boy. “It's a dwarf elephant swallowed by a boa constrictor.” But despite the young boy's protests, the adults could only see a man's top hat.
Recognize the scenario? It is from Antoine de Saint-Exupery's The Little Prince. Perhaps this story best represents the inability of many scientists to acknowledge that there is substance in the death, dying, and reincarnation research of the past several decades, enough substance to guide theoretical research. These scientists suffer from what is sometimes called the “I will see it when I believe it” syndrome. Perhaps this book will help establish a different belief system that will bestow credibility to reincarnation, NDE, and the data from other survival research even for skeptical scientists.
But to you, open-minded reader, the data are already sufficiently credible, so I am sure you won't mind if I use the evidence to guide my theoretical endeavor. There are three kinds of evidence (this list is not inclusive, however).
* Experiences in connection with the altered state of consciousness at death. Deathbed visions, near-death experiences, and life-review experiences fall into this category.
* Reincarnation data: evidence of past-life recall, details of which have been verified and have passed scientific scrutiny; past-life recalls under hypnotic regression, under drugs such as LSD, and under other techniques such as holotropic breathing developed by the psychiatrist Stan Grof; past-life readings of others by people such as Edgar Cayce; people of unusual talent or psychopathology that cannot be explained as due to the conditioning experiences of this life alone.
* Data on discarnate entities: mediumship and channeling fall in this category, plus the data on angels, spirit-guides, automatic writing, etc.
The first kind of data is mostly explained as nonlocal experiences at death, more or less according to the model of the last chapter. The second kind of data fit that model to some extent, but not entirely. The third kind of data does not much fit that model. Prognosis: progress, but quantum nonlocality is not the whole story. Below I review some of the details of the data and the conclusions they lead to. Let me note, however, that my job is not to convince the reader about the authenticity of the data presented; the researchers whose data I discuss are credible scientists who have argued the validity of their cases as well as can be done. The skeptical reader should check the original references for their complete argument.
Let's look at the full range of accumulated scientific data about experiences at death. Anecdotal data, of course, go back millennia, but collection of what today we may call scientific data goes back only to the nineteenth century, roughly coincident with the establishment of the British Society of Psychical Research.
One class of evidence relates to the threshold of death, the dying experience. Suppose a person you love is dying, but unfortunately, you are not with her. And yet, suddenly you see hallucinatory visions pertaining to this dying person. Experiences of such deathbed visions communicated psychically from dying people to relatives or friends are not that uncommon. In fact, this kind of data goes back to 1889, when Henry Sidgwick and his collaborators began a five-year compilation of a “Census of Hallucinations.” Sidgwick discovered that a substantial number of reported hallucinations related to people who were dying (within a twelve-hour period) at a distance from the hallucinating subject.
More recent data is even more suggestive. In the study conducted by the psychologists Osis and Haraldsson (1977), the correlated well subject does not experience the hallucinations of a suffering, dying person; instead, the communications more closely represent ordinary ESP with another well person. But if a dying person can communicate the peace and harmony of a well person, must he not be experiencing a nonordinary state of consciousness? In such deathbed visions, the dying subject seems to transcend the dying situation which is, after all, painful and confusing (Nuland 1994). The dying subject seems to experience a joyful realm of consciousness different from the realm of ordinary experience. There is evidence that even Alzheimer's patients may recover lucidity when dying (Kenneth Ring, private communication with author).
Speaking of Alzheimer's patients, the physician-author Rachel Naomi-Remen (1996) tells the story of Tim, a cardiologist, whose father suffered from Alzheimer's when Tim was a teenager. During the last ten years of his life, Tim's father gradually became close to a vegetable state. However, one day, as Tim and his brother were sitting by him, he turned gray and slumped forward in his chair. Tim's brother instructed Tim to call 911. But before Tim could respond, the voice of his father that he had not heard for ten years interrupted, “Don't call 911, son. Tell your mother that I love her. Tell her that I am all right.” And he died. Later, autopsy showed that the brain was quite destroyed by the disease. Shakes up our ordinary concepts of dying, doesn't it?
In my view, the deathbed visions corroborate the theoretical model of the last chapter just about perfectly. The joy or peace communicated telepathically in deathbed visions suggests that the death experience is an intense encounter by the dying with nonlocal consciousness and its various archetypes. In the telepathic communication of a hallucinatory experience, clearly the identity with the painful, dying body is still strong. But subsequently, that identity is released; hence, the joy of quantum-self consciousness beyond the ego-identity is communicated unadulterated.
More well-known, of course, are near-death experiences in which the subject survives and recalls her own experience. In near-death experiences (NDEs), we find confirmation of some of the religious beliefs of many cultures; the experiencer describes going through a tunnel into another world, often led by a well-known spiritual figure of his tradition or by a dead relative (Moody 1976; Sabom 1982; Ring 1980). The NDE also gives direct support to the idea of the nonlocal window opening around the moment of death.
The psychologist Kenneth Ring (1980) has summarized the various, generally chronological aspects of the near-death experience. (See also Rinpoche 1993.)
The opening of the nonlocal window in the NDE is striking. NDEers (such as accident victims) see from above their bodies being operated on and often report extraordinary details (Sabom 1982). Clearly, there are no local signals to carry the information. So how else to explain this information transfer than quantum nonlocal viewing in conjunction with somebody else's (for example, the surgeon's) viewing (Goswami 1993). The most recent data is showing that even the blind can “see” in this way; they are not encumbered by the fact that their own vision is inoperative (Ring and Cooper 1995); they must be seeing telepathically (that is, nonlocally) in synchronicity with someone else's viewing.
There is no need to see a contradiction here just because the NDEers usually report seeing their bodies while hovering at the ceiling while the operating surgeon's (or of the assisting nurses') perspective, although one from above, is not exactly the same one. The explanation is similar to that of mental telepathy—while the surgeon looks at the operating table getting the actual information, consciousness collapses a similar actuality from quantum possibilities available in the correlated NDE subject's brain. Thus, minor differences, such as in the viewing perspective, can easily arise.
That near-death experiences are encounters with nonlocal consciousness and its archetypes is borne out by this direct data. A new dimension of NDE research is that when the survivors' later lives are studied, it is found that the NDE often has led to a profound transformation of the way these people live their lives. For example, many of them no longer suffer from the fear of death that looms in the psyche of most of humanity (Ring 1992). And, in general, survivors of NDE are able to live a life dedicated to love and selflessness, suggesting spiritual transformation manifesting from the insight gained in the near-death encounter with the quantum self.
What is the explanation of the specific imagery described by near-death subjects? Near-death patients have a lessening of the body identity—the ego is not busy monitoring the body. This state is much like a dream state, much like what Jungian psychologists call a “big” dream. So as in the big dream, in NDE also, one experiences archetypal images such as Buddha or Christ, but where do the images come from in big dreams or in the NDE? In agreement with neurophysiological models (Hobson 1990), I think that we construct the images out of the Rorschach of random electromagnetic noise always available in the brain. However, this noise is quantum in nature; it represents quantum possibilities and is not classical and deterministic as the neurophysiologists assume. Consciousness collapses suitable patterns into meaningful pictures as it recognizes them.
The key point in the NDE is the lessening, even release, of the ego-identity, which allows the subjects to remember archetypal images that they don't normally recall. The images visualized—spiritual figures, relatives such as parents or siblings—are clearly archetypal.
This way of looking at the near-death experience should also put to rest the debate about whether the experience of light reported in NDE is simply a physiological phenomenon or something deeper and significant. In my way of looking, it is both. What the materialists miss is that the near-death subjects work with what is physiologically available in their brain, but they make new meaning out of it, much as we do in a creative experience when we transform a mundane scene into a new insight. In other words, consciousness, and not the brain, orders the neurological events into a unique, spiritual experience.
Finally, many near-death subjects report life-review experiences during which their entire lives, or at least a significant portion of them, flash before their eyes. (For a review, see Greene and Krippner 1990.) This is crucial for our model to work. As the dying person has a life-review experience, the aborning child of the next incarnation shares the memory recall. And it becomes part of the childhood reincarnational memory of the next incarnation.
A disturbing discordance, however, exists with the super-ESP theory of the last chapter in the fact that the NDE subjects insist that they experience being “out” of their body; they experience being light and having no body feelings such as pain. Clearly their identity must shift away from their physical body during the NDE, but to what? Can it be to a discarnate soul as they seem to claim?
The evidence for reincarnational memory is obtained mainly from children remembering their past lives in details that can be verified. University of Virginia psychiatrist Ian Stevenson has accumulated a database of some 2,000 such claimed-reincarnational memories which have many characteristics that have been verified.12 In some cases, Stevenson actually accompanied the children to the villages of their remembered past lives. The children had never been to these villages; yet they seemed familiar with the scenery and were able to identify the houses in which they lived. Sometimes the children recognized members of their previous families. In one case, the child remembered where some money was hidden in his previous life, and the money was found in the remembered place.
Not only Stevenson has collected such data. Consider the case, studied by L. Hearn at the end of the nineteenth century, of the Japanese boy named Katsugoro who at age eight claimed to be Tozo, the son of a farmer in another village, in another life a few years earlier. He also said that his father had died when he was five in his previous life and he himself had died a year later of small pox. He gave many details of his previous birth, for example, the description of his parents and of the house in which they lived. When Katsugoro was taken to the village of his previous life, he was able, unaided, to find the house in which he lived then. All together, sixteen items of his past-life recall checked out (Hearn 1897). (See also Stevenson 1961.)
Swarnalata Mishra, who was born in Shahpur, India, in 1948, is another remarkable case. Swarnalata began having past-life memory recall at age three when, on a trip to a nearby city, she suddenly asked the driver to go down “that road” which led to “my house.” In the next several years, she related things and events of her past life as a girl named Biya Pathak, describing her house and family car (an unusual possession for an Indian family at the time). At one point, she met the wife of a professor whom she recognized as an acquaintance from that past life and remembered the wedding they had attended together. The professor's wife confirmed this and many other statements made by Swarnalata of her life as Biya. Swarnalata's case was investigated by a reputable Indian reincarnation researcher, Dr. Hemendranath Banerjee, and also later by Ian Stevenson, and many items from her huge paraphernalia of past-life recall checked out, especially the long list of acquaintances (Stevenson 1974).
Another remarkable corroborated reincarnation story, that of Nicola Wheater, comes from two researchers, Peter and Mary Harrison (1983). Nicola recalled her past life as a young boy named John Henry Benson of a nearby village in Yorkshire, England, during the last part of the nineteenth century (a hundred years before Nicola's time). When she was two, Nicola said things like, “Why am I a girl this time?” and “Why am I not a boy like I was before?” to her parents. Soon the little girl remembered many more things about her past life and expressed them so coherently and with such consistency that her mother felt compelled to take her to the village of her past life. Here Nicola guided her mother to the house where she had lived in the previous century. And to her great amazement, the mother found the local church registry showing the birth of a boy named John Henry Benson.
All of this data generally fits with the theoretical picture of the last chapter. You can find more details in the books and articles cited as well as in many recent books on the subject. Read, for example, Cranston and Williams 1984 and Viney 1993.
So far I have discussed cases in which only one life was recalled because these are the cases that could be corroborated to a large extent. There are, however, many cases of multiple-life recall, even as many as nine in the case of a South African girl.13 Thus, the idea of a nonlocal window that connects past, present, and future incarnations of a monad and that opens during special moments such as the time of death seems to be vindicated.
If the current model is correct that reincarnational memory is formed at a very early age via nonlocal communication from the dying self of the previous life, there is one way to verify this. If adults can be induced to regress to childhood, they may be able to remember past-life experiences better. Indeed, Banerjee has a few cases in which he was able to obtain many more details from his reincarnation recallers under hypnosis.
The psychiatrist Stan Grof has elicited past-life recall in many subjects under LSD and with a new technique—holotropic breathing—all of which have given much good data about reincarnational-memory recall that basically confirms the model of the last chapter. This is what Grof says about his cases of reincarnational-memory recall:
They [the reincarnational memories] feel extremely real and authentic and often mediate access to accurate information about historical periods, cultures, and even historical events that the individual could not have acquired through the ordinary channels. In some instances, the accuracy of these memories can be objectively verified, sometimes in amazing detail. . . . The criteria for verification are the same as those for determining what happened last year: identify specific memories and secure independent evidence for at least some of them. . . . I have myself observed and published several remarkable cases, where most unusual aspects of such experiences could be verified by independent historical research (Grof 1992).
I leave it up to the reader to read specific cases that Grof found satisfactory.
If you grow up in India, it is not unusual to hear of a child who remembers his past-life experiences. Parents and siblings are quite sympathetic with that. The same is true in Tibet. “It is common for small children who are reincarnations to remember objects and people from their previous lives,” says the current Dalai Lama. “Some can even recite scriptures, although they have not yet been taught them.” In fact, Tibetans put this to good use in locating reincarnated lamas and rinpoches.
But it is relatively rare in Western culture. The English romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley believed in reincarnation. One day, while in a conversation with a friend, he came across a woman carrying a child. Immediately, he became interested. “Will your baby tell us anything about preexistence, madam?” he asked the mother. When the mother answered, “He cannot speak, sir,” Shelley cried with an air of deep disappointment, “But surely the babe can speak if he will. . . . He may fancy perhaps that he cannot, but it is only a silly whim. He cannot have forgotten entirely the use of speech in so short a time.”
But some babies, even in the West, do remember and do speak of preexistence as soon as they are physically able to speak. The following episode would have pleased Shelley. An autistic five-year-old was brought to Helen Wambach, a clinical psychologist. This child, Linda, was severely withdrawn and refused all contact with the therapist until through role-playing she was allowed to repeatedly force-feed her therapist from a baby bottle. Now Linda was able to reveal how much she hated the helplessness of infancy. Contact was now established and rapid progress followed, and soon Linda was like any other five-year-old.
Now what is also interesting in this case is that, as an autistic child, Linda possessed high math and reading skills, skills she lost when she became normal. Wambach says that Linda's autistic behavior was due to the child's holding on to the adult identity of a previous life. When she came to accept her new condition of a child with the help of her therapist, she gave up her adult identity and lost her adult skills (Wambach 1978).
But in Western culture, reincarnational-memory recall is still considered weird (although this is changing somewhat); so children who have it are not encouraged. Wambach reports another case in which a hyperactive child, Peter, was brought to her. After some reassurance, Peter began to confide to her about his former life as a policeman and how he resented not being allowed adult privileges like smoking. Of course, his parents had discouraged and forbidden him from talking about his previous life as a policeman (Wambach 1978).
Not all children who remember a past life become autistic, but repression of such memory is common in this culture. But such suppressed memory can be recalled under hypnosis. Although hypnotic regressions get a bad rap because too many subjects remember being such famous historical people as Cleopatra in their past lives (it is difficult to sort out fantasies from a genuine reincarnational-memory recall), there is good data of hypnotic past-life recall as well. (Read Wambach 1978, 1979; Netherton and Shiffrin 1978; Lucas 1993.)
The phenomenon of reincarnational memory likely occurs through the open nonlocal window of the individual, but there are subtleties that do not fit. For example, take the above-cited case of Swarnalata. When Swarnalata met with the family of her previous incarnation as Biya, she was found to take on the appropriate character as well. She behaved like the child that she was in her usual surroundings of her current life, but when with the Pathak family, she became Biya in character; she behaved like the older sister to people who were many years her senior. Helen Wambach's subject, the autistic child Linda, retained math and reading skills from her past life. So what brings the conditioning of the past life into this life? The model we have at this point has no answer.
There are still other data that don't fit well either. Stevenson (1987) has correlated phenomena of special talents with reincarnational memory. But special talent is not the result of memories of content that the model of the last chapter can handle; instead, special talent refers to memories of a propensity or learned contexts of thinking. Xenoglossy, the phenomenon in which children (or even an adult occasionally) speak a language that they have not learned in this life, also falls in this category.
I have quoted the Dalai Lama above as saying, “Some [Tibetan children] can even recite scriptures, although they have not yet been taught them.” But this ability of reciting scriptures cannot be explained as reincarnational-memory recall by itself. Furthermore, when Tibetans look for the reincarnates of their rinpoches and lamas, they depend more on such transmigrated qualities as the ability to read scriptures than reincarnational-memory recall.
Reincarnation researchers find that subjects of past-life recall often have character traits that cannot be explained from genetic or environmental conditioning. Says the psychologist Satwant Pasricha about her research data:
The present study revealed certain physical and psychological characteristics in the subjects that were unusual for their families but that corresponded well with those of the identified previous personalities. Except in five [out of sixty] cases, in which the subjects were biologically related to their claimed previous personalities, the hypothesis of genetic transmission cannot adequately explain such unusual behavior on the part of the subjects. Where the genetic theory has failed to explain the inheritance of physical and psychological traits, the hypothesis of reincarnation may offer an explanation for them (Pasricha 1990).
How is a Mozart able to play piano so well at the age of three or a Ramanujan able to become such an expert at summing infinite mathematical series without any exceptional mathematical training in his background? The usual answer, genetic or environmental conditioning, seems utterly inadequate in such cases. Genes are instructions to make proteins, nothing more. There are no special-talent genes that some people inherit. And the presence of environmental conditioning can be checked in each individual case of a child prodigy. Indeed, there are a substantial number of cases, such as Ramanujan, for whom appropriate environmental conditioning is conspicuously lacking to explain the special talent. These are the cases for talent due to past-life conditioning, no doubt, but our theory needs additional new ideas before it can explain such cases of predisposition from a past life.
Stevenson has also correlated certain phobias with past lives. Phobias, in psychoanalytic theories, are avoidance conditioning connected with childhood traumatic experiences. But cases exist where no such childhood trauma occurred. In the same vein, there is neither any genetic nor environmental explanation of gender confusion, such as cross-dressing. So a logical explanation is that these are cases of conditioning flowing from a past life into this life (Stevenson 1974, 1987; Guirdham 1978), and never mind that this does not agree with the model of the last chapter. This is just another evidence that my simple model has to be extended.
The important thing to recognize is that if phobias are reminders of past-life traumatic conditioning, regression into a past life should have therapeutic advantage.
There is evidence that reincarnational-memory recall under hypnosis has been used quite successfully for therapeutic purposes. I will quote from the back cover of a bestseller:
A blind woman cured when she confronts what she wished she had not seen a hundred years ago . . . An anorexic compensating for her prior life of insatiable greed . . . A coward who relives his own murder . . . (Goldberg 1982)
Such books relate how eliciting such reincarnational memory can be therapeutic. My first inclination, like so many hard scientists, was to dismiss this data as a mere therapeutic gimmick with little or no substance, but several things contributed to changing my mind. First and foremost, I myself underwent a past-life regression session back in the 1970s. Although I can see how difficult it is to distinguish between pure fantasy and what came up for me during the session, still two of the episodes remembered made a strong impression on me regarding my psychological tendencies. Second, I myself have discussed the subject with reputed past-life therapists such as Roger Woolger, and the methodology seems utterly credible to me. Third, over the years, I have listened to many past-life regression stories in connection with my travels and/or in connection with my teachings and several of them have stood out. I will give an example from a woman who took a course on “physics of the soul” from me. In her own words:
My spiritual studies began . . . in what appeared to be an accidental way. I was a member of a traditional church, twenty years old, and recently married. I had no interest in learning about spirituality—feeling perfectly satisfied with life as I was living it. At that point my husband's air force career took us to a new location and I began a new teaching career. . . . Soon thereafter, things began to unravel for me.
The stresses of moving away from family and beginning a new career and a new marriage were compounded by my husband's job sending him away on a two-month training assignment. Something about this experience triggered an extreme reaction within me—one that I had never experienced before and had no way of dealing with. I became extremely anxious and afraid of the experience of being “left behind” by my husband going away on his assignment. I saw other air force wives in similar situations that were coping with this quite differently, so I knew my reaction was out of proportion to the experience. Up until that point in time, I had handled stress very well—working, going to school on a year-round schedule, and moving frequently as a child in a naval family. So when I began to experience severe anxiety which led to actual anxiety attacks, accompanied by depression, I was mystified. My state of mind had been so completely normal to that point in time that I did not even have words for the feelings I was having. . . .
This engaged all my coping mechanisms as I tried desperately to regain my mental and emotional balance. Having always had a spiritual connection through my religion, I turned to our minister for help. There was none available from that source. What I was experiencing was foreign to him. Something inside of me felt betrayed. I had dutifully followed all the church's rules in order to go to Heaven when I died—and yet I was living a veritable hell on Earth right then! I began to search for answers outside of my church, through reading everything that seemed to have answers for me.
During this time of searching, I came across the writing of Edgar Cayce, in which reincarnation was mentioned. This was my first exposure to the concept. It made sense to me, so I searched further. I found the writings of Ruth Montgomery, in particular, a book titled Here and Hereafter. That book was a godsend to me at the time. In the book, Ms. Montgomery explains the concept of reincarnation and gives examples of people who had found help and solace through discovering their past lives. And at the end of the book she explains how a person can go into a meditative state and actually begin to recall their own past lives. I began to practice this, and recall came to me quickly and easily. The puzzle began to be solved.
The first recall I had was a lifetime with my husband about one hundred years ago. In that lifetime I was living in Denver, Colorado, during the Gold Rush days. I was a saloon girl whose job was to entertain the men (certainly not a very respectable profession by my standards today!) However, at the time, and due to my circumstances, it was the only way I could support myself. Things were fine for me, until one day a stranger (my husband of today) came to town and into the saloon where I worked. There was an instant recognition between us. (As it turned out, we had spent many lifetimes together before that.)
I immediately felt the connection and wanted to go with him and leave behind my life in the saloon. However, he was a gold miner, living with all his belongings strapped to a single mule. He had no way to support a wife or family. So he left me there. What had been an acceptable life to me before that time now appeared sordid and undesirable. From that point on, in that lifetime, I sank into a state of despair and eventually was murdered in my bed.
The recognition of the similarities instantly clicked within me and I knew why I was feeling so anxious and afraid. While I wouldn't say the healing was instantaneous, it certainly opened up doors of understanding in my consciousness that led to my healing. [I might paraphrase: “Consciousness is the ground of all healing.”] Something in me remembered that he had left me before, not actually of his own choosing then either. Something in me remembered that I became despondent. And something in me remembered that I wanted to die so badly that I actually attracted the circumstances for that to happen. I felt like it was happening all over again! Naturally, I was terrified of sleeping alone, for I knew what had happened before. The mystery began to clear up and my peace of mind returned.
At that point in time, I doubt that anything could have convinced me of the validity of reincarnation except a direct experience with it. Consequently, I am very understanding when others don't accept it. It is something that has to be experienced to be really believed. Otherwise it's just an interesting theory. For me, it is not a theory. It's a reality that quite literally saved my life or, at the very least, my sanity (Anonymous, private communication with author).
Surveys collected by serious researchers during regression sessions also support reincarnation. Consider for example the research of Helen Wambach. Wambach has researched 1,088 regression cases and has tabulated the distribution of the recalled past lives as a function of sex, race, and socioeconomic class, and has even correlated the data with the population-growth curve. She found that irrespective of the gender of the regressee, the past lives of her subjects were distributed quite evenly across sex: 50.6 percent male, 49.4 percent female, in almost exact correspondence with the gender distribution in the actual population. The same result was found for the distribution of race, even though Wambach's patients were mostly white. Similarly, the socioeconomic breakdown of the past lives followed historical trends. Among lives of older times that were recalled, only about 10 percent were upper class, the rest poor. But the percentages changed in more modern cases in agreement with the change of our socioeconomic spectrum.
And interestingly, the time distribution of the recalled lives was found to follow the empirical population growth curve. So here is another answer to the population paradox of soul-thinking. How can a fixed number of souls keep up with the population explosion? Wambach's answer: souls take birth at a greater and greater frequency as time progresses. (This research is reported in Viney 1993.)
Legend has it that Buddha could see five hundred of not only his own but also others' past lives. This is not historically documented, but there are some historical cases of people, the best known recent example being Edgar Cayce, who are able to read other people's reincarnational past lives (Sugrue 1961). Cayce, under hypnotic sleep, gave about 2500 such past-life readings, sometimes more than once but never contradicting himself. Sometimes his readings involved period aspects of history that could later be checked. One time he read a person's past-life occupation to be a “stool-dipper,” but he himself did not know what that entailed. Research showed that indeed such an occupation was part of early Americana; stool-dippers strapped supposed-to-be witches on stools and dipped them into cold water.
How could a person like Cayce look into the nonlocal window of another individual? Cayce's own answer was “Akashic memory,” for which an acceptable translation is nonlocal memory, but I think a more tangible explanation exists in terms of the nonlocal window of our model. The point is that, in principle, consciousness is one; thus, any person's nonlocal window that connects all of her incarnations is open to everyone who knows how to look, but this is a very unusual capacity. In India, it is said that such capacity comes naturally with liberation. Clearly, Cayce had it.
We have been speaking of data regarding experiences that involve people in the manifest reality, but there is very controversial data of people—mediums, mostly—who claim to communicate directly with the dead person in the afterworld. Entire scenarios—all extremely dualist—of the afterworld have been built, based, perhaps, on this kind of evidence. I will discuss this evidence and how we may deal with it in more detail in the next couple of chapters, but here is a preview.
By far the most romantic, the most puzzling, the most controversial data regarding after-death survival are those in which a living person (usually a medium in a trance state) claims to speak for a person who has been dead for some time and inhabits a realm beyond time and space. Here seems to be evidence not only of the survival of consciousness after death but of the existence of a dualistic “soul” living without a physical body.
Naturally the evidence is controversial because there seems to be no way to ascertain whether the data is concocted by the medium, especially when cases of fraud are abundant. Even about data for which fraud is not an issue, the researcher Michael Grosso has this to say:
After studying the best of the case material, however, one is driven to the conclusion that the great mediums were either (1) obtaining information from minds deceased and discarnate, or (2) creating compelling illusions of deceased people by obtaining all the relevant information by paranormal means, often from a variety of sources (minds of living people and written or photographic records) and then instantaneously synthesizing these scattered data and creating convincing personas of known deceased people (Grosso 1994).
But there is somewhat compelling evidence of survival, even in mediumship data, which is obtained via “cross correspondence,” in which the deceased communicates an integrated message divided up into several pieces through several different mediums (Saltmarsh 1938). In this case, it is difficult to argue how a particular medium could get the information from a living person by telepathy. Against this data, one can still argue that maybe the mediums concerned were unconsciously creating the appearance of cross correspondence. Or perhaps they were synchronistically tapping into the nonlocal window of the deceased in just the right way; maybe the purity of the intention of the deceased along with that of the psychics was enough to create these synchronous events of intrigue. In any case, clearly, this kind of mediumship data need not be taken as evidence of what they are purported to be—communication with a conscious discarnate soul.
Anyway, this aspect of the mediumship data concerns content of the dead person's history and therefore, at best, proves the medium's ability to tune into the nonlocal window of the dead.
Of more significant importance is the data on channeling. Here again commercialism and fraud abound. Even so, there have been channels and channeled entities that are intriguing because the channelers seem to take on the character of the channeled entity, which is strikingly different from the channeler.
A spectacular example is provided by the case of “Lydia Johnson,” a thirty-seven-year-old housewife, a case studied by Ian Stevenson and cited by Sylvia Cranston and Carey Williams (1984). Lydia initially was helping her husband with his experiments on hypnotism. But soon, with help from another hypnotist, she began to channel an entity named Jensen Jacoby, a name she pronounced as “Yensen Yahkobi,” who lived in a tiny village of Sweden three centuries ago. As Jensen, Lydia spoke Swedish and recognized seventeenth-century Swedish objects; most tellingly, as Jensen she would forget how to use modern tools such as pliers. The case of the psychologist Jane Roberts and the channeled entity Seth is another outstanding example of the channeling of an entity very different in character from the channeler, and it showed. When channeling, Jane's character changed; she behaved like an intellectual male, for example (Roberts 1975).
I myself have witnessed a channeler in action, JZ Knight, who channels an entity named Ramtha, supposedly an enlightened being. In this case, also, there is a remarkable change in character when JZ channels Ramtha; literally, her behavior becomes that of a dominant male guru, quite different from her ordinary pattern of behavior. This change endures for hours at a time.
I will share with you one of my encounters with JZ while in the process of channeling Ramtha. I have checked with JZ herself and also with her associates and it seems that JZ is not much of a drinker. But on this occasion, JZ as Ramtha was giving a party when I found her guzzling wine, and yet she remained so unaffected that she shared, quite poetically, Ramtha's experiences of migrating from Atlantis to India when the Atlantis civilization was being destroyed. Never mind the content of what she said, but the change of her character was so remarkable that ever since I have never doubted the authenticity of the channeling phenomenon.
In another remarkable case of channeling in Brazil, the channeled being is a German surgeon, Dr. Fritz. Dr. Fritz has been channeled by a series of channelers, all of whom are ordinary people with no surgical skills. But while channeling Dr. Fritz, they successfully and rapidly perform complex surgery without anesthesia or proper hygiene.
Remarkable as these performances are, could such channelers be faking a change in character? The paranormal researchers Gilda Moura and Norman Don have done a study that substantially rules out fraud. Moura and Don wired up a channeler's brain to an EEG machine and found that his brain waves changed uncharacteristically from ordinary low frequency beta (around 30 Hz) to very high frequency beta (over 40 Hz) when he performed surgery. High frequency beta is characteristic of a great amount of concentration. Surgeons exhibit it in their work, but not ordinary people who are faking surgery (Moura and Don 1996).
A similar study has also been carried out on JZ Knight using eight simultaneous psychophysiological indicators. All of the indicators show significant changes between JZ's ordinary performance versus that when she is channeling. It would be impossible to fraudulently pass all eight indicators, conclude the scientists (Wickramsekera et al. 1997).
Another interesting class of data come from people purportedly communicating with angels and spirit guides. It seems that these entities lend character patterns to the subjects that make the subjects capable of fulfilling tasks that would normally be considered impossible for such subjects. For example, the Christian priest Padre Pio is supposed to have had the help of his guardian angel in translating Greek, a language unknown to the Padre (Parente 1984). (See also Grosso 1992.)
One of the most famous cases of angelic interference saving one's life happened to the best-known magician that ever lived, Harry Houdini. On December 27, 1906, Houdini was performing one of his best and riskiest tricks, jumping handcuffed in ice-covered water through a hole, escaping from the handcuffs, and coming out through the hole. On this particular time, though, something went wrong; when Houdini did not emerge after five minutes—the escapade usually took him no greater than three minutes—reporters declared him dead. Fortunately, Houdini did make it back after eight minutes. And he did not contract hypothermia.
What happened was that currents swept him away this time, disorienting him from using the usual air pockets trapped between the river and the ice sheets and preventing him from doing his trick. He was also contracting hypothermia fast and did not know where to swim and how to return. Suddenly he heard his mother's voice guiding him to swim in the direction the voice was coming from. He also felt sudden and inexplicable warmth. The combination enabled him to get out of the handcuffs and emerge through the hole.
Was his mother communicating to Houdini telepathically? But how would she know where to guide her son? Also that does not explain the inexplicable warmth. A better explanation is angelic lending of an extraordinary sense of direction (the mother's voice was an external projection), and of the unusual power of generating heat (Goldberg 1997).
To summarize, then, there seems to be enough data to warrant the hypothesis of discarnate beings, or souls. First, there are out-of-the-body experiences, in which the subjects claim to have shifted identity to a discarnate body, albeit temporarily. Second, there are unexplained propensities or tendencies; if they are reincarnational, how can propensities be transmitted without transmigration of some element of the ego-being? Third, mediums seem to be able to channel entities whose character they assume temporarily. Fourth, ordinary people often receive guidance from discarnate entities (spirit guides) because they, too, it seems, are able to take on character patterns very different from their ordinary being.
So we come to the quintessential question: Is there an individual soul? Do we have bodies other than the physical that bestows the monad/sutratman of the last chapter with individuality? Is there a discarnate body after death that transmigrates and brings to the next life the propensities acquired in this life? Is it possible that mediums communicate with discarnate bodies in transition? And are there permanent or semipermanent discarnate bodies, angels and such?