5

PAST-LIFE RECOLLECTION

The evidence reviewed in the foregoing chapters suggests that it is possible to communicate with a human consciousness even when the body with which that consciousness has been associated is no longer alive. Here we look at an additional strand of evidence in support of this hypothesis: it is furnished by the practice of regression analysis. Hunches of having lived a previous life are reported by many people, but thanks to regression analysis there is now a more systematic and less anecdotal way of gathering and assessing the evidence.

“Regression” in psychotherapy means going back in the mind of a person beyond the range of his or her present lifetime. Normally this calls for shifting the consciousness of the patient into an altered state. Doing so may or may not require hypnosis; often breathing exercises, rapid eye movements, and a well-formulated suggestion are sufficient. When the patient reaches the appropriate state of consciousness, the therapist impels him or her back from memories of the present lifetime to memories that appear to be those of previous lives.

Moving patients back to early childhood, infancy, and even physical birth is seldom a problem for the therapists. Their patients relive the corresponding experiences, even to the extent that, if they stem from early infancy, they exhibit the involuntary muscle reflexes typical of infants.

It appears possible to go back further, to memories of gestation in the womb. And some therapists find that they can take their patients back still further. After an interval of apparent darkness and stillness, strings of anomalous experiences appear, memories that seem to be of other places and other times. The patients not only recount them as if they had read of them in a book or seen them in a film, but they relive the experiences. They become the person they experience, even to the inflection of their voice and the language they speak, which may be one they do not know in their present life.

Regression in altered states of consciousness is often taken as evidence that we had previous lives. Having lived before our present life and living again beyond it is an age-old belief. Evidence from the earliest burials shows that our ancestors interred their dead with great care and supplied them with tools and other utilities essential for their next life. Over four-and-a-half thousand years ago, Mesopotamian kings were buried with musical instruments, furniture, and even tools for gambling. Such was the belief in successive lives that soldiers and servants were sometimes ceremonially executed and their bodies placed in the burial chamber so they could serve their masters in their coming life.

On the Indian subcontinent a belief system of creation and emanation is still followed by hundreds of millions. For Hindus death is not the end of existence, but part of a repeating cycle. When life comes to an end, the immortal soul or subtle body of the individual is reborn in a new physical body that can be human or non-human. The cycle of birth and rebirth is samsara. This contrasts with the Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity, Islam) where a return to another life on the earthly plane is not recognized.

Psychologists have taken an interest in the phenomena also in the Western world. Sigmund Freud suggested that irrational fears and phobias might be based on forgotten or sublimated past-life experiences. Through hypnosis Freud was able to take his patients back to the source of these fears and phobias, enabling him to help his patients get rid of them. For Freud’s student Carl Gustav Jung, this was evidence of the existence of a collective unconscious in which each individual can access the memories of the broader consciousness that contains all human experiences. But for the mainstream in Western societies, the manifestation of previous life-personalities during hypnotic regression was a form of hysteria or mental illness.

Swedish psychiatrist John Björkhem took a more open-minded approach. Over a long career Björkhem conducted over 600 regressions, many of which involved subjects speaking in languages that were ordinarily unknown to them. A woman named “Mirabella” was able to write in twenty-eight different languages and dialects in her hypnotic trance state.¹

A SAMPLING OF PAST-LIFE RECOLLECTIONS

Between 1892 and 1910 the French researcher Albert de Rochas used hypnotism to regress a series of individuals. One of them was his cook, Josephine. Josephine proved to be particularly responsive to hypnotic suggestion. In a trance state she described being a man called Jean Claude Bourdon, a soldier in the French Seventh Artillery regiment based in Besançon. She described Bourdon as having been born in Champvent.

Later Josephine was regressed again; this time she recollected being a woman named Philomène Charpigny, who was planning to marry a man by the name of Carteron. In his 1911 book Successive Lives de Rochas described how he successfully checked out the details of both regressions and found that both individuals had existed and had experienced the life-events described by Josephine.²

De Rochas’ most prolific past-lifer was the wife of a soldier, whom he identified simply as “Madame J.” Over a series of regressions she described ten previous incarnations. In the first she died at the age of eight months old and was unable to identify who she was. The second session supplied more details. In this she was a girl named Irisee living in Imondo, a small town near Trieste in Italy. She described how she collected flowers for the priests and later offered incense to the gods.

Two other of De Rochas’ cases merit mentioning. The first involved a thirty-year-old Frankish warrior chieftain named Carlomee who was captured by Attila the Hun at the Battle of Châlons-sur-Marne in 451 CE. Madame J described how Carlomee had his eyes burned out. The second was that of a French soldier called Michel Berry who was born in 1493. He had a series of love affairs before being killed at the Battle of Marignano in 1515, dying of a lance wound. What is particularly odd about this past life is that Michel stated that he had experienced a precognition that he would die in this way.

De Rochas’ most discussed case has been that of eighteenyear-old Marie Mayo. In a trance state she went back to being an eight-year-old girl living in Beirut. She wrote her name in Arabic, but then moved on and became Lina, the daughter of a Brittany fisherman. At the age of twenty Lina married another fisherman called Yvon and a few years later had her first and only child. Sadly, the child died at the age of two. Later she described how her husband was drowned at sea and, in despair, she herself jumped off a cliff into the sea. De Rochas described how Marie became agitated at this point and went into convulsions.³

In the middle of the twentieth century a high-profile case of past-life recollections lifted the subject into the mainstream. In 1956 the book The Search for Bridey Murphy became a runaway best seller, first in the United States and then across the world. Morey Bernstein, a businessman from Pueblo, Colorado, described how he had discovered that he had a natural proficiency in hypnotism and that he decided to try out his newfound skills on the twentynine-year-old wife of a business associate, “Virginia Tighe.” In her hypnotic state Virginia began to speak in a deep Irish brogue. When Bernstein asked who she was, he received the reply that she was a young Irish woman called Bridget (Bridey) Murphy. Bridey said that she was the daughter of Duncan and Kathleen Murphy, Protestants living in the Meadows in Cork. Bridey said that she was born in 1798. Over a series of six taped sessions, Bridey supplied a considerable amount of evidence of her life in early nineteenth-century Ireland. In 1818 she married a Catholic, Brian McCarthy. She offered many details, including the church that Bridey and Michael frequented and the shops where she bought her food and clothing. She described how she traveled with Brian to Belfast, where Brian became a barrister and taught at Queen’s University. Bridey died in 1864 after a fall. In the hypnotic state Virginia Tighe, speaking as Bridey, described how she watched her own funeral and looked down at the headstone.⁴

Subsequently the Chicago Daily News sent a reporter to Belfast to check on the details supplied by Bridey. Two of the grocery stores mentioned by Bridey were found to have existed at the time of Bridey’s death. In one session Bridey had described a two-pence coin that was in use during her lifetime. This again was confirmed by the reporter. Further evidence was discovered in support of Bridey’s memories, such as the location of the Meadows just outside Cork. At the time of the regression sessions there was no evidence of such a location. However, researchers then found an 1801 map of the Cork area showing a large area of open pasture called the “Mardike Meadows” to the west of the city. In one session Bridey stated that the Meadows was sparely populated with no nearby neighbors. This was confirmed by the 1801 map.

Such was the interest in the case that Tighe took the name Ruth Simmons in order to protect her identity, but journalists managed to track her down. However, the rival newspaper, Chicago American, discovered that Virginia had an Irish aunt, Marie Burns, although in the book she had stated that she had no links to Ireland. Marie, it was claimed, had told her young niece many stories about Ireland. Even more suspicious was that during her childhood Virginia had lived opposite an Irishwoman named Bridey Corkell, whose maiden name had been Murphy.

But things were not quite as clear-cut as the article made them seem. Subsequent research by the Denver Post showed that Marie Burns was not of Irish birth, having been born in New York, and that she and Virginia had not met until Virginia (“Bridey”) was eighteen.⁵

In 1965 Bernstein published a new edition of The Search for Bridey Murphy, and this contained his rebuttal of the criticisms. In this book Bernstein quoted William J. Barker, a journalist who spent many weeks in Ireland checking out every statement Bridey made against authentic documents. Barker wrote that “Bridey was dead right on at least two dozen facts that ‘Ruth’ (Virginia Tighe, alias Bridey) could not have acquired in this country, even if she had set out deliberately to study up on Irish obscurities.”⁶

A researcher who continued to investigate the reality of past-life recollections was Anglo-American psychotherapist Dr. Roger Woolger. In 1989 Woolger published an influential book, Other Lives, Other Selves. In this he introduced his model of past-life memories in a therapeutic format.⁷ Woolger believed that present-life trauma and psychological problems may have their roots in past lives rather than in the current one. Initially Woolger had been taking a standard Jungian approach, until an event took place that shook his belief system. One of his clients was a woman suffering post-traumatic stress disorder after a major car accident. As part of his therapeutic approach, Woolger used hypnotherapy. Following his standard procedure, he hypnotically regressed the woman back to the car crash. She then relived in detail the events that had led up to the accident. There was, however, a new element that only emerged during regression. Woolger reported,

Not only did she relive the accident and release much buried trauma held in her body but she also proceeded to re-play the experience of watching herself from above as ambulance men pulled her body from the wreckage. She then saw her body taken to the hospital and undergoing surgery. Next she felt herself drifting up to a higher realm and meeting with beings of light she recognized as deceased members of her family, who told her that her work on earth was not finished and that she must return. She remembered the pain of coming back in to her body. Prior to the regression she had not “remembered” any of this.⁸

This is a classic NDE, coming about in the regressed state of consciousness induced by hypnosis. Woolger was fascinated by the implications and used regression analysis on himself. For years he had been plagued by images of torture and killing. He associated this with his lifelong fear of fire. He then discovered that he had been a mercenary soldier during the Crusade against the Cathars in thirteenth-century France.

Most of Woolger’s sessions evoked past-life memories that could not be identified with the lives of then-living persons. The lives Woolger elicited were often those of, in his words, “African tribesmen, nomadic hunters, nameless slaves, Middle Eastern traders, anonymous medieval peasants . . . lives cut short by famine, plague or disease at an early age.” He also evoked countless lives of young men dying on the battlefield.⁹

PAST-LIFE RECOLLECTIONS: WHAT THE EVIDENCE TELLS US

Do memories emerging in altered states of consciousness provide evidence that the individual has lived a previous life? This is a difficult question to decide. Why do only some people have memories of previous lives and not others? If all or at least most people had previous lives we would expect that many among them would have some recollection of them. But only a small segment of people have such “memories.” Could it be that most people have forgotten their past lives, as many spiritual traditions maintain? Or that the circumstances under which such memories surface are so specific that they are extremely infrequent? We do know that access to anomalous experiences often calls for entering an altered state of consciousness. For such experiences to be communicated, they need to be vivid enough to be recollected in the waking state. And if they are to be reported without fear of ridicule, they also need to be documented and supported by the experiences of other people. These conditions are not likely to be frequent. Thus it is not prima facie impossible that all or most people have lived previous lives even if only a very few among them can—and wish to—recollect them.

Whether people have had other lives in the past, and whether their recollections are bona fide memories of those lives, is not clear. Yet the evidence is powerful in regard to a basic point. Whether or not the memories that surface in the consciousness of people are memories of their own previous lives, or are fragments from the life of others, memories do surface that are not memories from the present lifetime of the individual. If this is true, then the consciousness of a person who had once lived does not vanish with the death of that person but can be reexperienced by a living person. This conclusion stands whether or not the person whose memories are reexperienced is the same person as the one who reexperiences them.