Past life memories: Fenwick excerpt #14

Professor Erlandur Haraldsson, of the University of Iceland, studied the personalities of 30 Sri Lankan children who claimed past-life memories. Although he was only able to verify a few of these cases, his main aim was to try to identify common characteristics in children who had these memories. Did they show a tendency to dissociate – and how did they get along with their parents? If they did not, then the child might have a good reason for feeling he actually belonged to somebody else.

What he did find was that the children who had past-life memories were usually very bright and mature for their age. They had greater verbal skills, better memory and were more serious, less likely to fool around in school. If one assumes that past-life memories are quite common in early childhood, but are quickly forgotten, then perhaps it is only the early talkers who could speak about them before they vanished completely. But he found no evidence that such children were socially isolated, suggestible, had a tendency to dissociate or had relationship problems within the family - in fact that they were no more likely to create this fantasy world than any other children.

These are the most common features of a previous life:

·   They died a violent death, often related to a phobia in their present life. Of 52 reincarnated children who had died by drowning, 42 had a fear of water (Stevenson, 1990)

·   There are birthmarks which correspond to an injury at the time of death in the previous life e.g., bullet wounds, or reproduction of injuries e.g., missing fingers. It has also been suggested that previous lives might be a factor that contributes to the development of human personality.

·   Nightmares related to the previous life are common.

·   The time most frequently seen (mode) between death and rebirth is estimated to be about four and a half years. But the mean is much longer, in the teens.

·    After a few years the child starts discussing their previous life and attempts are then made to verify what they say. In some of these cases correspondence is remarkably high.

·   Most children lose their past-life memories by the age of 6.

·   Ian Stevenson noted that many children appear to be in a partial trance when they talk about their previous lives (Stevenson, 2001).

·   Some people, even as adults, have inexplicable feelings of déjà vu when they find themselves in certain places or situations.

Roger Woolger was one of the first doctors to practice regression therapy. He did this not because he was trying to prove reincarnation, (though he gave the impression he believed in it), but because it worked as a therapy. Belief was incidental to his work as a therapist, which involved using stories that might or might not be true (Woolger, 2010).

Woolger found that one of the quickest ways to get people into past lives was to start from the idea that everyone has within them inner characters, secondary or sub-personalities, which appear in their dream life, and then to try to find one or two places in the world which either attracted or repelled them, and imagine they were living there in another lifetime.

Although he believed that between 10 and 30% of what came up was fantasy, he also believed that he could distinguish between a fantasy reconstruction and a genuine past life memory. Regression therapy seldom provided any evidence of reincarnation. A past life regression that is attempting to prove reincarnation would take quite a different form (Fenwick & Fenwick, 2001). The hypnotist would try to elicit as many details as possible – name, date, places, anything that could be checked, to see how well the past life story hung together, as in the following case:

Neil is a professional hypnotherapist who uses both past life and present life regressions to resolve problems. One day when he was working with a client she regressed to a past life in the 1920s and recounted very specific details of her life, including the name of her favorite aunt – Aunt Aggie. The client’s previous life ended in 1934. She was born in this life in 1946 so it seemed likely that some of her previous relatives were still around.

This lady had never been to England and yet she had given specific details of names and addresses in Burnley, Lancashire. After the session with the client present Neil telephoned directory enquiries and gave them the surname and address that she had relived. “I was given two telephone numbers for that name in that street in Burnley. One was identical to the house number that she said she had lived at. With the client’s permission Neil telephoned that number and asked for Aunt Aggie, to be told by the person who answered the phone that Aunt Aggie had died about five years ago. Neil said that his client was freaked out by this and understandably did not want to continue any further. He added that his client had no relatives in Burnley, in fact she had never heard of the place. (Fenwick & Fenwick, 2001)

Coincidence is really the only rational explanation, and yet the account would involve four coincidences – name, house number, street name and town. Is this really that much easier to believe than the idea that the client had somehow tuned into memories of a past life, whether her own or someone else’s?

Another case which illustrates very well the value that past life therapy can have is that of a young woman, Catherine who, for more than a year had been suffering from recurring nightmares and chronic anxiety attacks. When no traditional therapy seemed to help her, her psychiatrist, Dr. Brian Weiss, turned to hypnosis. This was something he had always been skeptical about, so he was astonished when Catherine began recalling past-life traumas which seemed to hold the key to her problems, and he lost his skepticism completely when she began to channel messages from 'the space between lives', which contained remarkable revelations about his own life (Weiss, 1994). 

 

 

“To Be And Not To Be. This is The Answer: Consciousness Survives,” essay for the 2021 Bigelow essay contest submitted by Dr Peter Fenwick & Dr Pier-Francesco Moretti, Dr Vasileios Basios, and Martin Redfern. The complete essay with footnotes is available at https://bigelowinstitute.org/contest_winners3.php.