Past Life Regression

Introduction

The theory of reincarnation may offer an insight into several features of human personality and biology that contemporary theories do not clarify adequately. Past life regression (PLR) is a posited journeying into past lives, undertaken while the individual is subjected to hypnosis. The late s resulted in a resurgence of interest in PLR. Alternate explanations proposed for previous life memories include wishful thinking, cultural construction, deception, self deception and paranormal explanations other than reincarnation.

Previous life memories If reincarnation does take place, it is only one manifestation of survival after physical extinction, and it makes other forms of survival scientific possibilities also. The existence of reincarnation is not inconsistent with early Christian teachings.2,3 With regard to the various categories of scientific evidence that support reincarnation, utterances made by young children about previous lives.

It is noteworthy that these children reveal their apparent recollections of their own volition. The information that they give has the appearance of verisimilitude, and it is easy to determine whether any suspect channels of communication have been brought to bear on young people.

In his recent publication, Stevenson has opened his commodious file of cases of people who have birthmarks and birth defects corresponding to the wounds of people of whom they are hypothesized to be reincarnations. About 35 per cent of children who claim to remember previous lives have birthmarks or defects that they attribute to wounds suffered by a person whom they represented in an earlier existence. A total of 210 such children have been investigated by a research team.

In those instances in which it was possible to identify a deceased person the details of whose life reliably matched the child’s statements, a close correspondence was nearly always found between the child’s birthmarks and defects and wounds known to have been inflicted on the deceased person’s body. This is currently the only objective evidence in favour of the hypothesis of reincarnation.

A less tangible kind of evidence occurs: remembering a previous life may have a specific positive outcome in adulthood, and conversely children who recall a previous life may become neurotic as a direct result of the circumstances. Many child subjects may experience turmoil of conflicting personal loyalties between their present and previous families.

Scepticism is demonstrated by pointing out that if the memories of all the hypnotically regressed subjects claiming to have been present at the Crucifixion of Christ were true, there would have been no room for Roman soldiers to be in attendance on Golgotha.

Trans-century cases

In their spontaneous experiences, children who make reincarnation-type revelations remember a previous life that ended only a few years before their birth (the average period is two years). Conversely, in hypnotic PLR the interval between the death of the previous personality and the birth of the living person is sometimes longer, a century or more.

There are a few remarkable instances. Edward Ryall of Essex remembered a previous life in Somerset in the seventeenth century.

Ryall’s claims to have had previous life memories. A.J. Stewart recalls a previous life as King James IV of Scotland in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.She never surrendered her royal memories to investigators of reincarnation, but published them independently. It would have been appropriate for her to have subjected her experiences to investigation in the light of the eminence of her supposed earlier persona. These two cases were

not products of PLR, but natural recollections of previous lives. It is reasonable to make the assumption that in instances that bridge the centuries, previous life memories do not readily or spontaneously appear in the conscious mind and that they become clearer in a hypnotic state. The time lag is a convincing explanation of the apparent blockage of the free flow of distant life memories, very different from the experience of children who are remembering recent past lives.

There are two main criticisms that may be levelled at trans-century cases that are revealed through PLR. One is financial: therapists charge their clients by the hour, and the exploration of centuries instead of years greatly extends the length of time a patient will need to be treated, thereby making therapy more lucrative for the practitioner.

Secondly, in trans-century cases both therapist and patient are usually free to speculate wildly without much fear of being contradicted by the facts – usually no one bothers to investigate the accuracy of the detail.

A historical case of PLR

The most famous case of PLR is undoubtedly that of Bridey Murphy. In the mid-twentieth century Morey Bernstein, a Colorado businessman who had practised hypnotism for ten years with hundreds of different persons, decided to attempt to regress someone to one or more past lives. He chose as his

subject a woman called Virginia Tighe, knowing that she had the ability to go into a deep trance with ease. Between 29 November 1952 and 29 August 1953 Bernstein made six attempts to facilitate the regression of Virginia.

During those sessions she recalled one brief life as a baby who died. After that there emerged the figure of Bridey Murphy – more formally Bridget Kathleen Murphy. Following her first experience as Bridey, Virginia mutated into her alter ego whenever invited to do so in a trance state. She proffered a significant amount of information about Ireland, none of which she had any explicable way of knowing as Virginia Tighe. She said she had been born in Cork in 1798, the daughter of a Protestant barrister called Duncan Murphy and his wife Kathleen. She had a brother named Duncan Blaine Murphy, who had married

Aimee Strayne. Another brother had died in infancy. At the age of twenty, Bridey said, she was married in a Protestant ceremony to a Catholic, Brian Joseph McCarthy, the son of another Cork barrister. Brian and Bridey moved to Belfast, where he attended school and eventually progressed to teach law at Queen’s University. They had no children, and Bridey lived until she was sixty-six. No record of any of these facts has been identified in Ireland.

However, during her narration of her experiences as Bridey, Virginia mentioned the names of two Belfast grocers, Farr’s and John Carrigan. It proved possible to verify that two grocers with those names did operate retail enterprises in the city at the appropriate time. She said that her address in Cork was The Meadows, and it was established that there is an area in that town named Mardike Meadows.

Queen’s University in Belfast is of course a renowned educational establishment. Virginia used certain distinctive words that on investigation proved to be in use in Ireland at Bridey’s time, such as ‘ditched’ for ‘buried’, a ‘linen’ to mean a handkerchief, and ‘lough’ for river or lake. It was pointed out by those convinced of the veracity of Virginia’s recollections that a girl born and raised in the United States, as Virginia was, would be unlikely to have been acquainted with these terms. Investigative reporters concluded that there was some evidence for ‘something’, as yet unexplained. Credible hypnosis experts claim to have debunked this case,

A Modern Case

One of the recent self published cases is interesting. Carroll Beckwith was a minor portrait painter who had lived and worked in New York city in the late 19th and early 20th century. He had never done anything outstanding that would make him immortal as an artist. Captain Robert L. Snow is a commander of the homicide branch at the Indianapolis Police department. He discovered while under hypnosis that he was Carroll Beckwith in a previous life. Snow wanted to disprove the images he had experienced while under hypnosis as a form of cryptomnesia. Snow was already disenchanted with hypnotherapeutic procedures in child sex abuse cases. The regression took

place in 1992 and Snow was able to find 28 details to his regression that could be proven or disproven. Instead of disproving the veracity of his images, Snow proved that most every recollection he had while hypnotised actually took place nearly 100 years earlier. While holidaying in New Orleans, he entered an art gallery in an obscure side street where he encountered the painting of his memory: the hunchbacked woman. He learnt that Beckwith’s personal diaries and an unpublished autobiography existed in a local library in New York. For a detective this was a definitive piece of evidence to close or prove the case. From Beckwith’s diaries, he found that 26 points of 28 matched with the life of Carroll Beckwith. His recollections included that Beckwith used a walking stick

even though he was not disabled, visited France, drunk wine (whisky was the popular drink in US), disliked painting portraits, was upset over bad picture hangings and lighting in art shows, painted the portrait of a hunchbacked woman, his mother died of blood clot, his wife Berth was childless, and that Berth used to play piano or sing for friends. Snow got the name of the previous personality’s wife incorrect but his frank admittance of it adds to his credibility. Snow claims that he has more proof of his previous life existence than most murder cases and is convinced that he carries some of the memories of Carroll Beckwith.

Parapsychologists could offer alternative explanations even for such apparently true memories. A sceptic of PLR could argue that his experiences are the outcome of ‘walk-in phenomenon’ or spirit attachment. Captain Snow simply concludes : ‘I cannot accept that with the

billions of people who have inhabited the Earth, my case is unique, that mine would be the only case since John the Baptist – who some say that Jesus describes in the Gospel of Matthew as being Elijah reborn’.

PLR may be both an experimental technique and a form of therapy but it has scientific credibility only if reincarnation itself is proven scientifically to exist. The existence of reincarnation is not yet a scientific truth. Recent studies indicate that reincarnation merits acknowledgement as a scientific hypothesis because it can be falsified or confirmed through scientific investigation.

Dingwall recognized that individuals can fabricate narratives of imagined experiences in greater detail than may be accounted for by the application of conscious knowledge. Memories may be tyrannical, even overwhelming. Most previous life memories are focused on unhappy events. Murders and other crimes dominate memories to such an extent that the mind of the subject may be likened to a burial ground.

The immature brains of children who remember previous lives often cannot synthesize such experiences. Conversely, adult subjects who experience PLR are sufficiently robust psychologically to accommodate them as a learning experience, so that they are enabled to use their memories to adjust their current behaviour.

Conclusion

Parapsychology is notoriously subject to the allegation that it attempts to prove the existence of things that do not exist. For this reason it perhaps warrants an intellectual health warning. Given the multifarious nature of times and places that relate to past existence, why a PLR subject recalls a particular time and place in connection with a previous life drama is a matter for investigation. It is arguable that previous life memories constitute an indication of a past life existence and that not all represent actual memories.

It is possible that in many claimed occurrences of PLR, the past life memories may be metaphysical stories promulgated by the unconscious as a form of self-education and personal development. Recounting past life events and experiencing past lives are different; the former may be a psychic fraud.

PLR techniques, with all their pitfalls, may be useful in gaining a deeper understanding of mind, an entity that is still shrouded in mystery.

Experimental testing of the possible therapeutic benefits of PLR is overdue. The potential psychological value of PLR is evident, and further serious attention to this activity is merited, particularly in the light of its potential for ameliorating hurt and distress in those who experience it.

PLR requires sophisticated therapeutic procedures. It is unsafe in the hands of marginally trained therapists. These are comparable with the surgeons who pre-date modern knowledge of anatomy and physiology, who functioned in the absence of knowledge of the human form and of antiseptic procedures.

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