Can Past Life Regressions Provide Evidence of Reincarnation?
Could your love of sushi be proof that you were Japanese in a past life? Maybe not, but for a group of 24 Burmese children it might be. After WWII, a large group of children in Burma claimed they remembered being Japanese soldiers in their past life and could not tolerate the spicy Burmese cuisine; instead they craved raw fish.
This concept of reincarnation is widely held in many parts of the world, especially areas where Hinduism and Buddhism are practiced, but not until recently has it come to be a widely accepted idea in the western world. Like other eastern philosophies that are becoming more and more pervasive in our culture, reincarnation has become more plausible, especially in the context of past life regressions.
Remembering Past Lives
It’s been estimated that about a million people have accessed past life memories in one way or another. But the most common method is through a guided therapy session with a psychotherapist. During these sessions, the subject is put under hypnosis while a therapist guides them with directions and questions.
Regressions can range in time periods, locations and ages, and are often cathartic as they help patients access memories that are somehow tied to physical afflictions or anxiety experienced in the current lifetime.
Today, one of the most prominent names in past life regression is Dr. Brian Weiss. Weiss’ daughter, Amy Weiss, had never had a successful regression, despite her father’s profession. Having, essentially given up on any expectations, she decided to participate in one more session, figuring that she could at least get a nap out of it.
She had recently been diagnosed with cataracts at the age of 25 and was confused as to why someone her age would be afflicted with such a condition. She experienced a past life regression and connected with an old man in the middle ages who was accused of being a wizard. His house was set on fire by villagers, subsequently burning his eyes. She said she felt a connection with the man’s heart and realized it could be tied to her cataracts.
The session proved to have profound therapeutic benefit as her cataracts eventually cleared up. She said the experience brought her closer with her father as she now understood the power of his practice.
Weiss was originally a skeptic of past life regressions himself. As the head of psychiatry at Mount Sinai Medical Center in Miami, Weiss boasts an impressive resume of Ivy League education and esteemed med schools.
At one point during his tenure, Weiss conducted a therapy session with a patient whom he put under hypnosis. Their session triggered a past life regression in which she described people, places and events in great detail. Weiss was so intrigued by her account that he looked up historical records and confirmed what she had said. From that point on he was convinced and has devoted his life to the study.
Reincarnation Evidence
Past life regressions can be a contentious topic among practitioners of psychology. The evidence and accounts are overwhelming, but there is debate as to what they really are. Of course, one side believes they are real memories, but other professionals believe they could be anything from fantasies, to archetypical allegories and metaphors, to an expression of the collective unconscious. There are even those who have devoted their careers to studying and documenting cases of young children with memories of previous lives, who are still skeptical of reincarnation.
Dr. Ian Stevenson is a well-respected name as the chair of the department of psychology at the University of Virginia. He was given a million-dollar grant to fund research into paranormal psychology, or parapsychology, with the intention of disproving the concept of reincarnation. However, his research on the uncanny memories of young children from their past lives convinced skeptics otherwise.
Today, Dr. Jim Tucker continues to conduct the work started by Stevenson. One of the commonalities their research has found is that 70 percent of people who experience these memories tend to have died at a young age or due to an unnatural cause of death. A quarter of those who died of natural causes died under the age of 15.
Another recurring characteristic they noticed was that birth marks are often associated with areas of trauma or injury from past lives. Some cultures even use this idea to spot reincarnations in the future. The Dalai Lama and other Buddhists often smear butter on bodies after death, which is thought to correspond with a birthmark on their reincarnated bodies.
The biggest difference between Dr. Stevenson and Dr. Tucker’s work, compared to most past life regression therapists is that they do not study those put under hypnosis. Instead, they look at cases of kids who start to spontaneously remember things and who start speaking about their previous lives while fully cognizant.
In one of Tucker’s papers he recounts a story of a boy from Thailand who, at the age of three, started complaining he had been shot and killed in his previous life while riding a bicycle to school. He even remembered he was a local teacher named Bua Kai. His grandmother took him to the village where he said he had lived, leading her to the home of Bua Kai. He recognized the people living there and they confirmed that five years earlier, their son Bua Kai had been shot and killed while riding a bicycle to work. He was shot in the back of the head marked by a small entry wound with a larger exit wound in the front of his head. The little boy had been born with a small birthmark on the back of his head and a larger, oddly-shaped mark on his forehead.
Did We Really Have Past Lives?
For those who haven’t had vivid memories of their past lives there are a few characteristics that might be clues to whether you may have been reincarnated. Some can be as blatant as a strange birth mark, but others are a little subtler. The following are a list of feelings, experiences, or traits that some associate with reincarnation and past lives…
- You have out of place memories
- You feel older than your age – sometimes people refer to you as an old soul
- You feel like you were born into the wrong decade or era
- You are fascinated with foreign countries and foreign language comes easier to you
- You have vivid dreams of being in a different place or different time period
- You have inexplicable fears or phobias that could be linked to past life trauma
Another common trait often attributed to past lives is an association with the opposite gender. Gender fluidity, or feelings associated with a different gender could be due to a past life in which one was the opposite sex. Tucker found anecdotal evidence of this in a family, again in Thailand.
In certain parts of Asia, families will mark the deceased with smears of butter in hopes of finding birthmarks on children that could be evidence of reincarnation. This one particular family believed to have found this to work after smearing butter on the back of their grandmother’s neck. She had mentioned that she wanted to be reincarnated as a man so that she could have a mistress like her husband.
After her death, a boy was born into the family who exhibited effeminate behavior in every aspect of his life. Aside from playing solely with girls, wearing women’s clothing, and showing a general aversion to any masculine behavior, the boy blatantly claimed to be their grandmother. He also had a birthmark on the back of his neck, where the family had smeared butter on their grandmother. While it might sound like the family led the child to believe and act this way, his behavior was offensive in their culture due to strict gender norms.
Is it possible that we have led past lives in which memories could have transcended into this lifetime, continuing to remain in the depths of our subconscious? Past life regression therapists and traditional psychiatrists are still at odds as to what is really being accessed when someone undertakes one of these sessions. But even some of the most astute academics and doctors have been convinced that there is some sort of unexplained phenomenon occurring. Have you ever accessed memories of a previous lifetime?
About the Author
Near-Death Experiences
It’s been almost 30 years since my near-death experience, but the memory of it is as vivid as if it occurred yesterday. Moments that jolt you to your very core are hard to forget. I suppose that’s one of their benefits. It’s safe to say that nearly dying changed everything about my life and for that I’ll be ever grateful.
I’d caught what I thought was a cold. It moved into my chest and didn’t clear up. I functioned as normally as I could. Eventually, I became bedridden and so weak that I spent three feverish days completely exhausted, coughing nonstop. To make a long story short, I had double pneumonia. I’d been to the doctor, but he’d misdiagnosed me as having one quarter of a lung filled with fluid. In reality, I only had one quarter of a lung left, the other three quarters being completely filled. I was suffocating. Although I should have admitted to the hospital, he sent me home to see how I’d do through the night. That decision changed my life.
I was alone in the bedroom, coughing, feverish, weak and completely exhausted. I was dying. I remember lying there feeling as helpless as I’d ever felt. Hope had left me and been replaced by resignation. I wasn’t sure if I was going to make it or not and I couldn’t muster up enough energy to definitively care either way. I remember thinking that I was just too tired to care.
That’s when my eyes flew open and I saw the light.
I was blinded by a brilliant, white light at the foot of my bed. I could make out a silhouette standing next to the light, but couldn’t see it well. I managed to move out of the direct line of the blinding beam and was finally able to see the figure. I was surprised to see my father, dressed in a double-breasted, white suit, smiling at me. If I hadn’t been so tired, I’d have rolled my eyes at how cliché and trite it was. The death of my father, a few years earlier, had torn at the very fabric of my worldview and here he was, standing in front of me, but I felt nothing. I didn’t feel glad to see him, nor any emotion at all, other than surprise. This fact led me to the conclusion that it wasn’t him.
I managed to ask, “Dad?” The image by the white light shook its head in the negative and said, “No, I’m not your father, but I’m here in his form because that’s what you expected.”
The white light had now become a doorway, behind which was an escalator that rose into a brilliant background. The entity told me that he’d come because I was very ill. He explained how easy it would be for me to join him; all I’d have to do would be to get up and go to him. I doubted this, because I was so weak, but I found that I could sit up easily and knew that all I had to do was jump out of bed and get on the escalator. It would be the easiest thing that I’d ever done. He held out his hand and smiled so sweetly, that I almost did it.
I asked him if I had to go with him. He replied that I could stay if I wanted, but I had a long road of recovery ahead of me and that it wouldn’t be easy. He asked if I really wanted to stay and I replied that my children needed me and that I had a feeling that there was something I was supposed to do for the world, something important. He smiled again and kindly told me that my children would be just fine.
They would miss me, of course, but they would grow up to be well-adjusted and happy without me.
He explained that the world would keep spinning and that any contribution I would’ve made would develop, one way or another. He went on to say that if I wanted to stay, I had to do so for me and for no other reason.
I was crushed at the thought that my existence on this planet was so expendable, that my children would do fine without me and that I simply wasn’t all that important. That moment yanked every bit of self-martyrdom out of me and I suddenly knew that I needed to live. I told him that I wanted to stay. He reiterated that it was fine for me to make that decision, but to expect it to be a difficult road back to health and to anticipate great changes in my life. I asked him if I would see him again.
He told me that when the time was right, he would return.
I then asked if he’d be in the form of my dad. He said that would be up to me and with that, he was gone.
There isn’t an ounce of doubt, anywhere in my being, to dispute the authenticity of my experience. I know for a fact that if I had decided to get out of bed and get on the escalator, I would’ve died in the middle of the night, nearly 30 years ago. I know that the entity was genuine and I’m grateful that I was given a choice. I’ve never regretted my decision to stay, not even for a heartbeat.
My story isn’t a rare one. Humans have experienced near-death encounters for millennia. Even though my situation was unique to me, it had all the hallmarks of thousands of others, related by fellow human beings. The brilliant white light, the familiar, friendly entities, feelings of complete calm and peace and the decision to stay are all common themes when it comes to Near-Death Experiences. I believe the stunning similarity between stories exists because the phenomenon is real.
Although I didn’t take the escalator to the afterlife, whatever the afterlife means, I knew it was there and I could feel that there were many at the top waiting for me. It felt loving and reassuring, even though it was something I’d never considered being real before that very moment.
Near-Death Experiences have been explained by scientists as being the deprivation of oxygen to the brain, thereby causing hallucinations. Some have put forth that this is built into our makeup as human beings. They theorize that it’s a defense mechanism, to keep us from feeling fear when making the transition from life to death, making it easier and less traumatic. Frankly, none of that matters to me. I suppose it could be the brain shutting down, sensory input being replaced by physiological hallucinations, but those of us who’ve seen it and come back, never doubt that it was real.
Who was the figure who assumed the form of my father? As best as I can tell, it was a Psychopomp. A Psychopomp is an entity that guides our souls safely from the world we know, to the afterlife. Anubis, the ancient Egyptian deity, was a Psychopomp. He took the hand of the departed and escorted them to the safety of the Judgment Hall, where the heart would be weighed against The Feather of Truth. Hermes was a Psychopomp and often was seen as taking those in transition safely past Cerberus, the three headed hound, into the underworld, to meet Charon, the ferryman, for the next leg of the journey. Most societies have viewed this guardian of the road between worlds in a positive light. Often, dogs are portrayed, which makes perfect sense to anyone who’s ever owned a dog.
Oddly, in our culture the role of the Psychopomp eventually fell to a dark and troubling figure, the Grim Reaper. The thought of being “harvested” by the Reaper’s scythe is disconcerting, to say the least. Ancient cultures understood the power and importance of our transition from one form into another and usually opted for a benign image over a terrifying one.
I believe that some of the more horrible imagery of demons and devils were designed to terrify an innocent populace and coerce them into behaving.
This compliance was mandatory in order to be welcomed into the next world by feathered-winged angels, rather than bat-winged tormentors. I have no such fears.
My experience was real and I’m guessing that many of you reading these words have had similar experiences, or believe it because you feel it to be so. I genuinely don’t know what this proves regarding the possibility of an afterlife. That wasn’t the lesson of my Near-Death Experience.
For me, it was a chance to live with joy in my heart at the simple fact that I’m still here.
It’s odd, but when faced with the reality that I may not mean all that much to the world, it became easier to pledge myself and dedicate my heart to the betterment of the human condition, if I could. For me, it cemented the joy of being here every day and sharing this beautiful planet with my 8 billion brothers and sisters.
Many have had Near-Death Experiences. Some have seen heaven and were reunited with departed loved ones. I didn’t get that far. Every story is different, but all who’ve had an NDE seem to be deeply moved by a profound sense of peace and a realization that there’s nothing to fear in death. I have that sense of peace and for me it’s not about death at all. It’s about life and the realization that being here now is more important than whatever comes after.
Living in the moment was the true gift of my Near-Death Experience.
I know that when my time comes, a friendly face will be there to greet and guide me, but I’ve changed my mind as to the form. Instead of my dad, I want to be greeted by my beautiful Golden Retriever, who left this world recently and took a huge chunk of my heart along with her. To hear her bark again and see the joyous sparkle in her eyes, will be the perfect end to a blessed life. With her by my side, I’ll walk into that white light and embrace whatever comes next with excitement and happiness.
I wish you all peace and love.
