In the 1980’s I had a crisis of faith as a result of reading a book by Dr. Ian Currie entitled ‘You Cannot Die’ in which he made an apparently strong case for reincarnation. When I wrote my Kindle book ‘The God Debate - Dawkins in Denial’ several years ago, I did a lot of research into out-of-body experiences and this is presented in Chapter Six of my book. It included a section headed ‘Past-life memories: reincarnation or haunting?’ Here is an extract which I think is relevant to this debate. I hope you’ll all forgive its length.
"Among those familiar with NDE research, Dr. Alexander is by no means alone in believing in reincarnation. Ian Currie’s You Cannot Die advocated it and, as we’ve seen, Dr. van Lommel also gives the idea qualified support. Opinion polls show that a significant proportion of westerners believe in it, including many Christians. Originating in eastern religions hundreds of years before Christ, belief in reincarnation was widespread in the ancient world into which Christ was born, and the writer of Hebrews may have been responding to such beliefs in first century pagan converts when he wrote: “… human beings die only once, after which comes judgement …” (Hebrews 9:27).
"Ian Currie’s book has a chapter presenting evidence he thought supported reincarnation, including research into hypnosis induced past-life memories. However, other research and re-hypnosis tests have suggested that material recalled in such memories actually originate in this life. For example, a case that sparked great interest in America concerned a housewife, Virginia Tighe, who claimed that in a past life she had been a nineteenth century Irish immigrant named Bridey Murphy. When investigated, no historical trace of Bridey Murphy could be found, but what did emerge was that Tighe’s description of this woman bore a strong resemblance to an elderly Irish immigrant with whom she had spent a lot of time in her childhood. Her claim was sincere, not fraudulent, because she simply had no conscious memory of the stories told her by her talkative childhood friend.
"Currie also referred to the famous work of psychiatrist Ian Stevenson. A notable thing about Stevenson’s approach to researching reincarnation claims is that he did not feel comfortable with past-life memories induced in adults by regression hypnosis. This is because the brain is thought to record everything a person experiences in this life, but the vast majority of it is irretrievable except by techniques that resurrect the long-forgotten past. Secondly, the brain under hypnosis is highly susceptible to suggestions by the hypnotist. If a hypnotherapist believes that his patients’ psychological problems may stem from a previous life, he will regress them to their time in the womb and then suggest that they go back further and talk about past lives. But readers may well wonder what happens if there is no past life to recall, especially if the patient also believes in reincarnation. In those circumstances, will they sub-consciously endeavour to follow the therapist’s suggestive lead, dredging up material relating to the past that in fact originated in magazines articles or historical novels and films they have forgotten seeing, using it innocently to fabricate a plausible past-life scenario?
"Detailed investigation of such cases has, I believe, unearthed inaccuracies in the ‘recalled’ historical setting, e.g., in the use of language, that is traceable to Hollywood style fiction. In addition, the reliability of hypnosis in this context is very doubtful. Professor Ernest Hilgard (died 1989), formerly director of the Hypnosis Research Laboratory, Stanford University, warned that hypnosis was a “very dangerous tool” that should only be used by trained specialists. He stated that claims of new identities by patients undergoing hypnosis were “not uncommon and very easy to produce.” He said they were invariably due to long buried memories, and contrary claims were not justified from a scholarly viewpoint.
"When I first read Currie’s book in 1978, I found from further research that re-hypnosis of subjects confirmed the fact that their past-life recall used forgotten information learnt in this life, but I cannot now cite the source I used. But readers might like to consult an interesting Wikipedia article headed ‘Past Life Regression’ which reinforces this explanation. In view of van Lommel’s citation of past-life memories as an occasional component of NDE life reviews, it is of interest to note the article’s observation that once hypnosis has implanted a ‘past-life memory’ in the brain, it takes its place in the subject’s consciousness on an equal or even superior footing to genuine memories. During an NDE, therefore, a person may well be unable to distinguish such ‘memories’ from genuine ones.
"Ian Stevenson ignored hypnosis induced memories and focused his research on young children who at the age of two or three began to ask about another family whom they saw as their ‘real’ family, sometimes causing great distress to their parents whose parenthood they seemed to reject. He carried out hands-on research into hundreds of such cases, piecing together information provided by the child on names, places, circumstances and other details to see if he could track down the dead person with whom it identified and verify the child’s memories. In many cases, he was able to do so, even in some cases taking the child to meet members of its supposed other family and watching clear evidence of recognition. In over half the cases, the dead person with whom the child identified died in violent or tragic circumstances. However, by the age of five or six, the child’s past-life memories would fade away.
"Ironically, the previous chapter in Currie’s book offers an obvious alternative explanation for ‘past-life memories.’ Its title is ‘I Want a Body – Possession Experiences’, and the evidence it presents is just as credible as the evidence he used to support reincarnation. Of course, many people say they don’t believe in ghosts, but in fact there is great deal of data suggesting that, for a variety of reasons, a person whose death takes them by complete surprise may not realise they’re dead. Van Lommel mentions one NDE report in which a woman who had visited the familiar realm of light said she also saw another world, grey and dismal, whose spirit-inhabitants wandered apparently without hope or purpose, shuffling this way and that, pausing, then changing direction, as if confused and unable to decide what to do or where to go.
"Currie suggests reasons why some spirits may be unable to see beyond the world which trauma has forced them to leave. They include: obsessive love or hatred for persons, objects, situations or ways of life; earthly desires for sex, food, drink, drugs, money, power, revenge, sadism; negative personality traits like greed, lust, selfishness, religious fanaticism; and (sceptics please note) long-held beliefs that death equals oblivion and that, whatever is happening to them, it cannot be an afterlife and so they must still be alive.
"Such spirits seem to be earthbound and become very distressed that they can no longer deal with whatever may have been preoccupying them before their death and urgently seek an outlet for their frustrations. They want to re-enter the physical world, and as their own bodies are no longer available, find themselves attracted to what psychics term another person’s aura. They seem to see another’s person body as somehow their own and try to take it over, unconcerned by or unaware of their victim’s age, sex, identity or personal needs. Apparent availability is the sole criterion. If communication through mediums is to be believed, the possessor/haunter cannot connect the body they feel entitled to use with their victim. But they also cannot free themselves from the presence of the victim, who is therefore perceived as a very annoying person always hanging around and being a nuisance. Almost comically, they feel they’re the victim in the situation, not an unwelcome and disruptive intruder. The medical establishment tries to deal with the real victim’s resultant mental illness without any awareness of its cause.
"So, what happens if the victim is a psychically sensitive young child who can sense the resolve of their haunter to resume its former life? Has he/she become a medium? In Reincarnation: A Christian Appraisal , Mark Albrecht writes:
"One of the more obvious explanations of genuinely paranormal cases of reincarnation recall would seem to be direct spirit influence, as the great majority of cases exhibit features parallel with those of spiritism, seances, mediumship and demonic possession.
"Stevenson says that if information about a past life could be proved to come from spirit communication, it would cause serious problems: “Such a case, if we find one, would severely shake confidence in the subjective experience of memory.” It would also disturb reincarnation theories based on past-life recall. Stevenson agrees nonetheless that “the influence of some discarnate personality” is indeed an option, along with telepathy and clairvoyance. He even admits that mediums can duplicate the feats of detailed recall, saying, “Perhaps the children who remember previous lives really add to this number.” While he himself leans toward reincarnation as the genuine meaning of past-life recall, he notes that many features of the cases “do not permit a firm decision between the hypothesis of possession and reincarnation.” He does state that a “significant minority” of his subjects exhibited ESP or mediumistic tendencies.
"Of course, Stevenson cannot rule out the possibility that all his subjects actually had such psychic sensitivity. In his postscript, Albrecht notes that even believers in reincarnation do not accept Stevenson’s case studies as evidence for it:
"Third, recall of past lives does not prove reincarnation. There is nothing in the reported experiences of spontaneous recall or hypnotically regressed subjects that has not been observed repeatedly in mediumship, seances, spirit contact, demon possession, UFO contactee cases, and other forms of occult / psychic trance utterances … An orthodox Hindu swami, Sri Sri Somasundara Desika Paramachariya of south India (who accepts the traditional Hindu doctrine of reincarnation) wrote the following in an open letter to Ian Stevenson: “All the 300 odd cases reported by you do not in fact support the theory of reincarnation. . . . They are all spirit possessions, ignored by the learned in south India.” A Hindu swami from India would certainly be in a position to speak authoritatively on this subject. His refutation of Stevenson’s work in light of his knowledge and experience of spiritism is a devastating blow to the validity of recall in proving past lives.
[Extract from Chapter Six (p.72) and extract from Postscript (p.130), Reincarnation: A Christian Appraisal by Mark Albrecht, IVP 1987, The Evangelical Christian Library. Used by author’s permission.]
I hope that the above addresses the stress that some contributors have experienced by the concept of reincarnation.
