Memory, Memory, Quite Contrary

One of the interesting characteristics common to young children who spontaneously remember past lives is that almost all begin speaking about those lives soon after they learn to talk, between eighteen months and three years of age. Parents report particular circumstances under which the children tend to share these memories: when they are relaxed, when they are between sleeping and waking, when they have just had a bath, when they are on a long car ride, and so forth. Some are not even conscious of the memories outside of these specific conditions. When speaking about their past lives, most of these kids seem unusually lucid, clear, and serious, in contrast to those times when they’re just engaged in childish fantasy or imagination. And most of them lose the memories at around seven years of age, no matter what culture they are raised in. Significantly, this corresponds with the beginning of a specific developmental stage in psychology—“concrete operational,” if you’re using Piaget’s scheme—a stage associated with the development of the logical, rational part of the mind. And the amnesia is not just in relationship to past lives—as developmental psychologists have shown, children lose memories of their infancy and early life experiences at this same age (a phenomenon known as infantile amnesia).

Given these consistent patterns, it seems reasonable to hypothesize that these particular memories somehow operate within a different frame of reality than do everyday memories. As children grow up and become more connected to this life, they become less connected to whatever they may be remembering from the past. In the recent documentary Experiencing the Soul, based on the book of the same name by Eliot Jay Rosen, one psychologist relates a powerful story told by a couple who had a three-year-old daughter and a newborn baby boy:

During a period of several days, this little girl kept coming to the parents and saying, “I’d like to spend some time alone with my new baby brother.” The parents were a little nervous about this. They had heard of sibling rivalry, so they thought, “Well, maybe it’ll pass.” It did not pass. She persisted in her request, so they decided that they would allow her to do this. But they had a monitor in the room so they could listen over the intercom to what was going on. So the day came; they let her enter the room, and as they listened on the intercom, all was quiet for a few moments. And then they heard their daughter’s voice to the boy-child: “Tell me about heaven. I’m forgetting.”

Now, exactly what she meant by “heaven” is not entirely clear, but myth and literature have long supported the notion that growing up involves a process of forgetting. Plato, one of the original philosophers of reincarnation, wrote about the river of forgetfulness through which all souls pass before their rebirth. And Wordsworth evocatively described birth as “but a sleep and a forgetting.” But whatever amnesia we fall under as we come into this life, it would seem that for some of us, traces of a previous existence, and sometimes much more, survive, even well into adulthood. One of the most dramatic examples of this is a case from the 1960s, related in the book The Cathars and Reincarnation by British psychiatrist Dr. Arthur Guirdham.

In 1961, a woman walked into Dr. Guirdham’s office with an acute and confusing problem. She had been the victim of unrelenting nightmares since the age of twelve, and sometimes she screamed so loud she worried that the neighbors would awaken in distress. The content of the dreams was usually something related to horrible murders and massacres. After months of pursuing normal psychiatric approaches, the doctor discovered that when she was much younger, she kept a diary in which she had written some of her dreams as well as other odds and ends that came to her mind. As it turned out, the contents of her diary contained information about life as a Cathar in Toulouse, France, in the thirteenth century. The Cathars were a Christian sect that was persecuted in the Inquisition, and one of their heretical ideas was a belief in reincarnation. Her diary also contained verses of songs written in Medieval French, a language spoken in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.

Moreover, the woman had unknowingly recorded, in horrifying detail, the massacre of the Cathars. They were burned at the stake, and she included a gruesome description of having been burned at the stake herself. She recalled details of the event that only later were recognized by historians to be factual. Her memories of family names and aspects of relationships between different members of the Cathar sect were later verified by a detailed analysis of the records of the Inquisition. She even claimed, in contrast to the accepted history of the time, that Cathar priests wore dark blue. Historians insisted that they always wore black—that is, until 1966, when new facts from the Latin archives were discovered and the history updated. Cathar priests, we now know, did wear dark green and dark blue.

Whether or not these revelations helped this patient is unknown, but some swear by the healing power of unearthing memories of past lives. This particular example occurred long before the phrase “past-life therapy” came into vogue, but the intervening years have seen an explosion of people seeking to explore the healing effects of reliving past-life memories. And it’s not just psycho-physical healing. Many have reported profound spiritual breakthroughs, deep experiences of the soul, and powerful transformations of relationships—all through coming to terms with psychological patterns that have driven them not just in this life but through multiple incarnations. Sometimes it’s accidental. The therapist tells the patient, under mild hypnosis, to go to the source of his or her problem, and suddenly the person sitting opposite is no longer Dick or Jane of twenty-first century America but a seventeenth-century watchmaker in Europe, a peasant in India, or a monk in Japan. Therapeutically, it’s a mind-boggling proposition. Just think of common psychosocial issues rooted in childhood—the Oedipal complex, repression, defense mechanisms, problems in ego development—and then add a hundred variations over thousands of years. I think even Freud would feel overwhelmed.

Yet across this country, thousands (if not millions) have tried this experimental therapy, reliving times long since forgotten and experiencing cultures and epochs that historians would love to get a glimpse of—all from the comfort of the therapist’s couch. Everything from asthma to eczema to stuttering to nightmares to anxiety attacks has been cured, the stories tell us, using this therapeutic practice that takes depth psychology to a whole new level. It is a movement that has helped Dr. Brian Weiss become a New Age star and inspired Shirley MacLaine to walk out on a limb. It has helped convince many in the Judeo-Christian West—which Arthur Schopenhauer once described as the part of the world that does not believe in reincarnation—that rebirth is a fact. And it has motivated serious therapists to test the edges of their own profession, walking well outside the boundaries of mainstream psychology and donning a mantle more commonly associated with Madame Blavatsky than Sigmund Freud.

However, there is a snake in the grass when it comes to hypnotic regression—a problem technically known as cryptoamnesia. It means that we may not be consciously aware of all of our memories and that long-forgotten pieces of information, stored forever in the obscure byways of the human brain, can easily emerge under hypnosis. In other words, I might remember a World War II lifetime under hypnotic suggestion and be able to describe that lifetime in detail. When questioned closely, however, it would become clear that I was unconsciously weaving together a mixture of memories gained through watching television shows or perhaps reading books. It may sound unlikely, but a number of tests have shown that it is possible. As well-known science author Martin Gardner writes, “Almost any hypnotic subject capable of going into a deep trance will babble about a previous incarnation if the hypnotist asks him to.”

For many therapists engaged in past-life hypnosis, however, the veracity of the memories is not what’s important. Indeed, the goal in a therapist’s office tends to be wholeness and healing. Popular author and past-life therapist Dr. David Hammerman explained, “People will often ask me, ‘How do I know if this past-life memory is real or not?’ And my own stance is that I don’t think it’s terribly important to therapeutic purposes whether the story that somebody’s coming up with is totally made up by their mind. Does it have healing power? That’s the most important thing. Is the narrative that comes through therapeutic?”

Nevertheless, all of the therapists I spoke to were clearly convinced that at least some of the memories their clients relived were real. For example, Dr. Hammerman, who has had clients reexperiencing past lives that go all the way back to prehistoric times, conveyed to me a story of a patient who relived a past life in which she remembered a dramatic wartime scene in sixteenth-century Germany. The patient pursued information about the past life and eventually tracked down all of the relevant records, confirming her memories. And there are probably hundreds of cases like this scattered through the literature on reincarnation, some more fully documented than others. One of the most remarkable accounts is told by well-known past-life therapist Roger Woolger in Stephen Sakellarios’s 2002 documentary In Another Life: Reincarnation in America.

One day in a hypnosis session, a client of Woolger’s remembered a previous life in which she was a minor painter living in Italy during the Renaissance. Of the many details she remembered, one was the name of the painter. After the session, she decided to do a little investigation, but an exhaustive search through records of the Renaissance at local libraries revealed nothing. Then, almost a year after the initial experience, a friend recommended that she try a particular art institute that kept records of European painters. Buried in a five-volume history of Italian art, she found the name she had been looking for. The painter, as it turned out, had lived in Siena, Italy. Inspired by this discovery, she decided to take a trip to Italy, her first visit to the country. Immediately upon arriving in Siena, she was overcome with a powerful sense of familiarity and was able to walk straight to the house where this painter had lived. There on the wall outside was a historical plaque making reference to this Renaissance artist.

Few attempts have been made to study past-life hypnotic regression in a more systematized, scientific manner. What may be the most impressive and ambitious foray into this territory did not take place in a therapist’s office at all. It started in a Quaker library in New Jersey in 1966.

Helen Wambach was a practicing psychologist and teacher in Long Branch, New Jersey, when her life took a surprising turn. Visiting a Quaker center, she found herself unexpectedly transported to another time. Describing the event in her 1978 book, Reliving Past Lives, she writes:

As I mounted the stairs to the second floor, a feeling of being in another time and place came over me. As I entered the small library room, I saw myself going automatically to the shelf of books and taking one down. I seemed to “know” that this had been my book, and as I looked at the pages, a scene came before my inner eye. I was riding on a mule across a stubbled field, and this book was propped up on the saddle in front of me. The sun was hot on my back, and my clothes were scratchy. I could feel the horse moving under me while I sat in the saddle, deeply absorbed in reading the book propped before me. . . . I seemed to know the book’s contents before I turned the pages.

Deeply impacted by this event, Wambach was compelled to ask: Were such unexplained and subconscious memories buried deep in the psychology of all human beings? How could we know, she wondered, if these past-life memories were actually genuine? Ten years after her initial experience in the Quaker library, Wambach thought she found her answer to the question. It came in the form of two numbers—50.6 and 49.4.

50.6% and 49.4% are statistics that came out of Wambach’s research in the late seventies. In the most extensive experiment ever conducted using past-life hypnosis, Wambach regressed over one thousand people to different time periods in history, asking them to record any past lives that they experienced. After the sessions, participants would fill out forms answering specific questions about the lives they had remembered—questions about gender, clothing, skin color, types of food eaten, living arrangements, and so forth. Many participants reported numerous past lives from different time periods—some male, some female. When all was said and done, Wambach tallied up the results, and she found that 50.6% of the reported lives were male and 49.4% were female. And this statistic did not seem to depend on the percentage of men and women participating in her research sessions. In other words, if there were 75% women and 25% men in a session, the gender of the reported past lives remained steady, right around the 50.6%/49.4% split. This statistic is striking because it matches our best projections of what the global gender distribution has been throughout history.

Some people have called Wambach’s results the best evidence yet that at least some of the lives remembered under hypnotic regression are actual past lives. Could thousands of fantasy lives, they ask, conjured up by individual psyches really succeed in nailing such a key statistical figure so precisely? Her regression research was the first of its kind, in terms of the careful quantitative analysis of such a large volume of data. And it is an experiment that has never been repeated.

Despite Wambach’s efforts, past-life regressions ultimately count for little as empirical evidence for reincarnation within the academic community. Given the problem of cryptoamnesia and the hypnotic subject’s propensity to create imaginary memories, that is understandable. Stevenson himself has been highly critical of the whole field. But I found myself unable to dismiss all of the anecdotal accounts as mere fad or fantasy. There are simply far too many unexplained pieces of the puzzle and impressive stories from reputable sources that seem difficult to account for in other, more conventional ways.

Waiting for the Jury

Past-life memories obtained under hypnotic regression and children who remember previous lives are the two most common sources cited as evidence for the existence of reincarnation. Those hoping that these two fields of study can provide concrete proof will not, at the end of the day, be satisfied by the accumulated data. At this point, strong evidence has been gathered, but it is far from irrefutable. Reasonable people can disagree on what the evidence means. And we must also remember that there is much at stake in this debate. Worldviews, religious beliefs, and many deeply held convictions about the nature of life itself are all called into question by the idea of reincarnation, and it’s going to take more than twenty-five hundred unusual children and some impressive anecdotes from hypnosis subjects to overturn the status quo.

Nevertheless, the sheer volume of data suggestive and supportive of rebirth presents an impressive case for all but the most predisposed skeptics. I could not escape the fact that no one I spoke to—skeptic, agnostic, or believer—could come up with convincing alternative explanations for many of the cases I came across. At best, they would come up with a theory—fraud, faulty memories, cryptoamnesia, psi—that might fit some of the cases. And I began to see that there is a big difference between possible alternatives and convincing alternatives.

Before I began my research into the subject, I had little investment in reincarnation as an idea. It was never a part of my own religious beliefs and it was never a subject I felt strongly about. After months of looking into the stories, examining the literature, and interviewing the researchers, I still had no final answers, but I certainly felt that there was sufficient evidence to warrant a deeper exploration of survival studies. You see, if we assume for a moment that reincarnation is real, then that brings up an important question: What happens when we are freed from our physical moorings? If we do, in fact, survive death and exist beyond the body, then where exactly are we? What is the nature of that nonphysical experience?

Of course, there are many traditional answers to this question. However, I began to notice something interesting. As I read through the latest research in the field of survival studies, I realized that there were some intriguing similarities between stories of reincarnation and accounts from the strange and captivating world of near-death experiences and out-of-body experiences. And I started to wonder: Could all of these experiences be pointing to the same dimension of existence?