Eric Knickerbocker
14 May 2000
The belief of reincarnation has begun to gain more mainstream acceptance in Western civilization. There have been famous celebrities and other influentual persons who have become convinced that reincarnation is true. What are we to make of this philosophy? Does it merit looking into? Is it true? Let’s examine what we know of reincarnation and the evidence used to support its claims.
Two of the most widely cited proofs are the phenomenon of déjà vu, and past life regressions, or sessions in which hypnotists guide subjects through their alleged past life (or lives) in an attempt to help them better understand themselves. Since hypnosis is the means by which a past life regression is performed, we will explore that subject in some depth here. Dreams and hypnosis have something in common, so I will begin by describing an erotic dream I had. Please forgive me if it seems overly graphic. (Have you ever noticed dreams don’t seem to respect your religious faith or moral values?)
I dreamed I was at church alone with a long-time female friend of mine. I’m not sure what led to what, but we began having sexual intercourse, though in real life we have never slept together. I soon told her we needed to stop, not because I felt it was wrong or I wasn’t enjoying the moment, but because I felt the room we were in didn’t afford us much privacy. I didn’t want someone to come walking in on us in the heat of our passion. The church had begun to look less and less like my church, and yet I know that is where we were at. Incidentally, we never did “find a good place” before I awoke.
It seemed so very, very real and vivid, complete with all the stimuli of such an experience: the feel of her skin, the warmth, the moisture—in short, all the sensations that accompany a sexual encounter. When I awoke, it was a few moments before I intellectually realized that I had not slept with her and a good half an hour before the impression left me fully.
Ironically enough, she stopped by to visit that very day. I heard a knock on my bedroom door and just assumed it was my mom, so I said, “Come in.” When I turned to look, there she stood in my doorway. I had a difficult time looking her in the eye, and felt so self-conscious and uneasy that I eventually confessed to what had happened, so she wouldn’t think that I was currently having illicit thoughts. (I mean, I felt that my strange mannerisms and body language might be telling her something I didn’t want to convey. I was obviously a little uncomfortable in an odd way, know what I mean?) She just laughed and was gracious not to make me feel foolish.
I am sure that you have had similar dream experiences in which your dreams seem incredibly realistic, to the point that you just about have to pinch yourself to see if you are awake. No doubt you have had dreams that overshadowed your day, or at least the better part of your morning.
When we dream, our brain wave patterns closely resemble those of our conscious reality. My hypothesis follows that since altered states of consciousness—such as those brought on by mind-altering drugs or hypnosis—by their nature more closely resemble the dream state than ordinary conscious reality, that: a) an analysis of brain wave patterns from these altered states would show an even more striking resemblance to those of the dream state, and b) that the same portion of the mind would be affected in both instances. In short, I see some striking parallels between altered states of consciousness and the REM (dream) state.
Before I continue about the hypnotic state and the dream state, a distinction needs to be made. There is a difference between remembering and reliving. When we remember, we consciously recall something from the past. When we relive something, we not only remember the details, but we quite literally re-live them. Though we are not physically participating in the experience, mentally we are as much there as the very moment it happened. This is usually an involuntary and subconscious phenomenon, triggered by an external event. (See footnote 1.) We have the same emotions, sensations, and thoughts that we experienced when the original event happened. Conversely, when we remember, we think about what happened, but we don’t actually re-experience or relive the encounter. We “remember” remembering.
In the dream about my female friend for instance, I believe that my mind superimposed several things together. To begin with, I have had sexual intercourse many times, so no doubt that aspect of my dream was basically reliving the memory of an actual sexual encounter I had in the past. Considering I have never slept with this girl before, that would explain the incredible realism of the dream experience.
Second, being divorced and sexually abstinent can obviously be quite lonesome, particularly when a person has previously been accustomed to the married lifestyle. Finding myself single and sexually frustrated could easily account for the subject matter of the dream, as I believe the subconscious mind attempts to equalize or balance any perceived “deficiencies” of the psyche. Like all emotional yearnings, loneliness seems to come and go, and I find myself susceptible to it more at some times than others. I have yet to find a fail-proof pattern to predict such comings and goings, but during this time period I was feeling particularly affected.
Furthermore, I had known this girl in high school. After over six years of not seeing her, she had called me up several months prior and had been by to visit on several occasions. She was really my first serious attraction (though ironically, her sister soon became my dying obsession) so having seen her so recently, she could have stirred up old memories that my current unfulfilled desires, emotions, and feelings became “stapled to” in my dream. She could have easily “symbolized” to my subconscious mind my desire for a fulfilling relationship.
As previously stated, I think that the phenomena involved in dreams have some direct parallels with hypnosis. In my dream, my generic collection of longings for a meaningful relationship fixed with prior memories of sexual relations and an attraction toward a specific girl. My mind took a real memory of a sexual encounter and fused it with the memory of a real girl—but in a manner that was not real. I was reliving something that was real, and yet not real—not an actual event that occurred in reality. In the same way, fantasy can fuse with reality during a hypnotic session in deceptively realistic ways.
Hypnosis can produce a deeper contact with one’s emotional life, resulting in some lifting of repressions and exposure of buried fears and conflicts. This effect potentially lends itself to medical and educational use, but it also lends itself to misinterpretation. Thus, the revival through hypnosis of early, forgotten memories may be fused with fantasies. Research into hypnotically induced memories in recent years has in fact stressed their uncertain reliability. For this reason a number of state court systems in the U.S. have placed increasing constraints on the use of evidence hypnotically obtained from witnesses, although most states still permit its introduction in court [italics mine]. 2
I will attempt to differentiate between the dream state and the hypnotic state. The dream state is natural; the hypnotic state is induced. Dreaming is all a part of sleeping, which is a natural means of rejuvenating our bodies. Upon the morning light, we know that our dream was only a dream (as in my dream of my friend). We know that we were only dreaming. However, when we are hypnotized, it is a conscious experience. The mental boundary between “sleep and wakefulness” can become badly blurred, as we are fully awake when we are hypnotized; we do not “wake up” in quite the same sense when we exit the trance state. Therefore, I tend to think that hypnosis could cause much more long-range fusions of reality and non-reality than the dream state. For example, if my erogenous dream about the girl had been dredged from my subconscious during a hypnotic session instead, would I as readily have known that I had “only been hypnotized”? As incredibly life-like as the dream was, if it had occured during a hypnotic session instead, I could very well have left the hypnotic state absolutely convinced we had slept together.
The conscious mind is a powerful shaper of the deeper realms of the mind. It forms the basis for our ability to separate out the vast pool of information stored in our subconscious into logical order: practical or impractical, fact or fiction, reality or fantasy. Tamper with the conscious mind and you’re tampering with the system of differentiating between the real and unreal. The subconscious mind doesn’t “think”—the conscious mind does.
In most reported cases, a trained hypnotist is capable of bringing people out of a trance without their conscious recollection of the events that happened during the session. (This is usually left up to the discretion of the subject.) However, it has been evidenced that some subjects have reported long-range changes in behavior, such as kicking a chronic smoking habit or giving up overeating. If such positive results are possible, despite the patient’s lack of conscious recollection, there could potentially be some far-ranging side effects not anticipated by patient or trained hypnotist:
Most people can be easily hypnotized, but the depth of the trance varies widely. A profound trance is characterized by a forgetting of trance events and by an ability to respond automatically to posthypnotic suggestions that are not too anxiety-provoking [italics mine]. 3
If people are able to respond to posthypnotic suggestion even if they do not consciously remember (as the encyclopedia entry cited above clearly states), then it follows that some kind of permanent or semi-permanent alteration has taken place. In short, alterations made during the hypnotic state could influence the subject to believe that a “memory” fused of fragments was a bona fide “whole.” A person skeptical of past lives entering a regression session could emerge convinced that past lives were factual, when in fact this was merely a product of the hypnotist’s hypothesis or belief without “legitimate” verification. Normally an individual dictates what is input into his or her mind and what amount of that input is acceptable. A hypnotized person, however, has essentially forfeited control to the hypnotist who is regulating the input into the subconscious, which does not evaluate the information per se. If you will, the hypnotist is acting the part of the person’s conscious mind while the person’s subconscious mind stores the information without reflection, as it always does.
The mind is a sophisticated piece of machinery—the control tower of the body. The force—human or otherwise—that is in command of that person’s mind has control of that person. When you submit your mind to drugs or alcohol, intentionally induce an altered mind frame with learned mental techniques, or allow yourself to be hypnotized you are, at least in part, detaching your mind from your body. This makes your mind much easier to be manipulated by external forces, such as our example of the hypnotist.
In addition, most individuals undergoing past life regressions have had a keen interest in the occult, metaphysics, or the like for some time. Therefore they are naturally more predisposed to interpret any marginal evidence as conclusive proof, because they are already three quarters of the way convinced that past lives do indeed exist. Many are already totally convinced that they have experienced past lives.
The personal bias of patients on objective hypnotists, as well as the hypnotists’ own biases, could easily color the evidence and findings. As is indicated by their directing their credentials in such direction, most hypnotists conducting past life regressions have personal interest vested. Unless they are motivated by greed, it is otherwise doubtful they would seek such a questionable pursuit. Hypnotists impelled to credit (or discredit) theories of past lives are also more likely to interpret marginal evidence as much more conclusive or indicative to their relative perspective. This could interfere with obtaining truly objective evidence.
Another problem is that the hypnotized mind is, by its very definition, hypersensitive to suggestion. Even highly professional hypnotists who tried very hard to keep their personal biases totally out of the equation would face a Catch-22. By asking specific questions, hypnotists could very easily implant thoughts just by the mere questions themselves. They are trying to prove (or disprove) the validity of past lives, so they ask questions pertaining to that goal, which in and of themselves could pose as subtle cues for autosuggestion.
Hypnosis, altered state of consciousness and heightened responsiveness to suggestion; it may be induced in normal persons by a variety of methods and has been used occasionally in medical and psychiatric treatment. . . . The responses of subjects in the trance state, and the phenomena or behavior they manifest objectively, are the product of their motivational set; that is, behavior reflects what is being sought from the experience [italics mine]. 4
The Catch-22 is that if the hypnotist tried to ask questions that were not specific, there would be no real way to determine if the information was legitimate proof of past lives. For instance, if a hypnotist instructs me, “describe in detail what you see,” and I say, “a house that looks like it came from the past—medieval times maybe?—with a plume of smoke coming out the chimney, etc. etc. etc., and someone (who I interpret to be me) wearing a sombrero and boots” . . . What does that prove? That is hardly indisputable proof of past lives.
We also see ourselves in all sorts of different guises and settings in our dreams. Few individuals would conclude that these were proof of past lives, unless they have been taught a religious/philosophical viewpoint that supports this theory. If pressed, most individuals would reply that it was “just a dream.” On this note, psychology provides extensive theories that cast a strong shadow of doubt on accepting dreams as conclusive proof of the existence of past lives. (See APPENDIX 1.) While this subject is a complex and fascinating one, there are many plausible explanations for these seemingly unexplainable phenomena, and, to my knowledge, not even one of them seriously embraces the notion of past lives.
First, let me take you to a quick excerpt from Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis:
. . . But human beings are not [separate from one another]. They look separate because you see them walking about separately. But then, we are so made that we can see only the present moment. If we could see in the past, then of course it would look different. For there was a time when every man was part of his mother, and (earlier still) part of his father as well: and when they were part of his grandparents. If you could see humanity spread out in time, as God sees it, it would not look like a lot of separate things dotted about. It would look like one single growing thing—rather like a very complicated tree. Every individual would appear connected with every other. And not only that. Individuals are not separate from God any more than from one another. Every man, woman, and child all over the world is feeling and breathing at this moment only because God, so to speak, “is keeping him going.” 5
All the faculties of our being are “donated” to us by our parents. This includes our mental, physical, and spiritual sides, or specifically our mind, body and soul. You can not separate these parts from each other and still maintain the identity of the organism.
We inherit our DNA from our parents, which determines how we will grow—how tall we will get, how big our nose will be, the color of our eyes, etc. This internal blueprint then uses elements like the food we eat, the water we drink, and the oxygen we breathe to build onto what was also donated us by our parents. And of course, that is our body: genes, cells, and other bodily chemicals. Hence, this conversion of matter accounts for our growth into the adult person our DNA determines. Without the donation of the raw material from mom and dad, there would be nothing to mold.
Consider the following excerpt from John Powell’s book Why Am I Afraid to Love? pertaining to the early formation of anxiety:
Causes in the genesis of anxiety are not easy to trace. Psychologists, however, are becoming increasingly aware of the importance of what are called pre-natal experiences. When a woman is carrying a child, the child is on its mother’s bloodstream. Hematology (the study of blood and its diseases) has revealed the changes in blood chemistry which occur during the traumatic moments of human life. We are all aware of the physical effects of our emotions, of the adrenaline flushing into our blood streams, the palpitating heart and the beads of perspiration that form on our foreheads and in the palms of our hands.
The fetus or embryo, forming in its mother and nourished by her bloodstream, experiences these same impulses and effects. They are also transmitted by the muscular contractions of the mother’s body, which the fetus likewise experiences. The fetus records these experiences and retains them both in its brain-cells and nervous system which is formed during the period of gestation. When a woman is consistently upset emotionally during this period of pregnancy, the child to be born will receive and retain the message, transmitted via blood chemistry and muscular contraction: this is a very insecure world into which it is coming. 6
If anxiety (and other aspects of subjective experience) are passed through blood chemistry and muscular contractions from mother to child during the time they are linked as “donor” mother and embryo (or “host” and “symbiont”), why couldn’t other feelings, memories, experiences, etc. be passed on in a similar fashion—things not specifically “one’s own?” Perhaps this could account in part for Jung’s observation of a collective unconscious. And perhaps some of the more problematic and bizarre recollections on the threshold of consciousness could be the result of the birth process itself and early childhood development: a time when the intellect is still largely undeveloped and emotions and instincts dictate a child’s sense of reality. The following is extracted from I’m OK--You’re OK: A Practical Guide to Transactional Analysis:
. . . at biological birth, the little individual, within the brief span of a few hours, is pushed out into a state of catastrophic contrast in which he is exposed to foreign and doubtless terrifying extremes of cold, roughness, pressure, noise, nonsupport, brightness, separateness, and abandonment. The infant is, for a short time, cut off, apart, separate, unrelated. Common to the many theories about the birth trauma is the assumption that the feelings produced by this event were recorded and reside in some form in the brain. This assumption is supported by the great number of repetitious dreams of the “drainage pipe” variety which so many individuals experience following situations of extreme stress. The patient describes a dream in which he is swept from a body of water of relative calm into a sewer or drainage pipe. He experiences the feeling of increasing velocity and compression. This feeling also is experienced in the state of claustrophobia. The infant is flooded with overwhelming, unpleasant stimulations, and the feelings resulting in the child are, according to Freud, the model for all later anxiety. 7
Granted, this relates to anxiety, but I maintain that if an event such as the birth experience is so impacting—and yet not consciously remembered (at least as such)—that could be a possible explanation for profound and unexplainable feelings and images that lead sincere individuals to seriously examine past life theories. An infant has no words to describe the feelings it feels so strongly, nor does it have a bank of knowledge or previous experience with which to sort and categorize life. As opposed to a past life, an individual could very well have genuine memories that tantalized the conscious. These would in reality be a portion of life remembered from before knowledge and intellect were adequately formed, not a “prior life” per se.
Even those who believe in past lives believe that we forget them (or else it wouldn’t even be an issue—we’d all simply know we had experienced past lives), which I think is in and of itself an absurdity. I would ask, “Why?” What plausible explanation is there for such forgetfulness? The best one I can come up with is that humans simply don’t have past lives!
I would ask those that propose such theories some simple questions. At what point in time does the already existing soul unite with the new life: at conception when the sperm joins the egg, at six days, one month, seven months, when the child is born? (They certainly don’t believe that the physical side of life “jumped” inside the mother’s body from its prior life, do they! It has already been pointed out that we get our raw organic essentials from mom and dad.) Is the “life” truly alive beforehand? What joins it to the new life? What does it do, climb inside the embryo? How does it know how to get there? In short, wouldn’t it make more sense to say that our spiritual capacity—our soul—was donated to us by our parents as well? They donated to us all the rough “building blocks” we need to become a fully alive and fully functioning human being; I find it quite ludicrous to imagine that our soul was simply “snatched out of the air” quite apart from the sexual union of our parents.
I would pose some further questions. If people who are reincarnated are eventually achieving enlightenment and passing on, separated from the “wheel,” why the increase in population? It should be decreasing somewhat, or at least remaining consistent. Are more souls being created? Where do they come from? And where did the original souls come from? If souls are somehow created, why not just believe that we all were created “from scratch”? Why the process of reincarnation? And yet, if we get our essence from our parents, that would also explain the troublesome question of a beginning, at least temporarily. Of course, the original beginning—the first set of parents—is another question all together.
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