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Life after Death
By Deepaknar Mukhopadhyay
Belief in reincarnation is as old as the hills.
http://www.dailypioneer.com/secon2.asp?cat=\fory16&d=Foray
Followers
of almost all ancient religions all over the world strongly believed that people
returned to life after death and among them were the Hindus, Buddhists, Druids,
Gauls, Greeks, many Jewish groups and even the early Christians. Reincarnation
became a taboo for the Christians only after the Second Council of
Constantinople in 553 ad. Since then, the Church has developed a strong
anti-reincarnation stand.
Among the early believers, the most vocal supporter was the Greek philosopher
Plato. He had specially referred to the experience of a Greek warrior, Er the
Pamphylian, who was fatally injured in a battle but came back to life before
cremation. According to him, each soul was given a choice to select the form and
type of life for the next birth and nobody was responsible for the choice. After
the selection, the souls had to drink water from a river flowing through the
Plains of Forgetfulness, so that they could forget everything pertaining to
their past lives. Then like shooting stars they came down to start their new
lives.
There seems to be a fundamental difference between the Platonian and the
Hindu-Buddhist concept. While Plato stresses on free choice, the Indian school
insists that rebirth is decided strictly according to the Karma. The Orientals
also believe that a man does not necessarily be reborn as a human being he can
be an animal, even a plant. Manu-Samhita says the killer of a Brahmin will be
reborn an ass, a drunkard a bird that lives on dung, while other sinners will
become hyenas, rodents and other abominable creatures. The Westerners, however,
believe that once a human always a human. Out of the two, the Karma theory
definitely sounds more logical, for if there is a choice, everybody will opt for
becoming Dhirubhai Ambani, Sachin Tendulkar or Hema Malini; nobody would like to
become a destitute, an orphan or a cripple. The choice factor might be there,
but it cannot overrule the Karmic parameter of individual.
Again, the Karma of the individual is instrumental for deciding how long his
soul will remain in the outer world. In some cases, it returns quite fast, in
others it has to wait for even centuries. There are certain souls who do not
have to return at all, but they come back on their own to help other people. The
Buddhists call them Bodhisatvas. Tibetans believe that the Bodhisatva called
Abalokiteswara is the Dalai Lama. Only such advanced souls can remember their
previous lives.
However, people who believe in the free option theory got some encouragement
from the unusual research done by a psychiatrist Dr Helen Wambach. In the
mid-70s, she hypnotised 750 people all over the American continent, and
commanded them to go back to their status before they were born and also to
relive their birth experiences. During this hypnotic state, she asked them some
questions, like: Did you choose to be born?; Did anyone help in your choice?; If
yes, who?; Why did you choose the 20th century to be born?; Did you choose your
sex?; Did you know your parents-to-be?; If so, what was the relationship?; Were
you aware of other people whom you should know during your lifetime?
Dr Wambach left a five second gap between each question. After the last
question, she brought them back to waking reality, with a command to remember
all the answers, and hand them over paper and pencil to write down whatever
answers had flashed through their subconscious. Let us pick up one answer at
random: `Yes, I chose to be born. Someone did help me choose and it seemed to be
some voice that I trusted greatly. It was kind, helpful and wise... I choose
this period to be born because it is a great period of change where people need
stability within themselves. I am supposed to help them somehow. I did choose to
become a male because it is good for my work and I enjoy that sex-role. My
mother was my wife in a past life, my father was my son. I got some faint
flashes of mates and lovers, but nothing clear.
In the final analysis, 81% of Dr Wambach s subjects state that they have chosen
to be born while the remaining 19% feel they either resisted it or they were not
consulted. As one of them put it, `it was like a tour planned by a travel agent
and one had to accept it. In most cases, a group of counsellors advised the
spirits about their next birth. They were either friends and relatives from
previous births or even total strangers somebody remembered an old man with a
long beard who acted like a big boss. The counsellors adopted different tactics
with different individuals; one spirit, not too keen to be reborn was shown his
mother-to-be down below, and he liked the woman so much that he immediately
agreed to be her son. It is interesting that very few of the subjects 0.1% to be
precise ever felt the presence of God or any other religious figure in this
process.
A fascinating aspect of the research is the study of human relationship that
emerges through various births. Eighty-seven per cent of the subjects admit that
their parents, friends or lovers were known to them in their previous births.
The relationships are so varied that it is not possible to draw any general
inference. One subject even says he wanted to be the son of his jailer of
previous birth, who used to whip him everyday. Like love, hatred is also a
strong bond.
Although Dr Wambach's work is impressive, we cannot reject outright the Karma
theory. She does not reveal anything about her subjects their background,
education, or lifestyle. Most are volunteers who heard about her `hypnotic
workshop' and wanted to join it. From their datasheets, it is clear that they
are well-educated people with a healthy interest in paranormal matters. It is
possible that most of them were aware of the Western theory of self option in
rebirth and that might have influenced their subconscious. Dr Wambach herself
admitted that some of them might have been influenced by Dr Raymond Moody s
international bestseller Life after life as some of their pre-birth experiences
are surprisingly similar to some post-death syndromes recorded by Dr Moody. It
is interesting that Dr Wambach s book, published just two years after Dr Moody s
work, is titled Life before life.
I think, the most significant point about Dr Wambach s work is that in the last
quarter of the 20th century, a practising psychiatrist of the western hemisphere
has accepted reincarnation as a basis for scientific research. Caught in the
crossfire of religious disapproval and scientific disbelief, reincarnation was
slowly relegated to mythology. Only during the 60s, there was a serious attempt
to dust away the cobwebs gathered around it. Credit must go to Dr lan Stevenson
for his pathbreaking work, Twenty cases suggestive of reincarnation. (1966).
Please note the shadow of doubt in the title itself, but even today, the book
remains a classic. Dr Hemendra Banerjee s work on parapsychology got him
international recognition.
Both Stevenson and Banerjee put painstaking research behind each case and turned
up with cast-iron evidence. A textbook example is the Swarnalata episode. (A
detailed account of the case was recently published in The Pioneer.) An almost
identical instance was provided by a Delhi girl Shanti, who declared in her
childhood that she happened to be the wife of Kedarnath Pandey of Mathura. She
was so assertive that her people took her to Mathura, where she not only
correctly identified her erstwhile relatives but even dug out a tin box where
she used to keep her savings. Till some years ago, Shanti Devi was teaching in a
school in East Delhi, but I have somehow lost track of her. Another illustration
from their India file is a slightly eerie story of a boy, Jasbir Singh. The boy
died of smallpox at the age of three, but unexpectedly came back to life just
before the cremation. After some time, the family noticed some personality
changes in that little boy. One day, he announced that he was a Brahmin from a
nearby village and would, therefore, not touch the food cooked by his family as
they were from a lower caste! He was taken to that village and was soon
identified as Shobha Ram, a man who died of smallpox at the same time with
Jasbir, although Jasbir vehemently alleged that he was poisoned. But it was
obvious that the boy knew all about Shobha Ram and his family. It seems to be a
borderline case between possession and reincarnation.
No discussion on reincarnation is complete without mentioning Tibet, because
there the concept of rebirth is accepted as a biological truth like life and
death. Every major Lama or abbot will leave clear-cut instructions before death
to his disciples about where to find his reincarnation ( Tulku in Tibetan) after
he passes away. The process of locating the Tulku is an extremely interesting
one, which has been described by Anagarika Govinda, a German scholar who had
spent many years in Tibet and became a Lama. He was a direct disciple of Tome
Geshe Rimpoche, an illustrious Lama who was fourth in the hierarchy after the
Dalai Lama. After he passed away in 1936, the search for the Tulku started. The
Great Oracle of Nachung was consulted and it came out with the description of
the town where he was reborn. This was followed by details of the house where he
was living, the child s age and even the age of his parents.
After going through all details, the disciples concluded the place to be Gangtok,
the capital of Sikkim. So, a delegation of monks landed there and soon they came
across the house as described by the Oracle. The house belonged to Enche Kazi, a
respected Sikkimese nobleman; he had a four-year-old son. The moment the monks
entered the garden even before they had knocked the door the boy went to his
father and told him that his people had come to take him back to his monastery!
The monks then entered and subjected him to a familiarity test: they displayed a
whole range of religious items like bells and rosaries and the boy without any
error picked up only those items belonging to and actually used by Lama Rimpoche.
After this demonstration, the heart-broken father the moter had died at
childbirth had to allow his young son to go with the Lamas. As soon as they
entered the monastery, Lama Rimpoche s pet dog came running and greeted him with
great happiness.
One might even ask Govinda, a blue-blooded rational German, what made him
believe in reincarnation. His answer is simple: For myself, rebirth is neither a
theory nor a belief, but an experience. What is this experience?
Long before he developed his Tibetan connection, Govinda, in his twenties, was
living in the Island of Capri. One day, some of his friends invited him to
attend a seance. Out of idle curiosity, Govinda asked about his past life, the
spirit came out with a Latin name. Nobody had heard this name before. Only
Govinda vaguely knew that it was the pen name of a German writer who died some
years ago. He had come across the name in a bibliography.
After a few days, Govinda showed a short story which he had written some years
ago to a friend who was well-versed in German literature. After reading it, the
friend was very surprised and he asked Govinda if he had read the works of the
German writer who used a Latin pseudonym he found many similarities.
Govinda was taken aback. He got hold of the works of the German author and found
that his short story was virtually a part of an unfinished novel of that author,
the novel that he could not complete because of his death. Some of the passages
were identical and Govinda felt that not only the language, but his emotions,
his innermost feelings were reflected in the writings of the other man. Later,
Govinda found out that both of them were inmates in the same sanatorium and
somebody even told him that they looked alike!
A secondary evidence of reincarnation is the example of child prodigies. We
sometimes come across incidents of children achieving something unbelievable the
legendary exploits of Mozart for example, or that of Jean Cardiac who knew six
languages before the age of six. There is on record a famous case of a child who
spoke only a few hours after his birth, knew the Bible by the age of two,
mastered history, Latin and French by three, and correctly predicted his own
death at four! No amount of human excellence can explain these events. It seems
these children brought with them all their knowledge and expertise of previous
existence.
The detractors of reincarnation theory often point out that most of rebirth
cases are recorded in India and Tibet where people believe in the concept; fewer
cases are reported from the land of unbelievers. This does not seem to be true
after the publication of Dr Wambach experiments; we can round off this article
with the personal experiences of another psychiatrist from the other side of the
Atlantic.
Dr Arthur Guirdham is a well-known British specialist on psychiatry with many
years of practice. For some inexplicable reason, he always felt attracted to an
obsolete 13th century religious sect called the Cathars. The Cathars refused to
accept Christianity and were massacred by the Church near Toulouse in France.
The doctor had strong feelings of deja vu whenever he visited that area. (The
feeling of deja vu, of being somewhere for the second time when actually it is
the first visit, is often found to be a secondary evidence of reincarnation). He
also had a recurring nightmare; he was lying on the ground while a tall man was
approaching him menacingly. He could not explain this nightmare by any means. In
1962, a woman patient came to him and he was amazed to find that she was also
having an identical nightmare. After she disclosed it, the nightmares stopped.
During the therapy, the lady confessed that she had been seeing the doctor in
her dreams since the 1940s. Her dreams are invariably centered around her life
in the 13th century when she, a young peasant girl, met a young Cathar priest
Koger De Grissoles, and they fell in love. They lived together happily but not
forever; the persecution started, they were arrested, the priest died in prison
and the girl was burnt alive. She claimed Dr Guirdham was Roger.
This seems to be a Hindi movie in the Madhumati-Milan-Mehbooba gharana lovers
who met tragic end return after 700 years as doctor and patient! But there is a
minor problem. In her dreams, which she saw in the 40s, she saw in great details
the background and lifestyle of the Cathars in the 13th century. Those details
were documentarily proved only in the late 60s. And the lady was neither a
historian nor a sociologist. So it is not easy to dismiss the story outright.
But this was not the end of Dr Guirdham s Cathars connections. Even before this
incident, he had a woman patient who came because she could not understand why
two strange words, the words with which she had nothing to do, with, were
continuously repeated in her head `Albigensian' and `Raymonds'. Dr Guirdham was
again puzzled because Albigenses; was another name of the Cathars and Raymonds
was the Count of Toulouse who ordered the massacre of the sect. The same patient
also saw nightmares of being burnt alive and being hit on the back by a torch in
fact, she had a birthmark on her back which had a burnt look. In this way,
Guirdham went on meeting more people who were somehow related to the Cathars.
This led him to his theory that a group of people who were Cathars in the 13th
century were born together in various places during the last two thousand years.
Dr Guirdham s books were published around 1970 and as expected got much flak and
derisive laughter, but it may not sound so strange now.
There is only a basic difference between 1970 and 1979, the year of publication
of Dr Wambach s book, as I have already pointed out: Dr Guirdham had to retire
from practice and give up consultancy work before writing his books, because he
knew his professional reputation would be damaged beyond repair, while Dr
Wambach could still practice and reveal her studies.
Nothing could possibly illustrate better the gradual, though grudging,
acceptance of the basic tenets of reincarnation.
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