The Romeo Error

by Lyall Watson

  One of the few scientists ever to bring the techniques of his discipline to bear on reincarnation is the psychiatrist Ian Stevenson, of the University of Virginia. His involvement began when he submitted the winning essay entitled "Evidence for Survival from Claimed Memories of Former Incarnations" in a competition in honor of the pioneer psychologist William James. [263] In this he neatly turned the tables on most previous thinking about survival with a new experimental approach. He said, "In mediumistic communications we have the problem of proving that someone clearly dead still lives. In evaluating apparent memories of former incarnations, the problem consists in judging whether someone clearly living once died. This may prove the easier task."

  Stevenson accepted the task and went on to make a very careful analysis of almost a thousand cases of alleged reincarnation and from these picked twenty that he thought worth further investigation. [264] He personally followed up seven cases in India, three in Ceylon, two in Brazil, seven in Alaska, and one case in Lebanon. Of all these, I find that involving the Lebanese boy the most interesting, because Stevenson discovered it himself and was able to be with the child when he was first taken to the village in which he seemed to have spent a previous life.

  From the moment he was first able to speak, Imad Elawar seemed to know things that nobody had ever taught him. He mentioned by name a number of friends that his parents did not know, and they dismissed them as fantasies until one day the child rushed up to a stranger in the street of their village, Kornayel, and hugged him. The puzzled man asked, "Do you know me?" and Imad replied, "Yes, you were my neighbor." The man lived fifteen miles away across the mountains in the village of Khriby. From that moment, Imad's parents began to take him seriously, and by the time Stevenson arrived in Kornayel, to investigate another case altogether, they had concluded that Imad was once Mahmoud Bouhamzy who, had been married to Jamile and had been run over by a truck, had both legs broken, and later died as a result of his injuries. Stevenson made a list of everything the parents claimed, and as far as possible tried to separate this from what the boy had actually said. Then he and the five-year-old child went to Khriby together.

  There is very little contact between the two villages, and when they arrived there, Stevenson discovered that Mahmoud Bouhamzy did indeed live there, but that he was very much alive. However, he learned that one Said Bouhamzy had in fact died in the way the boy described and that this man's closest friend was his relative Ibrahim Bouhamzy, who was much affected by his friend's death and who himself died later of tuberculosis. Ibrahim had never married, but he had a mistress named Jamile and was a neighbor of the man Imad had recognized in Kornayel. Stevenson investigated the house in which Ibrahim had lived and found sixteen correct references to things like a small yellow car, two sheds used as garages, and an unusual oil lamp.

  Stevenson's notes show that Imad had not actually said that he had been the victim of the truck accident, but merely that he remembered one vividly. He had spoken fervently of Jamile, even comparing her favorably with his mother, but never claimed to have been married to her. The errors of inference made by Imad's parents serve in fact as an indication of their honesty and make it extremely unlikely that they built up the whole thing as a fraud, or that they were the unwitting channel by means of which Imad received his information about Khriby. On the basis of the facts of the case, it seems that the memories of Imad bear a relationship to the experiences of Ibrahim that cannot be accounted for by chance, fraud, or normal memory.

  Stevenson says, "We have left as serious contenders to explain it either some kind of extrasensory perception plus personation (whereby information gained by ESP is molded into a dramatic personal form), possession (by a spirit entity, presumably that of Ibrahim), or reincarnation."

  The distinction that Stevenson draws between possession by a spirit of the dead and reincarnation seems to me to be unimportant. Reincarnation is in effect permanent possession, and if multiple personality and complex possession are possible, I see no logical reason why more than one soul should not become incarnate in the same body at the same time. This leaves just two possibilities: either Imad is telepathic or Ibrahim has been reincarnated.

  In the light of controlled experiments between pairs of people in apparent contact with each other at a distance, telepathy works at an unconscious level. [294] One of the best ways of making contact with this area of the mind and of gaining access to information there is by hypnosis. Denys Kelsey gives the example of a teen-age girl whom he hypnotized during a course of psychotherapy that arose out of her fraught relationship with her parents. [145] "Simply to provide a starting point for the session, I asked her the name of her favourite tune. 'I don't know any,' she replied. This surprised me, because one of her mother's complaints had been that her daughter spent far too much money on gramophone discs. I asked her how old she was. 'I'm five,' she said, and then burst into tears." The girl had spontaneously regressed to a moment in her childhood that proved to be a key experience in her present inability to cope with her parents. This is unusual, but regression is frequently initiated under hypnosis by a deliberate and specific suggestion from the therapist.

  In regression most subjects can remember early events in their lives with such clarity that they seem actually to live through them once again. There is apparently no biological limit to the extent of the regression, many people recalling sensations and emotions going back to the moment of birth and some even to prenatal experiences. Sometimes these demonstrations look very unconvincing, but if one gives regressed subjects the standard intelligence tests, they hit the proper mental age with considerable accuracy -- and this is very difficult to fake.

  Whatever the reality of the phenomenon, there is no doubt that the technique can retrieve repressed memories and sometimes release entirely unsuspected talents. The Moscow psychiatrist Vladimir Raikov has used it to help students produce creative abilities in art and music. [210] Rachmaninoff's famous second piano concerto was written after a similar session and is dedicated to his hypnotist. Working with Raikov is Victor Adamenko, a physicist who has invented an instrument that uses a strategic combination of acupuncture points to measure the intensity of bioplasmic energy in a body. They find that this registers dramatic changes that make it possible to distinguish the ordinary levels of hypnosis from those achieved during regression. There is a measurable physiological difference -- very like that produced when the subject is in the act of receiving telepathic communication. It appears that both regression and telepathy take place in the bioplasmic body.

  In a few cases hypnotists have managed to regress their patients beyond the moment of conception and into a world of memories that seem to belong to another life. Kelsey now uses this technique as a standard form of psychotherapy when he can find no relevant episode in a patient's memory of this life to account for a particular stress or phobia. [146] I find one of his cases particularly interesting because the subject, who was being treated for alcoholism, was rather cynical about the whole subject of reincarnation. He was hypnotized and immediately went into a spasm in which he seemed to be trying to escape from bonds which held his arms in a spread-eagle position while he groaned and gasped, "They are cutting my tongue out!" It proved very difficult to bring him back to normal waking consciousness, but as the spasm passed he shouted for water and more water, and only when he returned fully to the present was his thirst quenched. Kelsey believes that this man's craving for drink goes back to a previous life, apparently in the Spanish Civil War, where he was tortured and left to die in pain and thirst. The patient was told the diagnosis, and although he still remains skeptical about reincarnation, he has lost the compulsive need to drink.

  Referring to the use of hypnotic regression as a method for investigating reincarnation, Stevenson says, "The personalities usually evoked during hypnotically-induced regressions to a 'previous life' seem to comprise a mixture of . . . the subject's current personality, his expectations of what he thinks the hypnotist wants, his fantas
ies of what he thinks his previous life ought to have been, and also perhaps elements derived paranormally." [264] I have no doubt that the conscious mind, with the aid of talents hidden in the unconscious, can produce all kinds of convincing amateur dramatics, and I suspect that some at least of the paranormal elements are received telepathically; but this leaves some data that still point toward the possibility of possession. The subjects of nearly all investigations into reincarnation have their own distinct personalities in addition to the traits and memories of others now dead. I suspect that Stevenson's dilemma over young Imad Elawar and the question of telepathy or reincarnation might best be resolved by the answer 'probably both.'

  Modern depth psychology believes that there are resources of wisdom hidden deep in the human psyche. Jung was certain that "rebirth is an affirmation that must be counted among the primordial affirmations of mankind" and that "there must be psychic events underlying these affirmations." [137] In one of Plato's dialogues, Socrates indicates that teaching is not a matter of something being placed in one person by another, but of eliciting something already present. He was not interested in drawing out the petty things like names and dates that we retrieve under hypnosis, but "traces of knowledge garnered by the soul in its timeless journey." [112] There are notions of reincarnation in Hindu, Jain, Sikh, Buddhist, Tao, Confucian, Zoroastrian, Mithraic, Manicheist, animist, Jewish, Christian, Muslim, Masonic, and Theosophical beliefs. In Western philosophy alone it crops up in the works of Hume, Kant, and Schopenhauer as palingenesis, metempsychosis, and transmigration." [113] No other single notion has ever received so widespread a cultural endorsement. It could be argued that this in itself might have kept a meaningless concept alive for a long time, but the belief stems from so many diverse and culturally unconnected origins that I cannot believe it has no basic biological validity. The problem is finding proof.

  The best possible evidence for reincarnation would be proof that a person now living has the same mind as that of a person whose body died some time before. The philosopher Curt Ducasse points out that the body of an old man may be totally unlike that of the same man when he was young and that the difficulty of identification can only be overcome if it can be shown that the young body has become the old one. [67] The same problem would apply to the mind, and it should be considered that "a mind at a given time is 'the same mind' as one at an earlier time if and only if the mind in view at the earlier time has become the mind in view at the later time." This could only be proved by demonstrating that the present mind contains memories of subjective experiences enjoyed by the old one. Many of the supposedly reincarnated minds investigated by Stevenson contain information of this kind, but because it relates to subjective experiences, which by their very nature would not have been recorded in the past, it is impossible to verify them. The best possible proof of reincarnation is therefore impossible and we have to settle for second best.

  I am prepared to accept the kind of evidence that would cancel out any possibility of telepathy or unconscious memory as proof of survival. If it can be shown beyond doubt that someone living now has information or an ability from a previous time that is possessed by nobody else alive at this time, then that person must have obtained it from an entity that has survived from that time. This would of course be proof that could support either reincarnation or spirit possession, but I think that distinction is at the moment unimportant.

  Frederic Wood, a doctor of music living in Blackpool, was already interested in a local girl when, in 1931, she began while entranced to use words in a strange language. The girl, known only as Rosemary, was a channel for communications that seemed to come from a woman who had lived in Egypt during the Eighteenth Dynasty under Pharaoh Amenhotep III, whose dates we know to have been 1460 to 1377 B.C. The spirit identified herself as Telika-Ventiu, the Babylonian wife of the Pharaoh, and explained that she was able to talk to Rosemary in the old language because the girl had herself once been a young Syrian slave who served as a temple dancer until the queen rescued her and kept her as a handmaiden, and that the two had been drowned together in the Nile while fleeing from the wrath of the priestly establishment. Melodramatic accounts of this kind are common in the literature on reincarnation and they are quite properly a cause of concern. If reincarnation does occur, it is difficult to understand why so many of those who survive should be ancient Egyptians of high stature or North American Indian chiefs, but this criticism is unimportant in Rosemary's case because she was really producing words in an old Egyptian language.

  Wood copied down a number of phrases and short sentences phonetically and sent them to the Egyptologist Howard Hulme for translation. Hieroglyphics, with the exception of the shape for the sound of Y, represent only consonant letters. No living person knows how ancient Egyptian was spoken, because the vowels have to be guessed at by comparison with the distantly related Coptic forms and pronunciations. Few Egyptologists agree even on the number and arrangement of letters in the hieroglyphic alphabet, but all concede that the missing vowels could make a difference and change the meaning of words altogether. When the vowel sounds were omitted from Rosemary's words, what was left was still intelligible to Hulme. He says, "It is difficult to show and explain the purely technical and most convincing features: such as period characteristics, survival of archaisms, grammatical accuracy, peculiar popular terms, ordinary elisions, and figures of speech . . . but they are very evidential." [297] He was convinced.

  It is possible that the communications are indeed based on the lost language of the hieroglyphs and contained additions that were unfamiliar to them, who knew it only in its written form. The question was raised of the possibility of Rosemary having made a study of hieroglyphics and invented her own vowels, but this seems to be negated by the speed with which she was able to produce sentences in apparently meaningful reply to spontaneous questions. No living person can speak ancient Egyptian, and even the experts cannot read it directly without solving each word like a cryptogram by a laborious process of trial and error. Yet Rosemary was able to give Hulme sixty-six accurate phrases in old Egyptian during a sitting of just ninety minutes, in reply to a set of twelve questions in that language that had taken him twenty hours to prepare.

  The reality of the Syrian slave girl and the Babylonian princess is still open to question. There is certainly no mention of them in any ancient papyrus of the time of Amenhotep III, and we have no other way of proving that "someone clearly living once died." But in a sense this does not matter, because we seem in this case to have very good evidence of survival, regardless of the actual mechanics involved. My evidential criteria have been satisfied in that someone living was able to demonstrate an ancient ability possessed by nobody else alive at the time.

  In his vivid history of the sacred mushroom, Amanita muscaria, Andrija Puharich tells of a similar association with the young sculptor Harry Stone who on a number of occasions went into a spontaneous deep trance state and began both to speak and to write in the hieroglyphic language. [221] After painstaking translation, Puharich discovered that Stone was identifying with an Egyptian called Ra Ho Tep and that the text was a detailed account of a long lost ritual invotving the use of the mushroom to raise human consciousness. Once again we seem to be provided with evidence no longer available to any living person.

  Joan Grant is an English author who has written several vivid historical novels. [146] She is also able consciously to enter a trance state, which she calls "far memory," that enables her to relive parts of what she believes to be her earlier incarnations. These occur to her in such detail that they now form the substance of several complex books on characters as diverse as a Roman matron who committed suicide in a marble sarcophagus, a medieval girl who was burned at the stake as a witch, and a minstrel who played the lute in sixteenth-century Italy. While dictating an episode in the latter life, Grant vomited several times and explained that her distress was caused by the overpowering smell of a woman suffering from smallpox. A visiting doctor who had
worked extensively with smallpox cases in- sisted that she must be mistaken, as the disease had no such distinctive smell, but some time later he sent her an article on a rare type of smallpox that had appeared in the Middle East and could be distinguished from all others by "a specific stench which once smelt can never be confused with any other."

  Grant believes that "the body of every individual has a physical and supra-physical component; and when the energy-exchange between these two components ceases to exist, the physical body dies. But the supra-physical body does not die." In this, she seems to be very close to the concept of bioplasma, but she suggests that the supra-physical body cannot die because "it consists of an order of matter which is not subject to the process which we call 'death,' a process during which the physical particles integrated by an energy-field disintegrate because the energy-field has become inactive." She sees survival as being in the hands of something called the Integral, which is a sum total of all the wisdom acquired through a whole series of incarnations, that decides which of a collection of past supra-physicals should become alert and take on a new fertilized ovum. The sex and skills and some of the irrational likes and dislikes of any individual are, she believes, produced directly by the action of this particular organizing supra-physical on the genetic raw material contained in thc egg.