Buried Memories of the Past
The basis of psychoanalytic therapy is the bringing of unconscious memories into the conscious mind. Once made conscious, such memories can be dealt with, can be integrated into the personality which is thereby healed and made whole.
Many dysfunctions of the personality – and even of the body – can be traced back to strong, deeply buried hurts, confusions, betrayals, frustrations and similar inharmonious events, which, until brought into the light of consciousness, lie buried like land-mines. They explode whenever some aspect of life treads upon their particular tract of territory.
Those who work in this field, the therapists, analysts, psychiatrists and counsellors of one persuasion or another, have long been used to the techniques of retrieving these memories from the deep unconscious pits in which they lie, well hidden. Dreams are one universal method used to gain access to these memories. Guided fantasies give another, as do art, word association and, in some cases, hypnosis.
Hypnosis is a very powerful tool and we cannot pretend that we know everything of its effects or possibilities. It has a somewhat murky reputation amongst the psychological establishment – there is the whiff of disrepute about it. And, it cannot be denied, this is hardly helped by the touring hypnotists who place themselves in the entertainment business rather than the therapeutic.
But many therapists continue, cautiously, to use hypnosis as a tool to gain access to deeper and deeper levels of buried memory. And it was while using hypnosis in this way that some therapists noted something very odd happening. Deep memories appeared which had no apparent origin in the patient’s life; they seemed to be memories of a past life.
Dr Edith Fiore, an American psychotherapist, described how a patient first brought her face to face with such past-life memories. She wrote, ‘He had come to me because of crippling sexual inhibitions. When I asked him, while he was under hypnosis, to go back to the origin of his problems, he said, “Two or three lifetimes ago, I was a Catholic priest.”’21 This took her by surprise. Her professionalism took over and she encouraged him to work through what he described as life as a priest in seventeenth-century Italy. The next time they met the patient reported himself free of his problems.
Of course, she was not the first to have discovered an apparent power of hypnosis to recover memories of past lives. The first major case to catch the public’s imagination was that of the sensational ‘Bridie Murphy’ affair in the United States in the 1950s, in which a claim was made of a previous life in nineteenth-century Ireland. In England, a similar storm of support and criticism was caused by hypnotist Arnall Bloxham, whose patients, recalling past lives, received considerable publicity when a BBC documentary was made about them.
Certainly, such cases are fascinating and the subjects provide large amounts of very intricate and intimate detail of their previous lives. Correctly, they came under intense scrutiny and criticism.
Perhaps the most famous of Bloxham’s patients was one man who, under hypnosis, recalled serving as a gunner on a British Navy thirty-two-gun frigate commanded by a Captain Pearce during the eighteenth century. The ship’s name was apparently ornate and difficult; the sailors, according to the patient, nicknamed her HMS Aggie. He never could recall her true name. Perhaps the sailor in those days was unable to read or to pronounce it. Perhaps Aggie was short for Agamemnon or something similar.
During his recollections, he used many old-fashioned phrases and nautical or descriptive terms familiar only to sailors of that era. He produced a wealth of detail about life at sea in those days: the stench, the worm-ridden food, the rough clothes and the flogging – which he claimed he escaped because he knew well how to ‘lay a gun’.22
His first, and only, hypnotic session ended with the drama of a battle. He described, with passion and vivid detail, a fight against a French naval ship just outside the port of Calais. They had been waiting close inshore for many hours, hidden by the morning mist. All the gun’s were primed and ready. The match-boys were swinging their lengths of smouldering tar-soaked cord to keep them burning, ready to fire the guns. The ship was cruising back and forth as it waited for the French ship to emerge. When it finally did, the English gunners were ready for action.
He described the action: the ships began to close upon each other. The less-experienced gunners were impatient, desperate to fire. He continued his story:
Waiting, waiting! Waiting for the order – steady lads, steady – now hold it, hold it hold it – wait for the order, wait for it wing those matches, aye sirree – stand clear from behind – NOW you fool. Now up fool now – NOW! – (screams in exultation as the shot is fired) – Well done, lads – run ’em up, run ’em up, get ’em up, get ’em up – get ’em up the front – (shrieks) – pull that man out, pull ’im out – send him in the cockpit – now get ’im back – get up there – get on the chocks there – run them up again!…
The shot in – ramrods – swab it, swab it, you fool, swab it first – the shot in, shot in – come on number four, you should be up by now – shot in, ram it home – prime – swing those matches – aye, aye, sir – ready!…
And again lads – you had him then – hurry men – by God you bastard – got him that aim – that’s the way to lay a gun – My Christ, they’ve got old Pearce, they’ve got Pearce – (sudden terrible screaming) – MY BLOODY LEG – (screaming and moaning uncontrollably) – MY LEG – MY LEG!’23
The patient awoke so shaken that he never again submitted to hypnosis.
This story was so extraordinary and convincing that Prince Philip and the Earl Mountbatten, who both served in the Royal Navy, requested tape-recordings of this apparent past-life recall. They set British Admiralty historians the task of identifying the ship, the captain and the action. Sadly, despite all the wealth of detail, they were never able to. Is this, then, not a true case of reincarnation memory? Is it but a fantasy embellished with fragments from books, films and radio programmes?
The jury is still out.
The Use of Hypnosis
There is no denying that hypnosis is a useful therapeutic tool, but are the statements of past lives elicited under it objectively true? Dr Fiore, for example, makes no attempt to verify the historical accuracy of the stories that her patients relate. She is interested in psychological truth rather than historical truth. She is interested solely in what will help improve the patient. If the patient’s psychological disability is cured or eased by virtue of understanding the causes of the problem in terms of reincarnation, then that alone is sufficient for her to take it seriously. This approach is rather like the search for the Dalai Lama; it is fascinating, intriguing, compelling – but hardly scientific.
Dr Stevenson has long been aware of this difficulty. In his own studies on reincarnation, he has stayed well away from the use of hypnosis. He freely admits that the use of it is attractive; it seems to offer the possibility of laboratory conditions for control and verification. But, as he explains, this is an illusion. It has always proved impossible to control the subject’s previous exposure to the details expressed in the recall of ‘past lives’: like novels, plays, films or documentaries.24
He explains that these apparent past lives appear to be built up from several sources: they contain pieces of the subject’s own personality together with fantasy material drawn from a variety of sources, written or filmed. They are also strongly influenced by what the patient thinks the hypnotist might want. In other words, the patient wants to please the expert by giving the ‘correct’ testimony.
Stevenson adds that there could also be an element derived paranormally: from clairvoyance, telepathy, a discarnate entity of some type, or from a genuine memory of reincarnation. But all these sources may be present at once, all together contributing to the ‘recall’. Such would result in a coherent and fascinating story but not one which is wholly a memory of a past life.
Yet we cannot totally dismiss the recollections, however flawed, evoked under hypnosis. It could be that some g
enuine past-life memory drags to itself all the related material which the mind gathers over the years. Perhaps in some way, under hypnosis, the subject is unable to discriminate between these sources and so presents all the available information he or she has, woven into a convincing whole.
Some of the statements, some of the recollections, have a quiet dignity, an undramatic sense of validity. These are less easy to dismiss completely. One particular example amongst Dr Fiore’s patients concerns a man who spoke of participating in a jousting tournament in England in 1486 – a tournament which, for him, went terribly wrong.
The Joust
‘I’m sitting on a horse in my armour… I’m – I’m a little bit nervous… and I feel like I’m… a little bit like I might throw up.’25
A patient under hypnosis was describing to Dr Fiore the moments before he was about to enter the lists in a jousting competition in England, during the reign of King Henry VII.
After describing nervously awaiting his turn, he finally spoke of entering the field. Suddenly his body jerked violently. He reported that he had just been knocked off his horse by his opponent. Dr Fiore asked whether he was on the ground.
‘No, I had… got up… I feel more ashamed than I am scared, but… I am kind of disoriented… I think my stomach is injured.’26
His opponent, meanwhile, still on his horse, was circling, waiting for a chance to beat the fallen man with a club. The patient described the difficulties he faced: armed only with an axe, try as he might, he was unable to cause much damage to the mounted opponent. Suddenly the knight charged and trampled over him. And, as the knight did so, he swung with his club – a spiked ball on a chain – landing a fatal blow upon his dismounted opponent’s head.
Dr Fiore’s patient screwed up his face in agony. She asked where he was. With his voice beginning to fade, he replied, ‘I’m lying there in the green… I just feel nothing… just a kind of a warmth and a… red blood, a warm blood is running through my body… and I’m just… kind of… I saw a white light and… I just kind of floated away…’27
He later described his death further:
‘I was lying face down and then I floated face down… floated up and… at first, for about three feet… and then I floated upright… just floated away… A feeling of warmth through my whole body and release in my body… I see the whole area. I can see everything.’28
Falling into the Sun
One curious case moves further into the broader context suggested by the last. For reincarnation is to be understood as just one aspect of a greater process, a process which begins, not ends, with death.
This case concerns a man who, in his late teens and early twenties, experienced a number of brief but vivid recollections of past lives. None of the experiences lasted for longer than a minute or two but he had no doubt whatsoever of their reality. As he explained, each time he suddenly found himself reliving these past events, his memory at the time also returned. Not only did he remember the life but he also knew that he had subsequently forgotten it. It was rather, he explained, like riding a bicycle after many years of driving a car. That moment of sitting on the saddle and pedalling instantly brings back the memory of how to balance and steer; riding becomes second nature – as it had been before. So too with the experience of the past lives; once they are recalled, their reality is self-evident.29
But there was a further discovery: upon first remembering each of the previous lives, upon first ‘joining’ with that life, he realized that he had done so either at the point in that life when he had died or at the point in that life when he had a profound experience.
One life he suddenly joined at the moment when, a Viking warrior, he was standing near the prow of the ship at sunrise as it creaked and thumped through the North Sea. As the sun rose, so too did his sense of the timeless. For an instant – in that life – he, as a Viking warrior, had realized the timelessness and unity of all creation: a mystical experience.
Another life he entered at a similar mystical point, but this time reached as the culmination of an initiation into some ancient mystery rite.
Others he joined at the moment of death: he was a slave in a Roman galley. He experienced again the stench, the nakedness, the sweat, the chains, the oars, the hopelessness and the hatred he felt towards the Romans. Then an enemy battering ram crashed through the side of the ship. A fountain of water gushed in after it. Chained to the boards, he was dragged down with the ship and drowned. It was over in a matter of minutes.
Yet another life he also entered just before death: he experienced being in the cockpit of a crashing Second World War German rocket fighter, a Messerschmitt Me-163. It exploded on landing, as these small fighters, charged with a very unstable fuel, tended to do. He found himself floating away from the wreckage, looking down over snow-covered devastation, and wondering, just as his memory faded, what had happened to beauty, love and truth. These questions dominated his next life, his present one.
He realized that each of these moments, in however many lives, however many years apart, were all the same time. In fact, to call the experience a ‘memory’ somehow failed to encompass the full breadth of its reality. Somehow, it seemed to him, those lives still existed; they were separated from the present only by time. Each life seemed like one spoke of a wheel, separate at the rim but joined at the centre.
Two or three years after this flurry of reincarnation experiences and when he was maintaining a regular routine of evening meditations, he had an experience which placed all the others into context.
One evening, after his meditation, he slept briefly before suddenly awakening: he seemed to be falling uncontrollably through deepest dark space; he enjoyed the tumbling freedom of it.
Then, before his eyes, a wispy scene began to form itself, rather like smoke gradually coming together and solidifying. As it formed he recognized one of his previous lives. He knew instinctively that he could accept this forming scene, join with it and experience it again. But instead of feeling curious he felt utterly weary. ‘No,’ he said. ‘No. I’m weary, I’m tired of all these lives. I just want to see the Light’.
The scene dissolved. He continued falling at great speed through the darkness of space. Then another scene began coalescing before his eyes in the same manner. Again he recognized it as one of his previous lives. Again he rejected it, stressing his weariness. Immediately it dissolved, leaving him again tumbling through space.
A third time a scene was presented. A third time he stressed his weariness. A third time it dissolved to leave him falling through the endless darkness. Yet this time there was a change. Far in the distance he saw a bright star, a sun far away. And he was falling towards it with ever-increasing speed. Until he fell into the sun.
Suddenly he was sitting, with the bright light coursing through every cell in his body. And with this light came an intense burning, a painful searing experience which exhausted him as he sat there, unable to do anything but allow it to continue.
Abruptly the pain ceased and the sun seemed to rise inside his body. It was, he explained, as though the sun was shining from the centre of his brow and filling him with the purest light. A light which was Divinity itself.
At that instant he knew that all was indeed one: he later laughed at having forgotten such a self-evident truth, one which he had known for ever, but one which he had long searched for. He realized his mistake: no search was necessary; merely a remembering.
Death was seen as a mythical beast; reincarnation as a process as natural as falling rain or the ebb and flow of the tide…
It is difficult to measure the above experience by scientific standards. Yet does that make it unworthy of our attention? Does it make it somehow irrelevant to our lives? However far short of objective proof it might fall, it does serve to impress upon us that reincarnation – as it is experienced – is a process which cannot be viewed in isolation. Like this report, others stress that it is an important component of something much greater.
It go
es without saying that the experience of past lives is closely tied to the experience of death itself. And with the experience of death we are, paradoxically, in the grip of the greatest mystery of life. A mystery which no amount of fossils, relics or ancient texts can ever truly explain. For any explanation depends upon a perspective which reaches far beyond the limitations of more time and space. And here, in this wider universe, science as we know it is inadequate. To survive, it will have to change.
1. Section of a shaped and polished wooden plank around 500,000 years old, excavated in the northern Jordan valley, Israel, 1989.
2. Stone mortar and pestle found under Table Mountain by a mine superintendent in 1877, over 1,400 feet from the tunnel mouth in an ancient river bed at least 33 million years old.
3. The Paluxy river, Texas. ‘Taylor Trail’ of fossil human-like footprints crossed from the left by the prints of a three-toed dinosaur. This ancient rock is dated to over 100 million years old.
4. (inset): Close-up of one of the human-like fossil footprints in the Paluxy river showing what appears to be an impression of toes.
5. Part of a fossilized shoe sole found in a rock over 213 million years old. With magnification, details of the stitching could be seen. The only known photograph was published in a New York newspaper in 1922.
6. Fossil print, apparently made by a shoe, which was found in Utah in 1968, in rock strata over 500 million years old. The small fossil trilobite in the heel has dropped on to the print after it was made; another, in the toe, has been crushed by the weight of whatever made the impression.
7. Comparison between the teeth of the huge, supposedly extinct shark megalodon (left), and that of a present-day Great White shark. Reports suggest that megalodon still exists in the South Pacific.
Ancient Traces Page 24