Remember Me?

Answering reader’s questions on reincarnation

We had a flurry of responses to the article on reincarnation. So, this week I am responding to the most common questions that readers have sent in.

How can events or memories from a past life affect people in this life?

Here are the most common:

• An inexplicable interest in a particular country, language, time period, historical event, etc.
• A person might, when presented with photographs or movie footage (related to their past life), feel an emotional rush and even identify themselves somehow with the visuals.
• Many individuals claim to be able to view their past lives in recurring dreams or nightmare
• Some people have, from a young age, seemingly irrational fears  about happenings like, say, drowning, aircraft crashing or loud noises, Under hypnosis, the person often states that the cause of the phobia is an event that caused their death in an earlier life.
• Unexplained or chronic physical afflictions for which there seem to be no evident reasons. Again, when working out this problem under hypnosis, people may often state that the origin of their problem is a traumatic event from a past life. And, surprisingly, once this discovery is made, the person’s problems are often reported as going away of their own accord,almost miraculously.

How do people claim to remember past lives?

The recall could be spontaneous, especially with small children, when memories simply appear to surface from nowhere, a “waking dream”. Recall could also be triggered by anything which appears to remind the person of a key part of the memory - a particular smell, object, noise, word or phrase, taste or physical setting.

Sometimes people have recurring dreams with a vividness that can leave them in a cold sweat or in tears.

Profound meditation can also enable spontaneous memories that appear to be from past lives and is probably the single most common method used by people of all religions or philosophies in order to gain mystical insights.

How many people believe in reincarnation?

Worldwide statistics are difficult to obtain, but a Gallup poll in the US in October 2001 of Americans’ belief in psychic and paranormal phenomena throws some light. The survey asked adults if they believed in “Reincarnation, that is, the rebirth of the soul in a new body after death”. 25% said they did believe in reincarnation, 54% didn’t, 20% didn’t know,  and 1% had no opinion. Belief was only slightly higher among males than females, but varied significantly between age groups: belief amongst 28-29 year-olds was at 25%, at 22% in 30-49 year-olds and 28% in people 50 and over.

Let me conclude with a poetic expression by William Wordsworth (English poet, 1770-1850) :

“Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
and cometh from afar:
Not in entire forgetfulness
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come...”

More on reincarnation next time.

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Thought for the Week

“I can well imagine that I might have lived in former centuries... 
that I had to be born again because I had not fulfilled the task 
Memories, Dreams and Reflections had given me”
Carl Jung (1875 – 1961)
Swiss Psychologist & Pioneer of Psychotherapy
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First published in Gray Matter - The Hindustan Times