Demystifying Reincarnation 02 – Hypnotically induced past life memories and Xenoglossy

Podcast

we will discuss in our next talk. Thank you.
Hare Krishna. Hare Krishna. Welcome back to the series on demystifying reincarnation.
And today we will discuss cases of reincarnation that have been subjected to scientific scrutiny. And especially, we will discuss a case of xenoglossy where a person knows a language that is not only foreign to that person but that language which has been extinct for more than 1500 years. How could a person have known such a language? That’s what we will explore in today’s session.
So, in the previous talk in the series, we discussed how the acceptance of reincarnation has been found in many of the world’s eminent thinkers throughout history and how even in contemporary times many celebrities have conceived of themselves as reincarnations of people who have lived in the past. So, the scientific study of past life memories has progressed in two broad lines. One is the hypnotically induced past life memories and the second is spontaneous past life memories.
So, hypnosis and hypnotic regression. Let us look at what these are and how they apply to past life memories. So, hypnosis is basically an art by which the hypnotizer can control the mind of another person thereby getting the other person to do what the hypnotizer wants to get done.
So, this is basically a skill by which one person can do this. And hypnotic regression is where the hypnotizer takes the person who is under hypnosis backwards in time. So, the hypnotic regression is often used in psychotherapy.
In psychotherapy, the idea is all of us have certain mental issues because of certain traumatic experiences which we may have had in our childhood and we may not remember those traumatic experiences now. So, therefore, through hypnotic regression, if a person is taken back in time, then they can remember those incidents and thereby those whatever has scarred them by remembering them and by recognizing that they are in the past now, the traumatic effect can be minimized and removed. Now, in the few cases when the researchers started doing hypnotic regression, they found they would take a person back in time.
Okay, remember when you are 10 years old. Remember when you are five years old. Remember when you are three years old.
Remember when you are two. Remember when you are one. Remember when you are just in your mother’s lap, newborn.
Remember before that. And in some cases, people started telling not just of the life in the womb, which somehow they recollected, but they would tell, oh, I was an old man with white hair, walking with a stick. And I was living in this remote village.
I was very much respected in this village. And the hypnotic regressors were taken back. What is this person talking about? We are trying to take him back in time.
But now what is he imagining about I being old person somewhere? And then as this happened several times, some hypnotic regressors started connecting the dots and they figured out that maybe these people were being hypnotized. They are remembering a previous life and the same principles of psychotherapy, that by remembering forgotten hurts, the hurts themselves we have forgotten, but the hurting because of that hurt is still there. To remove that, the effect of those hurts, remembering and freeing oneself from that hurt helps.
So that same principle, some researchers, some hypnotic regressors found that they could apply to past life memories also. So, for example, they decided that they could take a person into a previous life and suppose a person had hydrophobia in this life and an irrational fear of water and it is functioning with the normal way of living. So we took this person by hypnosis to a previous life and then they would remember, I had fallen into a river and swept away by its current and crying for help, but no one was there to help me.
I was despairing, trying to keep my head above the water and I drowned. And when people under hypnosis would remember such past lives, they would go through a whole panorama of emotions, of excitement, of thrill, of devastation, of horror, tears coming down and they would exhibit the emotions which are appropriate for their situation. And after that, they would come out of the hypnosis, they would feel calm, they would feel purge, they would feel healed.
All that emotional energy because of the hurt that was running rampant within them, that by the recollection of that incident would get calmed. And in this way, many people all over the world have found themselves healed of issues, healed of problems, mental and behavioral problems, which they were not able to deal with by conventional modes of medication. So perhaps the most prominent among the researchers who has used hypnotic regression into past lives as a means of healing is Dr. Brian Weiss.
He has written many books such as Many Lives, Many Masters, Through Time into Healing. And through such books, he has demonstrated how people who were unconventionally incurable have been cured. And Brian Weiss is no fringe quasi-doctor.
He has Ivy League pedigree. He has his Ivy League psychiatrist with degrees from Columbia University and Yale Medical School. And he has helped people become healed.
So, the healing itself is undeniable. It’s been well documented. And the hypnotic regression to past lives is often used as a therapy for people who have psychological issues that they are not able to deal with normal means.
At the same time, there are other researchers who have had reservations about hypnotically induced past life memories. The main reason for this is that when a person is under hypnosis, that when their mind is basically being controlled by the hypnotizer, the purpose of that control is to guide that person in thinking in a particular direction. But under such guidance, whatever the patient’s subject speaks, whether that is the subject himself, whether it is the subject’s recollection or whether it is the imagination based on the suggestion by the hypnotizer, that is difficult to discern.
And especially because the hypnotized subject is in a more receptive state, the subject is susceptible to suggestion. And therefore, what the subject may feel is a recollection may actually be a suggestion being reconceptualized as a recollection. And therefore, although there are some cases, quite a few cases where what the subject has recollected has actually turned out to be accurate for some other person somewhere else.
And hypnotic regression sessions are also taped to make sure that it is not that the facts are fed by the regressor to the subject. But still, this method has its skeptics. Still, simultaneously, the healing effect is there.
That is not to be disputed. But why a person is getting healed? Is it because they are actually reliving something which they have experienced in a previous life? Or is it simply because they think that they are reliving it? So, that is something which is difficult to discern. But still, there are some researchers who have taken past life memories through hypnotic regression to a very surprisingly high level of criticality.
So, for example, consider the researcher Joel Witten, who is a professor of psychiatry at the University of Toronto Medical School. And he has written a book called Life Between Life, co-authored with the bestselling author Joe Fisher. And in this book, he describes cases of xenoglossy.
So, xeno is foreign, like we have xenophobia, fear of foreigners. Xeno is foreign. Glossy, it refers to language.
Xenoglossy refers to knowledge of foreign languages, specifically knowledge of languages which one could not have known by normal means. And then there is xenoglossy. Within this also, there is another category we could call xenography.
A person does not just know how to speak the languages, but the person also writes in that language. So, there are some subjects who have exhibited xenoglossy. Xenoglossy is an inclusive term which also includes xenography.
And they have exhibited knowledge of languages which they themselves did not know, and even the regressor did not know. So, here often the suspicion was that whatever recollection the subject is having, that recollection is a imagination based on the suggestion given by the regressor. But if they are remembering a language, they are speaking or even writing in a language which neither the hypnotized subject knows nor the hypnotizing researcher knows, therapist knows, then that knowledge cannot be attributed to suggestion.
That knowledge has to be attributed to recollection. So, Joel Whitten writes in his book, Life Between Life, about a person named Harold. He remembered a past life as a viking named Thor.
And as he was remembering his life as a viking, whatever he is speaking and whatever he is remembering, so Whitten instructed Harold to write it down. And Harold started writing it down. And he wrote down something in a script with a fine silvery kind of script.
And he found that when he submitted this to experts in Icelandic and Norwegian languages, they found that this was indeed authentic viking language. The vikings were a group, were nomadic tribe who travelled extensively. And thus when they travelled at different places, in order to interact with the people over there or while interacting with the people over there, they picked up many languages.
So, their own language is eclectic, drawing from many sources. And similarly, whatever Harold wrote, that was also eclectic. So, now another regression session was done for Harold.
And in this, he started writing something in a, his hands started moving. And when he wrote that thing, it just, to Whitten, it seems to be just gibberish, seemed to be just scribble. And after Harold came out of his trance, hypnotically induced trance, and he looked at it, that also seemed plain gibberish to him.
And Harold himself said, you know, it seemed to be like a small child who doesn’t know writing and just scribbling with a finger is doing something. So, it made no sense to him, no, neither to the subject nor to the investigator it made any sense. But still, Whitten felt that maybe this should be investigated.
Because it was not just random scribbles, although they didn’t make any sense, they seemed to be having some order to them. And then he subsent his writing to several experts in various parts of the world. He recollected a life as a Mesopotamian named Zando.
And he talked about several common concepts such as brother, house and clothing. And then it was a spidery childlike hand in which he had written. And when he submitted this to an expert, Ibrahim Paurhadi, who was an expert in ancient Persian and Indian languages at the near eastern section of Washington’s Library of Congress.
So, Paurhadi said that actually what Harold had written was in an authentic representation of long extinct language called Sasanid Pahlavi, which was used in Mesopotamia between 226 and 651 AD. And Sasanid Pahlavi is a language that has been extinct for practically 1500 years. And today, extinct language means no one knows this language today.
And the only people who know this language are just a handful of linguists, language experts, especially those who are experts in Arab and Persian languages. And for Harold to have learned this language and learned it well enough to write in that language, speaking a foreign language is difficult enough. But that can be learned.
Many people who go to different places, they learn that language because they need it for communication. But actually writing, writing script and writing it properly in a foreign language, that is a skill which requires a lot of patience and determined endeavour. And Harold, if he had to learn it, he would have had to go to such experts who are only a handful in different parts of the world and he would have to learn from one of them.
Harold never did this. He never learned this language from any of the experts. And in fact, he himself could not recognize what he had written.
And how was he able to write it? The most logical explanation for Harold’s being able to remember and be able to write such a language is that he himself had existed as a Mesopotamian, as he claimed based on his own hypnotic regression into past life. He lived as a Mesopotamian. And at that time he had learned that language.
And because he was the same person who was now reincarnated as Harold. So somewhere deep within his subconscious memory, the knowledge of the language that he had learned in a previous life 1500 years ago, that knowledge had lingered. And during hypnotic regression, that language, that knowledge was brought out.
And as by the bringing forth of that knowledge under regression, he was able to speak this. So, Arthur Canyon Doyle in Sherlock Holmes and He says that actually in such investigative fiction overall, it is said that when all other explanations are exhausted, then the explanation that remains, no matter how incredible it seems to be, that is the most credible explanation. So, for the knowledge of Sassanid Mahalavi, for a person in the 21st century, there is just no way in which the person can learn.
Therefore, the most logical way is, the logical explanation is that he himself lived at that time, learned that language and spoke that language again. And xenoglossy is not just one or two cases. There are dozens, indeed scores of cases of well-documented evidence of people who have spoken, that are according to their speaking, or they have written in languages that they could not have known by normal means.
Of course, Harold’s case is exceptional, because he may well be the only human being who is able to speak in two languages that are either almost extinct or extinct now. The language of the Vikings and the language of the Mesopotamians, Sassanid Mahalavi. So, these cases, exceptional though they may be, and these cases may not involve some healing.
So, we could approach reincarnation from a utilitarian perspective. Okay, whether the past lives actually are real or not, if by remembering the past lives I am healed, then let me go into the past life, do some hypnotic regression, get healed of my issues and move on with my life. This would be a utilitarian way of approaching the issue of past life memories.
But if you have to approach this issue from an ontological perspective, what is real? So, from that perspective, xenoglossy is evidence that eludes all other explanations. And this documented phenomena of people being able to speak and write in languages of which they could have no other knowledge, that points very strongly towards the existence of some part within us that had existed long ago and that continues to exist now. And that, by logical influence, will continue to exist in future.
This is about hypnotically induced past life memories. Along with this, there is another genre of past life memories that has also been explored extensively by researchers. And to some extent, hypnotically induced memories can become like a craze.
Now, anybody who has a fascination to know what I was in the previous life, they go into, they go to some hypnotic regressor who may be of great credibility, good credibility or of questionable credibility. And there’s a kind of titillation, who was in my previous life? Who was I in my previous life? I want to know that. And it can become a kind of entertainment.
But for other, there are other cases where people remember their past lives, not under hypnotic regression, but spontaneously. And spontaneous past life memories often present far stronger evidence of the authenticity of the past life than hypnotically induced past life memories. And the pioneer in this study, in the scientific study of past life memories was the late Dr. Ian Stevenson.
He was a brilliant scientist himself, who in the, he was a Carlson Professor of Psychiatry and Director of the Division of Personality Studies at the University of Virginia. He was himself barely in his thirties when he became the head of department of the psychiatry department in his college. And he was considered one of the brightest researchers of his times.
And yet, when he read some cases about past life memories, and he felt inspired, let me explore this. So, he pioneered this new department of personality studies. And he did, he pioneered the method of systematic research.
And he has written many books, just 20 cases suggestive of reincarnation, just as cases suggestive of reincarnation in Europe. And like that, he actually spent more than four decades traveling extensively all over the world, researching cases of especially children who remembered the past lives. Stevenson decided to zero in on children, because when it comes to spontaneous past life memories, he found that there are many children, usually from the age of two, three, four, when they start speaking, they start speaking about being someone else.
And now, they’re saying, I was big then, I’m small now, start speaking like this. And such children, they exhibit their recollections, their recollection, their past life memories, they’re often very vivid. And because these children have had, they were not children, the children that Stevenson investigated, they’re not children who lived in a high tech environment where through the internet, they could have got knowledge of hundreds of things, or practically everything under the globe, under the sky.
But these are children who lived off in rural places, and they could not have known many things which they actually knew. And based on objectively evaluating the claims of the children, Stevenson investigated the study of the past life memories. So, in our next session, we will discuss about past life memories.
And we’ll find sensational cases of a child who loved fighter planes, and who it was found was the reincarnation of a World War Two fighter pilot. And like that, we’ll discuss several cases of reincarnation of past life memories, spontaneous past life memories among children in our next talk. In this session, we briefly discussed about the evidence for past life memories that has undergone scientific scrutiny, we discussed about hypnosis, hypnotic regression, and hypnotic regression to past lives, and how psychotherapeutically it has healed people, the healing is undeniable.
And this healing has been pioneered by Ivy League, Ivy League researchers and scientists. And although the healing itself does not prove the reality of the memory of the past life, so we could still, utilitarian perspective, we can use that healing. But from an ontological or existential perspective, the cases where children, where people have exhibited xenoglossy, knowledge of a foreign language, and especially we discussed the case of Harold, who exhibited knowledge of the language of the Vikings and the language of the Mesopotamians, knowledge which he could not have had by any normal means.
This strongly points to the reality of the past life and the authenticity of this language, knowledge being a recollection from past life. Join us again next time for a discussion on spontaneous past life memories. Thank you.
Hare Krishna. Welcome back to our reincarnation demystified series.