Demystifying Reincarnation 03 – Past life memories – Any normal explanation?

Welcome back to our series on demystifying reincarnation.
Can children be able to recollect facts which they cannot have known by any normal means? Can this point to the reality of their past life memories and thereby the reality of reincarnation? That is the question which we will discuss through analysis of specific cases in today’s and future talks. So till now, we have discussed about the global prevalence of reincarnation. And we also discussed in the previous session about xenoglossy and xenography during hypnotic regression into past lives.
People who had no knowledge of, say, an extinct language like Sassanid Pahlavi, they were able to write in that language under hypnotic regression. That strongly points towards the reality of their past life memories. So the pioneer, today we will be focusing on spontaneous past life memories, and the pioneer in this field is Dr. Ian Stevenson.
And let us look at the case of the Pollock twins, which we find in his book, the Reincarnation in Biology, a Contribution to the Etyology of Birth Marks and Birth Defects. Now, Pollock twins were two girls who were born in Hexham, Northumberland in England, in 1958. And they were Gillian and Jennifer Pollock.
And after they were born in Hexham, their parents moved away from Hexham when they were nine months old. And now before these, their parents had had two daughters again earlier, Jonah and Jacqueline. And both of them had died in a tragic accident, when once while they were going on a road, a crazed driver had hit into them and had killed them.
Now, when Gillian and Jennifer were very small, at that time, when first time the parents while cleaning up things in their house, they took out the things that belonged to Jonah and Jacqueline, say the dolls, then immediately Gillian claimed the doll that belonged to Jonah. And Jennifer claimed the dolls that belonged to Jacqueline, they said, these are mine, these are mine. And what do you mean mine? He said, Santa Claus gave it to me, they said.
Now, the parents were stunned, because these dolls had been, they had arranged for them to be given as Christmas gifts to their deceased daughters, Jonah and Jacqueline. And similarly, when other things were brought out later, this kept happening, multiple incidents. At one time, they took out a small toy ringer, which belonged to, which had belonged to Jonah.
And as soon as Gillian saw this, he said, this is mine. And then another time, while cleaning, while cleaning the house, their father put on a dress, like a overcoat, a working overcoat, he put on. And as soon as, he was, he was painting actually.
And at that time, when Jennifer saw this smock, she said, father, why are you wearing mama smock? Mama smock, what do you mean mama smock? He said, actually, he said, I knew, because that had been, that particular smock had been put away for a long time. And he had just found it as like an old piece of cloth, so that it will get dirty also, it doesn’t matter. They had not used it for a long time.
He said, actually, when I used to, when I used to drink milk from my mother’s breast, at that time, she would wear this cloth. Now, actually, this cloth had been in their godown for a long time. And in the store place, actually, his mother had worn that cloth, not when she was breastfeeding Jennifer, but when she had been breastfeeding Jacqueline.
So, that she even knew that such a cloth existed, and that my mother used to feed me with it. She was clearly identifying herself, Jennifer was identifying herself as Jacqueline. And then after, so these twins had been born in the exam, but they had moved away from exam.
So, when their twins were a few years old, and five, they came to exam for the first time. And immediately, this twin said, mommy, you know, I want to cross the road, and I want to go in the park, and I want to play in the park on the swings. Now, they had never been in that area before.
They didn’t even know that those swings, that there was a park over there, or there were swings in the park. But Jacqueline and Jonah, they used to play in that park regularly. So, their mother had been very skeptical, that she had not believed in reincarnation.
And their mother, she had been very skeptical about her children’s claim. But like this, one after another, when she saw incidents, she started accepting that these children, how could they have known this, that these are really my children who have been reborn. Now, this is just a sample case to, and the special feature of the sample case is that there are not just one child who remembers, but two children who are two separate individuals who were born as twins, and they remember their previous lives as two distinct individuals.
So, over the years, as I said, Stevenson spent several decades, four to six decades investigating past life memories. And he, although we use the generic word past life memories, actually they are not just memories. The memories comprise of four things we could say, the recollections, recognitions, there are behaviors, and then there are birthmarks and defects.
Now, among these, let us look at recollections means, say a person remembers, oh, I was so and so, I did like this, I went there, I did that. These are recollections. So, recollections is basically the person is at place A, but they are remembering that I was at place B, or I was, this is person A, and they are remembering I was person B. Now, recognitions means this thing is taken forward, and from place A, they go to place B, and there the places, the objects, and the persons, the landmarks, objects, persons, they are able to recognize them.
That is recognition. So, in this case of the Pollock twins, we can see that their recognition, oh, this is the park over there, we want to play over there. This is not just recollection, but also recognitions.
And after recognitions, there is also behaviors. So, children often behave in ways that are exceptional, that are characteristic of the behavior of the deceased person. So, the deceased person whom the children claim to be in a previous life, Stevenson used the technical word, previous personality to refer to that person.
The child behaves like the previous personality. And there is no circumstantial or familial reason for the child to behave in a particular way. We will discuss about those behaviors, or how a child born in India, say a child born in a vegetarian family who claims to be Muslim in a previous life, wants to eat non-veg food.
Or a child who is born in a low caste family in India, he claims to be a Brahmin, and he does not eat the food that his parents have prepared. And he demands that, no, Brahmin should cook food for me, only I will eat that food. So, this is behavior, which nobody would teach them.
But it is just behavior that springs up. And the fourth is birthmarks and birth defects. Often children are born with some birthmarks and birth defects.
And usually these birthmarks and birth defects are attributed to either genetic causes, they have it running in the family, or it is during gestation in the mother’s womb, if some reactions have taken place and the embryo in the womb is marked because of that. But when none of these factors apply, then the cause of the past life of the birthmarks and birth defects remains elusive. And in many cases, if the previous personality had died because of a fatal wound, and this child who claims to be that personality has a mark on the same place where the previous personality had the fatal wound.
So, in this way, these are four levels of evidences, the last birthmarks and birth defects, they are actually tangible, they are verifiable, they are physically mappable and physically correlatable. So, they are very tangible forms of evidence. So, we will look at cases with some or all of these evidences, and we will look at cases that are progressively stronger and stronger.
And now we can look at these cases and try to find out what explanations could be there for this. What could have caused these past life memories? And if we are going to look for explanations, we could say there are broadly four kinds of explanations that could come up. One is that the children, they might have acquired information by normal means, that maybe this child read somewhere about someone and somehow the child started imagining I was that person.
Not only information about, so they could acquire information by normal means. Second explanation could be the child children were just guessing, that okay, they thought maybe I was this one, and they just guessed some facts and came out right. The third explanation could be that they could have got this by, that this whole case might be exaggerated, maybe because of excitement of the parents, they may attribute to the child more facts than what the child actually spoke.
So, exaggeration could be a third possibility. And fourth possible explanation could be fraud. Maybe it is the parents who have made the child collude in a fraud, and they want to, for whatever reasons, they want to pull off a hoax.
And it could even be the investigators who have colluded in the fraud. So, we will look at these four possible explanations, information by normal means, information through guesswork, exaggeration, and then a fraud. And we look at cases which cannot be explained by these explanations.
And thus, we will see that these explanations are not enough, and some other explanations are required. So, let us look at the first possible explanation that is information by normal means. So, let us look at the case of James Linegar, who was born in America, and he was born to American parents, Andrea and Bruce Linegar.
At a very small age, when he was just two or three, you know, he would start screaming. Andrea would be horrified. And the baby starts crying.
Mother’s heart breaks at that time. But this was not the normal crying of a baby. These were the bone chilling screams of a person in mortal fear.
And screaming, he would say, airplane crash on fire, little man can’t get out. Airplane crash on fire, little man can’t get out. And the parents just couldn’t make any sense.
Andrea was horrified. What is happening to my child? So, whenever he would sleep, he would sleep at midnight, waking up and thrashing about in panic. It would horrify the parents.
And in the daytime, or in the night time, he would talk about pilot and being on fire. But daytime, in his normal way of living, he would, James would exhibit a fascination with fighter planes. And whenever he would get, whenever he would go to any exhibit, any shop, the first, his favorite toys, practically his only toy was fighter planes.
And whenever he would get a fighter plane, he would actually examine it systematically, from front to back, from top to bottom, as if he were going to, a pilot doing a check of a flight, of a plane before taking off. And then, once his mother got a toy, a plane for him, and she pointed out a plane to him. See, there’s a bomb on the back of the plane.
He says, Mom, that’s not a bomb. That’s a drop tank. He says, drop tank? What is that? His mother had no idea what a drop tank was.
But when later she asked, actually it was a drop tank. Yes, how does, how does he know this? She was puzzled. And then, when James’ nightmares, they became worse and worse in frequency and intensity, they consulted, some of their friends thought that maybe he’s remembering a past life.
So, the first reaction of Andrea and Bruce was, this is balderwash. This is nonsense. There’s no such thing as a past life.
But when the nightmares became worse and worse, they felt that some, some relief was needed. So, they went to Carol Bowman, who is a past life therapist, especially for children. And they told her that, what is happening to the child? And she said, yes, you, whenever he’s about to sleep, you can encourage him to speak.
Because usually, in the transition between consciousness and the unconsciousness that characterizes sleep, at that time, the children’s subconscious memories often pop out. And you can hear him. And let him speak.
Don’t be judgmental. Just let him speak. And maybe venting out his past life memories will help him recover.
So, when this was suggested, they started doing this. And one by one, James started speaking amazing facts. James said that, actually, he said that he was a World War II fighter pilot.
And his name was also James. And he said that he used to fly a Corsair. Corsair is a kind of a fighter plane.
And he would say, they used to get flats all the time. And Corsair is not a very common plane now. And the idea that the Corsair would get a flat, that was not known common knowledge yet.
When Bruce investigated it, he found that it was true. Then he said that he had taken off from a boat named Natoma. And he had flown off with a Jack Larson.
And when Bruce started investigating, he found that actually Natoma Bay was a plane, was a ship, which was used in the, especially in the war against Japan, as in the Indian Ocean and the vicinity of that, that area, Pacific Ocean, Indian Ocean, in the vicinity of the war which was fought in Japan. That area, this was a ship which was there. And from there, planes would go up.
And actually, Jack Larson was a pilot who was still alive. He had retired pilot. And he was living in Arkansas.
And then, and he said, they, Natoma squadron at Iwo Jima was James W. Houston, Jr. So now, so there was James Houston, Sr. And there was James Houston, Jr. And James landing on James. So when James learned to sign his name, children learn, they learn to write their name, make a signature. So James would spontaneously start signing his name as James III.
His parents were intrigued, why writing III? He had no explanation at that time. So they understood, okay, so there is James Sr., James Houston Sr., James Houston Jr. And now, James Leininger was third, so he was writing James III over there, and his signature. And then after that, they found that during the Iwo Jima raid, actually James Leininger had died over there.
And then finally, as he spoke these things, more and more of his nightmares went down. As he recollected in the mornings, recollected in the daytimes or before sleeping, the nightmares became lesser and lesser. And finally, his father Bruce Leininger took James to the same spot in the ocean in the general vicinity where his corsair had sunk.
So Bruce Larson said that James, when they had gone on a war expedition, at that time he had been hit right in the front. He had taken a full blow by anti-aircraft missile and the airplane had just exploded into flames. So what James was saying that plane on fire, little man cannot get out.
So what he was saying was, when the plane had exploded, he had wanted to jump out of the plane. But it had happened so suddenly and so abruptly that he had not been able to jump out and he had remembered his death. So when he was brought to that vicinity, as he was brought to that vicinity, James Leininger became more and more nervous.
And finally, he just ran into his mother’s legs and hugged it tightly and started sobbing bitterly. And the parents were just watching. It was a momentous moment for them.
And gradually, he sobbed, subsided, subsided, subsided. He looked carefully at the ocean and then calmed down. So for him, that incident led to an emotional closure.
He felt that that chapter in his life has ended. Now his mother, Andrea Leininger, she went on to write a full book about her experience with her child, sole survivor, the reincarnation of a World War II fighter pilot. Now in this case, he is such a small child, how could he have known about a Corsair and where that Corsair would get flats, and that there was a Jack Larson, and there was an Atoma Bay, and there were Ujima raids.
He knew so many things which he just could not have known by any normal means. So it is not just his emotional reactions, it is not just his healing, it is also his factual recollections. And Bruce, he actually investigated and he found all these facts to come out to be true.
And in that way, the case is of a case, so if we say that it is information by normal means, so this is a case where the child could not have acquired the information by normal means. Now let us look at another case where the child could not have acquired information by normal means because it was too intimate to be known. And this was the speciality of the information, of the information was investigated not just by the family members of the child of the previous personality, but by impartial third party also.
This is the case of Shantidevi. On 11th December 1926, Babu Rang Bahadur Mathur of Chirwala Mahalla, a small locality in Delhi, had a daughter whom he named Shantidevi. When she was 4 years old, she started saying that she had a husband and she had children.
And she referred to herself as a Chobin, that means the husband of a Chobe. And she said that her husband was fair, he had a prominent wart on his left cheek and that he wore glasses for reading. And she would talk longingly about her children and she said that her husband had a shop which was in Mathura in front of the Dwarkadheesh temple.
And now as she was growing, when they would ask her, what is your husband’s name? She would not reply because in traditional Indian culture, wives do not refer to the names of their husbands. But when a relative told her that if you tell the name, then we will take you there, we will take you there, then she told the name Pandit Kedarnath Chobe. And in the meanwhile, she also described how she had died while giving birth in the previous life.
And she described what the surgery was done, how her body had been cut and how it had failed. And she told this to a doctor. Doctor was amazed how such a 4-year-old girl could have such a detailed knowledge about the surgical procedures.
And this relative of hers, Babu Bishenchand, went to Mathura and found there was indeed Pandit Kedarnath Chobe who was living in Mathura and he had a shop next to the Dwarkadheesh temple. So, then Kedarnath Chobe visited the family of Shantidevi. And he came on 12th November, 1935.
And when he came there, she correctly identified him as her husband. Although, while introducing, people had deliberately introduced him as her husband’s brother. And then when the Kedarnath, they started having food and Kedarnath was amazed to see that they had made parathas for him and stuffed potato parathas.
And he asked, how did you make it? Shantidevi told that this is your favourite food. And Kedarnath Chobe had brought his son, Naveen, who was actually now older than Shanti. But Shantidevi was so delighted to see this Naveen, she ran and hugged him and she brought toys for him to play.
This is a peculiar sight, a smaller girl treating an older boy like a mother. And then Kedarnath had remarried and his wife also had come with him. And she asked him, you had told me, you had promised me before my death that you would not remarry.
Why did you marry again? Kedarnath was left speechless. Then that night, Kedarnath asked her, because she had arthritis in her, when she was, her name was Lugbi in her previous life and she had arthritis at that time. So, for her to even go through the activity for getting for conception, that was very difficult.
She asked him, how did you conceive at that time? And she described the whole unusual set of activities that they had done and so that without feeling too much pain in her body because of arthritis, still they had conceived. And she described that accurately and this was not known to anyone except Kedarnath and his deceased wife. And on hearing this, Shanti described this in so much detail, she, Kedarnath was left with no doubt that Shanti is his wife reincarnated.
And this story spread all over the country and it came to the attention of Mahatma Gandhi. And he appointed a committee to investigate this and there are prominent journalists, lawyers and social leaders who all were in this committee and they took Shanti Devi to Mathura. So, there was N. R. Sharma, leader of the National Congress Party at that time, then Lal Deshbandhu Gupta, managing editor of the Delhi Tej, a leading newspaper of Delhi and T. C. Mathur, a leading attorney.
So, there were illustrious people over there, they all wanted to see first-hand evidence of what would happen. So, when they reached Mathura, Shanti, she got out and she was just four years old, she was in Deshbandhu s arms and there was an elderly man wearing typical Mathura dress, who had just come and mingled in the crowd. And then she immediately got down from Deshbandhu s arms and she went there and touched this man s feet and she asked him, they asked, who is he? She said, Jaitji.
Jaitji means the elder brother of her husband. And although he had not identified himself, nobody had given any hint that he was there, but still she identified and not only identified, but she exhibited all the appropriate emotions. Then from Mathura to go to Chaubey s house, they boarded a Tonga and although Shanti had never been there before, she directed Tonga effortlessly, go this way, turn here, go left, go right.
Now, when they got to their house, she not only identified all the family members over there, but she also exhibited the appropriate emotions for an Indian housewife in relationship with various family members. And she also exhibited knowledge of the house, where is the kitchen, where is the well, things which outsiders would not have known. And every area has its own dialect and it has certain terms, which are used only in that area.
And she exhibited knowledge of that dialect also using words like Jajuru for lavatory or Katora for a type of fried pancake. And Stevenson, who also later on went through, reviewed the whole case, he said that she made 24 accurate recognitions. When this case gained international fame, a Swiss award winning journalist and critic, Stuart Lonerstrand came there and he came, flew all the way just for the purpose of disproving this case.
But as he studied this case systematically, he was convinced because of the sheer weight of the evidence. And he wrote a book establishing how this case is authentic. I have lived before the true story of the reincarnation of Shantidevi.
And that for us, again, if you consider, there was no way Shanti could have known this information, especially the information about how she had intercourse in a previous life with somebody, how Pandit Chaubey had intercourse with his wife. This was something she just could not have known, what to speak of all the other facts. So, cases like these, they strongly suggest that actually the information could not have been got by normal means.
And what other explanations are there and how those explanations do not actually explain, we will discuss in our future session. To summarize in this session, we discussed about how the past life memories are not just memories. We discussed the Pollock twins case and there are recognitions, there are recollections, recognitions, behaviours and birthmarks, birth defects.
And there are four possible explanations, information by normal means, there can guesswork, exaggeration and fraud. So, we discussed how the information could the children exhibit cannot have been obtained by normal means. We discussed James Leninger’s extraordinary knowledge about fighter pilots, fighter planes in general, and about a specific fighter pilot’s life and death.
And then we discussed Shantidevi’s case and her very specific intimate knowledge about the wife of Pandit Chaubey. And in our future talks, we will discuss about cases which stand, which are not explainable by the other explanations.