Demystifying Reincarnation 06 – Past-life memories – Frauds by parents?

Hare Krishna welcome back to our discussion on reincarnation demystified and we will discuss whether the past life memories could they be frauds elaborately executed either by the parents of the children since the children themselves are not really capable of frauds or could they be frauds by investigators so we discussed in the past life memories there are recollections recognitions there are emotions or behaviours and then there are birthmarks and birth defects and how are these to be explained and we discussed cases systematically which show how they cannot be explained as information coming by normal means or as information coming by guesswork or as exaggeration so if none of these work then could it be fraud there are two ways to be fooled one is to believe what is untrue the other is to refuse to believe what is true Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard it’s one thing not to see the forest for the tree but then to go on to deny the reality of the forest is a more serious matter biologist Paul Weiss so let’s consider a scepticism with respect to not accepting ideas which seem far fetched the scepticism is good it can protect us from being taken for a ride at the same time if some ideas may be far fetched and what they may require is expansion of our conceptions then we should be ready for such expansion of our conceptions so let’s consider objectively could the past life memory cases of children be frauds executed by either the parents or investigators let’s focus first on the parents now why would the parents execute such a fraud let’s look logically at what motives are there maybe they want to validate their personal beliefs maybe they want money maybe they want fame or prestige let’s consider this could be the normal motives because of which people do different things when we act in place we want money we want fame or prestige or we want to prove that I am right my belief is right so now as compared to let’s start with the validation of personal beliefs and actually the sceptical approach is what was adopted by editor for the Washington Post named Tom Schroeder when he read about the case of Ian Stevenson’s studies in past life memories he is intrigued and he was a sceptic so he decided to accompany Ian Stevenson on his research expeditions so he spent considerable amount of time with Stevenson in Lebanon and in India where he saw first hand the critical systematic exhaustive way in which Stevenson conducted the interviews and documented the results and he wrote a full book about it called Old Souls the scientific evidence for past lives and this book received many positive reviews and the conclusion of the book was that these cases are just not explainable by any normal means and one for example the review that was published in Publishers Weekly said that it is typical of the other reviews also the journalistic objectivity Schroeder brings to his material makes this an exceptionally valuable treatment of an often disparaged subject so we will look at how Schroeder analyses also as we conduct our analysis so let’s start with the validation of personal beliefs now there can be two cases one is where the parents believe in reincarnation and the second is the parents don’t believe in reincarnation and there are a significant number of cases where the parents don’t believe in reincarnation and we discussed for example the case of James Linegar where his parents Bruce and Andrea they just believed in reincarnation, Andrea was a little open but Bruce considered it complete balderwash, complete nonsense bogus bogus but it was the evidence that changed his stand on this so far from in their case and in the case of hundreds of others like that far from they wanting to fabricate any evidence to prove their beliefs, it was that the evidence had to overcome the power of their disbelief and the evidence transformed them from the position of disbelief to belief and Bill Tucker has actually focused to a significant extent on the cases in America and most Americans have been and are sceptical about reincarnation that means the parents of those children who have been documented as having past life memories have been sceptical so in these cases where the parents did not believe in reincarnation the validation of personal beliefs does not apply at all in fact it is the refutation of personal beliefs that applies and that’s the power of the evidence that is involved. Secondly if you consider the other case of parents who believe in reincarnation how especially in traditional cultures where belief in reincarnation is common, say in India or even in Sri Lanka, India has the prominent religion of Buddhism, of Hinduism and Sri Lanka has prominent Buddhism now in both these religions, reincarnation is just accepted as a fact of life and because of that most parents are not interested in having their belief validated because we need to validate our belief when somebody is questioning our belief.
If the belief is just a part of the culture in which we live in, we don’t question it and we don’t have to prove it. So for the children for the most parents of believing, for most parents who believed in reincarnation they were not at all concerned about validating their belief at all and further the parents were not really eager to publicise the case as Schroeder wrote in Old Souls family members admittedly interested in and open to the possibility of reincarnation had nonetheless refused to leap to any conclusions or embellish the child’s statement if anything they had played them down that means that the parents had no interest in publicising the case and there is one more reason for this Stevenson documented that there was a widespread belief among Indians especially rural Indians that if a child recollected a past life, then the child would die early in childhood now Stevenson is emphatic in saying that he has seen no such statistical correlation the longevity of children who recollect their past lives is no way lesser than the longevity of their children but despite the statistical evidence the belief remains widespread and because of this belief that oh the child may remember the past life and if the child keeps remembering the past life the child will die so the parents often neglect the child’s talking about a past life and try to suppress that belief and in spite of that when the child keeps remembering then it is not that the parents want the belief validated it is rather the child’s insistence that makes the parents talk about the case so there is no validation of personal beliefs as a motive for fraud involved in a substantial number of cases now let’s look at the second motive could there be monetary benefits Stevenson and researchers following his example adopted a policy that they would not offer any money for conducting the interviews of the subjects of the child or the family members and the reason for this was they did not want one pecuniary considerations to corrupt the case that means they did not want that because of the desire for getting more money the parents and other acquaintances should not exaggerate the case further so there is now money to be gained by the parents further not only that if we consider another point that actually the parents also did not have any interest in getting remunerated actually the parents had not only were they not going to get remunerated they also did not look for remuneration sometimes even when the child had recollected being a part of a previous life where the previous life’s family was much wealthier still the parents did not when they established contact the poorer parents of the child of this life established contact with the richer parents of the child in the previous life still the poorer parents did not expect any gifts from the children from those parents from the richer parents and nor did the richer parents give any gifts so for the parents financial consideration there is no financial incentive for doing this in fact there was substantial disincentive why disincentive? because many of these cases took place in villages and many of these villages were poor and they often had to work hard throughout the day to just make ends meet and when the researchers would come and conduct interviews often the interviews would go on for hours and hours sometimes for days and it would mean that they were losing the time that they could use to earn their livelihood and in spite of that the parents gave the interviews so there was no financial benefit at all no monetary considerations at all now third could be was there fame or prestige involved? now could it be that if a parent says that oh my child remembers his past life my child is a reincarnation of so and so well again in a culture where reincarnation is accepted as a fact of life there is really not much reason for the parents to doubt the belief in the child’s past life memory it doesn’t really make them very special they just accept that okay we all are reincarnation is a fact of life we all were someone in our previous life but my child was also someone and he remembers so what is the big deal so usually the parents were not interested in fame or prestige and of course in some cases some children there are some reincarnation cases where some children claim to be celebrities in their previous life maybe the president of a country maybe a famous movie star or something like that in general researchers treat such celebrity reincarnation cases with scepticism and we following their rigorous research standards have avoided dealing with any any of these cases of celebrity reincarnations so in most of the cases which Stevenson investigated he found that the parents that the children actually recollected lives which were of little known people who had lived and died without ever becoming celebrities there is no fame or prestige involved in such a case again to the opposite actually there is often for the parents embarrassment embarrassment because the child remembered the previous lives child often acted in ways which was not at all palatable for the children let’s look at a few cases like this in the case of Martin Martin described by Stevenson in his 1983 book cases of reincarnation type volume 4 so Martin Ong Myo was born in Burma in 1953 when she was about 4 once she was walking with her father and suddenly an aeroplane flew overhead and she immediately started became scared mortally scared and thereafter whenever aeroplanes would fly over the sky she would be overwhelmed with fear and at the same time as this started her crying paranoia on seeing aeroplanes along with that she would also get weeping attacks intermittently suddenly she would start weeping for no reason and when asked why was she weeping she would answer I am pining for Japan I want to go to Japan and at that time she started speaking she was actually a Japanese soldier and she said that she had come on that she or he the Japanese soldier who she claimed to be had come on deputation during the second world war when Japan had attacked and occupied Burma and while living there an allied aeroplane had dropped a bomb and that firing from the aeroplane had killed the Japanese soldier whom Martin Ongno claimed to be and that’s why whenever in her presence there was a talk of Americans or Britishers Martin would become very angry and she said oh Japan is my homeland I want to go to Japan and further he would say that oh this weather is so hot over here and he would feel very uncomfortable about it Burmese are just used to it and he said that oh this food here it is so spicy I want sweet food and she said especially she would like fish and especially among fish also half cooked fish and all these dietary preferences were actually the preferences of Japanese people and Japanese would often complain about the spicy nature of the food available in Burma and then as she grew up she actually claimed to be a soldier and she claimed to be a male and she would play not with girls she would play with boys and when it was time for her to go to school she would go in a in a male dress not in a female dress and as she kept growing up initially she was indulged in but as she kept growing up and the school teachers said that no the school administrators said you have to come in a female dress and she was so insistent about wearing a male dress that she dropped out of school and by this time actually her father had passed away so her mother was bringing her up and her mother was very concerned that if if Mati Nongmeo continued with her masculine dress and masculine behaviour then she would never get a good man to marry and she was pleading with her daughter to start behaving like a female and Mati Nongmeo paid no attention to this and she said she had no intention of marrying a woman, marrying a man because she was a man and she was going to marry a woman. Her mother was shocked by this and for so Stevenson kept investigating her going repeatedly over there and he found that even till the age of 27 most children actually outgrow their past life memories and by the age of 8 or 10 they often forget those memories also but Mati Nongmeo not only continued her memories but she also continued her self-identification as a Japanese and as a Japanese soldier so now she was even at the age of 27 living with her girlfriend and she had no intention of marrying and she was still dressing as a man and she still aspired to become a soldier now for our perspective for her parents, for her mother and other family members there was not any fame or prestige coming from her past life memories it was actually a source of profound embarrassment.
Why? Because first is her pining for Japan when the Japanese had lived in Burma they had committed many atrocities and that’s why the general Burmese sentiment toward Japan, Japanese was of fear and anger and that’s why there was no way from her circumstances, from her surroundings she would have got a pining for Japan, what to speak of such an intense pining and often she would sometimes when she would be alone she would speak in a strange tongue which none of the others could recognise and later it was found that she was speaking in Japanese along with that so this was antithetical to her culture and again it’s like say somebody in India pining to be a Pakistani it’s not going to bring any prestige it’s going to cause embarrassment to the relatives so it was like that and secondly her self identification as a male and all this happened in the 1970s at a time when Burmese culture was still very conservative and such conservative cultures gender roles are quite strictly defined so for a woman to claim to be a man is frowned upon in society and often family members feel embarrassed by this so why would family members perpetrate a hoax which would make them embarrassed so therefore cases like this strongly disprove the idea of parental fraud as a motive now there is another case many cases like this let’s look at another case where the parental fraud motive is further disproved because the parents were of the two sets of parents were actually crossed religious boundaries the child in this family this life had been a Hindu and in his previous life he had been a Muslim in the case of a Muslim to Hindu reincarnation described in journal scientific exploration volume 4 number 2 1990 documented by University of Virginia researcher Antonia Mills in fact in this issue she describes many cases of past life memories and she analyses exhaustively one particular case this case is of Mushir Ali Shah he was the eldest son of Fakir Haider Ali Shah through his second wife Najima and he lived with his parents in a town of Kakori near Lucknow in Uttar Pradesh and he worked as a horse car driver and when he was about 25 on 30th June 1980 he was struck by a tractor while he was driving his car and he was killed on the spot and this fatal accident occurred on the road from Kakori to Lucknow at a half kilometre distance from the village known as village of Bajnagar and this Bajnagar so Kakori, Lucknow Bajnagar and Bajnagar is about 5 kilometres from Kakori and in Bajnagar was born in April 1981 that is about 10 months after the death of Mushir was born Naresh Kumar Raidas and the third of the four children of Guru Prasad Raidas and Naresh was just two and he just started speaking a few words at that time he started saying Kakori, Kakori, Karka, Karka so Kakori was of course the place where Mushir had lived and Karka meant horse cart which was what Mushir used to drive in his life and at about the same age just from the age of two or three he would kneel down as if he were offering namaz and he would do this whenever he was alone and if he sensed that anybody was watching him he would stop doing this now the Fakir who was the father of Mushir Ali Khan, Mushir Ali Shah so Fahid Ali Shah known as the Fakir so he would he was like a holy man and he would beg for alms from village to village so he would come to Bajnagar and to Naresh’s house every Thursday for begging, he would go to different villages on different days and whenever he would come to Naresh’s house, Naresh would go and want to touch him and reach out to him and talk with him and go with him, he would follow him for one two, three, four, five houses and when the Fakir would not pay much attention to this boy who was following him then the boy would reluctantly and happily go back to his own house by August 1987 when Naresh was about six, he started saying that he was a Muslim from Kakori and one day he saw the Fakir and he called him Abba he said don’t you know me in my house there are five neem trees and I was hit by a tractor and he asked the Fakir to take him home, he claimed that he was the Fakir’s son and the Fakir refused, rejected this request and Naresh was so insistent that the next morning he told his mother you must take me to Kakori, he insisted and his mother took him and when they came to Kakori he led her into an area where neither his mother nor he had ever gone before and he led her straight to the house of the Fakir and when he came to that house as soon as he saw her, he said my Abba and my Ammi started calling out, mother and father now Naresh’s parents when he would call the Fakir Abba, they would try to tell him, call him Baba because Baba is the word which is used for a holy man in Hindu culture whereas Abba is the word used for father so and she was there at the house with his brothers and his sister who was there with her husband whose name was Mohammed Islam and all these people Mushir recognised and then he asked where is my younger brother Naseem and then they saw Naseem he said Naseem is sleeping, he went up to him and picked him and woke him up and started hugging him and kissing him and Naseem was befuddled, who is this person and then he not only did this, he actually identified when he was asked how many brothers and sisters he had, five brothers and six sisters and then he says one of the sisters is a stepsister, Najeeba was his second wife of Fakir Haider Nisha and then there was actually one more girl over there and he asked who is she he said to his Najeeba she was in your stomach at that time when I died and then Naresh also correctly identified Mushir’s suitcase and he told in advance what are the contents of the suitcase and those contents turned out to be right and then Fakir noted that Naresh had a slight depression in the middle of his chest so at the same place where actually he had been hit by the cart so then he asked the wife of a man named Zahid that he had kept for the Fakir 300 rupees with Zahid, had Zahid returned that money and actually after Mushir’s death Zahid actually returned the money and then when the Fakir’s family was sending Mushir back he said what do you mean you are sending me off you won’t send me off without tea and eggs Mushir had been very fond of tea and eggs and his Naresh’s request was significant because his family was a Hindu vegetarian and they would not eat eggs so now here the parents had absolutely no interest because in India Hindus and Muslims often have had religious tensions neither set of parents was interested in establishing any reincarnation connection even if we say that Naresh’s parents were Hindus and they might have been interested but why would Mushir’s parents have gone along with that fraud and in fact Mills says that if there are cases involving cross religious reincarnation then most of the time the past life researchers are not given permission to investigate and she said it is probably because Fakir was a respected holy man and because he accepted the case of reincarnation that’s why he allowed to investigate and others did not object and in fact when Fakir was asked he and his wife Najima they were in tears speaking about this when Fakir had gone to Naresh’s house and Naresh had said that I am your son he had been befuddled and that night he had been praying to Allah what is this mystery please help me understand and next day when Mushir had come and recognised so many people and so many things precisely he had felt that the mystery had been solved that actually Naresh was Mushir reincarnated now still Naresh Mushir’s wife Mushir’s sister for example Wahida she acknowledged that Naresh recognised all of them correctly she asked what was her conclusion we don’t believe in reincarnation we don’t accept reincarnation so here they acknowledged the evidence but rejected the inference so there is no question of them having a belief which they are trying to prove rather they strongly hold on to their disbelief even when they are acknowledging the reality of the evidence so when investigating other cases like of this kind Antonia Mills found that both the Hindu parents or the Muslim parents they would actually try various ways to make the child forget forget the past life memory connection past life memory claims so sometimes what they would do is they would sometimes ignore the child’s claim, tease the child or take the child to an exorcist or sometimes they would place the child on a wheel and have the wheel move counter clockwise so the idea is maybe that the brain fluids are moving in the wrong way because of which the child is collecting crazy ideas so getting the wheel to move counter clockwise will unwind the memories so all kind of queer superstitious ideas the parents would do to make the child forget the memory so in such cases where the child is not at all interested in the family is not at all interested in establishing the reincarnation connection and there is no question of parental fraud as an explanation another case noted by Stevenson in his book 20 cases suggestive of reincarnation this was a boy who was born in a lower caste Hindu family and he claimed that he was from a Brahmin caste and he absolutely refused to eat food that was cooked by his own parents and because he threatened to starve his father actually had to pay a Brahmin to cook food at his house and get food for his son now what father what family would want such embarrassment where their own child is refusing to eat food cooked by them only and they have to pay they not only have to go through embarrassment but they have to pay someone else to provide food for their house for their own son so definitely such cases where there is so much embarrassment involved the parents are not committing a fraud at all and that’s why if we consider objectively the fraud hypothesis yes it is naturally good to be critical to be sceptical to be suspicious not to believe far fetched claims but sometimes our scepticism itself may become fast fetched when the evidence is so strong so we discussed that for the parents of the children who are claiming past life memories often there is no reason to validate their personal beliefs because often the parents don’t believe in reincarnation so there is not validation but there is refutation of their beliefs or for parents who believe in reincarnation they don’t really care to validate because they live in a culture where they naturally accept reincarnation and there is still fear of talking about the memories because they fear that such a child who talks about past life memories will die soon so also because Stevenson and his following researchers don’t pay there is no monetary benefit and the parents also don’t claim anything from the richer parents of the previous life’s child and also there is disincentive because the parents often have to have to stop their day’s work which is necessary for their livelihood so that they can answer the exhaustive interview questions of the researchers and could it be fame or prestige there are in celebrity cases there might be some fame or prestige or in cases where there is a lot of a lot of sensationalism associated with past life memory there might be fame or prestige but where we are not discussing celebrity cases and there are many non-celebrity cases which is what researchers are focused on and further there is also the acceptance of reincarnation so there is no fame associated and there are often children exhibiting embarrassing behaviours for the parents so we discussed Martin Ongmyo’s self-identification as Japanese in a Burmese culture which is hostile to Japanese and her self identification as a male in a culture with rigid gender roles and then we discussed Mushir Ali Shah’s case of Naresh Raida’s case of identifying himself as a Muslim in a country where there is Hindu-Muslim tension and then we discussed this case of a lower caste boy identifying as a demanding food cooked by a Brahmin so therefore the Parallelism Fraud Hypothesis does not work and does the Investigator Fraud Hypothesis work that we will discuss in our next session. Thank you.