In past life memories might the investigators be committing frauds?

Answer Podcast

Transcript

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Does this answer your question? So, what about the investigators possibly committing a fraud? They could have the motive that they can write a book and become famous by that.
Yeah, naturally that’s possible. And as I myself talked about, there are some people who get into this field and they talk about celebrity reincarnations. For example, they will show a picture of Marilyn Monroe.
And they will show the picture of some other woman whose face looks similar to Marilyn Monroe. And they say, she is reincarnated here like this. And such books sell a lot also.
If you actually go into the cases, this facial similarity is no indicator of reincarnation. Because you just take a cross-section of human beings and you just play around with it. You can always say that two people have similar faces.
It’s not very difficult to find. Not identical, but similar faces. So, there are people in this field who are out to gain fame and make a quick buck.
That’s definitely there. But the point is that three things we could say. First is that if the researchers leave hard data, that means the researchers, if they are doing interviews of the subjects and they are recording the interviews.
Now we have video recordings. In the past they had audio recordings. They actually can see.
So, subsequent researchers can see what actually happened in that. There are some cases where the most likely situation where fraud can occur or where fraud can vitiate a case is during the meeting. A child is claiming to be someone, but when the two meet, if somehow the two families collude and they decide, we will tell this story.
Or the investigator, he arranges for the two families to collude. How would a fraud occur? There has to be some collusion among the people. So now, if the event, suppose that there is a case of a girl named Gyanti Lekha.
She was in Sri Lanka and she actually recognized her mother from a previous life, her sister, her brother. This whole meeting was done under supervision. There was a past life researcher, there was a local school teacher and there was a local village officer.
So they all observed it and everything was recorded on a tape recorder. So, if things are objectively recorded, then the possibility of fraud goes down substantially. Second is that it is also possible for researchers to go and subsequent researchers or skeptics to go and interview all those people again.
If a person is claiming and you go and you find out holes in the story. There are holes. So, again, if somebody wants to cross-check, they can cross-check like that.
And a third thing is that actually although at some level there is some sensationalization and glamorization, if somebody talks about past life memories, at a level of popular audiences, but in serious scientific circles, actually one gets a lot of criticism. Because the mainstream ethos today is materialistic, naturalistic. So, for example, Ian Stevenson, he was at the age of 37, he was the head of department of psychiatry at the University of Virginia.
And then he got into this field and he wrote a few papers, he was interested. But then his university told him, you cannot do this if you are the head of department. Our department’s reputation is getting contaminated.
So at that time, he had to choose. And he actually resigned and he started a separate department, University of Personality Studies, Department of Personality Studies. And then after that, he had to go through a lot of difficulties.
Because in this, there are no funds. Basically, again, if you come to religion, in… let me put it this way, with respect to survival after death, there are near-death experiences and there are past life memories. So now, it’s a whole different subject, but Christianity as it exists today accepts life after death, but it doesn’t accept reincarnation.
So what happens? In one sense, near-death experiences, they support Christian belief. Whereas past life memories don’t support Christian belief. Because they say, you have only one life, if you don’t surrender to Jesus, you are going to go to hell.
So now, what happens because of this? And Islamic doctrine is also like that. So Christians and Muslims have funded near-death studies quite a bit. And near-death research is a very big field.
Whereas, in general, if we consider, if somebody has an ulterior motive in trying to make a fraud, what would be their motive? And where do they get the funds from? So Hindus and Buddhists, who are the people who believe in reincarnation, they are not really into trying to empirically prove their belief. So generally, if somebody wants to do past life research, they don’t get much funds. There is not much money in it.
And one has to go through a lot of criticism. And if you consider, the last point I would make is that, specific cases can also be investigated. So there was a Washington Post journalist, Tom Schroder, who, when he heard about these cases of past life memories, which Jan Stevens was investigating, he decided to travel as an investigative journalist with him.
So he went for almost a year to Lebanon and to India. And he found, so he wrote a whole book about his observations while traveling with Stevens. And then, the book is called Old Souls, the scientific case for reincarnation, evaluating the case, something like that.
Now he writes that actually, so he was a skeptic. And after going, he documents what happened, what Stevens did, how the children reacted. And he said that, you know, I have no explanation for how it happens.
He remained still, he didn’t accept reincarnation, but he said, I can say for sure, none of the normal explanations work. So how it works, I don’t know. So to say that anybody can commit a fraud, whether it is the parents or whether it is the investigator, ultimately the child who has to remember.
And the child is remembering cases when a 3 or 4 year old child is just learning the first words of a language. So other children at that age are just learning the first words of a language while these children are actually reciting detailed biographies of persons whom they had not known. Nobody, none of their relatives had knowledge of.
So it’s completely unfeasible to say that this could be an orchestrated fraud. Because it is just beyond, no matter how expert at fraud the parents and the investigators may be, ultimately the children, how do you make the children behave like that? It’s too small to do that. So the fraud hypothesis is, at least from that book’s perspective, where a skeptical person has actually observed all the cases, there is no explanation at a normal level for this.
And again there is also hard evidence. As I said, if you have birthmarks and birth defects, what explanation do we have for that? What could the investigator fraud do for that? So one more explanation is that there are cases of people who have spoken foreign languages. It’s called xenoglossy.
Xenoglossy and there is another called xenography. Meaning speaking foreign languages and writing foreign languages. So there is a case which is described in a book by Joe Witten called Life Between Life, that of a man named Frank.
He actually wrote there are some past life memories which are spontaneous. There are some which are under hypnotic regression. So under hypnotic regression, he wrote something very strange.
A paten silvery script. And when he came out of his regression, what is that? I don’t know what it is. And then the researchers found what he had written down.
And he found that he had written something which was in a language called Sasanid Pahlavi which had become extinct 1700 years ago. So now there are only 5 people all over the world who know the script of that language. And Harald, his name was Harald, Harald had no contact with these people.
And here he has actually written in that script. So there is clear empirical evidence. So nobody can create a fraud over it.
Because his recordings are there, his writings are there, audio recording is there, the writing is there, and the language is extinct. There is no possibility for a fraud in such cases. Any other questions?