Demystifying Reincarnation 04 – Past life memories – Guesses or Hyperboles?

Hare Krishna. Hare Krishna.
Welcome back to our series on demystifying reincarnation. We are discussing past life memories and whether they can have any normal explanations. So, children claim to remember their past lives.
What if a child remembered not just one or two, but 15-20 facts correctly just recollection, and then 10-15 more facts through recognitions and also exhibited behaviors appropriate. What if the sheer possibility or probability of all those recognitions was disappearingly low? Would such a case not be strong evidence for the reality of the past life memories? Let us investigate some such cases in today’s talk. So, in Shakespeare and the Hamlet, it is said that there are more things in between in heaven and earth, Horatio, than I dreamt of in your philosophy.
So, most people today live with a materialistic philosophy. And the idea of materialism is that matter is all that exists, that we are nothing but our bodies and we die at death. But past life memories point strongly to the idea that there is more to life than what materialism has taught us to believe.
And what that more is, that we can explore and enjoy that higher reality. So, let us look at a case where the information was so specific that it could just not have been guessed. We are discussing past life memories and the four standard, four possible explanations, information by normal means, guesswork, exaggeration, and then fraud.
So, we discussed the cases of James Lanninger and Shantidevi in the previous talk, which pointed out how the information by normal means is not a suitable explanation. Now, we will discuss about exaggeration. We will discuss the case of Nazi al-Danaf.
So, this was reported by researcher Erlendur Haraldsson of the Department of Psychology, University of Iceland, Rijkzavik. He investigated this case which happened in Lebanon and wrote about it in the Journal of Scientific Exploration, volume 16, number 3. Nazi was born on 29 February 1992 in Balchemie, Lebanon, as the eighth child of Sabir al-Danaf and Naseem al-Danaf. And when he was just a year and a half, he started speaking things which stunned his parents.
He said he was a young, heroic man and he said that he had a beautiful wife and he had children that he wanted to see and he said he carried two pistols with him and he had six sisters and a mother and you tell them on their face, you know, my wife is prettier than all of you. She has much more beautiful eyes and nose. And then as he grew up, he started mentioning a place called Kabarchomon and he said that this is the place where I lived and I want to go there.
Again and again he started insisting that if they didn’t take him and he is a small child who would often usually not go out of the house also without escort. It was going for a longer distance and then he said I will go alone if you don’t take me. And finally, by the time he was six, he became so insistent that his parents took him there.
And as they were on the way to Kabarchomon, they came to a point, a cross road where there were six roads and the father asked Naseem, so which way to go? And he pointed the right way immediately whichever he wanted to go. And when he reached the locality which Naseem had described, then they found there had lived a person named Fuad Khadige who matched the description where Naseem had given. He carried pistols and he had been shot by a group of people.
And they found that Fuad’s… so the exact place where Fuad had lived, that is where Naseem had taken them. And that place, now Fuad’s widow, Najdia was still living there. And he immediately recognized her and started treating her as if she was his wife, although he was just a six-year-old boy.
And after this, she asked him several questions and he answered all of them accurately. She asked him that they had a gate and near the gate, they had a foundation. So who built the foundation of this gate? Actually, he described that it was built by a man from the Faraj family.
She says, when we were living in an earlier house, did I ever have any accident? He said, yes. He says, one morning while picking pine cones for our children to play, you slipped on a plastic nylon, fell and dislocated your shoulder. Precisely this is what had happened.
And remember, these two are meeting for the first time and this is a small child and this is a middle-aged lady. And then he asked, do you remember how our younger daughter got sick? He said, yes. So he said that she took my medication pills which were in my jacket and ate them and we had to rush her to the hospital to save her at that time.
Najdia showed him a picture of Fuad. He asked, who is this? She said, that is me. He said, I was big then, I am small now.
And then, she was convinced, Najdia, that this was her husband who had reincarnated. After visiting his widow, then Nazee went to Fuad’s younger brother who was known as Sheikh Adib. And as soon as he saw Adib, when they had went to his place, Adib was not there.
And as soon as Adib came, he said, that’s my brother Adib. And he went and embraced him and he said, I am Fuad. And this is a small child embracing a middle-aged man again.
He asked him, why should I believe that you are Fuad? And then he told him several points which only the two of them knew. And he said that, I gave you a Chekhi-16. And Chekhi-16 was an unusual gun.
And indeed, Fuad had given that gun to Adib. Fuad was a soldier and he had a gun extra. So he had given this gun to Adib.
Then Adib pointed out 3 photos or photos of 3 people together. And one of them was Adib. And he asked, who are these? They were childhood photos actually.
He asked, who are these? So he said, this is you Adib, this is me, Fuad and this is Nazee. This is our third brother. Now, Fuad’s widow was living in another house nearby.
Adib asked him, which house did we live in in our childhood? And he took him out and took him straight and pointed out to the house where they had been staying. Now, after this, all this convinced Fuad’s family that this was actually, Nazee was actually the Fuad reincarnated. Now, Bharelson, when he investigated the case, he found that before Nazee was taken to Fuad’s house, he had made 17 recollections, all of which had turned out to be accurate.
Then there, these 17 statements which he had made, this was not just the version of one or two people. Actually, both his parents and his 7 siblings, they all said this. So there were 9 witnesses for his statements.
When he reached Fuad’s place, he made 8 additional correct recognitions. And most of these were highly specific, like the Chekhi-16 gun. And this also he made in the presence of multiple witnesses.
And for Adib, who was quite skeptical, for him, the convincing thing was the Chekhi-16 gun. Because Chekhi-16 is not a gun that is commonly available in Lebanon. It is made in Czechoslovakia.
And to have it in Lebanon is rare. So to further cross-check, Adib brought another gun and showed it to Nazee and said, was this the gun that you gave me? He said, no, this is not the gun. I gave you a Chekhi-16.
So this way, when he spoke, it was convincing for Sheikh Adib. And now, the key point in our analysis is how improbable it is for a boy to get so many facts, at least 17 initially and further, so many facts right, 8 further, that is 25 facts right by guesswork. So, Harrelson asked this question in his article, we may ask, how many of the men who died in the war had a mute friend? This was also another thing which Nazee would say that I live in Qabar Qamon and there I have a mute friend and my house is close to a cave.
These are also facts she had said. So, Harrelson is compiling all these distinct, unique, specific facts we could say. We may ask, how many of the men who died in the war had a mute friend and a cave near their house, had given their brother a Chekhi-16 pistol and had a gate built in front of their house by a man from the Faraj family? In this case, the combined odds against chance seem very high indeed.
So, chance or guesswork is just not a satisfactory explanation. Then, what other explanations remain? We discussed that information by normal means is not adequate, guesswork is also not adequate. So, could it be exaggeration that when a child starts speaking something, may the parents get excited, oh a child is speaking something and they maybe embellish what the and in this way, the case gets made bigger than what it needs to be.
Now, yes, this exaggeration is possible and this exaggeration, it can be avoided if the crucial meeting between the child and the previous personality’s family members, that can be monitored. So, the past life investigator comes and monitors strictly and records, maybe the tape recorder or the video recorder, the proceedings, then they can be objective evidence and there will be no possibility for exaggeration because everybody will be able to see what is happening. So, now, actually for the past life researcher, if they can come, they can monitor the conditions, record the conditions and have them recorded for scrutiny by other researchers also.
So, but this is problem, this is not so easy because many of these cases happen in remote parts of the world and often these cases, when they do happen, at that time, the case becomes well-known, not just when the child speaks some things. Because okay, child speaking is unusual, but often when the parents themselves investigate and the parents take the child to the previous personality’s home and when the child makes recognitions over there, that is the time as case becomes famous and when the case becomes famous, then the past life researchers come to know about it and that’s when they can come and investigate. So, in general, for the past life researchers to come before the crucial meeting takes place is not easy.
But still, in a significant number of cases, the researchers have their alertness and promptness, have been able to intervene in the case before this meeting. So, they would come to the place where the child is claiming to have past life memories and note down the statements, what the child has made, what is the child making now, what the parents and other relatives are saying the child has said earlier and cross-check them, have objective record and then go to the other family and create a proper setting for a meeting and then observe everything. So, let’s look at such cases where the possibility of exaggeration is eliminated by objective documentation.
Let’s look at the case of Ajendra Singh Chauhan, which is described by Antonia Mills, a Canadian researcher, in the Journal of Scientific Exploration, Volume 18, Number 4. Ajendra was a boy born on 8 August 1978 in Northern India and he was aggressive from his early childhood. When he was three, his aunt offered him a glass of milk and he lashed out at her physically saying that, you know, two water buffalos used to give milk. I used to drink a bucket of milk and you have given me this small glass.
His aunt was taken aback to see this ferocity in this child and he said that, in my house, there was a mare who used to be there. Now, there was no mare in Ajendra’s house and not in that family ever have a mare. When he was about still three, one night, he was on the terrace of their house, lying on his father’s body and they were just lying there and relaxing and he suddenly said, Papa, they decoyed scheme.
They started shooting in the dark. I shot back at them, but then a bullet hit me and he started mining. He’s crouching on the ground as if a person is trying to evade an aggressor’s bullets and at the same time, take aim and shoot.
And then he started pressing, as if he was pressing a trigger and after that, he would move the gun down and raise it again and then shoot. Now, Ajendra’s father had no gun and there was no way a three-year-old boy at that time in the 1970s, when television was also not there in India, there was no way a boy could have known so much about a gun. And not only that, he said that, although he was very aggressive, he had a phobia for the dark.
Whenever his father would go out in the dark, he would be afraid and he would say, Papa, don’t go. Even Diwali, which is a festival primarily celebrated at night, he would not want to participate in Diwali because of his phobia for the dark and he would say, Papa, even if they had to go in a garden somewhere where it is dark, don’t go! Decoys come in the dark! And as he became older, when he was asked by his father some questions, Ajendra told that he lived in a place, in a village called Fareeha, which was about 75 kilometers from Ajendra’s home. Gajraj Singh Gaur was a junior college teacher and he had assisted Ian Stevenson in many of his cases.
So, when he came to know about this case, he recorded all of Ajendra’s statements and then he found out that there was a deceased person in Fareeha, Nareshchand Gupta, who matched the description of Ajendra. So, he informed Antonia Mills, a researcher from Canada and she came there. She recorded Ajendra’s statements, again cross-checked all of them and then they decided to go to Fareeha.
And when they found that, indeed, Naresh’s life story matched what Ajendra had described. And Naresh’s family had lived at two places. One was Fareeha, sometimes they would live in Fareeha and sometimes in Shekhanpur.
And some of the details that Ajendra had given, they matched Fareeha, the Fareeha house and others matched Shekhanpur’s house. So, for example, in the Shekhanpur house, they had two water buffalos and they also had a mayor. And further, Shekhanpur Naresh had been killed when the decoits had attacked their house and he had been trying to fight against them with a gun.
And the gun which they had at that time was a greener because it was of a particular make. So, for shooting, once it was shot, actually you had to push the gun down and raise it up again and then it would be shot. It had to be cocked.
And that was exactly the miming action that Ajendra had done. And altogether, as many as 25 details came out that Ajendra had given, came out to be perfectly accurate. And Bill Tucker is a prominent researcher, who is considered by many to be the successor of Ian Stevenson.
And he has, while evaluating various past life memory cases, has devised a strength of case scale, SOCS. And based on that, he evaluates, this is a weak case, this is a medium case, this is a strong case, this is a very strong case. And in this case, he plays Ajendra’s case as very strong among the top 3 to 5% of all the cases in his roster.
Now, again for our point, Ajendra’s case cannot be explained as a reincarnation, as an exaggeration, because everything was documented and monitored by neutral observers. So, not only this, there are other cases where things have been further monitored and not only monitored, but monitored by multiple observers. That is the case of Gyantileka.
Gyantileka Baddevithana was born in Sri Lanka in 1956. And she began recollecting a past life from the age of 2. And she said, she had in another place, a father, 2 brothers, a mother and many sisters. When she heard of a town called Talvakele, so then she said, oh that is where I used to live.
And she wanted to go and meet her former parents there. And when she was about 4 and a half, a neighbor wrote to a local journalist, Nishanka, and told her about the story. He had a PhD in International Relationships.
And later on, he wrote a story, a whole book about this, the girl who was reborn, a case study suggestive of reincarnation. Now, when Nishanka went to see Gyantileka, he took with him a well-known Buddhist monk and a teacher from a nearby college. And the three people interviewed Gyantileka together.
And she gave many factual details which were describing the life of Tilakaratne, was a boy who had died in 1954 and Gyantileka had been born in 1956. And Gyantileka’s descriptions matched Tilakaratne’s life. And Nishanka, along with the monk and the teacher, they noted down all her statements.
They wrote articles in a popular newspaper, local newspaper. And then they decided to take this investigation further ahead. So, they brought three people from Talvakele, the place where Tilakaratne was staying.
One was a teacher of Tilakaratne and two people were unknown to Tilakaratne. And they got him to meet Gyantileka. When they came to meet Gyantileka, she immediately said that she doesn’t know the other two people.
And she said, yes, no, you are my… and the third person said, you are my teacher. And after a moment thought, she says, you were always kind to me. You never punished me.
And she immediately climbed on the lap of this teacher. The next day, after this, he arranged another meeting. A three-member investigator team was there.
They took Gyantileka to a rest house, a place where people can stay and rest. And there, she was not told what was the purpose of the meeting. But the purpose was to get her to meet Tilakaratne’s family.
And they had arranged everything in such a way that Gyantileka would be center of the room and these three observers would be at three different parts, observing from different angles. So, as to check whether anybody is giving any cues to Gyantileka to recognize, they monitored it and then Nishanka had a tape recorder which would record everything. And then, Tilakaratne’s mother entered the room and she approached Gyantileka and she had a candy in her hand and she opened her arms and she said, just ran and embraced her.
She says, tell me, where do I stay? And Gyantileka, she said, and then she said, tell me, as they were talking, tell me, who am I? She looked here and there. She looked especially at her mother in this life and she then whispered gently and then she smiled and then Nishanka prompted her, speak loudly. And the recorder was there and she spoke loudly, my Talaukele mother.
And then, her father was pointed out. So, she said, who is this? So, Gyantileka said, this was my Talaukele father. And then, she had three other sisters.
So, they all came into the room one by one and they all asked her, do you recognize me? She says, yes, you are my fair sister and you are the sister in the house, who stayed in the house above us. And she said, you are the sister to whose house we would go to sew clothes. Now, all these recognitions were correct.
All these were happening under multiple observers. They brought her brother and her brother and she used to quarrel constantly. So, when she saw the brother, she said, do you know him? No, no.
He said, no, I don’t know him. And she said, no, do you know him? No, I don’t. And now, his brother was a grown up person.
Her brother was a grown up. She says, go and sit on his lap. She said, no, I will not sit on his lap.
Never. He was very strong about it. Childish.
She was cold about it. And then, finally, her mother asked him, who is he? Do you know him? No, I don’t know him. Please, do you know him? He says, he is my… She was still upset.
He says, he is my Talaukele brother. And then, after that… So, overall, she made many recognitions, none of which she could have known normally. And then, later on, she made two more spontaneous recognitions.
The Talaukele teacher, Gyantileka became quite close to him and sometimes she would go out for walks with him. And one day, when she was going out for a walk, she said, that woman, I know her. I used to go with her to the temple in Talaukele.
And then they found out, when they enquired, they found out, yes, she actually used to go with this woman to a temple. Another day, when they were going out for a walk, she pointed toward another woman. She says, that woman is angry with my Talaukele mother.
And then they enquired and they found, yes, at the time when Tilak Ratne was living, they had a spat among them. But since then, they had patched up. So, Stevenson also came and investigated this case, cross-checked all the statements.
And Gyantileka had said that she had a sister named Lora or Dora. She would give two names sometimes. And they had found that she had actually no sister by the name Lora or Dora.
And then later on, he found that she had a childhood friend by that name. And Stevenson went and located this Lora and then he brought her along with another woman. And when they brought her to Gyantileka, he asked, do you know her? She immediately said, you are my friend, Lora.
We know each other in Talaukela. And now, at that time when Tilak Ratne had died, he was a young boy. And at that time, this girl was also young.
But now she was a middle-aged woman and still Gyantileka recognised her. So now, Gyantileka’s recognitions are very significant because they are both positive and negative. She recognised many people, almost all the people who were known to Tilak Ratne, she recognised them.
And people who were not known to Tilak Ratne, she consciously, even when she was prompted, she said, I don’t know these people. So, there’s both affirmative and negative recognitions were there. Further, all these were under multiple supervision.
And this way, this case is a very strong evidence of something that just cannot be explained as exaggeration. So, if it is not guesswork, it is an exaggeration, then what remains? What other explanation is there? Actually, the exaggerated explanation itself is falsified by another very concrete form of evidence, that is birthmarks and birth defects. And that we will discuss in our next session.
So, in this session, we discuss primarily whether the cases could be explained by guesswork and discuss how the case of Nazial Nanaf cannot be explained by guesswork. Then, can they just be exaggeration? For that, we discuss the case of Ajendra Singh Chavan and the case of Gyantileka and how there are multiple recognitions under supervision. And the supervision means because all the facts are objectively documented, all the statements, the recollections, recognitions, they are documented and supervised.
So, there is no chance of prompting and exaggeration happening. And in this way, the past life memories case becomes stronger and stronger and it points to the reality of these being not just guesses or exaggerations, but actually memories from a past life. The birthmarks and birth defects, we will discuss in our next session.
Thank you.