How can some people remember their past lives?

Answer Podcast

Transcript

This is an AI-generated transcript and may contain some errors.
So how is it that some children have recollections of their previous lives? Basically the mind is the same from this body to another body.
And our memories are partly stored in the brain but they are partly stored in the mind also. So especially the deep memories, the deep impressions are stored in the mind. Now, in principle, if the memories are stored in the mind, then it is possible for people to remember it, remember their previous lives.
But usually the transition from one body to another body is so traumatic, so disorienting, that most of the memories get pushed back to the background so much that they are not recollectible. But in some cases, especially in cases where death is violent or unexpected in some way, then at that time the soul, the event of death is not fully processed. And because of that not being fully processed, in some cases those unprocessed memories filter up.
So the children, basically Dr. Ian Stevenson was a prominent researcher from the University of Virginia and he did a lot of research. He actually spent four decades travelling across all the inhabited continents, investigating thousands of cases. And he found four levels of indicators of this continuity of the person from one body to another.
The first was, as you said, past life memories. The children would remember, oh you know, I was so and so and I lived here and this was my friend and this was my brother, this was my wife or my husband or whatever. Like that.
That is one level. The second level is, not just past life recollections, but there are also past life recognitions. When the children were taken to that place, there was this case of Titu Sharma.
He was Suresh Verma in his previous life and he was shot dead. It was outside his house when he was returning home from a car in Kanpur. And then he was reborn as Titu in Lucknow.
These are both cities in India. And then he was taken there back and he was a small child. He was just a barely four-year-old child.
He would say that I am married and I have a wife. My wife’s name is Uma. Now, where is his shop? What is this child saying? But he says, I own an electrical shop named as Verma Electrical Shop.
And then I stay in the city of Kanpur. So then his relatives went and checked. They actually saw there was a Verma Electrical Studio.
And they found it was run by a widow named Uma. So then they took this boy there. And as soon as they took their boy there, normally as a four-five-year-old boy, if you see some unfamiliar woman, there will be a little hesitation.
She said, as soon as he saw the shop, hey Uma, why did you change the shop like this? That’s the first thing he said. Because there was something which was kept high up. And she was a woman.
She had changed the design in such a way that things would be more accessible to her. So then he not only called her by name, but called her in a very familiar way, like a husband calling his wife. But then later on, when he met her, he identified several other family members also.
So when his mother saw him, he went and just embraced her legs. And she didn’t see who it is. She thought it’s her grandson.
And he called her and said, I’m not your grandson, I’m your son. So there are past life recognitions. That’s the second level.
Third level is past life behaviours. That means, there are two aspects. There are phobias and there are behaviours.
So for example, if somebody has died by drowning in a previous life, then in this life they have severe hydrophobia. Or in some cases, there was a Muslim boy who was born as a Hindu. And he was born in a vegetarian family.
But when he went to his previous life Muslim parents, he told them. All these things happened. He identified them.
In this life his name was Om, in the previous life his name was Naseeb. So he went to Naseeb’s parents and then they saw him, they were amazed. They just couldn’t process it, what is happening.
Because according to their belief system, there is no such thing as reincarnation. But finally when he identified him, he was about to go. He said, what is this? My mother would never let me go without offering tea and eggs.
He in his house would never eat eggs. But here he had that habit. So there are phobias which can go on from previous life and habits can go on from previous life.
At the third level. And the fourth level is actually birthmarks and birth defects. So for example, this Titu, Suresh Verma had come back from his shop at night, in the evening and he had been shot at point range, just in his car.
So a bullet had entered from his right temple and gone out of his left temple. And Titu had birthmarks at exactly the same location. No, swelling on the left side, swelling on the right side and swelling on the left side.
And normally when a bullet enters, usually standard it is that the entry point of a bullet is smaller, the exit point is bigger. Because the bullet process out, it causes more damage. So in this case also, the swelling, the birthmark on the right side was smaller, the left side was bigger.
And because it had been a murder case, so they had done some post-mortem of Suresh Verma’s body also. So Ian Stevenson, what he did was, he divided the human body into a set of grids, like we have XY coordinates. So he divided into 64 grids and then he correlated.
Now how precise is the location of the previous life’s fatal wound and the location of this birthmark? And he found there are precise correlations. The same place in the grid where the previous life’s wound was there. The same place here there is a birthmark.
And another thing he found is, by the current scientific understanding, birthmarks and birth defects can basically occur for two reasons. One is there are some genetic factors. The parents have those birthmarks and that’s how the children get the birthmark.
Second is that during pregnancy, if the mother goes through some chemical imbalance, either she has some disease or she smokes or she drinks and she takes in some chemicals, which can harm the embryo. Now in these cases, he monitored and he found that there are no genetic defects. In almost 70-80% of the cases of birthmarks and birth defects, he found that there were no cases of the mother having taken any substance that causes the child any problem, nor were there any genetic factors.
So biologically also the presence of birthmarks and birth defects are not explainable. So these four things, past life recollections, past life recognitions, past life behaviours and past life correlation with birthmarks and birth defects, they are all very strongly pointing towards the continuity of the person from one life to the next.