Reincarnation International, London, No. 5, March 1995, pp. 13-15
Debate
Swiss past-life therapist Dr. Jan Erik Sigdell takes issue with Prof. Ian
Stevenson, who is sceptical about the therapeutic and scientific value of
hypnotic regressions
Are facts
important to a soul?
I WISH to show that there are certainly many shades of nicer colours,
including white, in the picture which
Prof. Ian Stevenson
wanted to paint mostly in black,
in his critical and sceptical article about past-life regressions
and past-life therapy in “Reincarnation International” No.2. (1)
Let me begin
with an example — not from true life, but reframed in an especially
demonstrative way.
A person has very strong fears of water,
especially when the sea gets deep. In a regression — not to a past existence
but to this actual life — he experiences himself almost drowning as a little
boy, saved in the very last minute. He relives the emotions and releases them.
Practical work with similar cases shows that he can now expect to be free from
his deep-water phobia, if that experience was the only important cause
for it.
Confusion
In the
regression, we ask him where it is. “I think it is in Italy.”
We ask how old he is. “Maybe five
years.”
Then we have an opportunity to check
with his mother, who says: “Yes, that really did happen! It was awful! But it
wasn’t in Italy. It was when we were on holidays in Spain and he was only three
years old.”
This is how inaccurate data often
are when they come up in a regression — in this life or to a past one. Real experiences
come with strong emotions, but data, such as names of places and persons as
well as historical dates, are quite uncertain. Why is that?
In my German text-book on past-life
therapy, I deal with this question at some length, and in the following lines
present an English translation of relevant parts.
“Our intellect is greedy for facts,
but these are of a secondary importance on the level of the soul. The person in
a regression rarely reacts to questions about dates and facts as if they were
of importance. What are significant are experiences and emotions. The same
holds for childhood experiences. All questions about the date, time and place,
where and when the person fell into the water as a child, and how deep he sank,
are totally irrelevant — if one wants to release him from the fear for water he
has to-day. The only important thing is what he experienced, that this is
relived in the regression and that the emotions are released.” (2)
Emotional
What the soul carries over in the first place
is an emotional experience, not factual data. A person spoke Chinese in
a past life. In the regression, he tells in English (or in the language used in
the regression) what he then said to someone, normally not in Chinese. What
carries over in the first place is the content of what was said, not the
form (the actual acoustical words), which is secondary to the soul. Similarly,
the emotional content of an experience and the kind of situation
in which it occurs are primary, but the facts around them are secondary to the
soul.
In his article, Stevenson states:
“It is not difficult to induce a hypnotised person to imagine himself or
herself in a previous life. The scenes are vivid, the emotions intense...”
I think that it is quite difficult to induce a
person to have an emotion he or she has never really had! Even though the scene
may be vivid, the emotions will in such a case be weak. There is no smoke
without fire. If the soul knows an emotion, there has been a real experience in
which it has experienced it. And why should it then invent it all, rather than
go back to the “real thing”, at least in essence?
Placebo?
The
question then is less one of the reality of the emotional experience than one
of the correctness of all details stated around it when questioned about
facts. Especially when the emotional experience is able to explain a problem
(e.g., a phobia) the person has to-day and by reliving and releasing it the
problem is solved!
Stevenson seems to think that no
form of psychotherapy can cure anything, but some do and some don’t. Some in
this case, others in that case ... even past-life therapy! And if someone
prefers to classify the latter as merely symbolic or placebo, what real
difference does it make to the patient, when he afterwards doesn’t have the
problem anymore?
“In the evaluation of facts stated
in past-life regressions one has to bear in mind that two incarnations in
different time periods, involving similar experiences, can mix up. It is also
possible that concepts known in the actual life to-day may be projected into
the regression experience.
“Furthermore, it happens that there were
certain things we more or less unconsciously want to see in another way than
how they really were, since the latter could lead to an unpleasant discovery or
a painful experience. To avoid them, one may then unconsciously insert other
scenes instead. It may also happen that the regressor doesn’t notice it. It
must be seen as a methodical (or tendential) error in the evaluation, if such
possibilities are not considered in experimental regressions. Some
‘evaluators’ seem to hunt only for wrong facts and at their first possible
finding, with a sigh of relief, see their aim fulfilled, which is — without
respect to other data — to declare the whole thing as fraud or fallacy.” (2)
“As for the question of the
existence of the personality experienced, the following way of evaluating is
part of their strategy
—
if sources of information about the person experienced are found to exist, then
the person to-day ‘must’ have learned the data from such sources and it ‘can
only’ be a case of cryptomnesia,
— or, if such sources of
information cannot be found, then it ‘can only’ be fantasy and the personality
experienced ‘has never existed’.” (2)
Inner eye
I would
like to mentioned three examples of projection and distortion from my own
practice. In the non-hypnotic method I use, we let the unconscious self
become visible to the inner eye in some form (usually a human being, a being of
light or a light phenomenon), which is called the “guide” or “counsellor”.
What we no longer know in our conscious self, the unconscious self still knows
— in fact, it seems not to forget anything. Uncertain points can, therefore, be
checked with this “guide” in the regression itself.
For example, a noble lady travelled from
England to Austria in the 17th century and said she was sitting in a train. The
guide said that it was in reality a long and tiresome journey with a coach,
but she didn’t like to experience that and, for more comfort, put in a train,
instead...
Another woman relived a love story
with a man dressed in woman’s clothes, allegedly as a disguise to escape
pursuers. When she came to meet the guide, she was told that it wasn’t a man.
She hadn’t wanted a lesbian love experience she had had to be true. (3)
In a recent case, a man was a little girl taken
for a ride on a tractor, away from the farm, by her father who then sexually
abused her in the bushes. The year was said to be 1784. Checking the scene
again, it was a cart pulled by a horse... A fact of little relevance was filled
into the scene from to-day’s consciousness. Furthermore, “mix-ups of names of
places that sound similar as well as years (e.g., 1683 or 1873 instead of 1783
— mixed-up digits) do occur.” (2)
Calculations
If the
person didn’t actually know then what year it was, the unconscious self
obviously calculates or estimates it, e.g., from its knowledge of how many
years have lapsed, which can come out wrong. That such calculation takes place
is evidenced by questions about year and age in two different scenes of the
same life-time. The differences in the statements of the ages is normally
exactly the same as in the statements of the years.
If the experience itself is true,
the subject may tend to fill in lacking or blurred memories of data from his or
her school knowledge of to-day — when asked for them. Therefore, a real
emotional experience of the past can in the regression be mixed up with
cryptomnetic data. This could very well have happened in the case of the
Crusades, mentioned by Stevenson. If the time period was stated as the “time of
the Crusades” by the person regressed, to-day’s school knowledge has obviously
bled through, since none knew at that time, that such a denomination
would be given to the period in later (future) times!
If the “time of the Crusades” was simply a
deduction by the regressionist from years mentioned, the latter could have come
out wrong. Could it, furthermore, not be possible that he carried some kind
of messages between Versailles and Bordeaux, even though Versailles was not yet
of governmental significance? Someone lived there at that time, too.
I will not argue that the examples claimed as
false data by Stevenson are necessarily cases of true experiences, but I will
argue that factual faults cannot definitely prove that the subject never
had that experience. False facts are a possible counter-evidence but not a
counterproof.
Conclusions
To
continue playing “the Devil’s advocate”: in the second case stated by
Stevenson, maybe there was an Earl of Leicester by the name of James in another
time period and “Cromwell” was unconsciously interpreted from today’s
school-knowledge. Was this possibility checked for? It also seems to me that
“Lechester” could very well have been the pronunciation in those days. We
cannot draw certain conclusions from to-day’s way of speaking. Has anyone
checked that? If there could be possible positive evidence in it, maybe no one
wanted to ...
As to the third case mentioned by Stevenson,
the year 1922 could be as “certain” as in other cases mentioned above. Lives
could also have been mixed-up. Operations similar to lobotomy were made in
ancient Egypt, though they usually turned out to be fatal. Can it be definitely
excluded that some singular experiment was made in later times even before
Moniz described lobotomy in 1936, but not historically recorded?
For the fourth case, “The Netherlands” can
well have been unconsciously interpreted, or rather guessed, from some blurred
impression. Rocks and hills in Eastern Belgium or Luxembourg would certainly
seem like “mountains” for someone then, who had never seen anything higher. A
similar situation could also apply in the case of the “Moors”. The century
could also be wrongly stated by the subject, bearing in mind that people at
that time often had no knowledge of the counting of the years.
Cover-up?
In the
fifth case, one might argue that the subject skipped the death experience and
jumped to his next life, to 12 years before he died there. Can we definitely
exclude a cover-up — it wouldn’t have been the first one in history — if the
murderer really did escape, which one would never like to let the public know?
I don’t assume that this was the case, but just for the sake of argument...
[See this note about the case!]
With this, I only wish to show that
the conclusions drawn by Stevenson (and jumped to by others) concerning these
and similar cases, even though they may well be valid in one, some or all of
the cases, cannot be taken as definite proofs against the reality of the
experiences. I have therefore stretched the argument in a demonstrative manner.
There are remarkable cases of data
which were confirmed. The Bridey Murphy case was one, in spite of all the —
sometimes extreme — efforts to counter-prove it. A recent case was presented
on German television in 1993; the case of the tank division captain Richard
Meissner who was shot in the second world war. His existence and all data were
proven after the regression by a documentation centre in Berlin.
There have been more cases of astonishing
confirmation. The most spectacular evidence for reincarnation seems to be the
Australian television documentary “Reincarnation” (4), which gives astonishing
evidence of the existence of four persons regressed hypnotically by Peter
Ramster in Sydney. More common is the cross-confirmation found in regressions
when we have the opportunity to regress two persons who knew each other in a
past life. If done independently and taking caution that the other person is
kept uninformed before his or her own regression, we are nevertheless likely
to arrive at a mutual confirmation.
We will never have a proof of
the truth of a regression experience, and we will never have a disproof. Even
if all facts are found to be right, this still doesn’t prove that the
person to-day was the person then, i.e., the same soul in another body. We can,
at most, confirm that the personality experienced really existed, but for
being a case of reincarnation we will only have evidence and arguments for and
against.
There is some similarity here with the question
about the reality of the Euclidian geometry. If that geometry is really true in
our cosmos, it can never be mathematically proven that it is so. All actual and
future measurements will forever leave an uncertainty within the “plus-minus”
of the accuracy of measurement, within which a non-Euclidian geometry, albeit
very close to the Euclidian, could still be the real thing and valid. The important
question concerning past-life regressions is really to which extent the
experience is helpful to the client.
In my experience, it usually is, and that is
one piece of evidence. An important discussion about reincarnation and
experience is given at various locations in a book by Ronald Laing, which
seems to have escaped the attention of most authors on this subject. “Reculer Pour Mieux Sauter” (5).
Rare event?
Some seem
to want to have it this way: “Reincarnation? OK, but only in rare cases!” But
what if we really do incarnate, all of us? Why should it be true only the one
way (e.g. in memories of a few children), but not the other?
__________________________________
(1) Stevenson, Ian: “A case of the psychotherapist’s
fallacy”, Reincarnation International, No.2, Vol.1, 1994, pp.8-11.
(2) Sigdell, Jan Erik: Emotionale
Befreiung durch Rückführung. Ein Handbuch für Reinkarnationstherapeuten und
ihre Klienten, own publication, Basel, 1994,
Chapter 2. (Dr. J.E. Sigdell P.O. Box 194, CH-4012 Basel, Switzerland.)
(3) Sigdell, as above, Chapter 12
(4) Reincarnation, Soundsense Films, Sydney, 1985.
This documentary has been shown on television in Europe, in the Netherlands and in Denmark.
(5) Laing, Ronald D.: The Voice of Experience,
Penguin, Hammersmith (Middlesex), 1983.