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DISCOVERING REGRESSION THERAPY: A LOVE STORY
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Past Lives: A researcher's perspective.
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I’m at the University of Virginia in the United States. It’s in the Department of Psychiatry,
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that we have a special research division called the ‘Division of Perceptual Studies’
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where we look at phenomena that relate to the mind-brain question and also
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the questions of survival after death. So I’m a child psychiatrist and my particular interest is in
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children who say that they remember past lives. And this is a work that has gone on at the university
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for 50 years. It involves these children from all over the world basically, who had from a very early age
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start saying they remember past lives. What our work has involved is trying to determine exactly
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what the child has said and how well it matches the life of somebody who died and then also whether the child
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could have learnt that information through normal means. So with our work we have now studied
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over 2,500 cases. The children can come out with very specific details, sometimes names for somebody
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who lived quite some distance away, sometimes quite some time ago, and yet the details all fit.
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And then along with the statements, the apparent memories. The children would show a lot of emotions
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or behaviors that seem to fit also. Sometimes they recognize people, or recognize buildings or places
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at the old place where the previous person lived. So it all adds up to quite an interesting phenomenon
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where there does seem to be this connection between a past life and the current child.
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Well, we certainly try to use a scientific approach where we don’t assume anything is the case if
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we don’t have to. So every case we approach is an open question, ‘What is the best explanation?’
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And then It involves trying to nail down every detail that we can. We’ve got... I specialize in the past life memory work,
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we have another researcher looking at near death experiences and then we have a laboratory
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where they do measurements like EEG brainwave kind of measurements, as people are trying to do
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parapsychological tasks. All told there may be 5 or 6 of us working on this, along with the support research
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assistant and that sort of thing. We have a lot of cases, one that I studied fairly recently was:
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There is a little boy in Oklahoma, which is in south west of US, who started saying that he had a life in Hollywood
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And would get very upset about it, crying about missing his life. So his mom checked out a couple of books
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on old Hollywood from the library to see if there were still more specific memories so that he could
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deal with them. They were looking through them one day and there was a picture from an old movie
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and he stopped and pointed at one of the men and said ‘Hey that’s George, I made a movie with him’,
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and the man he pointed to was George Raft, a movie star back in, like the 30’s .
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And then he pointed to another man and said ‘Hey and that’s me, I found me!’ Well, the fella that he pointed to,
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turned out was an extra who had no lines in the movie, so it was impossible to identify who he was…
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seemingly impossible. So the mother wrote to me to see if I could help to identify him.
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Eventually, through a lot of work and the efforts of a Hollywood archivist we were able to identify that man.
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Meanwhile the mom was sending me emails all the time, talking about statements that this little boy is making
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about the past life. He talked about how he had danced on Broadway in New York, and then gone to Hollywood.
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He was in the movies, and then he worked for an agency, he said that he had seen the world on big boats
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and he had a house with a big swimming pool, and all this seemed quite unlikely to me for an extra
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with no lines in a movie. But when we eventually identified the fella, he in fact had had that life.
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He had danced on Broadway, he’d gone to Hollywood, he was in the movies for a while and then
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he started a successful talent agency. He and his wife went to Europe on the Queen Elizabeth.
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The little boy had said that the street address had the word ‘Rock’, and the street address of this house
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was ‘Roxbury’. So this was one where the child gave a lot of specific details about something
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that looked a long time ago, the fella had died 50 years before this little boy was born.
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And it seemed impossible that he could have learnt about that through any normal means,
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so it looked like there was this connection with this fella’s past life.
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I don’t think that we can just map these cases on to a mainstream materialistic view of the world, I think
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what they seem to indicate is that consciousness is not limited just to the physical brain but can continue on
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after the brain dies. I think there are reasons, other reasons, to consider that consciousness should be
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considered separate from the physical world, that it’s a separate entity. And it’s not necessarily dependent on
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the physical world, in fact the reverse may well be true, that the physical world is dependent on consciousness.
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So in these cases this consciousness has continued after the brain died and for whatever reasons has shown
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up again in somebody, another person that was born. That doesn’t mean that it will typically happen
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but it is what appears to have happened, in our strongest cases anyway.