The Holographic Universe (35 page)

The evidence does not
prove that reincarnation exists, nor is it the intention of this book to make
such an argument. In fact, it is difficult to imagine what might constitute
perfect proof of reincarnation. Rather, the findings that will be touched upon
here are offered only as intriguing possibilities and because they are relevant
to our current discussion. Thus, they deserve our open-minded consideration.

The main thrust of
Whitton's hypnosis research is based on a simple and startling fact. When
individuals are hypnotized, they often remember what appear to be memories of
previous existences. Studies have shown that over 90 percent of all
hypnotizable individuals are able to recall these apparent memories. The
phenomenon is widely recognized, even by skeptics. For example, the psychiatry
textbook
Trauma, Trance and Transformation
warns fledgling
hypnotherapists not to be surprised if such memories surface spontaneously in
their hypnotized patients. The author of the text rejects the idea of rebirth
but does note that such memories can have remarkable healing potential
nonetheless.

The meaning of this
phenomenon is, of course, hotly debated. Many researchers argue that such
memories are fantasies or fabrications of the unconscious mind, and there is no
doubt that this is sometimes the case, especially if the hypnotic session or
“regression” is conducted by an unskilled hypnotist who does not know the
proper questioning techniques required to safeguard against eliciting
fantasies. But there are also numerous cases on record in which individuals
have, under the guidance of skilled professionals, produced memories that do
not appear to be fantasies. The evidence assembled by Whitton falls into this
category.

To conduct his research,
Whitton gathered together a core group of roughly thirty people. These included
individuals from all walks of life, from truck drivers to computer scientists,
some of whom believed in reincarnation and some of whom did not. He then
hypnotized them individually and spent literally thousands of hours recording
everything they had to say about their alleged previous existences.

Even in its broad
strokes the information was fascinating. One striking aspect was the degree of
agreement between the subjects’ experiences. All reported numerous past lives,
some as many as twenty to twenty-five, although a practical limit was reached
when Whitton regressed them to what he calls their “caveman existences,” when
one lifetime became indistinguishable from the next. All reported that gender
was not specific to the soul, and many had lived at least one life as the
opposite sex. And all reported that the purpose of life was to evolve and
learn, and that multiple existences facilitated this process.

Whitton also found
evidence that strongly suggested the experiences were actual past lives. One
unusual feature was the ability the memories had to explain a wide range of
seemingly unrelated events and experiences in the subjects’ current lives. For
example, one man, a psychologist born and raised in Canada, had possessed an
inexplicable British accent as a child. He also had an irrational fear of
breaking his leg, a phobia of air travel, a terrible nail-biting problem, an
obsessive fascination with torture, and as a teenager had had a brief and
enigmatic vision of being in a room with a Nazi officer, shortly after
operating the pedals of a car during a driving test. Under hypnosis the man
recalled being a British pilot during World War II. While on a mission over
Germany his plane was hit by a shower of bullets, one of which penetrated the
fuselage and broke his leg. This in turn caused him to lose control of the
plane's foot pedals, forcing him to crash-land. He was subsequently captured by
the Nazis, tortured for information by having his nails pulled out, and died a
short time later.

Many of the subjects
also experienced profound psychological and physical healings as a result of
the traumatic past-life memories they unearthed, and gave uncannily accurate
historical details about the times in which they had lived. Some even spoke
languages unknown to them. While reliving an apparent past life as a Viking,
one man, a thirty-seven-year-old behavioral scientist, shouted words that
linguistic authorities later identified as Old Norse. After being regressed to
an ancient Persian lifetime, the same man began to write in a spidery,
Arabic-style script that an expert in Near Eastern languages identified as an
authentic representation of Sassanid Pahlavi, a long-extinct Mesopotamian
tongue that flourished between A.D. 226 and 651.

But Whitton's most
remarkable discovery came when he regressed subjects to the interim between
lives, a dazzling, light-filled realm in which there was “no such thing as time
or space as we know it.” According to his subjects, part of the purpose of this
realm was to allow them
to plan their next life, to literally sketch out the
important events and circumstances that would befall them in the future.
But this process was not simply some fairy-tale exercise in wish fulfillment.
Whitton found that when individuals were in the between-life realm, they
entered an unusual state of consciousness in which they were acutely self-aware
and had a heightened moral and ethical sense. In addition, they no longer
possessed the ability to rationalize away any of their faults and misdeeds, and
saw themselves with total honesty. To distinguish it from our normal everyday
consciousness, Whitton calls this intensely conscientious state of mind
“metaconsciousness.”

Thus, when subjects
planned their next life, they did so with a sense of moral obligation. They
would choose to be reborn with people whom they had wronged in a previous life
so they would have the opportunity to make amends for their actions. They
planned pleasant encounters with “soul mates,” individuals with whom they had
built a loving and mutually beneficial relationship over many lifetimes; and
they scheduled “accidental” events to fulfill still other lessons and purposes.
One man said that as he planned his next life he visualized “a sort of
clockwork instrument into which you could insert certain parts in order for
specific consequences to follow.”

These consequences were
not always pleasant. After being regressed to a metaconscious state, a woman
who had been raped when she was thirty-seven revealed that she had actually
planned the event before she had come into this incarnation. As she explained,
it had been necessary for her to experience a tragedy at that age in order to
force her to change her “entire soul complexion” and thus break through to a
deeper and more positive understanding of the meaning of life. Another subject,
a man afflicted with a serious and life-threatening kidney disease, disclosed
that he had chosen the illness to punish himself for a past-life transgression.
However, he also revealed that dying from the kidney disease was not part of
his script, and before he had come into this life he had also arranged to
encounter someone or something that would help him remember this fact and hence
enable him to heal both his guilt and his body. True to his word, after he
started his sessions with Whitton he experienced a near-miraculous complete
recovery.

Not all of Whitton's
subjects were so eager to learn about the future their metaconscious selves had
laid out for them. Several censored their own memories and asked Whitton to
please give them posthypnotic instructions
not
to remember anything that
they had said during trance. As they explained, they did not want to be tempted
to tamper with the script their metaconscious selves had written for them.

This is an astounding
idea. Is it possible that our unconscious mind is not only aware of the rough
outline of our destiny, but actually steers us toward its fulfillment?
Whitton's research is not the only evidence that this may be the case. In a
statistical study of 28 serious U.S. railroad accidents, parapsychologist William
Cox found that significantly fewer people took trains on accident days than on
the same day in previous weeks.

Cox's finding suggests
that we all may be constantly unconsciously precognizing the future and making
decisions based on that information: some of us opting to avoid mishap, and
perhaps some—like the woman who chose to experience a personal tragedy and the
man who elected to endure a kidney disease—choosing to experience negative
situations to fulfill other unconscious designs and purposes. “Carefully or
haphazardly, we choose our earthly circumstances,” says Whitton. “The message
of metaconsciousness is that the life situation of every human being is neither
random nor inappropriate. Seen objectively from the interlife, every human
experience is simply another lesson in the cosmic classroom.”

It is important to note
that the existence of such unconscious agendas does not mean that our lives are
rigidly predestined and all fates unavoidable. The fact that many of Whitton's
subjects asked not to remember what they said under hypnosis implies again that
the future is only roughly outlined and still subject to change.

Whitton is not the only
reincarnation researcher who has uncovered evidence that our unconscious has
more of a hand in our lives than we may realize. Another is Dr. Ian Stevenson,
a professor of psychiatry at the University of Virginia Medical School. Instead
of using hypnosis, Stevenson interviews young children who have spontaneously
remembered apparent previous existences. He has spent more than thirty years in
this pursuit and has collected and analyzed thousands of cases from all over
the globe.

According to Stevenson,
spontaneous past-life recall is relatively-common among children, so common
that the number of cases that seem worth considering far exceeds his staff's
ability to investigate them. Generally children are between the ages of two and
four when they start talking about their “other life,” and frequently they
remember dozens of particulars, including their name, the names of family
members and friends, where they lived, what their house looked like, what they
did for a living, how they died, and even obscure information such as where
they hid money before they died and, in cases involving murder, sometimes even
who killed them.

Indeed, frequently their
memories are so detailed Stevenson is able to track down the identity of their
previous personality and verify virtually everything they have said. He has
even taken children to the area in which their past incarnation lived, and
watched as they navigated effortlessly through strange neighborhoods and
correctly identified their former house, belongings, and past-life relatives
and friends.

Like Whitton, Stevenson
has gathered an enormous amount of data suggestive of reincarnation, and to
date has published six volumes on his findings. And like Whitton, he also has
found evidence that the unconscious plays a far greater role in our makeup and
destiny than we have hitherto suspected.

He has corroborated
Whitton's finding that we are frequently reborn with individuals we have known
in previous existences, and that the guiding force behind our choices is often
affection or a sense of guilt or indebtedness. He agrees that personal
responsibility, not chance, is the arbiter of our fate. He has found that
although a person's material conditions can vary greatly from one life to the
next, their moral conduct, interests, aptitudes, and attitudes remain the same.
Individuals who were criminals in their previous existence tend to be drawn to criminal
behavior again; people who were generous and kind continue to be generous and
kind, and so on. From this Stevenson concludes that it is not the outward
trappings of life that matter, but the inner ones, the joys, sorrows, and
“inner growths” of the personality, that appear to be most important.

Most significant of all,
he found no compelling evidence of “retributive karma,” or any indication that
we are cosmically punished for our sins. “There is then—if we judge by the
evidence of the cases—no external judge of our conduct and no being who shifts
us from life to life according to our deserts. If this world is (in Keats's
phrase) ‘a vale of soul-making,’ we are the makers of our own souls,” states
Stevenson.

Stevenson has also
uncovered a phenomenon that did not turn up in Whitton's study, a discovery
that provides even more dramatic evidence of the power the unconscious mind has
to sculpt and influence our life circumstances. He has found that a person's
previous incarnation can apparently affect the very shape and structure of
their current physical body. He has discovered, for example, that Burmese
children who remember previous lives as British or American Air Force pilots
shot down over Burma during World War II all have fairer hair and complexions
than their siblings.

He has also found
instances in which distinctive facial features, foot deformities, and other
characteristics have carried over from one life to the next. Most numerous
among these are physical injuries carrying over as scars or birthmarks. In one
case, a boy who remembered being murdered in his former life by having his
throat slit still had a long reddish mark resembling a scar across his neck. In
another, a boy who remembered committing suicide by shooting himself in the
head in his past incarnation still had two scarlike birthmarks that lined up
perfectly along the bullet's trajectory, one where the bullet had entered and
one where it had exited. And in another, a boy had a birthmark resembling a
surgical scar complete with a line of red marks resembling stitch wounds, in
the exact location where his previous personality had had surgery.