8
For I have already at times been a boy and a girl, and a bush and a bird and a mute fish in the salty waves.
—Empedocles
Were an Asiatic to ask me for a definition of Europe, I should be forced to answer him: It is that part of the world which is haunted by the incredible delusion that man was created out of nothing, and that his present birth is his first entrance into life.
—Arthur Schopenhauer, Parerga and Paralipomena
Crosscultural Perspective on Reincarnation
According to Western materialistic science, our lifespan is limited to the period between our conception and our biological death. This assumption is a logical consequence of the conviction that we are essentially our bodies. Since the body perishes and decomposes at the time of biological death, it seems obvious that at this point we cease to exist. This perspective is in conflict with the beliefs of all the great religions and spiritual systems of the ancient and pre-industrial cultures who have seen death as an important transition, rather than the final end of any form of existence. Most Western scientists dismiss or even ridicule the belief that our existence can continue beyond death. They attribute this idea to lack of education, to superstition, or to primitive wishful thinking of people who are unable to face and accept the grim reality of impermanence and death.
In pre-industrial societies, the belief in life after death is not limited to a vague notion that there might be a Beyond.
Mythologies of many cultures offer very specific descriptions of what happens after we die. They provide intricate maps of the posthumous journey of the soul and depict various abodes—heavens, paradises, and hells—that harbor discarnate beings. Of particular interest is the belief in reincarnation, according to which the individual units of consciousness keep returning to earth and experience entire chains of embodied existences. Some spiritual systems combine the belief in reincarnation with the law of karma, suggesting that the merits and debits from previous lifetimes determine the quality of subsequent incarnations. Various forms of the belief in reincarnation show a wide distribution over geographical space and historical time. They have developed, often independently, in cultures separated by many thousands of miles and by many centuries.
The concept of reincarnation and karma is the cornerstone of many Asian religions—Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, Sikhism, Zoroastrianism, the Tibetan Vajrayana, Japanese Shintoism, and Chinese Taoism. Similar ideas can be found in such historically, geographically, and culturally diverse groups as various African tribes, American Indians, Pre-Columbian cultures, Polynesian kahunas, practitioners of the Brazilian umbanda, the Gauls, and the Druids. In ancient Greece, several important schools of thought subscribed to this doctrine, among them the Pythagoreans, the Orphics, and the Platonists. The concept of reincarnation was adopted by the Essenes, the Pharisees, the Karaites, and other Jewish and semi-Jewish groups. It also formed an important part of the cabalistic theology of medieval Jewry. This list would not be complete without mentioning the Neoplatonists and Gnostics and in modern times the Theosophists, Anthroposophists, and certain spiritualists.
Although the belief in reincarnation is not a part of modern Christianity, similar concepts existed also among the early Christians. According to St. Jerome (A.D. 340–420), reincarnation was given an esoteric interpretation that was communicated to a select elite. It appears that the belief in reincarnation was an integral part of Gnostic Christianity, best known from the scrolls discovered in 1945 at Nag Hammadi. In the Gnostic text called Faith Wisdom or Pistis Sophia (1921) Jesus teaches his disciples how failures in one life are transferred to another. Thus, for example, people who use curses against others will in their new life be “continually troubled in their hearts,” while arrogant and immoderate persons might be reborn in a deformed body and be looked down upon by others.
The most famous Christian thinker speculating about the pre-existence of souls and world cycles was Origen (A.D. 186–253), one of the greatest Church Fathers of all times. In his writings, particularly in the book De Principiis, or On First Principles (Origenes Adamantius 1973), he expressed his opinion that certain scriptural passages could only be explained in the light of reincarnation. His teachings were condemned by the Second Council of Constantinople convened by Emperor Justinian in A.D. 553 and became a heretical doctrine. The verdict read: “If anyone assert the fabulous pre-existence of souls and shall submit to the monstrous doctrine that follows from it, let him be anathema!” However, some scholars believe that they can detect traces of the teachings in the writings of St. Augustine, St. Gregory, and even St. Francis of Assisi.
How can we explain that so many cultural groups in the course of history have held this extraordinary belief and that they formulated complex and intricate theoretical systems describing it? How is it possible that they were all in agreement about an issue that is alien to the Western industrial civilization and that is considered utterly absurd by Western materialistic science? The usual explanation is that these differences reflect our superiority in the scientific understanding of the universe and of human nature. However, closer examination reveals that the real reason for this difference is the tendency of Western scientists to adhere to their belief system and to ignore, censor, or distort all observations that are in conflict with it. More specifically, this attitude reflects the reluctance of Western psychologists and psychiatrists to pay attention to the experiences and observations from holotropic states of consciousness.
Empirical Evidence for Reincarnation
The concept of reincarnation and karma is not a “belief” in the usual sense of the word, meaning an ungrounded and arbitrary theoretical and emotional position that is not supported by facts.
For the Hindus, Buddhists, Taoists, and other groups for whom it constitutes an important part of their religion, reincarnation is not a matter of belief. It is an eminently empirical issue, based on very specific experiences and observations. This is also true for open-minded and knowledgeable Western consciousness researchers. They are not naïve, ignorant, and unfamiliar with the philosophical position and worldview of materialistic science, as their critics like to portray them.
Many of these researchers have good academic training and impressive credentials. The reason for their position is that they have made some important observations concerning reincarnation for which their academic training failed to provide adequate explanations. In many instances, they also had extraordinary personal experiences that they could not easily dismiss. According to Christopher Bache, a researcher who has thoroughly reviewed the literature on reincarnation and encountered past life experiences in his own inner search, the evidence in this area is so rich and remarkable that scientists who do not think the problem of reincarnation deserves serious study are either uninformed or “boneheaded” (Bache 1990).
Let us take a brief look at the existing evidence that one should be familiar with before making any judgments concerning reincarnation. The nature of this evidence is described in a mythological language in a passage written by Sholem Ash (1967), a twentieth-century Hassidic scholar: “Not the power to remember, but its very opposite, the power to forget, is a necessary condition of our existence. If the lore of the transmigration of souls is a true one, then these souls, between their exchange of bodies, must pass through the sea of forgetfulness. According to the Jewish view, we make the transition under the overlordship of the Angel of Forgetfulness. But it sometimes happens that the Angel of Forgetfulness himself forgets to remove from our memories the records of the former world; and then our senses are haunted by fragmentary recollections of another life. They drift like torn clouds above the hills and valleys of the mind, and weave themselves into the incidents of our current existence.”
Modern researchers have amassed a large amount of observations suggesting partial lifting of the veil of forgetfulness that Sholem Ash talks about. Many of them studied and described vivid past life experiences that occur spontaneously in everyday life or in the course of various therapeutic sessions involving holotropic states of consciousness. Others collected additional information about reincarnation by guiding people to specific areas of their psyche with the use of hypnosis or some other approaches. There have also been interesting attempts at experimental verification of the authenticity of such guided past life experiences (Wambach 1979). And finally, there are certain intriguing data from the Tibetan spiritual tradition that provide valuable insights into this area from yet another angle.
Children Remember Past Lives
Among the most interesting phenomena related to the problem of reincarnation are spontaneous past life experiences in children. Reports from many different countries of the world indicate that, occasionally, small children remember and describe their previous life in another body, another time and place, and with other people. These memories can present many problems in the lives of these children and their parents. They are often associated with various “carry-over pathologies,” such as phobias, unusual idiosyncrasies, and strange reactions to certain people, places, and situations. There exist reports of child psychiatrists who treated and described cases of this kind. Access to these memories usually appears around the age of three and gradually disappears between the ages of five and eight.
Ian Stevenson, professor of psychology at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, has conducted meticulous studies of over three thousand of such cases and reported about them in his books (Stevenson 1966, 1984, 1987). Stevenson’s cases were not only from “primitive,” “exotic” cultures with an a priori belief in reincarnation, but also from Western countries, including Great Britain and the United States. Being a cautious and conservative researcher, Stevenson reported only several hundred of them, because many have not met the high standards he had set for his research. Only the cases with the best scientific evidence were included. Stevenson eliminated many of the observations, because the family benefited from the behavior of their children financially, in terms of social prestige, or public attention. Additional reasons for not including certain cases were inconsistent testimony, false memory (cryptomnesia), witnesses of questionable character, or indication of fraud.
The findings of Stevenson’s research are remarkable. Although he had eliminated in all the reported cases the possibility that these children could have obtained the information through the conventional channels, he was able to confirm their stories, often with incredible details. In some cases, he actually took the children into the village or town that they had remembered from their previous life. Although they had never been there in their current lifetime, they were familiar with the topography of the village and were able to find the home they had allegedly lived in. They even recognized the members of their “family” and the villagers and knew their names. Possibly the strongest evidence in support of the reincarnation hypothesis was the incidence of striking birthmarks that specifically reflected injuries and other events from the remembered life; this could be confirmed by independent research (Stevenson, 1997).
Past Life Memories in Adults
Spontaneous, vivid reliving of past life memories in adults occurs most frequently during episodes of psychospiritual crises (spiritual emergencies). However, various degrees of remembering can also happen in more or less ordinary states of consciousness in the circumstances of everyday life. Mainstream psychiatrists are aware of the existence of past life experiences, but they treat them routinely as indications of serious psychopathology, usually by suppressive pharmacological medication. The leading theories of personality in contemporary psychology are firmly anchored in the materialistic paradigm and thus naturally subscribe to the “one-timer view.”
Past life experiences can be facilitated by a wide variety of techniques that mediate access to deep levels of the psyche, such as meditation, hypnosis, use of psychedelic substances, and stays in a sensory isolation tank. They can emerge during body work and in sessions of experiential psychotherapy, for example, in the course of rebirthing, holotropic breathwork, or primal therapy. I have heard of many instances where past life episodes appeared unsolicited in sessions with therapists who had a very conventional theoretical framework and did not believe in reincarnation, or even those who were violently opposed to the concept. The emergence of karmic material is also completely independent of the experiencer’s previous philosophical and religious belief system.
In a fully developed past life experience, we find ourselves involved in an emotionally highly charged situation that is happening in another historical period and in another location. Our sense of personal identity is preserved, but it is experienced in relation to another person and another time and place. These experiences often involve other people with whom we have an intense relationship in this lifetime. The emotional quality of these episodes is usually very negative. Sometimes, they are associated with physical pain, panic anxiety, deep sadness, or guilt feelings. Other times, it is consuming hatred, murderous anger, or insane jealousy. However, in some instances, these sequences can reflect great emotional fulfillment and happiness. They portray passionate love affairs, devoted friendships, or spiritual partnerships.
The most characteristic aspect of past life experiences is a convinced feeling that the situation we are facing is not new. We clearly remember that it happened to us before, that we once actually were this other person in one of our previous lives. This sense of reliving something that one has seen before (déjà vu) or experienced before (déjà vécu) in a previous incarnation is very basic and cannot be analyzed any further. It is comparable to the ability to distinguish in everyday life our memories of events that actually happened from our dreams, daydreams, and fantasies. It would be difficult to convince a person, who is relating to us a memory of something that happened last week, that the event did not really occur and that he or she is just imagining it. Past incarnation memories have a similar subjective quality of authenticity and reality.
Unique Features of Past Life Phenomena
Past life experiences have some extraordinary characteristics for which they deserve serious attention of researchers studying consciousness and the human psyche. Considered in their totality, these features leave no doubt that karmic sequences represent unique phenomena sui generis and not simply fantasies or figments of pathological imagination. Past life experiences occur on the same continuum with accurate memories from adolescence, childhood, infancy, birth, and intrauterine existence, phenomena that can often be reliably verified. Sometimes they appear simultaneously or alternate with biographical material from our current life (Grof 1988, 1992).
Another interesting feature of past life experiences is that they are often intimately connected with important issues and circumstances in our present life. When karmic sequences emerge fully into consciousness, either spontaneously or in the context of deep experiential psychotherapy, they can provide illuminating insights into various previously incomprehensible and puzzling aspects of our everyday existence. This includes a wide variety of emotional, psychosomatic, and interpersonal problems for which conventional forms of psychotherapy failed to provide explanation.
Experiences of past life memories typically provide more than just new understanding of these problems. This process can also often result in alleviation or complete disappearance of various difficult symptoms, such as various phobias, psychosomatic pains, or asthma. It can also be instrumental in healing of troublesome relationships with other people. Past life experiences can thus contribute significantly to the understanding of psychopathology and play an essential role in successful therapy. Therapists who refuse to work with these experiences because they reject the concept of reincarnation are depriving their patients of a very effective therapeutic mechanism.
The persons who experience karmic phenomena often gain accurate insights into the time and culture involved, concerning social structure, beliefs, rituals, customs, architecture, costumes, weapons, and other aspects of life. In many instances the nature and quality of this information makes it unlikely that these people could have acquired it through the conventional channels. Occasionally, past life experiences render information about specific historical events.
Verification of Past Life Memories
The criteria for verification of past life memories are the same as those that we use when we relive events from infancy and childhood of the present lifetime. We try to get as many details of the retrieved memory as possible and then search for independent evidence corroborating or disproving its content. Unfortunately, in many past life experiences, this information is not specific enough to allow independent verification. Other times, the quality of the information is adequate, but it is impossible to find sufficiently specific and detailed historical sources that would make the verification procedure possible.
Most past life memories in adults do not permit the same degree of verification as Stevenson’s spontaneous memories in children, which are typically more recent. To appreciate the challenge associated with such an endeavor, it is important to consider that even our memories from this lifetime do not always lend themselves easily to objective verification. Psychotherapists are well aware of the problems associated with the attempts to evaluate the veracity of memories from childhood and infancy retrieved in verbal or regressive therapy. Naturally, the task to verify past life experiences is incomparably more difficult than similar efforts concerning material from the present lifetime. Even if such experiences contain very specific details, which is not always the case, objective evidence is incomparably harder to come by, since the material is much older and often involves other countries and cultures.
In spite of all these difficulties, there are some rare instances in which all the necessary criteria are met. The result of such independent research can be truly extraordinary. Over the years, I have been able to make in my work several observations, in which the content of past life experiences could be corroborated in remarkable detail. In all these cases, I have not been able to find a natural explanation for the phenomena involved. There is no doubt in my mind that the information conveyed by these experiences came through extrasensory channels. I have also heard similar stories from other researchers.
In my previous publications (Grof 1975, 1988), I have described two such case histories. The first one involved a neurotic patient undergoing psychedelic therapy. She experienced in four consecutive sessions many episodes from a life of a seventeenth-century Czech nobleman. This man had been publicly executed in the Old Town Square in Prague together with twenty-six other prominent aristocrats. This public execution was an effort of the Hapsburgs to break the moral of the Czechs after they had defeated the Czech king in the battle of the White Mountain. In this case, the patient’s father conducted, unbeknownst to her, independent genealogical research of the family’s pedigree, which confirmed that they were descendents of one of these unfortunate men.
The second example was a man who relived in his primal work and later in his holotropic breathwork sessions during our monthlong seminar at the Esalen Institute a number of episodes from the war between England and Spain in the sixteenth century. They revolved around the mass slaughter of Spanish soldiers by the British in the besieged fortress of Dunanoir on the western coast of Ireland. During these sessions, he experienced himself as a priest who accompanied these soldiers and was killed with them. At one point, he saw on his hand a seal ring with engraved initials and drew a picture of it.
In his later historical research, he was able to confirm the veracity of this entire episode that he previously had not known anything about. One of the documents he found in historical archives gave the name of the priest who had accompanied the Spanish soldiers on their military expedition. To his and our surprise, the initials of this name were identical with those that were carved on the seal ring he had seen in his session and captured in a detailed drawing.
A striking aspect of past life experiences is their frequent association with remarkable synchronicities involving other people and situations. The protagonists in our past life memories often are important persons from our present life, such as parents, children, spouses, boyfriends, girlfriends, or superiors. It seems to make sense that an intense past life experience could result in dramatic changes in our own feelings and behavior toward the person who was an important part of our karmic scenario. However, these experiences also often show unexplainable mysterious synchronistic links with specific changes in the lives of other persons whom we identified as protagonists in our past life memory. These persons could be hundreds or thousands of miles away from the place where our experience happens and have absolutely no knowledge that it takes place. Yet they can independently undergo, at exactly the same time, a dramatic complementary change in their feelings and attitude toward us.
The Karmic Triangle
I will use here an example from my own life to illustrate this remarkable phenomenon. Over the years, I have observed many similar occurrences involving other people. The episode I am about to describe happened shortly after my arrival in the United States. My emigration to the United States in 1967 brought about radical changes in my personal, professional, political, and cultural environment. I arrived in Baltimore with some fifty pounds of luggage. Over half of the total content of my luggage was the documentation of my psychedelic research in Prague and the rest were my personal belongings. This was all that was left of my old life in Europe. It was a new beginning for me on all imaginable levels. While I thoroughly enjoyed the inspiring team of my professional colleagues at Spring Grove, the undreamed of freedom of expression, and all the novel things I was discovering in the world around me, I did not have much success in creating a satisfactory personal life.
All the women in my social sphere who were of appropriate age for me and shared my interests seemed to be married or otherwise committed. It was a frustrating situation since I was at a stage of life when I felt a deep need for partnership. My friends and colleagues at Spring Grove seemed to be even more concerned about this situation than I was myself and exerted great effort to remedy it. They searched for potential partners for me and kept inviting them for various social occasions. This resulted in a few frustrating and somewhat awkward situations, but did not bear any fruit. And then this situation suddenly changed in the most unexpected and very radical way.
A difficult relationship of a fellow therapist, Seymour, had abruptly ended and my friends invited his ex-girlfriend Monica for dinner. When Monica and I first met, I immediately felt a strong attraction to her and had a sense of instant deep connection. It was not difficult for me to fall in love with her. She was of European origin like myself, single, beautiful, and bright. Her unusual charm, wit, and facility with words quickly made her the center of attention of every party she attended. I felt rapidly drawn into the relationship and was unable to be objective and realistic about it.
I did not see any problem in the fact that Monica was considerably younger than myself. I also chose to ignore her stories about her extremely traumatic childhood and tumultuous interpersonal history that I would have normally seen as serious warning signs. I was able to reassure myself that all these were details, nothing that we would not be able to work out. Had I been able to be analytic under the circumstances, I would have recognized that I had met what C. G. Jung called an anima figure. Monica and I started dating and had a passionate and unusually stormy relationship.
Monica’s moods and behavior seemed to change from one day to another, or even from hour to hour. Waves of intense affection toward me alternated with episodes of aloofness, evasiveness, and withdrawal. The situation seemed to be further complicated by two unusual circumstances. Since my arrival in Baltimore, I lived in a studio that had been at one time rented by Monica’s ex-boyfriend Seymour and she used to visit him there. She was now coming to the same apartment to see a different man. In addition, Monica’s brother Wolfgang hated me since the very first time we had met. He and Monica had an unusually strong relationship that seemed to have distinct incestuous features. Wolfgang was violently opposed to my relationship with Monica and treated me like a rival.
I was very committed to make the relationship work, but nothing I was able to do had any influence on the crazy rollercoster ride we seemed to be taking together. I felt like I was alternately exposed to hot and cold showers. I found it very frustrating but, at the same time, my attraction to Monica had a strange magnetic quality and I was unable to terminate this confusing and unfulfilling relationship.
I desperately needed some insight into the baffling dynamic I was caught in. Our institute had a program offering mental health professionals the opportunity to have up to three psychedelic sessions. The members of our therapeutic team were eligible for this program. In an effort to reach some clarity in my relationship with Monica, I applied for an LSD session just as our difficulties were reaching their peak. The following is an excerpt from that session, describing my first introduction to the world of past life experiences and to the law of karma:
In the middle of this session I suddenly had a vision of a dark rock of irregular shape that looked like a giant meteorite and seemed extremely ancient. The sky opened up and a lightning bolt of immense intensity hit its surface and started to burn into it some mysterious arcane symbols. Once these strange hieroglyphs were carved into the surface of the rock, they continued to burn and emit blinding incandescent light. Although I was unable to decipher the hieroglyphs and read them, I sensed they were sacred and I could somehow understand the message they were conveying. They revealed to me that I had had a long series of lives preceding this one and that, according to the law of karma, I was responsible for my actions in these lives, although I could not remember them.
I tried to refuse responsibility for things of which I did not have any memory, but was not able to resist the enormous psychological pressure forcing me to surrender. Finally, I had to accept what clearly was an ancient universal law against which there was no recourse. Once I yielded, I found myself holding in my arms Monica, just as I remembered holding her on the previous weekend. We were floating in air in an archetypal pit of immense size, slowly descending in an extended spiral. I felt instinctively that this was the Abyss of Ages and that we were traveling back in time.
The descent took forever; it seemed it would never end. Finally we reached the bottom of the pit. Monica disappeared from my arms and I found myself walking in a hall of an ancient Egyptian palace, dressed in ornate clothes. All around me on the walls were beautiful reliefs accompanied by carved hieroglyphs. I could understand their meaning in the same way I would understand the message of the posters pasted on a Baltimore billboard. On the other side of the large hall, I saw a figure that was slowly approaching me. I knew that I was the son of an aristocratic Egyptian family and that the man approaching me was my brother in that lifetime.
As the figure came closer, I recognized it was Wolfgang. He stopped about ten feet from me and looked at me with immense hatred. I realized that in this incarnation Wolfgang, Monica, and I were siblings. I was the first born and as such I had married Monica and received many other privileges that came with that status. Wolfgang felt deprived and experienced agonizing jealousy and strong hatred toward me. I saw clearly that this was the basis of a destructive karmic pattern that then repeated itself in many variations throughout ages.
I stood in the hall facing Wolgang and feeling his deep hatred toward me. In an attempt to resolve this painful situation, I tried to send him a telepathic message: “I do not know which form I am in and how I got here. I am a time traveler from the twentieth century, where I took a powerful mind-altering drug. I am very unhappy about the tension that exists between us and want to do anything to resolve it.” I stretched my arms into a very open position and sent him the following message: “Here I am, this is all I have! Please, do anything you need to do to liberate us from this bondage, to set both of us free!”
Wolfgang seemed very excited about my offer and accepted it. His hatred seemed to take the form of two intense rays of energy resembling powerful laser beams that burned my body and caused me extreme pain. After what seemed an extremely long time of excruciating torture, the beams gradually lost their power and eventually completely faded. Wolfgang and the hall disappeared and I found myself holding Monica again in my arms.
This time we ascended through the same Abyss of Ages, moving forward in time. The walls of this archetypal pit were opening into scenes from different historical periods showing Monica, Wolfgang, and myself in many previous lifetimes. All of them depicted difficult and destructive triangular situations, in which we seriously hurt each other. It seemed that a strong wind, a “karmic hurricane,” was blowing through centuries, dissipating the pain of these situations and releasing the three of us from a fatal painful bondage.
When this sequence ended and I returned fully into the present, I was in a state of indescribable bliss and ecstatic rapture. I felt that even if I would not achieve anything else during the rest of my days, my life had been productive and successful. Resolution and release from one powerful karmic pattern seemed a sufficient accomplishment for one lifetime!
Monica’s presence in my experience was so intense that I was convinced she had to feel the impact of what was happening with me. When we saw each other the next week, I decided to find out what was her experience in the afternoon when I had the session. At first, I deliberately did not tell her anything about my session, trying to avoid any possibility of suggestion. I simply asked her what she did between 4 and 4.30 p.m. when I was experiencing the Egyptian karmic sequence in my session. “Strange that you should ask me,” she answered, “it was probably the worst time of my entire life!”
She then proceeded to describe a dramatic showdown she had had with her superior that ended by her storming out of the office. She was sure she had lost her job, felt desperate, and ended up in a nearby bar drinking heavily. At one point, the door of the bar opened up and a man walked in. Monica recognized Robert, a man with whom she had had a sexual relationship at the time she met me. Robert was very rich and gave her many expensive gifts, including a new car and a horse.
Unbeknownst to me, Monica continued the relationship with him after we started dating, not being able to make a choice between the two of us. When she now saw Robert entering the bar, she walked to him and wanted to give him a hug and a kiss. Robert made an evasive maneuver and shook her hand instead. Monica noticed that he was accompanied by an elegant woman. Clearly perplexed, Robert introduced her to Monica; it happened to be his wife. For Monica this was a shock, since during their entire relationship Robert had pretended that he was single.
At this point, Monica felt that the ground disappeared from under her feet. She left the bar and ran to her car, the one that Robert had given her. Severely drunk and in heavy rain, she raced down the beltway reaching the speed of over 90 miles per hour, determined to end it all. Too much had happened that day and she did not care any more! It turned out that exactly at the time when I reached the resolution of the karmic pattern in my session, my image emerged in Monica’s mind. She started thinking about me and about our relationship. Realizing that she still had somebody in her life she could rely on, she calmed down. She slowed down the car, drove it off the beltway, and parked it at the curbside. When she sobered up to the point that she could drive safely, she returned home and went to bed.
The day after this discussion with Monica, I received a phone call from Wolfgang, who asked for an appointment with me. This was an absolutely unexpected and surprising development, since Wolfgang had never called me before, let alone asked for a meeting. When he arrived, he told me that he came to see me about a very intimate and embarassing matter. It was a problem that is called in psychoanalysis the prostitute-Madonna complex. He had had a number of causal and superficial sexual relationships in his life, including many one-night stands, and never had had any problems developing and maintaining erection. Now he felt that he had found the woman of his dreams and, for the first time in his life, was deeply in love. However, he was unable to have sex with her and experienced repeated painful failures.
Wolfgang was desperate and afraid that he would lose this relationship unless he did something about his impotence. He told me that he was too embarassed to talk about his problem with a stranger. He thought about discussing the issue with me, but rejected the idea, because he had strong negative feelings toward me. At one point, his attitude toward me suddenly changed radically. His hatred dissolved as if by magic and he decided to call me and seek help. When I asked him when this had happened, I found out that it exactly coincided with the time when I had completed the reliving of the Egyptian sequence.
A few weeks later, I retrieved the missing piece of the Egyptian story. I did a hypnotic session with Pauline McCririck, a psychoanalyst from London. The following is an excerpt from my account of this experience.
I lay in the sand of a hot sun-scorched desert. I felt agonizing pain in my belly and my entire body was in spasms. I knew I had been poisoned and was going to die. I realized from the context that the only people who could have poisoned me had to be Monica and her lover. By the Egyptian law, she had to marry me as her oldest brother, but her affection belonged to another man. I had found out about their affair and had attempted to interfere with their relationship. The realization that I had been betrayed and poisoned filled me with blind anger. I died alone in the desert with my entire being filled with hatred.
The reliving of this situation brought another interesting insight. I seemed to remember that in this Egyptian lifetime, I was actively involved in the mysteries of Isis and Osiris and knew their secrets. I felt that the poison and the hatred intoxicated my mind and obscured everything else, including this knowledge. This made it impossible for me to take advantage of the secret teachings at the time of my death. For the same reason, my connection with this arcane knowledge was brutally severed.
I suddenly saw that much of my present life had been dedicated to an unrelenting search for these lost teachings. I remembered how excited I had been every time I had come across some information that was directly or indirectly related to this area. In the light of this insight, my work with psychedelics revolving around psychospiritual death and rebirth seemed to be a rediscovery and modern reformulation of the processes involved in the ancient mysteries.
In a subsequent meditation, I was unexpectedly flooded with a fugue of images representing highlights of my experiences with Monica and Wolfgang, some of them from real life, others from my sessions. The intensity and speed of this review rapidly increased until it reached an explosive climax. In an instant, I felt a deep sense of resolution and peace. I knew that the karmic pattern was now fully resolved. Monica and I remained friends for the rest of my stay in Baltimore. The tension and chaos disappeared from our interactions and neither of us felt any compulsion to continue an intimate relationship. We both understood that we were not meant to be partners in our present lifetime.
Reincarnation and Karma in Tibetan Buddhism
There exists another interesting piece of the puzzle of reincarnation. It is the information we have about certain Tibetan teachings and practices concerning the degree to which it is possible to actually influence the process of death and reincarnation. Tibetan literature describes that certain highly developed spiritual masters are able to choose the time of their death and predict or select the time and place of their next incarnation. Others have developed the capacity to maintain continuity of consciousness during their passage through the bardos, intermediate states between death and the next incarnation.
Conversely, according to these reports, accomplished Tibetan monks can use certain specific clues, received in dreams and meditations, as well as various external omens, to locate and identify the child who is the reincarnation of a tulku or a Dalai Lama. Eventually, the child is found, brought to the monastery, and exposed to a series of tests during which it has to correctly identify from several sets of similar objects those that belonged to the deceased. Some aspects of this practice could, at least theoretically, be subjected to a rather rigorous testing following Western standards.
Reincarnation: Fact or Fiction?
We can now summarize the objective evidence that forms the basis of the widespread “belief” in reincarnation and karma. The term belief is actually inappropriate when applied to this area. Properly understood, it is a theoretical system of thought, a conceptual framework that is trying to provide explanation for a large number of unusual experiences and observations. In holotropic states, spontaneous or induced, it is not only possible but very common to experience episodes from the lives of people in various historical periods and different countries of the world. When we experience these sequences, we feel completely identified with these individuals. In addition, we have a convinced feeling that we actually once were these persons and lived their lives. These experiences are typically very vivid and can engage all our senses.
In terms of their content, past life experiences transcend racial and cultural boundaries and can take place in any country of the world and at any time of human history or prehistory. They often provide detailed information about the countries, cultures, and times involved. In many instances, this information by far surpasses our previous knowledge of these matters and our general educational background. On occasion, the sequences from past lives can feature animal protagonists. For example, we can experience a situation in which we were killed by a tiger or trampled to death by an elephant. Over the years, I have also witnessed some past life experiences with only one protagonist, such as episodes where the experiencer died in an avalanche or was crushed by a falling tree. The therapeutic potential of past life experiences and the synchronicities associated with them are additional remarkable features of these phenomena. These are the facts that we have to know before we attempt to pass a judgment concerning the “belief” in reincarnation and karma.
These extraordinary characteristics of past life experiences have been repeatedly confirmed by independent observers. However, all these impressive facts do not necessarily constitute a definitive “proof” that we survive death and reincarnate as the same separate unit of consciousness, or the same individual soul. This conclusion is just one possible interpretation of the existing evidence. This is essentially the same situation that we encounter in science, where we have certain facts of observation and look for a theory that would explain them and put them into a coherent conceptual framework.
One of the basic rules in modern philosophy of science is that a theory should never be confused with the reality that it describes. The history of science clearly shows that there always exists more than one way to interpret the available data. In the study of past life phenomena, as in any other area of exploration, we have to separate facts of observation from the theories that try to make sense of them. For example, the falling of objects is a fact of observation, whereas the theories trying to explain why it happens have changed several times in the course of history and undoubtedly will change again.
The existence of past life experiences with all their remarkable characteristics is an unquestionable fact that can be verified by any serious researcher who is sufficiently open-minded and interested to check the evidence. It is also clear that there is no plausible explanation for these phenomena within the conceptual framework of mainstream psychiatry and psychology. On the other hand, the interpretation of the existing data is a much more complex and difficult matter. The popular understanding of reincarnation as a repeated cycle of life, death, and rebirth of the same individual is a reasonable conclusion from the available evidence. It certainly is far superior to the attitude of traditional psychologists and psychiatrists, who ignore all the available evidence and rigidly adhere to the established ways of thinking. However, it is not difficult to imagine some alternative interpretations of the same data. Naturally, none of these explanations is congruent with the materialistic paradigm.
At least two such alternatives can already be found in the spiritual literature. In the Hindu tradition, the belief in reincarnation of separate individuals is seen as a popular and unsophisticated understanding of reincarnation. In the last analysis, there is only one being that has true existence and that is Brahman, or the creative principle itself. All separate individuals in all the dimensions of existence are just products of infinite metamorphoses of this one immense entity. Since all the divisions and boundaries in the universe are illusory and arbitrary, only Brahman really incarnates. All the protagonists in the divine play of existence are different aspects of this One. When we attain this ultimate knowledge, we are able to see that our past incarnation experiences represent just another level of illusion or maya. To see these lives as “our lives” requires perception of the karmic players as separate individuals and reflects ignorance concerning the fundamental unity of everything.
In his book Lifecycles, Christopher Bache (1990) discusses another interesting concept of reincarnation found in the books by Jane Roberts (1973) and in the works of other authors. Here the emphasis is neither on the individual unit of consciousness nor on God, but on the Oversoul, an entity that lies in between the two. If the term soul refers to the consciousness that collects and integrates the experiences of an individual incarnation, the Oversoul or Soul is the name given to the larger consciousness that collects and integrates the experiences of many incarnations.
According to this view, it is the Oversoul that incarnates, not the individual unit of consciousness.
Bache points out that if we are extensions of our former lives, we clearly are not the summation of all the experiences that they have contained. The purpose that the Oversoul has for incarnating is to collect specific experiences. A full involvement in a particular life requires severing the connection with the Oversoul and assuming discrete personal identity. At the time of death, the separate individual dissolves in the Oversoul, leaving only a mosaic of unassimilated difficult experiences. These then become assigned to the life of other incarnated beings in a process that can be compared to dealing a hand of cards in a card game.
In this model, there is no true continuity between the lives of the individuals that incarnate at diffferent times. By experiencing undigested parts of other lives, we are not dealing with our personal karma, but actually clearing the field of the Oversoul. The image that Bache uses to illustrate the relationship between the individual soul and the Oversoul is that of a nautilus shell. Here each chamber represents a separate unit and reflects a certain period in the life of the mollusk, but it is also integrated into a larger whole.
We have so far discussed three different ways of interpreting the observations related to past life phenomena. The incarnating units were, respectively, the individual unit of consciousness, Absolute Consciousness, and the Oversoul. However, we have not exhausted all the possibilities of alternative explanations that could account for the observed facts. Because of the arbitrary nature of all boundaries in the universe, we could just as easily define as the incarnating principle a unit larger than the Oversoul, for example, the field of consciousness of the entire human species or that of all life forms.
We could also take our analysis a step further and explore the factors that determine the specific choice of the karmic experiences that are assigned to the incarnating unit of consciousness. For example, some people with whom I have worked had convincing insights that an important factor in the selection process might be the relationship between karmic patterns and the time and place of a particular incarnation with its specific astrological correlates. This notion is in general agreement with the observations from psychedelic sessions, holotropic breathwork, and spontaneous episodes of psychospiritual crises. They show that in all these situations the content and timing of nonordinary states are closely correlated with planetary transits (Tarnas, in press).
Holotropic Experiences and Their Influence on Our Belief System
To get a more comprehensive perspective on the subject of reincarnation, let us explore the changes in our beliefs that occur during systematic inner work involving holotropic states. Our belief or disbelief in reincarnation, as well as our understanding of what might survive death, reflect the nature and level of the experiences we have had. A typical member of the Western industrial civilization believes that he or she is a physical body. This clearly limits individual existence to a lifespan that reaches from conception to the moment of death. As we saw, this “one-timer” approach is in conflict with the perspective of many other human groups throughout history. In our culture, it is strongly endorsed by an unlikely alliance of materialistic science and the Christian Church. The problem of reincarnation is one of the rare areas where both of these institutions reach complete agreement.
Personal experiences of past life memories that we encounter in meditation, experiential psychotherapy, psychedelic sessions, or “spiritual emergency” can be extremely authentic and convincing. They can bring about a drastic change in our worldview and open us up to the concept of reincarnation, not as a belief, but as an experiential reality. Consequently, the emphasis in our self-exploration tends to change considerably. Previously, we might have felt that it was all-important to work through our traumas from childhood, infancy, and birth, because we realized that they were a source of difficulties in our present life. After the discovery of the karmic realm, we become more concerned about attaining release from traumatic karmic patterns, because they have the potential to contaminate not one lifetime, but many consecutive ones.
At this stage, we often continue having additional past life experiences that can be very rich in accurate detail and be associated with remarkable synchronicities. We thus keep obtaining convincing evidence about the reality and authenticity of this way of understanding existence. We do not think about ourselves any more as Alan Watts’ “skin-encapsulated egos.” Instead of identifying with one specific individual who lives from conception to death, we now have a much larger concept of who we are.
Our new identity is that of a being whose existence spans many lifetimes; some of them have already passed, others still await us in the future. To see ourselves in this way, we have to transcend our previous belief that our lifespan is temporally limited to the period between conception and death. At the same time, we have to continue believing in the absolute nature of spatial boundaries that separate us from other people and from the rest of the world. We think about ourselves as open-ended chains of lifetimes and see our karmic partners in the same way.
If we continue our inner journey, additional holotropic experiences can show us that even spatial boundaries are ultimately illusory and can be dissolved. This creates an entirely new perspective on the problem of reincarnation. We have now transcended the concept of karma, as it is usually understood, because we have reached a level where there are no more separate individuals. And the existence of discrete characters is a necessary prerequisite for any karmic interaction. At this point, we identify with the unified field of cosmic creative energy and with Absolute Consciousness. From this perspective, the past life dramas represent just another level of illusion, the play of maya. It becomes clear that all lives have ultimately only one protagonist and that, in the last analysis, they are all empty of substance.
We now do not believe in karma any more, certainly not in the same sense as we did before. This form of disbelief is of an entirely different kind and order than the attitude of a materialistic skeptic and atheist. We still remember the time when we lived in a completely constricted state of consciousness and rejected the idea of reincarnation as utterly ridiculous and absurd. We are also aware of the fact that powerful and compelling experiences can move us to a level of consciousness where reincarnation is not a concept, but lived reality. And we know that even this stage can be transcended when our process of inner self-exploration confronts us with experiences that make us understand the relativity of all boundaries and the fundamental emptiness of all forms.
Neither a categorical denial of the possibility of reincarnation, nor the belief in its objective existence are true in an absolute sense. All the three approaches to this problem mentioned above are experientially very real and each of them reflects a certain level of insight into the universal scheme of things. In the last analysis, only the existence of the creative principle itself is real. Both the world in which reincarnation seems impossible and the one where it seems to be an undeniable fact are virtual realities created by orchestration of experiences. For this reason, the cosmic game can include scripts that from our limited everyday perspective might appear to be incompatible and in conflict with each other. In the Universal Mind and its divine play they can coexist without any problem.