Alternate Explanations (Some Paranormal) for "Past Life Recollections"

What is called past life regression is a technique wherein a therapist puts someone in a hypnotic trance or a state of deep relaxation, and then asks the person to tell about a past life that occurred before the person's current life. Very many people will give accounts suggesting a previous life. Skeptics say this is not really evidence for reincarnation, but just an example of suggestibility. It is well known that people can be extremely suggestible under hypnosis. 

But there may be some reasons for thinking that more than just imagination may be involved in such "past life accounts." Psychologist Helen Wambach used hypnotic regression techniques on more than 1000 people, and collected data sheets on the statements made.  A series of common questions were asked, mostly relating to details about that could be checked, such as the type of home and the type of eating utensils used.  Wambach said that when the data sheets were checked against historical realities, very few discrepancies were found.  She said she found that only 11 out of 1088 accounts had "clear evidence" of historical or factual discrepancies (such as someone claiming he had played a piano at a time before the piano was invented). 

Reading Wambach's book Reliving Past Lives: The Evidence Under Hypnosis, I have some concerns about her technique. Her technique was apparently to ask leading questions such as "It is now the year 1700, what do you see?"  That kind of question will create an expectation that the hypnotized subject is supposed to provide some story of a past life. A better technique would be to ask neutral questions that do not suggest some belief in reincarnation. An example might be to first ask: "What year were you born?" and then to ask "Do you recall anything that happened to you before that year?"  On page 96 she tells us that she told people before being hypnotized that "their subconscious would have control over their experience of the past life recall," thereby creating the idea that some past life recall was expected from the hypnotized people. 

We know that under hypnosis people are extremely suggestible. A nineteenth century work describes this aspect of hypnotism, describing some hypnotized subjects:

"When they drank water, and were told that it was milk, coffee, rum, whisky, or wormwood, they tasted it as such. Nay, after drinking it as whisky, they were told that they were drunk, and in a minute or two became, in every particular, very drunk indeed. The expression of the face was perfectly that of intoxication, and they could not walk a step without staggering or falling. They were easily made, by suggestion, to fancy themselves any other persons, and acted in character. They shot, fished, swam, lectured, and exhibited every feeling suggested to them. They were as easily made to suppose a stick to be a gun, a rod, a sword, nay, a serpent ; or a chair to be a tiger or a bear. From these animals they fled with extreme terror. They were made to see, hear, and feel a dreadful storm, and to creep for shelter under a table or a chair, supposed by them to be a house."

Since people are so very suggestible under hypnosis, it could be that people telling stories of past lives are merely responding to the suggestion of their hypnotist, in a way similar to the cases listed above. 

Another type of possible evidence for reincarnation consists of young children who start to say they have memories of a previous life. Typically the child will claim to remember details of the life of a person who died not long before the child was born. There have been many cases in which information on the  claimed "previous life" was obtained, and a close match was found between the child's statements and the details of the corresponding person's life and death.  Researcher who have published investigations of many such cases include Ian Stevenson and Jim Tucker. 

On a web page discussing the research of Jim Tucker, we have the following interesting set of numbers:

Median age at the time of the previous person's death: 28.
Percent of the children claiming they died a violent or unnatural death: 70%.
Percent of the children saying they had the same gender in a previous life: 90%.
Median time between the claimed death and the child's birth: 16 months. 

The previous figure differs from a figure cited by Wambach, who gives a figure of about 50 years between past lives. 

Does the evidence above show the likelihood that reincarnation occurs? Perhaps not, partially because there are alternate explanations why such things might happen even if no one is being reincarnated.  If you are a materialist, you are very limited in the alternate explanations you can give. But there is no reason why we have to limit ourselves to material explanations. We can imagine paranormal explanations or spiritual explanations other than actual reincarnation. 

One explanation is that souls survive death, and that when a young child gives stories of what he calls his previous life, such information is telepathically coming from another person who had such a life.  Such person may exist as a disembodied spirit in some realm of the dead.  There could be some reason why very young children could be more likely to be targets of such telepathic communication.  One possible reason might be that very young children have not been trained by society to dismiss the paranormal as impossible. 

A similar explanation could explain accounts given in past life regressions.  For quite a few years the trance medium Leonora Piper would seem to speak in the voice of dead persons, stating information that such persons could have known, but she could not have known.  Such cases may suggest that during a hypnotic trance there can be some extrasensory communication between the dead and the living.  If that is true, then such communication could be the source of many or most of the accounts given in past-life regressions.  

So if you are put in a hypnotic trance, and say that you recall living as Wilbur Dalton in the nineteenth century, it may not be that you actually were Wilbur Dalton in the nineteenth century. It may be that you are picking up through ESP some recollections sent to you by Wilbur Dalton, who may be currently living in some heavenly realm of the dead. 

There's another possible paranormal explanation for past life recollections. It could be that the memories of each person's life are stored in some information system that persists indefinitely. Such an information system has sometimes been called the Akashic records. Without believing all the claims that have been made about such Akashic records, we can postulate some paranormal information repository that accumulates information on each person's life, information on a person's experiences.  It could be that during hypnotic regression, people are able to fleetingly access such a repository.  So you may remember being Wilbur Dalton in the nineteenth century, not because you were Wilbur Dalton in the nineteenth century, but because you were somehow able to tap in to some mysterious repository that includes details of his experiences. 

Such an idea may not seem so improbable when we consider extraordinary cases involving what is called psychometry.  There have been many documented cases where some psychic seemed to be able to tell all kinds of information related to some object when being shown the object. So, for example, a psychic such as Mrs. Morel when given some piece of jewelry to see for the first time would be be able to tell accurate details about the object's owner and the owner's experiences, people she had never met.  You can try to explain evidence for psychometery by postulating that sometimes memories get stored in objects. But a better explanation may be that the object simply serves as a kind of prompt allowing the psychic to retrieve information from some paranormal repository of information perhaps storing information related to the lives and experiences of all those who have lived. If such a repository exists, it could be the source of some of the information accessed in past life regressions and past life recollections. 

It was abundantly documented during the nineteenth century that some hypnotized subjects would display astonishing powers of clairvoyance (see here and  here and here and here and here  for examples). They would describe in the most accurate detail places known only to some other person in the room.  Such a thing was called "traveling clairvoyance," and was rather similar to the "remote viewing" of the twentieth century, although it seemed to work far more powerfully. If such a "traveling clairvoyance" can be unlocked in a hypnotized subject to allow him to see far away in space, it could be that such a subject (with unleashed psychic powers) could also mentally travel in time, to peer into the experiences of some person who lived before (but not a person who the seer ever was in a previous life).  

The evidence for paranormal occurrences under hypnosis is extremely vast. A typical psychology textbook discussing hypnosis will discuss only a small subset of the phenomena that have been observed under hypnosis, typically only the least interesting phenomena.  A deep study of hypnotic phenomena will lead you to think that hypnosis can be the doorway to unfathomable powers of the human mind.  If that is true, then there are many strange possibilities that might explain reports of past-lives during hypnosis, some of them being possibilities that do involve reincarnation. 

Bruce Greyson (an MD who is one of the leading researchers of near-death experiences) tells us of an interesting case in which three family members all claimed to be the reincarnation of the same person.  You can read about the case on page 6 of the link here.  We read the following:

"She [Rhonda Mead] also identified pieces of jewelry and other objects of Susan Albert’s as hers, and mentioned by name her great-grandmother’s dog, who had died before she was born. Furthermore, she had an oddly shaped scar on her right arm that resembled a tattoo her great-grandmother had on that arm, and she expressed likes and dislikes that were the same as Susan Albert’s. Around the same time of Rhonda’s birth, two other baby girls, Sheila and Susan Richards, were born to the extended family, both of whom also claimed to have been Susan Albert in their past life. Antonia Mills has investigated other cases of multiple children who claim to remember the same person among several of the Pacific Northwest tribes, and Ian Stevenson has noted such cases among the Inuit in Alaska and among the Igbo in Nigeria.  In other cases, a child will remember the past lives of two people who lived at the same time. And in some cases, the person whose life the child remembers died after the child was born. Such cases raise questions about how to interpret the children’s knowledge of someone else’s life."

Such cases may support the idea that "past-life recollections" may come from a person who did not actually live the life recalled. Because of a wealth of possibilities, it is hard to know exactly what is going on during past life regressions and past life recollections.  Such things may or may not be evidence for reincarnation.  In some cases they may be evidence for survival after death, but not clearly evidence for reincarnation. 

There is one type of protocol I would like to see done when using hypnosis relevant to reincarnation. We might call this a replication-seeking protocol. It would go like this:

(1) Put a person under hypnotic regression, and ask him to tell about his past lives.
(2) Record in a video all of the statements made.
(3) Bring the person out of the trance, and do not tell him about what he said, and do not show him the video. People normally do not recall (at least while they are not under hypnosis) what they said under hypnosis. 
(4) Months later put the same person under hypnotic regression, and ask him him to tell about his past lives, without mentioning anything the person said six months earlier.
(5) Record in a video all of the statements made.
(6) Compare the statements made in the first video with the statements made in the second video, to see whether they are consistent with each other, or whether they conflict with each other. 

 If there was no match, it would be evidence that an actual past life was not being recalled. For example, if John X. said in his first hypnotic session that in his previous life he was a fat baker in St. Louis, and said in his second hypnotic session that in his previous life he was a thin farmer in China, that would be evidence that he was not actually recalling a past life he had.  (By "his previous life" I mean here whatever earthly life he lived, if any, directly before this life, and do not mean "any previous life." For example, if John X. was born in 1960, and he says in Hypnotic Session 1 that in 1959 he was a fat baker in St. Louis, but says in Hypnotic Session 2 that in 1959 he was a thin farmer in China, those two stories conflict with each other, and would suggest that neither story is true. ) 

I am aware of only one case with a good information repetition across multiple hypnotic "past-life regressions." I read a claim that in the famous Bridey Murphy case, the person under hypnosis repeated "much of the information unchanged."  Looking up the book "The Search for Bridey Murphy" on www.archive.org, I do see some repetition of name, town and occupation information in each of three hypnotic sessions. The book provides transcripts of the hypnotic sessions. For example:

• In the first hypnotic session on November 29, 1952 the subject first identifies herself as Friday Murphy (page 112), says she lives in the town of Cork, and says her father is named Duncan Murphy and her mother is named Kathleen. She identifies her father as a barrister (page 113). Later (page 114) she states her name as Bridey Murphy.
• In the second hypnotic session on December 18,1952 (page 136) the subject identifies herself as Bridey Murphy living in Cork,  She says her mother's name is Kathleen and her father's name is Duncan (page 135), and she identifies her father as a barrister (page 137). 
• In the third hypnotic session on January 22, 1953 (page 154) the subject identifies herself as Bridey, her mother as Kathleen, and her father as Duncan, with a job as a barrister in the town of Cork. 

This good repetition places the Bridey Murphy case above reported past life regressions in which we have no data on repetition of claims between different sessions. However, the repetition does not prove that the hypnotized subject really was Bridey Murphy in a previous life.  It could be the subject imagined Bridey Murphy in the first session (or telepathically communicated with the spirit of a deceased Bridey Murphy in the first session), and then simply remembered in the second and third sessions what she had said in that first session. 

A book by William Gregory MD stated this (using the word "sleeper" for a hypnotized person, and "sleep" for a hypnotic trance):

"As a general rule, but not a rule without some exceptions, the sleeper does not remember, after waking, what he may have seen, felt, tasted, smelled, heard, spoken, or done, during his sleep ; but when next put to sleep, he recollects perfectly all that has occurred, not only in the last sleep, but in all former sleeps, and, as in the ordinary state, with greater or less accuracy, although usually very accurately indeed."

So the repetition of a past-life claim in multiple hypnotic sessions does not show a past life really occurred. But a complete lack of repetition between the narrative details of multiple "past life regressions" might be used to discredit the claim that a past life is really being recalled. 

Accounts of near-death experiences tend to conflict with claims that people undergo multiple lifetimes on Earth. One of the most common features of near-death experiences is a report of encountering one or more deceased relatives in some afterlife realm.  Such reports may conflict with claims that souls are reincarnated soon after death. But there is always the possibility that earthly reincarnation is an option granted to a soul that survives death, an option that most surviving souls do not use, or only use rarely. 

Accounts by mediums also tend to conflict with claims that people undergo multiple lifetimes on Earth. Such seers typically report a deceased person as being available for communication, not unavailable because the person had reincarnated as someone else.  In a nineteenth century work a medium or clairvoyant is asked about the nature of the afterlife. When asked "Do we, after a certain time, inhabit again the earth ?" the simple answer of "No" was given. 

Some of the points I have made here are reasons for doubting much of the testimony in the book Abduction: Human Encounters With Aliens by Harvard psychologist John E. Mack.  Very much of the testimony of that book is testimony extracted under hypnotic regression.  But much of that testimony could be spontaneous imagination produced after suggestive questions by the hypnotist (Mack). It's very hard to tell, because Mack does not provide any transcripts of the hypnotic regression sessions. So we don't know how much the people were responding to leading questions. Mack also seems to give no sign that he checked for a repetition of recalled details by the same person under two different hypnotic sessions. We have no way of checking for repetition because of a lack of hypnotic session transcripts. So we should be skeptical when we read a statement like this on page 610:

"With conscious recall Arthur had not been able to make out details of an actual vehicle, but now [under hypnosis] he remembered something like ribs, a hatch, and seams, and the vehicle seemed to be made of a 'really shiny, light metal, like metal when it's superheated.' " 

Mack emphasizes that his reputed abductees have considerable similarities in their stories of abduction by extraterrestrials. But there is a way of explaining a large degree of similarity in such stories under hypnosis by the same person, without assuming abductions by extraterrestrials. It is abundantly claimed in the literature of hypnosis that powers such as telepathy and clairvoyance may be greatly increased when someone is hypnotized.  Now let us suppose a hypnotist such as Mack might have had a kind of model in his mind of what to expect when someone describes an extraterrestrial abduction.  Then, though a combination of suggestion and telepathy, it might be that hypnotized people might tend to give similar answers when asked by Mack questions such as "Tell us what happened during your extraterrestrial abduction." They might tend to pick up telepathically ideas about extraterrestrial abduction in the mind of their own hypnotist. 

Postscript: In his interesting book "Life Before Life," Richard M. Eyre discusses the concept of a spiritual pre-existence of souls, not here on Earth, but in some transcendent or heavenly realm, or some other dimension. On page 32, Eyre makes the interesting point that so-called past lives recollections may be the result of information acquired during a soul's pre-existence.  

Here is a hypothetical example:

(1) Long before having an earthly life,  John X. exists for 500 years in some heaven. 

(2) In such a heaven John X. talks to Peter Y. who died in 1950, and went to the same heaven. 

(3)  The earthly life of John X. then begins in 1960. 

(4) Around 1970 John X. is aware of things that happened to Peter Y., who he never met on Earth. 

John X. knowing such details about the life of Peter Y. might be taken for evidence that John X. was once Peter Y. But under the scenario above, we have a very different explanation of how John X. learned such details about the life of Peter Y.