Signs of Reincarnation by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2021-06-12T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 6

Past-Life Recall in Adulthood and Third-Party Reports

The reincarnation cases of adults are weaker than those of children in the variety of signs they include, in how extensively memories penetrate into conscious awareness, and in overall evidential value. Many fewer adult than child cases are veridical, much less solved. In the first section of this chapter, I show how these differences are attributable to developmental changes that make it more difficult for past-life memories to penetrate into conscious awareness and behavioral expression as case subjects age. In the second section, I take up apparent past-life memories arising under hypnosis. Regression memories reveal a much greater degree of distortion than do involuntary past-life memories. I argue that this is due to psychological blocks to recall when attempts are made to induce memories, rather than allowing them to surface spontaneously. In the concluding section, I turn to the past-life identifications and readings of psychic practitioners such as shamans, psychics, and mediums. Psychic practitioners sometimes are able to retrieve information from the minds of their clients that the clients cannot access for themselves. They cannot accomplish this, however, if the clients’ subconscious resistance is too strong.

Developmental Factors in Past-Life Memory Retrieval

The past-life memories of adults have received little attention from researchers, who have concentrated on children’s memories largely for evidential reasons. Not only are adult past-life memories much less elaborate than children’s, it is much easier to demonstrate that children have not been exposed to the things they talk about through books, magazines, films, or television than it is with adults. One of the few researchers to have taken an interest in adults’ past-life memories, writer D. Scott Rogo (1985, 1986, 1991), held them to be qualitatively different from children’s memories, but I believe he was wrong about that. The involuntary past-life memories of children and adults look different at first glance but can be seen as related if viewed along a developmental continuum (Matlock, 1988a, 1988b, 1989).

Adult past-life memories may be defined as those occurring to subjects ten years or older, although this is an arbitrary dividing line. There is no definite break between child and adult forms of past-life memory. We can trace the changes in relation to three variables: the strength of penetration of episodic memories into conscious awareness with related behavioral and physical signs; the presence of triggers or cues, especially for the initial memories; and the state of consciousness in which the memories emerge. The younger the subject when he first speaks about the previous life, the stronger and more varied the signs are likely to be, the less likely the memories are to be noticeably cued, and the less likely they are to involve altered states of consciousness. The first and second of these relationships receive statistical support from Tucker (2000) and Matlock (1989), respectively. The third has not yet been assessed formally but can be demonstrated impressionistically and may be taken as a prediction from the theory of past-life memory I elaborate in this chapter.

Very young children may express their past-life memories somatically.

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