“I believe I shall, in some shape or other, always exist and, with all the inconveniences human life is liable to, I shall not object to a new edition of mine, hoping, however, that the errata of the last may be corrected.”
—BENJAMIN FRANKLIN
Even though early Christians and perhaps even Jesus himself had espoused reincarnation, Church councils effectively inoculated Christians against the idea.
As the decades and centuries rolled by, however, some Western thinkers began thinking outside the box and had to admit that reincarnation made at least as much sense as a doctrine of a one-shot chance before heaven or hell.
A man with no less stature and genius than the twentieth-century philosopher, physician and missionary Albert Schweitzer once said that “reincarnation contains a most comforting explanation of reality by means of which Indian thought surmounts difficulties which baffle the thinkers of Europe.”
As nineteenth-century German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer put it, “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.”
What many Westerners don’t realize is that some of the greatest thinkers in the West, past and present, have embraced reincarnation. The concept made a lot of sense to American founding father Benjamin Franklin, for example.
At the age of twenty-two, he wrote an epitaph for himself, although it wasn’t used when he died. It read in part, “The body of B. Franklin, printer, like the cover of an old book, its contents torn out… lies here food for worms, but the work shall not be lost, for it will as he believed appear once more in a new and more elegant edition revised and corrected by the author.”
Years later, at the age of seventy-nine, Franklin wrote in a letter, “When I see nothing annihilated (in the works of God) and not a drop of water wasted, I cannot suspect the annihilation of souls, or believe that He will suffer the daily waste of millions of minds ready-made that now exist, and put himself to the continual trouble of making new ones.”
The list of other prominent Westerners who have accepted or thought seriously about reincarnation in recent centuries is long and impressive.
In addition to those we have already cited, it includes such eighteenth and nineteenth-century greats as French philosopher Voltaire, German poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, French novelist Honoré de Balzac, American transcendentalist and essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson, American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and American industrialist Henry Ford.
From the twentieth century, the list includes British novelist Aldous Huxley, Irish poet W. B. Yeats, British author Rudyard Kipling, Finnish composer Jean Sibelius, Spanish painter Salvador Dali and American general George S. Patton.
Among those who have written about reincarnation or had their characters express reincarnationist ideas are British poets William Wordsworth and Percy Bysshe Shelley, German poet Friedrich Schiller, French novelist Victor Hugo, Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung and American authors J. D. Salinger and Jack London.
Today, belief in reincarnation is on the rise. Millions of Americans, Europeans and Canadians believe in reincarnation. By conservative estimates, over one-fifth of American adults believe in reincarnation—including a fifth of all Christians. The figures are similar for Europe and Canada.
Apart from the religious and philosophical reflections about reincarnation, there is growing body of research on the subject.
For some of the most prominent voices in the field, the evidence surfaced unexpectedly, forcing them to change their perspective about life and death.
Twentieth-century American clairvoyant Edgar Cayce, known as the Sleeping Prophet, was shocked the first time one of his “readings” talked about reincarnation.
For twenty years, Cayce had been giving medical readings, which he dictated to a secretary while in a trance like sleep.
Through his unique gift, he dispensed medical diagnoses and described natural remedies that healed many who came to him for help.
He could even successfully diagnose patients long-distance with only a name and address in hand.
As a devout and orthodox Christian, Cayce never entertained the idea of reincarnation—until, to his utter surprise, one of the readings talked about the past life of his subject.
Eventually, after much soul searching, Cayce came to accept the idea of reincarnation as compatible with Jesus’ teachings.
More than twenty-five hundred people learned about their past lives through Cayce’s work.
He revealed how their interactions in past incarnations had determined the course of their present life.
In many cases, he told them how karmic patterns woven through lifetimes had resulted in their emotional or physical afflictions.
Rabbi Yonassan Gershom in his book Beyond the Ashes describes how evidence for reincarnation came to him unexpectedly.
Over a period of ten years 250 people, both Jews and non-Jews, came to him for counseling because they had flash- backs, spontaneous memories, dreams and visions of having died in the Holocaust in a past life.
Some of the evidence for reincarnation comes from those who have recalled past lives under hypnosis.
Although I do not recommend hypnosis as a tool in therapy or for delving into past lives, the findings from past-life regressions are interesting and they often confirm the teachings on reincarnation and the afterlife that have come down to us through various spiritual traditions.
Dr. Alexander Cannon says he did his best to disprove reincarnation and even told his trance subjects that their memories were nonsense.
“Yet as the years went by one subject after another told me the same story despite different and varied conscious beliefs,” he wrote in 1950. “Now well over a thousand cases have been so investigated and I have to admit that there is such a thing as reincarnation.”
Dr. Helen Wambach, the clinical psychologist and regression therapy expert who pioneered past-life and prenatal research, regressed hundreds of people during her career.
She once said, “Ninety percent of the people who come to me definitely flash on images from a past life.”
Dr. Morris Netherton, a regression therapist since the 1960s, had a healing experience that changed his beliefs about reincarnation.
Raised a fundamental southern Methodist, he hadn’t thought much about past lives.
At the time he was undergoing conventional therapy to ease a number of problems including a chronic ulcer. “In the third session I talked about the pain I was feeling,” he writes, “and the next thing I knew I was in a different place.”
He saw himself in an institution for the criminally insane in the early 1800s, where a sentry kicked him in the stomach, in the exact place of the ulcer.
The pain, he says, immediately subsided and never returned.
Whether this past-life incident had really happened or was metaphorical, it dramatically changed Netherton’s direction he went on to found an institute that teaches regression therapy.
Most reincarnation accounts have not been able to provide details that can be checked against historical sources.
A recent and intriguing testimony by an unlikely candidate does just that. In 1999, Captain Robert L. Snow, commander of the homicide branch of the Indianapolis Police Department, published the story of his search for a past life in a book called Looking for Carroll Beckwith.
Raised in a strict Methodist family and working in the no-nonsense police profession, Snow never toyed with the idea of reincarnation.
He thought it only was for “kooks and weirdos.” Then one day at a party, he told a child-abuse detective who used hypnotic regression therapy that past-life regression was probably based on a lot of imagination.
“Besides,” he said, “if it was true, then how come no one’s ever proved they’ve lived a past life?” That’s when the detective, a woman, politely challenged him to test his beliefs.
She wrote down the name of a colleague who used hypnotic regression. Snow reluctantly took on her dare and under hypnosis he recalled, among other things, a past life as an artist.
He saw his studio and some of the paintings he had created in that lifetime. At first Snow dismissed the session as a product of his subconscious mind.
In true detective style, he decided to prove to himself that he had simply patched together memories of paintings he had seen before in a history or art book.
His search, however, proved just the opposite. First, he couldn’t find a picture of the paintings anywhere in a book.
Then, in a small art gallery in New Orleans, he stumbled across the exact portrait he had seen himself painting under hypnosis.
It was a rare work by a not-so-famous artist that had been in a private collection, so there was no chance he had ever seen it on display or in a book.
Once he found out the name of the artist, J. Carroll Beckwith, he was off and running.
Rummaging through diaries, scrapbooks and biographies, he went on to prove twenty-eight details that he remembered in regression—including that he had been upset about poor lighting for one of his paintings, he had painted a portrait of a woman with a hunchback, he didn’t like painting portraits but needed the money, his paintings were full of sun and bright colors, and he had died in the fall of the year in a big city.
“I have uncovered evidence that proves beyond a doubt the existence of a past life,” writes Snow in his fascinating account.
“The evidence I uncovered in this two-year investigation is so overwhelming that if it had been a criminal case, there would be no plea bargaining. A conviction would be assured…. What this all means, however, in the bigger picture of the other billions of inhabitants of Earth, I will leave to the philosophers and theologians.”
Some of the most compelling evidence for reincarnation comes from children.
Dr. Ian Stevenson, the world’s foremost investigator of children’s past-life memories, prefers not to deal with hypnosis.
Instead he interviews children who have had spontaneous past-life memories and then tries to independently verify the details of their previous existence.
Stevenson, a psychiatrist, has meticulously documented twenty-five hundred of these cases, chiefly from India, Sri Lanka and Burma.
One of the most remarkable and best-documented cases of reincarnation is that of Shanti Devi from India.
Mohandas Gandhi appointed a committee of fifteen people to study her unusual case. At three years of age, Shanti began speaking about her husband and children from her past life.
Eventually she told her new family her husband’s name and the name of the town eighty miles away where they had lived.
She described how her husband looked and how she had died after giving birth to her second child. A relative of her husband’s was sent to investigate and Shanti recognized him on his arrival.
She described the house she had lived in and even told him where she had buried some money—a fact that her husband later verified.
When her husband came to see her unannounced, she immediately recognized him. Shanti finally led the committee of investigators to her previous home.
She used idioms of speech familiar in that town, although she had never been there before, and recognized her husband’s brother and father.
I have found that children do have past-life memories until about age three. They don’t necessarily understand what they are seeing and they may or may not be able to clearly articulate it.
At about four years old, I had my own past life memory. I was playing in my sandbox in the picket-fenced play yard my father had built for me. I was alone, enjoying myself in the sun, watching the sand slip through my little fingers.
Read about Elizabeth Clare Prophet’s memory as a child of a past life
Have you remembered any of your past life experiences? Meditate and let you inner self respond this question.
There is a very good reason that most of us do not remember all of our past lives. We would probably get very confused if we remembered everything that had ever happened to us in hundreds of lives!
Through the process of our reincarnation on earth, we were meant to evolve spiritually—to grow in spiritual mastery as we nurtured our divine gifts and developed our talents.
Rather than focusing on the past, you can discover what talents you brought with you into this life and how is the best way to use them.
Try concentrating quietly and ask your Higher Self to reveal to you the important gifts you bring to this life. You can explore these gifts by using your journal.
What am I really good at? What do I love to do? What insights do I have about life? What talents come so easily to me?
What gifts do I want to share with the world? How can I help the world to be a better place?