Raymond Moody: Reincarnation

again thank you all very much and tonight I'm going to talk with you as I said last night about reincarnation and I want to say from the very beginning here that I am NOT the expert in this room on reincarnation the Swami's for upananda for example has met his whole life studying this and other Swami's whereas this to me has been a not the main focus of my research but rather near-death experiences so I will enter into some speculation and thought about reincarnation but with the proviso that you will understand that there are people here who know a lot more about this than I do um well the way I initially encountered the idea of reincarnation again is in connection with ancient Greek philosophy and one thing that I find it very interesting is that in the United States at least there's this popular myth or idea that the idea of reincarnation was introduced into the west from the east fairly recently or just like in the 19th century but this is not true and oddly the idea of reincarnation was present with the Greek philosophers from the very beginning in that Pythagoras was the person who coined the term philosophy and his the sort of central points a pivot point of Pythagoras is life to date him for you was say around 550 BCE and we know that Pythagoras claimed to remember eight of his past lives and not only that is that I'm sort of constantly reading in rear the near-death the ancient Greek philosophers and and my latest study of Pythagoras I came across the information either that I'd never realized or had just forgotten that not only did Pythagoras remember his past lives but he also had some sort of technique where he could get other people to to remember their past lives as well whether this was some sort of hypnotic technique as with the past life regression technique in the contemporary world we don't know but apparently he had a very active understanding of reincarnation from this early period another very colorful figure in early Greek philosopher philosophy who was mentioned the reincarnation ideas was impetus and impetus was a very colorful pre-socratic philosopher who is the person who formulated the notion of elements I suppose we've all studied chemistry to some degree and you know that the notion of an element is the notion of a substance that can't be converted to some other substance or reduced to some other substance and it was imperious or first propounded this notion that the elements are not interchangeable and before in pedicle each time this was thought to be true for example the early Greek philosopher Daley's for example thought that everything was ultimately water but the other elements earth earth air and fire were all just somehow transformations of this basic underlying element of water but impede the it's not true that the elements are not interconvertible but in his writing as well in pedak lee's talks clearly about his past life memories and his stories about what he was in in previous incarnations a nice and very interesting little side light on empedocles is that um and the generation or so before impetus ease there was a Greek philosopher named Sanaa Feeney's who in his studies had traveled high into the mountains and he observed that high in the mountains there were these fossilized organisms that obviously came at some point from the sea bottom and had been thrust up and he realized that these very primitive creatures were fossilized on mountaintops so and that knowledge was already in the background by the time of impetu cleese buttom pedicle EES went on to yet a further thought he realized that the early organisms apparently were very primitive but if you look around us now we see very complex sort of organisms so impedir had to be intermediate forms that since they weren't put together right just didn't make it so in his Origin of Species and the footnote I want to bear near the front of the book darwin gives credit to impetus for coming up with the first evolutionary theory and then the the person in the greek tradition who propounded and articulated the notion of reincarnation most brilliantly again was Plato who in his Republic and also his fado and as I recall also his dialogue the gorgeous talks about reincarnation of which he was apparently convinced Plato made some very interesting serve Asians about the the reincarnation process that things that just come up naturally I think in our curiosity about it one is if we had past lives why don't we remember it now and Plato said that just before you come back into this state of existence from the other side as he put it you drink of the waters of forgetfulness and forget all you know so you come into the world having forgotten your previous existence is no doubt that makes your learning experience here a bit more focused and but Plato also said that sometimes people don't drink drink quite so much of the waters of forgetfulness so they come back and they have a little more memories of the hour their past lives that then most of us one thing that I find so interesting about this little detail is that it reminds me of a very fascinating cyclic psychological notion called that of the event boundary and it turns out that the mind organizes things for processing in little packets as it were like thoughts and perceptions and ideas will be put together in a packet and and that the mind sort of works within these structures or strictures and the most common experience that I assume everybody here has had that illustrates the operation of event of an event event boundary it's when you're in one room and you think of something you want to get in another room you find that as soon as you walk through the door into the other room what do you do you forget right you forget what you came into the room for so very often you have to backtrack and go in then you can remember why you came in there and that's the that's what an event boundary is and I gather that the the platonic notion of this waters of forgetfulness you see is is equivalent in effect to an event boundary so we can say that there is an event boundary between this existence there that were in now and the one that let's say we came from before I wonder I wonder if this could have anything to do with why some people don't remember near-death experiences after a close call with death I really that's just rank speculation I don't know but I suppose it's conceivable there are three kinds of human experiences that at least three kinds that relate to the possibility of reincarnation and the first one I want to start with because it's the area that I have studied most about are reincarnation memories within the context of a near-death experience and I have heard a number of these over the years they are quite rare and as I gather they have nothing to do with whether the person had some prior religious background which inclined them to the area of idea of reincarnation the first two I heard actually was when I was in medical school and and I was in medical school in Georgia and it turned out both of these individuals who had past life memories in their in connection with their near-death experiences had been Southern Baptists of all things which is a doctrine I gathered that you know has has nothing to do with the idea of reincarnation but um I suppose one of the most dramatic ones like this I've ever heard came from wonderful woman named thy Horton in Augusta Georgia who in May of 1971 had a Justin astonishing near-death experience she was under is an apparent cardiac arrest for 40 minutes and had just amazing things happened to her but even though she had no grounding whatsoever in ideas about reincarnation in her life review she had an aspect of her life review convinced her that there was reincarnation and again I should preface this by saying as as people with these experiences often do say it's not real it's very difficult to put it into words because there are no words really to express these things nonetheless she was a very articulate person and this is how she explained it she said as she looked at this entire panorama of her life she said from certain incidents in this present life that she was in that there were what she called filaments she said it's like little filaments of light would go back and connect with events that she could see that apparently had taken place in earlier lives and the one example that she related that I think is most typical of them and was really quite startling um by the way I knew vies family very well I met her in connection with her near-death experience and I got to know everybody in her family except for her mother who had already died but I met her two older sisters and her father and her daughter and her husband I knew them all well so I had not only her story but also the accounts of the relatives of her who could attest to the amazing transformation of character that she underwent when she had her near-death experience but why was the youngest of the three children and had two older sisters and she sits she told me and her sisters and father also told me that when VI was three years old she ran out in front of the across the street in front of her house and a car was coming along and this was in the era before seatbelts and so the person driving the car had to slam on brakes and what happened was that a three year old child and the front seat of this car was thrown against the dashboard and killed and that's what happened in this life when Roth I saw that reviewed in her life review she said there was a little filament going to an event that took place in a culture she did not recognize she did not know where this was but in this event what had happened was that vai was riding on the front seat of a carriage being drawn down the street and a child that she recognized as the child that had been killed in the automobile accident ran out across the street and the driver of the carriage pulling back then in this version of I was thrown from the carriage and killed which is you know highly unusual I mean that seems to me a detail that wouldn't necessarily need to be balanced but in this in this case it was um in 1983 I met and Zurich stefan van Jankovic who was a very well-known architect in Zurich and Stephane had been a colonel and the unsuccessful Hungarian Revolution of 1956 and he escaped after the Revolution collapsed and he and his family settled in in Zurich and in 1964 Stefan had a automobile wreck in his sports car in the Alps and was believed dead at the scene but was taken into the hospital and resuscitated and amazingly he lived and Steffen as he told me had been raised to Catholic although he was not religious at that time but he said that nonetheless in his life experiences near-death experience he saw several scenes in which he had past lives and during his long recovery in the hospital being a graphic artist and designer he sketched out some of these places he had seen in his his past life visions of where he had lived before and much later he actually found one of these places which was a fishing village he had never been to but nonetheless he had the outlines of the surrounding mountains and everything accurate in his drawings incidentally I should say about Stefan some near-death experience and the life review that was a very interesting detail in this and he related one event that had taken place in Hungary before the Revolution collapsed and he Stefan apparently lived in an apartment building that was at the top of a hill and the roadway came to the bottom of the hill and dead ended so one day during the revelry stefan had gone home to eat lunch come to think of it that's an odd idea of going home during the revolution to eat lunch I suppose but that's what he did so he said but when he was having lunch there in his apartment that he saw a Russian tank come rumbling down the road and he the the tank came up to the dead end and he knew that at some point the soldier would have to lift the lid and look up to see where he was so Stefan decided he said well you know I'll shoot him and so Stefan showing me the gesture said that I aimed down over the hatch and just waited and after a while sure enough the the hatch came up and the young Russian soldier poked his head up to look around and what Stefan told me at this point once he said but I just couldn't do it say he didn't shoot and he said when this came back to him in his review he said it was a point in his favor that was the word he used he said it wasn't that if he had killed that person it was going to be some terrible punishment or whatever but he said that that was it turned out in his review that was the the correct decision under those circumstances so all of the cases incidentally from of these people who in twith in the context of their near-death experiences have some indication of pre-existence and reincarnation have been people from western traditions catholic baptist jewish and so on and by the luck of the draw I have never until just about a year or so ago found a Hindu person who had a near-death experience it's in which they reported past lives and this is a very fascinating case and believe me you will be hearing more about this there is a wonderful man and his name is dr. Rajiv party pa rt I and in Raji Rajiv was chief of anesthesiology at the Bakersfield Heart Hospital in California and according to Rajas picture of his existence up to this point he was totally consumed by the material world and competitiveness and he said his whole purpose in life was to have a bigger house and a fancier car than any of his colleagues and then he had a very dramatic near-death experience in which he saw his entire life reviewed one interesting thing that came out of this was that Raj said in his life review he saw quite a number of interactions that he had had with his patients and that he was very mechanical in his treatment of his patients and not very warm and would respond to them rather coldly but he said that in the life review that he had he would see the backstory of this and he would see the suffering that was was going on with his his patients and this has transformed him not just as a physician but also as a person and I've been with Raj several times when he's lectured and one time I was sitting on a sort of panel and Rajesh was here addressing the audience and so I could see the reactions of the audience to this man it's very powerful and everybody was weeping and so on he's a very kind-hearted very sweet person and to see this kind of transformation in him but in within his near-death experience he saw very vivid portrayals of his past lives so although this is rare statistically that if you had say thousand reports of near-death experiences they would be relatively few I think that that in which people recall a past life a lot more people say not that they saw anything that directly indicated to them that there's reincarnation but that they had somehow a sense from their time on the other side that that they've really sort of didn't get far enough into the picture to see reincarnation but they kind they came back from this experience very much more sympathetic to the idea um another the second kind of experience that that human experience that relates to past lives in reincarnation our spontaneous past life recollections and these occur in adults if wafers became aware of this was in about 86 87 I guess have a good friend who's a travel agent and who sometimes takes tours around Europe and came to me years ago because she had witnessed something so curious on her recent tour she had taken a group of American tourists to Europe and among the people who went was a very rigid American businessman and when they got into a little town this in Italy this man just fell apart because he had very very very vivid memories of having a life in this little town in Italy whereas he had never really in this dimension never gone outside of the United States so they do happen in adults and they also happen I am convinced in children this is just a very common thing and it does not require that the parents have any interest or inclination to this whatsoever and I know because mostly in the communities I live that my the Association Network I have is not consist of people with these kinds of interest but this is something that has fairly regularly people over the years have brought up to me they've said you know my three-year-old is talking about some previous existence so the parents come and you know are very curious about this it has happened to me with my own two adopted children now Carter who we adopted at Birth from Kerrville Texas is mexican-american by heritage and Carolyn now 14 we adopted at Birth from Montana and she is Blackfeet Native American and both of those kids have spontaneously related memories of previous existence Carter when he was five he and I were on the bed watching TV and I was flipping through the channels with the remote control and I flipped through what turned out to be the National Geographic Channel and when I did Carter became very very animated and he said dad dad that's my village and so he went on to explain that when I owned I turned back to the the National Geographic Channel as it was it was a documentary about village life in China and Carter started this long story of how his his - his mother and father in China and his brothers and sisters and he could see that I was rather startled as though to orient me he said yeah and then I was up in the trees looking down at you and Mom and I knew exactly what he was talking about because five years before Carter was conceived my wife and I were in Greece on a tour and we were just exhausted from the flight so in an archaeological site we were so tired that the attendant could tell and he said just go over there and lie down in the grass and taken them and what we and there were trees all around and what we were talking about was adopting a child then my little native-american daughter about say four years ago again out of nowhere we take these long walks she said one day to me I don't like this place and it was plain to me that what she meant was I don't like this world so I just said um and she said yeah she said you know when you die you just go up and you be with God and he holds you there till all the people you know while you're alive have died and then he sends you back as another person and I said well what makes you think that and she said just like this she said I know in my mind and she said and yeah I was with God and he pointed you out to me and he said you got to go down and be his daughter and I said well how did you feel about that and she said oh I didn't want to do it she said I wanted to stay with my Gaudi and I said well are you glad you came anyway and she said yeah yeah and incidentally it's easy I think for you to imagine maybe you know to say well sure you know at home he talks about this and so on but no actually Cheryl and I my wife we don't talk about life after death we talk about what's for dinner you know the kids homework how to pay the phone bill you know what's on at the movies and we don't take these kids to any sort of religious institutions because we're from Alabama I was saying today as like we're afraid of snakes alright so one you know they really just don't have any religious training and interestingly both of them have found out that I wrote the book life after life from the internet and and so you know I can be absolutely assured that I didn't put these ideas into these kids ads and so it's so consistent with what I've heard from many people over a long period of time that I am convinced that that this is just a very common experience with kids and what I surmise happens is that by and large the parents don't want to hear this they just sort of get the kid to stop talking about it or say oh that's your imagination or whatever sometimes these spontaneous past life experiences can have profound effects on people and I'm sorry to be repeating this for those of you who were this afternoon and the workshop but it's some nonetheless I mean I think I think it's such interesting information Arnold Toynbee who wrote a study of history and I 11 volumes when you get to the very end of that book and volume 11 Toynbee starts talking about why he studied history and and the story is that when he was a young man 23 years of age he went on a summer tour to Greece and I think it was in 1917 or so and so during that summer trip through Greece he had several incidents that came on him out of nowhere in which he says to use his exact words he said I dropped through a pocket in time and if you read this you see that Toynbee understood that it was real like he didn't think of it as a fantasy to him it was a real event said several occasions he he just lost track of time in the 20th century and was propelled back to ancient Greece and saw people there he said during one of these incidents he saw this horrific battle with so much you know Harbor so many harbors that he said I decided at that moment to to study history to try to understand the role of sin and the affairs of man now Gibbon who wrote decline and fall of the Roman Empire had a similar experience and I have known a number of history professors over the years as I have talked about this who acknowledge that that's how they got interested in history - was through some sort of spontaneous transmission back to the past or some kind of spontaneous memory of a previous existence and then the third kind of experience that people have that relate to the possibility of reincarnation our past life regressions the spawn the hypnotic induction of a trance to regress people back I first heard about this from a friend or I first experimented with it myself through a friend of mine named Diana Denham who is a clinical psychologist in Florida and Diana was using hypnosis not for the purpose of past life regression but rather for the normal things that's used for it to help people stop smoking and this sort of thing and she began to use it to try to under help other people understand their early lives and she said several times it would happen when she would regress people back to their early childhood that they wouldn't stop there and they would sort of spontaneously pop back into a previous existence so that interested her in this and then she began to do it as part of her practice and so I got interested in it I must concern I am just so crass and so many of my prejudices and so on as I increasingly realized as I get older but I remember very specifically the attitude that I had toward the idea of past life regression when I was hearing this and that was that I assumed you know what you hear in the popular press is that everybody is either Napoleon or Cleopatra right or that the people who can do this are very suggestible or histrionic people but what I quickly learned is that that's just not correct it's um I've taken maybe 300 or so of my students through the years through this past life regression experience and all that experience I never heard had any of them relate being a famous person or all of them were just very mundane lives and so I don't know what to make of this this hypnotic regression I just don't know but those are my impressions is the it's not what the the popular view tells you that it's you know people are always somebody famous is it doesn't work that way one thing that one question that the whole notion of reincarnation raises is what is it that survives you know it's like as I've come to acknowledge or realize I guess in the past three years or so I I've acknowledged now to my utter surprise there is an afterlife I'm still reeling from that realization but therefore the question becomes even more acute than what is it that survives and if you take the classical answers to this and the West it it begins with the notion of the soul and Plato for example had a very elaborate theory of the soul that the soul is the immaterial entity that in habits the body and to Plato the essence of our personal identity is the soul the body is is secondary and and unreal the the the soul and the consciousness is the real part to Plato and the material substance of the body is always changing and influx and flow and and not intelligible and not real and so his idea was that the essence of a personal identity is this immaterial thing or entity or substance called the soul and this was taken up and Western thought as we all know through the Middle Ages and so on into the church and it was only say in the 17th century that real objections and and concerns began to be raised about this and Thomas Hobbs for example and the 17th century raised the objection that the idea of an immaterial entity or immaterial substance is self-contradictory and and nonsensical but still the question was what is it that constitutes our personal identity and so then a hundred years or so elapsed and then Along Came John Locke who thought that the essence of what makes a person the person that that person is are our memories that in effect we are our memories and that what that's what makes us up and this becomes highly dubious when you realize what a flimsy thing mere memory is and how it's constantly changing it's not really as stable as we imagined and then in the 18th century humor long and said well in his own introspective process when he looked inside of himself he could never find any sort of underlying substrate of a self it was always the only thing he could catch in action were individual perceptions or ideas or feelings or whatever and that he couldn't introspect her into it and he under lying self that was the basis of all these things so that is a sketch more or less of how thought about personal identity and what what it is that could survive bodily death has gone in the Western intellectual tradition um and so what do I think about it well this realization I had of several years ago or coming to terms with the idea that there does appear to be an afterlife really set me to thinking about that that what is it that constitutes the identity of a person that is passed along or escapes this life to go into some other one and long about that time one of my favorite authors is le visa then I hope many of you have had the pleasure of reading and I was reading one of Ellie's books and came across this statement he said God made man because he loves stories and that hit me is oh my god I just had all kinds of experience thoughts about that because before I went into forensic psychiatry I spent some time in geriatric psychiatry and had this wonderful year or so where I had an addition to my patients with Alzheimer's and pick's disease and other kinds of dementia I had plenty of patients who were elderly but who were very cognitively sharp and who were just seeing me because of some situational stress or whatever and I constantly heard from people as they would tell me their life stories I heard this same idea expressed many times they would say that the older they became the more the impression developed the uncanny but undeniable impression developed as they look back at their life that it had been a sort of script or a play or a drama and then when I read that that Elie Wiesel said it just came together yes you know what is a person really what is the identity of a human person except that person's life story I mean that's that's about really as far as I can tell that's that's very close to the essence of a person is that person story and then I also heard that on one of the tapes by Joseph Campbell related that he had that same experience that when he got old he began to look back on his life and it gets developed this irresistible impression that it had been kind of scripted or drafted a drama so at least here in January of 2015 that's where I've come to it I think that the essence of life is story and that this thing that we're in is a kind of illusionary drama you think of all of the Shakespeare all the world's a stage for example and one man in his life plays many roles and I read a statement by a playwright about a year ago who said a play is just a life with the boring parts taken out many have brought back also a very dramatic experience I had in Charlottesville in 1967 a Broadway musical came through town and I forgot what one it was but it was a Broadway musical comedy and my our best friend was the guy who brought the entertainment to UVA so we got these great seats and we were on the front row and in this musical comedy there was a really terrific comic villain complete with dark stovepipe hat and the black cape the whole thing and at the end of the play when all the performers came out for their curtain call when the hero and heroine came out there are these wild applause and all the supporting actors and actresses came out and wild applause and then the villain came out and silence I think about it and it was really fascinating because you could actually feel the waking up of the people right that they come oh my god this just a play and then turd clamping right um I know this sounds rather crazy but my best estimate at this point in my life is that as I've heard from a long time ago from my friends here that the the Hindu view that this is a play kind of a screen of illusions and I feel that more and more of the older I get you see all of these uncanny things begin to unfold in your life and one way you might look at this and you say well that's just a metaphor you're taking this one aspect of human life the theater and you're projecting that out as an explanation of the whole and that's a logical fallacy but I don't think so I think it happened the other way around what I think is that you know the history of the drama is really one of the most sensational stories of history to me it's basically there was this ruler of Athens named piasa Stratos and in Athens there had been this some traditional festival of chant of singing and chanting and so on and it was a harvest festival I think and there were stories that came out through these choruses that would sing these things and one person Thespis stepped forward at one of these things and became in fact the first actor to speak his separate lines and this so impressed paisa Stratos that he set up a competition and and you know the Greeks had this incredible streak of competitiveness you know imagine these very complex societies really who are constantly at war with the other city 20 miles down the road I mean that's pretty crazy so competition was throughout that culture so he set up a competition to see who you know to to see who could come up with the best of these some these new kind of instruments to put what we call plays and Aeschylus came along and his innovation was that he had two characters speaking then came Sophocles and his innovation was they got it up to three and then with Euripides we have a whole cast of people and that was the history of drama and fifty years after they started this competition acting and being in the theatre was already a profession initially they the theaters were temples to the gods or goddesses and these plays were enacted within them but what I think probably happened is that people like Aeschylus and Sophocles and Euripides being very brilliant observers of human nature's you can tell from those plays that they had picked up on this aspect of life that when you get old you look back and you see this dramatic structure to it a beginning and a middle and an end and all the twists and so on and so that they just decided hey we can create a space here where we can condense this and put it on for people's amusement you know what the most the most perplexing thing to the historians who study the history of the theater the most the wildest and most difficult thing that for them to figure out is how in the world these guys got people to sit still for so long to watch something if you think about that was totally unprecedented they had the games of course but then people are young you know jumping around and yelling and screaming but how they want to noted these guys get people to sit down for a length of time like that and to watch something without moving around it's a very great mystery one other little point I want to raise every time I read the Republic every four years or so I um I see details in and I think how in the world and I missed that and this last time about a year ago I read the Republic I saw something but I'm still reeling from this because the Republic ends in this story of the Armenian warrior who had a near-death experience and ER is describing what he saw on the other side and near the last of his narrative he's describing what he saw about the people who were lining up to get into this world and he said the last thing that happened was that they would go down to this place and you can see it for yourself and read it for yourself and see what you think and see maybe I'm imagining things right I I might well be but it looks to me that what Plato was trying to describe is some sort of screen almost like a computer screen because they're looking down these people are getting ready to go over to this world and they're looking down and there's a guide there who shows them on this flat surface are depicted all the different kinds of patterns of lives that this person could choose to go into and some of them are criminals and some of them are holy people the whole gamut but the last thing that this guide says to them is whatever life you choose it won't affect the quality of your soul now what did he mean by that I don't know no no but it's I think it would go on very well with the idea of a drama you know that this life we're living in as a sort of it's a stage show in a way that we're going through hopefully to learn things and experience things we're out what I'm really faced with now is with this knowledge and understanding what's the best way to behave in this world when I was talking about this with some of the students earlier today somebody said well gosh you know why wouldn't you just have license to go and do terrible things well number one doing terrible things feels bad and also we know that in our life review you know whatever we put out there we're going to have to get back right because you what you the actions you put out to others in the final phase of your life in your life review you review those identical same actions but from the perspective of the people with you move interacted so um this is still a big mystery to me and I'm so grateful to all my friends here in my long association with them too as we're all trying together I think to understand more about this rather and comprehensible world that we're living in and I want to say again to all of you thank you so much for this has just been delightful to be with you and I hope I'll get to see you all again tomorrow at 2 o'clock at my workshop I'm going to talk about grief and in that connection we will talk about also other kinds of spiritual experiences related to death and dying but the reason I want to talk about grief is that this is almost always a factor and what brings people to a concern with the question of an afterlife is is very often that they lose a loved one to death and then they turn to this afterlife question with a very great urgency and and grief itself is an inherently fascinating process it's I think grief is one of the the big mysteries of the mind so we will talk about that tomorrow and again thank you all so much for this wonderful opportunity to be with you

Channel: Sivananda Ashram Yoga Retreat Bahamas

Views: 297,272

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Keywords: Reincarnation (Belief), Raymond Moody (Author), Sivananda Bahamas

Id: n_S8yacTRnU

Length: 52min 28sec (3148 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 06 2015