Reading from the Bhagavadgita, the best loved scripture of the Hindus, written in the 1st or 2nd century C.E.
(Arjuna is distressed because he is preparing to fight a battle in which he may be forced to kill some of his relatives. The god Krishna explains to him that, although it may be possible to kill the body, the soul is immortal, and passes from one body to another.)

KRISHNA: Thou grievest where no grief should be! Thou speak’st
Words lacking wisdom! For the wise in heart
Mourn not for those that live, nor those that die.
Nor I, nor thou, nor any one of these,
Ever was not, nor ever will not be,
For ever and for ever afterwards,
All, that doth live, lives always! To man’s frame
As there come infancy and youth and age,
So come there raisings-up and laying down
Of other and of other life-abodes,
Which the wise know, and fear not...
...That which is
Can never cease to be; that which is not
Will not exist. To see this truth of both
Is theirs who part essence from accident,
Substance from shadow. Indestructible,
Learn thou the Life is, spreading life through all;
It cannot anywhere, by any means,
Be anywise diminished, stayed, or changed.
But for these fleeting frames which it informs
With spirit deathless, endless, infinite,
They perish. Let them perish, Prince, and fight!
He who shall say, ‘Lo! I have slain a man!’
He who shall think, ‘Lo! I am slain!’ those both
Know naught! Life cannot slay. Life is not slain!
Never the spirit was born; the sprit shall cease to be never.
Never was time it was not; End and Beginning are dreams!
Birthless and deathless and changeless remaineth the spirit for ever;
Death hath not touched it at all, dead though the house of it seems!

Who knoweth it exhaustless, self-sustained,
Immortal, indestructible, - shall such
Say, ‘I have killed a man, or caused to kill?’

Nay, but as when one layeth
His worn out robes away,
And, taking new ones, sayeth,
‘These will I wear today!’
So putteth by the spirit
Lightly its garb of flesh,
And passeth to inherit
A residence afresh.

Bhagavadgita, (1993),
translated by Sir Edwin Arnold, Dover Publications, New York, pages 7-8.

*********************************

In 1726, when he was 20 years old, the scientist and philosopher Benjamin Franklin wrote his own obituary. It read:
The Body of Benjamin Franklin, Printer
Like the Cover of an old Book
Its Contents torn out
And stripped of its Lettering and Gilding
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 elegant Edition
Revised and corrected
By the Author.

Franklin was not the only 18th century thinker to express a belief in reincarnation. Voltaire, generally considered to be an arch sceptic in religious matters, wrote that ‘reincarnation is neither absurd nor useless; it is not more surprising to be born twice than to be born once.’
In the 19th century, Arthur Schopenhauer, another philosopher with little time for conventional religion, wrote: 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 entry into life.’
These three men were showing sympathy for a belief which, even though it has exercised the minds of thinkers from Pythagoras and Plato to Rudolf Steiner and Carl Jung, has played little part in the cultural and religious history of western Christendom. There are a few oblique references to reincarnation in the Bible – for example, the passage in the gospel of Matthew where Jesus identifies John the Baptist with the prophet Elijah (Matt 17: 12-13) – and some of the early church fathers, such as Clement of Alexandria and Origen seem to have held some version of the concept, but after the 2nd Council of Constantinople in 553 CE, when the doctrine was anathematized, it disappears almost entirely from the official version of western Christianity. But it’s never gone away entirely. Despite the indifference of theologians and the hostility of ecclesiastics, there have been relatively small groups within the western monotheistic traditions which have espoused the concept of reincarnation. For the Cathars in 12th and 13th century France, for example, who were ruthlessly exterminated by the Catholic church, reincarnation was a central tenet of their creed; and, in more recent times, certain Kabbalist sects within Judaism have expressed a belief in it. What’s even more surprising is that today there is a growing belief in reincarnation among Christian people of all persuasions. Twenty-five percent of American Catholics are now prepared to accept it as a reasonable hypothesis, even though they have never heard it preached in church or taught in school.
When we turn to the East, however, we find a very different state of affairs. What has been a marginal belief in the West is central in the East. The great religions of India – Hinduism, Buddhism, Sikhism – all accept the notion of reincarnation. The idea is so prevalent in the East that it wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that, far from being just an acceptable belief, it is the very cornerstone of these religious systems, and its ramifications extend into all aspects of life, political and social as well as religious. It is almost certainly the case that at least fifty percent of the world’s population have some sort of belief that, to paraphrase the Bhagavadgita, the spirit puts on new bodies as the body puts on new clothes.
Is there any evidence? Of evidence that would convince the hardened sceptic I have to say, we have none. Some people argue that reincarnation is the only doctrine that makes sense of human inequality and social injustice; disparities exist, they say, because human beings are being rewarded or punished in one life for their virtues or vices in another. But there are more coherent and less fatalistic ways of explaining differences of fortune.
It has also been suggested that child prodigies are proof of reincarnation. How could someone like Mozart have such astonishing musical abilities so early and without formal training? I can remember listening to Radio 3 some years ago, when the announcer said at the end of a piece of music, ‘Mozart wrote this symphony when he was nine.’ It took my breath away. And yesterday’s Guardian carried a review of The Last Man who knew Everything, a recently published biography of Thomas Young, who was born in 1773, and who made significant contributions to physics, physiology, engineering, Egyptology, linguistics, music, carpentry and life insurance! ‘As a child he was precociously talented,’ writes the reviewer. ‘By the age of 13 he had read 30 chapters of the book of Genesis in Hebrew, a language he mastered without tuition.’ Young said of himself, just before his death at 56, that he may be said to have been born old and to have died young. Who are these ‘old’ accomplished souls? Are they evidence of reincarnation?
Of course, strictly speaking, such things are not evidence at all; they are merely intuitions, feelings. And much of the rest of the so-called evidence is anecdotal which, because of the normal human tendency to exaggerate and to confabulate, is notoriously unreliable. Dr. Ian Stevenson of the University of Virginia, who has spent over 40 years researching the matter, published a book with the title ‘20 Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation’. And that’s as far as we can go. Anecdotal accounts may ‘suggest’ reincarnation, but they certainly don’t prove it.
One of the most celebrated cases suggestive of reincarnation concerns a woman by the name of Shanti Devi, who was born in Delhi in 1926. At the age of four, Shanti began to mention details of clothes, food, people, incidents and places which came as a shock to her parents. She said that her name was Lugdi, and that she had lived in the town of Muttra, about 85 miles away from Delhi. She was even able to speak the dialect of that area, without ever being exposed to it in her current life. She claimed that she had given birth to a son and that she had died ten days later. She was eventually taken to Muttra, where she recognised Kedar Nath, the man she claimed had been her husband in her former life; she was also able to identify a number of landmarks in the town, and to describe the way the furniture had been arranged in the house. She was able to pick out Lugdi’s parents from a large crowd of people. She said that in her former life she had hidden 150 rupees in the corner of the room. The money was no longer there, but Kedar Nath, her former husband said that the money had been there but that he had discovered it and spent it. In all she made at least 24 accurate statements of memories which matched confirmed facts, and members of a committee of notable citizens, including a politician, a lawyer and the director of a newspaper, which was formed to investigate the claims, declared that she could not have obtained the information by fraud, and their verdict was that this case provided conclusive proof of reincarnation, a verdict substantiated twenty years later by a Swedish writer, Sture Lonnerstrand, who travelled to India to meet Shanti Devi and to investigate the case anew.
The case of Shanti Devi is perhaps the best known of the cases of spontaneous recall of a former life, but it is by no means unique, and Stevenson has personally investigated over 4000 of them, mostly in India. Such spontaneous memories – if that is what they are – usually start to be expressed between the ages of 2 and 4, and fade after about 8.
However, such recall is not the exclusive preserve of the very young. It is claimed that under deep hypnosis some people can provide verifiable information about former lives, even speaking languages they had never learnt in their present life, and mentioning characters, incidents, and customs about which they could not possibly have known. The most convincing account of this phenomenon was presented in a film made about the work of the Australian hypnotherapist Peter Ramster. I saw it very late one night about twenty years ago and I was very impressed by one of the four characters whose experiences were studied.
Her name was Gwen MacDonald, a resident of Sydney, who claimed to remember a life in Somerset in the mid 18th century. When taken blindfolded to the area in Somerset she claimed to have lived in, she knew her way around perfectly well, even though she had never been out of Australia. She knew the location of a waterfall, and the place where stepping stones had been, even though these stones had been removed 40 years earlier. She knew the correct names of the surrounding villages as they were 200 years ago, even though they do not exist today or their names have been changed. She correctly used dialect words, such as ‘tallet’ which, apparently, is an archaic word for ‘loft’, and a word she could not possibly have come across under normal circumstances of her life in Australia. She was able to lead the team directly to the house in which she said she lived, which, although now a chicken shed, had indeed once been a dwelling. When the floor was cleaned they found a stone whose wear pattern matched almost exactly a flooring stone she had drawn in Sydney.
Taken at face value, this seemed to me to be almost irrefutable evidence for reincarnation, but, as with the cases of spontaneous memory in infants, we have to be very careful about how we assess the evidence. To begin with, just how reliable are the witnesses? One must always be aware that when there is money to be made out of something there will be a tendency to bend the evidence. In India, for example, parents sometimes claim that their children are remembering past lives in order to ingratiate themselves with a family richer than their own, even to have their child adopted and taken off their hands. And commercial films, like the Ramster film, have an interest in at least covering their considerable expenses and producers may be tempted to bend the evidence a little to make the project more newsworthy.
In addition, even if we grant the reality of the phenomenon, reincarnation is not the only way to explain it, although it seems to me to be the simplest way and the most obvious way. In some cases it could be what psychologists call ‘cryptomnesia’ hidden memories. According to this theory, all of us remember on some level of awareness, everything that has ever happened to us, everything we have seen or heard, everything we have read. Ordinarily, most of it is filtered from our waking consciousness, and even from our memory, but in an altered state of consciousness such as hypnosis, these things are recoverable. So, Gwen MacDonald may not have any conscious memory of skimming through a book of 18th century Somerset dialect, but she must have done so, and this is represented as a past life memory while under hypnosis.
Perhaps the explanation is ESP – extra sensory perception – and what looks like the memory of a past life is in reality a compendium of stray facts drawn from the minds of people who are still alive. This could be how Shanti Devi got her information. Maybe, as some people suggest, all memories of everyone who has ever lived are stored in some great psychic reservoir and certain people have the ability – unfortunate or otherwise – of picking such memories up and considering them their own.
The fact is that as with so much in the area of the paranormal, the attempts made to substantiate reincarnation can hardly be considered empirically valid; in fact it would be difficult to imagine how a scientifically respectable experiment to prove it could even be devised. So we are left to mix together unreliable anecdotal evidence, which can always be mistaken or fraudulent, with feelings, possibilities, and subjectivities. On balance, I am inclined to think it a reality, and years ago this would have made me very happy. All young people here in the prosperous West seem to want to be born again. But the Buddhists say that rebirth is something one has to escape from; that the wheel of reincarnation is not a merry-go-round, and the older I get the less the idea of it appeals to me. Could I really delight in being a baby again, in adolescent spots and tantrums, in years of tedious schooling, in paying off another mortgage, in facing inevitable physical decline? Perhaps I could. Perhaps I’ll have to whether I want to or not. But it’s instructive that the epitaph that Benjamin Franklin wrote when he was twenty was never actually used on his grave. His gravestone says simply, ‘Benjamin and Deborah Franklin, 1790’. At 84 he’d had enough.

Rev.Bill Darlison
Dublin Unitarian Church 21st January, 2007