RATHER THAN HELL: REINCARNATION part II
Allan Kardec
Allan Kardec (1804-69) was the Father of Spiritism in France. His real name was Hypolyte Leon Denizard Rivail. His pseudonym originated in mediumistic communications. Both Allan and Kardec were said to have been his names in previous incarnations. In his book entitle Heaven and Hell [1] (a book that has been channeled), Allen Kardec advocates a new religion called Spiritism. He denounces the doctrines of Eternal Punishment and Original Sin, and as a defense of reincarnation, he confuses human souls and angels as follows (Emmanuel Swedenborg did the same):
Souls, or spirits, are created simple and ignorant, that is to say, without knowledge and without the consciousness of good and evil, but with the aptitude of acquiring, in knowledge and morality, all that they lack, and which they will acquire through effort and labor. It is thus that, little by little the soul acquires development, effects of its own improvement, and advances in the spiritual hierarchy, until it has reached the state of fully purified Spirit or Angel. The angels then are the souls of men who have reached the highest degree of perfection attainable by created existences.2
And demons, according to Spiritism, are merely somewhat retarded but well-meaning angels: "They are imperfect spirits who will grow better in the course of time, they are still at the foot of the ladder, but they will reach the top sooner or later."3 Kardecian spiritism (its adherents prefer this term to spiritualism) spread to Brazil in the 19th century, and it includes reincarnation as one of its primary tenets.4 The spiritism of Kardec is the environment in which the famous demonic healers of Brazil are thriving, for example Ze Arigo (Jose Pedro de Freitas, died in 1971), who was called "the surgeon of the rusty knife," and the more recent "John of God" (Joao Teixeira de Faria). The latter does not deny being a medium: he works "in entity" or "when he incorporated the spirit entity." "John of God" declares that "his achievements are only the results of the law of reincarnation and the subsequent use of spirit doctors from the spirit plane."
Edgar Cayce
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Our third example is the American psychic Edgar Cayce (1877-1945). Daily for over 40 years of his adult life, (between 1901 and 1945) Cayce would lie down on a couch with his hands folded over his stomach and allow himself to enter a self-induced sleep state. Then, provided with the name and location of an individual anywhere in the world he would speak in a normal voice and give answers to any questions about that person that he was asked. These answers, which came to be called "readings" were written down by a stenographer, who kept one copy on file and sent another to the person who had requested the information. Today on file at the Association for Research and Enlightenment, Inc. (ARE), in Virginia Beach, Virginia, are copies of more than 14,500 of Edgar Cayce's readings, totaling over 49,000 pages of text. Sixty-eight percent of them are concerned with diagnosing and treating physical ailments, but the rest of them advocate occult subjects including reincarnation. Cayce believed in reincarnation while thinking himself to be a Protestant.
The demons established their control over him in May of 1890, when he was 13 years old. We quote from the only biography Cayce authorized himself, that written by Thomas Sugrue. He was reading his Bible in the woods near his home, when
he became aware of the presence of someone else. He looked up. A woman was standing before him. At first he thought she was his mother, come to bring him home for the chores–the sun was bright and his eyes did not see well after staring at the book. But when she spoke he knew it was someone he did not know. Her voice was soft and very clear; it reminded him of music. "Your prayers have been heard," she said. "Tell me what you would like most of all, so that I may give it to you."
Then he saw that there was something on her back; something that made shadows behind her that were shaped like wings. He was frightened. She smiled at him, waiting. He opened his mouth and heard himself saying: "Most of all I would like to be helpful to others, and especially to children when they are sick."5
Next day he had great difficulties with spelling, and again he heard the voice of the lady he had seen the day before: "If you can sleep a little, we can help you." He took a short nap with the spelling book as a pillow, and awoke with a photographic knowledge of the entire book.
After this he was hooked. He took all kinds of paranormal manifestations for granted. Two years later, in 1892, an injury made him delirious. He dictated instructions for a poultice which, he promised, would cure him. Later he awoke well, without any recollection of his disorder or the instructions he dictated.
In 1900, he lost his voice, but on March 31, 1901, under hypnosis he diagnosed his own malady, and after ten months of not being able to speak, he woke up with his voice restored. This started his 22-year career as a medical clairvoyant. For 22 years, the demons were biding their time, and patiently gave medical advice only. They were using this time to establish their credibility with the clients of Edgar Cayce. Their ability to give useful medical advice is not surprising since they have a complete knowledge of the material world.
In 1923, Cayce was exactly at the midpoint of his career (he died 22 years later), when he gave a reading to Arthur Lammers, a prosperous printer in Ohio, who was also a Theosophist. Lammers was the first to ask non-medical questions, questions "about the Cabala, the mystery religions of Egypt and Greece, the medieval alchemists, the mystics of Tibet, yoga, Madame Blavatsky and Theosophy, the Great White Brotherhood, the Etheric World."6 Although Cayce, while conscious, knew nothing about such things, in trance he answered all the questions Lammers posed to the satisfaction of occultists. Already in the very first reading, conducted by Lammers himself, reincarnation played a prominent role. Lammers was pleased with the outcome, and said to Cayce after the session: "You say I've lived before on this earth. You say this is my third appearance in this sphere and that I still have some of the inclinations from my last life, when I was a monk."7
The oldest son, 16-year-old Hugh Lynn Cayce, had the strongest reservations about all this.
It was bad enough that his father was a psychic; the boys continually asked him "What is the matter with your dad? What is that stuff he does?" But now it was worse. They weren't even to be Christians any more. They were to be heathens.8
...Hugh Lynn remained skeptical. To him it all smacked of occultism, and occultism was something he associated with shady fortune-tellers, women who believed in Theosophy, and Hindus wearing turbans and bending over crystal balls.9
But for Edgar Cayce there was no way back any more. He was committed to occultism. So for the next 22 years, the demons, with their credibility securely established, poured out an incredible amount of disinformation through Cayce on various esoteric subjects, including reincarnation and Karma, all subversive and destructive to Christianity,
The first question is what, or rather who is the source of all the information spoken of by Cayce? It is a fact that he knew nothing about them, he always asked after waking up following a session: "What did I say?" In some sessions, the questioner explicitly asks: "Please give us Thine Identity," but the answer is refused.10 Only one reading is given in The Edgar Cayce Companion, in which the demon identifies himself, and gives his name as "Halaliel."11 The indirect evidence for the demonic origin of all the readings (e.g., the ambiguity and deceitfulness permeating every sentence of the non-health related text) is overwhelming, and we take this for granted.
Of course, the demons themselves are anxious to confuse, so another reading states: "The subconscious mind of Edgar Cayce is in direct communication with all other subconscious minds...gathering in this way all knowledge possessed by millions of other subconscious minds."12 This "explanation," of course, belongs in the realm of sheer fantasy.
The Cayce readings are even more devious than Kardec or the Theosophists in trying to confuse and seduce Christians (they have succeeded in confusing Edgar Cayce himself, who thought of himself as a good Protestant). In the readings, there is a lot of Christian-sounding talk about Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, angels, archangels and guardian angels, and a feigned reverence for Biblical stories, but all the details are found wrong when carefully examined. In particular, most Bible quotes are given an esoteric interpretation. For example, Jesus Christ was merely a man,13 He had many incarnations.14 He traveled to India, Persia and Egypt;15 Mary (the Blessed Virgin Mary) had several children after Jesus,16 etc., etc.
The description of the human soul appears Gnostic: "An entity, or soul, is a spark–or a portion–of the Whole, the First Cause: or Purpose. And, "All souls were created in the beginning and are finding their way back to whence they came."18
This esoteric, pantheistic world view has the greatest difficulty with God, so not surprisingly, the demons of Cayce turn God into electricity: "Electricity or vibration is that same energy, same power, ye call God."19 This coincides with a general idea repeatedly occurring in occultism: the Cosmos is animated by Energy which coincides with the divine spirit. Which again leads to the confusion between matter and spirit: "Spirit moving in space becomes matter."20
Although 68% of the actual readings were concerned with health issues, the recent book, The Edgar Cayce Companion: A Comprehensive Treatise of the Edgar Cayce Readings devotes 17% to health issues, obviously considering the New Age type esoteric, "spiritual" readings more important. A lot of space is devoted to reincarnation, Karma, pantheism, astrology, evolution of mind, symbology, vibrations, and fantasies about higher dimensions, Atlantis, Lemuria, Arcturus and many other topics so dear to the heart of New Agers. But reincarnation is perhaps the best-known element of Cayce's life-readings, which describe thousands of past lives ranging from Atlantis to 19th-century America.
A rather unusual aspect of the Cayce readings is that in addition to the description of past lives, the readings also include what (supposedly) happens between reincarnations under the heading of "planetary sojourns." Just as astrology describes the effect of the planets on human bodies, here the supposed effects of the planets on discarnate souls (i.e., pure spirits) is claimed. The supposed explanation goes like this (citing all the details would be too tedious): souls are developing to become one with God, which requires their passage through "all the planes of the universal forces."21
According to K. Paul Johnson,22 this idea (really a fiction) has appeared in ancient Greek and Persian esoteric sources, but it has not been fully expounded there. Explicit formulations of this in modern occult literature were given by Gottfried de Purucker, a Theosophist, and by Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925), founder of Anthroposophy. Significantly, both accounts were published only after the death of Edgar Cayce. This is a vivid proof that the demons give the esoteric, occult literature its continuity by providing it with its main themes.
"Justification of Reincarnation"
If the universe is not completely senseless and irrational, some explanation is expected for reincarnation. The religious background is pantheism, which excludes a personal Creator, and therefore any explanation must take the form of some "eternal law."
Moral Justification in the East: The Law of Karma
In Hinduism and Buddhism the explanation and justification of reincarnation is moral, and it is called the Law of Karma. We state some of its essentials:
Karma is literally "action, "doing," "deed." It is at once cause and effect, and the law which equilibrates the two. It is Newton's third law of motion, that Action and Reaction are equal and opposite, applied to the moral and all other realms of sentient life.23
Some fundamental Buddhistic beliefs:
2) The Universe was evolved, not created; and it functions according to law, not according to the caprice of any God....
12) The Universe is subject to a natural causation know as Karma. The merits and demerits of a being in past existences determine his condition in the present one. Each man, therefore, has prepared the causes and effects which he now experiences.
13) The obstacles to the attainment of good Karma may be removed by the observance of the following precepts, which are embraced in the moral code of Buddhism:
• Kill not;
• Steal not;
• Indulge in no forbidden sexual pleasure;
• Lie not;
• Take no intoxicating or stupefying drug or liquor.
Five other precepts, which need not here be enumerated, should be observed by those who would attain more quickly than the average layman the release from misery and rebirth.24
Thus every man is the molder and the sole creator of his life to come, and master of his destiny.25
The statement above, "It is Newton's third law of motion, that Action and Reaction are equal and opposite, applied to the moral and all other realms of sentient life," equates physical laws and moral laws, which is entirely mistaken. Physical law is the law of the material universe, whereas moral law is a rule governing the free actions of rational beings. The physical law is mechanical, for example, in the case of Newton's third law, given an action, the reaction is uniquely determined. The moral law includes prescriptions for what ought to be done plus sanctions for not obeying the prescriptions. In the realm of morality, one cannot speak of a unique consequence of a moral act, for example a crime may be justly punished in several different ways. Paul Siwek sarcastically summarizes this impossible proposition (of equating physical and moral laws): "...morality becomes an integral part of physics."26
In Christianity, there is a personal God, whose will is the moral law. The same God judges every man at the end of his one lifetime as to his sins and virtues. The commandments and sanctions are clearly stated. And most importantly, the moral law is not applied mechanically; rather, the whole context of the moral act (extenuating circumstances, etc.] is taken into account by the All-Knowing Judge. For example, cold-blooded murder with the aim of robbing the victim is treated very differently from accidental killing whose aim was self-defense. So the passing of the judgment is by an Infinite Mind, i.e., God, and the execution of the sentence, delivering reward or punishment, is also completely under divine control.
In Buddhism, there is a moral law (partially stated above), but the sanctions for violating the precepts are unknown. Supposedly, the law of consequences is "unerring." Supposedly, the Karma causes every action, every word, even every thought, to be followed by an effect adequate and proportionate to it: a good effect follows a good action, a bad effect, a bad action. But this requires a Mind, in fact an all-knowing Mind, for which there is no room in pantheism. Pantheism only allows a mechanical law. Unfortunately, moral decisions can become arbitrarily complex by having to consider all the circumstances, and no fixed mechanism can foresee all the possible modifications and qualifications. The universe being finite, any mechanism contained in it must be finite, therefore any mechanism implied by pantheism must be finite. And a finite mechanism (the technical term for it is an algorithm) cannot possibly pass a just moral judgment in all possible cases.
Sixty years of Computer Science (which includes the study of algorithms), and in particular the failure of Artificial Intelligence27 proves this beyond a shadow of doubt. Computers (which are mechanical rule-based systems) did surpass humans in activities that are strictly mechanical (i.e., can be defined with a set of rules) such as playing games like chess. But no computer program can take the place of a human mind in non-mechanical activities such translating novels or poetry from one language to another. Neither can a computer be programmed to foresee what is accomplished at a typical criminal trial. Therefore, no mechanical Law of Karma can possibly exist that could make true moral decisions.
When Helena Blavatsky was questioned about this, she admitted her ignorance: "If you question me about the causative intelligence in it (i.e., in Karma), I must answer you, I do not know."28 The demons realized that they had to do some damage control, so Annie Besant, six years after the death of Helena Blavatsky, started talking about the "Lords of Karma," intelligent beings that make the moral decisions concerning Karma.29 Since Theosophy denies the existence of the one true God, the "Lords of Karma" must be finite spirits, so we are back at the basic problems of reincarnation. Finite spirits, angels (fallen or otherwise) have the following limitation:
They do not know the secret thoughts of other rational creatures....For the same reasons which make it impossible for a spirit to act directly on the will of any rational creature we say that the secret thoughts of the heart of man or the mind of a spirit are hidden. In every thought there is an act of will, because I think when I will and I think what I will, but the hiddenness of the will covers my very thoughts.30
With such limitations, they are not able to take into account the intentions of the person, not able to consider mitigating circumstances, and consequently they cannot make completely just moral decisions. In the framework of pantheism there is no solution, there cannot possibly be any solution to the problem of passing a just sentence.
An equally serious problem for the fiction of reincarnation is that the delivery of judgment (reward or punishment) is as unpredictable as all the happenings of a human lifetime. Other human beings with their free wills modify the supposed sentence: charitable, kind actions lighten it, sinful, criminal actions make it more burdensome. So when Helena Blavatsky is recklessly boasting: "It would be impossible either to delay or to hasten the Karma in the fulfillment of justice,"31 she is simply wrong.
But the worst thing is not being able to remember past lives and past sins. Fr. Arendzen is blunt: "To mete out dire punishments or luscious rewards to individuals for things they can know nothing about is surely an act of Supreme Insanity...."32
The conviction that one's own suffering is always the outcome of one's own sin, and mostly to sin in an unknown previous existence, is deleterious to any attempt at improvement, first, because the burden of sins in previous births is an unknown quantity, and may be immense, this naturally leads to sullen despair; secondly, because the character of these sins is unknown and the reborn criminal does not know in what way to expiate or to prevent their recurrence; thirdly, because a justifiable resentment arises in every human breast at being punished for deeds which one is totally unconscious of having ever committed; lastly, because the very idea of punishment and reward, the very idea of the ethically good and evil gets impaired through the mechanical working of the iron law of retribution.33
Karma would make the universe a soulless machine, with which one should not interfere:
"The conviction that all suffering is the outcome of personal sin, cannot but act disastrously on human charity and kindness."34 Victims of disasters, victims of illness, victims of criminal violence would deserve no pity or help because they are only criminals who are justly suffering for their sins.
Justification in the Modern West: "Evolution of Spirits"
In the East, Karma is fatalism; reincarnation is a kind of punishment which has a distant resemblance to purgatory. Getting out of the terror of a never-ending series of reincarnations, a deliverance from it, is the main goal of Eastern religions. In the modern West, reincarnation has been made more attractive because Karma lost its connection with morality. Head and Cranston state it this way:
Theosophists have an approach to the reincarnation theory that is manifestly different from that commonly found in the East....In the Orient the great hope has been to escape as quickly as possible from the wheel of rebirth, and to attain Moksha or Nirvana. Similarly, Western religions usually viewed return to earth life as a penance or as a means of purging oneself of impurities. The Theosophists, however, regard re-embodiment as the universal law of evolutionary progress, holding that in an infinite universe there must be infinite possibilities for growth and development. Hence one would never outgrow the need for fresh experience and new cycles of incarnations, although a long period of rest and assimilation may separate one life from another, as well as one great world-period of activity from another.35
The universe is certainly finite rather than infinite, so the above reasoning is faulty, but we shall give Theosophy a hearing nevertheless. G.K. Chesterton detected this divorce from morality, and lets Father Brown, the hero of many of Chesterton's mystery stories, comment on it:
Look here, Doctor; you know I know there are all sorts in all religions; good men in bad religions and bad men in good religions. But there is just one little fact I have learned simply as a practical man, an entirely practical point that I have picked up by experience.... I've scarcely ever met a criminal who philosophized at all, who did not philosophize along those lines of orientalism and recurrence and reincarnation, and the wheel of destiny and the serpent biting its own tail. I have found merely in practice that there is a curse on the servants of that serpent; on their belly shall they go and the dust shall they eat; and there was never a blackguard or a profligate born who could not talk that sort of spirituality... here in our working world it is the religion of rascals.36
The shift from the fatalism of Karma to the new interpretation as the "evolution of spirits" may appear slight, but in fact it is all-important, and completely subversive of Christianity. It is an all-around effort to implement the original Satanic temptation in the Garden of Eden: eat the fruit of knowledge, and then "you shall be as Gods, knowing good and evil" (Gen. 3:5). Knowledge acquired through occult means (paranormal or psychic knowledge) will make us like God. This will take many reincarnations, and the process has the innocuous name of self-improvement.
The goal is: "you shall be as Gods" (Gen. 3:5). Religion with some kind of binding morality (including Hinduism and Buddhism) is replaced with knowledge: hermeticism, Gnosticism, Theosophy, and false mysticism (including that of Brahmanism and Buddhism). Man can arrive at the knowledge of God intuitively, i.e., without having recourse to discursive reasoning. Manly Hall puts it this way:
The masters of the Mysteries taught secret practices and disciplines by which the properly qualified disciples could develop potent abilities latent within the soul, and so, come into conscious communication with spiritual realities.37
And:
This is at once the primary purpose and the consummate achievement of the Mysteries: that man shall become aware and consciously be reunited with the divine source of himself.38
So "knowledge" is the ultimate goal, the occult equivalent of salvation, and "ignorance" is the only sin or evil to be rectified.
At the same time, since we discard the old morality binding on man, we become masters in deciding between good and evil, i.e., we become "free." How is this to be accomplished? Reincarnation, in order to appear attractive to Western man, came to be interpreted as something divorced from morality. Hinduism and Buddhism do have a moral law. By contrast, in Theosophy, "morals were entirely the individual member's affair."39 The divorce from the Eastern, moral interpretation of Karma was accomplished by changing the meaning of the words "good" and "evil." According to Mrs. Blavatsky, "Good is that which promotes the development of life; evil is that which harms it,"40 a substantial reinterpretation of the meaning of these words. This necessarily means moral relativism: good and bad now mean utility or harmfulness of actions, which depends on your "level of development." The same thing can be good on one level and bad on another.
The promoters of reincarnation in the West, modern Theosophy and New Age, are definitely anti-Christian, just as Gnosticism has always been. A proof of this is the fact that the founders and early leaders of Theosophy-Helena Blavatsky, Annie Besant, and Alice Bailey-have all been closely connected with Freemasonry. And the developmer of Theosophy happened under demonic inspiration (e.g., most works of the above three women are results of channeling), which explains their implacable hatred of Christianity.
There are attempts to graft the doctrine of Reincarnation onto a kind of a shadowy, gnostic Christianity. If words familiar from Christianity are used, Western man is more likely to get interested in embracing the new ideas. Helena Blavatsky articulated this hope:
While the orthodox hasten to make away with the old hell and sapphire-paved New Jerusalem, the more liberal accept now under Christian veils and biblical nomenclature our Doctrine of Karma, Reincarnation, and God as an abstract Principle. Thus the Church is slowly drifting into philosophy and pantheism.41
Chesterton's comment on the "evolution of spirits":
A sort of Theosophist said to me, "Good and evil, truth and falsehood, folly and wisdom are only aspects of the same upward movement of the universe." Even at that stage it occurred to me to ask, "Supposing there is no difference between good and bad, or between false and true, what is the difference between up and down?"42
And the great Dominican and Thomist Garrigou-Lagrange, in his book Life Everlasting, characterizes the result of the "evolution of spirits" as follows:
What a world separates the true idea of heaven from heaven conceived by naturalism, by pantheism, a heaven which would be married to hell beyond good and bad, a heaven where without renouncing anything men would find supreme beatitude. This is the heaven defended by the secret doctrines of the counter-Church which begins with the Gnostics of old and continues in present-day occult doctrines that produce universal confusion.43
This fiction of the "evolution of spirits," by introducing angel-like creatures who were once human but later totally transcended the human condition, is trying to wipe out the distinction between human souls and angels. Human souls are created without innate ideas and are united with human bodies for their existence and proper operation. They are learners during their one and only life in the body, and this is the only true spirit evolution in the realm of nature. Angels, on the other hand, are purely spiritual substances that do not need a body either for their existence or for their proper operation. They were created with all the knowledge they need, they are not learners, and do not "evolve" in the realm of nature. Angels without bodies are differentiated by the different sets of innate ideas that God implanted in their natures at creation. To avoid all misunderstandings, we quote Dom Anscar Vonier:
The angelic mind starts with fullness of knowledge, and it is not, like the human mind, subject to gradual development. In this we have the profoundest difference between spirit intellect and human intellect. A spirit starts his existence fully endowed with all knowledge; he is never a learner in the true sense of the word, as a man is a learner. It may be said of an angel that he applies his knowledge to new objects, but does not acquire ideas that were not infused into him by the Creator in the very making of him.44
Occultism is trying to erase this distinction between angels and humans so that they could claim that some kind of "natural evolution" will turn humans into "gods." In reality, true "spirit evolution" comes only from acquiring the (sanctifying) grace of God, both for angels and for human souls.
"Experimental Evidence" for Reincarnation: Remembering Past Lives
There is a telling exchange in the readings of Edgar Cayce: Question: "What will convince me of reincarnation?" Answer: "An experience."45The demons here are pushing their wares: they are experts at giving humans illusions, and they do it often (God permitting). And many are all too eager to be taken in by such illusions, believe them to be real human experiences, and then claim to have some "experimental evidence" for reincarnation.
For the sake of argument, let us assume that the doctrine of reincarnation is true, and true according to the authentic Eastern religions such as Hinduism or Buddhism rather than according to fraudulent modern Western adaptations such as Theosophy or New Age. That means all souls ALWAYS existed (creation out of nothing is not part of these religions), therefore all souls must have reincarnated many times. It is then reasonable to expect that most if not all people have memories of their past lives. The stark and irrefutable fact is that the vast majority of people have absolutely no recollections of this kind.
In this section we examine what is called the "experimental evidence" for reincarnation: the claim made by a few people to have recollections of some past lives. (The number of claimants as percentage of the population is infinitesimally small.)
A human being is a composite of body and soul, so when we want to identify him, we usually use characteristics of his body, such as his fingerprints or details of the eye. If a person suffered disfiguring injuries, we may have a difficult time identifying him. In such cases, we have to rely on the person's memory, and would ask him some facts that only he knows. (That is done today when somebody has to be identified on the telephone.) And this is what St. Joan of Arc did to prove to the Dauphin that she was sent by God: she told the Dauphin some facts that only he and God knew.
The "experimental evidence" for reincarnation means trying to provide some proof that two different bodies have been animated, at different times, by the same soul. Having to identify a human soul is inherently more difficult than identifying the human composite. Not surprisingly, existing efforts by advocates of reincarnation usually concentrate on memory. Unfortunately, it is hard to find information that uniquely identifies a person. Other, less convincing efforts try to make use of some aspects of our animal nature such as likes or skills (e.g., in a story below one lady is said to be a reincarnation of another one because they both were fond of cats, and in another story both persons had unusual skills in sewing). Even more dubious is the argument by Stevenson that similar birthmarks on two bodies imply that the same soul animated the two bodies.
"Experimental Evidence": Reminiscences from Dreams and the Influence of Drugs
Completely unworthy of consideration is "experimental evidence" provided by dreams and the influence of drugs such as LSD. Siwek devotes a chapter to dreams as evidence46 and considers them worthless. Edwards devotes many pages to the effects of LSD, especially experimentation with LSD as pain killer for terminal cancer patients.47 LSD distorts the subject's perception of the world, makes him lose any sense of reality; he becomes highly suggestible, and he generally tries to please the physician. Any evidence provided under the influence of LSD is totally without merit.
"Experimental Evidence": Reminiscences Under Hypnosis
The word "hypnotism" describes the art of lulling the patient into a trance like state, an artificial sleep, after which he can be controlled by suggestion. The hypnotic sleep was originally used in surgical operations as an anesthetic, to be replaced in 1846 by ether. It is induced in the patient by monotonous repetition of words and gestures. There are degrees of it: in slight hypnosis consciousness remains and actions are remembered, in deep hypnosis the patient is extremely suggestible, all sorts of suggestions are acted upon, but actions are forgotten. The effect of hypnosis is to deprive the patient of independent free action though he will respond to suggestions. Usually the most absurd suggestions are accepted by the patient as rational. Fr. Charles Coppens, S.J., states:
Legal writers and lawyers have serious charges against hypnotism....They point to the statements of Dr. Luys, a respectable authority on hypnotism, who says: "A patient under the influence of hypnotism can be made to swallow poison, to inhale noxious gases. He can be led to make a manual gift of property, even to sign a promissory note or bill, or any kind of contract."48
From the moral standpoint hypnotism in itself is not sinful nor opposed to religion as long as there is in it no superstition and no pantheism. Any sort of spiritualistic hypnotism would be a grave sin.49
Since undergoing hypnosis means abdicating one's reason and will, the Catholic Church condemns hypnosis if it can lead to moral evil. It is permissible as medical treatment only if the hypnotizer is skilled and morally unexceptionable, and trustworthy witnesses are present throughout the whole procedure.50
In hypnosis, the mind appears to become dissociated, split into separate compartments, one active, others dormant. Ian Stevenson himself disapproves of the use of hypnosis:
Some of the earliest and most thorough investigators of the evidence for reincarnation used hypnosis to regress subjects back in time to supposed "previous lives." Unfortunately, the results of these experiments have proved inconclusive and on the whole disappointing chiefly due to the difficulty of controlling the subject's access to the information embodied in the "previous personality." The "personalities" usually evoked during hypnotically-induced regressions to a "previous life" seem to comprise a mixture of several ingredients. These may include the subject's current personality, his expectations of what he thinks the hypnotist wants, his fantasies of what he thinks his previous life ought to have been, and also perhaps elements derived paranormally.51
Stevenson also quotes another researcher called Zolik:
Zolik elicited "previous life" fantasies in subjects hypnotized, regressed and instructed to remember a "previous life." In later sessions, with subject hypnotized but not regressed, Zolik traced the origin of some of the information and some of the personality traits shown in the "previous life" fantasy to people, books or theatrical productions which the subject had known.... [T]he personalities evoked in the "previous life" fantasies were ad hoc constructions produced under the direction of the hypnotist....52
Cryptomnesia, or source amnesia, in which the subjects obtain their knowledge through normal channels (i.e., in their present lives rather than in any "past life") but are unable to recall them, explains these "previous life" fantasies produced by hypnosis. Probably the most famous case of a "previous life fantasy" manufactured with hypnotic regression is the Bridey Murphy case in the United States. Our source is the chapter entitled "The Rise and Fall of Bridey Murphy" in Paul Edward's Reincarnation: A Critical Examination.
Between November 1952 and October 1953, a Colorado businessman by the name of Morey Bernstein, an amateur hypnotist and a believer in reincarnation, conducted six hypnotic sessions with Virginia Tighe, a 29-year-old housewife. The sessions were taped and several witnesses, including Virginia's husband, Hugh Tighe, attended them. Virginia was easily put into a deep trance and began to speak in a soft Irish brogue. During the sessions she consistently identified herself as Bridey Murphy, born in 1798 in the Irish town of Cork to a Protestant barrister, Duncan Murphy, and his wife Kathleen. She described her conventional schooling and her marriage at the age of 20 to Sean Brian Joseph MacCarthy, the son of another Cork barrister. She had a drab and uneventful life and died in 1864. This much is the "previous life fantasy."
The story was first published in the Denver Post's Sunday supplement "Empire" in September 1954. Then Doubleday contracted Bernstein to write a book on the case, because they hoped for a national bestseller. The Search for Bridey Murphy appeared on January 5, 1956. While Bernstein was writing the book, Doubleday hired a legal firm in Ireland to verify the details of the story. Although they came up empty-handed, the book stayed on the national bestseller list for many weeks. More than a million copies sold, and the March 15 issue of Life Magazine featured an article entitled "Bridey Murphy Puts Nation in a Hypnotizzy."
The Bridey Murphy mania reached a tragic climax when a 19-year-old boy in Shawnee, Oklahoma, shot himself with a rifle leaving a note that said "I am curious about the Bridey Murphy story–so I am going to investigate the theory in person."53
The tizzy was quickly ended by a series of articles that first appeared in the Chicago American in May and June 1956, and subsequently syndicated in all the papers of the Hearst chain. The Hearst reporters discovered that Virginia Tighe spent her childhood and adolescence in Chicago. They located "the real Bridey Murphy," Mrs. Bridie Murphy Corkell, who had come to America from County Mayo in Ireland, and who lived across the street from the apartment in which Virginia spent her Chicago years. Virginia had frequently been to her home.
The Hearst exposé effectively destroyed whatever credibility the Bridey Murphy story had possessed, even though later it was found to contain some inaccuracies. Not only was it impossible to verify any of the facts of the story in Ireland, but also it was quite easy to obtain in Chicago a lot of information about life in Ireland. An important source was the 1893 World's Colombian Exposition in Chicago, where one of the prize exhibits was a large Irish village consisting of 15 cottages. So Bridey Murphy's knowledge of Irish history and customs was almost certainly an instance of cryptomnesia.
"Experimental Evidence": Reminiscences of Children
Polish Jesuit Paul Siwek54 devotes a chapter to inventions of children in his book published in 1952. They are as convincing as the sister-in-law of this writer now living in Minnesota who used to say when she was a three-year-old girl: "When I was a bear, I lived in a forest and ate berries." Innocent, childish flight of imagination, nobody rushed to the conclusion that it was a new startling proof of reincarnation. But Ian Stevenson, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Virginia, has changed all that. He started his career with a very cautiously written book,55 but since has written many others expressing increasingly strident support for reincarnation, especially as he began to be hailed as the "Galileo of reincarnation." This phenomenon is usually described as "As long as they are buying, I am selling!"
Stevenson claims to document case histories "suggestive of reincarnation," almost all of them concerning small children. These children begin to make statements between the ages two and four about a past life, and between the ages of seven and eight all such statements stop, and the whole thing is forgotten by the child. Stevenson considers cases only if there is some independent corroboration of the claims of past life. The corroborations do not appear very convincing, because there are always natural ways of obtaining the information that is used to argue for reincarnation. For example, if B is supposedly a reincarnation of A, then the families of A and B live only a few miles from each other. Stevenson in his published cases argues that such transfer of information did not take place, but such arguments are inherently unconvincing. The crucial links could have been accidentally overlooked, left unexplored, or deliberately ignored.
It is important to notice that children tell stories of past lives only in countries and in cultures where reincarnation is believed, so children are growing up hearing them. It naturally occupies their minds, and they feel encouraged to make up stories along those lines. We describe a few cases as illustrations: three supposed reincarnations in the Lorenz family in Brazil described by Ian Stevenson, M.D., in his book Twenty Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation.56 Thirty-five of 396 pages are devoted to the cases involving the Lorenz family.
Maria Januaria de Oliveiro (know familiarly as Sinha or Sinhazinha) was born about 1890 and died in October of 1917. On August 14, 1918, Ida Lorenz gave birth to a daughter, Marta Lorenz, the supposed reincarnation of Sinha. The two families lived 12 miles from each others. Sinha enjoyed the friendship of Ida Lorenz, wife of F. V. Lorenz, the schoolteacher of the district. Twice Sinha fell in love with men of whom her father disapproved. One of these men, called Florzinho, committed suicide after Sinha's father blocked their marriage. Sinha was diagnosed with tuberculosis and after a few months she died. On her deathbed she acknowledged to Ida Lorenz that she wanted to die and had tried to become infected. She intended and caused her own illness. But she promised her good friend Ida Lorenz that she would return again and be born as her daughter.
Marta talked a lot about being Sinha between the ages of two and half and ten, which is considered "suggestive of reincarnation" by Ian Stevenson. After age ten, she began to forget details. To further complicate matters, Florzinho (the man who committed suicide) supposedly has returned as a son of Marta.
Sinha indirectly committed suicide, and Marta had also often wished to die. "She never actually attempted suicide, but thought that she might have killed herself at times if she had a gun with which to do so."57
Sinha and Marta both were fond of cats. Moreover,
both Sinha and Marta were credited with more than average powers of extrasensory perception. Once her grandmother gave Marta a book as a gift. Marta ignored it, leaving it in its wrappings. Her father asked her: "Are you not going to read it?" Marta replied: "No. The book is about a case similar to mine." She then correctly gave the title of the still wrapped book.58
Emilia Lorenz was the second child and oldest daughter of F. V. and Ida Lorenz. She was born on February 4, 1902. She was extremely unhappy during her short life. She felt constrained as a girl and some years before her death she told several of her brothers and sisters, but not her parents, that if there was such a thing a reincarnation she would return as a man. She made several suicide attempts, and finally she succeeded in killing herself with cyanide on October 12, 1921. Some time after the death of Emilia, Ida Lorenz attended some spiritualistic meetings at which she received communications from a spirit purporting to be Emilia: "Mamma, take me as your son, I will come as your son." Ida Lorenz had her last, 13th child, a boy named Paulo born on February 3, 1923. He never married. Paulo committed suicide on September 5, 1966. As "proof" of the reincarnation of Emilia in Paulo, the following are mentioned: both had interest in traveling, both had unusual competence in sewing, and both had a habit of breaking off corners of new loaves of bread.
So three supposed reincarnations are described in one family, with six people involved, out of whom four committed suicide.
"Experimental Evidence": Spontaneous Memories of the "Initiated"
Throughout the ages claims have been made by or on behalf of certain special, "initiated" individuals that they could recall previous lives. These memories or ostensible memories differ from hypnotic regressions in that they occur to the person in his waking life, and furthermore they are not provoked by artificial stimulus. It is widely believed by Buddhists that yogis have the power to remember entire past lives, and not only recent ones, but all those in which they inhabited a human body. The Buddha himself is reported to have made the following claim:
I, brethren, according as I desire, can remember my divers former lives, that is today, one birth, or two, or three, or four, or five births, or ten, twenty, thirty, forty, fifty births, or hundred, a thousand, or even a hundred thousand, or even more.59
Moreover, the Buddha remembered that in one of his previous lives he was an immensely rich and powerful king in
a royal city surrounded by seven ramparts of gold, silver, beryl, crystal, agate, coral and gems; this surrounded by seven rows of palm trees made of similar precious stones and metals; his magnificent palace; his 84,000 wives, chief of whom was the Pearl among Women; his 84,000 dependent cities, his 84,000 elephants.60
John Hick, in his Death and Eternal Life points out that there is no credible historical evidence that the real Buddha ever made such claims, and he adds that the details of the past incarnations of Buddha "belong to the rhetoric of fairy tale rather than to historical reality."61
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The list of others usually includes Pythagoras, the Emperor Julian the Apostate, Swedenborg, Alexander Dumas Junior, Madame Blavatsky and Annie Besant. "Pythagoras did believe in reincarnations and he may well have claimed to recall previous lives, but the only evidence for this are two paragraphs in Diogenes Laertius, a notoriously unreliable purveyor of gossip and hearsay."62 We dismiss the testimony of the Roman Emperor Julian the Apostate (331-363) since he was possessed. No less authority than the great Greek Church Father St. Gregory Nazianzen describes how he came to be possessed:
At Ephesus Julian came under the direct influence of Maximus. He stayed there for some time and completed a regular course of studies in theurgy. There he must also have been officially initiated into the theurgic mysteries, an event not recorded for us by a pagan but by his adversary, Gregory Nazianzen.
Julian descended into a subterranean sanctuary closed to the common people in the company of a clever conjurer, a theosophist rather than a philosopher. Such individuals practiced a kind of divination that required darkness and subterranean demons to foretell the future. As Julian advanced farther and farther, he encountered terrors increasingly numerous and alarming–strange sounds, revolting exhalations, fiery apparitions, and other such prodigies. Since he was taking his first steps in the occult sciences, the strangeness of the apparitions terrified him. He made the sign of the cross. The demons were subdued and all the visions disappeared. Julian regained courage and began to advance. Then the dread objects started to reappear. The sign of the cross was repeated and they again disappeared. Julian wavered. The director of the initiation at his side explained: "We loathe, but no longer fear them. The weaker cause has conquered!" Convinced by these words, Julian was led on toward the abyss of perdition. What he later heard and did only those know who have undergone such initiations. At any rate, from that day he was possessed.63
Emmanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772), was a Swedish scientist who later in his life wrote theological works. Nominally a Protestant (Lutheran), he claimed that Our Lord Jesus Christ appeared to him in London in 1745 and initiated him into a "true understanding" of Scriptures. Swedenborg misinterpreted the Trinity, believed in "superior races" existing on planets like Jupiter and Mercury. No pure spirits exist, angels and devils are former members of the human race. Death is the casting off by man of his material body which has no share in the resurrection. Immediately after death all human souls enter an intermediate state known as the world of spirits, where they are instructed and prepared for their final abodes, heaven or hell. The Last Judgment already took place in 1757 in the presence of Swedenborg.64
According to Siwek,65 Swedenborg claimed to remember his former lives, but according to experts Siwek cites Swedenborg was "from the psychic point of view seriously ill; he was suffering from persistent hallucinations." His evidence must be suspect since his confused religious views cannot easily be reconciled with reincarnation. And Inge Jonsson writes in the Encyclopedia of Philosophy:
This is not the place to discuss the difficult problem of Swedenborg's mental status....His Theosophy is the result of a pathological development of a pronouncedly schizoid personality whose intense desire for synthesis could not be satisfied within the boundaries of science and normal experience.66
Alexander Dumas, Jr. (1824-95), son of the more famous novelist Alexander Dumas, Sr., is best known for his play La Dame aux camelias which was the basis for Verdi's La Traviata. His memories of past lives are difficult to take seriously since most of his life he was "ultra-nervous" and for a whole year (1859) he was literally insane.67
We can easily dismiss Helena Blavatsky and Annie Besant, leaders of modern Theosophy, since both of them have been under Satanic influence most of their lives. Fr. Martindale describes these two infamous women. Speaking of the youth of Helena Blavatsky (1831-91) [See "Rather than Hell: Reincarnation," The Angelus, July 2005, p. 8], he writes:
She was a somnambulist and very psychic. She was supposed to be possessed, was "drenched in enough holy water to have floated a ship" and was exorcised. However, she still spent hours and days whispering in dark corners "marvelous tales of travel" and the like, to companions visible only to herself....In the August of 1851 her diary says she was in London, and there, during a moonlight ramble by the Serpentine "I met the Master of my dreams."68
About Mrs. Annie Besant (1847-1933) [See "Rather than Hell: Reincarnation," The Angelus, July 2005, p. 8] Martindale writes:
She takes to Spiritualism, finds its phenomena "indubitable" and real....One evening a "voice that was later to become to me the holiest sound on earth" bids her take courage: light is near. A fortnight passes, and Mr. Stead offers to her two large volumes to review. They are Helena Blavatsky's Secret Doctrine.
This was in 1889, four years later "Mrs. Besant was already practising witchcraft."69
Since possession has been mentioned in connection with historical personages, an explanation is in order concerning the distinction between partial and full possession. Partial possession is better known on account of the spectacular phenomena that usually accompany it, such as freezing temperatures, stench, and the partially possessed person not being socially well-adjusted. That is because part of such a person is still fighting against the possession, so exorcism may be attempted with a promise of success. A fully possessed person, on the other hand, is much harder to recognize because he is socially well-adjusted and no easily recognizable indicators of the possession exist. That is because a fully possessed person has wholeheartedly embraced his condition, his will is fully given over to evil, and consequently he cannot be exorcised. So the fact of perfect possession usually can only be inferred.
(to be continued)
Dr. Gyula Mago was born in 1938 in Hungary and brought up Catholic. He lived under Communist rule for 20 years. Dr. Mago obtained his Ph.D. from Cambridge University, England, in 1970, and was a professor of Computer Science at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill (1970-99). He presently lives in retirement in Durham, North Carolina, and assists at the Latin Mass at Holy Redeemer Catholic Church in Raleigh, North Carolina. Part 3, appearing in the September 2005 issue, will thoroughly examine the arguments against reincarnation.
1. Allen Kardec, Heaven and Hell, or Divine Justice Vindicated in the Plurality of Existences (Trubner, 1878).
4. Ian Stevenson, Twenty Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation, 2nd ed. (University Press of Virginia, 1974), p. 181.
5. Thomas Sugrue, There Is a River: The Story of Edgar Cayce (Henry Holt & Co., 1945), pp. 45-46.
10. Ernest Frejer, The Edgar Cayce Companion: A Comprehensive Treatise of the Edgar Cayce Readings (A.R.E. Press, 1995), p. 10.
11. Ibid.,p. 6, Reading 507-1.
13. Ibid., p. 171, Reading 900-10.
14. Ibid., p. 235, Reading 5749-14.
15. Ibid., p. 217, Reading 5749-2.
16. Ibid., p. 207, Reading 5749-8.
17. Ibid., p. 19, Reading 2079-1.
18. Ibid., p. 178, Reading 3744-4.
19. Ibid., p. 28, Reading 2828-4.
20. Ibid., p. 174, Reading 873-1.
21. Ibid., p. 35, Reading 900-24.
22. K. Paul Johnson, "Afterlife Visions of a Sleeping Prophet," Gnosis Magazine, No. 42, Winter 1997.
23. Humphreys, Buddhism, p. 100.
26. Siwek, The Enigma of the Hereafter, p. 112.
27. Hubert L. Dreyfus, What Computers Can't Do: The Limits of Artificial Intelligence (Harper, 1979).
28. The Key to Theosophy, p. 157.
29. Annie Besant, The Ancient Wisdom (London: Theosophical Publishing Society, 1897), p. 293.
30. Anscar Vonier, The Angels (Neumann Press, 1928), pp. 36-37.
31. Blavatsky, The Key to Theosophy, p. 137.
32. J. P. Arendzen, Platform Replies (The Newman Bookshop, 1948), p. 19.
33. Arendzen, What Becomes of the Dead? pp. 237.
36. G. K. Chesterton, "The Dagger with Wings," The Incredulity of Father Brown (Penguin, 1975), p. 144.
37. The Secret Teaching of All Ages, p. 5.
40. Siwek, The Enigma of the Hereafter, p. 110.
41. "The Cycle Moveth," Lucifer, March 1890.
42. G. K. Chesterton, Autobiography (Sheed & Ward, 1936), p. 158.
43. Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange, Life Everlasting (Herder, 1952), p. 172.
45. Frejer, The Edgar Cayce Companion, p. 123, Reading 956-1.
46. Siwek, The Enigma of the Hereafter, pp. 30-36.
47. Edwards, Reincarnation, pp. 195-222.
48. Charles Coppens, Moral Principles and Medical Practice (Benziger Brothers, 1897), pp. 208-09.
49. S. A. La Rochelle and C. T. Fink, Handbook of Medical Ethics (The Newman Bookshop, 1944), p. 188.
50. Henry Davis, Moral and Pastoral Theology (Sheed and Ward, 1949), II, 17-19.
51. Twenty Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation, pp. 2-3.
53. Edwards, Reincarnation: A Critical Examination, p. 62.
54. The Enigma of the Hereafter.
55. Twenty Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation.
59. Edwards, Reincarnation, p. 100.
63. Giuseppe Ricciotti, Julian the Apostate (Bruce, 1959), p. 41.
64. The Catholic Encyclopedia, s.v. "Swedenborgians."
65. The Enigma of the Hereafter, pp. 53-54.
66. S.v. "Emanuel Swedenborg."
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