PARA ARTICLE :.

THE THIRD EYE

  Posted July 20.04

Two persons caught me and took me with them. I felt tired after walking some distance; they started to drag me. My feet became useless. There was a man sitting up. He looked dreadful and was all black. He was not wearing any clothes. He said in a rage [to the attendants who brought Vasudev, the narrator of this near-death experience] ‘I had asked you to bring Vasudev the gardener. Our garden is drying up. You have brought Vasudev the student.’ When I regained consciousness, Vasudev the gardener was standing in front of me [apparently in the crowd of family and servants who had gathered around the bed of the ostensibly dead Vasudev]. He was hale and hearty... He seemed to sleep well in the night, but the next morning he was dead."

Manju Sharma from Mathura district of Uttar Pradesh was two years old when she started talking about belonging to a different family in a village located 5 km away. She said she had drowned in a well in her previous birth and remembered vivid details of her family, relatives and friends.

When news spread, relatives of her so-called previous personality visited her. Manju wept bitterly when she saw them, and insisted on staying with them for a few days. She remembered Krishna’s (her personality in a previous birth) anklets, recognised her friend. In effect her previous family was convinced that their dead daughter had been re-born as Manju.

What often passes off as extrasensory perception, past-life memories and near-death experiences could well be fantasy, delusion or downright fraud. There are any number of people who claim to know events before they happen, see incidents and images that are taking place in far-off places, have had a near-death experience like Vasudev’s or say they were reborn.

India abounds in tales of such unexplained occurrences. Enterprising men with exceptional talent to emote and a gift of the gab have built careers out of faking such experiences. With a touch of spirituality, they have even managed to elevate themselves to godmen.

But there are others who have chosen not to go to town about their ‘unknown’ experiences, and who presented themselves as objects of study before the scientific community. These are the people whose tales science is trying hard to explain; tales that have split the community of ‘right-thinking people’ vertically.

Vasudev and Manju are among a few hundred cases that have been put under the microscope in India. Vasudev was investigated in 1973 by Dr Ian Stevenson, professor of psychiatry at University of Virginia, along with Dr Satwant K. Pasricha, head of the department of clinical psychology at National Institute of Mental Health and Neuro Science, Bangalore. A young boy from Uttar Pradesh, Vasudev had the near-death experience when he was seriously ill with typhoid. The boy recovered and the family’s gardener, Vasudev, died. Stevenson has investigated 2,600 such cases with his collaborators across the world. Pasricha has studied 500, and Manju is one of them.

Manju was born three years after Krishna’s death in 1965. Though her parents, Tej Pal Singh and Ram Siri, kept quiet about her past-life memories for fear of losing their daughter, word spread after she recognised a person from Chaumuha, Krishna’s village. He informed Krishna’s father, Ladali Saran, who came to Pasauli with his son. Manju wept bitterly when she saw them. They took her to Chaumuha where she identified the well in which Krishna had drowned. Once both families thought Manju was Krishna in her previous birth, she divided her childhood between Pasauli and Chaumuha.

The regularity with which such cases as Manju’s have presented themselves has raised questions about whether our understanding of concepts such as mind, matter, time and space is flawed, if not totally wrong. Die-hard rationalists too agree that a dismissive view of such occurrences would be myopic.

Astronomer Carl Sagan, a confirmed sceptic, believed that psychic phenomena are worthy of serious study. Closer home, Justice V.R. Krishna Iyer, one of the prominent judicial minds of our time, in his book Death and After (Konark Publishers) details his experiences of trying to communicate with his dead wife. Popular media commercialised the subject through teleserials such as X-Files and Honi-Anhoni and films such as the Hollywood blockbuster Ghost and Bollywood hits Madhumati and Karz. But all these could be termed as commercial exploitation of para-psychology, considering the thirsting mandate for believe-it-or-not stories. Ipsita Roy Chakraverti, a ‘practising witch’, in her book Sacred Evil, Encounters with the Unknown (HarperCollins, 2003) narrates nine autobiographical stories of her dakini vidya (witchcraft) and how she can align with some external powers.

Can Ipsita align with what psychiatrist Carl Jung termed the ‘collective unconscious’, the energy source that is said to surround us and which supposedly contains the memories of the entire human race? We have no answer. In the first place, scientists have not yet figured out where human consciousness is located, let alone find out how it can exist outside of the physical body.

Philosopher U.G. Krishnamurti, popularly known as UG, rubbishes all academic efforts that try to unravel human consciousness. "You have no way at all of finding out the seat of human consciousness, because it is all over, and you are not separate from that consciousness," he says. "Even with all the experiments that the brain physiologists and psychologists are doing, wasting millions and millions of dollars on trying to locate the seat of human consciousness, they will never be able to find it out at all. I am not making a dogmatic statement or any such thing."

On the other hand, Dr Brian Weiss, former chairman of psychiatry at Mount Sinai Medical Center in Miami, and a psychiatrist, shed his rationalist way of looking at patients in the course of treating one. Catherine, who sought his help for her anxiety, panic attacks and phobia, did not respond to conservative therapy. When he hypno-tised her as a last resort, she recalled her past life. Detailing this in his book Many Lives, Many Masters (Judy Piatkus Publishers, UK, 1994), Weiss wonders whether he had stumbled upon the collective unconscious through Catherine’s experience.

One could argue in Weiss’s favour—why would a well-established professional risk his reputation by accepting spooky stuff? But, the inevitable convergence of such findings with religion makes it impo-ssible for a sceptic, atheist and man of science to swallow such phenomena.

In India, where karma is the guiding principle and where Hindutva is on an upswing, subjects like parapsychology grow denser. If on the one hand, there is unquestioning acceptance of reincarnation at the level of the masses, on the other, it is rubbished (by academics) as irrational or attempts at ‘cultural revivalism’.

For instance, H.S. Naicker, the yoga guru of Kannada matinee idol Rajkumar, believes there is an interconnectedness of human consciousness. "When I talk to you, it is not myself communicating with you," says Naicker. "It is a conference of souls. We are all related."

Naicker talks about concepts like parakayapravesha (entering another body) and claimed he had a telepathic link with Rajkumar when the actor was held hostage by the brigand K.M. Veerappan. In an interview during the kidnap drama, Naicker said Rajkumar had not been kidnapped at all because no soul could be confined against its own will. Everything, he said, is maya.

While this is the dense, meta-physical end of the belief spectrum, the opposite end—blind rationalism— rejects even the scientific experim-ents. Prof. Yash Pal dismisses parapsychology as something that "should be thrown into the same bin to which astrology and vaastu shastra belong".

In the middle are open-minded researchers like Pasricha. "I believe in my research," she says. "People should judge for themselves on the basis of evidence." An unusual piece of evidence reported in her book Claims of Reincarnation: An Empirical Study of Cases in India is Uttara Huddar of Nagpur. While researchers have found that memories of past lives are most active during childhood, Uttara started becoming aware of her previous birth as Sharada when she was in her early 30s.

The memories changed her personality: she would speak a language which was unfamiliar to her in her normal state and dress up like a married Bengali woman and talked at length about the 19th century genealogy of a Chattopadhyay family to which Sharada had belonged. While in most cases of reincarnation, rebirth is claimed to happen within a couple of years of death, Uttara was born 110 years after Sharada’s death.

However, the current debate in science is no longer about providing evidence of the psychic, but about accepting the psychic as real. Says Dr Dean Radin in his book The Conscious Universe (HarperCollins, 1997): "Psi [psychic phenomenon] has been shown to exist in thousands of experiments. There are disagreements over how to interpret evidence, but the fact is that virtually all scientists who have studied the evidence, including the hard-nosed sceptics, now agree that there is something interesting going on that merits serious scientific attention."

In the 1990 edition of Introduction to Psychology, a textbook on psychology by Richard L. Atkinson et al, the authors wrote: "Readers should take note of a new section entitled ‘Psi Phenomena’... And although we still have strong reservations about most of the research in parapsychology, we find the recent work on telepathy worthy of careful consideration."

Radin says if so much proof, as presented by studies of the paranormal, had been presented to support any other natural pheno-menon, science would have long embraced the findings. That raises the debate whether science is equipped to cope with these enigmas.

The vast area that separates belief from disbelief holds the key. While the former invariably winds its way to spiritualism and religious faith, the latter does not draw a line between the paranormal and the spiritual. Accepting one would mean accepting all and, thereby, sacrificing scientific ideals at the altar of faith.

The implications of accepting psychic phenomena would obviously question the very foundations on which science has been built. But to dismiss them without scientific inquiry would be to dogmatise science, and label as heresy any challenge thrown at it.

N. Bhanutej

.:Story originally published by:.
This Week / India - July 18.04

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