Indian Studies of Past Life Childhood Memories
Bangalore: Previous roles, former families and tracing old houses amidst ruins. Reincarnation still remains a rare phenomena to many people world over. However, to this doctor from the National Institute of Mental Health and Neuro Sciences (NIMHANS), two-year-olds who talk about their past lives as thakurs would be an ideal subject for study.
According to Dr Satwant Pasricha, Department of Clinical Psychology, NIMHANS, nearly 2,500 cases of children who claim to remember previous lives have been investigated in several cultures over the past three decades.
"Cases have been reported and investigated not only from cultures or communities whose people believe in reincarnation, but also from those whose people don't believe," says the professor who first came to Bangalore in 1972. Pasricha is the only person in India to have done work on reincarnation.
"I have collaborated with the University of Virginia. I always felt there was something strange about human behaviour. We don't have answers to all our anomalous behaviour," she adds. Pasricha says that to begin with, she was very skeptical. "I had taken up psychology as a subject and learnt about abnormal psychology," she says.
"The claims of some persons that they were able to recall spontaneously the events of previous lives earlier attracted little attention from scientists," says Pasricha, who undertook an investigation to study 45 cases of reincarnation with the hope that it would contribute to the existing knowledge of human behaviours, both abnormal and paranormal. All these cases were from North India.
"I don't know why there are fewer cases in the south. In fact, I have thrown open this question to other scientists," says Pasricha, who has also recently placed an advertisement in newspapers asking people to write in to her.
"In order to learn about the belief in reincarnation, I adapted a special questionnaire. It revealed that the belief existed even in people who didn't know of any actual rebirth case. I gathered information from various sources in order to understand and reconstruct events involved in a case. The majority of the cases were reported either from towns or villages. The subjects' ages ranged from three-and-a-half-years to 35 years," she says.
Pasricha adds that there were more male subjects, probably because parents were less ready to allow the investigation of girls.
She found unusual behavioural features in most cases -- unusual likes or dislikes toward food, clothes, people, play themes ; phobias that corresponded closely to the mode of death in past life (141 out of 387 cases) and children who claimed to remember past life with change in religion.
She explains, "The intermission between death and presumed rebirth was from one day to 224 months."
During any investigation, Pasricha always goes in a team. "There are several reasons. One could be reliability of information. I may hear what I want to hear. Moreover, when you are alone, you can't really concentrate. When you come back after making notes, discrepancies can be resolved between the team and you can then go back to the original informant," she adds.
Pasricha's work on reincarnation is an ongoing process. She says, "I have continued to investigate reincarnation cases up to the present. Some of the less thoroughly investigated cases are still under study."
• Story originally published in •
The Times of India - November 14 2000
