... I have to ask this .... what exactly is modern science doing?
Picture this. You’re nearly 40 years
old. Your name is Hanan. You have three beautiful children who love you more
than anyone else. You’re married to the man
of your dreams. Everything is perfect;
just the way you always wanted it to be.
One day, you leave your family and
travel abroad for heart surgery. Before the operation you call your daughter
but you can’t get through. After the operation, you want to call but you can’t
remember the last digit in the number. You get frustrated. You want to go home
to your loved ones but you can’t. You’re
forced to live with another family.
Years pass. Everyday you think about
your family. Your love for them never dies. Finally, one day you are allowed to
meet up with them again, but they don’t love you the same way. You find out
your husband has another woman. Your children don’t want to look at you. You
feel betrayed, hurt and rejected.
Your world is completely shattered. Your very reason for being is taken away from
you for the second time.
It’s not your fault. All you want is for things
to be the way they were before the operation.
You want your family to love you and accept you again. You want them to
be happy to see you. You want your dream back. There’s only one obstacle. You’re
5 years old and your name is Suzanne. How do you deal with the heartache? How
do you live with the trauma?
If you think this sounds unreal. Think again.
This is just one of many documented cases of reincarnation and past life memories
around today.
What is reincarnation? Reincarnation
comes from the Eastern philosophies of Hinduism, Buddhism and Taoism. They
believe a soul comes back, in many bodies, over many lifetimes to learn and
grow. It is its chance to make old wrongs right.
In Western culture, Edgar Cayce was
one of the first people to introduce this philosophy back in the 1950s. In many
of his readings, he says the main purpose of the soul is to learn and grow; to
earn its place next to the Creator.
However,
reincarnation is not widely accepted among Christians. Christianity says we
have two options in this lifetime. We can either be good and go to heaven, or
we can be bad and go to hell. Either
way, we don’t get second chances. Yet, nowadays
religious faith is being challenged more and more. Many people are turning to
Holistic ways of living. Media is full of “alternative” ways of thinking. So,
even many Christians find themselves curious about the subject.
There are
many books available on reincarnation like Dr. Brian Weiss’s Many Lives, Many Masters (1988) and Tom
Shroder’s Old Souls (1999). The
problem with authors (sceptics and believers alike), researchers and
speculators is that everyone is too
busy trying to prove if reincarnation exists or not. Some argue over proof and
lack of it. Some argue how research
methods are not good enough. Some are too busy just trying to make a name for
themselves.
While researching the American, Italian, British
and Portuguese Psychological societies online, I found that nobody is studying
how memories of past lives directly or indirectly affect children’s mental
health. Nobody is offering professional
help for teenagers who live with the suffering these memories cause. Nobody is developing new models of thought to
help these young people. Why?
We like to think of ourselves as an evolved
society of human beings but science and scientists are behind the times; not
just in Western societies. Science refuses to accept that reincarnation exists
because there are no hard facts. My
question is how can we continue to let
these children suffer in the name of a “globally accepted” science that is
completely out of date? Why can’t we (as scientists) put our beliefs, religion,
culture and egos aside to find new ways of helping these children?
In Western society, we choose to
believe or not in reincarnation. However, for the Druze (or Druse) memories of
past lives are very real. They are a group of people who follow the spiritual
faith of El-Mowahideen El-Druze. It is not certain but the Druze
faith may have started in Egypt
about 1000 years ago. According to the Druze Organisation, nowadays there are
almost one million followers worldwide. Many live in Lebanon,
Syria, Jordan, parts of India
and Egypt.
Many others live in Western societies. (www.druzenet.org/dnenglish.html)
Although the Druze basic religious
beliefs begin in Islam, their faith is very different. They believe their
spiritual leader, El-Mowahideen El-Druze, was
the reincarnation of God. They believe in the efforts of man and his actions. Their central philosophy is that a soul will
return to earth many lifetimes to learn and grow. They believe it has done so
since the beginning of time and will do so until the end of time.
These differences caused religious
wars in regions such as the Gaza
strip. They also played a part in the civil war in Lebanon.
During his (almost) 40 year career, Dr.
Ian Stevenson travelled throughout Lebanon
and India
documenting cases of past life memories. He interviewed thousands of Druze
children, their family members, friends and neighbours. He also did follow-up interviews to see how
memories of past lives affected behaviour in adult life. Yet, he offers little
or no research on mental health issues.
Shroder documents more than twenty
cases from Stevenson’s 1998 visit in Old
Souls. He also mentions some cases found in the United States of America.
The first person to bring past life
memories to the general public, was Dr. Brian Weiss. In 1988 he published: Many Lives, Many Masters. In it, he speaks
of his patient Catherine, who comes to him because she is seeking a cure for
her fears of water and choking, dieing and airplanes.
At first, he believes these fears
come from somewhere in Catherine’s childhood.
So, they both agree hypnotherapy is the best treatment. Hypnotherapy is
a form of hypnosis used to bring painful, hidden memories back into the waking
mind. So, the professional can help a
patient face them, deal with them and let them go. This is the way Inner healing begins.
During hypnotherapy, a professional
uses hypnotic suggestions to guide a person into a deep state of relaxation. In
this state, the conscious mind, which processes all the information we receive,
is temporarily switched off. So, we are
free to enter the sub-conscious mind. This is where we store all information we
are not fully aware of; including painful memories.
Catherine has several hypnotherapy sessions
with Dr. Weiss. He asks her to remember anything
from her childhood that she associates with her fears. She remembers nothing. One day, Weiss gives
her a different type of hypnotic suggestion.
He asks her to remember the first ever memory she feels is the
cause. Suddenly, Catherine starts talking
about previous lives.
As the memories unfold, Weiss
discovers that her fear of water comes from drowning in another life. Her fear of airplanes comes from being a male
soldier in the Second World War. Slowly, he finds that every current fear of
hers comes from something that happened in another lifetime.
They begin to see progress and
Catherine’s fears begin to disappear. However, she is mentally disturbed by knowing
that she is talking about past lives. Reincarnation
is not a word that is in her vocabulary since it challenges her beliefs. Dr. Weiss has to convince her a lot to
continue the sessions.
As far as I am aware, there is no
follow-up research to say how Catherine was mentally marked by her experience. Her
fears disappeared but has her life changed as a result? Has she suffered any form of identity
crisis? Did what she gain outweigh what
she lost? These are all questions that remain unanswered.
One of Dr. Stevenson’s cases, Daniel,
remembered dieing in a car accident when he lived as a young man called Rashid.
He started speaking of this as a very young child. He remembered names, faces,
his previous mother, his family members and so on. He accused his current
mother of not being his mother; his family of not being his real family. He
insisted daily on being taken back to his real
family.
His mother says that, as a child,
Daniel didn’t like getting in the car. Also, that he screamed and cried every
time they drove past the scene of the accident.
As a man, Daniel tells us that he
likes cars but he still has a fear of fast driving. He, also, still has a fear
of the place where the accident happened.
So, simply talking about traumas from past lives is not enough to make
fears disappear. At least not in every case as Weiss would have us believe.
Daniel only begins to feel better
when he and his family meet Rashid’s. Luckily, they all find support and
friendship in one another. Daniel’s parents no longer see their child suffering
and they become more accepted by him. Rashid’s parents no longer grieve because
they have a part of their son back and Daniel finds himself with two loving support
groups he can turn to. Everyone is happy
and the trauma is overcome.
But what about Suzanne’s case? She
was only six months old when she tried to phone Hanan’s daughter; Leila. She is now a young woman and still
very much in love with her husband. She still misses her children and cries for
them as a mother would. As well as coming to terms with her new life and
growing up, she has to deal with emotions of loss, anger, jealousy etc. tied to
her last life.
Over the years, Farouk decided to
break all ties with her because of his own feelings of pain and guilt. He and
the family believed she was Hanan but they couldn’t deal with the fact that she
was now a little girl. The only solution
was to walk away. However, walking away
is only avoiding the issue. Neither
parties involved had professional help they could turn to. Now in his sixties, Farouk is still affected
by the experience.
Suzanne’s life is not moving forward
and she is not mentally developing in a healthy way. She is living in the past and nobody is
helping her to come through this. Who she was is very real to her; like for
many others. The feelings and emotions of the past life are very real. It is
not about having some memories of being someone else. It is not about having fears that come from
somewhere unknown as with Catherine. It is about being born as the same identity
in a different body, a different environment and in a different family.
Psychiatrist Jim Tucker explains
this as a transfer of one person’s personality into another. However, nobody knows what a personality
is. Nobody knows what a soul is. So, it’s impossible to explain how either one
can go from one body to another. At
present, psychology and science offer no help either. In fact, they are challenged by the very
existence of children like Suzanne.
Psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud was the
first to say that infants, as young as six months, are only capable of
satisfying their biological needs. They
have no awareness similar to that of adults.
He says personality only develops while growing up.
Carl Jung, founder of analytical
psychology, proposed that babies are born with instincts. Thus, they automatically know how to get
attention, when and how to cry for food etc. It is something he believed we all
shared in common in a collective unconscious.
Psychologist, Jean Piaget, in his Theory of Cognitive Development proposed
that infants only begin to put together actions (on purpose) by the age of 2
years. Up until that time, he believes
they only understand the world through how they interpret it. They learn by trial and error of their
actions.
Yet, at six months, Suzanne behaves
similar to an adult. She picks up a phone and tries to call Hanan’s daughter’s.
She shows no sign of understanding she is a baby. She is only held back by the
limiting abilities of her physical age.
This is not the first case where
this appears. Another infant called
Joseph insisted his mother buy him size 8 shoes. She tells him they will be too
big but he doesn’t believe it until he
tries them on. In another case, Robert
can speak and string whole sentences together by the age of 6 months.
These children are outside the
normal child development models presented above. Unfortunately, nobody is developing a model
for them. There are no guidelines to help professionals help them. We need to
be open to new possibilities and start looking at things in a different way if
we are to find a solution. Not only would it be beneficial for cases of
reincarnation, it would help to explain the development of child geniuses in the world.
However, science continues to ignore
the issue. So, what are we left with? Transpersonal and Holistic psychology.
These are relatively new fields that look at the person as a unique individual
made up of mind, body and soul. They do
not stick to strict clinical methods of investigation like conventional science
but it does not make them any less of value. They give individuals the safety
to talk about memories of past lives.
However, they fail to offer
cross-cultural understanding. To understand a culture, one has to live in that
culture. One has to be able to put aside
their own belief systems. One has to be
accepted into that culture and break through barriers of prejudice. One has to be able to communicate in a way
that is understandable in another culture.
Most important of all, one has to learn to be humble in front of another
culture.
Having travelled extensively
throughout 39 countries and worked with almost every nationality on the planet,
I know how important adaptation and respect is. Too many wars have pulled us apart
as human beings.
It’s time we put our egos aside and
worked together as one people. It’s time
that science and transpersonal science find a way to work together. It’s time to stop fighting over who is right
and who is wrong. If we are going to
help children with past life memories, we need to develop new ways of
thinking. We need to come up with new
models and guidelines to help professionals have a better understanding.
Children are children. They are the future of this world. As such, they deserve the best attention we
can give them, regardless of their culture, religion, colour or belief. Unless we find new ways of helping them, we
will never be able to call ourselves evolved human beings.
If there are Druze in our community, I would dearly love to hear from you in the strictest confidence. Please contact me at: venerinac@yahoo.co.uk or send me a private message through AdlandPro.
Thank you and take care,
Namaste
V
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