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The Non-Local Mind: Past-Life Regression                       by Richard Stammler       © Rich Stammler, 2008      If other lives (past, future and simultaneous) can be shown to be real, then the ability to travel with the mind to a past life (or a future life) would definitely provide evidence of the non-local mind. Several talented researchers have worked hard to do just that.      Many past life regression hypnotherapists leave the reality of an “other life” open stating that the results are just as effective if it is the mind that generates these memories at the unconscious level in order to objectify a psychological conflict. The unconscious does this during an altered state of consciousness in order to create an opportunity to resolve it. The psychiatrist and one of the fathers of transpersonal psychology, Stanislav Grof, says it doesn’t matter if the ego believes it (the past life) or not the unconscious believes it.1 That being said, my guess is that most transpersonal (past-live regression) hypnotherapists believe in reincarnation and the veracity of the past lives as expressed by their clients. This in no way means that they believe every transpersonal memory dished up by the unconscious or conscious of the client/patient is accepted as a “real” past life. Hypnotherapists believe that there is a range of remembered and, at times embellished, experience that extends from the imagined and confabulated to the real. They also maintain that for the professional the difference is, in practice, easy to discern.      There are a number of researchers that have focused on a scientific assessment of the veracity of the past-life experience. Helen Wambach and more recently Chet Snow2 have tirelessly regressed thousands of people in order to achieve statistics about past lives. Helen Wambach devised a simple logic. If, for example, the past lives of American Indians were a confabulation, then logically the imagination would romanticize the information and lead to an overwhelming report of popular versions of Indians such as Cherokee, Sioux, Hopi and the like. What Wambach found was that this was not the case and in regression the past lives mimicked what history indicated should be the rough proportion of Indians spanning North and South America. The results correspond to that evidenced by historical records. More extensive analysis of incidence of occupation, clothing, socio-economic class and other factors of daily life also bore out her thesis, that the distribution of past life experiences mimicked, to a remarkable degree, what one would find from historical records.3 It simply is not true that everyone that remembers a past life remembers some famous personality or character.      Psychiatrist Ian Stevenson4 at the University of Virginia is renowned for his decades of direct research into the problem. He painstakingly researched instances of childhood reports of others’ lives. The children had no apparent way to get this knowledge experientially and he reported that their description of these other lives was essentially accurate. There are individual cases that have been researched, which simply allow for no other reasonable conclusion than that the experience came from the child’s memory of real events. If the past life of the child is not real, then at a minimum there is a mechanism for the child gaining such knowledge that eludes any scientifically-based explanation.5      Iverson spent much time researching these cases in foreign cultures where there is no bias against reincarnation as it is in the west. In Lebanon, for example, certain ethnic groups believe that the soul must reincarnate immediately after death and in these areas it is common to find children with inexplicable memories of lives in nearby villages. For example, children express at an early age that “you are not my real mother and father” to their biological parents. Typically, the children describe their homes in a nearby village and their “remembered” parents. Often they are able to explain their death and where and how it occurred, all this from a five year old! Stevenson also published research that demonstrated occasional strong correlation between birthmark and disfiguration in a child and their remembered trauma (often leading to the death in that life) in their previous life.6      There are a number of specific instances of memory of past lives where the verified information is striking. One is the very interesting case of Robert Snow.7 Robert Snow is (was) the chief detective of the homicide unit in a mid-sized Indiana city and clearly did not believe in reincarnation. As a matter of fact, the whole arena of meta-physics, new age belief and the paranormal belonged, for him, to the realm of the “airy fairy” for which he had no patience. One day a discussion ensued between Snow and the female staff psychologist who was familiar with past-life regression. Detective Snow expressed his belief that reincarnation was not real whereupon the psychologist invited him to have a regression session and make up his own mind. Repeated attempts by her to conduct the regression with Snow were always met with one excuse after another. This continued until, true to her profession as a psychologist, she played the one card that he couldn’t refuse. She asked him, “Bob, it’s not that you are afraid of being regressed is it?” To this came Snow’s macho denial and the session was planned and executed.      During the highly successful regression, Snow recalled and experienced a recent past life as a painter by the name of Carroll Beckwith who, as revealed in the regression, had completed some unusual paintings including one of a hunchbacked woman. Somewhat shaken by the experience Snow remarked after the session that surely he had made it all up and it couldn’t have been real. However, as time went on, he couldn’t let go of the experience which proved so unsettling that Snow devised a plan that would resolve the issue once and for all. Snow reasoned that his profession was to establish the facts of events to a sufficient degree as to meet requirements for legal conviction. Since this was his profession, detective Snow felt that he could determine the veracity of the so called past-life memories and established some 32 hard and fast facts that came out of the regression. He was sure he was up to the task of researching these items and was convinced that if he disproved even one of them, the past-life regression was simply imagination or he got the information in some other rationally explainable way.      Detective Snow was desperate to disprove the memories as real past life events. To shorten the rest of the story, in what became a book, Looking for Carroll Beckwith,8 Bob Snow details the ensuing adventure and improbable synchronicities. He relayed these and subsequent events at a roundtable discussion on the reality of past lives at the 2003 IARRT (International Association for Regression Research and Therapies, Inc.) Conference.      Detective Snow followed all of the key facts and proved to his satisfaction that they were not accessible to him in any other readily empirically verifiable way. All 32 “facts” were proven true and he concluded that they represented a reincarnational existence. In his words, the most difficult part of the process was to reorder his way of thinking about reality because once one accepts the reality of past lives a whole host of metaphysical possibilities ensue.      There are also other exemplars of people who, from childhood on, spontaneously and persistently report memories, dreams and flashbacks of other lives. The data, when carefully examined, are so compelling that other explanations are difficult. I am talking about the Canadian pop singer Sherrie Lea Laird with memories of Marilyn Monroe as detailed in a book by the UCLA psychiatrist Adrian Finckelstein.9 There is also the interesting case of Robert Barnes, a native of Arizona, who had persistent childhood memories of a ship, the Titanic.10 When he expressed them as a child, he was punished for these memories but eventually, as an adult, thoroughly researched them with the help of a research psychologist whose aim was “to find him a fraud.” This she was unable to do. Barnes details the life and death of the chief engineer and builder of the Titanic, Thomas Andrews, who was destined to drown when it sank.      Every day these types of memories are excavated during past-life regressions and lead to the inescapable conclusion that the mind is non-local. If the mind did not have this attribute, then mutual lucid dreaming, remote viewing and past-life regression would not be possible. More generally, it is the non-local attribute of the mind that makes a whole host of psi phenomenon possible. Each of us has this attribute, which is limited only by belief and experience. If you do not believe that your mind is non-local, then the exercise of this attribute of the mind will be the exception, but it can be quickly learned as the practice of clinical hypnotherapy continues to demonstrate.      It appears in this state [transpersonal transcendence] any kind of boundary is negotiable, arbitrary, not something mandatory… as you move in this process you can transcend those boundaries in different ways and in different degrees by becoming another person, group consciousness humanity, by becoming aware of all of nature… all theses states are somehow experientially available….There are many reasons to consider these [transpersonal experiences] real phenomena.11       If you want to work on this some more – call me. ___________________ 1 Grof, S. (Speaker). (n.d.). The implications of consciousness research for the theory and practice of psychotherapy. Cassette Recording, Tape 108. Berkeley, CA: New Medicine Tapes. 2 Snow, C. B. (1989). Mass dreams of the future. Crest Park, CA: Deep Forest Press. 3 Wambach, H. (1979). Life before life. New York: Bantam Books and Wambach, H. (1978). Reliving past lives. New York: Bantam Books. 4 Shroder, T. (1999). Old souls, the scientific evidence for past lives. New York: Simon and Schuster. 5 Stevenson, I. (1987). Children who remember previous lives: a question of reincarnation. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company 6 Stevenson, I. (1997). Where reincarnation and biology intersect. Westport, CT: Praeger Paperback. Also, Stevenson, I. Birthmarks and birth defects corresponding to wounds on deceased persons. retrieved 15 March 2008 from http://www.scientificexploration.org/jse/v7n4.php. 7 Snow, R. L. (1999). Looking for Carroll Beckwith, the true story of a detective’s search for his past life. Emmaus: Daybreak Books. 8 The book is available for a few dollars on Half.com at this writing. 9 Finkelstein, A. (2006). Marilyn Monroe returns, The healing of a soul. Charlottesville, NC: Hampton Roads Publishing Company, Inc. 10 Barnes, W. (2000). Voyage into history, Titanic secrets revealed thru the eyes of her builder. Gillette: Edin Books, Inc 11 Grof, S. (Speaker). (1997). The Healing potential of non-ordinary states of consciousness. NMT-21. Berkeley, CA: New Medicine Tapes.