Hidden depths
Brian Inglis
Mind Out of Time: Reincarnation Investigated Ian Wilson (Gollancz pp. 283, £5.95).
Even as recently as ten years ago, in our society, to believe we have a string of past lives behind and ahead of us was considered to be just about as nutty as to think a headache could be removed by sticking a couple of needles into a foot. Since then, both reincarnation and acupuncture have climbed rapidly up their respective league tables to credibility, largely thanks to the Painstaking research of Professor Ian Stevenson of the University of Virginia – and in this country, to the work on hypnotic regression carried out by the late Arnall Etloxham, Joe Keeton and others; and to Dr Arthur Guirdham's books.
The evidence 'suggestive of reincarnation', as Stevenson cautiously describes it, is not sufficiently well-documented and wellattested to make outright scepticism look Childish. And three interpretations of it have presented themselves: that we do have a succession of lives, and that recollection of earlier ones can sometimes break through: that the evidence points not to reincarnation, but to retrocognition – our minds floating back through time; or that what appear to be reconstructions of past events can be accounted for in terms of conventional psychology, without the need to invoke either reincarnation or 'super ESP'.
Ian Wilson plumps for the psychological explanation. Much of what has passed for evidence of an earlier life can be traced, he argues, to cryptomnesia: to information Picked up in early childhood and then forgotten (the explanation offered in the celebrated 'Bridey Murphy' case, when it Was disclosed that Virginia Tighe, who under hypnotic regression had become the early 19th century 'Bridey', had been fed with tales of Ireland by an aunt). He also attaches past lives to secondary personalities, common enough phenomena – though this is tricky, owing to the difficulty in deciding which is the chicken, which the egg.
To declare my own prejudices: I find the idea of returning to earth periodically in different human guises uncomfortable (though as the wise Dr Leslie Weatherhead pointed out, it is not quite so uncomfortable as the Christian notion of having only one soul to be damned with throughout eternity). And the case for 'super ESP', the ability to tune in to anything past, anywhere, is a little too glib. But if Mr Wilson's is the best case that can be made for the psychological theory, it too is sadly weak.
For a start, he is less than fair to Prof. Stevenson. To speak of Stevenson as holding 'strong pro-reincarnationist views' is grossly misleading; and to cite some minor inaccuracies in order to say 'if they occur in cases we can check, then we may justifiably suspect them in those we cannot', is rash, in view of Wilson's own deficiencies.
The reason for them is immediately apparent. The success of his book on the Turin Shroud doubtless suggested that he could do a similar job on reincarnation; but having begun with the notion 'that my degree in history would be the only qualification I needed', he found himself immersed in psychology, 'a field in which I had not the slightest qualification'. The fact that his wife qualified in psychology reassured him, and he went ahead with her as a kind of long-stop: hardly a sensible way to approach such complex issues.
As a result Mr Wilson makes elementary errors, such as assuming that mesmerism is hypnotism renamed. And in discussing trance regression, he manages to leave out the seminal research conducted by the Swiss psychologist Theodore Flournoy, described in his From India to the Planet Mars. It was Flournoy who put the crymptomnesia idea on the map; to ignore him is like writing a book on precognition and leaving out J.W. Dunne's Experiment with Time.
To leave Dunne out of a study of the evidence for reincarnation is also, paradoxically, a mistake; and not just because if we can move forward in time, in our dreams, we presumably can move backwards too. What was important about Dunne's account of his dreams was his emphasis on the fact that although he often 'saw' the future, he invariably 'saw' it inaccurately.
Mr Wilson laboriously shows that the records of past lives as relived in trances can be faulted — as if this sufficed to discredit them. One of Bloxham's subjects, for example, described the Vikings he had encountered in a past life as having horns sticking out of their helmets. The inference, Mr Wilson claims, is that he saw the Vikings not as they were, 'but as he imagined them to be'. Indeed, yes; but this is not dismissive of reincarnation or retrocognition. If they exist, they presumably lie deep in the unconscious mind. On their way to the surface they can be expected to become confused with ideas and pictures which our pre-conscious minds have absorbed; much as a net used to trawl for deep-ocean flora and fauna collects flying-fish and weeds before it is pulled in.
The same applies to Mr Wilson's magisterial dismissal of the evidence from xenoglossy, or 'speaking in tongues'. There is a great deal of evidence from research with trance subjects, and frequently it reveals errors and solecisms of a kind that a native speaker would not make. But this, like the Vikings' horn helmets, should serve only as a warning not to accept everything which emerges from trance regression as accurate. It may once have been, in its pristine state, but become corrupted on its way towards consciousness.
This precaution should in any case not lead us to downgrade xenoglossy. Whatever its source, it is surely a remarkable phenomenon, in which an individual speaks strange languages or dialects fluently, even if not perfectly, though he can never have learned them. Where do they.come from? But if this and related problems are to be solved, it will only be by investigators who approach them with rather more caution, and a lot more humility.
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