by Max Ehrlich
First, he said, the idea of reincarnation was older and better established than any of the present religions. It was just as believable, and even more logical, than any of the existing religions. Even today over one billion people on the planet believed in it. Most of them were from the East, but it was rapidly spreading through the western world. Reincarnation was not simply a comforting superstition for idiots; many men of intelligence and reason passionately believed or had believed in it. Among them were: Gandhi, Benjamin Franklin, Henry Ford, Masefield, Yeats, Robert Browning, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Thomas Huxley, Voltaire, Goethe, Ibsen, Spinoza, Plato, and Oliver Wendell Holmes. “The professors in our universities, the scientists, regard the occult groups, the fringe societies, as absurd, way out, immature, fuzzy, unsubstantiated and fraudulent. The fringe groups see the so-called Establishment as rigid, arrogant, intolerant, and condescending. Both are partly right and partly wrong, but each can learn from the other. Some day they may fuse their efforts in a constructive way. And the catalyst may be reincarnation.
“The materialist says that only that which you can see or measure, or otherwise identify by your senses, is real. But this kind of materialism belongs in another age. Any child with a primary scientific education today knows that no one has ever seen an atom. It exists only by inference. But we accept it as there. Yet most psychologists, most of my colleagues, will not accept the idea that a soul exists. Why? Because nobody has ever seen one. I am defining ‘soul’ here as a living thing that leaves the body at death and goes on to exist elsewhere.
“Those who ridicule the concept of rebirth try to bury any evidence of reincarnation. They call it wishful thinking. It is, to use the parlance, a ‘copout,’ a refusal to face the future on rational grounds. But let us now examine this concept on a rational basis. An orthodox scientific approach to any problem is to make a number of reasonable assumptions and then either eliminate or prove them by the application of logic. There are three assumptions we may make here. The first is that when you’re dead, you’re dead. The soul, if it exists at all, dies with you. The second is the idea that you do have a soul, but when you die, your soul goes to heaven or to hell, depending on how you behaved in life. And the third is the idea of reincarnation. Your soul is immortal and is carried from one life to another.
“As to the first assumption,” said Bentley, “nobody has ever proved that when you’re dead, you’re dead. I know that most people insist this is true, but there is no real evidence to prove it is so. As to the second assumption, nobody has ever proved that your soul has gone to hell, or to heaven, either. But consider the third assumption, the idea of reincarnation.
“Here, we must consider certain phenomena. Not real evidence, perhaps, and by no means scientific proof, but interesting nevertheless. These consist of observation, testimony from living persons, and memory phenomena no one can explain.
“First of all, there is the phenomenon of déjà vu. The skeptics argue that if we have indeed lived before, why can’t we remember anything of our past lives? But the fact is, many of us seem to do just that. Almost everybody has had the experience of going somewhere he has never before visited in his lifetime, and yet having the eerie feeling that he has been there before, has seen the place before: a hillside, a road, a village, a view. There are thousands of case histories of people, rational and intelligent people, who have claimed déjà vu. Orthodox psychiatrists have put this down simply as a process of ‘opening a false memory door.’ But they never explain the basis of this ‘false memory.’
“There is another phenomenon—one that is truly universal. You meet a stranger whom you like or dislike intensely on first sight, even before you’ve exchanged a word. And you can’t explain why. In a boy-meets-girl situation, there is often instant attraction, or ‘love at first sight.’ Why does this happen? Some call it a mysterious chemical attraction. Others say the stranger reminds you of someone in childhood you loved or hated or feared. The children of Aquarius call it vibrations. But nobody has really explained it. Could it be possible that these likes or dislikes have come from buried memories of someone you knew in a past life? This, to me, is at least as good an explanation as any of the other theories, and probably better.”
But the evidence for reincarnation, Bentley pointed out, was most startling in the behavior of children.
“Researchers all over the world have recorded hundreds of instances in which children seemed to remember some past life. They insisted they were someone else, an adult in some previous life, and they described places where they have never been. Usually, this is put down to childish prattling or fantasy. But the fact is that the people and places named by these children and some of the happenings they recounted have later been verified by trained and disinterested investigators.”
He cited some famous cases of prenatal memory in children—that of Shanti Devi; and the Japanese boy, Katsugoro, first reported by Lafcadio Hearn, as well as others. Also, there was the work done by Stevenson of Virginia in the prenatal memory of children. It was interesting that in India, when children talked about being somebody else or having once lived in some other place far from their native village, they were listened to seriously. Here in the West, when children spoke about the same thing, it was considered childish fantasy and either dismissed or actively discouraged. Children became inhibited about reporting these prenatal memories and ultimately repressed them. In this way the memories became “lost” to them.
A third phenomenon, Bentley continued, was the existence of child prodigies—for instance, Mozart and Mendelssohn, who wrote great symphonies at a very young age, or the great chess master Samuel Reshevsky, who, at the age of five, played three European champions at the same time and beat them all. Some people tried to explain this in terms of genes, but, again, this has not been conclusively demonstrated. A more interesting explanation would be reincarnation. Could these prodigies have actually learned these skills as adults in previous lives, and simply brought them into their present ones? Again, it is as good a hypothesis as any other, if not better.
“Finally,” wrote Bentley, “parapsychologists like myself have been able to regress people under hypnosis—not just to the point where they remember their very early childhood and even their babyhood, but way beyond that, where they remember, or claim to remember, some previous life. Some, while in regression, have even spoken foreign languages totally unknown to them.
“Unfortunately, we have never been able to document these past lives. The reason for this is that the subjects regress to periods too far in the past for their experiences to be reliably corroborated. It is this lack of documentation that makes it ultimately impossible to offer conclusive proof of reincarnation….”
Chapter 11
Bentley’s office was on Rodeo Drive. It was modest in size and tastefully furnished. The parapsychologist smiled a welcome and waved Peter to a chair.
“Sit down, Dr. Proud.”
He was a big man, about fifty, with iron-gray hair and penetrating gray eyes under heavy brows. To Peter, he looked more like a football coach than a parapsychologist.
Bentley offered him a silver cigarette box.
“Smoke?”
“No, thanks.”
“Sam Goodman was very mysterious about your problem. All he would say was that you were going through some curious psychic experiences and that they were upsetting you pretty badly. He called them fantastic, absolutely unique. And Sam isn’t a man given to superlatives.” He smiled. “Naturally, I’m hooked.”
“Dr. Bentley, I’m in trouble. Frankly, I’m scared.”
“Suppose you tell me about it.”
“l don’t even know where to begin.”
“Go back a little first. Tell me something about yourself. Who you are, what you do, who your parents are. Then you can get into the nitty-gritty. Just tell it the way it happened, and don’t leave out anything.”
Peter glanced at the clock. “It’s going to take some time.”
“Relax. We’ve got
plenty of time. And I’m a good listener.” He motioned to the small tape recorder on his desk. “Mind if I use this?”
“No.”
“Good. It seems to upset some people. But I like to have everything on tape.” He picked up the small microphone and said: “February fifth, 1974. Initial interview with Peter Proud. Referred by Dr. Samuel Goodman.” Then Bentley leaned back and signaled Peter to begin.
Through it all, the parapsychologist sat perfectly still. He never took his eyes from Peter’s face. When Peter got into the dream sequences, Bentley seemed particularly fascinated. Peter told him about everything except his visit to Verna Bird, which he omitted out of embarrassment. He was afraid Bentley would think him an idiot.
When he had finished, Bentley continued to stare at him. “Well, I’ll say this. You’re a pretty unique bird.”
“Yes?”
“I’ve had a lot of people, come in here and tell me they’ve lived past lives. They sailed with Ulysses, or spoke to Christ as a shepherd in Galilee, or fought the Gauls with Caesar. But you’re the first one who’s walked into my office and claimed prenatal memory that’s really recent.” He paused. “You’re sure these dreams never vary? There’s never anything new?”
“No.”
“Interesting. I’ll use a better word than that: fantastic. Sam Goodman was right.”
“The question is—can you help me?”
“I don’t know. I’m still trying to digest what you’ve just told me.”
“I wish to God I knew what was happening to me. If you have any idea at all …”
“Let me put it this way. If men like Staub don’t know, then I can’t illuminate your problem any further. That is, not on their terms. But without going into a long song and dance about some of the work we’ve been doing in the Psi area, I can tell you this. We have some reason to believe, in our limited frame of reference, that recurring dreams like yours may be an indication of genuine prenatal memories. The fact that the same details accurately repeat themselves over and over makes the possibility even stronger. And the fact that they are almost contemporary makes them even more intriguing. However, from your point of view, they’re tormenting and debilitating, both mentally and physically. And in time they could be dangerous. It’s important to penetrate through to them, if we can. My suggestion, Dr. Proud, is that we try regressive hypnosis.”
“Regressive hypnosis?”
“Yes. Once in a great while, we’re able to regress people in a trance state back to prenatal memory. Presumably, they’re able to remember details of their previous lives. I’d like to try that with you. If it works, we may open up a very important door.”
“What do you mean?”
Bentley took a deep breath. “Dr. Proud, in every case I’ve ever known about in which a subject regressed to a prenatal state, the ‘memories’ have always gone far back in time—so far back that nobody can check to prove the reincarnation. Even the celebrated Bridey Murphy goes too far back for easy and conclusive proof. She is supposed to have been born in 1798 and died in 1864. The controversy about her is still going on, and it’ll go on for a long time, because there’s no way of checking it out.”
Bentley paused. “Now you walk in here and drop a bombshell in my lap. Without any regressive hypnosis at all, you’ve experienced dream fragments just a few years away from being contemporary. All of them fall into the same time frame—according to the Automobile Dream, as you call it, sometime in the forties. Mind you, that’s what the hallucination says. That doesn’t mean it’s true. I’m not buying it, at least not all the way. It’s still possible you saw a picture of that car, or even the car itself, a long time ago and stored it in your memory bank. In none of your dreams can you recall any names whatever—names of people, the town, anything we could follow up and prove. But if we can regress you back into prenatal memory, and it’s a very big IF, then maybe you’ll come up with something—the name of this town you lived in, your own name, or, rather, the name of the man you call X. If you knew the name of the town, for instance, you could go back and visit it. Find some answers. Obviously, if it exists in reality, it’ll still be there.”
“My God,” Peter said softly. “That’s—frightening.”
“I know,” said Bentley dryly. “It’s an interesting scenario. But don’t count on it. We ran out of miracles long ago, and I don’t think anything’s changed. But if you agree, I’d definitely like to try it. And if it doesn’t work, we’ll try to attack your problem through suggestion hypnosis. That means that I’ll try to get rid of the hallucinations through suggestion—exorcise them, so to speak. Well, what do you say?”
“I’ll try anything at this point.”
“All right. Suppose you be in my office tomorrow morning at ten o’clock.”
When the door closed, Hall Bentley leaned back in his chair and shut his eyes.
It was enough to stagger the imagination.
Listening to Proud’s story, he had at first been incredulous, then shaken. He had fought to stay cool, to present only his professional face to Proud. He didn’t want his patient even to sense the excitement churning around inside of him; it might upset him. Any effective use of the trance itself was contingent on the trust and confidence the patient had in the hypnotherapist; without it, there would be resistance to the induction of the trance itself. Further, the hypnotized subject was very sensitive to everything in his immediate environment, especially the emotional configuration of the hypnotherapist.
He canceled all his appointments for the rest of the day. And that night he was unable to sleep.
Chapter 12
The next morning, Bentley saw that Peter was tight, tense.
“What do I do first?”
“The first thing you do is try to relax.”
“That’s pretty hard to do. I’ve got a lot riding on this.”
“The idea of hypnosis bother you?”
“I guess it does, a little,”
“No reason for it. If you respond, you’ll find the whole experience quite pleasant. Now, suppose we get started. That is, if you feel ready to begin …”
“As ready as I’ll ever be.”
“All right, Pete,” he said, slipping into the first name casually and easily. “Take off your shoes and loosen your tie. Lie down on the couch and put your head back on those pillows. Let your body go slack. Take a few deep breaths …”
Then he spoke into the tape recorder.
“This is Wednesday morning. The date is February sixth, 1974. The hypnotist is Dr. Hall Bentley. The place is my office on Rodeo Drive, Beverly Hills, California. The subject is Dr. Peter Proud, age twenty-seven, a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. I have never hypnotized or regressed this patient before.”
He clicked off the mike. Then he went to the windows and closed the blinds. He walked back to his desk and turned on a small desk lamp. Then he sat down in one of the easy chairs, lit a cigarette, and looked at Peter.
“Still uptight?”
“Yes.”
“Take it easy. Just lie there. Try to empty your mind of everything. Take a few more deep breaths.”
There was silence for a while. Bentley sat in the chair as motionless as a Buddha, watching him. The clock on the shelf, next to the sailing trophies, ticked away the seconds. Peter felt his muscles loosen a little. He began to get a little drowsy.
Bentley reached into his pocket and took out a flat gold disc about the size of a half dollar suspended on a thin chain. He held the disc up to the lamp. It glittered in the light.
“Now, I want you to take ten deep breaths. In and out, in and out, slowly. Deep, deep. Now fasten your eyes on this disc. Keep looking at it. That’s it. Relax, relax …”
His voice was soothing, tranquilizing. He started to revolve the disc on the chain. Peter continued to stare at the spinning disc. Bentley’s face faded. So did the rest of the room. He saw nothing now but the glittering gold disc.
“Now close your eyes. Listen to
my voice. I am going to count to ten. At ten you will be fully relaxed.”
Bentley began the count in a slow beat. It seemed to Peter that his voice was receding. It sounded disembodied, far away.
“Your arms and legs are getting heavy. Your whole body feels as though it were sinking down in the couch. You are alone now. You hear my voice, but it comes from a distance. I am going to count to ten again. When I reach ten, you will float out into the distance. Far from where you are now. It will be a pleasant place, but far away. And you will always hear my voice.”
Bentley’s voice slowly counted to ten. It seemed to move even farther away. But he could still hear it distinctly. It didn’t seem to belong to anyone in particular. It was just a voice.
“You can still hear everything I say. Now listen to me. You are free, and you are floating away. You are alone, You are happy, relaxed and alone. There are no more problems. Do you still hear my voice?”
“I hear you.”
“You cannot open your eyes. Try to open your eyes.” The voice was calm. It was serene, soothing. He did not even try to open his eyes. He did not want to.
“You are asleep now. You will not awaken till I wake you. And you will answer all my questions without waking. Do you understand?”
“I understand.”
Suddenly the faraway voice seemed close in his ear.
“All right. You can open your eyes. You will awaken now.”
He opened his eyes. Hall Bentley was sitting in the same chair, watching Peter as before. But now he was in his shirtsleeves. The ashtray next to him was full of butts.
“How do you feel?”
Peter stretched. He was deliciously relaxed. “I feel great. It’s all over?”
“Yes.”
“How did I do?”
“I’ll say this much, You were a good subject. Very responsive. At least to hypnosis.”
“What happened? What did I say?”
Bentley did not answer at once. His face was expressionless. He went to the window and opened the blinds. The sunlight came flooding in. Peter blinked in its glare. He lay back on the couch limply. He felt marvelously rested, as though he had slept around the clock.
