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THE DISTINCTIONS formulated in Secs. 2, 3, and 4 of Chapt. XIV make it possible
to give to the expression "survival after death" a meaning which is precise but
involves no assumption as to whether the life-after-death one has in view is
life discarnate, or life reincarnate. In the present chapter, however, what we
are concerned with is survival specifically as reincarnation of the mind, or of
some part of the mind, of a deceased person in another human body. The question
before us is therefore whether the facts we have reviewed, which seem to
evidence reincarnation, admit of alternative interpretations perhaps more
plausible.
1. Mediumistic communications from minds surviving discarnate, vs. memories in a
reincarnated mind
If the possibility of life at all after death is assumed,
then the most obvious of the alternative interpretations of the facts which
suggest reincarnation is the one Spiritualists would ordinarily adopt; namely,
that the person, through whose organs of expression true statements are uttered
concerning the past life on earth of a deceased person, is not a reincarnation
of the mind of the deceased, but is a medium through whose temporarily borrowed
lips or hand the surviving discarnate mind of the deceased speaks or writes,
mentioning facts of its past life it remembers, that are adequate to identify
him.
This hypothesis concerning the source of true communications of past facts
recommends itself especially when, as for instance in the case of Mrs. Piper,
the true communications received appear to emanate from several quite different
persons who were contemporaries of one another. On the other hand, the
reincarnation hypothesis remains as plausible as the Spiritualistic when, as in
the Bridey Murphy case, virtually only one personality manifests itself through
the entranced organism, and does so steadily throughout a prolonged series of
experiments; or, if several personalities appear, they present themselves as a
series of incarnations of the same entity, memory including experiences of
discarnate existence during the intervals between the several incarnations. In
the Bridey Murphy case, there seemed to be memory of a brief and painful life as
a sick baby in New Amsterdam at some time before the birth of Bridey; but
because of its brevity, of the distress attaching to it, and of the unlikelihood
that it could have contained memories of verifiable details, Bernstein did not
push the attempt to explore it. There is no evidence, then, that this brief life
as a sick baby actually occurred, nor that the scanty account of it Virginia
gave represented a memory of some episode rather than only an invention to
satisfy the hypnotist's demand for regression to a time before Bridey's birth.
2. Reincarnation as "possession"
The best case on record of reincarnation as
"possession" is that of the Watseka Wonder described in Sec. 4 of Chapt. XVII.
In that case, the mind of a definitely identified person, Mary Roff deceased at
age 18 some 12 years before, did to all intents and purposes reincarnate in the
body not of a neonate but of a 13 year old girl, Lurancy Vennum, displacing
altogether the latter's personality for a period of some 14 weeks.
Reincarnation in the sense this would illustrate is very rare, and is anyway not
reincarnation as ordinarily conceived, which is not thus episodic but lasts
through the whole time between the birth and death of the body concerned; and in
which what is reincarnated is not a developed mind and therefore can be supposed
to be only a set of latent aptitudes brought from one or more previous lives.
It should, however, be noted that aside from this, reincarnation in the
"possession" sense illustrated by the Watseka Wonder case differs from the cases
of direct control of a medium's body by the surviving mind of a deceased person
only in two respects, which are a matter of degree rather than of kind.
One is that, in the mediumistic cases, the "possession," i.e., the direct
control, is but momentary - usually a matter of minutes rather than of even as
long as an hour - whereas Mary Roff's possession or "direct control" of
Luraney's body endured for more than three months.
The other difference is that the body Mary Roff "controlled" was not in trance
like that of a medium used for communication by the surviving mind of a deceased
person, but was as aware of and active upon its physical environment as that of
a normal person. It is true that some mediums or automatists do not go into
trance while giving communications purporting to emanate from the surviving mind
of a deceased person. But in this case this means that they remain aware that
they are functioning as an intermediary, while so functioning. That is, only a
part of their organism is being "possessed" - only their organs of speech or of
writing. Their body does not, even for the duration of the séance, proceed to
behave and to occupy itself as it would if the "possessing" personality were
controlling the whole body instead of only its organs of speech or its hand. In
the Watseka case, on the other hand, the Mary Roff personality possessed the
whole of Lurancy's body which, during 14 weeks, then did occupy itself and
respond to its environment as Mary Roff's own body would have, had it been still
alive and occupied by the mind of Mary Roff.
3. Reincarnation and illusion of memory
If the possibility of survival after
death is not, as in the two preceding sections it was, assumed ab initio, then
the verified memories that purport to be memories of an earlier life on earth of
the person who has them are likely to be dismissed by the critic as being really
illusions of memory similar to those cited in Sec. 2 of Chapt. XXII, of a man
whose memories of incidents in the Harrison presidential campaign really were
memories only of the images of those incidents lie had formed as a child from
descriptions of them by his uncles.
The difference would be only that the experient's verified memories, instead of
being referred by him to an early part of his life, would be referred to an
earlier life he imagined he had lived on earth; whereas the truth would be that
the facts he really remembers are facts he learned in a normal manner during his
present life and then forgot, but which the subconscious part of his mind
retained, and which eventually emerged again into his consciousness in
dramatized form as content of a so-called "progignomatic fantasy;" that is, of
an imagination or day-dream which he does not realize to be this, of himself as
living on earth a life anterior to his present one. The fantasy might be
presenting itself spontaneously as an effect of repression of strong but
unacknowledged impulses or cravings. Or it might be created under hypnosis, in
compliance with the hypnotist's command to the subject to push back his
consciousness to a time earlier than the birth or conception of his body.
Evidently, the acceptability or not in a given case, of this explanation of the
fact that the incidents remembered and ascribed to an earlier life did really
occur, though in the present life, turns on the probability or improbability or
perhaps the certainty or impossibility - in the light of all we know about the
person's contacts, his education, his available sources of information, etc. -
that he should have learned normally during the course of his present life the
past facts he now remembers but refers to an earlier life.
The probability that he did so learn them, however, depends in part on the
"antecedent" improbability that the mind, or any part of the mind, of a deceased
person survives after death; for if it does not, it could of course not remember
anything. But in Part III it was shown that such survival is not antecedently
either improbable or probable - the allegations to the contrary being based not
on facts known, but only on gratuitous fideistic or scientistic assumptions.
4. Extrasensory perceptions, vs. memories of an earlier
life
If one proceeds
under the assumption that survival after death is not possible, and if it turns
out to be highly improbable or impossible that some of the memories purportedly
of an earlier life should really be memories of facts normally learned in the
present life and then forgotten, then one might attempt to account for the
correspondence of those purported memories to real facts by supposing that the
person concerned ascertained those facts not normally but by extrasensory
perception - by telepathy, perhaps, from the minds of persons who know them, or by
clairvoyance or retrocognition. The probabilities or improbabilities of this,
however, are the same no matter whether the survival to which this supposition
would provide an alternative be survival as reincarnation, or survival in a
discarnate state. It will be recalled that in Chapt. XIX, we examined Prof. E.
R. Dodds' contention that the identificatory information alleged by believers in
survival to emanate from the surviving discarnate spirits of deceased persons is
really obtained through unconscious exercise of telepathy or/and clairvoyance by
the mediums or automatists who communicate it; and we concluded that although
some of the prima facie evidence for survival may with some plausibility be
explained away in this manner, nevertheless certain others of the evidential
items cannot be so accounted for without postulating for extrasensory perception
a scope far outranging that for which there is independent evidences; nor
without depending even then on certain additional and unplausible postulations.
These conclusions apply with equal force when the form of survival under
consideration is not discarnate survival specifically but is survival as
reincarnation, whether immediately after death or after survival in a discarnate
state for some time.
5. What would be the best possible evidence of reincarnation
That the mind of a
now living person is the same mind as that of a person whose body died some time
before means, according to the analysis offered in Sec. 4 of Chapt. XIV, that
the mind of the person who died has become the mind present in the now living
person. If they are in this sense the same mind, then automatically the history
of the later one includes the history of the earlier one. Such knowledge,
however, as a mind has of its own history consists of such memories as it has of
its past experiences.
At this point, we need to distinguish between memories and memory. Memory is the
capacity of a mind to "remember" past events that were its own subjective
experiences, and objective events or facts that it experienced, i.e., perceived.
According to the analysis of the notion of "capacity" - or "ability" or
"disposition" or "power" - given in Sec. 2 of
Chapt. VI, a capacity is an
abiding causal connection between any event of a given kind C and some event of
a given other kind E, occurring in any state of affairs of a given kind S. And
exercise of a capacity - e.g., of the capacity designated "memory" - is what
occurs when an event of kind C occurring in a state of affairs of kind S causes
in it an event of kind E. - e.g., awareness of an event experienced in the past.
A memory, on the other hand, is the present awareness of an event or fact one
experienced in the past, which occurs if something now causes exercise of one's
capacity to remember that event or fact. Memory, then, is a capacity, not an
occurrence; whereas a memory is an occurrence, not a capacity.
If now we ask how a given mind knows itself to be the same mind as one which
existed earlier, the answer is as follows.
If a memory it has is of a subjective experience - e.g., of a thought, an
emotion, an intention, a desire, etc., which it had - and it is a genuine memory
of it, then the mind that has this memory is necessarily the same mind as the
mind that had the subjective experience remembered; for nobody but oneself can
remember his own subjective experiences. Another person could, at most, only
remember such perceptible objective expressions, if any and whether candid or
deceitful, as one gave to them; and anyway one gives no perceptible expression
to many of them. This, however, brings up the question whether memory of any of
one's subjective experiences can be illusory not genuine; and I submit that, if
one distinguishes clearly between subjective experiences themselves, and such
status - e.g., of "dream," or "hallucination," or "perception," or "sign of..."
etc. - as one may ascribe to them, then it becomes evident that memory of one's
subjective experiences, like presentness of them, cannot be illusory. For
illusion is possible at all only where interpretation enters. And pastness of a
subjective experience one remembers is not inferred but is just as direct an
experience as is presentness of a subjective experience. Vacuousness of the
supposition that one's memory of a subjective experience can be illusory (e.g.,
of a subjective experience one calls "pain," or "dizziness," or "fear,"
or "bitter taste," etc.) follows from the fact that any attempt one might make
to prove either that it is or is not illusory would automatically presuppose
that one does remember the subjective experience one designates by the
particular one of those words one employed.
If, on the other hand, a memory is of some objective fact or event, then
the only evidence there could be - which, however, would be adequate - that a
mind whether incarnate or discarnate having that memory is the same mind as a
certain mind that was incarnate at a given earlier time, would consist of the
following three items together: (a) that the memories of objective facts or
events the present mind has include memories of them which the earlier mind had;
(b) that these included memories were veridical, i.e., are known to
correspond to what those objective facts or events were; and (c) that those
memories are known to be genuinely memories because the person having them
is known not to have had opportunity to acquire his knowledge of those objective
facts or events in any way other than personal observation of them.
Possession by a given mind of memories of subjective experiences of an earlier
mind. or/and possession of memories of objective facts or events also remembered
by that earlier mind, would thus mean that the earlier mind had eventually
become the given mind and was thus an intrinsic early part of it.
This relation, however, is precisely the relation which, according to the
accounts we have of the cases of Katsugoro, of Alexandrina Samona, and of Shanti
Devi, did obtain between the whole of the memories each had, and the portion of
these relating to a period anterior to the birth of their present body.
These cases, then - if the reports are accurate, which we have of them and of
other cases where memory likewise spontaneously extends to a period
earlier than the birth or conception of the present body - provide the best
conceivable kind of evidence that the person having those memories is a
reincarnation of one who had died earlier. Indeed, the account we have of each
of these cases, if it is accurate, constitutes an account of what it means,
to say that the mind of a given deceased person reincarnated in
the body of a neonate who has now reached a certain age.
If, however, we wish to speak - as ordinarily - of reincarnation also in cases
other than these; that is, in cases like that of each of the rest of us, where
no such spontaneous memories of an earlier incarnation are possessed; then that
which is supposed to be reincarnated in our body cannot be an earlier mind.
It can be only the "seed" left by an earlier mind - a seed consisting of the set
of what Prof. Broad would term its "supreme dispositions," and which we have
described as the set of its basic aptitudes; that is, of its capacities
to acquire under respectively appropriate circumstances various more determinate
kinds of capacities.
It is conceivable, however, that one of those reincarnated basic aptitudes
should be aptitude to regain, under appropriate stimulus, memories now latent
that would satisfy requirements (a), (b), and (c) above, and would therefore
be memories of an earlier incarnation. Moreover, the appropriate stimulus -
or a sometimes adequate stimulus - for the regaining of them whether temporarily
or enduringly, might consist of a demand to this effect made on a person under
hypnosis by the hypnotist.
To have regained them in this manner would then mean that knowledge of the
sameness of the mind of the deceased person and of the mind of the person
who has been given that stimulus, has been temporarily or enduringly achieved,
instead of having been spontaneous and native as in the cases of Katsugoro and
of the other children cited.
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