place, and with other people. These memories emerge usually spontaneously shortly after these children begin to talk. They often present various complications in the life of these children and can be even associated with “carry-over pathologies”, such as phobias, strange reactions to certain people, or various idiosyncrasies. Child psychiatrists have described cases like this. Access to these memories usually disappears between the ages of five and eight. Ian Stevenson, professor of psychology at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, VA, has conducted meticulous studies of over three thousand of such cases and reported them in his books Twenty Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation, Unlearned Languages, and Children Who Remember Previous Lives (Stevenson 1966, 1984, and 1987), reporting only several hundred of them, because many have not met the highest standard. Some of them were eliminated because the family benefitted financially, in terms of social prestige, or public attention, others because Stevenson found a connecting person who could have been the psychic link. Additional reasons were inconsistent testimony, cryptomnesia, witnesses of questionable character, or indication of fraud. Only the strongest cases were included. The findings of Stevenson’s research were quite remarkable. He was able to confirm by independent investigation the stories the children were telling about their previous lives, often with incredible details, although he had eliminated in all the reported cases the possibility that they could have obtained the information through the conventional channels. In some cases, he actually took the children into the village that they remembered from their previous life. Although they had never been there in their current lifetime, they were familiar with the topography of the village, were able to find the home they had allegedly lived in, recognized the members of their “family” and the villagers, and knew their names. To illustrate the nature of Stevenson’s material, I will present here a condensed version of the story of Parmod Sharma, one of the twenty subjects described in his early publication. Parmod Sharma was born on October 11, 1944, in Bisauli, India. His father was Professor Bankeybehary Lal Sharma, a Sanskrit scholar at a nearby college. When Parmod was about two and a half, he began telling his mother not to cook meals for him any more, because he had a wife in Moradabad who could cook. Morabad was a town about a ninety miles northeast of Bisauli. Between the ages of three and four, he began to speak in detail of his life there. He described several businesses he had owned and operated with other members of his family. He particularly spoke of a shop that manufactured and sold biscuits and soda water, calling it “Mohan Brothers”. He insisted that he was one of the Mohan brothers and that he also had a business in Saharanpur, a town about a hundred miles north of Moradabad. Parmod tended not to play with the other children in Bisauli but preferred to play by himself, building models of shops complete with electrical wiring. He especially liked to make mud biscuits, which he served his family with tea or soda water. During this time, he provided many details about his shop, including its size and location in Moradabad, what was sold there, and his activities connected to it, such as his business trips to Delhi. He even 16 (14) Stanislav Grof
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MzgxMzI=