be regularly reliably verified. Sometimes they coexist or alternate with them (Grof 1988, 1992). There are important reasons to assume that past life experiences are authentic phenomena sui generis that have important implications for psychology and psychotherapy because of their heuristic and therapeutic potential. (1) They feel extremely real and authentic and often mediate access to accurate information about historical periods, cultures, and even historical events that the individual could not have acquired through the ordinary channels. (2) In some instances, the accuracy of these memories can be objectively verified, sometimes with amazing detail. (3) They are often involved in pathodynamics of various emotional, psychosomatic, and interpersonal problems. It seems to matter little to the psyche whether the pathogenic forces are related to events from ancient Egypt, Nazi Germany, prenatal life, birth of the individual, or from the infancy and childhood in the present lifetime. (4) They have a great therapeutic potential, more powerful than memories from the present lifetime. (5) They are often associated with amazing meaningful synchronicities. The criteria for verification are the same as those for determining what happened last year: identify specific memories and secure independent evidence for at least some of them. Naturally, past life memories are more difficult to verify. They do not always contain specific information that would render itself to a verification procedure. Evidence is harder to come by, since they are much older and involve other countries and cultures. It is important to consider that even our current memories cannot always be corroborated, only some of them. Most evoked memories do not permit the same degree of verification as Stevenson’s spontaneous memories, which are typically more recent. However, I have myself observed and published several remarkable cases, where most unusual aspects of such experiences could be verified by independent historical research (Grof 1985, 1987). I am including two of these stories to illustrate the remarkable nature of this material. In the first of them the karmic pattern started to emerge during sessions of primal therapy and continued in sessions of Holotropic Breathwork. At an early stage of his therapy when Karl was reliving various aspects of his birth trauma, he started experiencing fragments of dramatic scenes that seemed to be happening in another century and in a foreign country. They involved powerful emotions and physical feelings and seemed to have some deep and intimate connection to his life; yet none of them made any sense in terms of his present biography. He had visions of tunnels, underground storage spaces, military barracks, thick walls, and ramparts that all seemed to be parts of a fortress situated on a rock overlooking an ocean shore. This was interspersed with images of soldiers in a variety of situations. He felt puzzled, since the soldiers seemed to be Spanish, but the scenery looked more like Scotland or Ireland. As the process continued, the scenes were becoming more dramatic and involved, many of them representing fierce combat and bloody slaughter. Although surrounded by soldiers, Karl experienced 20 (18) Stanislav Grof
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