Past Life Regression Cases

The two major theories of reincarnation and past life regression (PLR) have been around for a long time; they are a part of a variety of religions and belief systems stretching back to ancient times — and reading about some of history’s most notable accounts of purported past lives may be rather bizarre. Although both PLR and reincarnation are usually dismissed as pseudoscience, according to the Pew Research Center, nearly a quarter of Americans (24%) believe in reincarnation. That isn’t a small figure; it shows that the concept resonates powerfully with a large number of people, but the reasons for this may differ widely from person to person.

Despite the history of the theory of what is reincarnation and PLR, it wasn’t until the late 19th and early 20th centuries that serious research into past lives began — and it wasn’t until the 1960s that it truly took off. Ian Stevenson is responsible for the drive to take the phenomenon more seriously, and today, people like Jim Tucker are continuing to learn more about what we know — and don’t know — about purported past lives. However, interest in supposed past life regression sessions and experiences peaked in the English-speaking world a little less than a decade before Ian Stevenson’s first published study on the subject. In this article, you will find an in-depth research and case studies on past life experience from history. Let’s find out:

A Past Life Regression Case Study From The Past

Bridey Murphy is, without a doubt, the most well-known PLR case. Morey Bernstein, a Colorado businessman who had practiced hypnotism for ten years with numerous different people, decided to try to regress someone to one or more previous lives in the mid-twentieth century. He chose a woman named Virginia Tighe as his subject because he knew she could easily enter a deep trance. Between November 29, 1952, and August 29, 1953, Bernstein made six attempts to help Virginia regress. She remembered one brief life as a child who died during those sessions. Following that, the persona of Bridey Murphy – more precisely Bridget Kathleen Murphy – developed.

Virginia morphed into her alter ego whenever she was allowed to do so in a trance state after her initial experience as Bridey. She shared a wealth of details about Ireland, hardly any of which she could explain as Virginia Tighe. She said she was born in Cork in 1798, the daughter of Duncan Murphy, a Protestant attorney, and his wife, Kathleen. Duncan Blaine Murphy, her younger brother, had married Aimee Strayne. Another brother had perished while he was young. Bridey stated she married a Catholic, Brian Joseph McCarthy, the son of another Cork attorney, in a Protestant ceremony when she was twenty years old. Brian and Bridey relocated to Belfast, where he went to school and later became a law professor at Queen’s University. Bridey lived to be sixty-six years old, and they had no children.

In Ireland, no record of either of these events has been found. Virginia did, however, include the names of two Belfast grocers, Farr’s and John Carrigan, during her account of her experiences as Bridey. It was feasible to confirm that two grocers with those identities did operate retail businesses in the town at the time. She stated that her residence in Cork was at The Meadows, and it was discovered that Mardike Meadows is a neighborhood in that city.

Of course, Queen’s University in Belfast is a prestigious educational institution. Virginia employed words like “ditched” for “buried,” “linen” for “handkerchief,” and “lough” for “river” or “lake” that were in use in Ireland at Bridey’s time.  Those who believed Virginia’s recollections were true pointed out that a girl born as well as raised in the U.S., as Virginia was, would’ve been unlikely to be familiar with these terminologies. Investigative journalists concluded that there had been some evidence for “something” that had yet to be explained. Although credible hypnosis and past life regression experts claim to have refuted this instance, Stevenson thought it was worth investigating further. PLR became popular in the United States after the Bridey Murphy case, and other well-known post-Bridey Murphy cases have already been documented.

A Modern Case Of Past Life Regression

One of the most recent self-published cases is particularly intriguing. Carroll Beckwith was a minor portrait painter active in New York City during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He’d never done something extraordinary as an artist that would make him immortal. Captain Robert L. Snow is the commander of the Indianapolis Police Department’s homicide branch. He found that he was Carroll Beckwith in a prior life while under hypnosis. It is one of the most significant past life regression hypnosis stories. Snow sought to prove that the visions he had seen while hypnotized were not a sort of Cryptomnesia. Snow had already lost faith in hypnotherapeutic treatments in cases of child sex abuse. Snow was able to identify 28 details about his regression to past life that could be verified or disproven, and the regression did take place in 1992.

Rather than confirming the reality of his memories, Snow demonstrated that practically every remembrance he experienced while hypnotized occurred nearly a century earlier. While on vacation in New Orleans, he went to an art gallery on a side street and saw the painting that would stay with him forever: the hunchbacked woman. Beckwith’s personal journals and an unpublished autobiography were discovered at a small New York library. This was a crucial piece of evidence for a detective to shut or prove the case. Beckwith’s diaries revealed that 26 of the 28 criteria corresponded to Carroll Beckwith’s life.

Beckwith used a walking stick despite not being disabled, visited France, drank wine (whisky was the popular drink in the U.S.), disliked painting portraits, was irritated by poor picture hangings as well as lighting in art shows, painted a portrait of a hunchbacked woman, his mother died of a blood clot, his wife Berth was childless. Snow spelled the prior personality’s wife’s name incorrectly, but his candid admission adds to his credibility. Snow claims that he does have more proof of his prior life than most murder cases, and he believes he has a few of Carroll Beckwith’s memories. Even for such ostensibly authentic memories, parapsychologists may be able to propose alternate explanations. PLR’s experiences, according to skeptics, are the result of “walk-in occurrence” or “spirit attachment.”

Captain Snow simply stated that with the people around the world who have lived on Earth, he could not accept that his experience was different, that his regression of past life would be the only case since John the Baptist – whom some claim Jesus identifies in Matthew’s Gospel as Elijah reborn.  PLR may be both an experimental methodology and a sort of therapy, but it can only be considered scientifically credible if reincarnation is confirmed to exist. The existence of reincarnation has yet to be proven scientifically as now one can prove that is reincarnation real. Because it may be falsified or validated by scientific research, reincarnation deserves to be recognized as a scientific hypothesis. As a result, Stevenson’s foreign field investigations are extremely valuable. Any hypothesis with clinical utility has clinical validity; however, PLR’s clinical validity has yet to be shown satisfactorily.

Past Life Regression – An Experimental Tool

The experimental value of hypnotherapeutic PLR outweighs its therapeutic value. However, the scientific legitimacy of this type of study into prior incarnations has long been questioned. The following viewpoints on PLR have been expressed. All must be assessed:

• In PLR, hypnosis’ ego-strengthening power may be used incorrectly.
• Hypnosis can raise the certainty with which memory is kept while lowering the memory’s authenticity.
• Information obtained through PLR may be correlated with information obtained from a historical novel that is a synthesis of fact and fiction: a few items of memory derived from a previous life may become dislodged and reattached to fantasies – similar to how iron fillings become attached to a magnetic field.
• Imagination may run wild in mistaken memories of earlier incarnations. When it comes to stretching the reality, we have limits, but when it comes to expanding a lie, we seem to have infinite capabilities of imagination. Individuals can construct more detailed narratives of imagined experiences than can be explained by using conscious knowledge.

Personification is one of PLR’s intrinsic flaws. The subject surrenders control of their ideas to the hypnotherapist during past life regression through hypnosis, and their objection to the therapist’s instructions is reduced. The person is instructed to recall something. When they don’t have accurate facts to share, they may make misleading comments to please the therapist, unaware that they’re blending fact and fiction. Hypnosis can let you tap into your mind’s dramatic abilities. When PLR is involved, the previous personality may become overly grandiose. It is generally known that subjects have a proclivity to assign themselves a historical role in former incarnations or to identify themselves through associations with well-known persons and locations.

Past Life Regression Therapy

The therapeutic advantages alone are insufficient to justify a therapist’s specific methodology. Only when PLR is inevitable should it be used, and only with informed consent can it be utilized. To use another instance, not every episode of headache necessitates the use of a brain scan. When choosing patients, the past life regression therapists should be discerning. Unfortunately, there are no established criteria for sending patients to hypnotherapy, which falls outside of the scope of traditional therapy. Patients should be encouraged to assess for themselves whether recalling traumatic occurrences from a prior life might be beneficial to them.

Psychological well-being could be linked to the healing of past-life traumas, or the imagined regression past life could be a catalyst for changing perspectives and improving self-image. The therapeutic effect of PLR, in the majority of cases with a successful outcome may be due to patients who are unsatisfied with their current circumstances establishing an artificial identity that encourages them to seek new goals. The operation is similar to doing an organ transplant in that the new identity may be blended with old memories. The therapeutic impact may be the outcome of the reconnection of the concealed identity with the functional identity when prior life memories are either totally or partially authentic.

Conclusion

To discover the reality and study these cases deeply, systematic research into reincarnation and past life regression began in 1960 when Ian Stevenson released a summary of what he discovered until that particular time. Over the years, others have taken up Stevenson’s mantle; now, psychiatrist Jim Tucker is at the front of the area. He’s best renowned for his work with children who believe they’ve lived previous lives. Many times, past-life stories are attributed to Cryptomnesia — literally, “hidden memories” — caused by confabulation, or the unconscious act of generating a scenario that the narrator thinks is true but is plainly incorrect; still, we are captivated by them.

Reference Links:-

https://psi-encyclopedia.spr.ac.uk

https://outlanderpastlives.com/past-life-regression/

https://www.livescience.com/7737-reality-reincarnation.html

https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1991-98296-000

https://www.sciencedirect.com

https://psi-encyclopedia.spr.ac.uk/articles/past-life-regression

https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1979-21518-000

https://www.jstor.org/stable/639951?seq=1

https://med.virginia.edu/perceptual-studies/wp-content/uploads/sites/360/2016/12/STE45.pdf

https://www.carolbowman.com/past-life-regression/