According to Dr. Satwant K. Pasricha of NIMHANS in Bangalore, “Yes, there is life after death.” A professor of Clinical Psychology at NIMHANS, she has worked with A.N. Stevenson, a world authority on reincarnation.
According to her, a human being is made up of physical (body) and non-physical (mind) components. Once a person is dead, the non-physical associates with another physical body and lives on.
Pasricha claims that most babies recall previous lives between the ages of two and four. “Observing the behaviour of their parents, the child starts talking on impulse about his previous birth, saying things like, ‘Father never used to get angry at me.’ The child’s present-life behaviour matches up with its previous avatar.”
She offered several instances as proof of reincarnation. “There was this child in UP who used to take a stick and tell his friends to open their mouth so he could check their temperature. Investigations revealed that he was a doctor in his previous birth in a village 300 kms from the place where he lived.”
Pasricha says once a child reaches the age of 6 or 8, pat lives are forgotten although behaviour patterns persists a little longer. “What makes these cases hard to disprove and easy to prove are a child’s prominent birth marks and physical anomalies, which have a bearing on its past life.” She explains, “One boy remembered his father’s grandmother. He would smoke beedis just like her and object to his sister going out with her hair uncombed. Similarly, one woman who was a male lawyer in a previous life, would talk like a man. She never accepted the fact that she was a woman.”
Twins figure in the hundreds of cases that she has studied from over 8 countries. One twin was an unsavoury character in Bihar while the other was a school teacher. Their behaviour in this life matched their previous life. The former was tough and non-religious and the latter was a religious pacifist. One person who was fed nasally before he died was reborn with a nose mark.
Pasricha related several anecdotes, using slides to illustrate her theories. “A girl in Rajasthan recalled how she was pushed to death by her cousin sister in the past. There was a birthmark on her head to prove it. One gentleman remembered his past life as a Muslim dacoit. He was reborn a Hindu with fingers missing on his right hand. Apparently, the dacoit had his fingers chopped off in an encounter.”
Dr. Pasricha says that 70% of rebirth cases were as a result of newspaper advertisements. Her investigations include medical examinations to determine the cause of death, and matching up injuries of the deceased with the living person. In most cases, “detection was easy because most homes were in the residential radius of the person who was reborn.”
Her research claims that 49% of Indians died violent deaths in their previous birth while the rest had died due to natural causes. The difference between a deceased person and his rebirth varied from 15 to 91 days. There were also some people who remembered more than one past life.
In most cases, children were not reconciled with their earlier families “Because of the wide socio-economic gap. A Thakur born in a cobbler’s family for example”
Then what’s the objective of the research? “To supplement genetics and environmental factors to explain why a child is physically disabled or has unusual behaviour in its infancy and early childhood,” says Pasricha.
If you have a nagging doubt about someone’s behaviour or physical characteristics, they could well be carrying the baggage of the past. Call Pasricha at Nimhans to find out. But be warned!. While she may hook you up with your past… getting connected by telephone to NIMHANS is a much tougher proposition.