PAUL ENO'S THOUGHTS ON REINCARNATION

The belief that people die and are reborn in new bodies, sometimes again and again for millennia, is a fixture in many religions. Hindus, Buddhists, animists and many other groups accept the doctrine in one form or another, as did many of the ancients, including the Celts. There's evidence that reincarnation was an important part of Judaism at one time, and there were early Christian sects that accepted it as well.

Reincarnation is taken for granted among those involved in the occult today. And many people who belong to religious groups that actively disavow reincarnation -- like Roman Catholics and most Protestants -- believe in it privately anyway. It's very comforting to think that we don't just go "poof" when we die or don't have to face some terrible, win-or-lose judgment with no appeal.

But what's the actual evidence for reincarnation? Aside from the realization that so many of our remote ancestors believed in it, a fact that deserves respect, we have unexplained memories, feelings, habits, seemingly impossible coincidences, unshakable dreams, and even bizarre historical facts that point toward "us being there."

We have deja vu, the feeling that we have "been here before." And for the past 150 years or so, we have had hypnosis. Today, many hypnotists will "regress" people to "past lives." This isn't just for fun -- it has shown remarkable results in helping deal with phobias and other problems people have in their current lives -- problems they believe are traceable to past lives.

Certainly in Nature, all things die and are reborn.

But there were a few things that always bothered me as a paranormal investigator, mainly because one of the first lessons I learned as such was that things are almost never what they appear to be. You always have to dig deeper.

First, if reincarnation is true, why are there so many "old ghosts"? Second, what part might ancestral memory play in the reincarnation experience? And finally, what would quantum mechanics, the branch of physics on which I base my own theories and methods, have to say about reincarnation?

I think the first question can be answered by the other two. The few researchers who have sought to correlate past-life memories with genealogy have sometimes found that people share memories that probably belonged to their ancestors. This, of course, would include memories only up to the time of the birth of the child from whom the subject is in turn descended. And it wouldn't explain death memories.

It's to quantum mechanics that we can look for an explanation of reincarnation that ties up all the loose ends.

Einstein and his successor scientists have essentially proven that time is relative. It exists only in relation to the observer. String theory and quantum mechanics have taken this to the point that we can no longer say that past and future even exist in any objective form.

If there is no past, how can there be past lives? And if there is no time, how can there be such a thing as death?

There can't.

Instead, I'm convinced that what we call reincarnation is the experience of parallel or simultaneous lives. And that's exactly how at least one interpretation of quantum mechanics (the one I believe I see in day-to-day action in ghost hunting) views how the universe is constructed. Like soap bubbles in a bathtub, there are billions of parallel worlds side by side with us all the time and with which we constantly interact.

We exist in many of these worlds. The other people we are form our subconscious and give us our memories and imaginations. Hypnotic regression simply ties into these parallel-life memories.

If this is true, and if hypnotism really is a valid way to get at it, shouldn't regression therapists have an inkling of this deeper reality?

They do.

For years I've made it a point to ask regression therapists if they ever have subjects describe worlds they don't recognize. Almost invariably the answer is "yes." I sometimes get a torrent of stories about subjects whose answers unnerved the therapists. There were stories about subjects who gave dates in the future -- sometimes the remote future -- when asked what the year was. Others described being people who were still alive or who hadn't yet been born, at least in our own little corner of the quantum universe.

In fact, more and more reincarnation experts are accepting the notion of simultaneous lives.

In my opinion, then, the classical idea of reincarnation is wildly obsolete. If we hope to understand our experiences of being other people, we must accept that we actually are other people!

I think that, down deep, we and our religions know this is true. If you take Matthew 22:39 ("Love your neighbor as yourself....) and translate it properly from the original Greek, it says "Love your neighbor because he is yourself...."

What a difference! Can you imagine what a true grasp of this concept could do for humanity? As I've said time and again. It's a whole new world, and it's the first day of school!

This site was last updated 06/11/11