The Reincarnation of Peter Proud (10 page)

“Okay.”

“Incidentally, he’s written an article that might interest you. You’ll find it in last month’s issue of
Parapsychology
.” There was a little grin on Sam Goodman’s face. “It’s called ‘The Case for Reincarnation.’ As you may gather, he’s interested in the subject.”

“By the sound of the title, he believes in it.”

“Not exactly. He simply says he’s got an open mind on it. Makes a number of assumptions, and then—well, you’d have to read it for yourself. Anyway, he’s already alienated a lot of his peers—those in the orthodox establishment, I mean. This in spite of the brilliant work he’s done in his field. Some of them have been calling him a charlatan. But the fact is, they really don’t like an open mind. It frightens them.”

He picked up the magazine at the library and read the article.

Bentley began with a prologue—his own gut reaction to the subject, purely personal, purely subjective.

“It seems incredible to me,” he wrote, “and it depresses me to find the western world clinging to the dread of death instead of the hope of life. I am not a religious man, and nobody has proved to me that God exists. But it’s hard to believe that we simply are born, we suffer, and we die. Ashes to ashes, and dust to dust. It is hard to believe that this is all there is.

“For if this is so, what are we doing here in the first place? For what purpose, what reason? Simply to eat, sleep, defecate, fornicate, love and hate others, suffer pain, enjoy a little pleasure, and then die? Must life be so hopeless, because no matter how we live it, death ends it?

“When we die, we die, we are told. Death is the end. But is it?

“I, frankly, do not believe it. I believe, as a rational man, that we must be here for some higher reason, some greater and continuing purpose. Men have always been aware, on some deep and mystical level, that there is another part of him that has nothing to do with logical thinking, but is something far beyond that.”

But all this, wrote Bentley, was simply an expression of faith on his part. What he proposed now was to examine the entire idea of reincarnation as a scientist, coldly and objectively.

First, he said, the idea of reincarnation was older and better established than any of the present religions. It was just as believable, and even more logical, than any of the existing religions. Even today over one billion people on the planet believed in it. Most of them were from the East, but it was rapidly spreading through the western world. Reincarnation was not simply a comforting superstition for idiots; many men of intelligence and reason passionately believed or had believed in it. Among them were: Gandhi, Benjamin Franklin, Henry Ford, Masefield, Yeats, Robert Browning,
Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Thomas Huxley, Voltaire, Goethe, Ibsen, Spinoza, Plato, and Oliver Wendell Holmes. “The professors in our universities, the scientists, regard the occult groups, the fringe societies, as absurd, way out, immature, fuzzy, unsubstantiated and fraudulent. The fringe groups see the so-called Establishment as rigid, arrogant, intolerant, and condescending. Both are partly right and partly wrong, but each can learn from the other. Some day they may fuse their efforts in a constructive way. And the catalyst may be reincarnation.

“The materialist says that only that which you can see or measure, or otherwise identify by your senses, is real. But this kind of materialism belongs in another age. Any child with a primary scientific education today knows that no one has ever seen an atom. It exists only by inference. But we accept it as there. Yet most psychologists, most of my colleagues, will not accept the idea that a soul exists. Why? Because nobody has ever seen one. I am defining ‘soul’ here as a living thing that leaves the body at death and goes on to exist elsewhere.

“Those who ridicule the concept of rebirth try to bury any evidence of reincarnation. They call it wishful thinking. It is, to use the parlance, a ‘copout,’ a refusal to face the future on rational grounds. But let us now examine this concept on a rational basis. An orthodox scientific approach to any problem is to make a number of reasonable assumptions and then either eliminate or prove them by the application of logic. There are three assumptions we may make here. The first is that when you’re dead, you’re dead. The soul, if it exists at all, dies with you. The second is the idea that you do have a soul, but when you die, your soul goes to heaven or to hell, depending on how you behaved in life. And the third is the idea of reincarnation. Your soul is immortal and is carried from one life to another.

“As to the first assumption,” said Bentley, “nobody has ever proved that when you’re dead, you’re dead. I know that most people
insist this is true, but there is no real evidence to prove it is so. As to the second assumption, nobody has ever proved that your soul has gone to hell, or to heaven, either. But consider the third assumption, the idea of reincarnation.

“Here, we must consider certain phenomena. Not real evidence, perhaps, and by no means scientific proof, but interesting nevertheless. These consist of observation, testimony from living persons, and memory phenomena no one can explain.

“First of all, there is the phenomenon of
déjà vu
. The skeptics argue that if we have indeed lived before, why can’t we remember anything of our past lives? But the fact is, many of us seem to do just that. Almost everybody has had the experience of going somewhere he has never before visited in his lifetime, and yet having the eerie feeling that he has been there before, has seen the place before: a hillside, a road, a village, a view. There are thousands of case histories of people, rational and intelligent people, who have claimed
déjà vu
. Orthodox psychiatrists have put this down simply as a process of ‘opening a false memory door.’ But they never explain the basis of this ‘false memory.’

“There is another phenomenon—one that is truly universal. You meet a stranger whom you like or dislike intensely on first sight, even before you’ve exchanged a word. And you can’t explain why. In a boy-meets-girl situation, there is often instant attraction, or ‘love at first sight.’ Why does this happen? Some call it a mysterious chemical attraction. Others say the stranger reminds you of someone in childhood you loved or hated or feared. The children of Aquarius call it vibrations. But nobody has really explained it. Could it be possible that these likes or dislikes have come from buried memories of someone you knew in a past life? This, to me, is at least as good an explanation as any of the other theories, and probably better.”

But the evidence for reincarnation, Bentley pointed out, was most startling in the behavior of children.

“Researchers all over the world have recorded hundreds of instances in which children seemed to remember some past life. They insisted they were someone else, an adult in some previous life, and they described places where they have never been. Usually, this is put down to childish prattling or fantasy. But the fact is that the people and places named by these children and some of the happenings they recounted have later been verified by trained and disinterested investigators.”

He cited some famous cases of prenatal memory in children—that of Shanti Devi; and the Japanese boy, Katsugoro, first reported by Lafcadio Hearn, as well as others. Also, there was the work done by Stevenson of Virginia in the prenatal memory of children. It was interesting that in India, when children talked about being somebody else or having once lived in some other place far from their native village, they were listened to seriously. Here in the West, when children spoke about the same thing, it was considered childish fantasy and either dismissed or actively discouraged. Children became inhibited about reporting these prenatal memories and ultimately repressed them. In this way the memories became “lost” to them.

A third phenomenon, Bentley continued, was the existence of child prodigies—for instance, Mozart and Mendelssohn, who wrote great symphonies at a very young age, or the great chess master Samuel Reshevsky, who, at the age of five, played three European champions at the same time and beat them all. Some people tried to explain this in terms of genes, but, again, this has not been conclusively demonstrated. A more interesting explanation would be reincarnation. Could these prodigies have actually learned these skills as adults in previous lives, and simply brought them into their present ones? Again, it is as good a hypothesis as any other, if not better.

“Finally,” wrote Bentley, “parapsychologists like myself have been able to regress people under hypnosis—not just to the point where they remember their very early childhood and even their
babyhood, but way beyond that, where they remember, or claim to remember, some previous life. Some, while in regression, have even spoken foreign languages totally unknown to them.

“Unfortunately, we have never been able to document these past lives. The reason for this is that the subjects regress to periods too far in the past for their experiences to be reliably corroborated. It is this lack of documentation that makes it ultimately impossible to offer conclusive proof of reincarnation….”

Bentley’s office was on Rodeo Drive. It was modest in size and tastefully furnished. The parapsychologist smiled a welcome and waved Peter to a chair.

“Sit down, Dr. Proud.”

He was a big man, about fifty, with iron-gray hair and penetrating gray eyes under heavy brows. To Peter, he looked more like a football coach than a parapsychologist.

Bentley offered him a silver cigarette box.

“Smoke?”

“No, thanks.”

“Sam Goodman was very mysterious about your problem. All he would say was that you were going through some curious psychic experiences and that they were upsetting you pretty badly. He called them fantastic, absolutely unique. And Sam isn’t a man given to superlatives.” He smiled. “Naturally, I’m hooked.”

“Dr. Bentley, I’m in trouble. Frankly, I’m scared.”

“Suppose you tell me about it.”

“l don’t even know where to begin.”

“Go back a little first. Tell me something about yourself. Who you are, what you do, who your parents are. Then you can get into the nitty-gritty. Just tell it the way it happened, and don’t leave out anything.”

Peter glanced at the clock. “It’s going to take some time.”

“Relax. We’ve got plenty of time. And I’m a good listener.” He motioned to the small tape recorder on his desk. “Mind if I use this?”

“No.”

“Good. It seems to upset some people. But I like to have everything on tape.” He picked up the small microphone and said: “February fifth, 1974. Initial interview with Peter Proud. Referred by Dr. Samuel Goodman.” Then Bentley leaned back and signaled Peter to begin.

Through it all, the parapsychologist sat perfectly still. He never took his eyes from Peter’s face. When Peter got into the dream sequences, Bentley seemed particularly fascinated. Peter told him about everything except his visit to Verna Bird, which he omitted out of embarrassment. He was afraid Bentley would think him an idiot.

When he had finished, Bentley continued to stare at him. “Well, I’ll say this. You’re a pretty unique bird.”

“Yes?”

“I’ve had a lot of people, come in here and tell me they’ve lived past lives. They sailed with Ulysses, or spoke to Christ as a shepherd in Galilee, or fought the Gauls with Caesar. But you’re the first one who’s walked into my office and claimed prenatal memory that’s really recent.” He paused. “You’re sure these dreams never vary? There’s never anything new?”

“No.”

“Interesting. I’ll use a better word than that: fantastic. Sam Goodman was right.”

“The question is—can you help me?”

“I don’t know. I’m still trying to digest what you’ve just told me.”

“I wish to God I knew what was happening to me. If you have any idea at all …”

“Let me put it this way. If men like Staub don’t know, then I can’t illuminate your problem any further. That is, not on
their
terms. But without going into a long song and dance about some of the work we’ve been doing in the Psi area, I can tell you this. We have some reason to believe, in our limited frame of reference, that recurring dreams like yours may be an indication of genuine prenatal memories. The fact that the same details accurately repeat themselves over
and over makes the possibility even stronger. And the fact that they are almost contemporary makes them even more intriguing. However, from your point of view, they’re tormenting and debilitating, both mentally and physically. And in time they could be dangerous. It’s important to penetrate through to them, if we can. My suggestion, Dr. Proud, is that we try regressive hypnosis.”

“Regressive hypnosis?”

“Yes. Once in a great while, we’re able to regress people in a trance state back to prenatal memory. Presumably, they’re able to remember details of their previous lives. I’d like to try that with you. If it works, we may open up a very important door.”

“What do you mean?”

Bentley took a deep breath. “Dr. Proud, in every case I’ve ever known about in which a subject regressed to a prenatal state, the ‘memories’ have always gone far back in time—so far back that nobody can check to prove the reincarnation. Even the celebrated Bridey Murphy goes too far back for easy and conclusive proof. She is supposed to have been born in 1798 and died in 1864. The controversy about her is still going on, and it’ll go on for a long time, because there’s no way of checking it out.”

Bentley paused. “Now you walk in here and drop a bombshell in my lap. Without any regressive hypnosis at all, you’ve experienced dream fragments just a few years away from being contemporary. All of them fall into the same time frame—according to the Automobile Dream, as you call it, sometime in the forties. Mind you, that’s what the hallucination says. That doesn’t mean it’s true. I’m not buying it, at least not all the way. It’s still possible you saw a picture of that car, or even the car itself, a long time ago and stored it in your memory bank. In none of your dreams can you recall any names whatever—names of people, the town, anything we could follow up and
prove
. But if we can regress you back into prenatal memory, and it’s a very big IF, then maybe you’ll come up with something—the name of this town you lived in, your own name,
or, rather, the name of the man you call X. If you knew the name of the town, for instance, you could go back and visit it. Find some answers. Obviously, if it exists in reality, it’ll still be there.”