What If You Could Remember Your Past Life? | Unveiled

What If You Could Remember Your Past Life?

Do you ever get the feeling that you’ve been here before? That this isn’t the first time you’ve walked this Earth? We’re told that we have just one life… but what if that’s not always true?

This is Unveiled, and today we’re answering the extraordinary question; what if you could remember your past life?

On planet Earth, we’re all united by at least one thing - our experience of life. Everybody’s born, everybody lives, and everybody dies. Modern science and technology is trying its best to outwit that last one so that one day we might choose to be immortal… but, for now, there’s no choosing your own birth, there’s no escaping your own death, and everything that happens in between amounts to your own personal life experience. The good, the bad, the beautiful and the ugly, our life experience is what makes us us. But, what if that’s not strictly true?

Past life regression (or PLR) is an increasingly practiced hypnosis technique. It isn’t widely supported by scientists and is considered a pseudoscience by many… but it is gaining popularity, regardless. Broadly speaking, it prompts the person being hypnotised to not only delve into their own histories, but to go beyond that… beyond even the moment they were born… to face what came before. To face their past lives. In doing so, it’s hoped that they will discover hidden details to explain previously unexplained thoughts and feelings. In some cases, past life regression is said to provide a reason for certain, seemingly unprompted phobias - perhaps, for example, you drowned in a past life and that’s why you’re scared of open water. At other times, it can give context to personal interests - maybe you owned a bar during the prohibition era, and that’s why you’re so enthralled by 1920s history.

There have been a number of high-profile cases down the years. One of the most famous saw a US woman in the 1950s, Virginia Tighe, undergo hypnotism and, whilst in a trance, recall in detail the life story of Bridey Murphy, a woman from nineteenth century Ireland. Tighe’s recollections began in the early 1800s, when she said an eight-year-old Bridey (her former self) was living in the city of Cork. Tighe could also remember when Bridey later married, and even how she had died in 1864 after taking a fall. Tighe herself was born fifty-nine years later, in the United States in 1923, and didn’t reveal anything about Bridey until she underwent hypnotism in the ‘50s.

Unfortunately, while parts of Tighe’s story could be verified, most of the key facts couldn’t be - including the existence of Bridey Murphy, born when Tighe said she was or dying when she said she did. Nevertheless, the story took hold of mid-century America, and as we move through the twenty-first century there’s now a growing list of similar cases. Unlike with Virginia Tighe, however, the majority involve the recollections of children.

While, again, every case tends to generate scepticism within the scientific community, past life recollections most often come from children between the ages of around two and six years old. The internet is awash with parents’ testimonies that their child has unexplained knowledge or memories of a life that isn’t their own. And they’re usually quite unsettling stories, where a four-year old, for example, drops into conversation a detail about how they last died… or a five-year old begins chatting to their current parents about what their past parents were like.

Dr. Jim Tucker, of the University of Virginia, is one of the world’s leading experts on children and past life recollection. He’s also a rare example of a genuine scientist who isn’t dismissing these claims from the outset. Instead, he researches them in detail and, in some cases, suggests that they can’t be only fantasy. That there has to be something else to explain them. Speaking to the Virginia Magazine in 2013, he said “there is evidence here that needs to be accounted for [and] some sort of carry-over of memories often makes the most sense”.

Exactly how this carry-over of consciousness from one person to another happens, Tucker isn’t certain about… if he was, then he will’ve made perhaps the greatest scientific breakthrough of our age! But he suspects that quantum physics has something to do with it all. Finally, Tucker says that strong recollections tend to fade away at around the age of six, at a point where a child seemingly leaves their past life behind and continues with their current one. For many, this ties in with how our memories seem to work. Our earliest memories are usually from around this time in our lives, while everything beforehand is a blank or a blur. All of which means that, as adults, it’s all but impossible to have the same recollections. Unless, of course, you undergo PLR hypnosis, and it works.

But, now let’s imagine what life would be like if remembering past lives wasn’t a murky, pseudoscientific phenomena, but was instead an expected facet of the human experience. How different would the world be if everyone living in it wasn’t living just one life… but was actually living the latest in a long line of lives. It’s a uniquely bizarre, hypothetical scenario.

For one, the breadth of knowledge that everyone would have would grow immeasurably. Yes, in the real world we can take an interest in history and try to learn from stories of the past, but in this alternate world we’d have a much better understanding of all that came before us. We’d remember wars, revolutions, celebrations, and scientific breakthroughs… because we will have lived through all of them, as our past selves. Perhaps, then, we’d all be ultra-intelligent. In line with the popular saying, we’d certainly have wisdom beyond our years… in a very literal sense.

We’d also, hopefully, have a greater number of happy memories to draw upon. We’d have more friends from our past to think about. More loved ones. More school days to reminisce over, and more holidays to look back on with fondness. If, say, we were feeling down in the twenty-first century, we could briefly transport ourselves to a happy moment from an earlier time. We’d carry more reminders within ourselves that life is great.

But, despite the benefits, it wouldn’t be all good. Even with the past life recollection stories of today, they usually focus primarily on stressful or traumatic times. For example, if someone claims to remember their own death, they usually claim to have died in a particularly disturbing or frightening way. There have been instances where people have claimed to have been murdered in a past life, killed in a plane crash, or in a road accident. Regardless of the scepticism they receive, it’s rare that a past life recollection would include dying peacefully at home, surrounded by family.

Naturally, if everyone could remember their past lives, then most people thankfully aren’t going to recall being the victim of a gruesome murder. But, nevertheless, the negative moments that did occur in their former lives will still be carried through, as well. Accidents, injuries, relationship problems, illnesses, financial issues… all of us are likely to encounter any number of these things over the course of a lifetime. We learn to deal with them and move on. But, if everyone could remember their past lives, too, then there’d be so much more that they’d have to move on from, every single day.

There’s no doubt that remembering past lives could become a severe mental burden. And it’s no coincidence, then, that those undergoing past life regression hypnosis in the real world, often do so hoping to find a reason as to why they feel inexplicably sad, anxious, or frightened of something. Until such day as past lives are unequivocally proven, the practice will always attract doubt and ridicule. But, for some, it’s a source of comfort to consider that they may have been someone else before they became themselves.

What do you think? Do you believe that this life is all there is, or that there’s something more? Would you be open to past life regression, or would you rather focus on the here and now? And, in a reality where we did all remember our former selves, do you think it would be a source of joy or despair? It’s difficult to imagine exactly how our brains would react, how the human story would adapt, and how our personalities could change as a result… but that’s what would happen if you could remember your past life.