Here is the Introduction to the book

PASSPORT TO PAST LIVES:  THE EVIDENCE

Authored by Robert T. James and mentioned in other places in this Web site.  The book was published March, 2004. (ISBN: 0-595-310022-2) If your local bookseller is unable to order this for you, visit www.amazon.com.

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 INTRODUCTION

What are we to make of the almost universal human experience, that regardless of our religious or other beliefs, while in hypnosis, we humans seem to have memories of our own past lives?

Are these memories, figments of our imagination, some form of genetic memories inherited from our ancestors, cryptomnesia (information learned from another source and forgotten), or plain fraud and deception?  Are they true windows into our own immortality?  Because of certain circumstances, I found myself pondering these questions a few years ago.

I had no committed beliefs about rebirth, past lives, or religious doctrines such as reincarnation.  I do not accept the premise that the existence of past lives should be accepted on trust or faith, or be based on books or texts that many may hold sacred.

In saying this, I am not in any way trying to ridicule or denigrate those who do accept spiritual matters on faith.  I like to think that as a skeptic, I have an open mind on all spiritual doctrines; but accepting faith as a criterion in the search for truth is just not what I do.

I am not a mystic nor a medium.  I can not close my eyes and contact people who have died.  I have not had a vision on the road to anywhere. I was a skeptic; but a skeptic with an active and open mind.

I am also a pragmatist. I do research, examine the resulting evidence of my research and the credible research of others, and try to draw  reasonable and rational conclusions from that evidence.

With this book, I am not necessarily trying to convince the reader of anything, except that something seems to be occurring that cannot be explained by established, conventional, psychological concepts.  And, that whatever is going on is important.

I started studying hypnosis many years ago while an undergraduate in college.  After obtaining my Bachelor of Science degree, I went on to obtain a Juris Doctor degree and practiced law for 35 years.  My interest in hypnosis, however, never waned.  Over the years I continued my studies, attending a number of schools that taught hypnosis, hypnotherapy, and forensic hypnosis, including supervised training in these skills.  In 1986, after retiring from my law practice, I returned to college and for the next 3 1/2 years studied traditional psychology and psychotherapy.

In the early 1980s, a friend asked me to regress her back beyond birth to see if she could recall a past life.  I was reluctant, but I did it.  She went into hypnosis easily, and did indeed seemingly recall being a married woman, with a husband and a child, living in England in the 1800s.  The experience sparked my curiosity, but didn't spur me into seriously pursuing the phenomena.  It seemed a little "far-out" for serious inquiry.

Two years later, the same friend again asked me to regress her beyond birth.  Again I did.  She regressed to what appeared to be the same life as before.  In answer to my questions, she described the same life in much greater detail.  In that lifetime she recited with some emotion, dying by being run-over by a horse and carriage in the streets of London while still a young woman.  I had recorded both sessions.  In comparing them, I was very impressed with the consistency of the detail that she reported from session to session, even though they were two years apart.

Now I was more than just curious.  As an experienced trial attorney, I found it highly unlikely that she would be able to remember these same details years later if this were a made-up or fantasized story.  Knowing the lady fairly well, I was also convinced that she had not deliberately falsified the regression to further some agenda of her own.  This experience caused me to decide to explore the past-life phenomenon in more depth.  Because of both my skepticism and my experience and training in hypnosis, I felt, (right or wrong), that I was a suitable candidate to investigate this phenomenon.  I had nothing to prove or disprove.

Hypnosis is held in disrepute by many people, partly, I suspect, due to the use of it for entertainment purposes by stage hypnotists, and by its bizarre portrayal in motion pictures and television.  For many people, combining hypnosis with past-life research pushes the entire matter to the edge of credulity.  If I had any doubt about this, my colleagues reminded me of it from time-to-time.  ("Bob, take up golf.  Leave that stuff alone";  "Sounds weird to me"; and so on.)

Before advertising for subjects and starting hypnotic sessions, I conducted a search to determine what research, if any, of the past-life phenomenon had already been done.  Recent books and journal articles contained a great deal of pertinent information, although many of them ardently attempted to prove or disprove the case for past lives.  Very few have tried to evaluate the evidence supporting the reality of past lives critically.

Only a few authors that I encountered at that time, Ian Stevenson¹, Helen Wambach², Linda Tarazi³, and Rick Brown⁴ seem to have conducted reliable basic research into the subject following scientific acceptable methods that could be verified and replicated.  I refer to the published cases by these authors as the “hard Core” cases, that I examine in detail in Chapter 12.

Other popular books and reports contain cases that are certainly suggestive that we have lived previous lifetimes and that some form of our individuality survives our physical death.  To a skeptic such as myself however, all these cases and reports raised questions for which I could find no satisfactory answers.  For example, a number of the subjects involved persons seeking assistance with mental or emotional problems.  Is the experiencing of past lives while in hypnosis the normal capability of a healthy mind?  Or only an artifact of therapy?

In some of the reported cases, the authors seemed convinced of the reality of past lives.  Is the subject, knowing the belief of the hypnotist, merely responding to the relationship and trying to please the hypnotist?  Would the results of the regression be the same were the hypnotist a skeptic, neither a believer nor a disbeliever, and the subjects were so advised?

Would the religious beliefs, and the extent of the involvement of the subject in religious activities of one kind or another, affect the results of a hypnotic regression to a past life?

How do sex, age, and/or the education of the subjects influence past-life regression?

Would the subject’s expectations affect the results of the hypnotic regression?

Would the past-life regressions tend to confirm or rebut the experiences of those reporting near-death experiences?

In the event the evidence does indeed indicate that some form of our individuality survives our physical death, has lived in the past, and will probably live again, such evidence would contradict the current view held by many Christians and others in our culture, that such surviving entity was newly created by some divine source at the time of the physical birth or conception of members of our species.

To attempt to seek answers to my questions arising from the research of others, I conducted two different research projects into the phenomena of past lives.  I structured my research in accordance with scientific methods for conducting psychological research.

My first research project was designed to just generally inquire into the past-life phenomena to see if normal, healthy adults could and would regress beyond birth.  To begin, I ran advertisements in magazines of general, but not prominent, distribution in the Colorado Springs, Colorado, area.  My intention was to proceed inconspicuously, but still attract mature, emotionally-stable subjects.

Fortunately, I was successful in attracting an extremely interesting, sincere, and emotionally stable group of subjects, who sought no personal gain by participating in this project.

In my first research project, I worked individually with 107 subjects, three of whom did not go into hypnosis.  Of the 104 who did go into hypnosis, 81 reported memories of what seemed to be past lives.

In their encountered past lives, the subjects were frequently of a different sex than they are in their present lives, and were frequently of different races.

In PART ONE of this book, I give a brief Overview of Hypnosis and Past-Life Regressions, in order to show how past-life regressions came about.

PART TWO, in Chapters 2 through 11, I explore many of the experiences my subjects encountered in my First Research Project in what seemed to be previous lives, and also I explore their experiences in-between lifetimes.  My subjects were all healthy adults, of different ages, of both sexes, with different religious beliefs and philosophies, almost all of whom did not know each other.

In those ten Chapters, I have set forth a wide range of my subjects’ past-life experiences in the belief that this would give all of us a better understanding of the past-life phenomena, and aid us in analyzing the “hard-core” cases published by other researchers as I do in Chapter 12.

Because of the general nature of my First Research Project, no specific attempt was made to obtain verifiable data, and very little data was obtained that could be verified using readily-available resources.  The  research (as with most) gave credence to some propositions, but also gave rise to a great many questions.  The most important questions occurring to me at the conclusion of my First Research Project, was whether verifiable past-life data could readily be obtained from the subjects, and secondly, if the evidence indicated that we did indeed survive our physical deaths, what was the origin and nature of that surviving entity?  How does such phenomena fit into our evolutionary past?

These questions and a few others gave rise to my Second Research Project.  I again advertised for subjects.  Seventy-three persons responded.  I worked individually with 50 subjects.  One did not go into hypnosis. Of the 49 who did, 44 regressed to what seemed to be lives that they had lived before.  Again, my subjects were all healthy adults,  of different ages, different sexes, different religions and philosophies who did not know each other.

One of my two primary objectives in this Second Research Project was to regress the subjects back to lives just previous to their present ones, to see if verifiable data could readily be obtained.  I emphasize readily be obtained, because in several cases from sources other than from my own research, evidence of past lives as recalled by subjects have indeed been authenticated.  However, most of these verified cases didn’t arise by plan, but were randomly encountered, like in the Tarazi and Brown cases.

Secondarily, I planned to take the subjects back to the first time they lived on Earth in any form.  In addition, I also planned to take the subjects into their mothers’ wombs, just prior to their present lifetimes.  Could we determine when the subject entered the fetus?  Were they aware of their mother’s feelings and emotions while there?  Lastly, as “far out” as it may seem, had the subjects ever lived on another planet?  If they reported that they had, I wanted to explore those experiences.

PART THREE investigates with you my subjects’ experiences in my Second Research Project.

These experiences may very well not fit into the reality with which you are familiar.  I’ll confess, it was vastly different from my own.

I offer the material in this book, not to convince you of any particular philosophy or point of view, but merely to present the results of my own research, along with a discussion of what seems to be a few well-authenticated cases of other researchers.  The final determination of the importance of this material and its relevance to your life is, of course, always with you.

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