Sheikh Saud bin Al Thani is a passionate collector of art. Over the past few years, the sheikh — a cousin of the emir of
Qatar — has been frantically buying artworks and objects related to the erstwhile
Maharaja Yeshwant Rao Holkar II of Indore, another passionate patron who led a flamboyant lifestyle in the early part of the 20th century. But there is a reason why the sheikh is so interested in the Holkar: he believes he is the
reincarnation of the maharaja, who died in 1961.
Whether or not the sheikh is the maharaja reborn is a matter of speculation. But increasingly, more and more people are beginning to believe in the concept of reincarnation. "Objective evidence of reincarnation is growing, based on an increasing number of cases of people remembering their past lives," says Walter Semkiw, a San Francisco-based physician, who has established the Institute for the Integration of Science, Intuition & Spirit to research reincarnation and related phenomena scientifically.
To understand whether human beings come back in another body is a fascinating — and controversial — subject that has attracted a lot of debate. Till the past few decades, it was dismissed as bunkum, fit only for potboilers and masala movies. But many, according to Semkiw, are taking reincarnation more seriously now — and coming around to the acceptance of rebirth as a natural phenomena. "This is primarily because of the extensive research done by Dr Ian Stevenson of the
University of Virginia, who studied almost 3,000 children who claimed to have past life memories. In 700 of these cases, memories were so detailed that he was able to factually validate them," he says. Stevenson's book "Twenty Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation", first published in 1966, is regarded by many as a classic work of reincarnation research. "Anyone who reads "Twenty Cases" with an open mind will develop a belief in reincarnation," says Semkiw.
In
India, belief in reincarnation is nothing new. The concept of karma — the principle of cause and effect — has been firmly entrenched in the Indian ethos for a long time. New Age practices like past life regression (PLR) — made popular by American psychiatrist Brian Weiss — are reinforcing the belief. "Over the last few years , there has been an exponential increase in awareness of this therapy. A lot more people are willing to experiment and there is a lot less fear regarding exploring past lives," says Gurpreet Singh, an ex-Army officer who now dabbles full time in PLR. The number of trained regression therapists in the country has also increased. "From a few hundred in the last decade, it's close to more than 5,000 now," says Rock Furtado of Ritana Books that publishes material on spirituality.
Among the earliest therapists in the country, Newton Kondaveti, a Hyderabad-based doctor, left his medical career to focus on PLR. He now has a packed schedule of workshops , where people queue up to explore their past lives and also learn regression techniques. Kondaveti says there is a practical application of this knowledge. "Through PLR, one can get a clear understanding of why situations in this life are the way they are, and find solutions for the problems faced in the present life," he says.
Many of those who have undergone past life regression vouch for its efficacy. Actress Celina Jaitly — who discovered in a regression session that she was a man in a past life — says that knowing one's past life can be an extremely useful source of self-knowledge, inspiration and healing. "It helped me come to terms with several areas," she says. "It helped me a lot in discovering and dealing with certain aspects of connection to my parents, sibling and other important relationships."
Since regression essentially plays out in the mind, a common skepticism is that what passes off as a past life memory is just the mind playing tricks. But Kondaveti is emphatic that past life visions are not figments of the imagination. "When you imagine something, you will come up with something different every time. But in most people, the same visions are seen when the same past life is re-visited."
Those who have remembered factual details from their past life through regression have often checked the authenticity of the information. Many have been quite surprised at what they found. Chennai-based Susheel Nair recalls seeing himself as a pilot , working with KLM airlines whose aircraft — a DC-6 passenger plane — crashed into an apartment building in
Munich in 1951, killing all the 52 people on board. Nair says that after the session was over, he was unsure whether he had actually seen his past life. But when he searched for this information on the internet he could find, buried in a corner of the official KLM website all the details of the crash. It matched with what he saw, right from the make of the plane to the number of people killed. He says, "The experience helped me understand and deal with my childhood phobia of turbo-prop planes like the DC-6."
Despite regression being increasingly used to deal with traumas and health issues, modern medicine is yet to endorse it. "From a psychiatric point of view, there is not enough evidence to suggest that regression, or knowledge of past lives, can be used as a modality of treatment as of now," says Dr Samir Parikh, chief psychiatrist at Delhi's Max hospital.
Those who believe in it, however, continue to peep into the past, often to look for solutions for the present. As also for the tantalizing feeling that when you whirl back in time to the mists of the past, the stranger that you meet there might just be yourself.
