Talk:Past Life Memories or Spontaneous Recall (‘Jātismara’)
Krishna said:
Numerous are my lives that have passed, and so also yours Arjuna. I know them all, but you do not know them, Scorcher of foes. Gita 4.5
There are numerous examples available in the Hindu tradition where the past lives of saints were remembered and listed as such. In a verse attributed to Sant Kabir, he says that in his previous life, he was a Brahmana who did evil deeds and forgot the worship of Rama, whereupon he was reborn and landed up in the house of a Muslim weaver. Guru Gobind Singh, in his autobiographical account, named the ‘Bachittar Nātak’ also states that in his previous life, he performed great austerities to Lord Shiva and Mahākālikā, whereupon Hari commanded him to be reborn and found a flourishing (Khālsā) Panth.[1]
There is an abundance of literature listing and describing hundreds of cases of past life recall[2][3][4][5][6]. Let us look at a celebrated case below-
Shanti Devi:
An exciting case of spontaneous recall of past life was that of a girl named Shanti Devi who was born in the 1920s to a family in Delhi. She would insist from her childhood that she was a Brahmin (although her current family was not) and had a husband and son in Mathura. She described her house in Mathura (100 miles from Delhi) as having a yellow exterior, and would often speak to her present parents in a dialect that was prevalent in Mathura. Her case drew a lot of publicity, and Mahatma Gandhi intervened to set up a committee that took the girl to her ‘home’ in Mathura. Shanti Devi recognized all her family members correctly, and pointed to the spot where there used to be a well (now sealed), the spot where her past life’s family hid their money and many other intimate details between her and her past husband. Her case was studied by a researcher from Sweden who subsequently published her story[7]. She also described to the researcher in great detail how she (her atman) left her body just before cremation, how she was able to keep consciousness of her surroundings due to her lifelong practice of chanting Krishna’s name with devotion, her experiences between two lives, and how she was reborn in the womb of her mother in the present life. Shanti Devi could never overcome the attachments to her past life, and therefore she never married as her ‘husband’ was still alive, even though he had remarried after she died in the previous life. She spent her adult life teaching about Hindu spirituality and the truth of the Dharmic doctrine of rebirth to audiences in Delhi till her death around the age of 60.
References[edit]
- ↑ "Paraloka aura Punarjanma." Kalyāṇ, special issue, vol. 43, no. 1, 1969, Geeta Press, Gorakhpur, pp. 73, 230-231. Discusses cases where saintly Hindu leaders, such as Vinoba Bhave, made guesses about their past lives based on habits and circumstances.
- ↑ "Paraloka aura Punarjanma." Kalyāṇ, special issue, vol. 43, no. 1, 1969, Geeta Press, Gorakhpur.
- ↑ Swaminarayan Sampradaya. Relevant publications from Swaminarayan Aksharapith, Ahmedabad.
- ↑ Swami Rama. In Woods of God-Realization. Various editions, Rama Tirtha Pratishthan, Lucknow, India.
- ↑ Stevenson, Ian. Cases of Reincarnation Type. 4 vols., University Press of Virginia, 1974-1983.
- ↑ Kharel, Mohan. Past Life Recollection, OBE, NDE, and Other Parapsychic Phenomena in Nepal. Self-published, 2014.
- ↑ Lönnerstrand, Sture. I Have Lived Before: The True Story of the Reincarnation of Shanti Devi. Zark Mountain Publishers, 1994, Huntsville, Arizona (USA).