Rebirth and the Western Buddhist - Khamkoo

24 Rebirth and the Western Buddhist
ground and left to die. 48 Why too should a fantasy be so
realistic and consistent? Why, if the subject is merely
acting out an imagined death agony, should he reproduce
it identically each time, like a film being replayed? 49 On
investigation, any explanation other than rebirth becomes
very hard to sustain.
3· Recall under hypnotic regression
This is much the most widely-applicable method of investigating
previous lives and is now producing spectacular
results. It first caught the public attention in 1956
when Morey Bernstein, an American businessman and
amateur hypnotist, published The Search for Bridey Murphy,
50 which became a best-seller. Having read of the
experiments of the English psychiatrist Sir Alexander
Cannon in regressing subjects to before their birth, he
tried the experiment himself on his best subject, who
went back to a life as an Irish woman in the last century.
His book includes transcripts of the hypnotic sessions,
which show the method clearly. Many of the details
elicited from her were subsequently established, with
considerable effort, as historically accurate, although Bridey
herself was an ordinary, obscure person of whom no
specific record was found. The public reaction and the
distortions eventually used to discredit the story in defence
of Christian and psychoanalytic orthodoxy are described
by Cerminara. 51
Now, past-life regression has become a commonplace.
It is routinely applied by hypnotherapists to treat various
psychological problems: when hypnotised and asked to
go back to the origin of their problem, many patients go
back to a previous life. Techniques apparently vary considerably:
that of Denys Kelsey and Joan Grant appears
almost as arduous as the Desjardins' method discussed
above, and by Pisani's account 52 ' 53 produces results of