Rebirth and the Western Buddhist - Khamkoo

26 Rebirth and the Western Buddhist
is positively confirmed by these sources, and (3) the
confirmed information is sufficiently obscure that it is
highly unlikely the subject could have learned it in this
life. If the subjects give some information not known to
historians at the time but later confirmed, this is further
evidence that they did not learn it through normal channels-but
of course such good fortune is unlikely to come
the investigator's way. Nevertheless, Iverson, 56 investigating
by this method a series of past-life recalls by a British
hypnotist, found a case where the subject, as a Jew in
medieval York, hid in the crypt of a certain church in an
unsuccessful attempt to escape a massacre: when he
checked, that church was held to have no crypt, but soon
afterwards the blocked-off crypt was discovered by
accident.
The statistical approach has only just become practicable,
owing to improvements in technique. Wambach 57
developed a very efficient method in which the subjects
are not required to speak under hypnosis, but are told to
remember everything vividly and discuss it when awake.
Not only does that make it easier to gain information on
past lives, so that she was able to elicit past-life memories
from as many as ninety percent of her subjects, but by
getting the subjects to fill in a written questionnaire she
could work with groups of even fifty or more subjects 58
instead of one at a time, and also save all the labour of
transcribing tapes. Thus she was able to collect 1088 reports
of the past lives of modem Americans, sampled at a
series of specified times over the past 4000 years. The
reports included the answers to standard questions such
as the sex of the subject in the previous life, social status,
country, colour, age at death, cause of death, sort of food
eaten, utensils used, clothes and footwear worn, and so
on. The questions had to be repeated word-for-word
with each group of subjects since hypnotised subjects
interpret instructions very literally: rather like changing a