Rebirth and the Western Buddhist - Khamkoo

64 Rebirth and the Western Buddhist
suggestion employed called for "appearances on the earth
plane ... in each life which built or retarded the entity's
development." 113 This effectively excluded non-human
lives, so it is not surprising that Cayce refers to nonhuman
states only indirectly-he attributes some cases of
mental disease to possession by discarnate entities. 114 It
is entirely reasonable that lives with the most karmic
influence on this human life would also be human.
In most of the hypnotic regression experiments, certainly
in Wambach's, precautions are taken to stop the
subject experiencing anything too distressing. There is
therefore no possibility of recalling a hell existence even if
this were consistent with the other suggestions given. In
any case, experiences of extreme suffering are resistant to
recall. Nevertheless, the sparsity of animal rebirths recalled
is still difficult to account for if we have been born
animal more often than human in the last few millennia,
as the teachings assert.
There are many examples of people experiencing long
series of human lives with not more than a few centuries
between each, and sometimes much less. Above all,
Wambach's experiment57 showed that at each of the time
periods checked between 2000 BC and 500 AD, roughly
seven percent of the sample of present-day Americans
remembered being alive. From 1000 AD to the present
century, the proportion increased sharply. This implies
that virtually the whole human population in the historical
past is accounted for by past lives of human beings
now living.U 5 Also, the great majority of Wambach's
subjects remembered past human lives. Therefore there
is strong evidence that the human race consists of a group
of individuals repeatedly taking human rebirth, with a
very little interchange with other large mammals.
It seems then that in the short term-say a dozen
existences-the picture of our rebirth prospects presented
in the Buddhist teachings is exaggeratedly black. But this