By Royal E. Alsup, Ph.D.

A human being is a part of the whole called by us "Universe," a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest--a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty. -- Albert Einstein

Children are sacred. Liberation psychology is a spiritual and scientific psychology that endeavors to make the life-world of children a respected and valued position in our society. The research on predeath visions, near death experiences and spontaneous remembering of past lives indicates what we can learn from children if we open ourselves to their world of experience. The Sacred Soul uses experiences such as these in our materialistic time to give us messages that what we see is not all there is to existence. The wisdom of children who report these kinds of experiences can free us from the fear of dying and comfort us in our suffering from losing loved ones to the transformation of death. The Sacred Soul of these children brings us the good news that something survives in an afterlife.

The past life studies with children allow western people to hypothesize about reincarnation. The children studied in the research on reincarnation are still embedded in their intuition-the faculty of imagination-which sees through the celestial earth and unveils a sacred reality that is hidden from those of us who are brainwashed into perceiving only a material reality. Our society and our science have shaped and molded a reality of what we see, hear, taste, smell and touch, a reality based almost exclusively on the senses and the intellect. Listening to the experiences of children will lead us to the celestial world, from the unreal to the real, from a lack of meaning to meaning. Children's detailed descriptions of previous life experiences are visible illustrations of the Sacred Soul that opens to the experience of the Intelligence and Love of Creation and the Creator.

Dr. Ian Stevenson, of the University of Virginia Medical School, has carried out thousands of interviews with children who have spontaneously remembered apparent previous existences. Most of the children were between two and a half to five years old. The children sometimes had birthmarks or birth defects that were the same or in the same location on the body as in the reported previous life. They also sometimes had phobias that corresponded in theme to the manner of their death. For example, a child who suffered from a water phobia remembered a past life in which she died from drowning. Hospital records concerning the deceased that were recorded before the child was born could confirm these connections.

Children have lead researchers to the town, sometimes at a very distant location, where they remember having lived in a previous life. The children could pick out the living siblings or spouses of the deceased and could name them without having any prior information about them. They reported intimate details of family problems that never would have been reported in a newspaper or passed on in any way to the child. The children were too young to have made up their stories or to have retained them if their parents had rehearsed them. The children could describe the way the deceased died, what type of vocation they were practicing before their death and the socioeconomic level at which they lived. Several of these cases were reported in Christian and Muslim families who did not even believe in reincarnation.

The children who were studied in this research stopped recalling the images of the previous lives between five to eight years old. The images of the memories are strong when verbal behavior and cognitive structures emerge in early childhood. However, as language and thinking abilities develop the images of past lives begin to disappear. The children also respond to family and cultural contexts, which tell them that such experiences, are taboo and so they begin to forget.

The first case of reincarnation I encountered in my practice was in l976. The little girl was four years old and I saw her intermittently until she was twenty-two years old. I will call her Wendy. She and her mother belonged to a religion that believed in reincarnation. Her religion taught her that she could have out-of-body experiences (OBE's) for reasons of dying at will. Wendy told me that she and her mother had been reincarnating for many lives. At times she would be the mother and at other times she would be the daughter.

Wendy had the first spontaneous recall of her past lives at four years of age. Through the years of therapy she would tell me different aspects of the story, as subsequent spontaneous recall would occur. She did not forget the visual images from the past as her language development and abstract cognitive abilities emerged because her mother and her would have open conversations with her about their past lives. Their religious practices made the images believable, appropriate and useful for personal and spiritual growth. Wendy talked actively about her past lives and how her dying a violent death caused her birthmarks. This correlates with the research that indicates that those who have died from violent deaths have birthmarks where the wounds were inflicted on the deceased person.

I met with Wendy until she was nine years old and didn't see her again until she was sixteen. Her story at sixteen was consistent with her earlier story. She felt the experience of changing positions with her mother through past lives made their relationship special. It was consoling to her to know that they had been connected through many past lives. Wendy continued in therapy for the next two years.

During her senior year of high school she was having low self-esteem problems and anxiety about going to college. This triggered her to talk about her past lives again. Wendy opened up the subject by jokingly wondering if she had attended college in her past lives and she wondered what type of profession she had entered. She felt like she had been a helper to others in a past life or that she had died of an incurable illness that gave her empathy for those who suffer. During therapy sessions when she was about six years old she had created symbols in art therapy of doctors, nurses, and ministers. All through the years that I met with her she was altruistic and felt a call to help other people. At eighteen she decided to leave the area and enter a nursing program or a pre-med program.

I had not seen Wendy for four years. She came into my office one morning looking agitated and upset. It was fortunate that I had a cancellation that morning and I could see her. She was now married and she had brought her husband with her. Two years previous to this meeting she had a series of dreams that revealed to her that her mother and she had been spiritual enemies throughout their previous lifetimes and that they had taken turns killing each other. She felt that she could not see another therapist in the Bay Area because she was afraid they would not believe her. Wendy had been afraid to see her mother since she had the dreams. She was missing her mother now and she decided she really needed to go see her on Thanksgiving. I worked with Wendy and her husband for several sessions to help them deal with the fear of seeing her mother and the anxiety of wondering what the upcoming visit might bring.

Wendy did not want to tell her mother about the dreams. Her mother knew, however, that something was wrong because her daughter had stayed away so long. Just before the Thanksgiving visit her mother called and said, "Wendy, you found out didn't you?" Wendy replied, "I found out what, Mom?" Then her mother revealed that she knew, saying, "You found out that we have been enemies for many past lives." Wendy felt panic because she had never told her mother about the dream series that had unveiled their history of past life battles.

Three days after the Thanksgiving visit Wendy was at my office again reporting that she had been having panic attacks. She told me that one evening after dinner her mother decided to go to bed early. She told Wendy that she loved her and that she wanted to end this past lives war in which they had been participating and hurting each other. Her mother went to bed that night and died! I was shocked when she told me. Wendy was stunned because her mother had been healthy with no signs of disease. The doctors could only say that she died of heart failure but Wendy reported that no one in her family had a history of heart disease. She felt so much love for her mother and she felt like her mother had proven her love toward her by willfully dying, thereby putting an end to their past lives combat.

This was unbelievable. The experience with Wendy made an incredible impression on my mind and in my heart I felt a personal release from my own fear of dying. It made it believable to me that something or some part of us does survive death. Some may say the messages-the past life memories-that children receive may come from angels, some may call it the holographic universe, but it led me to believe in the Sacred Soul of Creation. The love and wisdom of these children show us, as the American Indians believe, that there is a sacred hoop that envelops minerals, plants, animals and human beings in a spiritual universe. They reveal that there is no separation between mind and nature and that we have nothing to fear. The Sacred Soul of the child unmasks a universe that is similar to the reality the new physics describes. The new physics and the new child research can truly lead us from the unreal to the real, from fear to love and from life to beyond life.

References

Corbin, H. (1977). Spiritual Body and Celestial Earth. New Jersey: Princeton University Press.

Gold, P. (1994). Navaho and Tibetan Sacred Wisdom: The Circle of the Spirit. Rochester, Vt: Inner Traditions.

Stevenson, I. (1987). Children Who Remember Previous Lives: A Question of Reincarnation. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia.

Talbot, M. (1991) The Holographic Universe. New York: Harper Collins Publishers.