Past lives. Statistical Proof from Dr. Wambach

Past lives. Statistical Proof.

'People who claim to have lived prior lives have always seemed fake to me. Too often they claim to have been someone famous, like an Egyptian Pharaoh, Napoleon or Joan of Ark. Certainly, if reincarnation is real, it is not limited to the rich and famous.'

So Dr. Helen Wambach thought when hypnosis research had been started.

I was surprised that someone else had addressed this obvious flaw. Her name was Dr. Helen Wambach and she set about to prove how foolish the whole idea of reincarnation was by conducting a scientific investigation of her own in the 1960s.

Dr. Wambach questioned 1088 white, middle class subjects from California while they were under hypnosis. The subjects were asked to regress to a former life. If this was successful, they were told to remember everything when they awoke from their hypnotic state.

Not satisfied to just ask who they were or when they lived, Dr. Wambach also made them describe their status, gender, race, clothing, footwear, utensils, tools they used, their money, housing and even the food they ate!

The subjects frequently reported viewing the former lives much like watching a movie. They said they could experience whatever the individual experienced in that particular time. They heard ancient languages but did not understand them. The full details of their experiences were recorded both during and after the sessions. Never before had past life inquiries been that specific or involved such a large population. The results of her 10 years of research surprised everyone.

The detailed reports were thoroughly investigated to see if they corresponded with historical facts. In all but 11 cases (less than 1%), the descriptions were totally accurate. Some of the results are as follows:

50.6 % of the past lives reported were male and 49.4 % were female -- this is exactly in accordance with biological fact.
The reported class or status was exactly the same proportion as the estimates of historians of the specific period of the former life.

In general, this was approximately 10% upper class, 20-35% from the middle class and the remaining 55-70% from the lower class. Although the proportion of middle class was higher around 1000 BC, the proportion later dropped and increased again after 1700 AD.

The recall by subjects of clothing, footwear, type of food and utensils used was better than that in popular history books. She found over and over again that her subjects knew better than most historians -- when she went to obscure experts her subjects were invariably correct.

A subject who lived around 1000 B.C in Egypt described different types of clothing worn by the upper and lower classes. The upper classes wore either a half-length or full-length white cotton robe. The lower classes wore something like an exotic-looking type of pants that was wrapped downwards from the waist. The researchers viewed historic records of clothing worn during the respective periods and could therefore compare it to the descriptions of these subjects. The descriptions were found to be correct.

Between 60-77% of the ancient population lived at or below the poverty level. They wore home made clothes and lived in simple, even primitive, abodes. The majority were farmers who labored every day in the fields. None of the hypnotized individuals recalled being a famous historical figure. Those who recalled a high social position seemed highly dissatisfied with their lives, as if it was a burden to be alive. Those who recalled being a farmer or a member of a primitive tribe appeared to be content.

Their recollections were from different geographic areas and races during their prior life. Dr. Wambach divided them into several categories: Caucasians, Asians, Indians, Blacks and Middle Eastern descent.

Around 2000 BC, only 20% of the subjects reported that they were Caucasians. They lived widely dispersed throughout what is now known as the Middle East, the Mediterranean, Europe and Central Asia (Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, etc., called the central steppe during historical times).

Five subjects stated that they lived in Central Asia between 1000 and 2000 BC. They recalled living in tents, which was common to the migrating population of that region. Amazingly, they found themselves to have white skin color and yellow or golden hair! At first, this didn't appear to be historically accurate as Asian people should have black hair and darker skin. However, recent discoveries of mummified corpses [right] along the ancient Spice Route have shown that there were indeed light skinned and blond haired people!

Eating habits of people who lived around 500 B. C. were not that bad. Twenty percent of the subjects recalled that they ate poultry and sheep meat. However, between A.D. 25 to A.D. 1200, people's eating habits were rather poor. The subjects recalled that the food was tasteless. One young man said: "I will never bad-mouth McDonald's food". It is not surprising that those who recalled the best tasting food were those who remembered a prior life in China.

Among all the subjects, 62% died of old age and illness, 18% percent died violently during war, or some other manmade catastrophe and the remaining 20% died in accidents. Many of the prior lives ended during the two world wars, as well as civil wars in Asian countries. Thus, these people reincarnated shortly after they died. We will see more evidence for this in our next striking example.

Surprisingly, Dr. Wambach found that 69% of the subjects who had died during the 1850's were Caucasians, while between 1900 and 1945, only 40% were Caucasian. It seems that transmigration of the different races increased after 1945. This is still not understood

Dr. Wambach went on to publish her findings in Reliving Past Lives: The Evidence Under Hypnosis and Life Before Life (1984). Although she began her work as a skeptic, she would later write,

"...Fantasy and genetic memory could not account for the patterns that emerged in the results. With the exception of 11 subjects, all descriptions of clothing, footwear, and utensils were consistent with historical records..."
And in later interviews, she stated,

"I don't believe in reincarnation -- I know it!"

Dr. Wambach