Theos-Talk Archives (July 2005 Message tt00020)

The philosopher John Hick writes the following
concerning one hypothesis other than "reincarnation" 
to explain the cases of children who claim to remember 
"their" previous lives:

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....Stevenson himself discusses several different 
hypotheses, other than reincarnation, each of which 
may apply to one or more of his own twenty cases, 
though he does not think that they can between them 
convincingly cover all of them. I should like to 
add one more to the list of possible non-reincarnationist 
explanations, making use of the psychic factor 
theory mentioned in chapter 7. This is the theory 
that after bodily death a mental 'husk' or 'mask' of 
the deceased person is left behind and is 
telepathically accessible under certain conditions 
to living persons. Such a 'husk' may consist of 
mere fragments of memory, emotion, habit – 
analogous to isolated pieces of a tape-recording – 
or of a relatively coherent and cohensive body of 
such elements and may . . . become linked to the mind of a medium 
when in trance and be presented under the dramatic guise of a 
visitor from the spirit world. This hypothesis can be extended to 
cover the comparatively rare cases of an individual 'remembering' a 
supposed previous identity and life. It may be that he (or she) is 
telepathically sensitive in the same sort of way as a medium, and is 
being influenced by the psychic 'husk' of some deceased person and 
identifying himself with this.

It is perhaps worth noting, as consistent with this possibility, 
that in most, or perhaps all, of the more impressive cases of 
reported memories of former lives – including all of Ian
Stevenson's twenty selected cases – the remembered life was
the most recent one, with a gap of no more than a few years between 
its end and the beginning of the reported memories. Likewise 
the 'spirits' who communicate through mediums have usually only 
fairly recently died. The recency of the material in each case 
might be expected if the phenomena have a common origin in 
persisting psychic traces or 'husks' which presumably gradually fade 
or decay with the passage of time.
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Quoted from:
John Hick, DEATH AND ETERNAL LIFE, p. 376

Daniel
Blavatsky Study Center
http://hpb.cc