challenge our current knowledge. In
"Beyond Science" Epoch Times collects
stories about these strange phenomena
to stimulate the imagination and open
up previously undreamed of
possibilities. Are they true? You
decide.
Even as far as reincarnation stories go,
this is an unusual one.
In the 1970s, famed reincarnation
researcher Ian Stevenson encountered
a woman who could fluently speak a
form of Bengali spoken some 150 years
earlier. Modern Bengali contains about
20 percent English loan words, Bengali
Professor P. Pal told Stevenson. But
this woman had long conversations
with Professor Pal without using a
single one. On the other hand, she used
more Sanskrit words, just as Bengalis
did around 1810 to 1830, the
hypothesized time period of her past
life.
She spoke completely fluently as
though she were raised in Western
Bengal, a region she had many
memories of, though she had never
been there in this life. She was born
and raised in Nagpur, India, speaking
Marathi, as well as a bit of Hindi and
English.
When this woman, Uttara Huddar, was
32 years old, a new personality
emerged calling itself Sharada. Huddar
had not talked about remembering a
past life before this point. She had a
double M.A. degree in English and
public administration and she was a
part-time lecturer at Nagpur University
until she started sharing her body with
what could be called a discarnate
woman.
Sharada, this new personality, could
not speak or understand any of the
languages Huddar could. Sharada
didn't recognize Huddar's family or
friends, and she was baffled by the
many instruments invented after the
Industrial Revolution. Huddar's family
didn't know any Bengali and they were
unfamiliar with the ethnic foods and
other things Sharada desired.
Stevenson and his fellow researchers
spent a couple of weeks investigating
her story over the course of a couple
years. They checked up on places she
remembered in Bengal (some of them
in modern-day Bangladesh). Her
descriptions were accurate in terms of
distance between places, geographical
layout, et cetera.
She gave the full names of her family
members, including her father's name,
Brajanath Chattopaydhaya. When
Stevenson found a genaeology of a
Chattopaydhaya family living in the
region Sharada described as home, he
discovered Sharada had correctly
named and described her relationship
with five of her family members,
including her father and grandfather.
These family members lived during the
19th century time frame Sharada's
accounts seemed to describe.
"The genealogy is exclusively a male
one. Since no women's names appear in
it, we cannot say that we have proved
that a person corresponding to
Sharada's statements existed. But the
correspondence between the genealogy
and her statements about the
relationships of the male members of
the family seems beyond
coincidence," Stevenson wrote in a
paper published in The Journal of the
American Society for Psychical
Research in July 1980 titled "A
Preliminary Report on an Unusual Case
of the Reincarnation Type With
Xenoglossy." Xenoglossy refers to the
ability to speak or write in a language
unfamiliar to the speaker or writer.
As a child, Huddar had a strong phobia
of snakes. Her mother said that, while
pregnant with Huddar, she had
dreamed repeatedly of being bitten on
the foot by a snake.
Sharada recalled that she was seven
months pregnant and was picking
flowers when a snake bit her toe. She
said she became unconscious, though
she did not explicitly say she
remembered dying. At the time, she
was 22, and "she seemed to have no
awareness that any time had elapsed,"
Stevenson said.
Sharada would take over Huddar's
body for days or weeks at a time, and
Huddar's family started to notice that
these periods corresponded to certain
phases of the moon. Neither would
remember the actions of the other,
leading Stevenson to say it was perhaps
more a case of possession than of
reincarnation.
"The amnesia each personality appears
to have had for events occurring to the
other, even though it was not total,
suggests the possession syndrome
more than a case of the reincarnation
type," he wrote. "This implies that
Sharada is a discarnate personality—
that is, that she consists of surviving
aspects of a real person who lived and
died in the early years of the 19th
century, and who, almost 150 years
later, came to dominate and control
Uttara's body."
He continued: "Other details, however,
are consistent with the interpretation of
the case as one of reincarnation. First,
Uttara had a phobia of snakes when
she was a small child, and later, she
showed a liking for Bengal and
Bengalis."
Her father was a Bengali enthusiast,
because he felt the Bengalis did a better
job protecting themselves from British
forces and he was involved in the
Indian nationalist movement. She may
have inherited this interest in Bengal
from him. She learned a few words of
Bengali in a high school class (taught
by someone who didn't speak Bengali
and who used the Marathi
pronunciations). But, said Stevenson,
there were no indications that she
could have spent nearly enough time
exposed to the Bengali language to
become proficient in the language, let
alone speak with the intonation and
fluidity of a native speaker. The fact
that the version of Bengali she spoke
was also 150 years outdated provided
compelling evidence, he said, along
with her intimate knowledge of the
food and culture.
Sent from my BlackBerry® wireless handheld from Glo Mobile.