Chapter 30 - The Case of Shanti Devi

The directedness of our consciousness, however, is not only dependent on the strength of our spiritual aim but to a certain extent on the intenseness of our emotions, especially when these are connected with a religious aim, a sacred duty, or a deep human relationship, based on a pure and selfless love. If such emotions are very strong at the moment of death they may result in carrying their remembrances consciously into the next following life, where they will be particularly vivid in early childhood, before new impressions and experiences can replace them.

A case of this type came to my knowledge in the winter of 1935-6. A little girl named Shanti Devi, who lived in Delhi with her parents, insisted that she was married and that her husband, Kedarnath Chaubey, together with her son, were staying at Muttra, a town about 80 miles distant from Delhi. When the girl first began to talk in this way she was barely three years old and nobody took much notice of it, assuming that it was just playful childish talk, imitating grown-ups. But when the girl was about eight years old and still persisted in her talk about husband and son, her grand-uncle, Professor Kischen Chand, began to suspect that there was more to it than childish imagination. He found out that in the very locality of Muttra described by Shanti there was indeed a person answering to the name of Kedarnath Chaubey. The Professor lost no time in getting in touch with him and related all that the girl had said. The news came rather as a shock, as Kedarnath had married again in the meantime; and there was also the fear that someone might be playing a trick upon him and the Professor. As, however, all the facts were fitting, he finally agreed to meet Shanti at her parents' house.

On the 13th of November 1935, Kedarnath Chaubey with his second wife and his tenyear-old son arrived in Delhi. Shanti had not been informed of their coming. As soon, however, as she entered the room in which her parents and their visitors were assembled, she recognised Kedarnath as her husband and the boy as her son. She embraced the child with tears in her eyes, using the very terms of endearment which her former husband remembered so well. If there had been any doubt in his mind as to Shanti's identity the last trace of it was removed. She also reminded her former husband of small intimate occurrences, known only to him and to her. The proof was complete.

Now other people too became interested in the case, and Deshbandhu Gupta, the President of the All-Indian Newspaper Editor's Conference and Member of Parliament, took up further investigations in order to convince himself of the truth of Shanti's alleged pre-natal memories. He therefore took her to Muttra and asked her to show him and to the others who accompanied them the way to her former home. They took a tonga and Shanti led the party with absolute assurance through the many narrow lanes and winding roads of the town to the very house where she had lived with her husband. But she at once remarked that the colour of the house had been changed.

'I remember that it was painted yellow, not white, as it is now' she exclaimed. This was correct. Kedarnath had left the house after her death, and the new residents had painted it white. Kedarnath thereupon took the party to his new residence, and afterwards Shanti led them to her former mother's house. There too she immediately noticed certain changes. 'There was a well in the garden', she said, 'what has happened to it?' She pointed out where it had been, and when the place was dug up, the well was found under a big stone slab covered with earth. She also recognised her former parents and her former father-in-law, an old Brahmin, bent with age. Shanti's remembrances had proved correct in every detail.

She would have liked to stay with her former son, but she realised that she could not take him away from his Father; and as to her former husband she knew that she could have no more claims upon him, since he had married again. Thus, the realisation dawned upon her that the bonds of marriage and motherhood cannot be maintained beyond death, whose very function it is to free us from those bonds and the sufferings of separation and remembrance, without destroying whatever we may have gained by our capacity to love and to serve others, so that we may meet those whom we loved under new conditions and in new forms, without being encumbered by the limitations of former relationships and the memories of an irretrievable past. And this realisation, made her turn to the more permanent values of a spiritual life in which all our loves and longings are sublimated into a deeper sense of compassion for all that lives: into the faculty to share the joys and sorrows of all with whom life brings us into contact.

Shanti Devi has never married again, but she dedicated her life to the service of others.

She became a highly qualified teacher in a Delhi high school. Friends who know her personally told me that she leads an intensely religious life and plans to found an ashram, where she can devote herself completely to her Sādhanā and to those who share her religious ideals.

Now, one might ask, why do such things happen so often in the East and not in the West? My answer is that they happen as often in the West as in the East; the only difference is that the West does not pay any attention to them, because they do not Fit into the mental attitude of the average Westerner, whose religion teaches him that entirely new beings come into existence at birth, and that those same beings, who were non-existent before their physical conception, would go on existing fix eternity ever after, while those who have discarded this view as being inconsistent with logic and common sense have generally come to the opposite conclusion, namely that beings which did not exist before birth (or conception) will also not exist after death, thus equating living beings with their physical existence and denying any possibility of pre-natal existence or survival after death, except in the form of physical heredity. But if we examine this mechanism of physical heredity we soon discover that the combinations and permutations of chromosomes, etc., are not sufficient to explain either the transference of an infinity of hereditary details, nor the distinct uniqueness of each individual -- even if it has originated from the same hereditary material (as in the case of children from the same parents) -- which shows that an individual is not only the sum total of the qualities of its progenitors. Very clearly an unknown factor is involved in the formation of a new physical organism, a directing creative force beyond all possibilities of observation or scientific analysis, a principle that cannot be reduced to a mathematical formula or a mechanistic theory. The real difficulty for the mechanistic theory is that we are forced, on the one hand, to postulate that the germ-plasm is a mechanism of enormous complexity and definiteness, and, on the other, that this mechanism, in spite of its absolute definiteness and complexity, can divide and combine with other similar mechanisms, and can do so to an absolutely indefinite extent without alteration of its structure ... 'The mechanistic theory of heredity is not only unproven; it is impossible. It involves such absurdities that no intelligent person who has thoroughly realised its meaning and implications can continue to hold it' (J. S. Haldane).

Yet in spite of these absurdities of current scientific idea, which are as unsatisfactory from a spiritual point of view as the former religious beliefs from a logical point of view, the average Westerner clings to his prejudice against the idea of reincarnation and thus fails to observe the ample proofs that are daily offered to him in various forms and through many phenomena which until now have remained inexplicable.

Among the latter, the phenomenon of child prodigies defies all laws of science as well as of current psychology. No amount of scientific knowledge can explain the spontaneous knowledge and even technical skill of such children. Unless, we admit the possibility of remembrances from skills and experiences or knowledge acquired in a former existence there is no reasonable explanation for such phenomena. A genius does not fall from heaven, but is, as all other things in this world, the product of a long evolution of trial and failure and final success through long practice and experience. How otherwise could one explain that a barely four-year-old child could master spontaneously the intricacies of a complicated musical instrument like the spinet, and the even more intricate and subtle rules of musical composition, without having been taught or trained, as it happened in the case of Mozart, Beethoven, and other prodigies. Mozart composed minuets at this early age and gave public performances at the age of seven at the court of the Empress Maria Thèrésa and in many other places. Beethoven, even before he had reached the age of four, had already composed three sonatas. He too gave concerts at the age of eight. Handel, Brahms, Dvorak, Chopin, and other great composers and musicians per-formed similar feats to perfection at an incredibly early age.

Many such cases could also be quoted from the fields of literature, mathematics, and other sciences, Voltaire at the age of three knew by heart all of Lafontaine's fables and Stuart Mill at the same age mastered the Greek language and at six he wrote a history of Rome. William Thomson (Lord Kelvin) at the age of eight or nine solved mathematical problems without the aid of grown-ups and at ten he entered the university. One could multiply such examples ad infinitum.

In addition to this, new evidence of pre-natal remembrances has been found in recent times by means of hypnosis. The results were all the more astonishing as they had not been expected or intended. They were merely a by-product of medical treatment, in which hypnosis was used for different purposes. The most outstanding of these cases was that of Edgar Cayce, an American, born in Kentucky in 1877, who later on became the founder of the well-known Cayce Foundation at Virginia Beach (Virginia). In his youth, he had lost his speech on account of a psychosomatic constriction of the throat. After all known medical remedies and methods of treatment had proved ineffective, he agreed to be treated by a hypnotist, who put him into a deep trance. And here it happened that not only his voice returned but apparently also his former knowledge of medicine, because during his trance he was able to give a correct diagnosis of his case and to describe in detail the necessary treatment in professional terms, though in his waking state he knew nothing of these things.

The treatment which he had revealed in his trance was so successful that other people too came to him for advice when professional doctors were at their wit's end. Again it was a great success, and his prescriptions were of such technical perfection and ingenuity that only a man of vast medical and pharmaceutical experience could have formulated them. Some of his remedies were entirely unknown to the professional world and contained ingredients and combinations that had never been used before. But the cures which he effected through them proved the correctness of his prescriptions. More and more people came to him for help, and he helped them without ever accepting any fees, probably because he felt this strange faculty of his as a gift from heaven. He had no knowledge of Eastern doctrines of rebirth or of a universal storeconsciousness or of meditational practices to induce trances. Yet after a short time he found out that he could put himself into a trance state without the help of a hypnotist. He had discovered the secret to dive into his subliminal depth-consciousness at will.

Once while he was in trance he was asked whether reincarnation was a fact, and without hesitation he answered in the affirmative. When, after he had returned to his normal state of mind, he was told about it he felt greatly upset, because he feared that the idea of reincarnation was incompatible with his Christian beliefs and that perhaps he was in the grip of some evil power. It was only after penetrating deeper into this matter through his trances, as well as through informing himself of the main ideas of Eastern teachings, that he set aside his fears and consented to continue to use his gifts for the benefit of all those who sought his help. Their numbers, however, were steadily increasing; and since he was able to treat even people who lived far away, his work finally spread over the whole of the United States and even to foreign countries. Edgar Cayce died in 1945, leaving behind him a big and prosperous institution to carry on his work and the ideas which inspired it. Though Cayce might never have heard of a Bodhisattva, he certainly acted like one, and perhaps it was this hidden quality in him which enabled him to make use of his pre-natal knowledge.

Though modem psychology is slowly catching up with the East by recognising the 'unconscious' part of our psyche (which perhaps would be better called our depthconsciousness) as the repository of various types of pre-natal remembrances (individual, collective, racial, universal), more or less corresponding to the Buddhist idea of the ālaya-vijnāna, it has not yet dared to admit the possibility of a conscious connection between consecutive forms of existence in the development of a self-perpetuating individual consciousness. In other words, it has not yet dared to recognise the possibility of rebirth. Due to this, even such cases as the above-quoted assume the character of either freakish or miraculous, but in any case 'abnormal', occurrences, due to which they lose their general significance for the human world. A phenomenon that cannot be integrated into the general aspect of the world or brought into relationship with other constituents of our experience can neither be evaluated nor utilised as a step towards a deeper understanding of the world and of ourselves.

There certainly is no dearth of facts or reasons for the justification of the idea of rebirth and the possibility of pre-natal remembrances. Even in observing the behaviour and the spontaneous talk and imagination of children at an early age, we would probably find that there are as many cases of pre-natal remembrance in the West as in the East. We seldom realise how much of what we call 'imagination' is a faint echo of remembrances -- just as our dreams have their roots not only in the events of our present life but very often in the deeper layers of our 'depth-consciousness' in which the remembrances of our pre-natal past (which widens out the farther we descend, so as finally to include remembrances and experiences of a supra-individual, universal nature), are preserved in the form of archetypal pictures and symbols.

But prejudice is the greatest enemy of objective observation and creative thought, while an awareness of yet unexplored possibilities will open our minds to new perspectives which reveal new facts. Then suddenly phenomena which seemed to be unconnected with the rest of our world and our experiences, and thus inexplicable in any natural way, fall into place, so that finally we wonder how we could pass by them without recognising their real significance or perhaps without seeing them at all.

Even by accepting the idea of rebirth or consciousness-survival as a theory or working hypothesis, an enormous amount of factual material, whose existence we failed to observe, would disclose itself before our very eyes and give to our life a new dimension of reality and a deeper meaning.