Four-Dimensional Vistas

by Claude Fayette Bragdon

During the past few years evidence has been accumulating that we never really forget anything. We have rediscovered the memory of the subconscious mind. It is generally known that in the mesmeric or somnambulistic sleep things hopelessly beyond recall for the habitual mind come to the surface, in fragments, or in whole series, as the case may be. It is perhaps news to some readers, however, that the memory of past lives has been recovered in this way. This but confirms the Eastern secret teaching that could we remember our dream experiences we should recover the knowledge of our past incarnations.

Among the achievements of Eastern hypnotism is the recovery of the memory of past births. Colonel de Rochas appears to have paralleled this achievement in the West. Certain of his experiments have been admirably reported by Maurice Maeterlinck in the eighth chapter of Our Eternity. Maeterlinck's account, somewhat condensed, is given here, because it so well illustrates the liberation of consciousness from the tyranny of time as we conceive it. He says:

"First of all, it is only right to say that Colonel de Rochas is a savant who seeks nothing but objective truth and does so with a scientific strictness and integrity that have never been questioned. He puts certain exceptional subjects into a hypnotic sleep and, by means of downward passes, makes them trace back the whole course of their existence. He thus takes them successively to their youth, their adolescence and down to the extreme limits of their childhood. At each of these hypnotic stages, the subject reassumes the consciousness, the character and the state of mind which he possessed at the corresponding stage in his life. He goes over the same events, with their joys and their sorrows. If he has been ill, he once more passes through his illness, his convalescence and his recovery.

"Let us, to come to details, take one of the simplest cases. The subject is a girl of eighteen, called Joséphine. She lives at Voiron, in the department of Isére. By means of downward passes she is brought back to the condition of a baby at its mother's breast The passes continue and the wonder-tale runs its course. Joséphine can no longer speak; and we have the great silence of infancy, which seems to be followed by a silence more mysterious still. Joséphine no longer answers except by signs: she is not yet born. 'She is floating in darkness.' They persist; the sleep becomes heavier; and suddenly, from the depths of that sleep, rises the voice of another being, a voice unexpected and unknown, the voice of a churlish, distrustful and discontented old man. They question him. At first he refuses to answer, saying that 'of course he's there, and he's speaking;' that 'he sees nothing;' and 'he's in the dark.' They increase the number of passes and gradually gain his confidence. His name is Jean Claude Bourdon; he is an old man; he has long been ailing and bedridden. He tells the story of his life. He was born at Champvent, in the parish of Polliat, in 1812. He went to school until he was eighteen and served his time in the army with the Seventh Artillery at Besançon; and he describes his gay time there, while the sleeping girl makes gestures of twirling an imaginary moustache. When he goes back to his native place, he does not marry, but he has a mistress. He leads a solitary life (I omit all but the essential facts), and dies at the age of seventy, after a long illness.

"We now hear the dead man speak; and his posthumous revelations are not sensational, which, however, is not an adequate reason for doubting their genuineness. He feels himself growing out of his body; but he remains attached to it for a fairly long time. His fluidic body, which is at first diffused, takes a more concentrated form. He lives in darkness, which he finds disagreeable; but he does not suffer. At last, the night in which he is plunged is streaked with a few flashes of light. The idea comes to reincarnate himself and he draws near to her who is to be his mother (that is, the mother of Joséphine). He encircles her until the child is born, whereupon he gradually enters the child's body. Until about the seventh year, his body is surrounded by a sort of floating mist, in which he used to see many things which he has not seen since.

"The next thing to be done is to go back beyond Jean Claude. A mesmerization lasting nearly three-quarters of an hour, without lingering at any intermediate stage, brings the old man back to babyhood. A fresh silence, a new limbo; and then, suddenly, another voice and an unexpected individual. This time it is an old woman who has been very wicked; and so she is in great torment (she is dead, at the actual instant; for, in this inverted world, lives go backward and of course begin at the end). She is in deep darkness, surrounded by evil spirits. She speaks at first in a faint voice, but always gives definite replies to the questions put to her, instead of cavilling at every moment, as Jean Claude did. Her name is Philoméne Carteron.

"'By intensifying the sleep,' adds Colonel de Rochas, whom I will now quote, 'I induce the manifestations of a living Philoméne. She no longer suffers, seems very calm and always answers coldly and distinctly. She knows that she is unpopular in the neighborhood, but no one is a penny the worse and she will be even with them yet. She was born in 1702; her maiden name was Philoméne Cherpigny; her grandfather on the mother's side was called Pierre Machon and lived in Ozan. In 1732 she married, at Chevroux, a man named Carterton, by whom she had two children, both of whom she lost.'"

Before her incarnation, Philoméne had been a little girl who died in infancy. Previous to that, she was a man who committed murder, and it was to expiate this crime that she endured such suffering in the darkness, and after her life as a little girl, when she had no time to do wrong. Colonel de Rochas did not think it wise to carry the hypnosis further, because the subject appeared exhausted and her paroxysms were painful to watch. He obtained analogous and even more surprising results with other subjects.

Maeterlinck's comments upon all this are of negligible value. He pays a fine tribute to the theory of reincarnation. "There was never a more beautiful, a juster, a purer, a more moral, fruitful and probable creed," he says: yet for all that, it is clear that he has not been at pains fully to inform himself of the Eastern teaching.

Colonel de Rochas' success, and that of all other experimenters along these lines, is due to their unconscious following of the Eastern method. He himself says that he "avoided everything that should put the subject on a definite tack,"—that is, he refrained from voluntary suggestion.