REINCARNATION
PAST LIFE RECALL
Famous neurosurgeon identifies who he was in previous life C. Norman Shealy’s intuition even led him to his former hospital MOST scientific research into past-life memories is focused on young children, including some so young that they are just beginning to speak. The reason is simple. They are too young to have been exposed to the information on which their claim to remember a previous existence is based. It often takes considerable research to verify a child’s memory of a past life, often involving taking the youngster to the town or village he or she has named and allowing them unprompted to find their former residence and identify former family members. Similar adult memories on the other hand – particularly those that emerge during hypnotic regression – are seldom so evidential. They can be rich in historical detail and concern places and eras about which the subject has no apparent knowledge. But the mind absorbs and stores huge amounts of data – from reading books and magazines or watching TV documentaries or dramas – which can surface during a hypnotic session and be used by the mind to construct an apparent past life. For that reason, hypnosis is not used as a research tool by Dr Jim Tucker or his colleagues at the University of Virginia, though he concedes that hypnotic regression, regardless of the source of the memories that manifest, could well be an efffective form of therapy. Tucker acknowledges, however, that there might be cases where an event in an adult’s life brings a spontaneous past-life memory to the surface. In fact, several such cases are to be found in reincarnation’s extensive literature, and one of the most striking concerns Dr C. Norman Shealy, neurosurgeon, pioneer in the management of chronic pain, and now a major player in the field of holistic wellbeing who is still running courses at the age of 85. Norm Shealy, as he likes to be known, is unusual in many respects. He told his parents at the age of four that he would be a physician, and by the time he was 16 he
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knew he would be a neurosurgeon. That desire seems to have carried over from a previous life, though he was not aware of that influence until January 1972 during a visit to Colorado. “I was sitting in a lecture at the Neuroelectric Society in Snowmass at Aspen,” he recalls, “waiting for Dr William Kroger to finish his lecture. I was a bit annoyed because he was trying to convince us that acupuncture was hypnosis and he suddenly said, ‘In the last century a British physician demonstrated that you could operate on patients who were mesmerised. His name was John Elliotson.’ “When he said that, I felt as if someone had thrust an iceberg down my back and I said to myself, ‘My God, that’s me’.” Elliotson was a 19th-century medical innovator and pain specialist but Norm Shealy had not heard of him until that moment. He asked his librarian if she could get any information on Elliotson but she was unable to locate anything. Shealy was neutral on the subject of reincarnation at that time but as he would be visiting the UK in June that year he decided to do his own research. Feeling confident that Elliotson must have been a surgeon, he hailed a taxi in London and asked the driver to take him to the Royal College of Surgeons’ headquarters in Lincoln’s Inn Fields. “As we turned down one corner to the right, I was sitting in the back of the cab and suddenly was picked up physically and turned in the opposite direction, again feeling as if there were an iceberg down my back. A block down to the left, instead of the right, was University College Hospital of London, where my office had been as John Elliotson. I walked into the
C. Norman Shealy (Photo: normshealy.com)
building and felt at home.” Elliotson was the first Professor of Medicine at the University College Hospital, which had opened in 1834 as the North London Hospital. During his career as an internist, Elliotson identified pollen as the cause of hay fever, introduced the stethoscope and narcotics, and used mesmerism to put patients into a trance state before operations. He remained a staunch advocate of mesmerism, even after the hospital’s board of trustees ordered him to stop putting on public displays of the phenomenon, leading to his resignation. Elliotson also sat with mediums, being sceptical initially but becoming a staunch Spiritualist after meeting famous physical medium Daniel Dunglas Home. John Elliotson takes centre stage
REINCARNATION
Professor of Medicine John Elliotson
Neurosurgeon Norman Shealy in 1958
in Wendy Moore’s excellent book The Mesmerist: the Society Doctor Who Held Victorian London Spellbound, published last year and reviewed in these columns [PN July 2017]. Author of over 300 articles and 29 books, and holder of 12 patents in the field of energy medicine, Norm Shealy is the inventor of the TENS [transcutaneous electrical nerve stimulation] unit, a device that discharges an electrical current through the skin to block pain. He also
invented the dorsal column stimulator, a subcutaneous device that has wires that are implanted next to the spinal cord. The electrical current they discharge block impulses in cases that involve severe and intractable back pain. He has always been very open about his New Age outlook on health, healing and spirituality, having written about communications with his spirit guide and a guardian angel. A month before he first heard Elliotson’s name mentioned, Shealy
received a $50,000 (£37,000) grant from a Fortune 500 company to study psychic diagnosis. “In 1973,” he explains, “I visited 75 individuals who were said to be excellent clairvoyants, and I did a test of medical intuition, or the ability of really untrained psychics or intuitives to do medical diagnosis. We found five who were between 70 and 75 per cent accurate. “When I told the 75 intuitives I visited that I had this personal feeling that I had been John Elliotson, all of them concurred.” As well as his own intuition and the clear similarities in the lives of Shealy and Elliotson, some may dismiss his claim as wishful thinking. But there is one additional piece of the jigsaw that should be taken into account. When practicing physician and author Walter Semkiw, who runs a reincarnation research website (iisis.net), heard about Shealy’s claim, he contacted him and asked to see present and past-life portraits for comparison, taken in the early part of their respective careers. They are reproduced here for readers to make their own judgment. Semkiw has found that in many reincarnation cases there is a striking facial resemblance from one life to the next. Similarities of this kind are not, of themselves, evidence of reincarnation but may be viewed as an important supportive element in the intriguing tapestry of the past-life mystery. n
University College Hospital, in central London, which Norman Shealy recognised from his former life during a London taxi ride (Photo: Lord Harris) PSYCHIC NEWS | JANUARY 2018
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