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Namah Memories from beyond: ‘unseen’ effects of trauma

had been diagnosed with mental distress, body would experience consequences of past
or who have had spiritual awakening, or actions, before being reborn. In India, people
extreme experiences, to be responding not said a person consisted of a body, breath and
only to trauma from their current incarnation, a soul, and identity was not fixed at the skin.
but also from a previous incarnation? Or
did they tune in sensitively to a current or I discovered while doing training in UK that
previous life scenario? Perhaps it was possible people who were first generation migrants
to have PTSD from a remote memory? I discuss from India (and its diaspora) also believed an
this material in more depth in my recent book individual did not die with the human body.
(7). There were widespread beliefs that ancestors
continued to exert influence over their living
Understanding this proposition about remote relatives. A human being was believed to
sensitivities made me question the ‘diseases consist of both physical and non-physical
of the brain’ and ‘chemical imbalance’ models components, some of which preceded and
of mental distress. Alongside the scientific survived death.
evidence offered by Whittaker and Cosgrove
(8), Whittaker (9) and Davies (10), there was In addition a living person’s body appeared
a lot of material on non-local experiences and to be permeable to spirits of the dead.
‘memories’ that made me further doubt bio- In many non-Western countries, much
medical models of mental ill-health. human misfortune and mental ill-health
was attributed to ghosts of those who died
Ubiquitous reincarnation beliefs an untimely death. For example belief in
ghosts was ubiquitous in Asia, First Nation
As an anthropologist, I conducted a couple America, rural Africa and similarly with first
of research projects in India, and in the most generation Asian migrants. A ghost required
recent I interviewed priests, psychiatrists prayers in order to become an ancestor, to be
and traditional healers in temples, mosques, recycled and reborn as a human baby.
clinics and churches about ways they
interpreted “symptoms of distress (11).” On For many years scholars in the West assumed
one of my visits to Rameshwaram in South the only people to hold beliefs about
India, I saw rituals for the dead carried out on reincarnation were Hindu communities
the seashore, which was a healing place for from south Asia. However a Professor
the dead, rituals conducted for mental peace, of Anthropology at Princetown University
and for relatives’ closure after bereavement. argued that India was only one place among
many to hold this belief (12). Reincarnation
Pilgrims in India explained to me that our beliefs were also central to native Americans,
physical body enveloped an ethereal body. Africans, and Oceanic peoples.
After death, cremation destroyed the first
body, liberating the second ethereal body, The practitioners I met in India acknowledged
where it would journey to the abode of Eastern and Western beliefs may be incompatible.
ancestors. Once at the abode of ancestors, the Western models of psychiatry did not fit their
protective case was sloughed off, the ethereal spiritual beliefs about the nature of human

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