Apart from the evidences unearthed by painstaking efforts of scientific investigators, there have been many well-known people who have asserted that they remember their previous life or lives. While their statements cannot constitute evidence or proof in the scientific sense, but nevertheless they have a value in that they constitute a body of more trusted testimonies regarding past life memories.
Flaubert, Gustave (French novelist, author of Madame Bovary)
It seems to me… that I have always lived! I possess memories that go back to the Pharoahs. I see myself very clearly at different ages of history, practicing different professions… My present personality is the result of my lost [past] personalities.
Patton, George S. (American general)
So as through a glass and darkly, the age long strife I see, Where I fought in many guises, many names, but always me.
Rossetti, Dante Gabriel (English poet)
I have been here before, but when or how I cannot tell:
I know the grass beyond the door,
The sweet keen smell, the sighing sound, the lights around the shore.
You have been mine before – How long ago I may not know:
But just when at that swallow’s soar, your neck turned so,
Some veil did fall, – I knew it all of yore.
Thoreau, Henry David (American writer)
As far back as I can remember I have unconsciously referred to the experiences of a previous state of existence. (Journal, July 16, 1851)
And Hawthorne, too, I remember as one with whom I sauntered in old heroic times along the banks of the Scamander amid the ruins of chariots and heroes. (Letter to Ralph Waldo Emerson, July 8, 1843)
I lived in Judea eighteen hundred years ago, but I never knew that there was such a one as Christ among my contemporaries. (Letter to Harrison Blake, April 3, 1850)
As the stars looked to me when I was a shepherd in Assyria, they look to me now as a New-Englander. (Letter to Harrison Blake, Feb. 27, 1853)
![Shanti Devi was born in Delhi, India.[1] As a little girl in the 1930s, she began to claim to remember details of a past life. According to these accounts, when she was about four years old, she told her parents that her real home was in Mathura where her husband lived, about 145 km from her home in Delhi. She also shared three unique features about her husband – he was fair, wore glasses, and had a big wart on his left cheek. She also stated her husband's shop was located right in front of the Dwarkadhish temple in Mathura.[2] Discouraged by her parents, she ran away from home at age six, trying to reach Mathura. Back home, she stated in school that she was married and had died ten days after having given birth to a child. Interviewed by her teacher and headmaster, she used words from the Mathura dialect and divulged the name of her merchant husband, "Kedar Nath". The headmaster located a merchant by that name in Mathura who had lost his wife, Lugdi Devi, nine years earlier, ten days after having given birth to a son. Kedar Nath traveled to Delhi, pretending to be his own brother, but Shanti Devi immediately recognized him and Lugdi Devi's son. As she knew several details of Kedar Nath's life with his wife, he was soon convinced that Shanti Devi was indeed the reincarnation of Lugdi Devi.[3] The case was brought to the attention of Mahatma Gandhi who set up a commission to investigate. The commission traveled with Shanti Devi to Mathura, arriving on 15 November 1935. There she recognized several family members, including the grandfather of Lugdi Devi. She found out that Kedar Nath had neglected to keep a number of promises he had made to Lugdi Devi on her deathbed. She then traveled home with her parents. The commission's report, published in 1936, concluded that Shanti Devi was indeed the reincarnation of Lugdi Devi.[3] Two further reports were written at the time. The report by Bal Chand Nahata was published as a Hindi booklet by the name Punarjanma Ki Paryalochana. In this, he stated that "Whatever material that has come before us, does not warrant us to conclude that Shanti Devi has former life recollections or that this case proves reincarnation".[4] This argument was disputed by Indra Sen, a devotee of Sri Aurobindo, in an article later.[5] A further report, based on interviews conducted in 1936, was published in 1952.[6] Shanti Devi did not marry. She told her story again at the end of the 1950s, and once more in 1986 when she was interviewed by Ian Stevenson and K.S. Rawat. In this interview she also related her near death experiences when Lugdi Devi died.[1] K.S. Rawat continued his investigations in 1987, and the last interview took place only four days before her death on 27 December 1987.[7] A Swedish author who had visited her twice published a book about the case in 1994; the English translation appeared in 1998.[8]](http://reincarnation.theosophical.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/shantidevi3.jpg "Shanti Devi")
