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I grew up in Slovakia, a Central European country which had no traditional concept of multiple lives. Certainly not during my childhood (I was born in 1950). Neither its traditional Catholic religion nor the Marxist ideology of the ruling Communist party had any room for more than one life time. That is not to say that I never heard of any such concept. We were taught at school that in some parts of the world people believed in what our teachers called transmigration, but that was something utterly exotic that none of us would ever consider seriously.
It was not until 1967, when I was seventeen, that I met a person who took the idea of reincarnation as a real possibility. I was at a school trip to Schwerin in Germany, when a fellow student told me about it. Of course, I did not accept his belief, even laughed. He told me to read Teddy, a short story from J. D. Salinger’s book Nine Stories. I did find the book after we returned home from Germany and read all nine stories, including Teddy. Sure enough, its main character, Teddy, not only believed in reincarnation, he talked about it as an undisputable fact.
Naturally, that was not enough for me to start accepting reincarnation, let alone as an undisputable fact. But it stopped being something exotic. I now knew a real person from my own time and space that believed in it, and I had evidence, even if in the form of a fictional story, that others within our Western civilization were at least toying with the idea. So, reincarnation became a possibility, an idea that deserved further examination.
During my university studies I met other people who took the idea of reincarnation very seriously. Slovakia was still ruled by the Communists, so we had no access to any literature on the subject, but there were enough people quite knowledgeable about it.
After my graduation, I started working as a clinical psychologist, first with psychiatric patients, then with neurologic patients, but eventually a new position opened up and I was lucky enough to land it. I worked as the district psychologist for day-care centers in Bratislava IV (Bratislava is the capital city of Slovakia and was, at that time, divided into four districts, of which ours was the largest and the fastest growing).
These day-care centers, or nurseries, were run by the state health care departments to care for the youngest children of working parents (and under the Communist system just about everyone was required to work). The children’s ages were from six months to 3-4 years. Once they reached four years of age, they were transfered to preschools that were run by the department of education. Our centers were run by nurses. The idea of having psychologists work there was brand new and was the result of a growing awareness that such young children have needs beyond physical health. But there was only one psychologist for an entire district.
I had more than twenty day-care centers in my district, caring for some two thousand children at any given time. I spent much time in two of the centers, while regularly visiting all of the others.
It was while working with these children that I noticed something astonishing:
Each and every one of them had a complete personality, and each and every one of them had a unique personality. No two were alike.
At school I had studied developmental psychology. I was taught of the importance the first three years of life were supposed to have—according to such greats as Sigmund Freud, to name just one—on the personality later on in life. But my schooling had not prepared me for what I saw in all these children during the first three years of their lives. These were not some “future personalities” being developed gradually. These were complete personalities, already fully developed.
I could see only one logical and reasonable explanation for what I saw during my years working at those day-care centers. And even now, some thirty years later, I still can see only one logical and reasonable explanation: They were born with it. Each and every one of those thousands of children had brought their own personalities to their young lives from somewhere else.
It was then that, like Salinger’s Teddy, I started viewing either reincarnation or rebirth or some other kind of multiple lives as an undisputable fact.
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