The-Tibetan-Book-of-Living-and-Dying

90 THE TIBETAN BOOK OF LIVING AND DYING
The expert and archaeologist of Petra who accompanied
Arthur Flowerdew could not explain this very ordinary
Englishman's uncanny knowledge of the city. He said:
He's filled in details and a lot of it is very consistent with known
archaeological and historical facts and it would require a mind very
different from his to be able to sustain a fabric of deception on the
scale of his memories—at least those which he's reported to me. I
don't think he's a fraud. I don't think he has the capacity to be a
fraud on this scale. 4
What else could explain Arthur Flowerdew's extraordinary
knowledge except rebirth? You could say that he might have
read books about Petra, or that he might have even received
his knowledge by telepathy yet the fact remains that some of
the information he was able to give was unknown even to the
experts.
Then there are fascinating cases of children who can spontaneously
remember details of a previous life. Many of these
cases have been collected by Dr. Ian Stevenson of the University
of Virginia. 5 One startling account of a child's memories of
a past life came to the attention of the Dalai Lama, who sent
a special representative to interview her and verify her
account. 6
Her name was Kamaljit Kour, and she was the daughter of a
schoolteacher in a Sikh family in the Punjab in India. One day,
on a visit to a fair in a local village with her father, she suddenly
asked him to take her to another village, some distance away.
Her father was surprised and asked her why. "I have nothing
here," she told him. "This is not my home. Please take me to
that village. One of my school-friends and I were riding on our
bicycles when suddenly we were hit by a bus. My friend was
killed instantly. I was injured in the head, ear, and nose. I was
taken from the site of the accident and laid on the bench in
front of a small courthouse nearby. Then I was taken to the village
hospital. My wounds were bleeding profusely and my parents
and relatives joined me there. Since there were no facilities
to cure me in the local hospital, they decided to take me to
Ambala. As the doctors said I could not be cured, I asked my
relatives to take me home." Her father was shocked, but when
she insisted, he finally agreed to take her to the village, though
he thought that it was just a child's whim.