Exploring exceptional ability through past-life regression

Some interpretations connect hypnotic regression with exploring talents and abilities. Some people encounter spontaneous recollections of past lives; you can approach this deliberately by enquiring here about a past-life regression session.

A striking example of spontaneous past-life recollection and the use of one’s abilities is described in the experience of an exceptionally gifted woman mathematician from India:

Shakuntala Devi was born in India and became known around the world for her remarkable mathematical abilities. She travelled widely, astonishing experts with her ability to solve problems faster than a calculating machine. During her 1977 visit to the United States, major newspapers and many magazines reported on her unusual gift. She outperformed the UNIVAC 1108 at the US National Bureau of Standards, described as the world’s most advanced and highly valued computer, by finding the twenty-third root of a 201-digit number in under fifty seconds, thereby entering the Guinness Book of Records. The computer also required programming: around 13,466 instructions and 4,883 data locations had to be entered. According to calculations by the same computer, the odds of Shakuntala reaching the answer by chance were 598 million to one.

When Shakuntala Devi was three, her parents, puzzled by her extraordinary arithmetic ability, took her to consult scientists. After professors at Bangalore University confirmed that she could calculate logarithms, difficult roots, and sums in minutes, people began to write and talk about her. She spent little time at an ordinary school, but, as she said herself, numbers had always fascinated her. ‘Everything in life—art, science, and philosophy—is based on numbers,’ she once said. As a child, she thought everyone had these abilities and was genuinely surprised to learn that this was far from the case.

In an interview on the television programme ‘This Day’, Shakuntala said that in India her gift would be explained by reincarnation, briefly mentioning a past life in Egypt. Great mathematicians certainly once lived in the land of the pharaohs. The mathematical basis of the Great Pyramid, evident in both its construction and its details, has long interested researchers, but theories developed over a century have still not revealed all its mysteries.