hings hopelessly beyond recall for the
habitual mind come to the surface, in fragments, or in whole series,
as the case may be. It is perhaps news to some readers, however,
that the memory of past lives has been recovered in this way. This
but confirms the Eastern secret teaching that could we remember our
dream experiences we should recover the knowledge of our past
incarnations.

Among the achievements of Eastern hypnotism is the recovery of the
memory of past births. Colonel de Rochas appears to have paralleled
this achievement in the West. Certain of his experiments have been
admirably reported by Maurice Maeterlinck in the eighth chapter of
_Our Eternity_. Maeterlinck's account, somewhat condensed, is
given here, because it so well illustrates the liberation of
consciousness from the tyranny of time as we conceive it. He says:

"First of all, it is only right to say that Colonel de Rochas is a
savant who seeks nothing but objective truth and does so with a
scientific strictness and integrity that have never been questioned.
He puts certain exceptional subjects into a hypnotic sleep and, by
means of downward passes, makes them trace back the whole course of
their existence. He thus takes them successively to their youth,
their adolescence and down to the extreme limits of their childhood.
At each of these hypnotic stages, the subject reassumes the
consciousness, the character and the state of mind which he
possessed at the corresponding stage in his life. He goes over the
same events, with their joys and their sorrows. If he has been ill,
he once more passes through his illness, his convalescence and his
recovery.

"Let us, to come to details, take one of the simplest cases. The
subject is a girl of eighteen, called Josephine. She lives at Voiron,
in the department of Isere. By means of downward passes she is
brought back to the condition of a baby at its mother's breast The
passes continue and the wonder-tale runs its course. Josephine can
no longer speak; and we have the great silence of infancy, which
seems to be followed by a silence more mysterious still. Josephine
no longer answers except by signs: _she is not yet born_. 'She is
floating in darkness.' They persist; the sleep becomes heavier; and
suddenly, from the depths of that sleep, rises the voice of another
being, a voice unexpected and unknown, the voice of a churlish,
distrustful and discontented old man. They question him. At first he
refuses to a