Transcript
Ben (0:00)
In this episode of Hana Cosmos, we learn that my singing voice is exactly the same as Evanescence's Amy Lee's, so that's impressive. We also shock the world by determining that reincarnation is, in fact, the demons.
Brian (0:15)
This episode is brought to you by Zilli Creative Works, bringing you face to face Family fun that is fierce, fast, and affordable.
Ben (0:26)
The world is not just stuff.
Brian (0:34)
Minus 111.9.
Ben (0:45)
Widely publicized mystery of the Flying Saucers may soon be solved.
Brian (1:06)
It was May 5, 1957. The streets of Hexham were still. The midday sun shone down with startling strength. It made the already heavy air feel that much heavier, like a glowing fog blanketing the world. The woman looked outside of her brownstone window and soaked in all of this exterior serenity. But for all of this peace. Peace. She could not stop her hand from shaking. She could not stop her heart pounding loudly and irregularly enough to give her a headache. She was done. She was tired. She was hopeless and helpless. She had given her heart over as a living sacrifice to despair. But despair does not keep its sacrifices alive for long. Despair is a cruel God. She walked to the bathroom and looked at herself in the small mirror above the sink. What had she become? She could no longer say. She pulled on the mirror, revealing a small medicine cabinet behind it. She grabbed two bottles. What they contained is irrelevant. What matters is that they contained enough of it. She opened the bottles and poured the contents in between gulps of sink water into her mouth. The change came suddenly. Still shaking but no longer nervous, she exited the bathroom, walked to the kitchen, and grabbed her car keys. She walked to the front door and stopped to look back before leaving the home. She did not recognize anything anymore. She did not bother to lock the door behind her. The car's engine turned over. The woman pulled out of her driveway and rolled slowly onto the empty road that led closer to town. It was all too much. The divorce, the custody battle, the demons she didn't bother to wrestle with anymore. It was time. The woman sped up, swerving in and out of her lane. Soon the sides of the road contained sidewalks, but the sidewalks, for a stretch, were empty. Suddenly, on the horizon, she marked three children walking. She could see the church they walked toward. Further ahead of them, its steeple glistened in the sun and made her look away. She pressed her foot further into the pedal and the car lurched fast down the road. The kids drew closer. She became angry at them. Why should they make their parents happy? Why shouldn't others feel the loss that she felt? If she could not see her children anymore. Then she wanted to make sure that some others could not see theirs. Before the end. The steering wheel jolted back to the left as she forced the passenger side wheels up onto the curb and onto the sidewalk. The children still did not notice what was coming. Her foot pushed until the pedal could go no further. Her eyes were fixed on the children, two girls and a boy. In the final seconds, they did not turn back to look at the menace that chased them down. She saw their faces just before the impact. And then they were no more. Her wicked lust to share her own depravity with someone else had done its work. In an instant, the quiet peace of the English summer day turned to a theater of sins stained with the blood of youth. The children lay crumpled on the sidewalk now, shrinking in her rearview mirror as the woman pressed on down the road. She felt nothing. Minutes and then hours passed. Hours that saw the authorities gathered around the scene of the woman's murder of others. But hours that did not see the woman able to murder herself. She came to grips with the truth that she had failed. She pulled over and fell asleep, just waiting to be found by the police. When she was found and when the trial was done and the doctors had spoken, she was taken to a psychiatric hospital where she spent the rest of her days in the despondence of an unjust peace. History does not remember her name. As for the children, they were named Joanna Pollock, Jacqueline Pollock, and a neighbor boy named Anthony. The girls were 11 and 6 years old, respectively. It's not known to us how old Anthony was. They'd been walking to church together on that summer day. They'd been walking, as all children should walk, without a care in the world to slow them down or bow their heads. The families arrived on the scene with a kind of senseless devastation clouding their lives. They were faced with the impossible question which has plagued every unfortunate parent to share their grief since the days of Cain and Abel. How can we go on? What do we do now that what we cherished most has been lost? The parents were spent and they thought in their darkest hours that it would have been better for themselves to have never been born. As for Anthony's parents, we don't know exactly how they coped. One hopes they were able to find comfort and solace in the faith that their son was going towards the house of. But as for the Pollacks, we do know more. They had to go on for the sake of the four other children. They already had four other boys. Through pain and loss and Shadows of evil outside of their control, they pressed on. They never forgot their girls, but they didn't forget their sons or each other. For that, one cannot help but commend them in wonder. And yet one also cannot ignore the twisted way in which the father, John Pollock, consoled himself. He proclaimed Christ, yes, but he also held a deep conviction in the power of the occult. He had always tried to hold these two views in tandem, one in the left hand and the other in the right. An endless tug of war between two faiths that he must have known could not possibly live with one another in peace. But once his daughters were gone, he felt the pull of the occult more and more, yanking him over to one side and loosening his grip on his Christian faith on the other. Even as a boy, he had wondered at the thought of reincarnation. In the wake of the tragedy, this interest turned to a focus, and the focus turned nearly to an obsession. He began to pray. Unnatural prayers, twisted prayers. Prayers that asked God to give up comforting him. Prayers that asked God instead to return his daughters to him somehow. Then, early the following year, his prayers, or so it seemed to him were answered. His wife became pregnant. What came of that birth has gone down in the annals of mankind as some of the strangest things we have ever witnessed as a species. As the due date neared, tensions in the Pollock household rose exponentially. Not only did John continue in his unshakable belief that the pregnancy marked the reincarnation of his loss, he began asserting with equal certainty that his wife was actually pregnant with twin girls. This was something the doctors refuted time and time again leading up to the birth, since they were only ever able to hear one heartbeat. But John was not swayed. He somehow knew in his heart of hearts that two children lived lay in his wife's womb. His wife, Florence, was torn between three things. One, she did not want to feed the reincarnation delusion from John. Two, she did not want to disagree with the doctors. But three, she was also excited at the idea of two new babies. Whatever hope she had for John being right never showed, and she contented herself with wishing he would just let it go. But he never did. More than that, Florence so fervently disagreed with the reincarnation idea that she was entirely uncomfortable with John's consolation by it. And she was even more uncomfortable to see that he really, genuinely believed it. Things came to a head in August of that year, just two months before the birth, when she nearly filed for divorce from her husband. But ultimately, they reconciled, neither one still giving an inch on what they thought the coming child would be. Florence just loved her as the gift of another daughter from God. But they also did not wish for this conflict to break the family in two. Especially not right before it grew again. On the morning of October 4, 1958, the doctors stood dumbfounded as, sure enough, twin girls were born to John and Florence Pollock. The fact that John had been right about the pregnancy immediately began to shake for Florence's doubts of reincarnation. But she didn't show it yet. Their new girls, Gillian and Jennifer, breathed the free air of the world for the first time. Two identical twin girls. It was a joyous time for everyone. But right away, the doctors noticed something unusual. One of the girls, Jennifer, had birthmarks that her twin did not share. And yet it wasn't so much that she had birthmarks, but rather where the birthmarks were. That was so strange. One of them on Jennifer's hip matched a birthmark Jacqueline had had almost exactly in the same spot. The other one, a slight discoloration on the forehead, matched a scar Jacqueline had again, and almost exactly. Florence chalked it up to divine providence, a sweet ribbon tied onto a sweet gift from God. But John took it as further confirmation that his wish of reincarnation had been granted. When the girls were three months old, the family moved about 30 miles away from Hexham to the charming coastal village of Whitley Bay. The fresh pair of twins marked a fresh start for the bereaved family. It was only right that they left their place of mourning behind them for better days on the eastern shore of their homeland. In fact, it would not be until the twins were 4 years old that the family returned to Hexham for a visit with with old friends from church. But by the time the girls were three, the family started to wonder whether or not they had somehow returned before without the rest of them. It started with basic toddler phrases. I remember Hexum when we go back home. Tony was good neighbor. Phrases like this began to escape each of the twins with increasing regularity before their fourth birthday. Before long, the phrases started to evolve until they appeared to both parents as more memory than random words. Thr together, the twins seemed to know the names of streets and parks and shops that were frequented by the Pollux before the tragedy. Favorite Hexum restaurants and ice cream parlors started to be a regular request from the girls. It was all uncanny, but it was nothing compared to what came with the actual visit. Having never seen hexum before, having never even seen pictures of hexum to the knowledge of the family before the little girl started pointing out and naming landmarks on the way in. And I don't just mean pointing to a train station and calling it a train station. I mean pointing to the train station and giving it its proper name. Pointing to a creek beneath the bridge and naming the creek correctly, or naming the bridge for that matter. The girls knew Hexum. But how? They asked to visit their favorite playground again, one they named by name on the other side of town, near to their old home. It was the playground that Joanna and Jacqueline loved most in their old neighborhood. They even recited, as if it was a nursery rhyme, the directions to the playground from the front door of the family's old home. At the friend's house they found some of their late sisters old toys. They proceeded to give the toys, mostly dolls and playhouses, the same names that Joanna and Jacqueline had given to them. They even divided the toys up into groups, one group the favorite of Gillian and the other the favorite of Jennifer. Just as the late sisters did. The twins even started asking for the same types of snacks and books that the older girls had once enjoyed. For all of this, John grew more settled in his opinion of their reincarnation. But Florence continued to resist. That was until she walked in on them discussing the crash in what must have been a sincerely difficult thing to witness. Florence waited outside of the girls room listening intently while Gillian cradled Jennifer's head in a kind of make believe saying, the blood is coming out of your eyes. That's where the car hit you. This coupled with increasing levels of strangeness, pushed Florence over the edge. At one point she watched Gillian point to the birthmark on Jennifer's forehead and say, you got that mark from falling on a bucket. Jennifer had of course not fallen on a bucket, but Jacqueline had. And it's what had given her the similar scar. The small town story of potentially reincarnated sisters started to garner some attention from the wider world. Eventually A man named Dr. Ian Stevenson visited the family and requested an interview with the girls. He was a clinical psychologist whose personal area of interest included cases of apparent reincarnation. At the conclusion of their time together, Stevenson admitted that he had a very difficult time explaining some of the twins behavior with conventional wisdom in the field. He included their case in one of his seminal works, Children who Remember Previous Lives. Stevenson noted some particularities that the parents had not thought to mark yet as well. For instance, during one session with the family, the doctor saw Gillian holding her pencil in a very impressive way given her age, delicately, with the pencil nestled between her thumb and forefinger. Meanwhile, her twin sister Jennifer, grasped the pencil with her fist and could not write. At the time of the accident that took the lives of the older girls, Jacqueline, 11 years old, was able to write proficiently, while Joanna was only just beginning to learn. Additionally, Stevenson performed a blood test on the Pollock girls to figure out whether or not they were truly identical twins. The results showed without any doubt that they were indeed monozygotic twins. Identical twins from a single egg, which meant they should have shared the same genetic material through and through. This surprised the doctor because it meant that if Jennifer's birthmarks were of a genetic origin, her sister would have had the exact same ones. While this can be explained by a genetic aberration that occurred during the twins gestation periods, the similarity of Jennifer's marks to Jacqueline's does seem almost too good of a coincidence to be true. This went on for a number of years. Some new instance of apparent revelation would come to the twins about their sisters, knowledge they shouldn't have had. It would lead to some attention from the press, which would lead to some believers and some naysayers. Then, as mysteriously as it all began, it started to cease. The girls reached further into girlhood, about 7 or 8 years old, and stopped having or stopped voicing their old memories. Eventually they faded altogether. Then one day they were done. The parents never heard of the late girls again, and the twins became entirely their own people in all of it. The Pollock parents maintained that neither they nor their sons talked to the twins about their deceased sisters or the accident that took them. To this day, it is one of the most controversial cases of parapsychology ever recorded. Gillian Pollock died in 2002 at 44 years old. What is man? What is the substance of man? What is his nature? What is his end? These questions have been a ghost haunting mankind since the first days after his fall from grace. In answering, we tend to do one of two things. We either untether ourselves even more from our Creator, or we see ourselves more and more clearly, our Creator's truth, illuminated by our Creator's light. When man sinned, he became a cursed thing. But he did not stop being man. Though even his rational nature has been touched by the curse of sin. Fallen man yet remains rational man. Though oftentimes the providential rationality of the playwright is far too complex and transcendental for him to comprehend. And even though his rationality is often turned to folly and error. And so we find answers to these questions that, though undeniably rife with error, nonetheless confession contain glimmers of truth that compel us to think deeper. Yet we cannot see as far as we often think we can by the light of these glimmers. An interesting penumbra doesn't lead to the clear light of day for the one lost in the deep shadow. One thing that all great societies have agreed upon for all time is that man is somehow a composite of both a physical body that we can sense and an equally real but invisible, invisible, energizing essence or soul. The nearly ubiquitous belief among all religions is that this soul is something immortal. Different religions take this immortality to different levels of status. Some, like Christians, maintain the soul's immortality but do not attribute divinity to it, While others, like the Orphic mysteries, believe the soul to be a God in itself or a part of the divine nature as a whole. Whole. The paradox comes in when one recognizes that it is those religions which divinize the soul that also cyclically bind the soul to the body, something they universally see as lesser than that which is invisible. What does it say about their theology and theogony that the divine nature is continually trapped within a cage of physicality it only ever wishes it could escape? It says that the gods are weak and tossed around by some other force outside of their own will. It turns them into something less than God's. As a counter to this, the Christian religion, despite its so called lesser view of the soul, is the only belief system that gives the physical body its proper place. After all, God became man and Jesus is still a man for all eternity. Glorified man, yes. Immortal and perfect man, man, yes. But true man, the body, like the soul, is hallowed by its maker. But I digress. At any rate, Hinduism, Buddhism, some sects of Judaism, Wicca, Native American paganism, Pythagoreanism, Platonism, and even the Virgilian vision of Elysium exposited by Anchises among countless other religions, firmly hold to some kind of reincarnation or transmigration or metempsychosis. Especially in the eastern lands, belief in some kind of rebirth is as widespread as religious belief itself, which is to say, it's universal. But is it true? Well, obviously not. When we behold the world in light of our Creator, in the light of his revealed word, we find that all of these reincarnational fantasies are just that, fantasies, phantasms, lying, ghosts. Whenever we see a case of supposed reincarnation, we're seeing something which is somewhere along the line either a deception or a mistake. But if it's a deception, who is doing the deceiving could it be that dark forces in the world, seeing the prolific conviction of reincarnation, a conviction they perhaps even taught us, can somehow make its proponents think that it relates happens? After all, if it really is appointed once for man to die and then to judgment, what better way to keep him trapped in sin and death than the notion that he will have another and another and maybe even infinite chances to live again? Join us in this episode of Haunted Cosmos as we discuss the lure and the lie of reincarnation. But first, some unfinished business. Returning to the saga of the Pollock sisters, there are facets of Dr. Ian Stevenson's life that should further interest us. You see, he was very serious about reincarnation. He documented dozens of supposed cases of it throughout his career and caught no small amount of flak from the more conservative camps in his field because of that. But one must always wonder where the seed of the idea came from. Where did he first make the connection? Of this possibility? No one can ultimately say, probably not even the doctor himself. But one season in his life may be worth noting as a contributing factor. For there was a time when Stevenson became friends with the popular author Aldous Huxley. When the two met in the 1950s, Huxley was just going public with his endorsement of psychedelic drugs and their positive effects on man. The young psychologist was eager to see if he might use the drugs to help in his studies. He therefore started to take LSD himself and record his experiences. He studied and interviewed others as they also took varying doses of the psychedelics. He described his findings as profoundly impactful on his life. He even went so far as to say that his trips gave him the gift of perfect serenity, freedom from all anger and anxiety. He bemoaned the fact that the serenity fled so soon after the drug wore off. He said the memory of that peace persisted through his life as a kind of hope, something he always wanted to get back to. Dr. Ian Stevenson was raised by a lawyer father and an eclectic mother. His father was a foreign correspondent he saw very little of in his early childhood. His mother therefore became his chief parent and confidant. Given how sickly Stevenson was in his early years, he even started to think of his mother as his closest friend. He therefore took great interest in all that interested her. One Such topic for Mrs. Stevenson was the esoteric doctrine of theosophy, a subject which she reserved a whole bookshelf for in their home. Stevenson read every single book, cover to cover, as a youth. He said that it fueled his love for the paranormal forevermore. Escape Master is a fast paced fantasy card game that your family game night needs. Think of speed or Dutch Blitz mixed with deep fantasy lore, battle strategies and character building. 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