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July 12, 2014 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
01:07:29
Edition 165 - Past Lives

This time British woman Jenny Cockell on her “past lives” – PLUS a surprise superstarguest!

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Across the UK, across continental North America, and around the world, on the internet, by webcast and by podcast, my name is Howard Hughes, and this is The Unexplained.
Thank you very much for your emails.
I'm going to do some shout-outs and also address some of your points coming very, very soon.
The guest on this edition is Jenny Cokell talking about her reincarnation, she says.
And we'll also hear from a very famous man, very briefly, a Beach Boy, Mike Love, founding member of the Beach Boys, man responsible for some of their greatest lyrics and sounds.
And I spoke to him on radio yesterday about his life, career, times, fascinating man, and also his interest and use of transcendental meditation.
So we'll hear a couple of minutes about that coming soon before we hear Jenny Cockhell.
Thank you very much to webmaster Adam Cornwell at Creative Hotspot in Liverpool for his hard work and for maintaining the website wwwtheunexplained.tv.
That is the place to go if you want to leave a donation for the show.
That would be gratefully received to allow the work to continue.
And also the place, if you want to leave me any feedback, send me an email.
I've been very busy lately, not only with work, but also appearing on other people's shows.
I was on the Doug Steffens show in America just about 10, 12 days ago.
A week ago, I appeared on James Wales' BBC show talking about the unexplained.
And there is a possibility that I will appear as a guest on John B. Wells' show at some point.
So that's very exciting and very keen to do that.
So big times and we're making progress here.
Let's just get through some of your emails now.
And I want to address one that's only just come in.
This comes from Mark, who will not, I'm presuming, even hear this reply.
Mark tells me, and I presume he's in the U.S., that he's going to stop listening to The Unexplained, because I allowed Uri Geller to effectively endorse Michael Jackson and say that he believed he was innocent.
Well, those were Uri Geller's views, Mark.
They were not mine.
I am the host.
I am not allowed a view.
Radio stations around the world are still playing this man's music.
Some people accuse him of a variety of things, which I won't even rehearse here because you know.
And some people believe that he is completely innocent.
I cannot take a view.
I don't have one.
And I certainly did not endorse Michael Jackson on the show.
I like his music.
That's all I can say, Mark.
So I'm sorry that you feel that way.
That's not what I did.
What you heard were Uri Geller's views, and he is entitled to them just as you're entitled to your view too.
Mark, I hope you understand.
Hello to Ben.
Thank you for your email.
Numbers stations.
Good suggestion, Ben.
I'm trying to get onto this because I've been hearing numbers stations, which are said to be to do with espionage for years.
Barry in California, great email.
Thank you for that.
I'll take you up on that offer, by the way, if I ever get to live in California, which I'd love.
James Russell, interested in the new airport security checks and flight MH three hundred seventy, if there's any tie in here, he says, is all of this to do with lithium ion batteries?
I wonder, James.
Denise M. DuPont, wonderful name, Denise.
New listener, great suggestion, thank you for that.
JC Syson says Tally Ho, as of course we all say here in Britain, thank you, JC.
Guy Wagner wants me to get into underground and underwater bases, would love to.
Darren in the UK thought Stafford Betty recently, the show that we did with him, about life after death, etc was a life changer.
Wants me to do a show on crop circles, okay, Darren.
Brenda told me her story about a medium's reading.
Brenda, thank you very much for sharing that.
Detailed and fascinating.
I will try and do some more about that.
Chris Troy in Raleigh, North Carolina, David Paul Lydes, Chris will be back on this show soon.
He's just sent me his new book.
I'm reading it.
And he and I are talking about dates.
Heather, who listens to me while she's commuting in Atlanta, Georgia, nice email, Heather, thank you.
Paul, who is a fellow Scouser, if you're listening in America or anywhere else, a Scouser is somebody who hails from Liverpool, isn't it, Paul?
Says the show stands out like an oasis of intrigue and education in a moral desert.
Well, thank you, Paul, very much for those comments.
Very kind, and only a fellow Liverpuglian could be as florid in use of language as that.
Love it.
Peter Bartolosso in Colombia, originally, I believe, from Belgium, fan of Michael Tellinger in South Africa, who we've talked to twice on this program.
Need to get back on again.
Andrew, suggesting the author Jonathan Gray about ancient civilization.
Thanks for that, Andrew.
Matt in Nashville, Tennessee, who listens to these shows on his night shifts.
Thank you, Matt, very much.
And I hope you're well and the night shift is going well.
Scott in Kansas thinks this show is right up there with Art Bell.
Oh, Scott, I am not worthy.
He was my hero and remains so, but that's so kind.
Chris in Sweden heard Uri Geller on the show and phoned him up and had a useful conversation with Uri.
Says, Chris, that's nice.
David, kind email.
Thank you for that.
Says he'll donate when he can, but he's got two kids.
He's putting through college.
I understand, David.
And Nikki in southern Maine wants to hear an episode about the Plum Island Research Facility and is also interested in the HAARP facility in Alaska.
Nikki, thank you for your email.
If I didn't get round to yours, please believe me that I do see all of your emails and unlike the mainstream media, I read them and I do things about them.
And a lot of the mainstream media, not all, of course, but a lot of the mainstream media just doesn't bother.
Okay, Jenny Cockhell talking about her reincarnation that she claims very soon.
First, yesterday on radio, I spoke to Mike Love, charming, intelligent, fascinating, and hugely talented man, founding member of the Beach Boys, still on tour in the middle of a 130-date tour of the United States, UK and other places.
And we talked about his music, of course, extensively, but we also talked about his great interest, along with George Harrison, who was a big friend of his, in Transcendental Meditation.
Now, the conversation was on a mobile phone, a cell phone, because Mike was on a tour bus heading for Tupelo, birthplace of Elvis Presley, to do a concert, a gig there.
So it's not the best audio quality, but this is what Mike Love said just a couple of minutes of it about Transcendental Meditation and the fact that over all of these decades he's been using it and he says benefiting from it.
This is Mike Love.
Of course, you'd like to introduce a thing or two that's either new or not, you know, that they haven't heard before.
And we have a song like that.
I call it Pisces Brothers.
It's a song which is a tribute to George Harrison, who passed away a number of years ago.
But he would have been on February 25th.
He would have been, I think, 71.
And my birthday is on March 15th.
So we're both Pisces.
And the song is a tribute to George, but it's reminiscing about a time in India when we both had our birthdays at Maharishi Mahesh Yogi's place in India.
So that was a very special time.
And it's a beautiful, you know, it's a heartfelt song.
It's very sentimental.
And, you know, George Jarrison was such a great guy, not just only in guitar, but he was very much in his meditation.
And, you know, he's just a great, great songwriter.
And so I think people will enjoy hearing that.
And it's really, really kind of extra special to be doing in George's homeland.
And of course, that was the difference, wasn't it?
The divide between you, Brian, and a couple of the guys that they got into experimenting with substances in that era, and you went towards transcendental meditation, which is what George Harrison did.
And you both found that that was the way forward for you.
Exactly.
Exactly.
Precisely.
There are a lot of ways to find relaxation and mental expansion and stuff, but some of them have a negative side effect, as is well known.
And so, you know, I was very fortunate to have learned TM and then a couple months later, I found myself in India at Maurice's invitation, along with the Beatles.
And Donovan was there, and it was a fascinating time and a wonderful time.
And I still benefit from that meditation, which I do every day.
And do you find that with 130 shows to do on this tour, and that's a hell of a schedule, however way you look at it, do you find that you relax yourself that way before you go on and perform?
Because talking to you now, you sound absolutely flat, calm, relaxed, and yet you've got a big gig tonight.
Oh, yeah, we have many, many shows when we're out on the road.
But I always meditate in the morning and in the evening before a show, and that gives you not only the relaxation, but the energy too, because you can drop your metabolism to a level of rest twice as deep as sleep.
Your breath rate goes down to a very deep level of rest.
And so that gives you the clarity and energy and positivity, basically, to undertake the level of activity that we do.
So it's a real huge benefit.
It's like a secret weapon, basically.
And we said that harmonies is what the Beach Boys has always been about.
Brian Wilson, yourself, always absolute sticklers.
No matter even if you had to do 25 ticks at Western Studios, you just did the 25 ticks to get them absolutely right.
But I have to say, you know, you're in your early 70s now.
You know, the meditation and all the rest of it, the relaxation that you do must be helping with the voice.
I'm a big one for the spoken word and the sound of the voice and the power that that communicates.
But you've got to work on that, haven't you?
If you want that to be right.
Well, we do so many shows that some of the vocal cords are well, you know, we don't do anything to impair the functioning of the vocal cords.
For instance, I don't and never have smoked cigarettes or we don't drink excessively like hard liquor or anything like that.
And we live a sensible lifestyle along with the meditation.
And the activity of performing keeps you very fit vocally.
And so just living a sane, sensible lifestyle and making the shows a priority.
Because I feel the people pay a lot of money and go through a lot of effort to come to one of our shows.
And we want to do the absolute best we can in replicating those songs and recreating them for the audience.
Mike Love from the Beach Boys, what a pleasure to be able to talk with him.
And we have agreed at some point that we're going to do one of these shows together.
I really hope that that can happen because I'd love to put him on this show to talk with you.
Right, let's get to Jenny Cocklell now in the UK, somebody who says that she was reincarnated with a purpose.
Got to hear this story.
Jenny Cocklell, thanks for coming on the show.
Sorry, thank you.
Thank you for asking me.
And whereabouts are you?
I know that you're in the United Kingdom.
I think you're in the sort of South Midlands area.
Is that right?
Yeah, I'm actually slapbagging in the middle of England in Northamptonshire.
Okay.
And has that been a long-term residence for you?
Oh, yes, quite a while, quite some years.
Right.
Now, your story, if I am to believe some of the things that I've read on the net, is highly interesting, almost sensational, but of course, like any story of its kind, very controversial.
Just in a few words, before we talk about you and then we'll unfold the story properly.
Is this, as I assumed it was, the story of reincarnation, which we've heard before, other people have claimed to have been reincarnated, but in your case, very much reincarnation with a purpose?
It's just that I always remember.
I assume the purpose is that you have to have sort something out.
I mean, that there's a problem that you didn't address.
Because the lives I've remembered, they've always been problems.
It's sort of finished early.
It's finished without something being resolved.
So I assume that that's what the purpose is.
But more purpose came to light as I was researching.
And I realized that the family I was trying to find in Ireland had all been separated from each other.
So then that gave me a job to do.
Right.
But we're jumping ahead.
But we are jumping ahead a bit, but that is what makes it fascinating.
And for people who are just listening to this thinking, as some of my listeners do, they listen to the first five minutes and they think, do I want to hear this guest?
Am I keen on this guest?
They rate All of us, really, they have every right to.
So I wanted to give them that little snapshot.
Before we progress, now you sound to me to be perfectly rational, and you have a very normal family life from what I hear.
You have children, don't you?
And what do you do for a living again?
I'm a podiatrist, self-employed.
Okay, so you look after people's feet.
You can't get any more down to earth than that, can you?
Probably.
Right.
And the story of you remembering past lives is, as often happens with children, something that happens very early.
Well, I think that more than it happening early, it's always there.
And then you start to talk about it.
Now, in my case, I was three, nearly four, when I started to talk about it.
And the only reason I began to discuss it with my mother was that I didn't understand why people didn't talk about their other lives.
I assumed, it was normal for me, I assumed that everybody remembered other lives, but I didn't understand why they were talking about it.
So when I started to discuss it with my mother and she came up with, it's a belief, I thought, what do you mean it's a belief?
I assumed that people, it was just something private.
But I went on from there, realizing that most people didn't remember, and it made me feel slightly uncomfortable.
But in fact, I think most children remember, even if it's just tiny snippets, they say odd things.
If you listen to them, they do say curious things that relate to things that they shouldn't really know, but to do with other lives.
Well, I've told the story before on this show, but never in very much detail.
But if my parents were alive, they would tell you how I used to go around telling people that I was an American and that I was from California.
And I would talk to them about the big pink Cadillac style cars there and beautiful sunshine all day in this long, long coastline that I came to know later as the Pacific Coast Highway.
And I had very clear memories of having been an American in California in a previous existence.
And those memories went away by the time I was about four.
Now, that's not uncommon, is it?
I think that's about normal.
I mean, I've been talking to a child recently who is now four, going on five, and is beginning to forget quite detailed memories.
I find it a little bit sad that people forget in some ways.
I think they were supposed to.
I think it makes this life much easier.
I must admit, remembering has been quite a problem.
In fact, it's taken me until, what am I now, 61, to get through to all of the past lives, to resolve them all, to get through all the issues.
And I now feel I'm free now, but only because I've resolved everything.
So I think it is very difficult if you do remember, because the whole time it's in the edge of your mind.
It's something that you've got to do something about.
So I think it probably is, the reason people forget is you're supposed to forget and it's probably normal to forget.
Although I don't feel anything but normal.
But from what I've read about you, what you said at the very top of this conversation, the memories that you had were both very young and very detailed.
Tell me how they began.
Did you start to see?
Did you dream?
Did you just simply have recollections, clear recollections?
How did these things manifest and what was manifesting to you?
Well, as I said, they were always there.
They were part of my memory as I was a very small child.
I started discussing them at about the age of three to four.
But some of it was normal memory.
So if you now think back, well, you have a past life memory yourself, but if you think back to your first day at school, and you can remember the classroom, you can remember what the teacher was like, it's very similar.
I would remember back to when I was an adult in Ireland, or I'd remember Japan, or I'd remember being chased by a truck as a child.
That was another of the lives I remembered.
There are about five particularly that I remember, but I'd just sit and think about it.
There did come in dreams as well, mostly the things that I didn't want to think about during the day.
So the Mary Sutton memory of dying in the hospital and worrying about leaving the children behind, that often came as a dream.
I'd remember during the day things like cleaning the house, stuffing the mattress, the children and making clothes for them, that sort of thing, and the cooking.
I'd remember things like that during the day.
And then I'd wake up in the night absolutely heartbroken because there was nothing I could do about the children that I'd left behind.
And one of the other lives that I'd remembered, as long as I can remember, I would wake up with the sensation that the bottom half of my legs had gone.
And I'd have dreams about trucks chasing me.
And that was actually to do with a different life.
I knew it was.
I could separate them.
That is the unusual part, isn't it?
You know, some of us have memories of being kids in California or being brought up in California and living there.
And that's just about where it stops.
But your memories were multiple and multiply detailed.
Yes, but it's linear.
It's a strange thing.
So, you know, now I can think back to when I was in my 40s or when my children were born or when I was a child or when I was a different child before that or when I was a mother before that or when I was a young person before that.
It's just linear memory and it's actually no different to normal memory.
There's just more of it.
So you have what all of us have for our own lives in this reality, a Facebook style timeline, really?
Yes, just about.
Yes, that's more or less how it works.
Sometimes I have to write, when I find things out, I had to write some of the details down so that the bits that I didn't know, like the dates in particular, I'd have a rough idea of the dates.
And once I get a specific date, a death certificate or something, then I've got that, I can write that down.
But yes, mostly it's, as you say, it's a longer memory, that's all.
I want to talk first about the Mary case, because that is the one that is the most celebrated and the best known.
Your recollections of that were from a very young age, you were telling me.
You can tell me in a moment exactly how young they started, but the sorts of emotions that you seem to be recalling, very hard for a small child to handle.
It was pretty horrible, actually, because I just knew that the children had been, I deserted them through death, and I felt so guilty.
And it's ridiculous.
I found out much later that it was a death that couldn't have been avoided.
It was through complications of pregnancy, and there were infections as well.
So there was no avoiding it.
But I felt guilty about leaving them.
And I mean, as I say, you said there were lots and lots of details.
That's quite helpful because when you finally find a family, a past life family, and you've got to try and think, how on earth am I going to approach them?
Should I approach them?
What am I doing?
Well, how long did you let Mary and her timeline and those memories prey upon you, prey upon your mind, before deciding to do something about it, presumably right the way through teenage years and beyond adolescence?
Well, that's right.
I didn't, we had an awful lot of problems as I was growing up.
So there was no chance of actually going to Ireland.
My parents separated.
We had to struggle.
We were actually briefly homeless.
So there was no chance of doing anything about it until I'd grown up.
And then I was a student and then things were still difficult.
It was after I'd had my own children, sort of this time around, that it started to get worse because I was looking after children again.
And I started to make notes.
I didn't know if I had enough.
I always knew it was Malahide.
I found that as a child.
I had a map of Ireland in my school atlas.
And I knew it was, I would point, I'd say, well, it was there.
And underneath my finger was the name Malahide.
I didn't remember the name of the village, but I did draw maps of it.
And Malahide's an area near Dublin, isn't it?
So it is a small, it was then, a small village near Dublin.
I can remember things like arriving there in a cart and I can tell you what I had one baby and a small child at the time.
So I knew that most of the children were born there.
But yeah, so the details that you have.
And it is important because when you do finally find the family, at least you can say things to them that nobody else knows.
So there's personal details about the family.
So it was important for me to go through and make a note as I remembered things to make sure I got all the details down.
And I did actually end up using hypnosis quite by accident.
I was talking to a friend about this and she said she knew someone who's a hypnotist.
And I thought, well, it might help me remember the surname because I couldn't remember the surname.
Like I said, I drew maps, I knew exactly where the house was.
But I thought, before I go there, I better just make sure I've got everything clear as much as I can.
So I underwent hypnosis.
And actually, it made it worse because all that happened was it stirred up the memories again.
It brought up one or two things that I'd forgotten, but it just brought everything right to the forefront.
And I hadn't realized how much I'd kind of tried to push it down just to get on with this life.
And you say that it brought out one or two things that you've forgotten.
Were they things that you had known when you were a child or things that you'd forgotten in the process of ceasing to be Mary and starting to be the person you are now?
That's actually a good question.
I'm not sure.
I'm not sure if I had remembered more as a child.
I mean, I'm guessing that I had more detail as a child.
And then as I was suppressing it, as I grew up, some of it drifted.
But it's always possible that there were some of the details that came up under hypnosis were things that I hadn't remembered as a child.
It's very difficult to evaluate particulars on that, but certainly there were some things that hypnosis brought up that I hadn't written down as an adult.
And they were often just small things, but some of them were quite significant.
And it was useful as well under hypnosis because I was asked specific questions, which meant I would then look in my memory for the answers.
So tiny little things like looking at the front of the house.
And I said, oh, yes, yes, there's a dip in the roof just above the door.
Oh, there's a bit of damage there.
Well, that's a bit worrying.
So when I finally got to seeing the family, I was able to say quite small things like there was this dip in the roof and they were saying, oh, yes, yes.
How did you know that?
So the difficult things for you to obtain through hypnosis would have been, I presume, you said yourself, the surname of this individual, Mary.
Yes.
Dates of birth and specific details that would allow you to do further research.
That's it.
I mean, of course, I was still dealing with my own memory, and my own memory isn't very good with names or dates.
So the hypnosis didn't make any difference in that regard.
I did come up with one or two names, but they were tending to be people.
I mean, the house was rented by somebody named Mac, and it was a Mac something name, the people who had rented the house out.
So I did get that.
So there are odd little bits, but I'm really not so good at names.
So I couldn't have expected that.
And did you recall specific milestones?
You said it was a timeline, but in Mary's case, could you remember Christmas, childbirth, getting married, having boyfriends, all of the things that people do?
Often you remember odd days.
It's like any other memory.
So I would remember the day we were walking along the street.
I was with my new husband.
There were no children at the time.
And it was at a different place.
Now, I've found out since that place was Kettering in England.
We'd come over for a year or two to stay with a brother.
And before returning to Ireland.
And you're in an area that is not too far away from Kettering.
Are you 10 or 15 miles away from Kettering?
Yes, I had actually wondered about getting in touch with the brother's family a few times.
But I'm beginning to wonder if, since you're in that area, could you possibly have somehow discovered these details in another way, perhaps by reading about them, whatever?
I wasn't living here anyway.
I was in Hertfordshire as I was growing up.
No, I mean, there are the things I see where you're going.
Could you have accidentally got access by some other means?
Yeah, I mean, Hertfordshire is not a million miles away from where you are now, so is there another way that you could have divined all of this?
Well, the problem there is that some of the things I remembered were things that were very private to the family and things that they had never discussed with anybody, not even other relatives.
Can you give me a taste of what they were?
Yeah, well, one of them, they'd started setting traps for animals, so it's poaching.
But I was able to remember that there was a man who lived across the road and up a little bit on the house next to the turn off in Malahide, who had shown the older children how to make a snare to catch rabbits.
And they'd set a snare and they caught something.
And it was actually when we went to it, it was still alive and struggling and it was all stretched out.
What I didn't remember was that the children, it was a hare anyway, which wasn't as easy to cook.
And the children were a bit put off by the fact that it was still alive and they let it go.
But I was right about the other things.
But they hadn't told anybody because they could have got into trouble.
So that's a kind of thing.
Things like the stuffing the mattress with chaff in the autumn.
The mattresses were, the filling was all taken out and the chaff from the harvest was filled into the mattress and then it was sewn up again.
And we overfilled it and we couldn't get it through the doorway.
And if we burst out laughing, the boys were laughing all over the floor and we had to take it back out again, unsew it and take some out again.
And the oldest son remembered that very, very clearly.
So if Mary was a figure from history, famous, you know, Mary, Queen of Scots or Henry VIII or somebody like that, it's possible to get details like that.
But somebody who lives the small change of life, an ordinary life like you and I lead, details like that, how would you get them?
Well, you wouldn't.
I mean, nobody's written them down.
I had to really, in fact, the family really had to try hard and remember some of the things I could remember.
And there were other things, quite bizarre.
Somebody asked me, did I remember which room in the hospital that I died in?
I thought, oh, that's a bit of a tall order.
But I said, well, I do know it was one floor up because I could see the treetops.
It was on the corner of the building.
And I drew a little, I knew where the corridors were.
So I drew what I remembered of the corridors, because I was actually wheeled into the room and did a little sketch.
And they took it to the Rotunda Hospital, which we know on the death certificate, that's where it was.
And the matron looked at it and said, oh, I know which room that is.
And she actually showed us the room.
And it was a room where they put people who were ill so that they didn't infect other people.
And it was quite strange, actually, because I went into this room.
And in my memory, I could only, there was only one window, but I went into the room and there were two windows.
And I thought, oh, I don't remember two windows.
So then I walked around to where the bed was, and there was a big pier between the two windows that was sticking out.
And when I was standing where the bed was, you couldn't see the second window.
Very fortunate that the UK went through the process of getting rid of a lot of older hospitals in the 60s and 70s.
When I lived in Ireland in the 80s, a lot of those buildings were still there.
Yes, yes.
I mean, I was very lucky with the house because the house in Malahyte is gone now.
But the ruins were still there when I started to research.
And one of the older residents further down the road was still there and remembered the family and had been to school with the children.
So I was extremely lucky.
I mean, the whole thing, the way it unfolded, it was just bizarre that there's so many coincidences, the way the things unfolded, that I had chosen just the right time to do it.
And how much hypnotic regression and making of notes did you do before you finally decided to get on the plane or get on the boat and go to Ireland and knock on doors?
I think, I can't remember how many sessions, but it was over a period of something less than six months.
I can't remember.
I think it was 1989 that I actually went over to Ireland.
And the period of Mary's life, I think we have to define that.
Her age and the period that she lived in.
Let's be specific.
She died at the age of 37, 1895 to 1932.
And I was fairly close on that.
I had thought about 1897 until 1935.
So I was a little bit out, but I was fairly close on it.
And again, there are all sorts of things that I just realised, the name of the road that I grew up in as a child in Ireland.
I got it slightly wrong, but what did I have it?
It was, I got walled down lane, and it was, and I can't remember what it was actually, but it was almost paraphrased, the name of the road.
But that was something else that came up in hypnosis.
But it is all the details that make the difference.
You do need all the details.
Tell me about the first trip to Ireland.
What happened?
Right, it was just a weekend.
And the taxi went past the area.
And I was straining, but it was dark.
And the next morning, I kind of got up before breakfast, so I had to let myself out of a side door in this little BNB.
And first of all, I walked to the jetty, and I remember the jetty.
I had a map with me by then, because I managed to find out that my childhood map was actually accurate.
It took quite a few years before I managed to find a detailed map of Malahide to be able to do that.
But I walked out onto the jetty, and the jetty is now stone, but it's in the same place.
And that was very, very strange.
Standing there on the end of the jetty waiting.
I remember waiting for a boat.
It turned out to be the oldest son used to go cadding for golfers on the little island on the other side.
And I was waiting for the boat to come back so I could walk home with him because he wasn't very old.
And then I walked through the village and there were odd things that would hit me.
I kept staring at a corner of one road where there were some shops and thinking, there's something, there should be a builder's yard there.
Why is the builder's yard important?
And it took nearly a year to find out that Mary's brother-in-law was a builder and that was his yard.
So that I knew the significance of that.
Then I walked up Church Street and found a church that I'd seen under hypnosis and drawn a picture of and then tried to take the little schlorkart around the back, which is now closed.
But I was kind of living in the two times at the same moment.
And then I got down to the lane where the cottage was, and part of me was still looking for a house that was standing.
And I could find a barn that was standing, but I couldn't see the house.
And I knew it's by the stream.
And it just looked all so different.
But I did manage to find, I made a note of an address of the next house down.
And when I got back, I wrote to the person who lived in that house and realised that actually I've walked past the ruins.
I wasn't looking for ruins.
In fact, all the way along, the whole problem was I was remembering things as they were and not letting time move on.
So even when I found the children, it took, it was quite a part of me realised, of course they'd be grown up, they'd be older, but part of me still saw them as children.
And there was a kind of almost a sort of culture shock accepting them as the people they were that much older.
Except that when I found them, I recognized their personalities.
I knew exactly how they'd respond to things.
I knew how I needed to approach each one.
Okay.
Tell me about the process of actually finding the people and the sorts of things that you said, because I believe probably you tell me please, that the first contact must have been, even if you were sure of your ground, which you sound like you were, must have been very, very difficult.
I didn't know quite how to approach it.
It was very difficult.
I got in touch with Professor Ian Stevenson, who was working in children who remember past lives, asking for help.
You know, have you got somebody who would come with me?
So that when I approach the family, it's not quite as difficult.
And they really weren't interested.
They weren't very helpful at all.
Then I found Dr. Peter Fenwick, who was working in this country, had been involved in some cases.
And I got in touch with him.
And he very kindly put me in contact with a BBC researcher, Gitty Coates, who was researching for a program that they were doing at the time.
Now, I wasn't sure that I wanted to be filmed with the first meeting.
I thought it was too much pressure for the family.
For myself, I wasn't at all bothered, but I didn't really want to expose the family that way.
But at the same time, I had this chance of an independent researcher.
So tentatively, I agreed to perhaps doing this programme only if the family were happy with it as well.
And they apparently were.
So I was able to explain all the things that I remembered and try and itemize it and detail it.
And Gitty wrote it all out.
And then she visited the oldest son, Sonny, who's living in Leeds, and did the same thing with him.
And in the end, we had nine pages of things that matched.
Little things like, was there a family pet?
Yes, there was a small dark dog, but it belonged to the children.
It wasn't mine.
There was this small dark dog.
As I said, the stuff in the mattresses, cooking the bread, the types of bread, the saucepan I used, were the layout of the inside of the cottage itself, the wall next to the cottage that you couldn't lean on because it would have been uncomfortable because there were stones on top.
So it's all tiny little details like that.
And as I said, the luck that I had somebody there in between.
But actually tracing them in the first place, I had to write to all of the...
So I wrote to every orphanage in Dublin.
Unfortunately, an awful lot of them had been closed.
But a priest helped me, and he found the baptism certificates for a number of the families.
Then I advertised in a newspaper in Ireland saying that I was trying to find this family, and I got a little tiny sort of scrap of envelope sent to me with the name and address of one of the sons, who I then contacted.
That was horrendously difficult because it was by phone, and it was very hard to try and explain what I was doing, and I thought, oh, I've just made an awful mess of this.
But I did get, at that stage, the address of the oldest son, which is why I was able to then ask for help, which I needed them.
I mean, having had the problems on this telephone call and not quite knowing what to say, I needed someone to stand between us, as it were.
Well, the only problem was then the programme took a while.
Things were delayed and we weren't allowed to meet each other.
And apparently, again, Ian Stevenson was involved with this programme, but he didn't want me and my story to be included with his programme.
So we got cancelled, which for me was brilliant because I then didn't have the pressure of the TV programme.
I could just go and see Sunny with the list of comparisons that we've got and just talk without any pressure, which was wonderful.
So the family and I, we all went up to Leeds for the day and met Sonny.
And it was just such a relief.
He was exactly the same person.
But as I said, there's this slight shock that I had to, part of me had to accept that he was now in his 70s and he wasn't the 13-year-old boy that I left behind.
And you must have had some convincing to do, did you?
Actually, he was very good about it.
He was amazingly good about it.
We just took it step by step.
I didn't say at any stage, I was your mother.
We eventually, I think it was the second or third meeting, that he eventually asked, this strange thing that you've been dreaming about my mother or having memories about my mother, how do you look at it?
And I said then, quite pleased that he'd actually asked, that for me it had to be that I had been his mother.
And by then, we'd had quite a lot of time talking and he'd had the researcher talking to him as well.
And he just accepted it.
He seemed to accept it straight off.
In fact, as time went by, he used to say, instead of saying, do you remember when my mother did such and such thing?
He would say, do you remember when you used to?
So I realised then when he started to say you, that he'd completely accepted it.
I thought I was extremely lucky because I hadn't expected any of the family to be able to accept it because I realised, I mean, I started out in life thinking that this was normal and ordinary.
And obviously, as I grew up, I realised that a lot of people had problems accepting this kind of memory.
And then I was imposing myself on the very people who were so important to me that I had remembered them over a lifetime.
Wow.
The strongest bond, perhaps, in life, well, not even perhaps, Jenny, is between a mother and a child.
I wonder how you felt because for the moments that you were meeting with him, you were his mother.
Yes, and yes and no, and it's so difficult.
The hardest thing I've noticed with other people who have remembered past lives, sometimes you see the children, there's a look that they get at the point where they suddenly realize they've found what they were looking for.
And I know what the look is, it's when you realize that you're not that person anymore.
That part of you was, but you're actually slightly different now.
You're the same person on the inside, but it's that realization that you've got to live in the present.
And in some ways, that's actually quite hard to accept.
So yes, my children, and then I looked at my children now, and then I looked at my child who was, and I realized even however much he accepted me, however much we had the contact, there was still something different.
It's quite subtle, but very, very strange, very strange.
And also, I suddenly became aware of the years I'd missed.
All that time I'd missed.
Well, 37, even in that era, in the 30s, where people did die younger, incredibly young to die and terribly sad when any mother dies and leaves behind children.
Yes.
And then, of course, the next job was to find the other children, because they've all been separated, to find them, trace them, and then step back and let them get to know each other without imposing myself.
You know, I had to sort of sit in the background and make sure that they were happy with each other before I said anything.
And it was when we had the first meeting that Sonny piped up as we were all sitting around a table.
What did everybody make of it?
And they each explained how they saw it.
And some of the girls were saying that they saw it as their mother working through me.
Two of the sons were very adamant that it was a reincarnation.
And one was slightly quiet and reticent on it.
But then he was always quiet, that one.
But did you have any details that would be the kind of thing that would change his mind?
Anything that you could offer him?
Actually, that particular son had a near-death experience when he had heart trouble.
And before that, he wasn't very sure at all about what I was talking about.
After that, he found he really wanted to make contact.
He realised that there was something to it.
So he was won over after that.
So after his own experience.
Which is fair enough.
It's much easier to accept something where you have first-hand experience.
And I realised when I was sharing the story originally, that it must be very hard for people who do not have first-hand experience to be able to accept the reality of reincarnation.
Can we just make this clear?
After Mary's death, Jenny, this family was broken up and put in different orphanages?
Yes.
They were separated.
Terribly, terribly sad.
I mean, it's very, very moving just to hear of that.
But it happened quite routinely in this country, in Ireland, in many, many countries.
Did they keep in close contact with each other during their lifetimes?
The girls and the boys were separated, and they weren't able to.
They were taken to different towns.
The boys were all sent down to Cork.
But they did know each other.
Obviously, they were aware of where they were.
Yes, yes.
But they lost contact.
They completely lost contact.
So there were you a catalyst bringing them back together in the name of their mother?
The sons had managed to get together again about three years before I started to try and trace them.
So they had managed to find that.
One of them was working in Australia and bumped into the next door neighbour of one of his brothers.
He didn't know where he was.
And they all managed to get together.
But yes, it was finding the girls.
And of course, the baby who'd been adopted.
Wow.
That must have been a tough, really tough process then.
Yes.
Yes.
So we managed to find her.
And then that was where I really stepped back and just let them get to know her, let her get to know them.
And it was, I think it was, oh, six, nine months at least before any of them mentioned to her what my connection was.
Boy.
So this process took a long, long time to do properly.
To do properly, I think it had to, because you can't just turn up on somebody's doorstep and say, oh, I was your mother-in-law last life.
It would be an awful thing to do.
But you sound such a calm and rational person.
You know, that is absolutely the correct way to do it, and that's how you did do it.
But a lot of us are more emotional and impulsive than that, and we wouldn't be able to resist the temptation to go and scatter and spatter out details.
I am emotional and impulsive.
But you're talking about how you treat your children.
And you've got to be respectful and considerate.
I really, really didn't want them to find the experience negative.
Can you think of any details, you've talked about some already, that were the kind of disarming details that really would have hit the family when you brought them back together, the kind of thing that really get you in the solar plexus?
I think probably the one that, for Sonny, the one that really hit him was this rabbit, this hare, which is a silly thing.
But it was when he was quite shocked and he realized it was something that nobody else knew.
Most of the rest of it, it was just normal family life, normal things.
I mean, Frank, who was the one who was very quiet and shy, I just remember him fiddling with the bottom of his jacket all the time and not wanting to look up.
But the thing I was blocking out, the reason why some of the children were so quiet, was the husband.
I mean, I knew that there was a reason I was really, really bothered about the children being left with him.
And there were things that I was blocking out, but there was violence.
He was alcoholic.
So that was where the problems came.
And Sonny and I used to talk then about what happened after his mother, I had died, and the difficulties he went through.
And he ended up sleeping in hedges rather than going home.
He had a dreadful time.
And how did this man, the father, the husband, meet his end?
We don't know.
We think he married again.
I was absolutely horrified that somebody else would have to put up with him.
We think he went to Scotland and remarried or went to somewhere in the UK, but we think Scotland possibly.
And we have to remember that this is the 30s, and I know because I had Liverpool relatives, many of them, a network of people who lived in terraced houses and cobbled streets, and people led colourful lives.
There are people who would disappear, and people do all sorts of things and go to all sorts of places.
And you could start again in that era in a way that you couldn't these days because everybody is regulated, monitored, and tracked quite rightly.
But in those days, these are the sorts of things that happened.
Yes, you could disappear.
You could disappear.
The thinking is that he went back into the army to train soldiers.
That was what people in the area that he left were saying.
But we don't know any more than that.
Are you still in touch with all of the family?
And if you are, what are they telling you about what this process meant for them?
The children have all gone.
This was quite a while ago.
Obviously, they were all born.
I mean, Sonny was born 1919, so this is all a long time ago.
Did you go to his funeral?
I didn't, actually.
There's the funny thing, there was a slight gap.
I wasn't asked to.
I wasn't told.
Yes, it was.
How did you feel about that, Kenny?
Yeah, I'm not that much into funerals.
Once a person has gone, to my mind, they're not in the body.
So the actual funeral, I've lost friends and not turned up to their funerals.
Listen, I completely agree.
The funeral's for us, not for them.
Yes, so I didn't really want to impose on the family anyway.
I think they saved me a rather difficult situation that I impose on the family but I am in, if And I've managed to put cousins in touch with cousins again.
And it's great fun.
I've even had one who said, is it all right if I call you Granny?
And I said, yes, of course it is.
You know, of course, it would be lovely.
Thank you.
So, yes, some of them I'm not in contact with, some of them I am, but it's their choice, which is the best way around.
And were they all uniformly happy with you going public on this story?
I don't know.
The children were, and I made absolutely sure they were.
I wouldn't have gone public otherwise.
In fact, when I wrote the first book, I kept all of their own personal names out of it until they made it quite clear that they were happy.
I could use their names.
And in the end, there was only one name that I changed.
One of the brothers, he died just before I was able to share the story.
So I didn't really want to disturb the family to ask them, so I kept his name.
I put a false name in for him.
But we were going to keep them all private, but they one by one decided that they weren't bothered.
They were quite happy for me to use their names.
I get a lot of emails from listeners, and a lot of them are very accepting and very charming emails.
And every so often I'll get an email saying, why did you let that person just talk?
You didn't really challenge them.
But this show is about telling people stories.
I want to just ask you this, because those people will say to me, this woman is clearly deluded, has deluded herself Over a long period and clearly has deluded some other people.
You've heard that before.
I've read some reviews of your work on the internet.
Some of them, many of them, are extremely complimentary, some of them not very nice.
What do you say to those people?
The thing is, you see, I can understand.
If someone doesn't have a first-hand experience, then they are going to find it hard to accept what somebody else has been through.
And really, if somebody has made up their mind that they're not going to accept something, it doesn't matter how many times you say it, it doesn't matter how much evidence you put before them, they're still not going to be comfortable, which is fine.
You're allowed to have different opinions.
So I'm not actually going to get standing up and saying that people should accept it.
Why should they?
It happens to be that, you know, as far as I'm concerned, that this is what happens, that you keep coming back.
But I can quite understand if somebody doesn't want to accept that.
Knowing what you say you know and being Jenny in this life, very happily with your family, you mustn't then believe that somebody else is going to come back with memories of you.
How does that make you think and feel?
Oh, that's fine, because it'll still be me.
I mean, there's still the core personality.
So, you know, you go on and you're somewhere else.
The body is temporary, but it's spirit that keeps going.
I think that's rather nice, as long as we make sure that the world that we're coming into is as pleasant as possible.
It's not always easy, is it?
There's so much trouble, and there's too many people, and there are too many people who are poor.
And you can end up with a life that's difficult.
But in some ways, I quite like that thought because perhaps if more people started to think in terms of what's going to happen in 50, 100, 200 years, because they're still going to be here, perhaps they're going to be a little bit more considerate about what they're doing now and plan for the future a little bit more, be a little bit more involved in where we're going, what we're doing with the planet.
It's a very realistic and very profound thought, Jenny.
Is the book on Mary, metaphorically, I mean, closed now?
Have you any more work to do on this or is that it?
As far as I'm concerned, I've resolved my memories of Mary.
I then underwent to try and resolve my memories of living in Japan, which was 1858 to 1875 more or less, which I managed to do.
I managed to find the trace of family there who remembered the things that I remembered.
And then I went on to resolve the little memory I had of being in an accident, a road accident, at the age of six, which turned out to be in Gateshead.
And I've met the brother, and he's quite accepting.
When did that happen, Jenny?
What historical period was that?
That was 1939 to 1945, actually during the war years.
So there was a bunker that we used to play in as well.
So that was an incarnation straight after Mary?
Yes, in between Mary and now.
That was the one where I kept waking up.
What made me research it in the end, I'd left it for a while because I didn't think I'd found the right person.
Because when I had the birth certificate, the road layout was wrong.
But eventually I rechecked and got a death certificate and looked at an odd map of Gateshead and found that the road layout was absolutely spot on.
And then when I managed to find the brother, there were other things.
There was a house I could remember with the stairs up the middle.
Again, all of these things turned out to be completely right, position of the school.
But the crushing of the legs, what I kept remembering as I was waking up again and again, I had about a year where every single morning I wake up and the first thing I was aware of as I woke up was the crushing of my legs.
And I just thought, I've got to do something.
I know what it is.
I know it's this road accident, but...
The pain doesn't seem to register.
Mostly it's just, oh, my legs are crushed.
And do you have a memory of passing?
And if you do, what does that entail?
Everybody wants to know that.
Not so much on that one.
It was very, very sudden.
Basically, it was a milk truck backed over as this boy.
And the wheel went over the legs.
And then I remember sitting up and then nothing else.
So I think that the underside of the vehicle then hit the head and there wasn't anything else.
But as Mary, I have quite a lot.
I find it very difficult.
When I first read Yesterday's Children, the first book, I didn't want to put in what I remembered about dying and the between-life thing because it was just so I thought, well, it was so difficult to share all the other bits and pieces.
I didn't share that until a later book.
Well, I mean, for example, the popular, whether it's mythical or not, the white light and you go to a beautiful place that's like a garden.
Was it all like that?
It was sort of.
I didn't read about near-death experiences when I was a child.
And I hadn't done a lot of research on it until I started to talk about it and realised that actually what I was experiencing was very, very similar.
I remember the hospital room being suddenly up above the body, slightly to one side, but I seemed to be higher than the level of the ceiling, and hovered there for a minute.
Somebody came in, a nurse came in, she rushed out, and then somebody else came in and knelt by the side of the bed.
I had hoped it was a husband, actually it was a priest, but never mind.
He was in the pub, the husband.
Then the next thing I remember was folding up, very, very small, and being sucked away.
And I was still looking back, as it were, disembodied, no eyes obviously, But still looking back.
And so I didn't look towards the light, but I could see the colours of light, spectrum light, like rainbow light, either side of me.
And I don't remember much about the arrival on that one.
I remember more about the arrival when I died in Japan.
But the place that I remember between lives was like balls of energy bonded in a network, connected to all the other balls of energy there, and no sense of time passing.
There seemed to be like...
You know, how it could be described using accepted physics terms.
And one of the things I quite like is the theory of different dimensions that crash into each other and eventually make universes,
so that you have multiple universes, but that there are other dimensions that we are, or one particular dimension that we're connected to at a subatomic level.
And this idea of when you come out of body, you're literally feeling as though you're being sucked back to somewhere that you're already connected to.
So I'm wondering if you're sucked back to somewhere that is connected at this cellular level, a microscopic level.
And so yeah, this sense that there's no sense of time there.
And then just being drawn into another life.
But people who believe in reincarnation, many of them, I spoke to a researcher in America called Stafford Betty.
We discussed this recently in quite some detail, got some very good feedback about that particular conversation.
And there is the theory of the choice, that your soul has the choice of whether to return or whether not to.
Did you have any sense of that?
Right, my feeling of the between lie thing that is not, And when it comes to choice, there are lots of things that you're using to make a decision.
Now, the between-life sensation is that you don't have the body, you don't have any of the hormones directing you, and it's much more instinctive.
So I think it's an instinctive choice.
A little bit more like, you know, if you're in a crowded room and you see someone across the crowded room and for some reason you think, oh, I like that person.
I think it's more like that.
Much more instinctive and subtle than actual sitting down and making a decision and choosing.
Makes sense to me.
The story from Gateshead in the northeast of England, the small child crushed to death, age six, when you eventually met the brother.
How did you go about that?
What sorts of things did you talk about?
And how did you persuade him?
How did he come to be persuaded that you were what you claim to be?
Well, first of all, I don't try to persuade.
What I did was I, I had quite a bit of help while that moment, but what I did was I sent a copy of the film, a copy of the book, and a letter, and I spent months and months writing this letter.
And it was basically saying this, I'm very, sorry, but this is going to be very strange for you.
I've enclosed this book and the film to try and see if it will help your understanding this.
I don't expect acceptance because you can't.
But at the same time, I need to just share this with you.
So it was very, very careful, very well thought out letter.
So I wasn't trying to persuade.
I have never, ever expected people just to accept me.
I don't think that's reasonable.
But at the same time, you can't make decisions for other people.
So I've always approached people on the understanding that they can then make a decision.
And where have you left that?
Well, we're actually great friends.
It worked out fine.
We don't talk much now.
Well, we don't talk at all about the activist.
He was quite hurt.
He was only four.
Of course.
And the whole thing was very difficult for him.
We talked about that just a little bit right at the beginning.
But now I phone up.
I've been up there a few times.
We stop up in a BNB and go and see him and his wife.
And sometimes some of his family come round.
And it's been brilliant.
How lovely.
We only have about three minutes left, Jenny, and I'd love to talk to you again.
But briefly tell me the story of your Japanese life.
That was always there, the same as my life as Mary.
I managed to, in my school atlas, at the same time I was finding Malahide, I found, it was on the South Island of Japan, and I knew it was kind of there at the top of the left-hand side.
But it was years before I managed to find a detailed map.
And I was looking for a peninsula, and then sure enough, there was a peninsula.
Well, I managed to go to Japan, but it was with a Japanese TV company, and they had their own agenda, so it was really complicated, and it wasn't very, or it wasn't, you would imagine, it wasn't very pleasant.
But then a Japanese lady helped me afterwards, and she actually went to the area and introduced herself to the people in the area and found the family for me.
I remember the last bit, she was arguing with me and saying, the house cannot have been on the edge of the cliff.
It must have been on the other side of the road.
And I said, no, this is the picture of it, the one I'd sent you, and it was definitely on the edge of the cliff.
And when she found the family, the first thing they said to her, when they looked at this picture and they listened to her, they said, how could she have known about our house on the edge of the cliff?
Wow.
How have you left it with them?
Well, because I've actually, when I was researching, I practiced and practiced writing in Japanese because I realised that was the only way I was going to be able to do it.
So I have managed to write a couple of times to them.
Well, of course, if you'd lived a Japanese life, you would know parts of that, wouldn't you?
Yes.
Well, I found that it was fun, actually, learning to write in Japanese.
It's much easier than learning to talk in it.
But did you have a facility for it because you'd live, you say, there before?
Language is to do with the body.
It's not to do with the core personality.
Okay.
Well, Jenny, you know, we're recording this on a Sunday morning.
You're where you are, and I'm where I am.
I've been transfixed by everything you said, and I would like to talk to you again.
Very briefly, are you working on anything else now?
I've pretty much resolved.
I mean, I've got a book in the offing, and I'm looking at the physics, and I've included the bits that haven't been in any of the other books.
But it may take time to get it up because publishing is much harder now, so it may be time, quite a while before it goes anywhere.
And you feel that your work for this life is almost done?
I do, actually.
Yes, I need a project.
Got anything interesting?
Well, I'll have a think and I'll get back to you.
Jenny, if people want to know about you, your work, your research, yourself, how do they do that?
Where do they go?
If you just punch in my name, Jenny Cokell, you'll find that the books are listed.
You'll find I've got a contact page on Facebook.
And I think it's all out there.
I think it's all on the web.
Jenny, thank you so much.
Wow.
Jenny Cockle, thank you again.
And thank you.
Jenny Cockle, amazing stuff.
And please give me your feedback and thoughts about her and what she had to say.
You can get in touch with me through the website www.theunexplained.tv, www.theunexplained.tv.
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I'm happy to see whatever you have to say and take all of it on board.
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My fingers are crossed about that.
But until next, we meet here on The Unexplained.
My name is Howard Hughes.
I'm in London.
Please stay safe, stay calm, and stay in touch.
Take care.
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