Verification of the Rataraju Case -2-

The degree of establishment of the conversation

In analyzing the degree of establishment of the conversation, we devided the conversation into 58 sections by topic and evaluated whether Rataraju responded appropriately or not in each dialogue. The result of the evaluation including some presumptions is as shown below:

A) Conversation established with appropriate responses:
     26 sections (45 %)

B) Conversation not established with no appropriate responses at all:
     8 sections (14%)

C) Difficult to evaluate due to short and ambiguous responses:
     24 sections (41%)

The sections "Conversation not established" refers for example to where Rataraju responded “I don’t know” to the question “Is your wife at home?” or “Shiba… religions” to the question “What do you eat?” etc, thus to the dialogues where Rataraju undoubtedly made inappropriate responses.

The sections “Difficult to evaluate due to short and ambiguous responses” are for example where Rataraju responded shortly such as “I don’t know” or “Yes”, which were not clear enough to judge if Rataraju understood the meaning of the questions appropriately.

From the rough analyzation and evaluation mentioned above, we can conclude that around 80 % of the dialogues are to be regarded as established although not perfect.

Many of you who have read the transcript of the conversation from the session may point out the problem that several of Rataraju’s responses consist of short and simple ones such as “Yes” and “I don’t know”.

Besides, you may have doubts if the conversation indeed can be regarded as an appropriate one in Nepali due to Rataraju’s halting responses.

However, on this point, this Rataraju Case is not inferior at all compared with the transcripts of the conversations in German from the Grethchen Case reported by Dr. Stevenson.

Most of the responses of Gretchen, a personality of a previous life, consisted of short and simple ones such as “No”, “I don’t know” or “Town” etc.

In the first place, utterances of clients in hypnosis are generally slow and it should be mentioned that it is very rare where a client responds immediately to a question in a long context. Furthermore, it is vanishingly unlikely that a client utters at his or her own initiative.

Even Stevenson stated that Gretchen seldom uttered spontaneously and that she responded only shortly to the questions.

Where Rataraju uttered not as a response to a question but spontaneously occurred only twice; when Rataraju stated a question to Ms. Kalpana Paudel as “Are you Nepalese?” and when he complained of a stomachache.

It is worth mentioning that the sessions of Gretchen were conducted as many as 19 times. By reading the transcripts of the recordings, you cannot see so much change in the tendency of Gretchen giving only short responses with lack of fluency even in the later sessions.

Regarding this point, Dr. Stevenson stated for example that Gretchen’s responses were halting, that both grammar and vocabulary were not perfect and that there was no clear improvement or deterioration noticed throughout the entire sessions.

Rataraju’s conversation is very similar to this and for this reason, it can be concluded that the credibility of the Rataraju Case being responsive xenoglossy is high.

Taking the above into consideration, we believe that it should rather be valued that Rataraju was able to have a conversation in Nepali to this extent at his first session in Nepali.

<To be continued>