What is a prebirth memory? 

I’ve never had a prebirth experience, but many thousands on earth have. Numerous sites on the internet attest to this. We’ll be looking at one man who has had one. Christian Sundberg tells us about it in striking detail.

What is a prebirth memory? First, let’s clarify what it’s not. It isn’t what is known as a “fetal memory,” which causes a change in heartbeat when, for example, the mother repeats a familiar song. And it isn’t an imagined memory that might surface when under hypnosis. A genuine prebirth memory includes what actually happens leading up to conception, including remembered events in a previous physical life and the spiritual life between that life and the present. In some cases the rememberer sought the memory, while in others it occurred spontaneously. Often the rememberer is a young child.         

 Christian Sundberg had prebirth memories starting in early childhood but saw them vanish around the age of six. He even forgot he ever had them. But seven months into a meditation practice at the age of 30, he saw them return in force.  He remembered living in a realm of golden light and meeting a highly evolved being who made him realize he wanted the joy and power the being had. When his guides told him it would require a physical birth, he jumped at the chance. He was shown his future parents and the many possible directions his life might take.

He decided to dive into the denseness of flesh. He entered a rebirth chamber and, with technicians present to assist him, descended lower, lower, ever lower through a shaft leading to his mother’s womb. The descent into dense darkness was so alarming and repellant that he negated the process and fought his way back into the light. As a result, the fetus that was to house him died, and his mother miscarried. When he understood the suffering he caused her and her family, let alone his failure to carry through with his plan, he was overcome with shame and regret.  

After better preparing himself for a second descent, he again entered the rebirth chamber. Again he took the plunge, and again he found it unbearable. About to flee, he encountered a godlike being that he described as “the Great I AM.” This being gave him the confidence and courage to proceed. At this point I should say that the words I am using, and that Christian himself used to describe these events, are utterly inadequate to capture the feelings he had and the events he tried to describe. 

He remembered being born. He recalled being curious about what was happening to him but had no idea of what it was. Around the age of three or four, memories of prebirth events surfaced but seemed unremarkable. Around five or six they vanished altogether. Then at 30, as we saw, they reappeared. Eight years later, he began to record and systematize them. His book A Walk in the Physical followed.

Three things stand out about Sundberg’s experience and are the reasons for my making this video. First, we know that one in five pregnancies end in miscarriage. Modern medicine would say it’s all a matter of the mother’s body being unready or impaired. Sundberg’s account suggests another cause. It’s not the unreadiness of the mother’s body, but of the soul occupying the fetus within her body. It’s a conscious choice of that soul. My mother’s first child ended in miscarriage. Her next pregnancy went well, and I was born. Was my birth history the same as Sundberg’s? Did I chicken out before finding the courage to proceed? In any case, this spiritual account of miscarriage is intriguingly plausible for people like me and my colleagues but would be anathema to a materialist. 

The second is reincarnation. To lose the bounty of knowledge and experience collected through the ages in a sludge of physical matter does seem unappealing. To be deprived of it might feel like a loss of one’s identity. In any case, Sundberg found it unbearable. This is not to say that in the end it wasn’t exactly what he needed, as his guides pointed out. His resistance to rebirth is understandable. It might well have been what many of us felt when it was our turn. Small wonder so many of us struggle through life in the physical!  

The third is his description of God.  First he describes God as completely beyond words. Stammering as he goes along, out come words designed to give us a glimmer of what it’s like to be in God’s presence. God is “total love, total freedom, total joy,” he says. Is God personal or impersonal? Both. God is “the substance of all being,” of everything in the universe, of “who we are,” yet at the same time God is “absolutely personal.” God loves us in the most intimate way. God “celebrates us” not as a member of a species, but for the unique, inimitable, incommunicable being we are.  To be in God’s presence is to feel as if God “adores us.” Such is the intensity of God’s love. That is how special each of us is to God.

Is Sundberg’s theology sound? For him it’s not a theory, not the product of a formula. It’s not hemmed in by religious doctrine. You can take it or leave it. I, for one, took it. My heart rejoiced as I read his account. To settle for anything less bridled the Divine.  To give it play made faith possible.

I’ve not come across anything quite like it in any theology I’ve studied. His account is more in line with mystical experience down through the ages. Yet God’s personhood is missing in many mystical accounts. In my view, that is to miss a lot. Sundberg’s theology is more complete. 

I hope you’ve enjoyed this foray into one man’s prebirth memories. 

 Stafford Betty, Professor of Religious Studies, CSUB, (ret) is the author of When Did You Ever Become Less by Dying? and Heaven and Hell Unveiled. His novels include The Imprisoned Splendor, The Afterlife Therapist and Guardians of the Afterworld. His latest book, The Hell Dwellers: A Novel about the Dark Side of the Afterlife is published by White Crow Books. Stafford can be found at staffordbetty.com.