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Psychic Discoveries – Sheila Ostrander and Lynn Schroeder

In a large sunlit studio in Moscow, a cluster of art students eyed their model intently. Each deep in his own vision of the girl, they glanced up and down checking the curves of the model  against the figure growing on their sketch pads. Not one head turned when their instructor, Dr. Vladimir L. Raikov, entered the room and circled around them, talking with a visitor.

"I want you to meet one of my best students," Raikov said. A young girl in her early twenties stood up, rather grudgingly it seemed. But then, as if coming to herself, she turned quickly to the visitor and extended her hand. "I am Raphael of Urbino," she said.

The visitor wasn't as surprised at the name as he was at the nonchalant way this seemingly normal, wide-awake girl tried to pass herself off as the great Renaissance painter.

"Could you tell me, by any chance, what year it is?" he asked.

"'Why, 1505, of course."

Needing a moment to order his thoughts, the guest stepped back to focus his camera on the pretty young student. Instructor Raikov asked, "Do you know what he has there?"

"No!"

"Well, have you ever seen anything at all similar to it?"

"Never. I've never seen anything like it in my life."

After clicking a few shots, the visitor began talking again about cameras, jets, sputniks, and-as the girl grew more adamant in her denials -about anything that came into his head concerning 1966, the year they were living in.

“Phantasmagoria! It's all foolishness. You're bothering me with nonsense!" the girl cried angrily.

'All right, thank you for letting us talk to you," her instructor said "Go back to work now. Draw! Draw to the very best of your ability Maestro Raphael."

"That is an example," said Dr. Raikov to his guest, a writer from Komsomolskaya Pravda, "of what we call ‘reincarnation’."

This ‘reincarnation’ of Raphael in lra, a young science student, has not sent psychiatrist Raikov on a hunt through cobwebs and crumbling churchyard records to corroborate the girl's tale of a glorious past life. Raikov, who works with the Popov parapsychologists, knows how this Raphael became reincarnated-just as he knows how the other three Raphaels in the class came into the flesh again.

Raikov called them into being. He is a master hypnotist.

With his dynamic brand of reincarnation, Raikov is trying to evoke the birth of talent, perhaps even genius, in his students.

“We're not giving people something from the outside with ‘reincarnation’, something they don't have," the Soviets say. But few people, if any, realize the extraordinary powers they do possess.

"I am able to evoke this phenomenon of ‘reincarnation’ only when the subject is in exceedingly deep trance," Raikov reports.

'lt is a new form of active trance."