Surviving death cases: Rawlette excerpt #20

Sharon Hewitt Rawlette writes in her essay, Beyond Death: The Best Evidence for the Survival of Human Consciousness—Memories of contact with the living during the intermission period aren’t limited to apparitions and dreams, either. I’ve come across two cases where people remembered being involved in poltergeist phenomena, both of them from India. In the first case, a child in Uttar Pradesh reported that, after his death in a previous life, he hung out near his previous family’s house and sometimes took their food. The family in question confirmed that they noticed food inexplicably disappearing during that time. In the other case, a boy named Veer Singh reported that, after dying, he stayed in a tree outside his former family’s home. One day, he got annoyed at two women who were playing in a swing hanging from a branch of his tree. Realizing he might kill them if he broke off the branch the swing was attached to, he waited until the swing was low in its arc and then caused the wooden seat to break. His father from his previous life remembered an accident like this occurring after his son’s death.

Encountering Other Spirits of the Deceased

Another important element found in both NDEs and intermission memories is memories of meetings with others who have died. There are many accounts of young children reporting familiarity with relatives who died before they were born, and these claims can sometimes be independently verified.

In a case that Jim Tucker investigated alongside Ian Stevenson, a boy named Patrick Christenson had some memories of his deceased half-brother’s life and also had three scars in locations where his half-brother had been deformed. Furthermore, Patrick said that, while in heaven, he spoke with a relative of the family named “Billy the Pirate” who told him he’d died in the mountains after being shot at close range. Patrick’s mother had never heard of anyone like this in her family, but afterward she learned of a cousin with the nickname “Billy the Pirate” who had died just as Patrick reported.

There’s also the case of James Leininger, the boy who remembered being James Huston, a World War II pilot shot down in the Iwo Jima operation. Between ages three and six, James received three G. I. Joe dolls as presents, and he gave them the names Billie, Leon, and Walter. His family was surprised by the unusual names, and when they asked him about it, he said he gave them those names because that was who met him in heaven. It turned out that only 10 men from James Huston’s squadron on Natoma Bay were killed prior to his own death. Three of them were named Billie, Leon, and Walter, and their hair colors matched those of James’s G. I. Joe dolls, with Billie’s hair being brown, Leon’s blond, and Walter’s red.

Cases like this provide not only first-person evidence for the prebirth existence of the child who has the memory but also third-person evidence for the continuing, disembodied consciousness of the deceased person they remember encountering in the intermission period. 

Sharon Hewitt Rawlette has a PhD in philosophy from New York University and writes about consciousness, parapsychology, and spirituality for both academic and popular audiences. She lives in rural Virginia. She received an award from the Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies for her essay “Beyond Death: The Best Evidence for the Survival of Human Consciousness,” available at https://bigelowinstitute.org/contest_winners3.php. Footnotes in the essay are not included in these excerpts.

 

Apparitions/dreams verified: Rawlett excerpt #19

Sharon Hewitt Rawlette writes in her essay, Beyond Death: The Best Evidence for the Survival of Human Consciousness—Ian Stevenson investigated a case in which a Burmese woman, Daw Kyin Htein, experienced an apparition of a family friend a few months after his death in a plane crash. The apparition happened one night as she was returning from a trip to the outhouse. When she saw her deceased friend, she invited him to reincarnate into her family. Then she went to sleep and had a dream of him as well, one in which his mother and sister (both still living) asked him to go with them but he declined. The mother of the deceased also apparently had a dream—it’s not clear if it was on the same night—in which her son said he was going to live with U Ba Hein, Daw Kyin Htein’s husband.

Soon after this, Daw Kyin Htein conceived a son, Maung Yin Maung, who had memories of being her deceased friend. Furthermore, at the age of 12, he reported to Stevenson that he remembered being near Daw Kyin Htein’s home after his death. He saw someone he thought was her coming out of an outhouse. He remembered “showing himself” to this person as an apparition, and he remembered her inviting him to become her child. He also remembered communicating with his former personality’s mother and sister. They asked him to be reborn with them, but he said he was going to be reborn into Daw Kyin Htein’s family instead.

As this example shows, sometimes apparitions of the dead double as apparitions to future parents. Although dreams seem to be a more common form of communication with future parents,  it’s not unheard of for parents to see waking apparitions of their future children. However, I know of only one other case in which someone retained a first-person memory of appearing in this way to a future parent.

Intermission memories also offer corroboration for dreams of the deceased. In another Burmese case investigated by Stevenson, a woman dreamt that her deceased husband told her he’d left some money (a 5-kyat note) wrapped in a white handkerchief inside a small box of basket work. She then found the box, the handkerchief, and the money. Later, a Burmese boy was born who, around age three, began recalling a past life that matched that of this woman’s husband. He also remembered coming to his wife in a dream after death and telling her where to find 5 kyats wrapped in a white handkerchief. The boy wanted to know if his former wife had had such a dream, and she confirmed it.

In one more Burmese case, a grown man with past-life memories remembered how, after dying, he’d been guided by an old man dressed in white, first to the house where he’d lived before dying and then to another house nearby, which belonged to the family of the village headman, to whom he was subsequently reborn. In his memory, the old man asked him to wait outside at the first house, and at the second one, after first being told to wait outside, he was then told to enter and that he must stay there. As it happened, this man’s wife from his former life had a dream a week after his death in which an old man in white appeared to her and said he was sending her husband to the house of the village headman. When his wife went to the headman’s wife the next morning to tell her about her dream, she discovered that the headman’s wife had also had a dream. In that one, a man had told her that he was bringing the recently deceased man to be in her family. Then the man went outside and brought the deceased man in before ultimately disappearing. 

Sharon Hewitt Rawlette has a PhD in philosophy from New York University and writes about consciousness, parapsychology, and spirituality for both academic and popular audiences. She lives in rural Virginia. She received an award from the Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies for her essay “Beyond Death: The Best Evidence for the Survival of Human Consciousness,” available at https://bigelowinstitute.org/contest_winners3.php. Footnotes in the essay are not included in these excerpts.

 

Recalling funeral or burial: Rawlette excerpt #18

Sharon Hewitt Rawlette writes in her essay, Beyond Death: The Best Evidence for the Survival of Human Consciousness—Those who remember dying in a previous life also sometimes remember viewing their funeral and/or burial. In some cases, they mention something unexpected that was done with their body that can then be verified. In a Sri Lankan case, a girl named Disna Samarasinghe remembered her body being buried near an anthill, which was indeed true of the body of the person whose life she remembered. Disna was also able to point out the location of her unmarked grave.

In one of Ian Stevenson’s cases, a young Thai woman remembered that her previous body—that of a mere baby—wasn’t buried in the village cemetery as it should have been, but rather outside of it. She confronted the undertaker responsible, and he admitted to having done this thing that apparently no one else knew about.

This next case comes from Hertfordshire, England, and was reported by Mary and Peter Harrison in their book The Children That Time Forgot. It involves a young girl, Mandy Seabrook, who appeared to be the reincarnation of her sister who had died at the age of five months. Even though the family never spoke about her deceased sister, when Mandy was two years old, she started recounting memories of having been this other child. One day, while riding past the cemetery where her sister was buried, two-year-old Mandy exclaimed, “Look, Mummy! That’s the place you put me in the ground that time, and you nearly fell on top of me, remember?” 

At the time of the burial, her mother had been taking medication to help her deal with the shock, and she had been so out of sorts that she had lost her balance at the graveside and almost fallen into the hole with the coffin. Mandy also said she’d been buried with a silver bracelet and a fluffy yellow ball. Her mother remembered the existence of the bracelet and the yellow ball, but she only remembered the former being in the casket. Nevertheless, when questioned, an older sibling confessed to having slipped the yellow ball under the dead baby’s body.

One other interesting aspect of this case is that, when Mandy was six, she asked her mother, “Do you remember the night I died? There was a bright star shining in the sky.” When her mother thought back, she realized that she had in fact noticed a star out over the garden, unusually bright and low, and had mentioned it to someone else at the time. Mandy continued, “That was my star. It was my way of telling you that I would be back.” This is the only case I’ve come across in which a child remembered using a sign or synchronicity to communicate after death in their previous life. 

 

Sharon Hewitt Rawlette has a PhD in philosophy from New York University and writes about consciousness, parapsychology, and spirituality for both academic and popular audiences. She lives in rural Virginia. She received an award from the Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies for her essay “Beyond Death: The Best Evidence for the Survival of Human Consciousness,” available at https://bigelowinstitute.org/contest_winners3.php. Footnotes in the essay are not included in these excerpts.

 

 

Children recall prior death: Rawlette excerpt #17

Sharon Hewitt Rawlette writes in her essay, Beyond Death: The Best Evidence for the Survival of Human Consciousness—Let’s start with cases of children who not only have a vivid memory of their death in a previous life but also recall what happened immediately afterward. Many of their descriptions, though fairly simple, bear a strong resemblance to NDEs.

For example, Rylann O’Bannion, the girl who remembered dying when a plane crashed in her backyard during a thunderstorm, told her mom at the age of three, “It was raining a lot. There was a loud noise, then the rain shocked me. I floated up to the sky then.”

In another case, a Brazilian girl named Silvia mixed Italian words into her speech from the time she started talking, even though no one around her spoke Italian. She also had a fear of airplanes flying overhead. This fear appeared linked to her memories of living in a place she called the “capitolio,” where planes would drop bombs. Like Rylann, she was three years old when she told her grandmother about a boy who was carrying a bomb that blew up and hurt her and her friend. “Then my friend and me, we went up and up,” she said. Her grandmother asked if she meant up the stairs of the capitolio, but she said, “No, Grandma, we went up, high up there.” When her grandmother asked what happened next, Silvia replied, “I don’t know. Then I came here.”

Another Brazilian child, Kilden, had more precise memories of his death. He announced to his mother, again around the age of three, that his name was “Alexandre” (this was in fact Kilden’s middle name) and he was “the priest.” A decade ago, his mother had been friends with a priest she called Alexandre, and he had died in a car accident—or so she had heard at the time. Her friendship with the deceased priest was the reason she had given her son the middle name Alexandre. Now Kilden not only insisted that his true name was Alexandre, not Kilden, but also said that, when he had been a priest, he was hit by a truck when he was riding a motorcycle. He fell over, hit his head, and died. When his mother checked the facts of her friend’s death, she discovered he had indeed been hit by a truck while on a motorcycle. He’d fallen on his head and died in the hospital the next day.

Years later, around age 13, Kilden heard about a man who died after falling off a ladder, and he started explaining to his mother what happens when someone has an accident like that:

The person who suffered the accident arrives and is put in a room full of instruments. The doctors connect them.... Then the equipment is connected to the chest and the head, and the doctors keep trying to save the life of the person. At this point the person flies into a corner of the ceiling, watching the doctors’ fight to save him. Then a big hole like a funnel appeared in the corner of the wall near me, trying to suck me [in]....

His mother interrupted to ask if he was talking about himself or someone else. He said, “I think it was me. I saw my body and the doctors trying to save me.” He then continued his description, changing again between the third and first person:

When he was sucked through the hole into the tunnel, he saw a strong light at the end, so strong that I turned my head to one side. The light was very bright, and the hole closed behind him, near the wall. At that moment the doctors saw the screen on their machine stop.

Other children have after-death memories of being escorted by guides of some kind. Jim Tucker reports that a boy named Kenny who had detailed memories of dying in a vehicle accident “said that after he died, another spirit, probably the driver of the vehicle, took him by the hand, and the two of them were with other spirits in what seemed to be a huge hall.”

Three-year-old Stephen Ramsay remembered fighting as a soldier in a jungle-like place and dying when a plane “came down and hurt my tummy.” “That was when I died,” he said. “My tummy got hurt and it was bleeding.” Stephen said he then fell asleep, and when he woke up, he was still in the trees, but his tummy felt all better. Then, he says, “[a] lady came to see me. ... She was a nice lady and she told me to follow her. She took my hand and took me with her.” He gave an extended description of the place where the lady took him: a place where people rested after dying and waited until it was time for them to be born to new parents.

This next account comes from someone who retained past-life memories into adulthood. The Venerable Chaokhun Rajsuthajarn, a Buddhist abbot in Thailand, published his description of his memories in 1969, before NDEs had been widely written about. But his account of what happened at the moment of his death sounds very much like the experience many NDErs report of being able to go anywhere instantly and perceive anyone just by thinking about them, while at the same time having difficulty communicating with those still in living bodies. Regarding the time just after his death, when he was still realizing that he was dead, he wrote,

I felt stronger and could move much more rapidly from place to place. My body was light, as if it had no weight. I was so glad that I rushed up to join the conversation of my relatives. But no one noticed me. I grabbed this one’s hand and pulled that one’s arm, to draw their attention. Still, no one did anything. ... I could not make them understand [that I was all right].

They were crying and moaning. Some of them went to tell other relatives and friends in the neighborhood. The latter were now pouring into the house. At that moment, I felt as if I were omnipresent: I could simultaneously see people coming in from two or three different directions. Moreover, I could be there to receive them all at the same time. I could also hear their voices as well as see things quite clearly.

Far distant places appeared to be near, because I could move very rapidly from place to place. I could immediately be there to hear or see. There seemed to be no obstacle at all.

Those who remember dying in a previous life also sometimes remember viewing their funeral and/or burial. In some cases, they mention something unexpected that was done with their body that can then be verified.

In one of Ian Stevenson’s cases, a young Thai woman remembered that her previous body—that of a mere baby—wasn’t buried in the village cemetery as it should have been, but rather outside of it. She confronted the undertaker responsible, and he admitted to having done this thing that apparently no one else knew about.

In a Sri Lankan case, a girl named Disna Samarasinghe remembered her body being buried near an anthill, which was indeed true of the body of the person whose life she remembered. Disna was also able to point out the location of her unmarked grave.

This next case comes from Hertfordshire, England, and was reported by Mary and Peter Harrison in their book The Children That Time Forgot. It involves a young girl, Mandy Seabrook, who appeared to be the reincarnation of her sister who had died at the age of five months. Even though the family never spoke about her deceased sister, when Mandy was two years old, she started recounting memories of having been this other child. One day, while riding past the cemetery where her sister was buried, two-year-old Mandy exclaimed, “Look, Mummy! That’s the place you put me in the ground that time, and you nearly fell on top of me, remember?” At the time of the burial, her mother had been taking medication to help her deal with the shock, and she had been so out of sorts that she had lost her balance at the graveside and almost fallen into the hole with the coffin. Mandy also said she’d been buried with a silver bracelet and a fluffy yellow ball. Her mother remembered the existence of the bracelet and the yellow ball, but she only remembered the former being in the casket. Nevertheless, when questioned, an older sibling confessed to having slipped the yellow ball under the dead baby’s body.

One other interesting aspect of this case is that, when Mandy was six, she asked her mother, “Do you remember the night I died? There was a bright star shining in the sky.” When her mother thought back, she realized that she had in fact noticed a star out over the garden, unusually bright and low, and had mentioned it to someone else at the time. Mandy continued, “That was my star. It was my way of telling you that I would be back.” This is the only case I’ve come across in which a child remembered using a sign or synchronicity to communicate after death in their previous life.

Sharon Hewitt Rawlette has a PhD in philosophy from New York University and writes about consciousness, parapsychology, and spirituality for both academic and popular audiences. She lives in rural Virginia. She received an award from the Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies for her essay “Beyond Death: The Best Evidence for the Survival of Human Consciousness,” available at https://bigelowinstitute.org/contest_winners3.php. Footnotes in the essay are not included in these excerpts.

NDE memories of rebirth: Rawlette excerpt #16

Sharon Hewitt Rawlette writes in her essay, Beyond Death: The Best Evidence for the Survival of Human Consciousness—Accounts from NDErs in which they retain consciousness between the time of death and the time at which they attempt to enter a new body lead naturally to what is perhaps the strongest piece of evidence that past-life memories indicate actual survival of consciousness: the fact that many children with past-life memories also retain memories of the intermission period between the old life and this one. If consciousness were wholly dependent on the brain and these children were just psychically accessing the past consciousness of the deceased, we would expect the consciousness they were accessing to end abruptly at the moment of the previous death, and yet many of their memories continue far beyond that moment. They not only correlate with NDErs’ experiences of the period immediately surrounding death but also contain accurate observations about funerary events, other deceased people they remember meeting while in a disembodied state, and events that happened in their future family’s life before their birth, or even their conception. As we’ll see, some of those with intermission memories even remember having contact with their loved ones after death, by coming to them in dreams or manifesting as apparitions or poltergeists.

According to two studies, memories of the period between death and rebirth show up in about 20% of cases of past-life memory, though researchers Ohkado Masayuki and Ikegawa Akira suggest they may be underreported. An analysis of Burmese cases of past-life memory conducted by Poonam Sharma and Jim Tucker shows that intermission memories are significantly correlated with a higher number of verified statements about a previous life, including names. As Sharma and Tucker put it, “their reports of events from the intermission period seem to be part of a pattern of a stronger memory for items preceding their current lives.” In other words, the fact that intermission memories correlate with verified statements about previous lives lends credibility to the intermission memories, which often can’t be verified (but sometimes can, as we’ll soon see).

It’s worth mentioning, too, that memories of the intermission period aren’t only found among people with past-life memories. Anecdotes regarding “pre-birth memories” abound, and books dedicated to the topic include Elisabeth Hallett’s Stories of the Unborn Soul, Sarah Hinze’s We Lived in Heaven, and Wayne W. Dyer and Dee Garnes’ Memories of Heaven. Ohkado and Ikegawa compared stand-alone intermission memories with those that accompanied past-life memories and found no notable differences in content.

It’s also true that some adults retain detailed memories of a pre-birth existence. Two book-length first-person accounts written by adults are Toni Maguire’s Memories of the Light and Roy Mills’ The Soul’s Remembrance. And, as with memories of previous lives, many apparent memories of the intermission period have been evoked in adults through hypnotic regression. However, all the memories I’ll describe in this essay occurred spontaneously without hypnosis. 

 

Sharon Hewitt Rawlette has a PhD in philosophy from New York University and writes about consciousness, parapsychology, and spirituality for both academic and popular audiences. She lives in rural Virginia. She received an award from the Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies for her essay “Beyond Death: The Best Evidence for the Survival of Human Consciousness,” available at https://bigelowinstitute.org/contest_winners3.php. Footnotes in the essay are not included in these excerpts.

 

Recalling previous lives: Rawlette excerpt #15

Jim Tucker

Sharon Hewitt Rawlette writes in her essay, Beyond Death: The Best Evidence for the Survival of Human Consciousness—Another frequently recurring feature of these cases is the presence, not just of verbally expressed memories, but of behaviors that match what would be expected of the person in the previous life. Phobias are one example. Ian Stevenson wrote that, out of 252 cases he studied in which the death of the previous person was violent, in 50% of them, the child remembering the death had a corresponding phobia (for instance, a fear of water if they remembered drowning).

Other behaviors reported in children with past-life memories are more idiosyncratic reflections of the past personality they remember. A young girl named Rylann O’Bannion was afraid of thunderstorms and told her mother she’d died in the backyard when there was a loud noise and the rain shocked her. On another occasion, Rylann said she remembered seeing a plane crash when she was standing in the yard. She also remembered the name “Jennifer” and said the year 1971 felt “familiar” to her. These clues helped Rylann’s mother discover a girl named Jennifer Shultz who had died outside her home when a plane crashed into her neighborhood during a thunderstorm. This Jennifer had been born in 1971. In addition to her memories that matched Jennifer’s death, Rylann also exhibited behaviors that were later discovered to match Jennifer’s. They both had the unusual habit of opening and closing the drawers in their bathroom vanities, not to take anything out of them but just to look inside. And both girls created owls from yarn that they then perched on sticks. This commonality can’t be chalked up to a fad in children’s crafts, as Rylann and Jennifer were born almost four decades apart.

More evidence for the validity of children’s past-life memories comes from the fact that psychological testing of the children who have these memories has not revealed any connection with psychopathology. In fact, these children have higher-than-average intelligence and are less suggestible than other children, as measured by the Gudjonsson Suggestibility Scale.

Another interesting statistical fact is that, among cases in which the death remembered is a natural (non-violent) one, the lives remembered are roughly 50% male and 50% female. However, among cases in which the death remembered is “unnatural” (a murder, a suicide, or an accident), 73% percent of the cases are of male lives. This matches the general statistics on unnatural deaths in the United States, where 72% are male. That is, these children’s memories, evaluated as a whole, accurately reflect sex differences in manner of death in the population at large.

The sheer number of past-life memories that have been verified as accurate combined with the overall consistency of the phenomenon points to past-life memories being much more than the product of childhood imagination. Thousands of children have memories of lives that did take place in another body. But does this automatically mean the survival hypothesis is true? It has been suggested by some that these children are not actually identical with or inhabited by the surviving consciousness of the people whose lives they remember but instead are just accessing those people’s memories by some not-yet-understood process that doesn’t involve the continuing consciousness of the deceased. The idea is that either these children are psychically accessing the past or are psychically accessing “dead” memories.

Little is known about the mechanisms by which these memories present themselves to the consciousness of the children who have them, but whether or not these children are wholly identical with the people whose lives they remember, it is clear that at least part of the consciousness of those people lives on in these children. In the strongest cases, these children not only share the memories of the deceased but also multiple aspects of their behavior/personality and even physical characteristics. Many continue to have emotional attachments to people the deceased knew, in some cases still being in love with their former spouses. Since memories, personality, and interpersonal attachments are three of the primary characteristics we’re interested in seeing survive beyond our death, it is hard not to see these children’s memories and behavior as a kind of survival, even if only partial. (It bears remembering, too, that survival, even while we are still in the same living body, is almost always “partial,” in the sense that we are continually forgetting the previous events of our lives and changing our personality and behavior to a greater or lesser degree.)

Furthermore, these children generally identify themselves with the person whose memories they carry. For instance, the mother of one child with previous-life memories was trying to help him put them behind him and live in the present, and so she told him, “Ryan, you do know that you are not that man in the picture anymore. We just want you to be Ryan.” According to Tucker, who investigated the case, her son responded “that he was not the same as the man in the picture on the outside but that on the inside he was still that man.” (There are, however, some cases in which people with memories of previous lives feel some separation from that other personality, in some cases even referring to them in the third person. See, for example, the case of Kilden at the beginning of the next section, who alternates between third- and first-person pronouns.)

Also, it’s important to note that near-death experiencers corroborate children’s memories of previous lives in various ways. For instance, many NDErs report learning about reincarnation during their NDEs. Mary Helen Hensley, for example, was the daughter of a Baptist minister and as a young person never gave the idea of reincarnation a second thought. Nevertheless, when she had an NDE at age 21, she saw a play-by-play review of her current life as well as suddenly remembering many lives she’d lived before. She says, “Of the many things that I can remember [from the NDE], there is one that I feel compelled to convey with certainty—I think it is important to state that reincarnation is a fact.” Another NDEr reports, “After my NDE, I understood that this life here is only one of many we have to go through. We are bound to be born here time after time [until] we are good enough to go to other dimensions permanently."

In addition, there are a few accounts of NDErs who, while apparently out of their bodies but still hanging around the physical world, remember attempting to jumpstart the reincarnation process by entering the bodies of newborns. Here’s an excerpt from an NDE account published in a London newspaper in 1935:

Then suddenly I was again transported—this time it seemed to be against my wish—to a bed-room, where a woman whom I recognized was in bed, and two other women were quietly bustling around, and a doctor was leaning over the bed.

Then the doctor had a baby in his hands.

At once I became aware of an almost irresistible impulse to press my face through the back of the baby’s head so that my face would come into the same place as the child’s.

The doctor said, “It looks as though we have lost them both.” And again I felt the urge to take the baby’s place in order to show him he was wrong, but the thought of my mother crying turned my thoughts in her direction, when straightway I was in a railway carriage with both her and father.

Interestingly, the NDEr went on to report that he recognized the woman in labor as a neighbor of his. Upon reviving in his own body, he told his parents that the neighbor’s baby was dead because he couldn’t get into its body. They discovered afterward that the woman in question had indeed delivered a stillborn baby that day (and had herself died, just as the NDEr observed during his experience).

 

Sharon Hewitt Rawlette has a PhD in philosophy from New York University and writes about consciousness, parapsychology, and spirituality for both academic and popular audiences. She lives in rural Virginia. She received an award from the Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies for her essay “Beyond Death: The Best Evidence for the Survival of Human Consciousness,” available at https://bigelowinstitute.org/contest_winners3.php. Footnotes in the essay are not included in these excerpts.

Memories of past lives: Rawlette excerpt #14

Ian Stevenson

Sharon Hewitt Rawlette writes in her essay, Beyond Death: The Best Evidence for the Survival of Human Consciousness—Memories of having lived a previous life in a different body don’t get nearly as much press as near-death experiences, even though the literature documenting the accuracy of past-life memories is much vaster and more thorough than the literature on verified paranormal perception in NDEs. Much of the documentation related to memories of previous lives is due to the monumental work of the late Dr. Ian Stevenson of the University of Virginia School of Medicine, who beginning in the 1960s spent several decades traveling the world conducting extremely thorough investigations into the past-life memories spontaneously reported by young children.

Similar work, with similar results, has been conducted on a smaller scale by several other researchers, including Satwant Pasricha, Antonia Mills, Jürgen Keil, Erlendur Haraldsson, Jim B. Tucker, and James G. Matlock. These researchers have sought to determine whether there are actual deceased people whose lives correspond to the past-life memories children report, how closely the children’s memories correspond to the details of these people’s lives, and whether the children could have learned these details in some non-paranormal way. 

For many of these cases, the correspondences between the memories and the lives of the deceased are so accurate and detailed, and the possibility of the children learning such details in a normal way so remote, that the best explanation appears to be some sort of “reincarnation”: the continuation of a deceased person’s consciousness in a new body. By 2001, the University of Virginia already had in its collection over 2,500 cases that investigation showed to be suggestive of reincarnation.

There has also been a lot of interest in the past 70 years in retrieving past-life memories through hypnosis. However, the number of hypnotic regression cases in which the existence of the specific individual remembered has been verified is much smaller than the number of spontaneous cases where this has been achieved, and there is debate within the parapsychology community over the accuracy of memories evoked by hypnosis. For this reason, I’ll restrict my attention in this essay to spontaneously occurring memories.

One of the most striking cases of past-life memory investigated in the United States in the last couple of decades is that of a boy named James Leininger, who at age two began having terrible nightmares during which he would scream, “Airplane crash on fire! Little man can’t get out!” Over the following months, James began talking about the content of his nightmare while awake. His parents asked him for more details about what had happened to the plane he was in, and James said it was shot, by the Japanese. Later, James added that his plane was a Corsair. James also told his parents that he had flown his plane off a boat. When asked for the name of the boat, James replied, “Natoma.” His dad said that the name sounded Japanese, and James looked “perturbed” at this comment. He corrected his father, telling him it was American.

James’s father, Bruce, had strong Christian convictions and at the time of James’s first comments had a negative reaction to the idea that they might be indicative of reincarnation. However, Bruce was open-minded enough to try to investigate the things his son was saying. Through a web search, he discovered that there had indeed been a U.S. escort carrier named “Natoma Bay” in the Pacific during the Second World War.

Over the following months and years, James went on to produce further details about his apparent memories of another life. When asked who the little man in the plane was, James would say either “me” or “James,” which didn’t seem very helpful. When they asked if there was anyone else in the dream with him, he gave the name Jack Larsen and said that Jack was a pilot, too. At another time, James saw a picture of Iwo Jima in a book and said, “My airplane got shot down there, Daddy.” And, on still another occasion, James told his dad that his plane had been hit at the front of the engine, right in the propeller.

Bruce eventually learned that pilots from Natoma Bay had participated in the Iwo Jima operation and that only one pilot had been killed during it: a pilot named James Huston. When Bruce was finally able to get his hands on the aircraft action report for the day of Huston’s death, he saw that, flying right next to Huston was a pilot named Jack Larsen. Bruce was also able to talk to four men who had actually seen Huston’s plane go down that day. They all confirmed that Huston’s plane had been hit head-on, in the engine.

James had also reported that “Little Man” had two sisters, Ruth and Annie, and he specified that Ruth was four years older than Annie, who was four years older than he was. It turned out that James Huston did have two older sisters with these names, and their ages were spaced in the way he indicated.

One thing James said that didn’t seem to be quite right was the fact that his plane had been a Corsair, as there had never been any Corsairs flying from Natoma Bay. James Huston had died in an FM-2. And yet it was later discovered that James Huston had flown a Corsair before coming to Natoma Bay. His surviving sister Anne had a couple of pictures of him in front of a Corsair, and it was confirmed that Huston had previously tested the Corsair for the Navy.

This case has been carefully researched by Dr. Jim Tucker of the University of Virginia School of Medicine’s Division of Perceptual Studies, among other researchers. And while it is certainly one of the most strikingly detailed of the American cases of apparent past-life memories, it is far from the only one of its kind. As previously mentioned, similar cases have been collected and studied in countries all around the world, and they show remarkable consistency in their features. 

For instance, children nearly always begin speaking about their memories of another life between the ages of two and five, and they generally stop talking about them between five and eight years old, although there are some adults who retain spontaneous past-life memories as well. Another consistency is that past-life memories tend to be of things that happened close to the end of the previous life, and almost 75% of children with past-life memories make statements about how they died.

 

Sharon Hewitt Rawlette has a PhD in philosophy from New York University and writes about consciousness, parapsychology, and spirituality for both academic and popular audiences. She lives in rural Virginia. She received an award from the Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies for her essay “Beyond Death: The Best Evidence for the Survival of Human Consciousness,” available at https://bigelowinstitute.org/contest_winners3.php. Footnotes in the essay are not included in these excerpts.

Eye-witness testimony: Rawlette excerpt #13

Sharon Hewitt Rawlette writes in her essay, Beyond Death: The Best Evidence for the Survival of Human Consciousness—We have now seen some of the independently verifiable aspects of near-death experiences, but the evidentiary value of NDEs doesn’t stop there. While aspects verifiable by third parties are important corroborations of the objective quality of the experiences, there is so much more to the near-death experience than what can be verified by an independent observer, and we would miss a lot by not listening carefully to all aspects of the testimonies of those who have had the experience themselves.

To begin with, those who have had a near-death experience are almost universally convinced of the reality of life after death and see their fear of death vanish. That is, those who have actually had the experience—including those who were previously die-hard atheist physicalists—are sure that consciousness goes on after permanent bodily death.

Another aspect of NDErs’ accounts that weighs against the hallucination hypothesis is the fact that 71% of NDErs say that their NDE memories are clearer and more vivid than those of other events. In fact, one common observation made by NDErs is that the experience was “realer than real.” Compared to what they experience in the NDE, normal life seems like a dream.

NDErs also commonly report that, during the NDE, they not only perceive more, with 360-degree vision and the ability to perceive events at a distance in space and time, but they also describe their thinking as being faster and clearer. Dr. Bruce Greyson reports in his 2021 book After that, among more than a thousand NDErs he’s surveyed in his 45 years of studying the phenomenon, “half described their thinking during the NDE as clearer than usual, and almost as many described it as faster than usual.” 

The vast majority of his NDErs who described experiencing life reviews reported them as “more vivid than ordinary memories.” Some even noted that they were able to perceive more detail in their life review than when the events actually happened to them. An NDEr named Tom Sawyer, for instance, reports that, during one scene of his life review, he was able to perceive things so clearly that he could have counted the number of mosquitoes present. An NDEr named Peggy says that, during her NDE, “I did not have the limited consciousness I have on earth. It felt like I had 125 senses to our normal five. You could do, think, comprehend, and so on, you name it, with no effort at all. It’s as if the facts are right before you in plain sight with no risk of misinterpretation because the truth just is! Nothing is hidden.” 

Another woman, a Canadian anthropologist, reports that, during her NDE, “I could see the tiles on the ceiling and the tiles on the floor, simultaneously: three hundred degree [sic] spherical vision. And not just spherical. Detailed! I could see every single hair and the follicle out of which it grew on the head of the nurse standing beside the stretcher.”

Some NDErs feel they suddenly understand huge quantities of information about the universe, only some minor portion of which they are able to retain when they return to their body. According to surveys conducted through the Near-Death Experience Research Foundation website, 30.7% of NDErs felt that, during their NDE, they understood everything “about the universe.” In fact, experience in an NDE is so different from normal experience that NDErs have trouble even describing it. NDEr Steve Luiting reports, “The language spoken [during the NDE] was much, much more complex and could literally encapsulate experiences. Even the memories when coming back into my body flattened, simplified, and became symbols of what really happened. I believe this flattening happens simply because the human brain can’t understand a world so much more complex and possibly so alien.”

It’s intriguing to consider the idea of “super-survival,” the idea that our post-death selves may actually be a significantly enhanced version of the selves we currently experience ourselves as having. As one NDEr has said, “Our identity will continue to be—in a greater way.” But whether or not our consciousness is in fact enhanced after the death of our bodies, the most important point to recognize here is the sheer number of near-death experiencers (again, 4-15% of the general population) and their overwhelming conviction that what they’ve experienced is indicative of survival of consciousness after the permanent death of the body.

As philosopher Jens Amberts emphasizes in his forthcoming book Why an Afterlife Obviously Exists, “at least some NDErs were equally as skeptical of the existence of an afterlife or of the idea that NDEs are or can be indicative of an afterlife as we may be now, and at least some of them also shared the intensity of that skepticism, and at least some of them also shared whatever justifications we may think or feel that we have for that skepticism. And yet, the NDE thoroughly and justifiably convinced them that there really is an afterlife....” 

When so many eye-witnesses with reasoning faculties similar to our own all say the same thing, we do well to pay attention— especially when these reports offer us a glimpse into a state of being that, to the rest of us, is the equivalent of a locked room. Rather than insist that it’s impossible for what’s in that room to be different than what we experience outside it, we would do well to take seriously the testimony of those who have the relevant firsthand knowledge.

At the same time, despite all the compelling evidence from NDEs that consciousness doesn’t depend on a functioning brain, it’s still true that NDEs are not actually testimonies from people whose bodies are permanently dead, but only people whose bodies are provisionally, reversibly dead. Despite their conviction otherwise, it is still logically possible that their experiences do not accurately reflect what we will experience when our bodies permanently die and degrade. 

 

Sharon Hewitt Rawlette has a PhD in philosophy from New York University and writes about consciousness, parapsychology, and spirituality for both academic and popular audiences. She lives in rural Virginia. She received an award from the Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies for her essay “Beyond Death: The Best Evidence for the Survival of Human Consciousness,” available at https://bigelowinstitute.org/contest_winners3.php. Footnotes in the essay are not included in these excerpts.