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| Jim Tucker |
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.
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