Cases of the reincarnation type: Nahm excerpt #6

Michael Nahm, in his Bigelow award-winning essay, "Climbing Mount Evidence: A Strategic Assessment of the Best Available Evidence for the Survival of Human Consciousness after Permanent Bodily Death," writes:  

Although Westerners may be more familiar with NDEs than with cases of the reincarnation type (CORT), people who claim to remember previous lives are not at all uncommon even in the West. In general, cases involving young children who speak spontaneously about past lives are most compelling because they are less prone to being created artificially than cases involving adults, be it purposefully or involuntarily.

A famous CORT unfolded in the early 1930s when a little Indian girl named Shanti Devi claimed to remember the life of a Lugdi Devi who had lived in Mathura, 90 miles from Shanti’s present home in Delhi. Shanti provided numerous details about the life of Lugdi. After some of her statements had been verified, the case stirred such attention that Mahatma Gandhi established an official government committee to probe her claims. Shanti had never been to Mathura at that time, so the committee took her there and observed her reactions closely. In Mathura, Shanti recognized several people known to Lugdi, knew the way to Lugdi’s home, and showed impressive knowledge about the interior of the building, especially of its state several years ago. Shanti even disclosed where Lugdi had hidden money—something only known by Lugdi and Lugdi’s widowed husband who accompanied the committee. He was just as surprised as the others by Shanti’s behavior and knowledge.

Systematic field investigations of CORT were begun in the 1960s by Ian Stevenson. He traveled the entire planet for four decades looking for children who claimed to remember a past life. As a result, he published dozens of scientific articles as well as eight comprehensive books in which he reported his most remarkable findings from India, Sri Lanka, Burma, Thailand, Lebanon, Turkey, Africa, the Americas, and Europe. Researchers have now documented more than 2,500 CORT. In typical cases, young children begin to talk about a past life between the age of two and five. In CORT studies, the child is usually referred to as the “subject”, and the person whose life they claim to remember is the “previous personality”. If a deceased person who matches the child’s statements can be identified, a case is considered “solved”. If a satisfactory identification is not possible, the case remains “unsolved”. In later years, often between the ages of five and eight, the subject’s memories of a past life start to fade. Still, numerous CORT subjects have retained some memories into early adulthood and even well into later adulthood. These basic patterns apply to CORT all around the globe in different cultures, whether they have a belief in reincarnation or not.

One of the most intriguing traits of CORT is their richness in survival-related phenomena. In fact, they contain numerous incidences of the other survival phenomena already introduced. For example, many CORT begin with an “announcing dream”, often dreamed by a future parent, in which the deceased person announces that they will be born into a specific family. Sometimes, the deceased also appear in a “departure dream” in which they tell a member of their previous family that they will be reborn in another family. There are even a few cases on record in which the deceased spirit was seen as an apparition that indicated its interest in becoming reborn to the percipient. Obviously, all these experiences represent varieties of typical after-death contacts (ADCs). CORT share another commonality with ADCs: In both cases, a disproportionate number of the personalities manifesting again had died a sudden and violent death, indicating they had been torn away from “unfinished business”.

Moreover, about 20% of CORT subjects report having memories of events that occurred during the intermission between their death in the previous life and their birth into the current life. In many of these cases, the children claim that they continued to observe what happened to the dead body of the previous personality from an OBE-perspective, just as is reported from NDEs. The subjects may even provide verifiable information about these occurrences. But while reports of veridical perceptions reported from OBEs during NDEs are often accepted as being authentic by physicalists and are attributed to residual brain functions, this cannot work for CORT subjects who give veridical accounts of events that occurred in this intermission. Here, the only option left for physicalists is postulating that these cases are not authentic.

There are also accounts in which CORT subjects have described how they found and entered their new bodies, sometimes providing verified details regarding specific circumstances. Similarly, some NDErs have described trying to enter the body of a newborn baby or a child but giving up on it and returning to their own body. Reports like these indicate that the line separating NDEs on the one hand (returning to one’s own body) and CORT on the other hand (returning to another body) might be very thin. In addition, CORT are not only associated with ADCs and NDEs, but sometimes also with mental mediumship. This is the case when deceased communicators at mediumistic sittings announce that they will be born into a specific family, and a child being born later in this family reports memories that pertain to the past life of this communicator.

Additionally, CORT can include an objective dimension in that they may include physical features such as birthmarks or birth defects that can contribute to the identification of a matching previous personality or to the confirmation of an identification. About one third of CORT subjects have such somatic features.

The complexity of CORT is reflected in the assessment of their survival score. Their investigability is “high” (4) because cases can be documented “in the making” and then followed-up for years, even by different researchers. Many CORT involve numerous eyewitnesses who can be interviewed repeatedly under optimal conditions of observation. In some cases, Stevenson and his colleagues interviewed more than 30 informants, in one particularly important case. Generally, they agreed on the crucial details of a case. Modern CORT, in particular, also allow the verification of claims about previous lives through written documents and other objective sources. Stevenson knew that this approach would essentially equal the approach pursued in courts, as exemplified in his explanation of the term “authentic” in the context of his studies:

“By authentic, I mean that the reports given to investigators by informants and then set out by myself describe events with satisfactory closeness to the events as they really happened. [...] It is, in principle, no different from the striving of lawyers to reconstruct the events of a crime [...] to understand what really happened in the past.”

In court, a striking agreement of more than 30 eyewitnesses would carry enormous weight. The repeatability of CORT is likewise “high” (4) because they are not at all uncommon, especially among cultures holding a belief in reincarnation. But new CORT are continually found and investigated even in the West. Given that they are numerous, frequently rich in detail and possess a multifaceted phenomenology, which may even include a tangible physical dimension involving birthmarks and birth defects, the quantitative and qualitative strength of CORT are also both “high” (4). Obviously, the relevance of (solved) CORT for human survival is also “high” (4), especially if they contain verifiable elements from the intermission.

 

Michael Nahm is a German biologist and parapsychologist whose psi research has focused on terminal lucidity, near-death experiences, cases of the reincarnation type, physical mediumship, hauntings, the history of parapsychology, and various other riddles of the mind and the evolution of life. In 2018 he accepted an appointment at the Institut für Grenzgebiete der Psychologie und Psychohygiene (IGPP) (Institute for Frontier Areas of Psychology and Mental Health) in Freiburg, Germany. His publications are available at http://www.michaelnahm.com/publications-and-downloads and his Bigelow essay may be downloaded at https://bigelowinstitute.org/contest_winners3.php. Footnotes have been deleted in these excerpts but are available in his text posted on the Bigelow website.