Old Souls: Nahm excerpt #7

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: 

Of all survival phenomena, CORT attained the highest survival score. Hence, they constitute the best available evidence for survival of human consciousness after permanent bodily death. Furthermore, they offer better research prospects than ADCs, NDEs, mental mediumship or other survival phenomena.

Therefore, I will discuss the fascinating phenomenology of CORT in more detail, highlighting numerous important facets. In doing so, I will treat reports of CORT as authentic in Ian Stevenson’s sense.* Accepting CORT reports as authentic in the present context is useful because the eyewitness reports might simply be authentic and correspond to what really happened—and explanatory models for a given phenomenon must be able to provide a theoretical explanation covering the full phenomenology described, or to provide good reasons for rejecting the assumed notion of authenticity.

As mentioned earlier, studies of CORT have chiefly been conducted by Stevenson. His books are packed with technical details about how the interviews with the children and their families were performed, but also with tables and considerations about the strengths and the weaknesses of each studied case, and hundreds of exotic names of people, towns, and villages that are difficult to memorize for readers who are used to Western names. As a result, most of his books share the reputation of being a rather dry read.

For readers not yet familiar with the literature on CORT, I consider the book Old Souls written by award-winning journalist Tom Shroder to be the most captivating introduction to Stevenson’s work. In 1997 and 1998, Shroder accompanied Stevenson on research trips to Lebanon and India—and then skillfully composed a lively account of these travels. Another advantage of his account is that the reader learns about Stevenson’s work from an impartial observer’s perspective, provided by somebody with no specific agenda to promote parapsychology and/or reincarnation.

Nevertheless, Shroder fleshed out the names of the children and their kin with substance and emotion, and evoked visual imagery of settlements so remote that it is impossible to imagine how difficult it was to reach them when just reading Stevenson’s matter-of-fact texts. As it would hardly have been possible to arrange appointments with potential interviewees in these locations, Stevenson simply drove to his points of interest, hoping for the best. In Lebanon, he passed bombed villages and ruins inhabited by his informants, and climbed narrow, vertiginous mountain roads leading to hamlets rarely visited by strangers of whatever kind.

In India, he spent hours and hours amidst the packed bedlam of Indian roads, traffic jams, dirt, and poverty, crouching patiently in the car’s backseat. Travelling 75 miles to a village by car might take six hours. The reception from the families they visited was sometimes undisguisedly hostile and aggressive. Threatening eyes would stare at Stevenson, Shroder, and their companions: Why would rich Westerners visit such poor places, asking uncomfortable questions that evoke unwanted emotions without even offering adequate presents or money? Have they come to take our child away?

In contrast to what is sometimes purported by critics of Stevenson’s work—more on that later—the interviewers frequently encountered reluctance, downplaying of children’s memories, sad emotions about bygone times, sobbing children and parents, already-strained family ties under pressure, and all this intertwined with one prominent topic: death.

One might also wonder: Was Stevenson, a trained psychiatrist who had even published a book on psychiatric examination in 1969, really so naïve that he exposed himself to all this stress and danger for four decades without ever realizing that every case he investigated rested on misinterpretation and fraud, as some of his critics presume?

Finally, Shroder’s book serves as a brilliant introduction to CORT for one more reason: In the course of his travels with Stevenson, he encountered practically all aspects of CORT that are important for identifying the best explanatory model for them, the crucial issue to be discussed in Chapter 4 of this essay. Therefore, let me now take you on a short trip through Lebanon and India with Stevenson and Shroder, stopping every once in a while to introduce important aspects of CORT.

 

*Stevenson writes: “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.”

 

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.