Researcher 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:
Tom Shroder
In India, researchers Ian Stevenson, Satwant Pasricha, and journalist Tom Shroder also followed the case of a boy who persistently ran away from his home as soon as he could walk, and before he could even speak. He was born into a Moslem family, but refused to join their prayers, denying that he was Moslem and insisting on returning to his Hindu family. Shroder noted that it appeared quite unlikely that his parents were fond of this behavior or that they contrived and embellished their son’s claims. This case is remarkable because the boy already showed clear signs of an awareness that he didn’t belong to his parents before he could speak.
I call such cases prelingual cases. By “prelingual”, I mean that these children already displayed signs of remembering a previous life before they were able to talk in full sentences consisting of several words.
One of the first words of an Indian girl Stevenson, Shroder, and Pasricha studied was the Hindi expression for kerosene-powered candles. She always spoke it fearfully and had a corresponding phobia of fire. The girl appeared to remember the life of her cousin, who burned to death at the age of fourteen after such a candle fell over and set the surroundings on fire. In a solved case the trio re-investigated in Lebanon, one of the earliest words of a little boy was “Ibrahim”. When he learned to speak more articulately, it turned out that “he” had died in an accident in the car of Ibrahim, who was speeding and wouldn’t listen to his friend’s warnings.
Other children who related their earliest words to a previous life include Bishen Chand Kapoor, who repeated the word “pilvit” until it gradually developed into “Pilibhit”, the name of a town where he said he belonged to. This was correct for the person whose life he claimed to remember. The first words of Lebanese Salem Andary were “Bedouins”, “stones”, and “hit”, and he later stated he was stoned to death by a group of Bedouins. This was likewise correct for the person whose life he claimed to remember.
Prelingual aspects of CORT can also present in other forms. They may manifest in phobias, as with the above-mentioned Indian girl who remembered being burned and had a fire phobia, but also in nightmares, play, or habits.
An Indian boy, Veer Singh, stubbornly refused food cooked by his parents even before he could speak. Later, he explained that he would not eat food prepared by members of a lower caste because he was a reborn Brahmin. Cases involving prelingual phobias include Burmese Maung Myo Min Thein who had a strong aversion to approaching the location where the person whose life he remembered was murdered, Turkish Cevriye Bayri who had a severe phobia of darkness and, as soon as she learned to speak, tried to pronounce the name of the man who had killed the person whose life she remembered in the dark, and Sri Lankan Shamlinie Prema who had a prelingual phobia of water as well as of buses. She remembered the life of a girl from a village called Galtudawa who was pushed into a flooded paddy field by a bus and drowned. Among her earliest words were “Galtudawa mother”.
A very peculiar prelingual case concerns Süleyman Zeytun from Turkey: He was born deaf-mute. Nevertheless, by using only nonverbal communication and gestures, the little boy convinced his parents that he was the reincarnated personality of a man who drowned in a swollen river while trying to wash his horse in it. He also convinced the family of the man whose life and death he seemed to remember of his identity. Süleyman had a water phobia from early on.
Stevenson was particularly interested in CORT involving twins because he thought they may offer new insights into the development of human personality. For instance, identical twins with identical genomes can sometimes still differ considerably in bodily and psychological traits. Stevenson considered it difficult to explain such differences solely in genetic terms and/or in terms of potentially different environmental conditions around the fetuses in their mother’s womb. Rather, he speculated that traits conveyed from a previous life might additionally come into play, for example in the case of Indika and Kakshappa Ishwara. These boys were identical twins but looked and behaved differently. Both spoke about memories of a former life.
In 13 of the 37 twin CORT analyzed by Stevenson, one of the two twins remained silent about a previous life. In 22 cases, both twins spoke of a previous life. In the remaining two cases, both twins said nothing about a previous life; the identification with previous personalities was derived from announcing dreams, birthmarks and/or similar behaviors. It is intriguing that in most of the cases for which the information is available, the twins were apparently acquainted with each other in their previous lives. Usually, they were spouses, siblings, family members, or friends. Among the solved cases, Stevenson was able to collect information about the dominance and submissiveness of the twin subjects as well as of their previous personalities for 11 twin pairs. In every pair, their current relationship was identical to their former one—a probability of 1 in 2048. Although this finding is based on a small sample, it supports the notion that this repeated relationship didn’t follow patterns of mere chance.
*CORT is an abbreviation for "Cases of the Reincarnation Type".
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.
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