Reincarnation: Fenwick excerpt #13

Advocate for the Afterlife:

In this session we call on neuropsychiatrist Dr Peter Fenwick to resume the witness stand and provide evidence for reincarnation - those who have died being re-born in a new body.

History

Every culture has its own theory of survival. Plato believed the soul was immortal. Pythagoras is said to have taught reincarnation and Virgil introduced the idea of reincarnation in his account of the underworld in the Aeneid.

Hindus and Buddhists believe that Karma sets the moral tone for your next life. In Tibetan Buddhism, after the death of a spiritual leader, there is a search for his reincarnated soul.

Let's turn to documented evidence from more recent times. One of the clearest indicators of the survival of individual human consciousness after bodily death would be reincarnation. So what's the evidence?

Ian Stevenson

One of the first serious studies in this area was done by Ian Stevenson who collected over 2000 cases, mainly from India (Stevenson, 2001) but also from Europe (Stevenson, 2001). Jim Tucker collected many in the USA, and showed they occur as commonly in a Western culture as in India (Tucker, 2015).

From the age of only five or six, Alan Pring knew that he wanted to become a pilot. His chance came when he joined the RAF in WW2.

“When I began flying in 1943 my instructor was convinced that I had piloted aircraft before. Just knew how to fly and every ‘new’ experience to which I was introduced in the air was already a memory. Similarly, the first time I encountered the smell of aircraft fabric dope I knew that I had experienced it previously, and it gave me the most peculiar sense of pleasure, as if it was associated with very happy memories. My love of flying has never faded but it is directed always in my memory towards biplanes. I feel that I flew with Sopwith Aircraft.” (Fenwick & Fenwick, 2001)

After the war Alan joined RAF Voluntary Reserve and one day six of them decided they would have a mock dogfight. Alan felt he had managed to climb to 9000 feet without being seen, spotted four of the planes at least 1000 feet below him and concentrated on searching for the fifth.

“Suddenly with an ominous sinking in my stomach I looked behind me. There, not five yards from my tail was the whirring propeller of the fifth plane. At that moment I experienced a horrendous feeling of doom....It was no longer a Tiger-Moth behind me but a Fokker triplane. I saw the two flashes of its machine guns and immediately felt terrible blows in my back and momentarily everything went black..... I was quite emotionally upset...not at losing the contest, but the conviction that it had all happened before and that I had been killed through carelessness and over-confidence in a dogfight in the First World War.” (Fenwick & Fenwick, 2001)

Many years after this experience Alan had a near-death experience which had a profound effect on him. It convinced him that it was impossible to die. Given this belief, he says, it would seem plausible, if not logical, that reincarnation is a possibility. (Fenwick & Fenwick, 2001)

Classically these past life memories start to emerge when the child is very young – around the age of two years - and are lost by the time they are six. These children usually also have repeated nightmares which relate to their previous life, often including an unnatural or violent death – murder, suicide, accident or combat. After a few years the child starts discussing their previous life and attempts are then made to verify what they say. In some of these cases correspondence is remarkably high. Often, the time between death and rebirth is only a few years, though in one of the strongest and most interesting cases, that of James Leininger, described below, it was over 50 years. But it included many statements that have been verified as accurately describing the life which is said to be reincarnated (Tucker, 2016).

In 2000, when James was 22 months old, his father took him to the Cavanaugh Flight Museum in Dallas. James was fascinated by the planes, particularly by the World War II exhibit, and by a video about the Navy's flight exhibition team. Soon after the trip he began repeatedly to say “airplane crash on fire,” and slamming his toy planes nose first into the family's coffee table. James's father travelled a lot, and when James and his mother saw him off at the airport, James would often say, “Daddy, airplane crash on fire.” He also began to have nightmares in which he would scream and eventually also say “Airplane crash on fire! Little man can't get out.”

His parents and Jim Tucker investigated this case and they came upon 12 close correspondences with the life and death of a WII pilot, James Huston, who had been a pilot in the American Airforce, whose plane took off from a boat named Natoma, and was shot down by the Japanese. The plane’s engine was hit, it was set on fire and crashed. Although James Leininger said that he was flying a Corsair, which frequently got flat tires, when he crashed, in fact Huston had been flying a different plane when he died, an FM- 2, but he had flown a Corsair earlier, which frequently got flat tyres in test flights. James also remembered the name of one of Huston’s friends, Jack Larsen, who had been on the aircraft carrier with him, and this too was verified (Tucker, 2015).

James’s recurrent nightmares and what appeared to be post- traumatic compulsive play of plane crashes appear very similar to those that children who have experienced trauma in their current life display, and they are often seen in children who report memories of previous lives.

It is difficult to dismiss this as fantasy, or say that the child James's statements matched Huston's life purely by chance. The specifics present in this case would seem to undermine that possibility, for example, knowing the unusual name Natoma for a ship that was indeed in the place he reported.

James had made all of the documented statements by the time he was four years old, so he could not have read about them. In any case no published materials about James Huston are known to exist. No television programs focusing on Natoma or James Huston appear to have been made either (Tucker, 2015).

Another interesting case is that of Ryan Hammons, born in Oklahoma in 2004. His speech development was delayed so he did not speak in full sentences until he was four, when he started talking about a past lifetime. He remembered being in his mother’s womb, and asked her why she had cried when she discovered he was a boy (which was true, though he could not have known about it). He said that he wanted to go home to Hollywood and visit his “other family,” and gave so many details of this life and family, that his mother began to investigate it herself, and eventually contacted Jim Tucker, who also investigated it. Ryan’s previous life was found to be as Marty Martyn, a Ukrainian Jew and unsuccessful actor (though he did manage to tap dance on Broadway). Ryan gave 55 verified details of his life. Martyn was known to be very fond of Chinese food. The first time Ryan was taken to a Chinese restaurant he picked up his chopsticks and used them quite naturally without having to be shown how. He also liked to tap- dance. He is said to be one of a few such children who seemed to have psychic abilities, able to predict things which were about to happen (Kean, 2018) (Tucker, 2015) (Haraldsson & Matlock, 2017)

 

“To Be And Not To Be. This is The Answer: Consciousness Survives,” essay for the 2021 Bigelow essay contest submitted by Dr Peter Fenwick & Dr Pier-Francesco Moretti, Dr Vasileios Basios, and Martin Redfern. The complete essay with footnotes is available at https://bigelowinstitute.org/contest_winners3.php.