Reincarnation evidence: Sommer excerpt #11

Ian Stevenson

Historian Andreas Sommer writes: Ian Stevenson did not just replicate findings from classical areas of survival research. In the early 1960s, he single-handedly created a new branch of investigations into survival, which can be considered complementary to classical research on mediumship and apparitions: the evaluation of claimed memories of previous lives by young children. As put by Stevenson, if the strongest mediumship and apparition cases suggested that someone who had died was still alive, some cases of the reincarnation type suggested that someone who is now alive had previously died.

In the early days of the SPR, ideas of reincarnation were strongly associated with the ‘Indian Theosophy’ of H. P. Blavatsky, one of several psychics debunked by Richard Hodgson. However, although early psychical researchers like James and Myers did not investigate claimed reincarnation memories, they were certainly open to the notion. In fact, years before James came rather close to accepting the ‘spirit hypothesis’ as an interpretation of the strongest mediumship cases, he wrote that to him empirical evidence for reincarnation would make the most convincing case for personal survival.

In 1960, Stevenson was the first scientist to write about rigorously investigated empirical indications of reincarnation, and eight years later he published his first collection of 20 investigated cases. Most though by no means all of Stevenson’s investigations took place in India and other countries and regions where belief in reincarnation is widespread and cases not as difficult to come by as in the West. Today, however, there are thousands of cases on record internationally. And while modern Skeptics dismiss this material along with other findings of psychical research, one of the most widely read endorsements of Stevenson’s research in 1995 came from a rather unlikely figure: co-founder of modern Skepticism Carl Sagan, who wrote in his classic The Demon-Haunted World that Stevenson’s cases of the reincarnation type (CORT) deserved “serious study”.

By the time of Sagan’s reference, Stevenson was no longer the only scientist to investigate CORT by applying rigorous methods and the highest standards of documentation. Principal investigators who independently replicated his findings were the aforementioned Erlendur Haraldsson, Indian psychologist Satwant Pasricha, Canadian anthropologist Antonia Mills, German-born psychologist Jürgen Keil at the University of Tasmania, and the current director of DOPS at the University of Virginia, psychiatrist Jim Tucker, whose own research has strongly focused on American cases. 

 

A strong case might look like this: A child, usually aged between 2 and 5, alarms their parents by claiming to be someone else, stating the name of their ‘previous self’. To the parents’ added horror, the child also demands to be reunited with their spouse, children, and ‘real’ parents, whose names are also given. Despite threats and beatings by the parents, the child continues to insist. Apart from giving names and other details, the child also exhibits unusual and specific behaviors, which strikingly correspondent with idiosyncrasies of personality in an actual individual, who is eventually located in a different city or village, and who had in fact died a few years before the child was born. Perhaps most incredibly, in addition to specific memories, the child also displays birthmarks, lesions or deformations, which strikingly correspond to fatal wounds in the ‘previous self’ (as corroborated by autopsy reports), who had died in an accident, or by murder or suicide.

Stevenson and most other principal investigators never claimed that the mass of this astounding empirical material provided conclusive proof of reincarnation. One seasoned CORT researcher, Jürgen Keil, even explicitly argued against the reincarnation hypothesis, but his alternative still had to resort to squarely parapsychological explanations involving ‘psi’ (extra-sensory perception and psychokinesis) from the living. You remember a similar theme in my brief account of Piper’s mediumship, whose principal investigators discussed whether her trance phenomena should be explained by spirit agency or unconscious telepathic information acquisition from the minds of living persons. And it is in a discussion of these ideas where I believe we can find evidence that more than just tips the scale towards personal survival.

 

Andreas Sommer, “What is the Best Available Evidence for the Survival of Human Consciousness after Permanent Bodily Death? Submitted to the Bigelow Institute 2021 contest on this topic. The paper with all notes and bibliography is available at https://bigelowinstitute.org/Winning_Essays/12_Andreas_Sommer.pdf.