Greg Taylor writes: If consciousness can survive physical death – as the evidence we have so far reviewed strongly suggests – does that mean it can continue on in a new body? Incredibly, the answer to that question appears to be ‘yes’, based on the convincing evidence collected by researchers over the course of the past six decades.
The instigator of this modern research was Dr. Ian Stevenson, a respected psychiatrist with some 60 publications in the medical and psychiatric literature when he took on the position of Chairman of the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Virginia in 1957. As an extensive reader, Stevenson had become intrigued by a number of strange reports of individuals who appeared to have memories of a previous life and thought the topic worthy of further investigation. He collected and analyzed 44 of them in a paper that was published in 1960, noting later that once he had pulled the cases together as a group and viewed the similarities – most notably, that “they predominantly featured young children,” that “it just seemed inescapable to me that there must be something there...I couldn’t see how they could all be faked or they could all be deception.” Stevenson subsequently traveled to India and Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) to investigate reports in person and uncovered 32 more cases during these trips alone.
As Stevenson found, a typical case of past-life memories involves a young child about two to three years old who begins telling parents or siblings about a life they led in another time and place, and usually stops around age seven when most seem to lose the memories (which is also the age when children typically begin losing their memories of being an infant). These memories arise spontaneously – hypnotic regression is not involved – and the child usually describes their ‘previous personality’ as being an ordinary person of no particular note, rather than a well-known historical figure. What often does set their lives apart – in some 70% of the reported cases – is that they died an unnatural, often traumatic, death.
As Dr. Stevenson explained:
The child usually feels a considerable pull back toward the events of that life and he frequently importunes his parents to let him return to the community where he claims that he formerly lived. If the child makes enough particular statements about the previous life, the parents (usually reluctantly) begin inquiries about their accuracy. Often, indeed usually, such attempts at verification do not occur until several years after the child has begun to speak of the previous life. If some verification results, members of the two families visit each other and ask the child whether he recognizes places, objects, and people of his supposed previous existence.
Stevenson’s work attracted the attention of Chester Carlson, inventor of the Xerox machine, and with Carlson’s financial support in 1967 he established the Division of Personality Studies (now the Division of Perceptual Studies, or DOPS) at the University of Virginia as a dedicated research center. He was thus able to dedicate the bulk of his time over the next four decades to investigating cases of past-life memories, until his passing in 2007. In that time, he wrote and published several books that documented his meticulously researched cases. The first of his books, published in 1966, was Twenty Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation. It showcased his careful research, determining exactly what children reporting past-life memories had said about their previous life, before painstakingly attempting to verify whether those statements were correct and had not been embellished or informed through some mundane information channel. Stevenson knew that such a controversial topic had to be approached in a very careful manner, so he sought evidence that was difficult to dispute. For example, he considered any statements made by subjects after they had met or been in communication with their ‘past-life’ families to be tainted; instead, his priority was to examine statements made before any contact was established. The American Journal of Psychiatry, in reviewing his research, was impressed enough to remark that the cases were “recorded in such full detail as to persuade the open mind that reincarnation is a tenable hypothesis to explain them.”
However, it should be noted that Stevenson consistently stated he wasn’t attempting to prove any particular hypothesis or religious doctrine, but instead was simply documenting and examining a mystery and remained open to all explanations. Washington Post journalist Tom Shroder, who traveled with Stevenson on some of his research trips and documented his experience in the book Old Souls: Compelling evidence from children who remember past lives, said it was this aspect that attracted him to Stevenson’s work in the first place: “He has never said anything like ‘Believe this because I believe it.’ What he is saying is, ‘Look at what I’ve found. Examine it any way you want to examine it. Think of your own questions, find tests of truth that have escaped me, and if you can imagine a more reasonable explanation for all this, please let me know.”
After the publication of his first book, Stevenson continued traveling the world investigating hundreds more claims of past-life memories across a number of countries and cultures. He intermittently reported cases in journal papers, but from 1975 to 1983 also published four volumes of a book series titled Cases of the Reincarnation Type, which documented in detail the large number of cases he had collected from India, Sri Lanka, Lebanon and Turkey, and Thailand and Burma, respectively. Once again, scientific reviews of his research were exemplary; the book editor of JAMA (the Journal of the American Medical Association) wrote of the first volume that “he has painstakingly and unemotionally collected a detailed series of cases in India in which the evidence is difficult to explain on any other grounds... He has placed on record a large amount of data that cannot be ignored.”
Other researchers were inspired by Stevenson’s work to do their own research on the topic, investigating and publishing reports on other cases of past-life memories. In 1994 a study, based on 123 cases across five cultures collected by three independent researchers, replicated his results, concluding – like Dr. Stevenson – that “some children identify themselves with a person about whom they have no normal way of knowing. In these cases, the children apparently exhibit knowledge and behavior appropriate to that person.” By the late 1990s, the body of scientific evidence for memories of a previous life had become so substantial that even Carl Sagan, the famous scientist and skeptic, said that he thought it was a claim that merited serious study.
Greg Taylor, “What is the Best Available Evidence for the Survival of Human Consciousness after Permanent Bodily Death?” An essay written for the Bigelow contest addressing this question. I am presenting excerpts without references, but this essay is available with footnotes and a bibliography at https://bigelowinstitute.org/contest_winners3.php.
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