More medium evidence: Mishlove excerpt #12

By psychologist Jeffrey Mishlove in “Beyond the Brain: The Survival of Human Consciousness After Permanent Bodily Death.”

Gladys Osborne Leonard’s mediumship.

There were many examples of information coming through Mrs. Leonard’s mediumship that convinced the eminent physicist, Sir Oliver Lodge, that his son Raymond who was killed in World War I was alive on the other side. Lodge’s book, Raymond or Life and Death: With Examples of the Evidence for Survival of Memory and Affection After Death, was a best- seller and immediately catapulted Gladys Osborne Leonard to international fame as a trance medium.

She continued her mediumship for the next half-century, during which members of the Society for Psychical Research studied her extensively. There have been over thirty articles about her in the publications of the Society, and seven more in the Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research. Nea Walker, Oliver Lodge’s secretary, made a long-term study of Leonard that ran for nineteen years. One researcher, the Methodist minister, Rev. Charles Drayton Thomas, had over 500 sittings with her. Throughout this entire time, there has never been a single, credible instance when Leonard’s integrity or sincerity has been questioned.

In 1921, Katie Dawson-Smith heard from her son who had been killed in WWI in a session with Leonard. He was insistent she find an old leather wallet, which she did. He said it held a tiny, yet important check stub. The significance of this became clear when, in 1924, she received a demand from a Hamburg firm for the repayment of a debt incurred by her son in 1914. However, the check stub enabled her to show that her son had already repaid the ten-year-old debt. She received an apology from the company. Dawson-Smith later sent the relevant documentation of this incident to the Society for Psychical Research.

Under the supervision of William McDougall at Duke University, John Thomas earned a doctoral degree in psychology for his extensive study of Gladys Osborne Leonard’s mediumship. Thomas was seeking evidence of his wife’s afterlife existence. She had died in 1926. His study ran for nine years. It included 2,964 specific points of information – a point being a single statement of a possibly verifiable fact. Of these, 2,358 were correct; 196 incorrect; 231 inconclusive; and 179 unverifiable. The percentage correct of the total verifiable points was 92.3%.171 Psychical researcher Trevor Hamilton describes Thomas’ approach as meticulous:

…he often had someone else sit with Leonard as a proxy on his behalf, ensured they were accurately recorded, looked for verifiable sources for the medium’s statements among his own records, and discarded unverifiable points, no matter how seemingly persuasive.

These examples merely represent some highlights from Gladys Leonard’s long career as a medium.

Forensic evidence via Eileen Garrett.

On October 5, 1930, the R101 dirigible crashed in France, killing 48 crew members and passengers. Two days later, Eileen Garrett, one of the twentieth century’s greatest mediums, experienced an unanticipated drop-in communicator, i.e., an unexpected visitor, during a sitting. The communicator identified himself as Herbert Irwin, the vessel’s deceased pilot. Irwin described the technical failures and design flaws that caused the crash.

This disaster was fraught with politics. The British Air Minister Lord Thomson, who had overridden the captain’s desire for more test flights, died in the crash.

Will Charlton, a former supply officer for the R101 who knew the airship and its personnel well, independently reviewed the mediumistic information. He confirmed the accuracy of many details provided.

William H. Wood, an airship pilot and a frequent contributor to the Freethinker, an atheist publication – conducted another independent review. In 1949, Wood shocked the British rationalist and atheist world by announcing the data convinced him of postmortem survival. He wrote in the Freethinker,

If this case does not prove survival, then nothing ever will. I consider the R-101 case to be cast iron.

While accepting survival, Wood kept up his status as an atheist.

Medium Ena Twigg and Bishop James Pike.  

Bishop James Pike famously resigned his post as California’s Episcopal Bishop after ongoing mediumistic communications with his son Jim who had taken his own life.180 Shortly after his son’s death, Bishop Pike, who was devastated by the suicide, began noticing poltergeist-like phenomena in the Cambridge apartment he had been sharing with Jim a few weeks prior. He drew up a list of 55 inexplicable events he suspected were signs of Jim’s surviving presence.

This led him to seek advice from Canon Pierce-Higgins, an Anglican Church official, who recommended a visit to the respected medium Ena Twigg. Eventually, Pierce-Higgins arranged a sitting, and Peirce-Higgins drove Bishop Pike to the séance. He took copious notes that he eventually shared with my next interviewee Roy Stemman, a journalist who covered the story for Psychic News in England.

Bishop Pike also confirmed that Ena Twigg provided information about his son she couldn’t have known or guessed. Through Ena Twigg, the late theologian Paul Tillich (1886-1965) also appeared. Tillich had been both Pike’s friend and Jim’s godfather. Communications with Jim continued through other mediums Pike consulted.

Bishop Pike’s book, The Other Side, documents a lengthy conversation he held with his deceased son and Paul Tillich. The topics touched upon personal friends, family, educational matters, and the emotional turmoil that led Jim to take his own life. Another topic discussed was the poltergeist- like phenomena seen at the Cambridge apartment – which were Jim’s initial attempts to communicate. The conversation also touched upon the controversy swirling around Bishop Pike’s liberal attitudes toward church dogma. Each time, the responses given by the discarnate spirits, Pike’s son Jim or Tillich, were knowledgeable and appropriate. Pike regarded the session as highly evidential.

Jeffrey Mishlove’s essay, “Beyond the Brain: The Survival of Human Consciousness After Permanent Bodily Death,” received first prize in the 2021 Bigelow Institute’s challenge to provide proof for the survival of human consciousness after death. Footnotes in Mishlove’s essay and videos he refers have been removed in this presentation but are available in his essay, which may be downloaded at https://bigelowinstitute.org/contest_winners3.php. Mishlove is a licensed clinical psychologist, author, and host on YouTube of “New Thinking Allowed.”

Historical medium research: Mishlove excerpt #11

Psychologist Jeffrey Mishlove in “Beyond the Brain: The Survival of Human Consciousness After Permanent Bodily Death,” provides evidence of medium communication after death.

Leonora Piper. William James brought the Boston medium Leonora Piper to the psychical research community’s attention. She became one of the most researched mental mediums in history.

James’ colleague Richard Hodgson had established his skeptical credentials earlier by debunking Madame Blavatsky, a Theosophical Society founder. Hodgson studied over 500 sittings with Piper. He concluded that a man named George Pellew (1859-1892), who produced automatic writing through Piper as her control spirit, was an authentic, discarnate individual.

Hodgson wrote a report detailing the correct and intimate details the deceased George Pellew communicated through Leonora Piper. Of 150 sitters who came to see Piper in sessions where the discarnate George Pellew manifested, thirty were individuals who had known Pellew in life. In 29 of these sessions, the deceased Pellew recognized them and addressed them by name. The only sitter the discarnate Pellew didn’t identify was a woman whom he hadn’t seen in life since she was a little girl.

These detailed and intimate communications convinced Hodgson – who had been skeptical until then – that he was dealing with a formerly incarnate human being.

Hodgson also noted the discarnate Pellew didn’t recognize the other 120 sitters, people attending Piper’s séances, whom he had never known in life. He saw this as evidence counting against the hypothesis the medium Leonora Piper or her communicator George Pellew were getting information by telepathically reading the individual sitters’ minds.

After working with Piper for years, Hodgson himself died unexpectedly in 1905. Subsequently, he appeared as a communicator in sittings with Piper. The prominent psychologist William James analyzed these sessions. He remarked that, because Hodgson had worked for so long with Piper, the conditions were far from ideal. Still, Richard Hodgson’s spirit communicating through Piper provided many intimate and accurate details concerning Hodgson’s life that Piper did not know.

When viewed in the light of his wider knowledge of mental mediums (and Piper in particular), James acknowledged he believed Hodgson’s ostensible spirit provided information that was paranormal. It wasn’t likely to be attributed to Piper’s telepathic abilities:

... the total effect in the way of dramatic probability of the whole mass of similar phenomena on my mind, is to make me believe that a “will to communicate” [meaning via a spirit entity] is in some shape there.

Therefore, he speculated that if the discarnate Hodgson wasn’t communicating through Piper – perhaps it was a spirit entity, with access to a cosmic reservoir of all knowledge, masquerading as Hodgson. James hoped, within the next hundred years, psychical research would resolve this potential confusion.

Frederic Myers’ return. The major case of a deceased entity starting and taking part in psychical research is that of Frederic Myers. In 1902, the discarnate Myers started an experiment lasting for over three decades. It resulted in over 3,600 documents, referred to as the cross-correspondences. Near the end of this series, Myers dictated two books about the afterlife through Geraldine Cummins’ automatic writing mediumship.

Frederic Myers was, without question, a stellar figure in the founding and early investigations of the Society for Psychical Research. He was coauthor, with Edmund Gurney and Frank Podmore, of Phantasms of the Living. Over a century after its posthumous publication in 1903, Myers’ book, Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death, remains a classic.

Myers introduced the term telepathy and preceded Freud in discussing the subconscious mind, which he called the subliminal mind. Myers expected that communicators from the other side were planning experiments:

... there are probably experiments of a complexity and difficulty which surpass our imagination; but they are made from the other side of the gulf by the efforts of spirits who discern pathways and personalities which for us are impenetrably dark.

The discarnate Myers laid out a plan for the cross-correspondences in messages transmitted via automatic writing through Margaret Verrall in Cambridge, a classical scholar, and Myers’ friend:

Record the bits and when fitted they will make the whole.... I will give the words between you neither alone can read but together they will give the clue he wants.

Thus began a project that ran, at least, until 1936 and included scripts from nine different automatic writers receiving messages from Myers and other deceased researchers from the Society. The overall project is too complex to be summarized adequately here. This complexity has led some critics to dismiss the entire matter as hopelessly obscure – requiring Greek and Latin knowledge, and an understanding of poetic allusions from Wordsworth and others.

It took several years before Society for Psychical Research investigators detected Myers’ project and wrote about it. This first occurred when Alice Johnson, the Society’s secretary, published a lengthy article concerning the automatic writing of Mrs. Holland in India – a pseudonym for Alice Fleming, the famous poet Rudyard Kipling’s married sister. Fleming’s family disapproved of her remarkable “uncanniness.”

Nevertheless, Alice Fleming persisted in her experiments with automatic writing. Transcripts show discarnates Myers and Edmund Gurney (another of the Society’s deceased founders) both coached her in this discipline. However, as she had been reading Myers’ classic book, it is reasonable to assume her subconscious mind was, at least, helping them along.

At one point, she wrote the address, 5 Selwyn Gardens, Cambridge, along with a message that Fleming should contact Margaret Verrall, the first automatic writer to receive messages dictated by Myers. Fleming had never been to Cambridge and had never met Verrall – although she knew of her from Myers’ book. She had no way of knowing Verrall’s address (which it was). Fleming, however, didn’t contact Verrall directly. Instead, she reached out to Alice Johnson.

Johnson, in that lengthy article, describes the cross-correspondence process:

What we get is a fragmentary utterance in one script, which seems to have no particular point or meaning, and another fragmentary utterance in the other, of an equally pointless character; but when we put the two together, we see that they supplement one another and that there is apparently one coherent idea underlying both, but only partially expressed in each.

These cross-correspondences are complicated, with many overlapping meanings. It took Johnson 226 pages to describe the early instances. Despite its obscurity, the cross-correspondences present substantial evidence for survival.

Jeffrey Mishlove’s essay, “Beyond the Brain: The Survival of Human Consciousness After Permanent Bodily Death,” received first prize in the 2021 Bigelow Institute’s challenge to provide proof for the survival of human consciousness after death. Footnotes in Mishlove’s essay and videos he refers have been removed in this presentation but are available in his essay, which may be downloaded at https://bigelowinstitute.org/contest_winners3.php. Mishlove is a licensed clinical psychologist, author, and host on YouTube of “New Thinking Allowed.”

Xenoglossy: Mishlove excerpt #10

Psychologist Jeffrey Mishlove in “Beyond the Brain: The Survival of Human Consciousness After Permanent Bodily Death,” argues that xenoglossy, which is the ability to understand, and even converse, in a language one has never learned (sometimes an archaic language), constitutes evidence favoring reincarnation or possession. 

The Hensen Jacoby case

Walter Semkiw, MD, describes a Philadelphia woman of Russian-Jewish descent. Upon being hypnotized by her husband, a medical doctor, she began speaking an old form of Swedish, claiming to be a Swedish man named Jensen Jacoby.

He said he was a Christian farmer who owned livestock and who lived near the coast. He expressed great fear of Russians, saying he had died when he was forced into a body of water – and then hit on the head (the implication being Russian soldiers had killed him).

Swedish scholars examined recordings and determined the speech was middle Swedish, as used in the seventeenth century. Ian Stevenson who investigated this case even subjected the family members to lie detector tests and had them sign affidavits testifying none of them spoke Swedish. Also, Jensen Jacoby could accurately name objects in Swedish.

For example, when shown a Swedish seventeenth century sailing ship model, Jenson correctly called it a “skuta” or “skute.

The Uttara/Sharada case

Semkiw also describes a well-known xenoglossy case involving intermittent, temporary possession. Here, the replacing personality, Sharada, spoke only the Bengali language – a language unknown to Uttara and her family.

Uttara was an educated woman with two master’s degrees. She was a university lecturer. At one point in her life, she was hospitalized for medical problems. While she was in the hospital, a guru came there and taught meditation. Uttara started to meditate.

One day, unexpectedly, a Bengali personality, called Sharada, emerged from her. Uttara only spoke the Marathi Indian language. Sharada could only speak Bengali. This was strange for the family, because they could not communicate with their daughter. Nobody in the family knew Bengali. The Sharada personality completely took over the body for as long as 43 continuous days, during which the family had to bring in translators, so they could interact with their daughter. 

Sharada still thought she was alive, in the 1820s, in Bengal. She expressed disdain for the people who spoke Marathi, and she didn’t know how to use modern appliances. She was unable, for example, to cook on a gas stove, being familiar only with wood-burning stoves. Multiple Bengali academics, and outside researchers, studied the case over nine years, making tape recordings of their Bengali conversations.

While the Sharada case has attracted much criticism, the critics have all failed to account for (a) Sharada’s Bengali was what one would expect from the 1820s; (b) lengthy conversations Sharada had in Bengali with scholars; and (c) Sharada’s ability to identify, by name, ancestors in her family tree.

 

Jeffrey Mishlove’s essay, “Beyond the Brain: The Survival of Human Consciousness After Permanent Bodily Death,” received first prize in the 2021 Bigelow Institute’s challenge to provide proof for the survival of human consciousness after death. Footnotes in Mishlove’s essay and videos he refers have been removed in this presentation but are available in his essay, which may be downloaded at https://bigelowinstitute.org/contest_winners3.php. Mishlove is a licensed clinical psychologist, author, and host on YouTube of “New Thinking Allowed.”

Electrical Communication: Mishlove excerpt #9

Psychologist Jeffrey Mishlove writes in “Beyond the Brain: The Survival of Human Consciousness After Permanent Bodily Death,” that beginning with Thomas Alva Edison, researchers, hobbyists, and ghost hunters have been experimenting with electronic devices for communication with the deceased. Popular television programs and books report hundreds of successes.

The potential criticism of apophenia (projecting meaning onto random stimuli) clouds most instances. However, we shouldn’t lightly dismiss Instrumental Trans Communication. The late Willis Harman – emeritus Stanford University engineering professor – took this data seriously. While many discarnate voices appear vague and subject to varying interpretations, others are unmistakable.

Konstantin Raudive’s return. In the following video excerpt from the mid-1990s, Willis Harman expresses his interest in the phenomena. After World War II, commercial tape recorders became available. It wasn’t long before voices mysteriously appeared on tape. Researchers and hobbyists soon came to accept that these were discarnate entities.

Konstantin Raudive was an early researcher who died in 1974 but kept up his interest from the other side. Messages and pictures from him have come through on audiotapes, videotapes, television screens, and computer disks.

Dan Drasin, an esteemed colleague I have known for over thirty years, presents (with audio) several Konstantin Raudive communications to which Willis Harman was referring. One recipient, Mark Macy – author of Instrumental Trans Communication (ITC) books, tape-recorded detailed technical instructions from Raudive. Raudive’s voice is clear!

Anabela Cardoso’s voices. Cardoso is a former Portuguese diplomat who has served as Consul General in the United States, Spain, and France as well as Charge D’Affairs in Japan and India. She has authored three books on ITC and, over two decades, she has made hundreds of audio recordings of anomalous voices.

Cardoso has specialized in a technique known as Direct Radio Voice. She tunes her radios to a government channel, reserved for emergencies, so the only sound normally is white noise. When voices appear, she can engage in two-way conversations, even though there is no radio transmission coming from her end. In the following video, she describes how she communicates with her family members who call her by her pet name of Bela.

Psychologist David Fontana, former president of the Society for Psychical Research, has observed Cardoso communicating with these voices on multiple occasions. He states, as a corroborating witness:

The voices were clear, at normal volume, and ... there was no doubt that the voices were direct communications with Anabela and could not be dismissed as stray radio voices.

Fontana conducted his own tests and background research and concluded that Cardoso, herself, was not engaged in subterfuge.

Cardoso also organized a two-year study of the voices, conducted at a well-equipped and well-shielded acoustical laboratory at the School of Engineering, Vigo University, Spain. There, many anomalous voices were detected and independently verified.

Phone calls from the dead. As in the previous videos, individuals report having received telephone messages, and sometimes clear, two-way conversations with the deceased. Researchers D. Scott Rogo, working with Raymond Bayliss, carefully investigated fifty such cases.

Callum Cooper, a psychologist in the UK has continued to investigate over thirty additional cases. Cooper has analyzed these cases, putting them into different categories. He describes what a typical case, in the most extreme category involving a prolonged conversation, would be like. 

The telephone conversation, initiated by a discarnate person, might last half an hour and be with somebody whom you believe to be alive. The conversation could cover many topics and end with a suggestion that the person will be going away. Only later it is learned that the caller was deceased. The phone company will then show no call record.

I had a minor experience along these lines in combination with a lucid dream involving the late Elisabeth Targ who died in 2002. In the dream, I was conversing with Elisabeth (who had been a friend) and congratulating her on all the reported after-death communications involving her. When I picked up the receiver, all I heard was white noise. I do not recall another time when I answered a ringing phone to discover only white noise.

Russell Targ, Elisabeth’s father,  also describes an incident where Elisabeth communicated, shortly after her death, by interfering with the electrical circuitry in his house. On that occasion, not long after Elisabeth’s death, he was with his son, Nicholas and Elisabeth’s widower, Mark Comings. They remarked to each other that, because Elisabeth was such a strong person, perhaps she would try to communicate. At that moment, all of the lights in the house went off and came back on. As Russell was commenting on how unusual that was, as if someone has turned the circuit breaker for the whole house on and off, it happened a second time.

 

Jeffrey Mishlove’s essay, “Beyond the Brain: The Survival of Human Consciousness After Permanent Bodily Death,” received first prize in the 2021 Bigelow Institute’s challenge to provide proof for the survival of human consciousness after death. Footnotes in Mishlove’s essay and videos he refers have been removed in this presentation but are available in his essay, which may be downloaded at https://bigelowinstitute.org/contest_winners3.php. Mishlove is a licensed clinical psychologist, author, and host on YouTube of “New Thinking Allowed.”

Psychopathology: Mishlove excerpt #8

Psychologist Jeffrey Mishlove writes in “Beyond the Brain: The Survival of Human Consciousness After Permanent Bodily Death,” that many types and degrees of possession have yet to be cataloged. This is particularly true regarding possession within mental mediumship and channeling. However, there is also a psychopathological dimension associated with possession, obsession, and spirit attachment.

This section includes testimony from multiple professional psychotherapists. Sometimes it includes the identification of discarnate entities. This material highlights the price to be paid – in terms of human well-being – for ignoring the data supporting postmortem survival.

Wilson Van Dusen was Chief Psychologist at Mendocino State Mental Hospital in California. Van Dusen felt negative discarnate entities often hounded the psychotic patients with whom he worked. He maintained that Emanuel Swedenborg’s visionary descriptions of heaven and hell were actually an accurate depiction of the human unconscious.

Mental health professionals influenced by the spiritist tradition in Brazil often incorporate a similar diagnostic approach.

Clinical psychologist Edith Fiore describes how some discarnate spirits become earthbound because of their addictions to alcohol, cocaine, nicotine, and even chocolate. Many discarnates are confused and don’t realize they are no longer in their own body.

The situation Fiore describes may be more common than we realize. Adam Crabtree, a Freudian psychotherapy trainer based in Toronto, acknowledges, that he has also encountered cases of discarnate possession in his therapy practice.

Psychotherapists rarely function as psychical researchers, trying to verify the identities of the possessing entities. They aim to help their patients, not to cultivate evidence about postmortem survival. Because of these diverging interests, the psychical research literature pays little attention to the therapeutic interest in possession.

Nevertheless, there are instances where therapists working with depossession have been able to identify the discarnate possessing entities that manifest under hypnosis. In his 1934 book, The Gateway of Understanding, Carl Wickland, a physician who practiced depossession therapy for several decades, supplies specific, verified details naming four such discarnate persons unknown to him at the time of the treatment

Jeffrey Mishlove’s essay, “Beyond the Brain: The Survival of Human Consciousness After Permanent Bodily Death,” received first prize in the 2021 Bigelow Institute’s challenge to provide proof for the survival of human consciousness after death. Footnotes in Mishlove’s essay and videos he refers have been removed in this presentation but are available in his essay, which may be downloaded at https://bigelowinstitute.org/contest_winners3.php. Mishlove is a licensed clinical psychologist, author, and host on YouTube of “New Thinking Allowed.

Replacement reincarnation: Mishlove excerpt #7

Psychologist Jeffrey Mishlove writes in “Beyond the Brain: The Survival of Human Consciousness After Permanent Bodily Death,” that - Possession, in its most extreme form, is also known as replacement reincarnation. A deceased person’s spirit enters someone else’s body, replacing – permanently or temporarily – the original personality. One interesting distinction between these cases and reincarnation is, in possession cases, the possessing personality’s memories don’t seem to fade over time. The replaced person’s memories, however, seem to vanish.

Replacement reincarnation is a rare phenomenon. I doubt there are more than a few dozen cases on record – compared to thousands of reincarnation cases starting at birth. However, in trance mediumship, short- term possession by controlling discarnate persons is common. To my knowledge, we haven’t fully cataloged nor understood the types and degrees of possession – as well as its relationship to obsession and spirit attachment.

The Shiva/Sumitra case shows the difference between possession and reincarnation cases.

Sumitra Singh was a woman living in India. She could barely read and write and had no formal schooling. In 1985, Sumitra, a married woman with children, began experiencing fits, going into altered states of consciousness, and illness. She feared she would die. At one point, after she had stopped breathing and her body was cold, the family was told by a doctor she was dead. As the family was preparing for cremation, she revived.

Upon reviving, she claimed her name was Shiva Tripati. She claimed Shiva’s sister-in-law had murdered her a few months earlier. She seemed to be an educated woman – and she wanted to reconnect with her original birth family, the Tripati family.

The Singh family, naturally, didn’t know what to make of this. This new personality, Shiva, didn’t even recognize the Singh family members.

Shiva was an individual who had apparently been murdered, died accidentally, or took her own life. They found her body on the railroad tracks, after a quarrel with her in-laws. She was cremated quickly thereafter. Three months elapsed before word of this strange occurrence reached the Shiva’s birth family.

The Tripati family sued Shiva’s in-laws – because they felt she had been murdered. Then the rumor reached them that, in another village about 100 kilometers away, a possession was taking place involving their deceased daughter. So, they arranged a visit.

As soon as they arrived, Shiva hugged and kissed them, treated them warmly, and called them by their nicknames. She wanted to see her children and make sure they were being taken care of.

Shiva gave sixteen facts about her life, not mentioned in any press reports. She named 22 relatives of Shiva from photographs. A video also has an interview with Shiva’s father and mother who explain how Shiva convinced them she was their daughter. The video shows Shiva five years after the original transformation, still adamantly insisting she has all of Shiva’s memories and none of Sumitra’s.

In 2010, Canadian anthropologist Antonia Mills went to India and conducted more research on this case, assisted by Kildip Dhiman. By interviewing witnesses, Mills learned that Shiva Tripati’s personality remained in Sumitra Singh’s body consistently for thirteen years.

Shiva had a college education and wrote letters. She expressed herself using much more sophisticated language than the uneducated Sumitra.

Shiva found herself married to a stranger. However, she kept Sumitra’s social status as the wife of Sumitra husband, Jagdish Singh. She was uncomfortable about this. Shiva would look at Sumitra’s body in the mirror and say, “This isn’t me. These people are not my family.” But she realized she had to accommodate herself to these new circumstances. She even had two more children before she died.

The case is strong evidence for survival. You have an intact personality surviving for a sustained period, with the deceased person’s full emotional expression and memories. For example, she insisted on being referred to as Shiva for the entire thirteen years. That’s who she felt she was.

Interestingly, in replacement reincarnation cases, the replaced person’s memories don’t appear to remain with the physical body.

Jeffrey Mishlove’s essay, “Beyond the Brain: The Survival of Human Consciousness After Permanent Bodily Death,” received first prize in the 2021 Bigelow Institute’s challenge to provide proof for the survival of human consciousness after death. Footnotes in Mishlove’s essay and videos he refers have been removed in this presentation but are available in his essay, which may be downloaded at https://bigelowinstitute.org/contest_winners3.php. Mishlove is a licensed clinical psychologist, author, and host on YouTube of “New Thinking Allowed.”

Reincarnation: Mishlove's excerpt #6

Psychologist Jeffrey Mishlove writes in “Beyond the Brain: The Survival of Human Consciousness After Permanent Bodily Death,” that: The University of Virginia, Department of Perceptual Studies, now has a database of over 2,500 individual cases in which young children report former life memories. In roughly 1,700 cases, the information led to the deceased previous person’s identification. We know these as solved cases. This work was initiated by former Psychiatry Department chair Ian Stevenson.

The most solid reincarnation evidence comes from the totality of the 2,500 cases in the database, instead of from the strength of particular cases.

Stevenson worked in the field, meeting the children, talking with their families, and with the previous person’s families. He collected firsthand observations – as well as autopsy and police reports. In many cases, children named the previous person or the village where they had lived. The children’s behaviors are an essential feature. They are often in line with the previous person’s habits. Stevenson would often re-interview the children and other witnesses after a period of time had elapsed, to see how consistent their stories were.

Essentially, Stevenson followed the case study procedures established in the 19th century by the researchers with the Society for Psychical Research to corroborate spontaneous events such as apparitions. Stevenson depended upon legal and forensic methods. He researched reincarnation cases as if he were preparing to present them in a court of law.

Some patterns found in the reincarnation database are culturally specific. Others are universal and apply across cultures. Birthmarks, physical features, and even deformities often conform to the previous person’s death wounds. Sometimes, the children begin to speak about their past life as soon as they start to talk. The main window at which these cases begin is two to five years of age. After a few years, the memories fade. This process is generally completed by late childhood, i.e., five to eight years old. Only about a third of the children retain past-life memories into adulthood.

Reincarnations usually seem to occur in the same area, with the same religious or ethnic group or the same race – essentially within psychological comfort zones.

Recollection is first person, not as if children were watching someone else in a movie. They feel as if their consciousness is continuous with the earlier lifetime they recall. It is personal and can be emotional, with fears and phobias carrying over from the former lifetime.

There is an extremely high incidence, 50% of solved cases in the reincarnation database, where the previous person met with a violent death. We may relate this to the fact that about two-thirds of cases, cross-culturally, involve male children.

An afterlife existence between incarnations is reported in about 20% of reincarnation cases. These intermission memories are often like reports from near-death experiences, including communication with spirit guides and other deceased entities.

Anthropologist James Matlock studied the length of the intermission time between lives. It varies by culture. Globally, the median time is 16-18 months from the death of the earlier, identified life to the birth of the present life.

The median time for western cases is 35 years. 80-90% of reported cases come from Asia.

These are dramatic findings. They strongly suggest the interpenetration of the living world with that of the deceased. If the afterlife operated independently, according to its own laws and principles, one would expect the intermission length reported by children with past-life memories – as well as gender change between lives – to be unaffected by cultural expectations. This is clearly not so. However, since we are referring to solved reincarnation cases, neither can the results be purely a fantasy- based, cultural artifact.

Such findings show us we the living can influence the afterlife. People who enter the immediate afterlife will see what they need to see or what they’re prepared or conditioned to see. They are still encountering something very real on the other side. To the degree that these stories enter our culture, we are setting ourselves up to have different afterlife experiences.

 

Jeffrey Mishlove’s essay, “Beyond the Brain: The Survival of Human Consciousness After Permanent Bodily Death,” received first prize in the 2021 Bigelow Institute’s challenge to provide proof for the survival of human consciousness after death. Footnotes in Mishlove’s essay and videos he refers have been removed in this presentation but are available in his essay, which may be downloaded at https://bigelowinstitute.org/contest_winners3.php. Mishlove is a licensed clinical psychologist, author, and host on YouTube of “New Thinking Allowed.”