Falsification of ghosts? Ruickbie excerpt #2

Psychologist Leo Ruickbie writes in “The Ghost in the Time Machine,” his 2021 prize winning essay in a competition sponsored by the Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies:

Logically, if we are going to become ghosts after death, then we must have this ghost potential now; and, if ghosts after death, then why not also before life? Therefore, ‘ghosts,’ as an immaterial identity format, or IIF (that will be our working definition), must also be implicated in things such as mediumship, near-death experiences, out-of-body experiences and even reincarnation, expanding our evidential base and scope for theoretical modelling.

When Scrooge sees the ghost of his former partner, Jacob Marley, he finds that Marley in death is just like Marley in life. Scrooge might not believe in him, but he does recognize him. For the survival of consciousness after the death of the physical body to be recognizable as such, then it, too, must involve the experiences, personality traits, and self-awareness that characterized the person in the living body, that strange sense of ‘I’ that we have floating inside our heads.

However, if Scrooge did not believe in Marley, will one piece of evidence be enough? Although William James famously asserted in connection with the supernatural that one ‘white crow’ is sufficient to prove that not all crows are black, which is entirely correct, the existence of one white crow did not change Scrooge’s mind, and has not changed our materialist paradigm. What we must do is gather a flock of white crows.

The ‘best’ evidence, then, is not one single piece of evidence – we have plenty of that, and herein also lies a problem. The sheer amount of evidence has become too much for the average person to sift through, too diverse in its content to grasp, too contested to judge easily; simply, all too much to take in. This cognitive challenge defaults to denial. We need to find structure in the evidence, if we are going to be able to make sense of it.

The way in which apparitions present themselves to us tells us something about them and in doing so will raise questions about the nature of reality. Dickens again provided us with an interesting structure in A Christmas Carol. The ghost of Marley opens a supernatural journey involving “The Ghost of Christmas Past,” “The Ghost of Christmas Present,” and “The Ghost of Christmas Yet To Come.” We tend to think of ghosts as things of the past, yet, if anything of ourselves should survive physical death, then it must also be capable of spanning temporality. This creates a new way of approaching the question of survival that will lead us to a new conclusion.

All of what we will look at will seem outrageous, individually, but taken together will form something more than the sum of its parts. The best evidence must also include a theory. It is a frequent counter-argument against parapsychology in general that it has no theory. Importantly, the theory should not, like the carthorse, come before the facts; however, simply arranging the facts has led me to my theory, and it is important to show them in that order to demonstrate how I have arrived at my conclusions.

As often claimed, does the evidence need to be ‘extraordinary?’ We cannot even define what that should mean. Is the evidence for anything in science actually ‘extraordinary?’ And what if we only had ‘ordinary’ evidence, would that be ruled out? A common standard for deciding cases where the stakes are high – life after death would seem to qualify – is found in the legal system: it must be “beyond reasonable doubt.” The problem is, that like ‘extraordinary evidence,’ ‘reasonable doubt’ is a circular definition and law courts have conspicuously refused to define it.

In a rare attempt to make ‘reasonable doubt’ understandable to jurors, the Federal Judicial Center made the following instruction:

Proof beyond a reasonable doubt is proof that leaves you firmly convinced of the defendant’s guilt. There are very few things in this world that we know with absolute certainty, and in criminal cases the law does not require proof that overcomes every possible doubt.

It could be argued that “firmly convinced” is just as circular as “beyond a reasonable doubt,” but the crucial clarification is that proof does not need to answer “every possible doubt.”

Are Scrooge’s doubts reasonable? He does not believe in Marley’s being a ghost because he believes that “a slight disorder of the stomach” may cause hallucinations. It should be easy to establish that slight disorders do not cause much, apart from wind perhaps, and certainly not realistic, interactive hallucinations, therefore, Scrooge’s doubts are not reasonable, but still he persists in them. We cannot define exactly what a reasonable doubt is, but we can show when a specific doubt is groundless.

What sort of witnesses will we be dealing with? What type of evidence is being presented? Is it direct, circumstantial, primary or secondary, or hearsay? In most cases we will be dealing with eyewitnesses giving direct evidence, that is, “personal experience through their senses.” In the same way that witnesses giving direct evidence are not dismissed by the court as repeating anecdotes, so our witnesses should not be accused of the same: what we are dealing with is testimony. Witness testimony has its own drawbacks, which is why we will also seek corroboration and supporting evidence. We will also hear from expert witnesses with specialized knowledge in the matter.

At the outset of this project, I believe that the mind is simply a product of the brain and that nothing of the person can continue after death. But I have some niggling doubts because I am not unaware of the evidence. As I said, I am like Scrooge, too, but I am going to see if I can prove myself wrong. This, in itself, is a good scientific principle, what Sir Karl Popper called ‘falsification.’

 

Leo Ruickbie, “The Ghost in the Time Machine,” 2021 prize winning essay in a competition sponsored by the Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies. Ruickbie teaches psychology at Kings College and the University of Northamptom in the United Kingdom. Footnotes have been deleted from these online excerpts from his essay. The entire essay may be downloaded at the Bigelow site, https://bigelowinstitute.org/contest_winners3.php.

The Scrooge Paradox: Ruickbie excerpt #1

“You don’t believe in me,” observed the Ghost.
“I don’t,” said Scrooge.
“What evidence would you have of my reality beyond that of your senses?” “I don’t know,” said Scrooge.
“Why do you doubt your senses?”

“Because,” said Scrooge, “a little thing affects them. A slight disorder of the stomach makes them cheats. You might be an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of an underdone potato. There’s more of gravy than of grave about you, whatever you are!”

– Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol (1843)

Leo Ruickbie

That is the problem. Not just Scrooge, many people have seen ghosts, but modern science does not believe them because the human senses are fallible. The paradox is that all the sciences are founded on the human faculties – either the physical senses or mental reasoning – and all are fallible, yet still we have split the atom, sent men to the moon, and eradicated smallpox. We have more than two thousand years of recorded testimony (excluding religious teachings) that death is not the end of the human personality or consciousness, so the question is not where is the evidence for ‘life’ after death, but why science will not accept it. At the heart of this is, not that we lack the evidence for consciousness being independent of the physical body (not just as apparitions, but also as out-of- body and near-death experiences, among other things), but that we doubt the experience – a case of seeing not being believing – what I will call the ‘Scrooge Paradox.’

Over a hundred and fifty years on from Dickens, polls regularly find large numbers of people believing in ghosts. In the UK, 34% believe in ghosts. In the US, between 31 and 33% of adults believe in ghosts. What this means is that of the nine or so people you call friends, three of them believe in ghosts. Interestingly, more people in the UK believe in life after death: between 45 and 47%. More than a quarter (27%) of those in the UK thought it possible to communicate with the deceased, compared to 21% in the US and 24% in Canada. Polling in the UK went further and asked people whether they believed that they had communicated with the deceased: 9% said yes. These are large proportions of the population and may be greater in other parts of the world.

Unexpectedly, the statistics doubled when people were asked whether they had seen a ghost. A 2018 survey of 2,000 people in the US found that 60% said that they believed that they had seen a ghost.. Although these were different studies, what this pattern seems to indicate is that more people believe that they have seen a ghost based on their own experience, but fewer are prepared to commit to saying that they believe in ghosts as a fact. In a sense, then, people do not even believe themselves – just like Scrooge.

I confess that I am like Scrooge, too. As someone involved in research in this field, scientifically investigating alleged hauntings and mediums, amongst other things, the experiences I have had that could be interpreted as encounters with spirits, I have explained away as random coincidence, even trickery, or due to psychological factors. Our identification with the body is so strong as to make existence without it seem ludicrous. So this essay is not just about the ‘best’ evidence – the best evidence has already been published – but about whether I could convince Scrooge, or myself, that there is sufficiently compelling evidence.

Some of the greatest names in parapsychology have also doubted the evidence for life after death. In 1972, the famous reincarnation researcher Dr. Ian Stevenson chaired a symposium with the subject “What evidence, if you had it, would convince you of survival?” Karlis Osis from the American Society for Psychical Research was there, as was Germany’s foremost parapsychologist at the time, Prof. Hans Bender of the Institut für Grenzgebiete der Psychologie (Institute for the Border Areas of Psychology), also Dr. John Palmer of the University of Virginia, and Dr. W.G. Roll of the Psychical Research Foundation. Bender was forthright: “I actually see no way for cogent proof.” Roll argued that “Since the dead cannot be directly observed and since we do not know whether the entities which speak through mediums are who they claim to be, we are unable to tell whether consciousness continues after death.” Finally, Stevenson reported that the prevailing theory among parapsychologists (at least in 1972) was that extrasensory perception (ESP) of the living accounted for what had previously been regarded as evidence of life after death (what came to be known as the ‘super-psi’ or, better, the living-agent psi hypothesis). Many parapsychologists are like Scrooge, too.

Dickens did not make Scrooge have a near-death experience, an out-of-body experience, a religious revelation or a scientific discovery, he had him see a ghost because ghosts are the common currency of any discussion about the afterlife. Everyone knows what a ghost is, it needs no further explanation (at least superficially). When considering what the best evidence for the continuation of the human personality after permanent physical death is or could be, the question of ‘ghosts’ must be the first one to examine because it is the most common and well-known experience across both human history and culture. As far as the extent of our current knowledge allows, we may state that there was never a time when ‘ghosts’ were not talked of and never a people who did not talk of them. This means that it must provide the most documented evidence from the greatest range of people, including the most credible and reliable witnesses.

 

Leo Ruickbie, “The Ghost in the Time Machine,” 2021 prize winning essay in the Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies. Ruickbie teaches psychology at Kings College and the University of Northamptom in the United Kingdom. Footnotes have been deleted from these online excerpts from his essay. The entire essay may be downloaded at the Bigelow site, https://bigelowinstitute.org/contest_winners3.php.

Survival of consciousness: Rawlette excerpt #22

Sharon Hewitt Rawlette writes in her essay, Beyond Death: The Best Evidence for the Survival of Human Consciousness—"We’ve now looked at a wide variety of evidence for survival of death, both from third-person and first-person perspectives. Each phenomenon we’ve examined—apparitions, dreams, mental mediumship, poltergeist phenomena, phantom phone calls, synchronicity, near-death experiences, memories of previous lives, and intermission memories—provides some evidence for survival when taken alone. But the real strength of the evidence lies in the fact that not only are experiences of postmortem consciousness exceedingly common but, across their many forms, they display consistent evidential qualities and a cohesiveness that’s hard to explain except by appealing to the actual survival of consciousness beyond the death of the body.

"Some people are likely to still reject the idea of survival because it doesn’t fit today’s mainstream scientific views about the physical world and the connection between consciousness and the brain, but it would be a serious mistake to ignore the well-substantiated evidence described in this essay just because it doesn’t match currently popular theory. This evidence has a lot to teach us, and its clearest lesson seems to be that we are still in our infancy when it comes to understanding consciousness and its relationship to the physical world.

"Fortunately, there’s an increasing number of researchers and theorists who take the evidence for survival seriously and who are formulating theories about the mind-brain relationship that account for this evidence as well as making new, testable predictions. The most promising kind of theory, in my opinion, regards consciousness as the primary reality and understands physical reality as just one type of experience that consciousness can have. 

"Consciousness is the hardware, if you like, and physical reality is one kind of software it can run. Another analogy I find useful is to think of physical reality as a dream consciousness can experience. This fits well with the observations of NDErs who say dying is like waking up from a dream. It also explains why there seem to be other ways, besides dying, of taking a momentary break from the experience of the physical world: for instance, through the altered states of consciousness facilitated by meditation or psychedelic substances.

"Maybe the most important advantage of a consciousness-based theory of reality is that it dissolves many of the puzzles that arise when one studies the evidence for survival of death. For example, investigators have long been stymied by the fact that apparitions sometimes and in some respects seem like physical objects (for example, by having solidity and opaqueness, appearing appropriately from multiple angles, causing physical effects) while at other times and in other respects seem like projections of the mind (the fact that they wear clothing, often appear younger than the deceased’s age at death, sometimes appear transparent, dissolve, or walk through walls). 

"If all physical objects are fundamentally patterns of conscious experience, then there’s no need to choose between apparitions’ being physical and their being mental. Apparitions are in consciousness just like everything else, and while they sometimes play by the same rules as the phenomena we call “physical,” they can also deviate from them and be more fluid and responsive to intention, more like the experiences we have while, well, dreaming.

"Theories in which consciousness grounds the physical world are not new. In fact, they’ve been around for millennia, even in the Western world. In philosophy, they go by the name “idealism,” to reflect the primacy of ideas over matter. Idealism has had staunch defenders even during the scientific era, in philosophers such as George Berkeley, Brand Blanshard, and most recently Bernardo Kastrup. Consciousness is also understood as playing a central role in the determination of physical properties under some interpretations of quantum mechanics.

"But whether or not idealism proves to be the most productive path to understanding the physical world and the not-so-physical phenomena we’ve seen in this essay, taking seriously the evidence for survival of consciousness will be of vital importance in the development of future theory. And that’s not just because of what it tells us about what awaits us beyond death, but also because of what it reveals about the world we live in right now."

 

Sharon Hewitt Rawlette has a PhD in philosophy from New York University and writes about consciousness, parapsychology, and spirituality for both academic and popular audiences. She lives in rural Virginia. She received an award from the Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies for her essay “Beyond Death: The Best Evidence for the Survival of Human Consciousness,” available at https://bigelowinstitute.org/contest_winners3.php. Footnotes in the essay are not included in these excerpts.

Recalling prebirth events: Rawlette excerpt #21

Sharon Hewitt Rawlette writes in her essay, Beyond Death: The Best Evidence for the Survival of Human Consciousness—It’s very common for intermission memories to include observations of events in the life of the family the child will later be born into, events that occurred before the child’s birth—or, in many cases, even before their conception. In Ohkado and Ikegawa’s investigation of 21 Japanese children with memories from a pre-birth existence, 15 of the children (71%) reported being able to see what was happening on earth before they were born.

In one of Ohkado and Ikegawa’s cases, a child told her mother, “I saw you in a gorgeous white dress. You were holding a dog.” The mother clearly recalled that, after her wedding but while she was still wearing her wedding dress, she had returned to a room where her dog was being kept and held it.

In a case collected by researcher Carol Bowman and reported in her book Return from Heaven, a two-year-old remembered hovering over his mother before his birth and seeing her cut her finger and go to the hospital for stitches. He even mentioned that she’d been wearing a yellow dress. All of this was true, but he couldn’t have seen the dress after he was born because it had gotten blood on it and his mom had thrown it away immediately afterward.

In another book by Bowman, Hilda Swiger describes a trip to Epcot with her four-year-old grandson Randy. It was Randy’s first trip to the resort, but when they went into a certain restaurant, he insisted that his dad was about to sit in the wrong place. Randy pointed to a table and said, “That’s where you sat before.” Not long after Randy was conceived, the family had come to Epcot, and they’d sat at that table. When his dad asked how he knew this, Randy said, “Oh, I was following you and Mommy around that day when you came here before I was born.”

James Leininger’s parents report that, when he was four years old, he told his dad, “When I found you and Mommy, I knew you would be good to me.” His dad asked where he’d found them, and James replied it had been in Hawaii. “It was not when we all went to Hawaii,” he said. “It was just Mommy and you. ... I found you at the big pink hotel. ... I found you on the beach. You were eating dinner at night.” James’ parents had once stayed at a pink hotel in Hawaii, five weeks before he was conceived. On their last night, they’d eaten dinner on the beach in the moonlight.

According to two studies, approximately half of those who have intermission memories recall something about how they came to their parents.211 There are even cases that include memories of the events directly surrounding conception, and these memories sometimes persist into adulthood, as the next few examples demonstrate.

One grown woman remembered her whole life having a vision of herself floating above her parents in a mountain cabin, feeling love and excitement. As an adult, she finally decided to mention her vision to her mother and described in detail the cabin she’d seen. It turned out this was the place her mother and father had secretly made love for the first time, a week before their wedding, although they’d always said she’d been conceived on the wedding night.

An older gentleman named Rennie, who had a distinguished career as a U.S. Air Force pilot and intelligence officer, reports that when he was seven, he mentioned to his mother that he remembered where he was before he was born. Then he asked her, “Was I placed with you and Dad when you were in the front seat of a car?” She brushed him off, calling his suggestion “indecent.” But in his mid-20s, he asked his parents about it again. Specifically, he asked if they’d conceived him in the front seat of their 1917 Overland. They were embarrassed to discuss it, but when he told them the details he remembered—how they’d opened the car door and his mother had checked to be sure Rennie’s sister was asleep in the back—they confirmed everything he said.

A 45-year-old woman named Nan also reports a verified conception memory. She remembers her father coming home while her mother was making lunch and taking her into the bathroom. Her mom insisted she needed to put in her diaphragm, but he said not to worry about it. “I can remember that,” says Nan. “I thought, ‘Now is my chance. Here is my door.’” When she was an adult, Nan finally told her mom about this memory and had it confirmed that she and Nan’s father had had sex in the bathroom at lunchtime and that it was the one time they didn’t use a diaphragm.

In contrast to these conception cases, other children don’t seem to find their parents until the pregnancy is some ways along. An Indian Christian named Prashant still had a memory at age 40 of coming down from the clouds toward Earth, “zooming in” until she noticed a kind of market or bazaar where there was a joyful couple singing together while they clasped hands. “The man was wearing a light blue sweater and blue jeans,” she says. “[T]he woman was dressed in a traditional Indian orange sari.” She got even closer to the woman and remembered entering her uterus and what it felt like to be inside the womb. When she was a child, Prashant thought of this memory as a dream, but at age 17, she told her parents about it, and they confirmed that, when Prashant’s mother was four months pregnant with her, they had worn those precise clothes to the engagement ceremony of a friend. It was the only day they’d ever held hands and sung in public, and they were at the New Delhi South Extension market.

Finally, I should mention that there are children and adults who remember pregnancies associated with themselves being miscarried or aborted. Often they returned to the same mother in a later pregnancy, or sometimes to another family member.

One of the most detailed memories I’ve seen in this category comes from a case reported by Elizabeth and Neil Carman in their 2013 book Cosmic Cradle. It involves another Elizabeth (not identified as the author of Cosmic Cradle) who, as soon as she could talk, told her mother, “I was in your tummy twice. The first time, I washed away. The second time, I came out like a zipper.” Her mother had never talked to Elizabeth about her miscarriage. And coming out “like a zipper” seems like a pretty accurate way for a toddler to describe a C-section, which was how Elizabeth had been born.

Many years later, at age 28, Elizabeth still had a vivid memory of the miscarriage. She said,

Mom was taking a shower. She had her hands on her head shampooing her hair. The last thing I saw was her looking down at me; then I went down the drain. I did not feel pain. I remember the strong thump of hitting the shower floor, shaking everything within my core. I recall falling out of her body in slow motion and the emptiness and vastness. I felt exposed, no longer being in the womb, feeling unprotected. The drain was dark; it slowly started closing up, and at that point, I died. Everything stopped. I ceased to have awareness of that experience.

Elizabeth’s mother confirmed these details. When she was 12 weeks along with her previous pregnancy, she felt something fall out of her in the shower: a white glob two or three inches long.

Interestingly, Elizabeth actually remembered initiating the miscarriage. When she was seven, she was riding in the car with her mom in a neighborhood she’d never been to before when she pointed at a non-descript building and said she’d been in that building before. Her mom confirmed that this was the building where she’d gone to the doctor during the pregnancy she’d lost. “That was me,” said Elizabeth. “I was a boy, and you and dad had a fight. I chose to leave and come back as a girl.” It was true that her mother had sensed her baby was going to be a boy, and she’d fought with her husband about whether to circumcise him. Neither of them was willing to budge on the issue. Once she was an adult, Elizabeth was able to explain that she’d known her parents were in danger of divorcing over the circumcision question. “I needed them to stay together to fulfill what I came here to do,” she says. “So I chose to leave.” Though her mother had never previously connected the two events, she did confirm that the miscarriage had happened the morning after the circumcision argument.

Intermission memories clearly provide an essential piece of first-person evidence for consciousness apart from the body, expanding on the experiences of provisional death provided by NDEs and the evidence provided by the memories and personalities of deceased persons that recur in new bodies. Intermission memories provide crucial evidence that memories of previous lives are not caused by mere psychic access to the past but are due to an actual continuity of consciousness stretching from death in a previous life through birth into a new one.

I want to emphasize that intermission memories of using apparitions, dreams, and poltergeist effects to contact people left behind complement NDErs’ memories of contacting people through apparitions. Together, they provide crucial evidence that, when these phenomena occur after death, they are at least sometimes not mere super-psi simulations but actual reflections of the ongoing, first-person consciousness of the deceased.

Sharon Hewitt Rawlette has a PhD in philosophy from New York University and writes about consciousness, parapsychology, and spirituality for both academic and popular audiences. She lives in rural Virginia. She received an award from the Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies for her essay “Beyond Death: The Best Evidence for the Survival of Human Consciousness,” available at https://bigelowinstitute.org/contest_winners3.php. Footnotes in the essay are not included in these excerpts.

Surviving death cases: Rawlette excerpt #20

Sharon Hewitt Rawlette writes in her essay, Beyond Death: The Best Evidence for the Survival of Human Consciousness—Memories of contact with the living during the intermission period aren’t limited to apparitions and dreams, either. I’ve come across two cases where people remembered being involved in poltergeist phenomena, both of them from India. In the first case, a child in Uttar Pradesh reported that, after his death in a previous life, he hung out near his previous family’s house and sometimes took their food. The family in question confirmed that they noticed food inexplicably disappearing during that time. In the other case, a boy named Veer Singh reported that, after dying, he stayed in a tree outside his former family’s home. One day, he got annoyed at two women who were playing in a swing hanging from a branch of his tree. Realizing he might kill them if he broke off the branch the swing was attached to, he waited until the swing was low in its arc and then caused the wooden seat to break. His father from his previous life remembered an accident like this occurring after his son’s death.

Encountering Other Spirits of the Deceased

Another important element found in both NDEs and intermission memories is memories of meetings with others who have died. There are many accounts of young children reporting familiarity with relatives who died before they were born, and these claims can sometimes be independently verified.

In a case that Jim Tucker investigated alongside Ian Stevenson, a boy named Patrick Christenson had some memories of his deceased half-brother’s life and also had three scars in locations where his half-brother had been deformed. Furthermore, Patrick said that, while in heaven, he spoke with a relative of the family named “Billy the Pirate” who told him he’d died in the mountains after being shot at close range. Patrick’s mother had never heard of anyone like this in her family, but afterward she learned of a cousin with the nickname “Billy the Pirate” who had died just as Patrick reported.

There’s also the case of James Leininger, the boy who remembered being James Huston, a World War II pilot shot down in the Iwo Jima operation. Between ages three and six, James received three G. I. Joe dolls as presents, and he gave them the names Billie, Leon, and Walter. His family was surprised by the unusual names, and when they asked him about it, he said he gave them those names because that was who met him in heaven. It turned out that only 10 men from James Huston’s squadron on Natoma Bay were killed prior to his own death. Three of them were named Billie, Leon, and Walter, and their hair colors matched those of James’s G. I. Joe dolls, with Billie’s hair being brown, Leon’s blond, and Walter’s red.

Cases like this provide not only first-person evidence for the prebirth existence of the child who has the memory but also third-person evidence for the continuing, disembodied consciousness of the deceased person they remember encountering in the intermission period. 

Sharon Hewitt Rawlette has a PhD in philosophy from New York University and writes about consciousness, parapsychology, and spirituality for both academic and popular audiences. She lives in rural Virginia. She received an award from the Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies for her essay “Beyond Death: The Best Evidence for the Survival of Human Consciousness,” available at https://bigelowinstitute.org/contest_winners3.php. Footnotes in the essay are not included in these excerpts.

 

Apparitions/dreams verified: Rawlett excerpt #19

Sharon Hewitt Rawlette writes in her essay, Beyond Death: The Best Evidence for the Survival of Human Consciousness—Ian Stevenson investigated a case in which a Burmese woman, Daw Kyin Htein, experienced an apparition of a family friend a few months after his death in a plane crash. The apparition happened one night as she was returning from a trip to the outhouse. When she saw her deceased friend, she invited him to reincarnate into her family. Then she went to sleep and had a dream of him as well, one in which his mother and sister (both still living) asked him to go with them but he declined. The mother of the deceased also apparently had a dream—it’s not clear if it was on the same night—in which her son said he was going to live with U Ba Hein, Daw Kyin Htein’s husband.

Soon after this, Daw Kyin Htein conceived a son, Maung Yin Maung, who had memories of being her deceased friend. Furthermore, at the age of 12, he reported to Stevenson that he remembered being near Daw Kyin Htein’s home after his death. He saw someone he thought was her coming out of an outhouse. He remembered “showing himself” to this person as an apparition, and he remembered her inviting him to become her child. He also remembered communicating with his former personality’s mother and sister. They asked him to be reborn with them, but he said he was going to be reborn into Daw Kyin Htein’s family instead.

As this example shows, sometimes apparitions of the dead double as apparitions to future parents. Although dreams seem to be a more common form of communication with future parents,  it’s not unheard of for parents to see waking apparitions of their future children. However, I know of only one other case in which someone retained a first-person memory of appearing in this way to a future parent.

Intermission memories also offer corroboration for dreams of the deceased. In another Burmese case investigated by Stevenson, a woman dreamt that her deceased husband told her he’d left some money (a 5-kyat note) wrapped in a white handkerchief inside a small box of basket work. She then found the box, the handkerchief, and the money. Later, a Burmese boy was born who, around age three, began recalling a past life that matched that of this woman’s husband. He also remembered coming to his wife in a dream after death and telling her where to find 5 kyats wrapped in a white handkerchief. The boy wanted to know if his former wife had had such a dream, and she confirmed it.

In one more Burmese case, a grown man with past-life memories remembered how, after dying, he’d been guided by an old man dressed in white, first to the house where he’d lived before dying and then to another house nearby, which belonged to the family of the village headman, to whom he was subsequently reborn. In his memory, the old man asked him to wait outside at the first house, and at the second one, after first being told to wait outside, he was then told to enter and that he must stay there. As it happened, this man’s wife from his former life had a dream a week after his death in which an old man in white appeared to her and said he was sending her husband to the house of the village headman. When his wife went to the headman’s wife the next morning to tell her about her dream, she discovered that the headman’s wife had also had a dream. In that one, a man had told her that he was bringing the recently deceased man to be in her family. Then the man went outside and brought the deceased man in before ultimately disappearing. 

Sharon Hewitt Rawlette has a PhD in philosophy from New York University and writes about consciousness, parapsychology, and spirituality for both academic and popular audiences. She lives in rural Virginia. She received an award from the Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies for her essay “Beyond Death: The Best Evidence for the Survival of Human Consciousness,” available at https://bigelowinstitute.org/contest_winners3.php. Footnotes in the essay are not included in these excerpts.

 

Recalling funeral or burial: Rawlette excerpt #18

Sharon Hewitt Rawlette writes in her essay, Beyond Death: The Best Evidence for the Survival of Human Consciousness—Those who remember dying in a previous life also sometimes remember viewing their funeral and/or burial. In some cases, they mention something unexpected that was done with their body that can then be verified. In a Sri Lankan case, a girl named Disna Samarasinghe remembered her body being buried near an anthill, which was indeed true of the body of the person whose life she remembered. Disna was also able to point out the location of her unmarked grave.

In one of Ian Stevenson’s cases, a young Thai woman remembered that her previous body—that of a mere baby—wasn’t buried in the village cemetery as it should have been, but rather outside of it. She confronted the undertaker responsible, and he admitted to having done this thing that apparently no one else knew about.

This next case comes from Hertfordshire, England, and was reported by Mary and Peter Harrison in their book The Children That Time Forgot. It involves a young girl, Mandy Seabrook, who appeared to be the reincarnation of her sister who had died at the age of five months. Even though the family never spoke about her deceased sister, when Mandy was two years old, she started recounting memories of having been this other child. One day, while riding past the cemetery where her sister was buried, two-year-old Mandy exclaimed, “Look, Mummy! That’s the place you put me in the ground that time, and you nearly fell on top of me, remember?” 

At the time of the burial, her mother had been taking medication to help her deal with the shock, and she had been so out of sorts that she had lost her balance at the graveside and almost fallen into the hole with the coffin. Mandy also said she’d been buried with a silver bracelet and a fluffy yellow ball. Her mother remembered the existence of the bracelet and the yellow ball, but she only remembered the former being in the casket. Nevertheless, when questioned, an older sibling confessed to having slipped the yellow ball under the dead baby’s body.

One other interesting aspect of this case is that, when Mandy was six, she asked her mother, “Do you remember the night I died? There was a bright star shining in the sky.” When her mother thought back, she realized that she had in fact noticed a star out over the garden, unusually bright and low, and had mentioned it to someone else at the time. Mandy continued, “That was my star. It was my way of telling you that I would be back.” This is the only case I’ve come across in which a child remembered using a sign or synchronicity to communicate after death in their previous life. 

 

Sharon Hewitt Rawlette has a PhD in philosophy from New York University and writes about consciousness, parapsychology, and spirituality for both academic and popular audiences. She lives in rural Virginia. She received an award from the Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies for her essay “Beyond Death: The Best Evidence for the Survival of Human Consciousness,” available at https://bigelowinstitute.org/contest_winners3.php. Footnotes in the essay are not included in these excerpts.