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Sunday, April 17, 2022

Easter Life

News editor for the New Scientist, Anil Ananthaswamy, ends a remarkably clear explanation of a mysterious reality by acknowledging: “The case remains to be solved.”1 He was writing about the famous two-slit experiment in which a single photon of light may appear when measured to be a particle or a wave, depending on how the observer measures it.

I am writing about a very different case, the resurrection celebrated by Christians on Easter, which I affirm also “remains to be solved.” Ananthaswamy explains how “a sunbeam split in two” has shed “light on the underlying nature of reality.” I suggest the resurrection has shed light on the underlying nature of life.

The resurrection of Jesus after his death on a Roman cross has given Christians hope that conscious life can survive physical death. The dominant paradigm in science, which holds that all conscious life depends on a physical brain, assumes that physical death is the end of every form of conscious life. Yet, quantum physics has discovered that matter comes from energy, like the photon arising from the wave function of light. Material reality itself arises from energy that, like conscious thoughts and feelings, is not in itself material.

Near-death experiences, too, when a person’s brain is non-functional, are immaterial events that have significant consequences. My father remembered such an experience when during surgery his heart stopped, and his conscious awareness “awakened” despite anesthesia and observed the life-saving efforts of the medical team. Furthermore, my father’s conscious awareness left the hospital and “traveled” toward a brilliant but not blinding light, which he experienced as unconditional love. He also saw my mother in front of the light and wanted to remain there with her. But she communicated telepathically that it was not his time to die.

James K Traer

My father, a scientist, knew that materialist scientific explanations could not explain his near-death experience. Nonetheless, he told me, the experience was absolutely “real” and ended his fear of death. In addition, I knew that he had become a more compassionate person after his near-death experience. Moreover, research has confirmed that this character change is common among those who have shared their near-death experience with researchers. 2

Four hundred scientists have affirmed a “Manifesto for a Post-Materialist Science” that asserts: “Conscious mental activity can be experienced in clinical death during a cardiac arrest.”3 And other scientists have affirmed in “Beyond a Materialist Vision” that “the belief that consciousness is nothing but a consequence . . . of brain activity . . . is neither proven, nor warranted.”4

I am not suggesting near-death experiences explain the resurrection. I am suggesting the materialist assumptions of scientists have not resolved our experience of consciousness—even when we are physically healthy, much less in cases such as near-death experiences.

The resurrection was a conscious experience for those who were its initial witnesses, and Easter has been and continues to be a real source of hope for many. The case for conscious life after physical death has not been resolved but remains both a scientific and spiritual possibility.

Humbly, I wish you all an inspiring Easter . . . Robert Traer

1 Anil Ananthaswamy, “Through two doors: How a sunbeam split in two became physics’ most elegant experiment, shedding light on the underlying nature of reality,” Aeon, Oct. 2, 2018, https://aeon.co/essays/the-elegant-physics-experiment-to-decode-the-nature-of-reality

2 Bruce Greyson, After: A Doctor Explores What Near-Death Experiences Reveal about Life and Beyond (St. Martin’s Essentials, 2021).

3 See https://opensciences.org/about/manifesto-for-a-post-materialist-science.

4 See https://galileocommission.org.

Saturday, April 16, 2022

CORT evidence summary: Nahm excerpt #11

Researcher Michael Nahm, in his Bigelow award-winning essay, "Climbing Mount Evidence: A Strategic Assessment of the Best Available Evidence for the Survival of Human Consciousness after Permanent Bodily Death," writes:

I suspect we are still at the beginning of a thrilling expedition of endeavor, leading to the compilation of ever more compelling data, also regarding CORT.* Potentially researchable new cases—of highly variable initial quality, of course—keep on being reported constantly, even in the West. Jim Tucker at the University of Virginia is contacted 10–15 times each month by American families, and Jim Matlock’s over 17,000-member reincarnation group on Facebook also receives promising case reports [personal communication]. Currently, I am aware of two new intriguing and still unreported Western before-cases that are being investigated. One of them includes audio and video recordings plus a written list of statements taken down before the previous personality was identified—a boy who was killed in a tornado. Without doubt, there are many more cases out there that can be studied. Establishing an international network linking CORT researchers across the globe to develop a systematic research program is therefore highly desirable, and respective plans are currently in the making.

CORT are not only important because they constitute the best and the most researchable survival evidence, thereby evidencing that consciousness and memories are not produced by the brain. In addition, studying CORT might provide new insights into personality and character development, and a better understanding of post-traumatic stress symptoms or phobias in early childhood, but also of potential reasons for birthmarks and birth defects, and so forth. Growing public awareness of CORT could furthermore lead to increased acceptance of children who talk about past lives. Rather than ridiculing or trying to silence them, adults could progressively acknowledge them and appreciate that we can learn important lessons from our children.

From a more nature-philosophical perspective of biology, investigating CORT also bears considerable value for understanding the development of an organism. Given that experiences from past lives can contribute not only to shaping our character but also the development of bodily traits via psychically mediated carry-over effects, we must again take into account additional modes of causation, such as Aristotle’s “final causes”, Driesch’s concept of “wholeness-causality”, and other ideas of systemic and holistic top-down causation. CORT also raise intriguing questions for evolutionary biology: Given that psychological and bodily traits can be transmitted to other individuals of later generations without relying on genetic inheritance, does this process perhaps influence the development of instincts and bodily traits over the course of evolution?

Obviously, CORT open multiple lines of further scientific exploration. Their facets build bridges to different branches of biology, surmounting the current physicalist notion of most mainstream biologists that rests on an outdated understanding of nature and life. CORT provide solid arguments for developing modern versions of vitalism. Exploring phenomena such as CORT, which directly relate to nature’s background reality, might well lead to a breakthrough regarding our understanding of the nature of nature, of life, and of the question of what happens after we die.

*CORT is an abbreviation for Cases of the Reincarnation Type.

Michael Nahm is a German biologist and parapsychologist whose psi research has focused on terminal lucidity, near-death experiences, cases of the reincarnation type, physical mediumship, hauntings, the history of parapsychology, and various other riddles of the mind and the evolution of life. In 2018 he accepted an appointment at the Institut für Grenzgebiete der Psychologie und Psychohygiene (IGPP) (Institute for Frontier Areas of Psychology and Mental Health) in Freiburg, Germany. His publications are available at http://www.michaelnahm.com/publications-and-downloads and his Bigelow essay may be downloaded at https://bigelowinstitute.org/contest_winners3.php. Footnotes have been deleted in these excerpts but are available in his text posted on the Bigelow website.

Thursday, April 14, 2022

Prelingual CORT* cases: Nahm excerpt #10

Tom Shroder

In India, researchers Ian Stevenson, Satwant Pasricha, and journalist Tom Shroder also followed the case of a boy who persistently ran away from his home as soon as he could walk, and before he could even speak. He was born into a Moslem family, but refused to join their prayers, denying that he was Moslem and insisting on returning to his Hindu family. Shroder noted that it appeared quite unlikely that his parents were fond of this behavior or that they contrived and embellished their son’s claims. This case is remarkable because the boy already showed clear signs of an awareness that he didn’t belong to his parents before he could speak.

I call such cases prelingual cases. By “prelingual”, I mean that these children already displayed signs of remembering a previous life before they were able to talk in full sentences consisting of several words.

One of the first words of an Indian girl Stevenson, Shroder, and Pasricha studied was the Hindi expression for kerosene-powered candles. She always spoke it fearfully and had a corresponding phobia of fire. The girl appeared to remember the life of her cousin, who burned to death at the age of fourteen after such a candle fell over and set the surroundings on fire. In a solved case the trio re-investigated in Lebanon, one of the earliest words of a little boy was “Ibrahim”. When he learned to speak more articulately, it turned out that “he” had died in an accident in the car of Ibrahim, who was speeding and wouldn’t listen to his friend’s warnings.

Other children who related their earliest words to a previous life include Bishen Chand Kapoor, who repeated the word “pilvit” until it gradually developed into “Pilibhit”, the name of a town where he said he belonged to. This was correct for the person whose life he claimed to remember. The first words of Lebanese Salem Andary were “Bedouins”, “stones”, and “hit”, and he later stated he was stoned to death by a group of Bedouins. This was likewise correct for the person whose life he claimed to remember.

Prelingual aspects of CORT can also present in other forms. They may manifest in phobias, as with the above-mentioned Indian girl who remembered being burned and had a fire phobia, but also in nightmares, play, or habits.

An Indian boy, Veer Singh, stubbornly refused food cooked by his parents even before he could speak. Later, he explained that he would not eat food prepared by members of a lower caste because he was a reborn Brahmin. Cases involving prelingual phobias include Burmese Maung Myo Min Thein who had a strong aversion to approaching the location where the person whose life he remembered was murdered, Turkish Cevriye Bayri who had a severe phobia of darkness and, as soon as she learned to speak, tried to pronounce the name of the man who had killed the person whose life she remembered in the dark, and Sri Lankan Shamlinie Prema who had a prelingual phobia of water as well as of buses. She remembered the life of a girl from a village called Galtudawa who was pushed into a flooded paddy field by a bus and drowned. Among her earliest words were “Galtudawa mother”.

A very peculiar prelingual case concerns Süleyman Zeytun from Turkey: He was born deaf-mute. Nevertheless, by using only nonverbal communication and gestures, the little boy convinced his parents that he was the reincarnated personality of a man who drowned in a swollen river while trying to wash his horse in it. He also convinced the family of the man whose life and death he seemed to remember of his identity. Süleyman had a water phobia from early on.

Stevenson was particularly interested in CORT involving twins because he thought they may offer new insights into the development of human personality. For instance, identical twins with identical genomes can sometimes still differ considerably in bodily and psychological traits. Stevenson considered it difficult to explain such differences solely in genetic terms and/or in terms of potentially different environmental conditions around the fetuses in their mother’s womb. Rather, he speculated that traits conveyed from a previous life might additionally come into play, for example in the case of Indika and Kakshappa Ishwara. These boys were identical twins but looked and behaved differently. Both spoke about memories of a former life.

In 13 of the 37 twin CORT analyzed by Stevenson, one of the two twins remained silent about a previous life. In 22 cases, both twins spoke of a previous life. In the remaining two cases, both twins said nothing about a previous life; the identification with previous personalities was derived from announcing dreams, birthmarks and/or similar behaviors. It is intriguing that in most of the cases for which the information is available, the twins were apparently acquainted with each other in their previous lives. Usually, they were spouses, siblings, family members, or friends. Among the solved cases, Stevenson was able to collect information about the dominance and submissiveness of the twin subjects as well as of their previous personalities for 11 twin pairs. In every pair, their current relationship was identical to their former one—a probability of 1 in 2048. Although this finding is based on a small sample, it supports the notion that this repeated relationship didn’t follow patterns of mere chance.

*CORT is an abbreviation for "Cases of the Reincarnation Type".

Wednesday, April 13, 2022

Sample "before cases": Nahm excerpt #9

Michael Nahm, in his Bigelow award-winning essay, "Climbing Mount Evidence: A Strategic Assessment of the Best Available Evidence for the Survival of Human Consciousness after Permanent Bodily Death," writes:

From a scientific perspective, numerous CORT have a vulnerable point: They had already been solved by members of the involved families or other local people before the researchers who investigated and published the case reports appeared on the scene. Hence, when the two families had already met and talked to each other, it is possible that the information obtained in the later interviews had been retrofitted, embellished, or otherwise contorted to present a respectable case. Seeking to avoid these problems, CORT researchers are especially intrigued when they learn about cases in which a child’s statements about the remembered life were documented before the case was solved. Retrospective tampering is much more difficult and unlikely in these cases, thereby rendering their essential features much more authentic. These important cases are called before-cases.

To date, I am aware of 31 published reports of before-cases. On their travels through India, Stevenson, Shroder, and Pasricha followed up such a case, visiting 24-year-old Sunita Chandak and her family. The case was originally solved by Indian journalist Padmakar Joshi when Sunita was five years old, and Stevenson independently investigated it later.

Sunita was born in a town named Verni Kotha. At the age of four, she explained she came from a village called Belgaon and insisted on being taken there. Her father, however, had never heard of such a village. After she provided further information about it, her father contacted Joshi and asked him for help in finding a matching location. The latter identified 28 villages named Belgaon in the region, nine of which appeared to fit the rough description given by Sunita. Her parents took her to three of these Belgaons in the course of several months, but each time, Sunita claimed these weren’t the correct one. Thereafter, Joshi published a public note on Sunita’s case along with some of her statements. And indeed, a reader from one of the remaining Belgaons recognized several items that matched a fitting family: A girl named Shanta Kalmegh had died 24 years before Sunita’s birth at the age of six. When Sunita’s family took her to this Belgaon in 1979, a town 90 miles away and requiring multiple bus changes to be reached, she immediately identified it as the correct one. She recognized the Kalmegh house and family members. Moreover, because Shanta had died about 30 years previously, Sunita correctly described numerous details of this house and the neighborhood that had been present at the time but no longer existed. The Kalmegh family eventually became convinced that Sunita was Shanta reborn, and a lifelong friendship commenced. When Stevenson and his team visited Sunita in 1998, Joshi also joined them. Sunita was now married and lived with her husband, having children of her own. But she still maintained close relationships with both parents whom she called her “Verni Kotha parents” and her “Belgaon parents.”

Below, I briefly summarize two other CORT that are among the most compelling and best documented before-cases. One of them is the American case of Ryan Hammons of Oklahoma.

When Ryan began to speak in 2009, he talked about a previous life and a family he had in Hollywood. He explained that when he died he saw an awesome bright light that one should go to, a feature familiar from Western NDEs. Ryan would often cry and beg to be taken to Hollywood to see the people he loved and missed. When his mother Cyndi bought books about Hollywood, he stated he knew some of the people displayed in them. In a picture of a movie showing many people, he pointed to one of the actors, saying “Mama, that guy’s me.” At that stage, Cyndi contacted Jim Tucker, Stevenson’s successor at the University of Virginia, because she was looking for help in identifying the apparently quite unknown actor for whom no name was given. From then on, the case developed intriguingly. Cyndi Hammons and Tucker were in constant contact, documenting many more statements made by Ryan. They were furthermore in contact with film producers who hired an archival footage consultant who finally succeeded in identifying the actor in question. His name was Morris Kolinsky, but he later called himself Marty Martyn. This man tried his luck as a dancer and actor, but finally ended up running a successful talent agency in Hollywood. He died 40 years before Ryan was born. In photographs, the boy recognized several people known to Martyn, and the documented descriptions of the buildings that had been “his” home and office proved to be correct. Even before Marty Martyn was identified, Cyndi Hammons had recorded no less than 55 statements that perfectly matched his life.

The second case to be summarized concerns a young Sri Lankan girl named Gnanatilleka Baddewithana. It was investigated and solved by Dr. H.H.S. Nissanka, who always ensured that he was accompanied by academics and other esteemed personalities from the area. Nissanka vividly described the course of his investigations in a book. He tape-recorded his most important interviews and hired a photographer to take pictures of the most significant events, such as Gnanatilleka’s first meeting with members of the family she claimed to have been part of.

Gnanatilleka was born in 1956 in a remote settlement in the Central Sri Lankan highlands located about 15 miles from the town she remembered having lived in. She made dozens of statements about this past life that could be verified after the matching previous personality, a boy who died at the age of 13, was discovered by Nissanka in 1960. The two families hadn’t known each other before and were initially quite disinclined to participate in the investigation. When finally introduced to several members of her previous family one by one in a separate room of a guesthouse, Gnanatilleka identified all of them correctly without being asked leading questions. She also showed affectionate behavior towards them—with one exception: She became angry and fearful when the brother of the previous personality entered the room. This fitted: These brothers had a hostile relationship with each other. The photographs included in Nissanka’s book impressively document the behavior of four-year-old Gnanatilleka when she met all these people for the first time; the entire episode was also tape-recorded.

Ian Stevenson later investigated her case as well, but completely independently of Nissanka. Nevertheless, Stevenson’s report matches Nissanka’s report, and he added further pieces of information. The case can therefore be regarded as quite authentic.

Tuesday, April 12, 2022

Emotions and identification: Nahm excerpt #8

Following Stevenson’s footsteps through the mountains surrounding Beirut, you’ll meet Suzanne Ghanem. Here is a short summary of her case:

Suzanne Ghanem

As soon as she could speak at the age of 16 months, she’d pull the phone off the hook as if trying to talk into it. Again and again, she said “Hello, Leila?” Later, Suzanne told her parents she was actually called Hanan and provided ample further information about her supposed previous life. She even scribbled a six-digit telephone number of her family before she had learned to read or write. But the number didn’t work. Nevertheless, when an acquaintance of Suzanne’s family made inquiries in the town she claimed to belong to, a Hanan matching Suzanne’s numerous statements was identified. Even the phone number was almost right: Suzanne had only transposed the last two digits. However, the two families were entirely unknown to each other. The day before Hanan died after a critical operation, she tried to reach her daughter Leila on the phone—in vain. When little Suzanne met Hanan’s former husband for the first time at the age of five, he being a complete stranger to her in conventional terms, she immediately recognized him as “her” husband and forged a strong relationship with him. When she visited him, the little girl sat on his lap and rested her head against his chest. From her home, she’d call him three times a day. Obviously, this caused a bit of a strain in this man’s new family life because his second wife wasn’t too pleased with the constant phone calls from a five-year-old who insisted on being her husband’s first wife. Twenty years later, Suzanne was still unmarried and called Hanan’s former husband “maybe more than once a week”.

But this is only one example. Tom Shroder, author of Old Souls, was particularly impressed by the abundance of CORT in Lebanon, where new cases worthy of investigation seemed to pop up at every turn. They were just normal. Visiting India, you’ll meet seven-year-old Preeti in a difficult to reach end-of-the-road village.

As soon as she could speak, Preeti explained to her siblings that “this is your house, not my house. These are your parents, not mine.” She provided further information about the life of a girl named Sheila who died in a car accident. Ultimately, when Preeti was four, a matching family was identified in the village she claimed to belong to. When Sheila’s father paid Preeti his first visit to her home—unannounced and again, as a complete stranger to this girl in conventional terms—she recognized him, clung to him, and insisted so stubbornly on going with this stranger to their alleged former home that her parents eventually agreed.

Strong emotions and a stubborn identification with the previous personality are not unusual in CORT. In one particularly moving case, the CORT subject married the widow of the man whose life he remembered as soon as he was grown up; he even had children with his previous wife again. But also when the children talk about the death of the person whose life they claim to remember, they may exhibit strong emotions and identifications. Indian psychologist Satwant Pasricha, who

Satwant Pasricha

studied dozens of CORT and joined Stevenson and Shroder on their travels through India, arranging most of their trips, commented about a little girl who remembered the life of another girl who fell into a well and drowned:

“When she talked about her memories of dying [...] I could see she was really reliving the terror of it. You can’t quantify that, but that was the sort of thing that persuaded me these stories might be real.”

Pasricha was not the only scientist who accompanied Stevenson during his decades of research, or who performed similar research without his help. In India, for example, Professor P. Pal investigated the case of a girl named Sukla Gupta before Stevenson was able to investigate the case himself.

Sukla remembered the life of a mother who died leaving a small baby behind her, Minu. Her last thoughts were concerned with who would be taking care of Minu. Even before Sukla spoke about her previous life, she would cradle a pillow or a piece of wood in her arms, calling it “Minu”. When Sukla later provided sufficient information to allow identification of Minu’s family and was eventually reunited with all of them including Minu, she was overwhelmed with emotion.

Pal concluded the article about his investigation with these thoughts about Sukla’s behavior, sympathizing with the reincarnation model:

“How else one can explain [her] emotions in the presence of Minu, who is eight years her senior, or wifely feelings for a man of 42 years in a girl under six [...] A girl of five cannot be tutored to simulate these feelings and that too not for an hour or two but for days and months.”

Monday, April 11, 2022

Old Souls: Nahm excerpt #7

Of all survival phenomena, CORT attained the highest survival score. Hence, they constitute the best available evidence for survival of human consciousness after permanent bodily death. Furthermore, they offer better research prospects than ADCs, NDEs, mental mediumship or other survival phenomena.

Therefore, I will discuss the fascinating phenomenology of CORT in more detail, highlighting numerous important facets. In doing so, I will treat reports of CORT as authentic in Ian Stevenson’s sense.* Accepting CORT reports as authentic in the present context is useful because the eyewitness reports might simply be authentic and correspond to what really happened—and explanatory models for a given phenomenon must be able to provide a theoretical explanation covering the full phenomenology described, or to provide good reasons for rejecting the assumed notion of authenticity.

As mentioned earlier, studies of CORT have chiefly been conducted by Stevenson. His books are packed with technical details about how the interviews with the children and their families were performed, but also with tables and considerations about the strengths and the weaknesses of each studied case, and hundreds of exotic names of people, towns, and villages that are difficult to memorize for readers who are used to Western names. As a result, most of his books share the reputation of being a rather dry read.

For readers not yet familiar with the literature on CORT, I consider the book Old Souls written by award-winning journalist Tom Shroder to be the most captivating introduction to Stevenson’s work. In 1997 and 1998, Shroder accompanied Stevenson on research trips to Lebanon and India—and then skillfully composed a lively account of these travels. Another advantage of his account is that the reader learns about Stevenson’s work from an impartial observer’s perspective, provided by somebody with no specific agenda to promote parapsychology and/or reincarnation.

Nevertheless, Shroder fleshed out the names of the children and their kin with substance and emotion, and evoked visual imagery of settlements so remote that it is impossible to imagine how difficult it was to reach them when just reading Stevenson’s matter-of-fact texts. As it would hardly have been possible to arrange appointments with potential interviewees in these locations, Stevenson simply drove to his points of interest, hoping for the best. In Lebanon, he passed bombed villages and ruins inhabited by his informants, and climbed narrow, vertiginous mountain roads leading to hamlets rarely visited by strangers of whatever kind.

In India, he spent hours and hours amidst the packed bedlam of Indian roads, traffic jams, dirt, and poverty, crouching patiently in the car’s backseat. Travelling 75 miles to a village by car might take six hours. The reception from the families they visited was sometimes undisguisedly hostile and aggressive. Threatening eyes would stare at Stevenson, Shroder, and their companions: Why would rich Westerners visit such poor places, asking uncomfortable questions that evoke unwanted emotions without even offering adequate presents or money? Have they come to take our child away?

In contrast to what is sometimes purported by critics of Stevenson’s work—more on that later—the interviewers frequently encountered reluctance, downplaying of children’s memories, sad emotions about bygone times, sobbing children and parents, already-strained family ties under pressure, and all this intertwined with one prominent topic: death.

One might also wonder: Was Stevenson, a trained psychiatrist who had even published a book on psychiatric examination in 1969, really so naïve that he exposed himself to all this stress and danger for four decades without ever realizing that every case he investigated rested on misinterpretation and fraud, as some of his critics presume?

Finally, Shroder’s book serves as a brilliant introduction to CORT for one more reason: In the course of his travels with Stevenson, he encountered practically all aspects of CORT that are important for identifying the best explanatory model for them, the crucial issue to be discussed in Chapter 4 of this essay. Therefore, let me now take you on a short trip through Lebanon and India with Stevenson and Shroder, stopping every once in a while to introduce important aspects of CORT.

*Stevenson writes: “By authentic, I mean that the reports given to investigators by informants and then set out by myself describe events with satisfactory closeness to the events as they really happened. [...] It is, in principle, no different from the striving of lawyers to reconstruct the events of a crime [...] to understand what really happened in the past.”

Saturday, April 9, 2022

Cases of the reincarnation type: Nahm excerpt #6

Although Westerners may be more familiar with NDEs than with cases of the reincarnation type (CORT), people who claim to remember previous lives are not at all uncommon even in the West. In general, cases involving young children who speak spontaneously about past lives are most compelling because they are less prone to being created artificially than cases involving adults, be it purposefully or involuntarily.

A famous CORT unfolded in the early 1930s when a little Indian girl named Shanti Devi claimed to remember the life of a Lugdi Devi who had lived in Mathura, 90 miles from Shanti’s present home in Delhi. Shanti provided numerous details about the life of Lugdi. After some of her statements had been verified, the case stirred such attention that Mahatma Gandhi established an official government committee to probe her claims. Shanti had never been to Mathura at that time, so the committee took her there and observed her reactions closely. In Mathura, Shanti recognized several people known to Lugdi, knew the way to Lugdi’s home, and showed impressive knowledge about the interior of the building, especially of its state several years ago. Shanti even disclosed where Lugdi had hidden money—something only known by Lugdi and Lugdi’s widowed husband who accompanied the committee. He was just as surprised as the others by Shanti’s behavior and knowledge.

Systematic field investigations of CORT were begun in the 1960s by Ian Stevenson. He traveled the entire planet for four decades looking for children who claimed to remember a past life. As a result, he published dozens of scientific articles as well as eight comprehensive books in which he reported his most remarkable findings from India, Sri Lanka, Burma, Thailand, Lebanon, Turkey, Africa, the Americas, and Europe. Researchers have now documented more than 2,500 CORT. In typical cases, young children begin to talk about a past life between the age of two and five. In CORT studies, the child is usually referred to as the “subject”, and the person whose life they claim to remember is the “previous personality”. If a deceased person who matches the child’s statements can be identified, a case is considered “solved”. If a satisfactory identification is not possible, the case remains “unsolved”. In later years, often between the ages of five and eight, the subject’s memories of a past life start to fade. Still, numerous CORT subjects have retained some memories into early adulthood and even well into later adulthood. These basic patterns apply to CORT all around the globe in different cultures, whether they have a belief in reincarnation or not.

One of the most intriguing traits of CORT is their richness in survival-related phenomena. In fact, they contain numerous incidences of the other survival phenomena already introduced. For example, many CORT begin with an “announcing dream”, often dreamed by a future parent, in which the deceased person announces that they will be born into a specific family. Sometimes, the deceased also appear in a “departure dream” in which they tell a member of their previous family that they will be reborn in another family. There are even a few cases on record in which the deceased spirit was seen as an apparition that indicated its interest in becoming reborn to the percipient. Obviously, all these experiences represent varieties of typical after-death contacts (ADCs). CORT share another commonality with ADCs: In both cases, a disproportionate number of the personalities manifesting again had died a sudden and violent death, indicating they had been torn away from “unfinished business”.

Moreover, about 20% of CORT subjects report having memories of events that occurred during the intermission between their death in the previous life and their birth into the current life. In many of these cases, the children claim that they continued to observe what happened to the dead body of the previous personality from an OBE-perspective, just as is reported from NDEs. The subjects may even provide verifiable information about these occurrences. But while reports of veridical perceptions reported from OBEs during NDEs are often accepted as being authentic by physicalists and are attributed to residual brain functions, this cannot work for CORT subjects who give veridical accounts of events that occurred in this intermission. Here, the only option left for physicalists is postulating that these cases are not authentic.

There are also accounts in which CORT subjects have described how they found and entered their new bodies, sometimes providing verified details regarding specific circumstances. Similarly, some NDErs have described trying to enter the body of a newborn baby or a child but giving up on it and returning to their own body. Reports like these indicate that the line separating NDEs on the one hand (returning to one’s own body) and CORT on the other hand (returning to another body) might be very thin. In addition, CORT are not only associated with ADCs and NDEs, but sometimes also with mental mediumship. This is the case when deceased communicators at mediumistic sittings announce that they will be born into a specific family, and a child being born later in this family reports memories that pertain to the past life of this communicator.

Additionally, CORT can include an objective dimension in that they may include physical features such as birthmarks or birth defects that can contribute to the identification of a matching previous personality or to the confirmation of an identification. About one third of CORT subjects have such somatic features.

The complexity of CORT is reflected in the assessment of their survival score. Their investigability is “high” (4) because cases can be documented “in the making” and then followed-up for years, even by different researchers. Many CORT involve numerous eyewitnesses who can be interviewed repeatedly under optimal conditions of observation. In some cases, Stevenson and his colleagues interviewed more than 30 informants, in one particularly important case. Generally, they agreed on the crucial details of a case. Modern CORT, in particular, also allow the verification of claims about previous lives through written documents and other objective sources. Stevenson knew that this approach would essentially equal the approach pursued in courts, as exemplified in his explanation of the term “authentic” in the context of his studies:

“By authentic, I mean that the reports given to investigators by informants and then set out by myself describe events with satisfactory closeness to the events as they really happened. [...] It is, in principle, no different from the striving of lawyers to reconstruct the events of a crime [...] to understand what really happened in the past.”

In court, a striking agreement of more than 30 eyewitnesses would carry enormous weight. The repeatability of CORT is likewise “high” (4) because they are not at all uncommon, especially among cultures holding a belief in reincarnation. But new CORT are continually found and investigated even in the West. Given that they are numerous, frequently rich in detail and possess a multifaceted phenomenology, which may even include a tangible physical dimension involving birthmarks and birth defects, the quantitative and qualitative strength of CORT are also both “high” (4). Obviously, the relevance of (solved) CORT for human survival is also “high” (4), especially if they contain verifiable elements from the intermission.