Past-life Interval memories: Taylor excerpt #22

Greg Taylor writes: Another study that made use of the University of Virginia Division of Perceptual Studies (DOPS) database involved an analysis of ‘interval memories’ in past-life cases – that is, recollections by the children of events said to have occurred during the interval between the death of the previous personality and the birth of the child. It was found that interval memories were present in approximately 20% of the cases, and that children who reported interval memories, compared to those who did not, “made a greater number of statements about the previous life that were verified to be accurate, recalled more names from the previous life, had higher scores on the strength-of-case scale, and were more likely to state the names of the previous personalities and to give accurate details about their deaths.”

DOPS researchers: Bruce Greyson, Ed Kelly, Marieta Pehlivanova, Kim Penberthy, Jim B. Tucker

Furthermore, a comparison of interval memories reported in Burmese cases were compared to reports of near-death experiences (NDEs). The study found features similar to the transcendental component of Western NDEs, and significant areas of overlap with Asian NDEs (e.g. they saw themselves from outside their body, encountered a mystical being or presence, and met deceased spirits). According to Dr. Tucker, based on this it is possible that “interval memories and NDEs could be considered parts of the same overall phenomenon, reports of an afterlife.”

Furthermore, a comparison of interval memories reported in Burmese cases were compared to reports of near-death experiences (NDEs). The study found features similar to the transcendental component of Western NDEs, and significant areas of overlap with Asian NDEs (e.g. they saw themselves from outside their body, encountered a mystical being or presence, and met deceased spirits). According to Dr. Tucker, based on this it is possible that “interval memories and NDEs could be considered parts of the same overall phenomenon, reports of an afterlife.”

One case recorded by Dr. Stevenson also provides an account of a veridical out-of-body experience during the interval period. The subject of the case complained of ‘seeing’ her ashes being scattered, rather than buried as requested. Upon checking, it was found that the previous personality had requested that her ashes be buried under a tree at her temple, but her daughter had found the tree’s root system made it impossible to dig there, so she scattered them instead.

Based on the number of strong cases of past-life memories collected over the past 60 years by researchers, Dr. Tucker says he is “now ready to say we have good evidence that some young children have memories of a life from the past.”

Currently, the best explanation for the strongest cases appears to be that memories, emotions, and even physical traumas can, at least under certain circumstances, carry over from one life to a subsequent one... [T]he cases contribute to the evidence for survival of consciousness after death.

 

Greg Taylor, “What is the Best Available Evidence for the Survival of Human Consciousness after Permanent Bodily Death?” An essay written for the Bigelow contest addressing this question. I am presenting excerpts without references, but this essay is available with footnotes and a bibliography at https://bigelowinstitute.org/contest_winners3.php.

A Prayer for All Seasons

O God of life and death.

 

May your grace and peace come,

may your will be done,

on earth as in heaven.

 

 

May we be healthy and humble

‘til our time has come.

 

And as we forgive those who’ve done us harm,

may we be forgiven for the harm we’ve done.

And may we resist temptation and evil.

For you are the Way, the Truth, Light and Love.

Amen.

 

 

 

                                                                                                            Robert Traer

Western reincrnation cases: Taylor excerpt #21

Greg Taylor writes: One of the initial criticisms of Dr. Stevenson’s research had been that the cases he reported were all from locations in which reincarnation was part of the religious culture. He addressed this issue in a paper in 1983 in which he documented 79 American cases – many of which occurred in families who did not have a belief in reincarnation – noting how they resembled cases from elsewhere in many ways, such as the early age at which they were reported and the effect on the child’s behavior.cxliii In recent years DOPS has concentrated on investigating more American cases, and according to Dr. Jim Tucker researchers “can now say with certainty that this is not purely a cultural phenomenon that takes place in areas with a belief in reincarnation.”

For instance, one of the most prominent American cases so far recorded is that of James Leininger, born in 1998 into a middle-class, Protestant Christian family in Louisiana, with his father in particular being quite opposed to the idea of reincarnation. At age 2, James began saying the phrase “airplane crash on fire,” and also slamming his toy plane nose first into the family's coffee table. He also began having nightmares multiple times a week, kicking his feet in the air and screaming “airplane crash on fire, little man can’t get out.” Not long after, his parents were able to have conversations with him where he told them his plane had crashed on fire, he’d been shot down by the Japanese, and that he flew a Corsair. When he was 28 months old, he said his plane had flown off a boat, and when his parents asked him what the name of the boat was, he said “Natoma”. It turns out there was a USS Natoma Bay that was stationed in the Pacific during WWII. When his parents asked him if he could remember anyone else’s name, he responded with “Jack Larsen.” When he was 30 months old, James’s father purchased the book The Battle for Iwo Jima. On looking in the book, James pointed at a photo and said that was where his plane was shot down.

Through his own searching, James’s father found that there was indeed a pilot on the Natoma Bay named Jack Larsen, and that he was still alive. Additionally, there was only one pilot from the ship who was lost during the Battle of Iwo Jima: a 21-year-old named James M. Huston, Jr. Huston died in exactly the manner, and location, that James claimed to remember. Additionally, James appeared to have knowledge from the past life experience that a young child would not know (e.g. that Corsairs got flat tires all the time), and was able to discuss personal details of his life with Huston’s surviving sister Anne. “The child was so convincing,” she said in a 2004 interview, “coming up with all these things that there’s no way in the world he could know, unless there is a spiritual thing.”

In reviewing the case, Dr. Tucker was able to rule out mundane explanations:

He could not have learned from the people around him, because they knew nothing about either the ship or Huston when he began talking about them. James had made all of the documented statements by the time he was four years old, so he could not have read about them. Regardless, no published materials about James Huston are known to exist. No television program focusing on Natoma Bay or James Huston appear to have been made either.

“On the face of it,” Dr. Tucker concluded, the most obvious explanation was that James “experienced a life as James Huston Jr. before having his current one.”

Other recent American cases with evidential weight include that of Ryan Hammons, who had memories of a past life in Hollywood – not as a famous star, but as an extra. Researchers verified over 50 of Ryan’s statements as matching with the previous personality, Marty Martins, despite many of them requiring archival searches to uncover. Another case, of a little boy who remembers dying in an explosion in Vietnam, also has strong evidence to back it up. The boy gave his (unusual) surname, the state he was from, and the age he died (21). Dr. Tucker conducted a picture test with the boy when he was five years old, showing him images that were relevant to the previous life – such as a photo of the school the previous personality attended, and family photos he had obtained from the previous personality’s sister – along with similar, but non-connected images as controls. Altogether, Dr. Tucker showed him eight pairs of pictures, and while he didn’t make a choice on two of them, he correctly chose six from six with the others.

 

Greg Taylor, “What is the Best Available Evidence for the Survival of Human Consciousness after Permanent Bodily Death?” An essay written for the Bigelow contest addressing this question. I am presenting excerpts without references, but this essay is available with footnotes and a bibliography at https://bigelowinstitute.org/contest_winners3.php.

Dr Tucker's research: Taylor excerpt #20

Dr Jim Tucker

Greg Taylor writes: In his final years, and subsequent to his passing in 2007, Dr. Stevenson’s work was continued on by other researchers, perhaps most notably child psychiatrist Dr. Jim Tucker, who in 2014 became the director of the Division of Perceptual Studies (DOPS) at the University of Virginia. In that time, focus has moved beyond simply tracking down individual cases to also include examination of groups of cases to get a ‘bigger picture’ view of the phenomenon. To do so, each case of past-life memories collected by researchers is coded with regards to 200 variables and entered into a database, allowing large-scale analysis of the reports.

For instance, a strength-of-case scale – based on birthmarks/birth defects, behaviors related to the previous life, and other aspects – was applied to 799 cases. It showed that the apparent strength of cases “did not correlate with the initial attitude that the children’s parents had toward their statements, indicating that parental enthusiasm did not make the cases appear stronger than they actually were... The strength of the cases also correlated with the age that the children began talking about the previous life in a negative direction (so the children started earlier in the stronger cases), the amount of emotion that children demonstrated when discussing the memories, and the amount of facial resemblance between the children and the deceased individuals.”

DOPS now has over 2500 cases of past-life memories in their files – from every continent apart from Antarctica - 1400 of which have resulted in identification of the “previous personality." 400 cases involve a child with a birthmark or birth defect that corresponds with the fatal wound on the previous personality, along with another 200 in which such a mark or deformity matches a non-fatal wound. Most of the children only ever describe one past life, and their memories are mostly from near the end of that life; 75% of the subjects mention how they died. The average interval between the two lives (i.e.. the death of the previous personality, and birth of the child relating the memory) is 4.5 years (though the median is only seventeen months) – however, in a small number of cases the interval is much longer, sometimes more than half a century.

Greg Taylor, “What is the Best Available Evidence for the Survival of Human Consciousness after Permanent Bodily Death?” An essay written for the Bigelow contest addressing this question. I am presenting excerpts without references, but this essay is available with footnotes and a bibliography at https://bigelowinstitute.org/contest_winners3.php.

 

 

Birthmarks and wounds: Taylor excerpt #19

Greg Taylor writes: In the course of his work collecting reports of past-life memories over several decades, Dr. Stevenson had also noted – and investigated, but not published – a curiously large subset of the cases: those in which the person reporting past-life memories was born with birthmarks or defects that matched wounds on the body of the claimed previous personality. In 1997, he published a 2268-page-long, two-volume collection detailing more than 200 of these cases, titled Reincarnation and Biology: A Contribution to the Etiology of Birthmarks and Birth Defects (along with a shorter, more accessible synopsis, Where Reincarnation and Biology Intersect).

As such cases provided corroborating physical evidence to back up the testimony of the children regarding their past-life memories, Stevenson went to great lengths to verify their details. He obtained autopsy reports, medical or police reports, and eyewitness testimony about the wounds on the past-life personality, and in his book included numerous pictures substantiating the similarities between the birthmarks/defects and the wounds. Some notable cases include a young girl with malformed fingers who remembered a previous life as a man whose fingers were chopped off; another girl with a pale, scar-like birthmark that encircled her head who remembered the life of a man who had skull surgery; and a boy with a malformed right side of his face and ear who had past-life memories of being a man who died as a result of a shotgun blast to the right side of his face.

Furthermore, a number of the cases involved double birthmarks, and were tied to deaths of the previous personality by gunshot. In most, the size and shape of the birthmarks on the children also corresponded with the entry and exit wounds of the bullet: a small, neat mark where the bullet entered the body of the previous personality, and a larger, more irregularly shaped mark matching the location of the bullet’s exit.

For example, a three-year-old boy in Thailand named Chanai Choomalaiwong began saying he had been a schoolteacher named Bua Kai, and that he had been shot and killed on his way to school. He also provided the names of his parents, his wife, and his children. When Chanai was taken back to the town where he said he lived, he led the way to his house, which was discovered to be the home of an elderly couple whose son, Bua Kai Lawnak, had been a teacher. He had been murdered eight years previous (five years before Chanai was born), shot in the head as he rode his bicycle to school. The elderly couple tested Chanai, who recognized Bua Kai’s belongings and one of his children (insisting that they call him ‘Father’).

Dr. Stevenson spoke with several of Bua Kai’s family, including his widow, who remembered that the doctor who examined her husband’s body had said he must have been shot from behind, because he had a small wound on the back of his head and a larger wound on his forehead. Bua Kai’s wounds matched two birthmarks on Chanai’s head, a small one on the back of his head, and a bigger one on the front. Overall, Dr. Stevenson published eighteen cases that involved double birthmarks matching wounds on the body of the previous personality.

Many children also exhibit behaviors that seem connected to their memories and become emotional when discussing events and people from their previous life. For instance:

A little girl in India named Sukla Gupta was under the age of two when she began cradling a block of wood or a pillow and calling it ‘Minu’. She gave a number of details about a past life, such as the name and section of a village eleven miles away. A woman there, the mother of an infant named Minu, had died six years before Sukla was born. When Sukla was five and Minu eleven, she met Minu and cried. Sukla acted maternal toward the older girl, and when Minu later fell ill, Sukla became distraught upon hearing the news and demanded to be taken to her.

A large number of children also have phobias that are linked to the manner of death of the previous personality. Of the 52 cases that DOPS has on file where the previous personality drowned, 43 of the children were scared of water. Dr. Stevenson examined a series of 387 cases and found that 36% of the children exhibited such fears, usually from an extremely young age, sometimes manifesting even before they had begun making claims about past life memories. They also sometimes, rather disconcertingly, acted out the way in which the previous person died, such as one child who re-enacted the suicide of the previous personality by putting a stick under his chin and pretending it was a rifle.

Many also display play behaviors consistent with their previous life, such as a young boy who spent much of his time pretending to be a shopkeeper of biscuits and soda water, which was the occupation of the previous personality. In a series of 278 cases, Dr. Stevenson found that almost a quarter of the children engaged in play related to their memories of a past life, despite it not being a part of their current life and surroundings.

 

Greg Taylor, “What is the Best Available Evidence for the Survival of Human Consciousness after Permanent Bodily Death?” An essay written for the Bigelow contest addressing this question. I am presenting excerpts without references, but this essay is available with footnotes and a bibliography at https://bigelowinstitute.org/contest_winners3.php.

Memories of past lives: Taylor excerpt #18

Greg Taylor writes: If consciousness can survive physical death – as the evidence we have so far reviewed strongly suggests – does that mean it can continue on in a new body? Incredibly, the answer to that question appears to be ‘yes’, based on the convincing evidence collected by researchers over the course of the past six decades.

The instigator of this modern research was Dr. Ian Stevenson, a respected psychiatrist with some 60 publications in the medical and psychiatric literature when he took on the position of Chairman of the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Virginia in 1957. As an extensive reader, Stevenson had become intrigued by a number of strange reports of individuals who appeared to have memories of a previous life and thought the topic worthy of further investigation. He collected and analyzed 44 of them in a paper that was published in 1960, noting later that once he had pulled the cases together as a group and viewed the similarities – most notably, that “they predominantly featured young children,” that “it just seemed inescapable to me that there must be something there...I couldn’t see how they could all be faked or they could all be deception.” Stevenson subsequently traveled to India and Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) to investigate reports in person and uncovered 32 more cases during these trips alone.

As Stevenson found, a typical case of past-life memories involves a young child about two to three years old who begins telling parents or siblings about a life they led in another time and place, and usually stops around age seven when most seem to lose the memories (which is also the age when children typically begin losing their memories of being an infant). These memories arise spontaneously – hypnotic regression is not involved – and the child usually describes their ‘previous personality’ as being an ordinary person of no particular note, rather than a well-known historical figure. What often does set their lives apart – in some 70% of the reported cases – is that they died an unnatural, often traumatic, death.

As Dr. Stevenson explained:

The child usually feels a considerable pull back toward the events of that life and he frequently importunes his parents to let him return to the community where he claims that he formerly lived. If the child makes enough particular statements about the previous life, the parents (usually reluctantly) begin inquiries about their accuracy. Often, indeed usually, such attempts at verification do not occur until several years after the child has begun to speak of the previous life. If some verification results, members of the two families visit each other and ask the child whether he recognizes places, objects, and people of his supposed previous existence.

Stevenson’s work attracted the attention of Chester Carlson, inventor of the Xerox machine, and with Carlson’s financial support in 1967 he established the Division of Personality Studies (now the Division of Perceptual Studies, or DOPS) at the University of Virginia as a dedicated research center. He was thus able to dedicate the bulk of his time over the next four decades to investigating cases of past-life memories, until his passing in 2007. In that time, he wrote and published several books that documented his meticulously researched cases. The first of his books, published in 1966, was Twenty Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation. It showcased his careful research, determining exactly what children reporting past-life memories had said about their previous life, before painstakingly attempting to verify whether those statements were correct and had not been embellished or informed through some mundane information channel. Stevenson knew that such a controversial topic had to be approached in a very careful manner, so he sought evidence that was difficult to dispute. For example, he considered any statements made by subjects after they had met or been in communication with their ‘past-life’ families to be tainted; instead, his priority was to examine statements made before any contact was established. The American Journal of Psychiatry, in reviewing his research, was impressed enough to remark that the cases were “recorded in such full detail as to persuade the open mind that reincarnation is a tenable hypothesis to explain them.”

However, it should be noted that Stevenson consistently stated he wasn’t attempting to prove any particular hypothesis or religious doctrine, but instead was simply documenting and examining a mystery and remained open to all explanations. Washington Post journalist Tom Shroder, who traveled with Stevenson on some of his research trips and documented his experience in the book Old Souls: Compelling evidence from children who remember past lives, said it was this aspect that attracted him to Stevenson’s work in the first place: “He has never said anything like ‘Believe this because I believe it.’ What he is saying is, ‘Look at what I’ve found. Examine it any way you want to examine it. Think of your own questions, find tests of truth that have escaped me, and if you can imagine a more reasonable explanation for all this, please let me know.”

After the publication of his first book, Stevenson continued traveling the world investigating hundreds more claims of past-life memories across a number of countries and cultures. He intermittently reported cases in journal papers, but from 1975 to 1983 also published four volumes of a book series titled Cases of the Reincarnation Type, which documented in detail the large number of cases he had collected from India, Sri Lanka, Lebanon and Turkey, and Thailand and Burma, respectively. Once again, scientific reviews of his research were exemplary; the book editor of JAMA (the Journal of the American Medical Association) wrote of the first volume that “he has painstakingly and unemotionally collected a detailed series of cases in India in which the evidence is difficult to explain on any other grounds... He has placed on record a large amount of data that cannot be ignored.”

Other researchers were inspired by Stevenson’s work to do their own research on the topic, investigating and publishing reports on other cases of past-life memories. In 1994 a study, based on 123 cases across five cultures collected by three independent researchers, replicated his results, concluding – like Dr. Stevenson – that “some children identify themselves with a person about whom they have no normal way of knowing. In these cases, the children apparently exhibit knowledge and behavior appropriate to that person.” By the late 1990s, the body of scientific evidence for memories of a previous life had become so substantial that even Carl Sagan, the famous scientist and skeptic, said that he thought it was a claim that merited serious study.

 

Greg Taylor, “What is the Best Available Evidence for the Survival of Human Consciousness after Permanent Bodily Death?” An essay written for the Bigelow contest addressing this question. I am presenting excerpts without references, but this essay is available with footnotes and a bibliography at https://bigelowinstitute.org/contest_winners3.php.

Robert Crookall's research: Taylor excerpt #17

Greg Taylor writes: There is one more aspect of research into mediumship that helps to establish that it is indeed interconnected with those other areas: accounts of the dying experience, as related by the dead themselves.

More than a decade before the publication of Life After Life – the 1975 book that started the public fascination with near-death experiences – another researcher, Dr. Robert Crookall, investigated the phenomenon and wrote about it in a pair of relatively obscure books: The Supreme Adventure (1961) and Intimations of Immortality (1965). Crookall cited numerous examples of what he called “pseudo-death,” noting the archetypal elements that Raymond Moody would later bring to the public’s attention as the NDE. What’s more, however, he also compared these ‘pseudo-death’ stories with accounts of the dying process as related by those who claimed to have already gone through it: deceased communicators speaking through mediums. Intriguingly, Crookall found a number of the same recurring elements, despite the fact that they were recorded well before the details of NDEs became well-known.

For example, Crookall noted that, according to the deceased communicators, the newly-dead are usually met by other deceased loved ones, just as has been related by those who have undergone NDEs and ELEs. This of course may not be considered a surprising thing for a medium to say – it’s probably what most people would hope for after dying. But the common elements continue and include some of the more idiosyncratic features of the NDE. For instance, Crookall noted that communicators often declare that “in the early stages of transition, they experienced a panoramic review of their past lives” – it’s worth emphasizing that the words used, “panoramic review,” are the exact same as used by a number of NDErs (and see also Moody’s archetypal NDE description mentioned earlier). In one case the communicator recounted that shortly after death “the scenes of the past life” are revealed; another said that upon ‘waking’ his “entire life unreeled itself.” Another said that after dying his thoughts “raced over the record of a whole long lifetime,” while another communicator said he saw “the events of my past life pass, in a long procession, before me.” One account sounds almost exactly like a typical NDE, with the dead communicator first having an out-of- body experience where he looked down upon his body and those gathered around him, before:

...the scenes of my whole life seemed to move before me like a panorama; every act seemed as though it were drawn in life size and was really present: it was all there, down to the closing scenes.

Crookall’s research also found that, just as in the case above, communicators regularly made note of the OBE component. For example, one communicator noted that he “seemed to rise up out of my body.” According to another, “I was not lying in the bed, but floating in the air, a little above it. I saw the body, stretched out straight.”

And communicators also described one other familiar element of the NDE: traveling through a tunnel and emerging into another realm full of light. “I saw in front of me a dark tunnel,” said one, before traveling through it and then stepping “out of the tunnel into a new world.” Another communicator noted that they remembered “a curious opening, as if one had passed through subterranean passages and found oneself near the mouth of a cave... The light was much stronger outside.”

The common elements are compelling. For anyone familiar with the literature, these reports through mediums are startlingly similar to the accounts of NDErs – and yet Crookall collected them years before the archetype of the NDE became common knowledge. In having one anomalistic phenomenon seemingly confirm another, we might see a parallel to the ‘impossible’ anomaly of stones falling from the sky being confirmed by combining reports from two different sources – for example, eye-witness testimony of a fireball, and the subsequent discovery by others of strange rocks in the same locality. 

 

Greg Taylor, “What is the Best Available Evidence for the Survival of Human Consciousness after Permanent Bodily Death?” An essay written for the Bigelow contest addressing this question. I am presenting excerpts without references, but this essay is available with footnotes and a bibliography at https://bigelowinstitute.org/contest_winners3.php.