Eben Alexander's NDE: Cook excerpt #23

Nick Cook writes: The neuroscientist whose NDE resulted in his best-selling book ‘Proof of Heaven’⁶⁹, Dr Eben Alexander, said that cross-over data gathered from the modalities may be key to our understanding of the interconnectedness of consciousness.

Dr Alexander became ill with acute bacterial meningoencephalitis in November 2008 and quickly fell into coma. For the next seven days he remained on a ventilator – scans of his brain showed massive damage. This, however, was his portal into an extraordinarily rich NDE, in which his conscious awareness was transported through levels of experience to arrive finally at what he described as ‘the Core’, a void ‘filled to overflowing with the infinite healing power of the all-loving deity at the source’.

Hoffman’s ideas are interesting, Dr Alexander told me, but they don’t go far enough⁷⁰. “The literature is there, the data is there – it’s not as if we need to ask what we have to do next to prove this.” This doesn’t mean, he went on to say, that we don’t have a lot more work to do to uncover what he calls the ‘mechanisms of consciousness’ – as a neuroscientist he remains intrigued by the way in which we communicate with the ‘deeper realms’ – psychedelic drugs, or entheogens, as he refers to them, being a case in point.

In his second book, ‘Living In A Mindful Universe’⁷¹, Dr Alexander quotes a 2012 report from Imperial College London, in which fMRI was used to evaluate various brain regions under the influence of psilocybin, the active ingredient in psychedelic mushrooms.

The most remarkable finding, he wrote, was that it demonstrated a reduction in activity of the major connection regions of the brain in those who were having the most profound psychedelic experiences – the opposite of what was expected.

This may be evidence, he told me, that DMT*, LSD, psilocybin and other entheogenic plant medicines are affecting the brain’s ‘main calculator’, the neocortex, and in so doing “revealing the vast reality that exists that we’re not normally aware of – the reality that comes into view in near-death and shared-death experiences. It’s by going into that ancient circuit that you can actually separate your conscious awareness from the here and now of the physical brain and the sense of self.”

*Dimethyltryptamine

 

69 Proof of Heaven: A Neurosurgeon’s Journey into the Afterlife, Dr. Eben Alexander, Piatkus, 2012.
70 From my interview with him on 15.12.20.

71 Living in a Mindful Universe: A Neurosurgeon’s Journey into the Heart of Consciousness, Dr. Eben Alexander, Piatkus, 2017.

Nick Cook is an author of 20 fiction and non-fiction book titles in the US and the UK. A former technology journalist, he is well-known for his ground-breaking, best-selling non-fiction book, The Hunt for Zero Point. He has also written, produced, and presented two feature-length documentaries for the History and Discovery channels. In 2021, Cook was amongst 29 prize winners in the BICS institute’s essay competition on consciousness. His essay is available at https://bigelowinstitute.org/contest_winners3.php.

Medium Suzanne Giesemann: Cook excerpt #22

Nick Cook writes: The evidential medium I interviewed at length was Suzanne Giesemann, a former US Navy commander, who once served as an aide to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff⁶⁵.

Suzanne’s capacity to derive verifiable, veridical information from the souls of the deceased has been scientifically scored by Gary E. Schwartz PhD, professor of psychology, medicine, neurology, psychiatry and surgery at the University of Arizona.

Professor Schwartz is a leading afterlife researcher who has conducted multiple exploratory investigations into the continuity of consciousness at the university’s Laboratory for Advances in Consciousness and Health. Having evaluated many mediums using the same process, he has rated Suzanne’s skills as amongst the very best – an endorsement I came across in her book, ‘Wolf’s Message’⁶⁶, which tells of her interactions with the spirit of a young man tragically killed by a bolt of lightning.

In a ‘pre-reading’ she details in the book – a pre-reading entails a spontaneous, unexpected communication with the deceased, without any feedback from relatives or friends about the deceased at the time the information is received (and thus represents much ‘cleaner’ data) – the number of ‘hits’ (i.e. verified pieces of data) about Wolf versus a ‘control’ were 73.5 per cent versus 5.6 per cent for the control.

Professor Schwartz points out that the probability of the difference between the scoring for Wolf versus the control as being ‘explainable by chance’ is less than one in a million. By contrast, he adds, the required criteria for statistical significance used in psychological research is less than one in twenty. He goes on to say that these findings do not in and of themselves prove that Suzanne had been communicating with Wolf but, along with other evidence, they do form a ‘compelling argument that Wolf’s efforts to communicate with Suzanne deserve to be taken seriously’⁶⁷. This, to me, appeared to point strongly to Wolf’s post-material existence as a functioning conscious entity retaining attributes of his personality. I asked Suzanne, therefore, about her conception of reality and our place in it – before, during and after ‘life’.

“(The) computer screen analogy is good,” she told me⁶⁸, revealing that, guided by a team of spiritual helpers she refers to as her ‘A-team’, she has come to use a similar analogy herself. “The screen is limitless intelligence, so we can call it the ‘One Mind’. But it arises as individual minds – and these minds experience life as a projection of stories. We are dense stories in physical form. I know that I, Suzanne, the story, am not the fulness of consciousness which is the screen itself – I am a projection of it.

“When I die,” she added, “my body is just one dense layer of that projection, but without it this pattern of consciousness – that’s my definition of a soul – still exists.”

65 My three interviews with Suzanne Giesemann were on 4.12.20, 10.12.20 and 19.1.21.
66 Copyright © Suzanne Giesemann, www.suzannegiesemann.com
67 From Appendix A, Wolf’s Message, ‘Statistical Analysis of Wolf Pre-Reading with Suzanne Giesemann’, Gary E. Schwartz, PhD.
68 From Suzanne’s first interview with me on 4.12.20.

 

Nick Cook is an author of 20 fiction and non-fiction book titles in the US and the UK. A former technology journalist, he is well-known for his ground-breaking, best-selling non-fiction book, The Hunt for Zero Point. He has also written, produced, and presented two feature-length documentaries for the History and Discovery channels. In 2021, Cook was amongst 29 prize winners in the BICS institute’s essay competition on consciousness. His essay is available at https://bigelowinstitute.org/contest_winners3.php.

 

Dean Radin research: Cook excerpt #21

Nick Cook writes: In seeking the best experiencers from each of FREE’s ‘contact modalities’, I received the valued advice of Dean Radin, Chief Scientist at IONS and Associated and Distinguished Professor of Integral and Transpersonal Psychology at the California Institute of Integral Studies.

Dean had been a close colleague of Dr Mitchell for many years, until Dr Mitchell’s death in 2016.

Having explained what I was looking to do, Dean put me in touch with experiencers whom he said were amongst the best exemplars across the modalities that I wanted to explore.

They included:

*An ‘evidential medium’ (mediums whose data is deemed to be provable via third party evidence) tested exhaustively at IONS and at the University of Arizona;

*A California-based shaman, tested extensively at IONS, who has worked with native healers around the world, most notably in North and Central America and South and East Asia;

*A trance-channeler tested exhaustively at IONS;

*And a neuroscientist whose 2008 near-death experience of realms he visited when ‘clinically brain-dead’ was detailed in a best-selling book.

In addition, I spoke with:

*An ex-US Navy officer who had undergone a series of unnerving experiences with ‘non-human intelligences’ after his ship encountered a UFO in the North Atlantic;

*A former US Army officer trained to remote view by Ingo Swann in the 1980s;

*And several practitioners of ‘DMT therapy’, in which experiencers – known as ‘DMT voyagers’ – open their minds supposedly to other realms via ingestion of the psychedelic drug dimethyltryptamine.

While I couldn’t claim the approach was rigorously scientific, it would employ proof- of-principles that would test the core assumptions.

A set of commonly ascribed features of different paranormal experiences would be plotted as yes/no responses along the x-axis. The experiencers would populate the y-axis. These, per the above, were: a UFO/ET contactee; an evidential medium; an NDE’er; a shaman; a channeler; a remote viewer; a deep meditator/lucid dreamer; and a DMT voyager.

The commonly ascribed paranormal features were: 

• Entoptics⁶³ and symbols;
• Entity and NHI encounters;
• A sense of knowing and deep connection;
• Instances of warning and precognition;
• ‘Psi gifts’ – psychic abilities that are claimed to be given to, or acquired by the experiencer during or after a psychic event;
• Instances of ‘miracle healing’;
• An overcoming or conquering of the fear of death;
• The acquisition of a sense of clear mission and/or purpose following an experience;
• An encounter with light;
• And an encounter with, or a profound sense of an omniscient intelligence at the heart of the encounter/experience expressed as ‘creator’ or ‘source’.

A tick (check) denoted a strong feature of the encounter/ experience⁶⁴.

As can be seen from the table below, certain modalities gather more ticks than others.

The near-death and shamanistic experiences, for example, score fully across the scorecard, while the remote viewing and meditation/lucid dreaming experiences do less well.

 

To repeat: the scorecard was never intended to capture all the features of an experience; the registering of a tick (check) is indicative of weighting only; and the modalities themselves are not exhaustive. What the table does show, however, is the degree of overlap amongst typically reported features of inner experiences – revealing, in effect, a set of common or shared features. These can be said to provide us with a level of ‘intersubjective verifiability’ about non-ordinary states of consciousness.

What it also shows – per the two pink shaded columns – is that all contactees across the modalities attested to encounters with ‘entities’ or ‘non-human intelligences’; and almost all to the presence of an omniscient, all-pervading intelligence – described variously as a ‘creator-presence’ or ‘source’ – as being embedded in the encounter.

The question is: are any of these entities, which include amongst them the souls of the departed, real?

63 ‘Entoptics’ appear as seemingly nonsensical symbols and hieroglyphs in a kaleidoscopic format, often, in the case of a DMT voyager, at the beginning of the encounter/experience. See Graham Hancock’s book, Supernatural: Meetings with the Ancient Teachers of Mankind.
64 The data are drawn from the interviewees and the literature I had researched during Phase 2 and are not intended to be exhaustive, merely indicative. 

 

Nick Cook is an author of 20 fiction and non-fiction book titles in the US and the UK. A former technology journalist, he is well-known for his ground-breaking, best-selling non-fiction book, The Hunt for Zero Point. He has also written, produced, and presented two feature-length documentaries for the History and Discovery channels. In 2021, Cook was amongst 29 prize winners in the BICS institute’s essay competition on consciousness. His essay is available at https://bigelowinstitute.org/contest_winners3.php.

We exist as holograms: Cook excerpt #20

Nick Cook writes: All I could say up to the end of my Phase 2 research with any beyond-reasonable- doubt conviction - that passed muster for me - was that consciousness was primary and extraordinary evidence existed for the survival of our ‘individual consciousness’.

I had gone as far as the research would allow. The more refined picture derived from across the project was that consciousness didn’t just survive; it continued – it had no beginning and no end; it just was. We exist as holograms in a holographic universe that is, in effect, ‘alive’. The next question was, were we - if by ‘we’ we mean an entity with intact awareness and aspects of the personality that we enjoy in this life?

To go beyond this point, I needed to address two questions: How/why phenomena project as ‘rogue icons’ on the screen of our ‘user interface? And: what conditions underwrite the ‘conditional reality’ effects that manifest as paranormal phenomena?

This impasse brought me to the second reason for my interest in Edgar Mitchell.

In addition to founding, in 1973, the Institute of Noetic Sciences (IONS), an organisation that brings scientific rigour to the exploration of mind and consciousness, he had been instrumental in setting up a body called ‘FREE’ - the Foundation for Research into Extraterrestrial and Extraordinary Experiences⁶¹.

"Nature's Mind: The Quantum Hologram"  

FREE theorises that all types of contact with what it calls ‘non-human intelligences’, including the departed – might actually be a single phenomenon that should be studied holistically. In this, it endorses what Pim van Lommel and others had concluded about the near-death experience: that experiences of the OBE, SDE and NDE variety were underpinned by a core, continuous aspect of consciousness.

FREE has gathered data across a range of what it refers to as ‘contact modalities’ – NDEs, remote viewing, shamanic encounters, channelling and others – that had, it said, yielded ‘numerous commonalities and variables’. One day, it hoped that these data would allow it to develop a ‘viable hypothesis for a possible unification theory of consciousness and contact with non-human intelligence’.

Hoffman’s ‘conscious realism’ model had allowed me to visualise how reality presented itself to us – by giving us just enough for us to be able to handle. Any more and we might undergo perhaps what is known as a ‘consciousness shift’.

We talk about consciousness shifts all the time, mostly without stopping to think what this actually means.

With deep, fundamental change in the world around us, we seem to be going through such a shift right now – and the appearance of unfamiliar icons on our user- interface may be indicative that ‘new lines of code’ are rewriting our whole conception of reality. For pointers to this, we need look no further than the acknowledgment in the Director of National Intelligence’s report to the US Congress⁶², delivered this June, that the UFO phenomenon (or ‘unidentified aerial phenomena’ in the parlance of the report) is real.

The subjective experience is no longer the pariah that it was, without place in the experimenter’s laboratory. Quantum mechanics – with its pivotal acknowledgment of the ‘observer in the loop’ - tells us how wrong it is that this was ever allowed to be.

FREE’s ‘contact modalities’ were heresy by any scientific yardstick, but since I was now beyond the view that mainstream science had primacy in any claim to providing us with a picture of the true nature of reality, I found myself looking at the ‘modalities’ as a tool that might, possibly, allow my research to go beyond Phase 2 to a Phase 3 - by probing the corner of the reality envelope beyond the last thing mainstream science currently acknowledges to be real: the in/out virtual particles of the zero- point energy field. This is where the final part of my research ultimately took me.

61 http://www.experiencer.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/Initial-Research-Data-Summary-FREE.pdf
62 https://www.dni.gov/files/ODNI/documents/assessments/Prelimary-Assessment-UAP-20210625.pdf

Nick Cook is an author of 20 fiction and non-fiction book titles in the US and the UK. A former technology journalist, he is well-known for his ground-breaking, best-selling non-fiction book, The Hunt for Zero Point. He has also written, produced, and presented two feature-length documentaries for the History and Discovery channels. In 2021, Cook was amongst 29 prize winners in the BICS institute’s essay competition on consciousness. His essay is available at https://bigelowinstitute.org/contest_winners3.php.

 

Edgar Mitchell’s research: Cook excerpt #19

Nick Cook writes: Ordinarily, we would say that of the two aspects of the NDE identified earlier - the ‘material aspect’, involving earthly impressions, and the ‘trans-material aspect’, in which the experiencer perceives phenomena in dimensions beyond our world⁵⁶ – only the former, because it relates to material ‘stuff’, can be brought back, discussed by a witness under cross-examination, and checked against the known, material facts.

But here, the research of a leading academic was hinting at an alternative: a set of data pointing to evidence of ‘permanent post-death survival’ in the trans-material realm might be cross-checkable via these two sets of experiencers, NDE’ers and past-lifers, if only a means could be devised of evaluating the evidence veridically.

Dr Pim van Lommel, who, as we saw, spent his career at the sharp end of the near- death experience, doesn’t refer to the survival of human consciousness post-death, but instead to what he terms a ‘continuity of consciousness’. The real question, he and others broadly agree, isn’t about how consciousness goes on when we die, but about the existence of an all-connected, all-knowing state with no beginning and no end, which, under certain conditions, happens to manifest in our 3D/4D reality as an out-of-body, shared-death or near-death experience – and has come to be known by millions. The core features of these experiences are similar, suggesting we need to look on them in the way van Lommel urges us to – not as distinct and unrelated, but as evidence of some property of our condition that is non-local, infinite and unbound.

Here, I took a short diversion into the research journey of Apollo 14 astronaut, Dr Edgar Mitchell, the sixth man to walk on the Moon, and for two essential reasons.

First, the scientific evidence I had amassed outside of the mainstream materialist view – which, had failed to my satisfaction to provide an adequate explanation for a reality that encompassed all the ‘icons’ on the user-interface of our experience – seemed to point, as the US Army’s Gateway paper had, to the universe as being ‘quantum holographic’ in nature; and Mitchell had formulated just such a theory.

The first glimpses of it came to him in a ‘peak experience’ on the way back to Earth in Apollo 14, when he became filled with a profound sense we were part of a living, harmonious, sentient cosmos, in which everyone and everything was connected.

This vision was a very long way from the cosmos of our textbooks – we and the matter of the universe, Mitchell maintained, were in a resonant relationship in which information was constantly being exchanged between perceiver and percipient.

The medium that facilitated this exchange, he said, was the zero-point field – the foam of quantum potential and unmanifest energy that arose from, and vanished back into the quantum vacuum – the substrate beyond which physics can’t see.

Our capacity to tap this data, Mitchell said, hinged on the ability of our brain and central nervous system, functioning as a quantum computer, to derive two fundamental aspects of the data held in the field: the material and the immaterial⁵⁷. The former, vested in its particle aspect, emerged as physical and local – energy that did work and matter we could see and touch; while information held in the particle’s ‘alter-ego’, the wave function, allowed us to sense and intuit non-locally, universally and psychically.

It was the second aspect of the exchange that provided us with our experience of the paranormal, Mitchell maintained, including the OBE and the NDE. In ‘The Way Of The Explorer’⁵⁸, the book that he wrote in 2008 that sought to portray his life’s journey through the lens of what he called a dyadic model of the universe⁵⁹, he described the OBE as ‘likely a trick of the psyche’ – a survival mechanism - that allowed us to dissociate when faced with an uncomfortable, traumatic or life- threatening situation.

‘The classic near-death experience,’ he wrote a few paragraphs later, ‘seems to be but an extension of the OBE’. This carried with it the emergence of archetypal images that ‘provide assurances of well-being and eternal survival.’ This information, conveyed often by entities with religious and cultural significance to those that it affected, he said, was recovered ‘either from the deep subconscious or from non- local memory, rather than being evidence of ‘discarnate entities from other realms’.

Whilst this tallied with key elements of the ‘exchange of light’ phenomenon we encountered earlier – the possibility that phenomena around a dead or dying person were symbolic, archetypal communications from the collective unconscious (or perhaps, even, from the universe), rather than from a person who had transcended bodily death – it seemed an uncharacteristically bleak portrayal of our place in eternity from a man who’d sought to integrate his scientific and spiritual worldviews for much of his life.

The fact that Dr Mitchell had gone on to become Chairman Emeritus of Eternea60, an organisation that espouses the survival of consciousness beyond the brain and body, told me his view of consciousness’s capacity to ‘go on’ wasn’t as stark as these two statements made out. But it raised an important point: if the universe is quantum holographic, could it be that our consciousness continued as a kind of ‘infinite hologram’ – a feelingless shadow of our earthly essence as opposed to one that held our awareness? And if it was the former, would this constitute true survival?

56 The ‘material aspect’ and the ‘trans-material aspect’ discussed earlier, from Leslie Kean, quoting Holden, on p.97 of Surviving Death. 

57 From Chapter 5, Nature’s Mind: The Quantum Hologram, by Dr. Edgar Mitchell, in Beyond UFOs: The Science of Consciousness and Contact with Non Human Intelligence, Volume 1, The Dr. Edgar Mitchell Foundation for Research into Extraterrestrial and Extraordinary Experiences, FREE, Inc. 

58 The Way of the Explorer, Dr. Edgar Mitchell, The Career Press, Inc, NJ, USA, 2008.
59 An evolutionary cosmological model using energy and information as fundamental concepts. 60 http://www.eternea.org

Nick Cook is an author of 20 fiction and non-fiction book titles in the US and the UK. A former technology journalist, he is well-known for his ground-breaking, best-selling non-fiction book, The Hunt for Zero Point. He has also written, produced, and presented two feature-length documentaries for the History and Discovery channels. In 2021, Cook was amongst 29 prize winners in the BICS institute’s essay competition on consciousness. His essay is available at https://bigelowinstitute.org/contest_winners3.php.

Tucker’s reincarnation research: Cook excerpt #18

Nick Cook writes: Jim B. Tucker, the Bonner-Lowry Professor of Psychiatry and Neurobehavioral Sciences at the University of Virginia School of Medicine, became intrigued by children’s past life memories after reading Stevenson’s work. In a paper published in 2006, he raises an often-overlooked aspect of past-life experiences: the memories reported by children of events occurring during the interval between death and rebirth.

Approximately 20 per cent of children in reincarnation cases, he found, make such reports⁵³.

Here, suddenly, I found myself back at the nub of the near-death issue that had vexed the question of veridical evidence surrounding Maria’s shoe.

It is impossible, critics of the post-death survival thesis say, to separate an NDE from an OBE because the ‘psychic interpretation’ - the difference between a consciousness associated with a body that has not yet lost the potential to live and the consciousness of a body that has forever lost that potential – can never be resolved.

To clarify: since it is impossible to ‘come back from the dead’, whatever the clinical definition of ‘death’ may be, we can never say for sure, based on those aspects of an NDE involving veridical evidence of the earth-bound variety (exemplified by Maria’s shoe), that consciousness survives permanent bodily death. The best we can say is it does temporarily, since, for a while, it operates outside the body, as in an OBE.

Which, potentially, takes us into a very thorny corner of our research envelope – because, technically, the only data under the court-of-law, beyond-reasonable-doubt principle that would be evidence of the ‘trans-material testimony’ kind – would be from someone who has permanently crossed into that other realm. Which by any yardstick is impossible, since this evidence has no means materially of being conveyed.

From Professor Tucker’s research, we learn that past-life subjects who reported ‘interval memories’ tended to make a greater number of statements about the previous life that were verified to be accurate, recalled more names from that former 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 compared to those who hadn’t reported such memories⁵⁴. There is something about this testimony, perhaps then, that may be considered to be inherently reliable.

Close analysis of 35 ‘interval memories’ in Burma indicated that these memories could be broken down into three parts: a ‘transitional stage’; a ‘stable stage’ in a particular location; and a ‘return stage’ involving a choice of parents or conception.

The reports of the Burmese children’s interval memories were compared to the testimony of people who had had NDEs – and were found to contain features that were similar to the transcendental (or trans-material) component of Western NDEs as well as having significant areas of overlap with Asian NDEs. ‘It thus appeared,’ Professor Tucker concluded, ‘that interval memories and NDEs could be considered part of the same overall phenomenon, reports of an afterlife (my emphasis added).’⁵⁵

The interval memories cast doubt, too, Professor Tucker went on to say, on the materialist reductionist explanation of NDEs as mere fantasies produced by dying brains, since the subjects reporting the interval memories were young and healthy.

53 Raised in a section of Prof. Tucker’s paper – Children Who Claim to Remember Previous Lives: Past, Present and Future Research, Division of Perceptual Studies, Department of Psychiatry and Neurobehavioral Sciences, University of Virginia - that discusses work beyond individual cases to include examinations of groups of cases, with correlations from across the department’s database.
54 Op.cit.
55 Op.cit.

Nick Cook is an author of 20 fiction and non-fiction book titles in the US and the UK. A former technology journalist, he is well-known for his ground-breaking, best-selling non-fiction book, The Hunt for Zero Point. He has also written, produced, and presented two feature-length documentaries for the History and Discovery channels. In 2021, Cook was amongst 29 prize winners in the BICS institute’s essay competition on consciousness. His essay is available at https://bigelowinstitute.org/contest_winners3.php.

Ian Stevenson’s research: Cook excerpt #17

Nick Cook writes: The world’s leading authority on reincarnation, Professor Ian Stevenson, was a Canadian by birth who worked at the University of Virginia’s Department of Medicine for 50 years until shortly before his death in 2007. In 1968, eleven years after being named its chair of psychiatry, he was bequeathed a million dollars by Chester Carlson, the inventor of the Xerox copying process, to pursue parapsychological studies at the University of Virginia. Carlson’s funding allowed Stevenson to travel the world in search of the best evidence of reincarnation – research he eventually compiled into ‘Reincarnation and Biology: A Contribution to the Etiology of Birthmarks and Birth Defects’, a 2,268-page, two-volume book published in 1977.51

This phenomenal work detailed accounts of people of all races, creeds and religions who professed to have memories of previous lives.

A typical case was that of an Indian girl, Kumkum Verma, who, aged three and a half, began to relate how she had lived in Darbhanga, a city of 200,000 people approximately 25 miles from her then home. Her aunt wrote down all the things Kumkum remembered about her previous life, which included the name of her son, her grandson’s name, the town where her father had lived and a pet snake that she used to feed milk to. A friend of Kumkum’s father went to the district in Darbhanga she had described and found that a woman who had died five years before Kumkum was born matched all the details the little girl had provided.

Hundreds more cases uncovered by Stevenson in India and elsewhere attested to certain common features, for example a tendency of subjects to talk about their previous life at a very young age - starting at two or three and stopping by six or seven. Most made their statements spontaneously and without the use of hypnotic regression. Some told of being deceased members of their own families; others, like Kumkum, of being part of families they had no knowledge of. Whilst most described ordinary lives, what often distinguished them was the way they had died: 70 per cent, Stevenson’s research showed, had died of unnatural causes, often violently and suddenly. In these cases, 35 per cent showed phobias related to their mode of death.

While some critics saw confirmation bias in this portion of Stevenson’s work, less easy to dismiss were subjects born with birthmarks and/or deformities matching the wounds inflicted upon them in their former incarnation.

In ‘Where Reincarnation and Biology Intersect’,52 another seminal work that he published in 1997, Stevenson listed 200 cases, many including autopsy reports and police records, in which the birthmarks or birth defects of those with past life memories matched wounds they had suffered as their former personalities.

The subjects included a boy with birthmarks on the front and back of his head that matched the entry and exit wounds of the bullet he said had killed him in his former life; and a girl with what Stevenson described as the most extraordinary birthmark he had ever seen that corresponded to the skull surgery she said she had undergone in her previous existence.

All these cases, Stevenson said, represented tangible evidence of ‘carryover’ from a deceased individual, with concomitant impacts on a developing foetus.  

 

51 The work is currently unavailable. Published as (1997a), Reincarnation and Biology: A Contribution to the Etiology of Birthmarks and Birth Defects. Some details are available here: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Reincarnation-Biology-Contribution-Etiology-Birthmarks/dp/0275952835  

52 Published as (1997b), Where Reincarnation and Biology Intersect, Westport, CT, Praeger.

 

Nick Cook is an author of 20 fiction and non-fiction book titles in the US and the UK. A former technology journalist, he is well-known for his ground-breaking, best-selling non-fiction book, The Hunt for Zero Point. He has also written, produced, and presented two feature-length documentaries for the History and Discovery channels. In 2021, Cook was amongst 29 prize winners in the BICS institute’s essay competition on consciousness. His essay is available at https://bigelowinstitute.org/contest_winners3.php.