Intuition and knowing: Beischel excerpt #4

Julie Beischel writes in “Beyond Reasonable: Scientific Evidence for Survival,” her prize-winning essay in the Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies competition:

 

It is not clear where knowledge by intuition fits in the list of methods for knowing. If it is included at all, it may be listed as in between tenacity and authority or as the very least valid method and equated with superstition. I’m going to use mine right now: My intuitive sense is that people who have intuitive experiences and acquire knowledge through them would give this method top billing. (Even higher than science!) For example, my colleagues and I found through our research that a phenomenon commonly experienced by mediums is “just knowing” information

about the deceased. Similarly, Emmons and Emmons* found that the mediums they studied “just ‘g-know’ (pronounced ‘guh-know’) things intuitively,” a term based on the word gnostic). Like experience, knowledge by intuition cannot easily be generalized to the natural world, leaving it somewhat lacking within the knowledge hierarchy. 

On the topic of survival, different people’s knowledge may come through different methods. People who know there is an afterlife based on religious teachings may be using the method of knowing by authority. People who have had near-death experiences may know through empiricism that consciousness survives. For some, it may simply seem logical; they may be able to infer an afterlife. And others may know intuitively that there is life after death. 

When I asked some mediums I know, each with decades of experience involving communication with the deceased, “Do you believe in an afterlife?” and “What makes you sure?” the responses I received were similar: “When you have an actual experience, you KNOW” (SA; emphasis in original), “It is a knowing, not a believing” (DC), “I know it is real because I live with it every day. I am part of it and I know it” (NM), and “I don’t need to believe, I know.” 

Other mediums chose to quantify their beliefs about an afterlife: “I believe 100% with no doubt” (DeM), “I believe without a doubt that there is an afterlife” (MR). “There is no doubt in my mind that our loved ones live on” (JG), and “100% yes!” (GQ). Several mediums listed personal out-of-body and near-death experiences (OBEs and NDEs) as the originating source of their belief in an afterlife. Several noted that they did not hold this belief before their OBEs, NDEs, or similar spiritually transformative experiences (STEs). 

The mediums’ regular and continued experiences of communicating with the deceased during readings for sitters also served to reinforce their beliefs: “I constantly look for validation from spirit and with great success get it. Spirit does not disappoint” (MR); “Communication with the energy of those who crossed has made me certain that survival of consciousness after bodily death exists” (LJ); “The most compelling part for me is watching how people respond to the information that comes through... The sitter seems to recognize ‘who’ is communicating” (DoM); and “Not knowing someone, sitting down and communicating with spirit prior to the reading, and relaying that and other information/messages to the client is a very powerful validation that there is life beyond this physical world” (TN). 

Although these are compelling claims, the described knowledge acquired is based primarily on experience. It is important to remember here that knowledge by experience is truly evidential and an entirely valid method of knowing for each individual. As I have noted before, science “can neither refute the existence nor defend the reality” of anyone’s experiences or what they know in their hearts to be true. However, society as a whole requires a more reliable method of knowing that includes conclusions that we can all agree on. Since at least the mid-1600’s, this method has been objective scientific inquiry, the roots of which are most likely thousands of years old. 

*Emmons, C. F., & Emmons, P. (2003). Guided by spirit: A journey into the mind of the medium. Writers Club Press. 

 

Dr. Julie Beischel is the Director of Research at the Windbridge Research Center. She received her PhD in Pharmacology and Toxicology with a minor in Microbiology and Immunology from the University of Arizona and uses her interdisciplinary training to apply the scientific method to controversial topics. For over 15 years, Dr. Beischel has worked full-time studying mediums: individuals who report experiencing communication with the deceased and who regularly, reliably, and on-demand report the specific resulting messages to the living. References cited in her paper are deleted from these excerpts but a full paper with references is available at the Bigelow website (https://bigelowinstitute.org/contest_winners3.php).

Authority, inference, experience: Beischel excerpt #3

Julie Beischel writes in “Beyond Reasonable: Scientific Evidence for Survival,” her prize-winning essay in the Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies competition: 

Knowledge by authority happens when claims made by trusted authority figures are accepted as true. Because we can’t learn everything through direct experience or even through logical inference, knowledge conveyed by authoritative figures is often required. Trusting that Mrs. Gustafsen was correct in saying to my kindergarten class that three follows two and N follows M was probably a valid pathway toward knowing. This can become problematic, however, when sources are inappropriately trusted simply because they, say, attended a prestigious university, are on TV, published a book, or have a Twitter following.

One step up from authority, when we can’t observe or experience things for ourselves, is knowing by inference, by using logical reasoning (also called rationalism; think Sherlock Holmes). For example, because I know how peristalsis of the digestive tract works (through knowledge conveyed by the authority of physiology professors and textbooks), I can infer that it is impossible for swallowed gum (or swallowed anything) to stay in the gut for seven years. If everything in the pantry is askew or upside-down when I open it in the morning, I can infer that my husband did some late-night stress eating. If my welcome mat looks more threadbare than it did yesterday, I can infer that some neighborhood birds are making nests and need building supplies. Knowing through inference, however, can be problematic if the assumptions used in the reasoning process are incorrect. Maybe I, myself, recently developed sleep-eating or sleep-door- mat-larceny habits and didn’t know it. That’s still logical (though not probable).

As stated above, the evidence that brain produces consciousness (materialism) is circumstantial and relies on inference. Moreover, because we can’t repeatedly experience consciousness after death (short of a Flatliners scenario), a lot of the evidence for survival is based on inference. Survival researchers “cannot send expeditions of scientists to the next world to report on their findings and return with specimens susceptible to analysis in human laboratories, but inference is a perfectly acceptable scientific tool”.

Direct personal observation or experience (also called empiricism) is another method of knowing. Early on in the evolution of our species we most likely had to do most of our learning about how the world worked through observation. Perhaps we learned which berries were safe to eat by watching the birds and animals. Most likely, we learned that leaves changing color meant that the cold season was coming.

In the modern era, by the time we reach adulthood, we’ve each already learned a sufficient number of facts through knowledge by authority (and hopefully less so through tenacity) and have developed the critical thinking skills necessary to use inference to collect others. Therefore, knowledge gained through individual experiences in contemporary society is primarily about ourselves and those close to us, rather than about the world in general.  

Once I know I am capable of, say, lucid dreaming, remote viewing, mentally controlling the timing of my menstrual cycle, or feeling physiologically connected to someone at a distance, I can never un-know that those things are possible for me. However, knowledge by experience cannot be generalized as applicable to others. This limits its usefulness.

Two faces      

In addition, the physical senses that humans use for observation and experience are tremendously fallible. In a novel I happened to be reading while writing this, a character named Dr. Marconi made this observation:

“The human eye has to be one of the cruelest tricks Nature ever pulled. We can see a tiny, cone-shaped area of light right in front of our faces restricted to a very narrow band of the electromagnetic spectrum... We can’t see heat or cold. We can’t see electricity or radio signals... It is a sense so limited that we might as well not have it. Yet, we have evolved to depend so heavily on it as a species that all other perception has atrophied. We have wound up with the utterly mad and often fatal delusion that if we can’t see something, it doesn’t exist. Virtually all of civilization’s failures can be traced back to that one ominous sentence: ’I’ll believe it when I see it.’”

Similarly, my husband worked in a science museum where a colleague had a sign in his office that read, “Seeing is the brain’s best guess.” And so, I choose to believe, many perceptual cognition experts. Because personal experience often cannot be generalized as being true for others, and our human sensory perceptual apparatuses are so limited, empiricism falls short of being a truly valid method for knowing about the natural world in general.

Dr. Julie Beischel is the Director of Research at the Windbridge Research Center. She received her PhD in Pharmacology and Toxicology with a minor in Microbiology and Immunology from the University of Arizona and uses her interdisciplinary training to apply the scientific method to controversial topics. For over 15 years, Dr. Beischel has worked full-time studying mediums: individuals who report experiencing communication with the deceased and who regularly, reliably, and on-demand report the specific resulting messages to the living. References cited in her paper are deleted from these excerpts but a full paper with references is available at the Bigelow website (https://bigelowinstitute.org/contest_winners3.php).

My only mediumship reading: Beischel excerpt #2

Julie Beischel writes in “Beyond Reasonable: Scientific Evidence for Survival,” her prize-winning essay in the Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies competition: I knew all sorts of magic can happen with TV editing, so I wanted to see this process for myself. I got a recommendation for a local medium and received an in-person reading in the summer of 2002. I had read a little about fraudulent psychic practices (7) and was prepared for the possibility of generic information and fishing for content. But, as a scientist, I wanted to keep my assumptions and my expectations to a minimum.

I want you to understand that I do not need what I am going to share with you here to be true. I have been accused of being an advocate or proponent of mediumship because I personally need it to be real. I have been called, among other much more terrible things, “a believer”.

In reality, it would have been easier for me if I discovered that mediumship was just an entertaining parlor trick. I would have preferred to learn that death was the end and that the people we have lost are gone.

As a scientist, however, I had to go through the process of collecting data before I could draw conclusions. And now, actually, with the death of someone close to me, I could personally examine the phenomenon of mediumship in a manner that would have been a stretch if the only dead person I knew was a school acquaintance or some distant uncle. 

I met with the medium in her home. She was a wife and a mother of three living in a Phoenix suburb who just happened to be a medium. She was about my age and did not look at all like a cartoon stereotype of a psychic: no crystal ball, no incense, no excessive bead accessories. In fact, she was wearing the same long denim skirt that I had at home. 

The reading contained many specific and accurate items. For example, the medium spoke about our deceased pet Dalmatian being with my mom and of Colorado where we sometimes vacationed. She also spoke about the symptoms of my mother’s psychiatric diagnosis, her siblings, her birth month, and where she was buried. The scoring system I used at the time demonstrated an accuracy level of 93%. Some information that I didn’t understand was later verified by my aunts. 

Most of the people in my life were supportive when I shared the story about the reading I’d received. I was surrounded by scientists and our training (ideally) prevents us from drawing conclusions without sufficient data. So, mostly I heard things like, “I don’t really know anything about mediums, but that sounds like an interesting experience that you had.” 

However, a few were—actually, one guy in particular was—convinced that I’d been duped by a con artist, because there was no way that what I described could be real. (His religious ideology may have bullied his scientific training into submission.) This closed-mindedness was motivation enough for me to want to bring mediums into a laboratory setting and test the phenomenon under controlled conditions.

The general hateful reactions and ongoing derision regarding mediums as a whole I’ve seen since have kept that motivation at full steam. I get it. There are frauds. But claiming that every person in a group is represented by a fraudulent subset of that group is, frankly, bigotry. The right thing to do is act rationally, bring it into the lab, and check it out.

After my mediumship reading, what I knew was that there was clearly more to know.

 

Dr. Julie Beischel is the Director of Research at the Windbridge Research Center. She received her PhD in Pharmacology and Toxicology with a minor in Microbiology and Immunology from the University of Arizona and uses her interdisciplinary training to apply the scientific method to controversial topics. For over 15 years, Dr. Beischel has worked full-time studying mediums: individuals who report experiencing communication with the deceased and who regularly, reliably, and on-demand report the specific resulting messages to the living. References cited in her paper are deleted from these excerpts but a full paper with references is available at the Bigelow website (https://bigelowinstitute.org/contest_winners3.php).

Post-mortem consciousness? Beischel excerpt #1

Julie Beischel writes in “Beyond Reasonable: Scientific Evidence for Survival,” her prize-winning essay in the Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies competition:

 

As I left the medium’s house that day, my overwhelming sense was how completely normal I felt for having just connected with my dead mother. In fact, the only thing weird about the mediumship reading was that—somehow—it wasn’t weird at all. Which, for me, as someone saturated with science and having had a strained relationship with my mother, was very weird. That experience marked the first step on a near-20-year journey of scientific exploration. I wanted to understand if it was possible for a living human being to genuinely connect with a post-mortem consciousness. My conclusion from the statistically significant evidence I proceeded to collect—under randomized, controlled conditions addressing falsifiable hypotheses—meets if not surpasses what could be considered proof beyond a reasonable doubt in a court system. That is, the most logical explanation for what at least some mediums are doing and based on the most rigorous experiments is that human consciousness does, in fact, survive permanent bodily death. Here, I will retrace the journey that led me confidently to that conclusion.  

I’ve always been a scientist. I grew up near Phoenix, and when I graduated from elementary school, I was chosen for the class Science Award. During my first year of high school, my water pollution project received an honorable mention in the nearby university’s science fair. I received a bachelor’s degree in Environmental Sciences with a Microbiology emphasis. My PhD is in Pharmacology and Toxicology with a minor in Microbiology and Immunology. Although my training primarily involved the topics of bugs and drugs, I became skilled in utilizing the scientific method to obtain answers to a wide variety of questions.

Thus, I naturally turned to those tools after my mother died by suicide while I was in graduate school. She was 54. I was 24. As you may know, not all parents are good ones. My mother was mentally ill, although not diagnosed as such until shortly before her death. My childhood was tremendously difficult, but I was well-behaved and got good grades so no one thought to intervene. When my mother died, it was, sadly, a relief to me. I’d heard about this place called Heaven because my extended family is remarkably Catholic, but, to me, it was a nebulous, unknowable, nearly metaphorical idea that I’d never really thought much about and didn’t feel any need to pursue. I hadn’t inherited my family’s cultural views about what happens after we die.

It wasn’t until a couple of years after my mom’s death that I was visiting with some aunts and we saw a medium on TV sharing messages from the deceased. My aunts were curious. I’d never heard of the phenomenon and didn’t know anything about psychic abilities of any kind. Currently, I define a medium as an individual who experiences regular communication with the deceased and shares the resulting messages with their living loved ones, called sitters, during a process called a reading.

The general purpose of these readings is facilitating communication between sitters and the deceased. Experiences of communication with the deceased have occurred regularly all over the world throughout time. Although anyone can have a mediumistic experience, people termed mediums have this experience regularly, reliably, and on-demand. Psychics, on the other hand, convey information about people, events, places, or times unknown to them, but messages about the deceased are not usually shared. A specific reading may include either or both psychic and mediumistic information. It is often said that all mediums are psychic but not all psychics are mediums.

Twenty years ago, when I saw the TV medium (clearly, it was John Edward) sharing messages, the people receiving them seemed, to me, genuinely moved by his statements. The content also appeared relatively specific. I was intrigued. Not as a grieving daughter but as a scientist. When one of my aunts later sent me a book featuring mediums, it further piqued my curiosity.

 

 

Dr. Julie Beischel is the Director of Research at the Windbridge Research Center. She received her PhD in Pharmacology and Toxicology with a minor in Microbiology and Immunology from the University of Arizona and uses her interdisciplinary training to apply the scientific method to controversial topics. For over 15 years, Dr. Beischel has worked full-time studying mediums: individuals who report experiencing communication with the deceased and who regularly, reliably, and on-demand report the specific resulting messages to the living. Her studies began with testing the accuracy and specificity of the information reported by mediums during phone readings performed under controlled, more than double-blind laboratory conditions that address alternative explanations for the source of their statements such as fraud, cueing, and overly general information. This protocol optimizes the research environment while also maximizing experimental controls. References cited in her paper are deleted from these excerpts but a full paper with references is available at the Bigelow website (https://bigelowinstitute.org/contest_winners3.php).

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.

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.

Prelingual CORT* cases: Nahm excerpt #10

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: 

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". 

 

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.