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
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.”
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.
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| Dr Jim Tucker |
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Greg Taylor writes: Given the careful, in-depth research on mediums by highly qualified scientists over almost 150 years, we can now say there is an abundance of evidence in favor of the conclusion that mediums truly do communicate with the consciousness of deceased individuals. However, there is one other possible explanation: the ‘super-psi’ theory (also known as ‘living-agent psi’). This refers to the possibility that the information being communicated by mediums is not being sent from deceased persons but is instead received by the medium via telepathy from the minds of the living, or via other paranormal means, such as clairvoyance, or precognition.
Some might suggest that super-psi is somewhat of a deux ex machina for those trying to avoid accepting the evidence for what it appears to be at face value: proof of the survival of consciousness. It begs a number of questions: Why would the medium extract information about a deceased person from the mind of the sitter? How do minds ‘read’ each other? And, extending that, if minds can do these amazing things, then perhaps mind is made of a thing beyond the physical, and is not restricted to life in a physical body? When we begin exploring the idea of super-psi, we often end up in the same neighborhood as the survival of consciousness hypothesis anyhow.
Dr. Beischel and her fellow researchers have, however, provided somewhat of a counter to the super-psi problem. During their experiments, some mediums described to them how there were two entirely different ‘feels’ to performing mediumship readings versus performing psychic readings for the living. In response to this information, the researchers set up a study in which mediums were provided with the first name of a target person at the start of a reading, some of whom were living while the others were deceased, though the medium and the experimenter were blinded to this knowledge. The medium then went on to answer questions about the target personality and completed a standardized questionnaire about his/her experiences during the reading. When these were analyzed, Julie Beischel says, “a statistically significant difference was found for blinded readings for living targets versus blinded readings for deceased targets.” This gives credence to some mediums’ opinion that they are not using telepathy or other ‘psi’ talents to acquire information about the deceased target. In short, Beischel says, “they know what psi feels like and mediumship feels different even under blinded conditions.” The data from her experiments, she believes, effectively refute both the idea that mediums use normal, sensory means to find out information about the deceased, as well as the more controversial super-psi theory. “This leaves only communication with the deceased as a plausible explanation for the source of their information,” Beischel concludes.
The S.P.R.’s researchers also confronted the super-psi problem, although the technique they ended up using to address it was somewhat of an ironic invention, as it was, apparently, devised by a dead person and communicated through a medium! The basic premise of what became known as the cross-correspondences was outlined very simply by one of the communicators: “Record the bits and when fitted they will make the whole.” The plan was for a communicator on ‘the other side’ to begin with a coherent idea, which would then be divided into pieces – like a jigsaw puzzle – and distributed to a number of mediums scattered around the world. The pieces on their own would not make sense to each medium, or those sitting with them, but once they had been recognized as pieces of the puzzle and reassembled, the overall picture would become apparent. Also, as further proof this revealed ‘picture’ would be seen to relate to the personality of the deceased communicator in some way.
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| Frederick Myers |
The main communicators in the cross correspondences claimed to be the afterlife incarnations of two of the co-founders of the S.P.R., Frederic Myers and Henry Sidgwick, and another important member of the society, Edmund Gurney. The cross correspondences were collected for some 31 years, between 1901 and 1932, and the ‘puzzle pieces’ often involved literary themes related to their academic interests. In total, over 50 papers were written analyzing the cross correspondences, many of those book-length, with complex analyses of how the literary puzzle pieces fit together. It’s therefore almost impossible for a lay-person to grasp the intricacies of the entire body of evidence – and indeed, some experts believe that complexity makes them virtually unusable as easily accessible evidence for survival of consciousness. But, as researcher and author Alan Gauld notes in his authoritative study Mediumship and Survival: A century of investigations, “the super-ESP hypothesis has great difficulty in accounting for cases of the ‘cross-correspondence’ kind.”
And finally, it is extremely important to remember that mediumship research findings do not stand alone when it comes to evidence supporting the survival of consciousness – they are instead part of a greater set that includes, as we have already seen, other convincing evidence from areas including NDEs and ELEs. When viewed in this full context, survival of consciousness seems a far more parsimonious explanation for mediumship than the “crippling complexity” of the super-psi theory, which requires multiple modes of paranormal information transfer.
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.
Alexander T. Englert, “We'll meet again,” Aeon , Jan 2, 2024, https://aeon.co/essays/kurt-godel-his-mother-and-the-a...
