Scientific Evidence for Reincarnation – TimeWaver Summer World 2018

Chris Bache: The good news is that after me, it's lunch, so I'm the end of your day. Now, I'm a professor. I've been at this game for a long time, so I know a tired audience when I see one. It's been a long morning and a lot of wonderful ideas. So I'd like to take a moment. Everybody stand up. Just stand up and stretch your arms up. Bring in that more good energy. Bring it in. Okay, now sit down.

Chris Bache: If the most important philosophical question one can ask in life is, do we survive the death of our body, which Dr. Van Lommel is asking, I think the second most important question is, do we live once, or do we live more than once? And it all hinges on time. The significance of time as a teacher: if I give a quiz, I have a right to expect a certain performance from the students. If I give an hour exam, I have a right to expect a higher level of performance. And if I give a take-home research paper, I expect a higher level of performance because they have more time. If this universe, this magnificent universe that we are in, has a purpose, then as a philosopher, we have to measure the purpose of the universe proportionate to the time we have to fulfill that purpose. If we only live one time, then we might extrapolate the purpose of existence a certain way. But if we live 100 times, if we live 1,000 times, if we live 10,000 times, if our participation in this magnificent universe is truly open-ended, then we have a very different relationship with the universe. Then we have a reason to think about the possible purpose of existence in a completely different framework.

And the religions of the last 4,000 years have had a tendency to not value physical existence. They've had a tendency to say, well, you achieve realization, you achieve enlightenment, and then you leave—you escape Samsara, moksha, or you achieve salvation, and then you leave. But that leaves the fundamental question, what is the purpose of the universe unanswered? What is the purpose of my physical existence in the universe? But if we come back, if we come back to this life many times, then we have a different story that begins to unfold. Our understanding of reincarnation is completely incomplete at this point, just as we've begun to understand the true depth and breadth of the universe that we are part of. Likewise, when we begin to understand that we participate, we're dancing with this universe for an extended period of time, then we have a deeper understanding of what the universe might actually be trying to accomplish in us and what might be our gift to the universe in the continual refinement and compounding of our talent over time.

So what I'd like to do today is talk about the evidence for reincarnation, and I've been thinking about this and been in this game for a long time. The first book I wrote was "Lifecycles." Notice how long ago I wrote it. It was the first book I wrote as an academic, and that is a signal of how important I think this topic is, and that there is good, critical empirical evidence that allows us to decide this topic. If there weren't critical evidence, then it would just be a wasted exercise. And I think this evidence did not exist 50 years ago, and the theologians used to debate about reincarnation, go round and round. But today, we have a different body of empirical evidence on reincarnation that has moved the topic from the theologians' table to the psychologists' table to the philosophers' table to the psychiatrists' table, and that's what I'd like to take you through some today.

Now when looking at the evidence for reincarnation, we can either go small or go large. We either look at the detailed cases or we look at the larger body of literature. The beauty and the joy are in the detailed cases. But in 45 minutes, I've chosen to go large. What I would really like to do is encourage you today to read one book on reincarnation that you haven't read yet, and so I want to take you into some of the literature on reincarnation and show you some of the patterns that are emerging in the literature on rebirth. Okay, ready to go? Let's go. "20 Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation" by Ian Stevenson. This is a book that changed my life because, like many people, when I finished graduate school in 1978, I was an atheistically inclined agnostic. I was trained in philosophy of religion, but all that training basically made me an atheist. But when I encountered this book right after finishing graduate school, it turned my life around because it convinced me that there was evidence that we live more than once.

Steven was the Carlson Professor at the University of Virginia between 1967 and 2001. He has written 11 books on reincarnation. Some of the most important are these cases of reincarnation, typewritten over a seven-year period from '73 to '84, and "Learned Languages by Children," about children who have an ability to speak a language which no one in their family speaks, no one in their entire town speaks, sometimes an ancient language, children who remember previous lives. And his last book, his magnum opus, a 1,000-page, two-volume work, a study of 187 cases of children who not only have detailed memories of their most previous life but actually carry the scars in their body which relate to the death wounds of the body in their previous personality. And that, of course, really upsets academics. I mean, it's one thing to have the continuity of memory—that's bad enough—but to suggest that a wound of death can actually be transferred into the physical body of a subsequent personality drives my colleagues right up a wall. But 187 cases, well-documented case histories. It's a magnificent book.

What are we looking at with Stevenson? We're looking at cases of children from around the world who have detailed recall of their most immediate recent life. They know their way around towns they've never been in before. They can recognize persons when they're brought into the life place of the previous personality. They can recognize persons they have never met before. They know their personal history with that person. They have the appropriate emotional responses with that person. Husbands for wives, children—you have cases of a five-year-old child who is showing all the feelings of the husband of a 35-year-old woman with all the emotional responses. There is one case of a child called Parmad. When he was reunited with the family of the previous personality, he was very shy around the wife of the previous personality. He wouldn't identify her until she left the room, but then he identified her, and then later he took her aside and said two things to her. He said, "I've come, but you have not fixed bindi," which is the spot that Indian women wear on their forehead as an indication that they're married. And he also criticized her for wearing a white sari instead of a colorful sari. And the tradition in India is when you become a widow, you don't wear color for the rest of your life; you wear only white. Essentially, this five-year-old boy was saying to this 35-year-old woman, "I've come, but you're acting like you're not married." They know the inner architecture of homes they've never been in. They know people who owed them money when they died and the debt had not been collected.

In one case, this little child was brought back to the home of the previous personality, and the wife of the previous personality said, "Okay, if you're my husband, where did you put the will? We couldn't find the will." The little boy walked over to a floorboard in the kitchen, pulled up the floorboard, and pulled the will out of this little secret place that only he knew about in the floor of the kitchen. Cases like that drive my philosophical colleagues at the university right up a wall. They don't know what to do with it. It's hard for them to deny it, but there it is.

Some patterns in the data: the average time interval between the death of the first personality and the birth of the second personality, Stevens finds, is about two and a half years. The average distance between the life place of the first personality and the life place of the second personality is 50 miles. And these children tend to lose their memories around the year eight when they begin to get into school and a more complex social environment. They basically forget. They lose their memories. So we're looking at a small time window for research—from about three years old to eight years old, a five-year time window to get to these children and document their memories. About 90% forget them by the time they're eight. The remaining 10%, the vast majority of those, forget them when they hit puberty. When they hit puberty, all hell breaks loose, and they forget their subtle traces of their former lives.

Stevenson asked, why do these children remember what most of us forget? And his answer is, he doesn't know. We need more research. It's all research. He has a hypothesis. He points out that about 60% of these children died violently in their previous life. The remaining 40% died either early, suddenly, or with an acute sense of unfinished business, like a mother who dies shortly after the birth of her baby. His hypothesis is maybe there's something about the trauma of being wrenched from life violently, suddenly, with an acute sense of unfinished business that encodes the consciousness in a way that draws them back faster than usual and closer than usual. Because this time, I don't have time to give all the evidence, but this two and a half years, 50 miles, is faster than the population at large and closer to home than the population at large.

In reviewing "20 Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation," the Journal of the American Medical Association wrote, "Stevenson has painstakingly and unemotionally collected a detailed series of cases in which the evidence for reincarnation is difficult to understand on other grounds." Two years later, the Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, a major psychiatric journal in the United States, published an entire journal devoted to Stevenson's cases. And it was such an unusual move that they published an editorial to justify or to explain their rationale, and in the editorial, they wrote, "Our decision to publish this material recognizes the legitimacy of his research methods and the conformity of his reasoning to the usual canons of rational thought." That's the way an academic qualifies their endorsement.

Now the philosophical institution, the guardians of orthodoxy, are not going to let Stevenson get away with this, not without a fight. And he has had his critics, and the most important critic is a man named Paul Edwards. And I promise you, this is the best picture I could find of Paul Edwards online. His book, "Reincarnation: A Critical Examination." Paul Edwards was a major American philosopher. He taught at the New School for Social Research. He's best known for having been the editor-in-chief of the eight-volume Encyclopedia of Philosophy. So he's a major heavyweight in the philosophical tradition. He wrote a series of articles in 1986 to '87, a four-part article on reincarnation. And eventually, he published these articles in a later form in this book, "Reincarnation," and he is the harshest critic of Stevenson.

He accuses Stevenson of fraud. He accuses Stevenson of not being sufficiently rigorous in his analysis of the data. He accuses Stevenson of not actually verifying that he thinks there could have been contact between the two families, that Stevenson isn't really critical in proving that these families, the first and second personality, have never had contact. But there's actually a deeper logic—accusing someone of bad research and proving bad research are two different things. And if you go through Stevenson's arguments very carefully, I'm sorry, Edwards' arguments very carefully, you see that there's a deeper logic operating in his work. He says reincarnation would represent a crucifixion of our understanding. And by "our understanding," he means secular humanism, the philosophical-scientific tradition, the Newtonian Cartesian philosophical tradition.

He says, if you believe in reincarnation, you must accept what he calls six collateral assumptions. And these collateral assumptions are that materialism is false, that mind is not reducible to brain, that our identity is more than our personality, that there is a domain other than space-time, that death is an illusion, that there may be a deeper logic to our lives. Edwards says, these assumptions are surely fantastic, if not indeed nonsense, and even in the absence of a demonstration of specific flaws, a rational person will conclude either that Stevenson's reports are seriously defective, or that his alleged facts can be explained without bringing in reincarnation. Well, I won't go over Edwards' arguments more carefully because Robert Almeder has done this for us.

Robert Almeder is another major American philosopher. He is Professor Emeritus at Georgia State University. He has authored, or co-authored, 24 books. He wrote this book in which he is evaluating five categories of evidence for survival of death. The major analysis he's doing in this book is the debate between Stevenson and Edwards. And what he shows by analyzing Edwards' argument is that Edwards does not refute Stevenson's argument. What he does is refuse to even look at it seriously because he is so convinced that it must be false. He says, his argument constitutes a blatant bit of question-begging because he always assumes precisely what is in contention. What is in contention is, can consciousness exist without a brain? And because he believes that science has proven that consciousness cannot exist without a brain, therefore we know that there must be something wrong with the evidence.

Almeder says, if you have a very commanding argument that you cannot refute, then not to accept the argument is to act irrationally. Stevenson's tradition continues, even though he's passed on. He's now looking from the bleacher seats, watching us from there. This book by Tom Schroeder, "Old Souls." Tom Schroeder wins for having the worst cover of any book in reincarnation research. But Tom Schroeder is an interesting guy. He's a reporter, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter. He's also one of the editors for The Washington Post, a major American newspaper, and he was interested in whether Stevenson's research could stand up to a critical reporter's eye. So he went with Stevenson on one of his trips around the world, studying these small children. He looked over his shoulder, and he came away convinced, as the subtitle shows, "compelling evidence from children who remember past lives," convinced that Stevenson's methods were good, the data would stand up. These children were real. This is a compelling case for reincarnation.

And at the University of Virginia, Stevenson's work continues in the person of Jim Tucker, who has now inherited Stevenson's chair. This book is a wonderful book, very much in the Stevenson tradition, continuing to look in detail at the detailed cases and explaining why these cases cannot be attributed to weaker hypotheses like super psi or something like this. I might mention that Jim Tucker's book is a lot easier to read than Stevenson's book. Stevenson writes and thinks like a lawyer. It's very good, but it's very, very detailed, very dry. Jim Tucker brings a little more life to the subject matter.

Now everything we've been looking at so far has to do with what I would call the evidence from spontaneous memories, just children who spontaneously have memories of previous life. But there's another body of evidence you have to approach with a different framework: evoked memories, memories which have been evoked in some way, different techniques—even massage can evoke a former life memory—but the most common one that we're familiar with is hypnotherapy, some type of hypnosis. The following cases, the following books are representative titles of people who have worked in the field of past life therapy.

My favorite book written by a single therapist who has worked in the area of past life therapy and has thought about it a great deal is this book by Roger Woolger. Notice the date. An earlier book, "Other Lives, Other Selves," started as a Jungian, ended up in past life therapy, doing past life work, even though Carl Jung, I don't know whether you probably know, he himself believed in reincarnation towards the later years of his life, but he kind of kept it quiet. This is a wonderful book, intellectually, totally competent, a wonderful review of detailed cases and a discussion of the implications of these cases.

Past life therapy began to really explode in the '70s and '80s, and there were a lot of therapists who were concerned that there was not a graduate school, there was no curriculum, there was no agreed upon curriculum for how to establish the credentials for people who wanted to do past life therapy. And this task was taken on by Winifred Lucas, who wrote a magnificent two-volume anthology, which is a compendium of essays and articles of the best of the best of the people working at that time in past life therapy. So if you wanted to read a single book, I would read Woolger's book by one author. But if you wanted to see an overview of multiple people writing in the field, I would go to Winifred Lucas' book, "Regression Therapy: A Handbook for Professionals."

Carol Bowman was a social worker. She wasn't interested in past life therapy. She got into it because her son started having nightmares. He started waking up with very disturbing nightmares, and she approached him. She tried to work with him, took him to therapists, tried to do conventional things, but it didn't work. And then she began to do her homework. She began to look into past life therapy. She began to learn the field, and she began to help her own child solve his own trauma carried over from a previous life that was both spontaneously bubbling up in his life. She began to attract other people, with other children who were also having problems, and eventually she wrote this beautiful book, specifically a therapeutic book for parents who have children who are having traumatic memories surface that they're having difficulty dealing with. It was very successful, very persuasive. It had a lot of impact. She got more business coming in, and she wrote a second book. She gets the award for the second worst cover on a reincarnation book, "Return from Heaven." She's looking specifically at relatives who have been reincarnated within their own families.

Now, as a philosopher, that's a weaker body of evidence, right, because there's so much potential for contamination if you're remembering your grandfather. But as a father, this is interesting. It's interesting because reincarnation simply doesn't happen where it works well for the researchers, across great distances and great families, but inside families is a very common occurrence, and therefore it deserves to be looked at.

And next, Michael Newton, two wonderful books, and I must confess a special partiality. If you want to read some—if you wanted to just pick out one or two books out of this entire list, I can't help but wish that you would read Michael Newton's work. Michael Newton was a hypnotherapist who got into past life therapy and was doing past life therapy, and then he accidentally discovered that his clients in deep hypnosis had the ability not only to remember their previous life, but to remember what happened to them after they died. They could remember—basically his clients were beginning to describe the afterlife, and he thought, he didn't think this was possible, but he followed his clients, good therapist that he is, and he took hundreds of people into deep hypnotic regressions, and he followed them when they would go through their former life and they would go through the death experience, he would follow them into their memories, continuing on, and then he would ask them questions.

And he kept detailed notes. He would ask questions about, what was this? What was going on? What was it like? And what he found was, regardless of what background people came from, whatever their cultural enculturation was—fundamentalist Baptist, Carl Marxist atheist, hard-core scientific reductionist—whatever their background was, people were describing the same fundamental reality in the after-death state. They were describing a world that had order, that had structure, that had logic. There was actually a social structure. It was a world in which older learners taught younger learners. And it was also a world where people made the choice to reincarnate as a conscious, careful decision.

It's one of the most important choices you make if you go to college, what courses you sign up for, that's an important choice because once you sign up for a course, you're committed for the entire semester. When you incarnate, what life you take on is an important choice. And Michael Newton found that, in fact, in the spiritual world, the choice of what life to take is a consciously taken choice, made under the guidance of your spiritual helpers and made in cooperation with the other persons that you're going to be incarnating with. So, before we were born, when we knew more than we know now, when we were aware of more than we are aware of now, we chose the life that we are living now. That fact alone just bears deep meditation.

Two last examples, not from professionals, they're from amateurs, but that's what makes them interesting. The first is this book, "Looking for Carroll Beckwith," and what makes it interesting is the man who wrote it, Robert Snow. Because Robert Snow is the commander of the homicide division of the Indianapolis Police Department. All right, so he's Chief of Detectives. He investigates murders. His opinion is very important. It must stand up in court. He would be the last person that you would think would be doing research on a former life. But it happened that he kind of, he did a hypnotic session not oriented towards past lives. He just kind of, on a lark, did the hypnotic session, and in this hypnotic session, he was hit in the face with a life that appeared to be his life, but it scared him to death, and he literally ran out of the room. But he was curious, and so he brought all of his detective skills to the systematic search to see if he could identify and track down whether there was such a person. And the story of his experience and the story of his detective work is told in this short book, "Looking for Carroll Beckwith."

And lastly, this book "Soul Survivor," which you may have seen it because they did some news clips, some decent news clips on it, written by Bruce and Andrea Leininger about their son, James. And this is a case of a child, three years old, two years old, who started having spontaneous memories and trauma, waking up crying in the middle of the night, spontaneous memories of apparently dying in World War II as an airplane pilot over the coast of Japan. And his father was a fundamentalist Baptist, and he was absolutely vehemently opposed to his son reincarnating. The mother was a little more receptive. So they got involved in it. First, they wanted to help their son, but he got involved in the inquiry because he wanted to disprove reincarnation. Whatever was going on with James, he wanted to disprove reincarnation to protect his faith. In the end, they tracked down this pilot. They tracked down the story. They were able to reunite James with the people at a military reunion, with the people who had served with this pilot. And James was able to identify people out of this group. The father became convinced that, in fact, his son was a reincarnation of this pilot, and reincarnation is true.

Now, I'd like to just finish with two observations. Quick observations, as lunch awaits. I'd like to emphasize what we don't know about reincarnation. The evidence for reincarnation may be compelling. However, we don't really know a lot about how reincarnation takes place or what the physics of rebirth is. We're still beginners in this. At this point, we can't say what the soul is or what it's made of. How does it come and go from the physical body? How does it interface with our biology and our genetic makeup? How does it encode its previous learning into our present body? And how does it leave with its learning intact after we die? These things right now are beyond our present grasp. I'm sure we'll make progress in the future, but before we do, we're going to have to stop reducing mind to brain, and we're going to have to approach this research with a more multi-dimensional metaphysical cosmology.

And lastly, I'd like to point to a certain paradox in the evidence. And to do this, I need to really go back to Ian Stevenson. Stevenson's evidence, I think, is the most powerful evidence for reincarnation, and his evidence liberates our thinking at one level, but it also constricts our thinking at another. Because the strongest evidence for reincarnation comes from lives that show the tightest connection, the tightest correlation. But the correlation can be so tight it can lead, if you just study Stevenson's evidence, it can lead to an anemic, an underdeveloped vision of what life is like when we die, when most of us die. In that respect, we must remember that Stevenson's cases are not typical cases. These children are coming back very fast and very close to home. Most people spend much more "time" in the timeless condition of the spirit world. They have a much wider breadth of experiences. So Stevenson's evidence liberates us to think about the soul and our existence in a much larger, expanded framework. But in order to actually fill in that canvas, in order to actually explore more deeply what happens to us when we die, and what the larger circle of life is like, from expanded consciousness to contracted consciousness and back into expanded consciousness, we need to look at other bodies of data. I think Michael Newton's work is an important body of data that gives us a larger vision. And this afternoon, when I talk about psychedelic research, I'll look at another body of data, which I think can give us an expanded vision of our life in this universe. Thank you very much.

Host: Again, Chris, thank you so much. This was again a real experience to listen to you, and I so much like how you make clear that this is the knowledge which makes really such a difference in how we live our life, which makes such a difference in how we approach every minute in our life. If this is true or not, it makes the real difference. I think all the three speakers of this session fitted together so well. I think it's so much arranged, and it's really the core of the Institute for Existential Consciousness because these are the real existential questions. And there is a scientific basis, and we have to bring it to society to make a shift in consciousness again. So thank you very much, and I'm so much looking forward to your next lecture.