The best definition of Europe is that it is that part of the world that does not believe in reincarnation.
Albert Schopenhauer
CLAIMS of reincarnation are certainly easier to find and investigate within a culture that accepts and even expects them. Whether they actually occur more frequently within such a culture is less certain. It seems more likely that past-life memories are part of the normal spectrum of human experience, so that a similar proportion of people in every culture will have them. There may also be racial or personal characteristics quite separate from cultural expectations which make some people more likely to have these memories than others. There is a strong link, for example, between psychic experiences and past-life feelings. Some experts suggest that in Thailand (where reincarnation is part of the culture) children are less outgoing, less impulsive and more contemplative than Western children. Might these differences facilitate remembrance of past lives? Are the children who have these experiences more imaginative, more given to fantasy than others?
Professor Ian Stevenson, of the University of Virginia, has studied possible cases of reincarnation for over twenty years and has collected an enormous body of data—over 2,600 case studies, far more than any other researcher. Most of his cases are from cultures in which reincarnation is accepted, and most of his data comes from studies of children who remember past lives.
One of the conclusions he has reached is that it is difficult to find much of a pattern in terms of consistency of culture, time and place from one incarnation to another. He has found that the death-to-rebirth time interval, for example, varies from thirteen months to nineteen years. Some people migrate hundreds of miles between one life and the next; others may be reborn into the same family, in the same place. Almost all Tlingit Alaskan Indian cases are reborn within the same family, almost all Asian Indian cases are of rebirth outside the family.
However, Stevenson believes that one can lay down some sort of a blueprint about reincarnation. Most of the cases of apparent reincarnation which he has studied have three or four of the following features in common.
Occasionally an old person may predict his own rebirth. This sometimes occurs in North American Indians, and less often in India, Tibet and Burma. The person who makes the prediction may also select the parents for his next incarnation.
Sometimes a prediction of reincarnation is made in a dream. “Announcing dreams” occur often in North American Indians, in Burma, Thailand, Turkey and occasionally elsewhere. Usually it is a woman who is pregnant or shortly to become pregnant who has the dream; occasionally it may be a close relative of hers—a mother or grandmother, for example. The person who is to be reborn appears in the dream and announces his intention. In Western society, announcing dreams and predictions of rebirth are rare.
In many of the cultures Stevenson has studied, the parents or relatives of an infant born with a birthmark or birth defect will attribute this to an injury or some other event that took place in the person’s previous life. The mark is often in a similar place, and it may even look similar. Usually, but not always, the person who is the reincarnation claims to remember some events in that life. Stevenson maintains that he has found such birthmarks or defects in about a third of all the cases of possible reincarnation he has studied.
Parents are much more likely to look for and notice birthmarks in cultures where reincarnation is not just accepted but is expected to occur within the family. Among the Tlingit of south-eastern Alaska and the Igbo of Nigeria, for example, a birthmark may help to identify the baby’s previous personality or be a sign that some notable person has reincarnated; in Burma it may confirm expectations of a reincarnation that has been predicted by an announcing dream. Indian Hindus and Sinhalese Buddhists, while they believe in reincarnation, do not expect a baby to be a reincarnation of anyone they knew. They therefore tend not to pay any particular attention to birthmarks or defects, or at any rate do not see them as being important in establishing a baby’s previous identity.
Memory of a past life would seem to be a sine qua non for any possible case of reincarnation. However, where a strongly held belief in reincarnation is part of the culture, a family may persist in believing that they have evidence that a child is the reincarnation of someone they have known, even if the child never talks about a past life and seems to have no memory of one.
More often, though, a child will start talking about his or her previous life between the ages of two and four, and go on doing so until between the ages of five and eight, occasionally later. Most mention the mode of death of the person whose life they claim to remember. Usually they talk with great intensity about their past life, sometimes speaking of it in the present tense, even when they are old enough to have some concept of time. Sometimes they show confusion about their own identity, especially if they remember a past life in which they were of a different sex, or have memories of themselves in an adult body. The children may feel conflicting loyalties towards their past and present families.
Parents of a child whom they believe is a reincarnation often deliberately seek out the family or community where the child previously lived to see if he or she shows any recognition. In Western cases the child is more likely to show spontaneous recognition and say things like “I lived there once” when passing a particular house or “My mother had a dress like that” when looking at a picture or a model in a museum.
This is a common feature in many of Ian Stevenson’s cases, and he acknowledges first that the proportion of violent deaths in past lives is much higher than in the general population, and also that in the cultures he has studied the incidence of violent death is in any case much higher than in, for example, a general Western population. He does not claim that violent death is a necessary condition for a memory of a past life, only that it appears to be a common one.
The belief that a violent death in a past life is more likely to be remembered is, on the face of it, an odd one. It can be argued that violent deaths are usually swift and that the brain will therefore have no chance to register and record the event. People who have been knocked unconscious in a violent accident, for example, seldom have any memory of the actual event when they recover. One might expect the slow, lingering traumatic death of an illness such as pneumonia to be more likely to be remembered, and yet this seems not to be the case. But perhaps the effects of the violent death are due not directly to memory but to the strong emotional impact of being wrenched from life.
Probably this is because for all of us death is surrounded by rituals. Even people who have no particular religious belief usually believe that the dead should have a decent funeral. In many cultures there is a belief that if your death is violent you won’t make the normal transition from life to death. In Western culture you are likely to hang around as a ghost, either troubled or troublesome, returning to haunt your murderer or the place in which you died. In Eastern cultures you will probably return as a reincarnation. Some cultures even have special rituals for people who have met a violent death to ensure that they are properly laid to rest and do not return.
Often the person shows behaviour or personality traits that seem to correspond much more closely to the previous personality than to anyone in the present, living family. These behaviours tend to persist, in the case of children, long after the memory of the past life itself may have faded. They may show phobias related to the previous personality’s death (as in the case of a child said to have died in an air crash in a past life who developed a flying phobia), or a particular liking for the people, food or clothes enjoyed by the previous personality. A craving for alcohol or tobacco may be attributed to a similar addiction by the previous personality. There may be a nostalgic longing for the previous family and insistent demands to be taken to see them. Children may play out their previous life or work as a teacher or doctor or car mechanic, for example.
Children may also show odd or inappropriate sexual behaviour. If they come into contact with their previous sexual partner, or someone who resembles him or her, they may show precocious sexual attention towards them, and if their “spouse” has remarried, they may seem jealous or resentful of the new partner. A child who remembers a past life as a member of the opposite sex may show a desire to cross-dress, or a preference for the games usually played by the opposite sex.
Finally, and much more rarely, they may exhibit a skill or talent which they have apparently never been taught, but which seems to be innate within them—the ability to speak a foreign language, for example, or to play the piano fluently.
Even among those cultures that accept reincarnation as a fact, beliefs about it differ. The Tlingit of Alaska, for example, have a matrilineal society and think it important to be reborn in the family of one’s mother, whereas the Igbo of Nigeria, who have a patrilineal society, think it important to be reborn in the family of one’s father. Not surprisingly, when cases of supposed reincarnation do occur, they reflect those differing beliefs.
Most Indians are Hindus, who believe in reincarnation, as do the much less numerous Jains, Buddhists and Sikhs. Most Muslims and Christians do not believe in reincarnation. Hinduism emphasises the doctrine of karma—that your conduct in one life will have an effect on your circumstances in your next life. If you are seriously wicked you may reincarnate in an animal body. Claims of sex change from one life to another are uncommon.
Most Burmese are Theravadan Buddhists who believe that if there is misconduct in one life this may lead to “payback” in the next, or even, as Hindus believe, to rebirth as an animal. A sex change from one life to the next is quite common. Usually the past life is someone from the same family or someone who was at least known to the family. Announcing dreams occur frequently and birthmarks and birth defects are widely regarded as evidence of reincarnation. People often claim to have some memory of an existence between death and rebirth.
The Thais are mostly Theravadan Buddhists. Their beliefs are similar to those of the Burmese Theravadan Buddhists, but the Thais have fewer same-family cases and claims of sex change are less common, though more frequent than in other countries. Many claim some memory of experience between death and rebirth.
In both Burma and Thailand there are strong regional expectations about rebirth. Although the doctrine of “no soul” in Theravadan Buddhism would seem to preclude any idea that memories can be carried from one life to a subsequent one, Buddhism accepts the idea of some kind of link between lives. There is, in Buddhism, a gradual accumulation of merit through deeds, and this can be carried over to a subsequent life. In Thailand there is a strong cultural expectation of a conscious out-of-body intermission between two successive lives, which makes memory of a previous life possible.
Tamils are mostly Hindus; otherwise most Sinhalese are Theravadan Buddhists with beliefs similar to Burmese and Thais. But there are few same-family cases, and announcing dreams almost never occur.
Most cases of reincarnation occur among Arabic-speaking Alevis, a sect of the Shiite branch of Islam. They hold a belief in reincarnation but without supposing that conduct in one life influences circumstances in a later one—conduct in Islam is assessed at the Day of Judgement. Sex changes almost never occur.
Most cases occur among the Druse, whose religion derives from the Shiite branch of Islam but has separated from it almost completely. Reincarnation plays a greater part in the life of the Druse than in any other religion. Druse parents nearly always encourage their children to tell them what they can remember about their previous lives, and a large proportion of Druse children are born with past-life memories. The Druse believe reincarnation as a newborn baby occurs immediately after death, and always with the same sex as in the previous life. Conduct in one life does not affect the circumstances of a later one, but is rewarded or punished at the Day of Judgement.
Most are formally Christians, but their traditional religion includes belief in reincarnation. They do not believe in sex change from one life to the next, or in animal reincarnation. Many believe that you can influence the circumstances of your next life before death: for example, by wishing for particular parents in the next life. The Tlingit also regard birthmarks and birth defects as identification marks of a previous incarnation. Announcing dreams are fairly frequent.
The Haida are formally Christians, but their traditional religion persists and includes a belief in reincarnation. Most don’t believe that sex change can occur. Neither do they believe that humans can reincarnate as animals, although they do believe that reincarnation is possible in two or more later physical bodies (“soul-splitting”). Announcing dreams are common, but attempts to identify a previous incarnation through birth defects and birthmarks are less common than among the Tlingit.
Although most are formally Christians, they still adhere to their traditional religion, which includes a strong belief in reincarnation. When a new baby is born, they believe it is important to identify the person of whom the baby is a reincarnation, and for this birthmarks and birth defects that correspond to wounds or other marks on a deceased person are important. Sex change is accepted and common. The Igbo, as well as some other groups of West African people, believe a baby who dies may be reborn in the same family, die again as an infant, only to be reborn yet again into the same family. These are called “repeater children”—the Igbo have developed strategies for thwarting the intention, as they see it, of the baby to die young.
Overall, in Stevenson’s cases there is an unequal balance between the reincarnated sexes. A sex change is claimed in 12 percent of the cases Stevenson has collected. Three times as many girls say that they were boys in previous lives as boys who say they were girls. Only in Burma were there more cases of reincarnated women than men. In most other cultures boys outnumbered girls by about three to one and by two to one in cases where the previous life ended in a violent death.
Stevenson suggests that there may be cultural reasons for this preponderance of male past lives. In many Asian countries, for example, women are expected to take a low profile; publicity resulting from a claim to reincarnation might damage a woman’s chances of marriage. Among the West African Igbo, a male-dominated society, more interest is likely to be shown in and more attention paid to a boy’s previous incarnation than a girl’s. Finally, he suggests that in these cultures men’s lives are more eventful, and therefore more memorable, than the lives of women.
There seems to be no hard-and-fast rule governing change in socioeconomic status from one life to the next. Princes may reincarnate as paupers and vice versa. Ian Stevenson has pointed out that of his Indian cases, two-thirds were better off in their previous life, one-third worse off. Some critics of his research have suggested that this is because fantasy or wishful thinking plays a large part in the recovered memories. In Stevenson’s view this is unlikely: in India there is no moral or social high ground to be gained by claiming a past life that is markedly better than your present one; all it suggests is that you may have done something pretty dreadful in it to deserve such demotion. Moreover, people who have been “demoted” in their present life tend to alienate the rest of their family either by boasting of their previous circumstances or complaining about their present ones.
Mainstream Christianity believes in the immortality of the soul but not in reincarnation. Instead, the belief is that at death souls go to some kind of intermediate state where they await the resurrection of the body—a prospect that seems a good deal more improbable and less desirable than any notion of reincarnation.
But even though reincarnation is not an accepted part of either the Jewish or the Christian tradition, it is a belief which is probably much more widespread than is generally acknowledged. An article on reincarnation in the Daily Mail in March 1998 elicited over 300 letters from people who had either had memories of a past life or at least held a belief in reincarnation. A Sunday Telegraph Gallup Poll in April 1979 reported that 28 percent of all British adults believed in reincarnation, as opposed to 18 percent in 1969. And despite the fact that reincarnation is a belief incompatible with Roman Catholicism, an official survey on attitudes among Britain’s Roman Catholics, prepared by Michael Hornsby-Smith and Dr. Raymond Lee of the Sociology Department of the University of Surrey, found that 27 percent admitted to a belief in reincarnation. The apparent strengthening of belief in reincarnation may well be a reflection of a general weakening of conventional religious faith and the encroachment of New Age beliefs. Surveys have also shown that people whose religion is important to them are less likely to believe in reincarnation (or, incidentally, in the devil, astrology or ESP).
However, a belief in reincarnation is still not generally accepted within Western culture, and so people tend to keep quiet about it if they or their children have memories of a past life. Children who talk about their “other family” are often discouraged by their parents, and such cases seem to be quite independent of any family belief in reincarnation. The parents are highly unlikely to try to identify a previous incarnation. In any case, memories are seldom specific enough for an identification to be made. Predictions of rebirth and announcing dreams are rare. Birthmarks and birth defects are not regarded as having any link with a previous life (unless, as in the case of the Pollock twins [see page 229], they are used to confirm an existing belief). Past-life memories, recognition of people or, more commonly, places, and odd behaviours, phobias or skills are the most common “markers” of an apparent past life in the West. Quite often, too, there is a suggestion of a violent end to the previous incarnation.
America is the only other Western society in which there has been a serious study of people who claim to remember past lives. Ian Stevenson has compared a sample of 79 American children (43 boys and 36 girls) with cases in Indian children and found some interesting differences.
Most Americans do not believe in reincarnation. Stevenson found that many of the parents he talked to were distinctly uncomfortable with the idea. The statements their children made about a previous life often conflicted with the families’ religious beliefs, and when the children made them they were frequently scoffed at, scolded or even punished.
In about a third of Stevenson’s cases he was not able to find out whether the family had any particular interest or belief in or knowledge of reincarnation. Of the remainder, about 16 percent occurred among children whose parents did believe in reincarnation, and 37 percent had heard of reincarnation and had at least some interest in it. In 20 percent the family had a general interest mi parapsychology, but in the remaining 27 percent they had little or no knowledge about reincarnation. The families Stevenson studied tended to be Christians, to be residents of small towns and villages, and to have had little education beyond high school.
The most obvious difference Stevenson found between these American children and those he had studied in India was that the American children made far fewer specific statements. They seldom mentioned names, for example. Of 266 Indian cases, 75 percent mentioned the name of the person whose life they remembered; only 34 percent of the American children did so. Overwhelmingly, the person whose life the American children felt they remembered was a member of their own family, such as a grandparent or a sibling who had died before the child was born. The single exception was a child whose past-life memories indicated that he was someone who had been a close friend of his mother. This has to raise the possibility that these children may have elaborated a fantasy about a past life based on what they had learned in a normal way about some family member.
On the other hand, only 16 percent of the Indian children believed that they were a reincarnation of a relative. In some cases the two families concerned had known each other, but in almost half the cases the families lived far apart, had never met and had no knowledge of each other.
Both groups of children began speaking about their past life at around the age of three, but the American children tended to stop speaking about it at around five, about twenty months earlier than the Indian children—perhaps because they got no positive feedback or encouragement from parents, and no attempt was made to verify what they said. The two groups made about the same number of different statements about their lives—usually around fourteen. The Indian children were much more likely to mention the way they died: 78 percent of them did so, and of these 56 percent had died a violent death. Only 43 perent of the Americans mentioned their mode of death, but of these 80 percent remembered dying violently. In both cultures, many of the children who remembered a violent death had phobias about the instrument or mode of death.
More American children (15 percent) remembered life as someone of the opposite sex, and nearly all of these were girls who remembered life as a man; only one boy remembered life as a girl. Of the Indian group, only three percent claimed to remember a previous life as someone of the opposite sex; a third of these were boys, two-thirds were girls. In both groups the life remembered was usually a very ordinary one. None of the children claimed to have been a famous person or to have performed extraordinary or heroic deeds—in stark contrast to many of the past lives remembered by adults under hypnosis.
Both Hindus and Buddhists believe that animals as well as human beings reincarnate. But even in southern Asia, despite this wide belief, claims that humans have reincarnated as animals, or animals have reincarnated as humans, are extremely rare. Professor Ian Stevenson has collected only about thirty such cases. Most are humans who claim to remember an incarnation as an animal; occasionally a human will identify an animal as the reincarnation of a human being. In the West such claims are rarer still. So the following story of Ruff the spaniel, told to us by Dr. June Alexander, is unusual, particularly as it describes the apparent reincarnation of a dog as another dog—an event that most people would agree fits far more comfortably into the natural order of things than any trans-species reincarnation.
One of my dogs—a springer spaniel called Ruff who died age sixteen in March 1988—always travelled in the car with me, slept by my bed and was very close. The hour he died Tuff and Rufus were born, two liver and white spaniels with nine black and white siblings of black and white parents. Tuff came to live with me when he was about fourteen weeks. I took him in the car to visit a residential home where Ruff had visited weekly all his life, seen the old ladies, then went upstairs to the matron’s sitting-room, where I had tea and Ruff a chocolate biscuit. To my amazement, having seen the residents, I noticed this puppy clambering upstairs and going along the corridor to matron’s sitting-room, then pawing at the cupboard where the chocolate biscuits were kept! Two weeks later we went to visit my mother, who lived in a block of seventy-two flats at Blundellsands near Liverpool. The puppy jumped out of the car and ran to the correct block of flats, up on to the first floor and into the correct flat. More than that, Ruff always used to find a mirror in the dining-room which went down to the floor and always enjoyed sitting down and “laughing” at himself. To my amazement, when I went into the flat this puppy was sitting by the mirror with his lips curled up “laughing.” I have no explanation.
Dr. Alexander adds that as he grew older, Tuff behaved like all the usual wayward springers; just as seems to happen in the case of children, Tuff’s apparent past-life memories seemed to fade.
In the many cases he has studied, Professor Ian Stevenson has made meticulous attempts to check every statement made by someone claiming to have memories of a previous life, and to discover the identity of the previous incarnation. If a memory of a past life contains a great deal of detail which can be proved to be correct and it can be proved that there is no way the present personality could have known it, then Ian Stevenson regards the case as “solved.”
When a society believes in reincarnation there are usually well-recognised links between one incarnation and the next—reincarnation is expected to occur (and may even be predicted) within the family, for example, or at any rate in the same neighbourhood, and usually within a limited time-frame. Identification within this framework is feasible.
However, very few Western cases are solvable in this way. The statements that children give seldom contain enough specific, verifiable information to enable their stories to be checked out. Many of the past-life memories of adults, particularly those that are remembered under hypnosis, seem to be more romantic, less culture bound, and usually contain very few specific, verifiable statements. The scenarios that appear most frequently—the tales of Indian braves and intrepid settlers, visions of ancient Egyptian temples and of death in battle—are an accurate reflection of the cultural icons and preoccupations of our age. They are also, surely, an indication of a natural sense of drama and love of romance common to us all.
Westerners are much more likely to remember a previous incarnation in another culture. It seems that in our past lives we can go anywhere, do anything. We can cross boundaries of time, culture, even sex. When there are literally no limits on our past-life experiences, when we are as likely to be the reincarnation of a sixteenth-century European peasant, an African slave girl, an American Plains Indian, or a passenger on the Titanic, the chances of verification are virtually zero. Ian Stevenson, too, has found that the most striking difference between children he has investigated who apparently reincarnate within their own culture, and those who claim to have had a previous life in a country or culture quite different from their own is that in cross-cultural cases the child is never able to give enough information for any of his or her claims to be verified.
Most of us are ordinary people leading unremarkable lives, and the chances are that if we have had a past life it will have been equally unremarkable and ordinary. It will also be difficult to verify. There is no argument, for example, about whether Florence Nightingale or Genghis Khan were real people or not. But someone who claims to be the reincarnation of Florence Nightingale or Genghis Khan is a mite less convincing than someone whose claims to a past life are more modest—an estate agent called John somewhere in the south of England whose surname you can’t quite remember, for example. However, the more obscure a personality, the more difficult it is to find proof that he or she ever existed, though of course if such proof is found, it is all the more convincing. Names, place-names, dates, all need to be reasonably accurate if anything like proof is to be found.
What seem to emerge most strongly in Western past-life memories are visual and emotional impressions. Hard data such as names and dates are seldom produced. Perhaps this should not surprise us. Visual and emotional impressions, rather than names and dates, are the stuff of which most of our memories are made in this life. We may remember the torment of being bullied, for example, long after we have forgotten the name of the child who bullied us. There is no reason to suppose that memories of a past life should be any different.
But this does, of course, make it very difficult to check out the facts of a past life. The most easily verifiable facts—names, addresses, dates, etc.—may not loom as large in the past-life memory as incidents that made a great visual or emotional impact but which cannot be checked.
It is very, very seldom that a past life can be “solved” in the way that Ian Stevenson attempts to solve it. What happens much more often is first of all that correct statements are mixed with incorrect ones, in variable proportions, and that there are usually a lot of near misses. In one particular case of Ian Stevenson’s, for example, the parents of a boy called Imad Elawar believed he was claiming to have been one Mahmoud Bouhamzy, who had a wife called Jamilah and who had been fatally injured by a truck after a quarrel with its driver. When the Bouhamzy family were traced, it was discovered that he was called Ibrahim, not Mahmoud, that he had a mistress, not a wife, called Jamilah, that he had not died in an accident at all but had witnessed his cousin Said who had indeed been killed in such an accident . . . Those who are so disposed will say that these inaccuracies invalidate the whole story; those who are more sympathetic will be inclined to take the view that it is impressive that the boy was so near the mark so often and that one should not expect him to have perfect recall.
Reincarnation is one way of explaining a host of phenomena—the feeling of familiarity with places or people, the fact that you seem to have information or skills or talents that you know you have not acquired in this life, or even memories of what seem to be other people’s lives or experiences. It can also give an explanation for the inequalities of this world which seem so unfair. But there are other ways of explaining these phenomena, some rational and scientific, others irrational and entirely outside the current domain of science.
We have to start with the rational. Past-life experiences may be the product of fantasy or imagination, for example, motivated by the unconscious needs of the person and sometimes unconsciously generated. They may be dramatic examples of the quite common déjà vu experience. They may simply be self-deception or a fanciful kind of fraud. Dissociated states (including the so-called multiple personality) are another possible explanation. Or it may just be that memory is playing tricks on us.
If none of these seems to provide an adequate explanation, then we have to abandon the scientific and the rational and look elsewhere. Often a child may have not only the looks but also the gestures, habits, predilections or personality of some other family member. We know that some tendencies—criminality or alcoholism, for example—are inherited. “He’s his grandfather all over again,” people who have not the slightest belief in reincarnation may say, whether they are talking about the way a child’s ears stick out or his or her sweet smile or foul temper, or tendency to steamroller anything that might obstruct a desire to get his or her own way.
All these are indeed characteristics that can be inherited and don’t require any other explanation than currently accepted genetic mechanisms and family cultural influences. One of the most intuitively appealing alternatives to the theory of reincarnation is that we inherit not only the physical characteristics of our ancestors but something of their memories too. It is popularly supposed that memories of experiences might leave physical traces within the genes, which could then be transferred to the next generation when they can be re-experienced. In several cultures—the Igbo of Nigeria, the tribes of north-western North America, for example—when someone remembers a past life it is nearly always as a member of their own family or extended family. So if memories could indeed be passed on through the genes, these cases of reincarnation could easily be explained.
Unfortunately, the theory of genetic memory does not stand up. The only kind of genetic memory that science recognises is the memory that is already encoded in the genes at birth. The genes determine the protein structures that go to make up the next individual. Some of these proteins determine the structure of the brain and, in simple animals, also determine certain instinctual behaviours. Even if memories left physical traces in the cells of the brain, for these to be transferred to the next generation these complex and widespread memory traces would have to be transferred to the egg or sperm which contains the genetic material for transfer to the next generation. There is no known mechanism by which this could be done.
So it is difficult to see how the genes could acquire memory of a lifetime’s events and, even if this were possible, how these could be passed on using the normal mechanism of inheritance, from parent to child. Neither could it explain how someone born into a different family, a few months or even years after a previous personality’s death, could have inherited these memories through the normal genetic mechanism. Even if memories could be transmitted via the genes, and reincarnation occurred within the same family, a child could still only receive genetic memories of events that had occurred before he or she was conceived. Many people who remember a past life say they remember their previous death. It is difficult to see how they could pass on this particular memory to their descendants.
Some interesting non-scientific theories are often advanced to account for the phenomenon of past-life memories. One set of theories makes use of parapsychology. The point about parapsychology is that some parapsychological processes are thought not to exist in linear time. Thus, it is possible to know what is in the past and what is in the future, and to become aware of other people’s previous life experiences through retrospective telepathy. We may then interpret these experiences as our own past lives. Parapsychology does not necessarily say that these lives are our own, simply that we resonate with past experiences, though we may of course interpret them as our own. (See chapter 16.)
Another non-scientific theory is that there is a common memory pool—something akin to Jung’s collective unconscious or the morphic resonance theory of Rupert Sheldrake—that certain people under certain conditions can “tune in” to. Yet another suggests that the experience is the result of a shift in time, a step back into the past.
These are all quite logical and interesting alternatives to the theory of reincarnation, but they don’t actually solve anything as they are outside our current scientific structure—they simply raise more questions that have to be answered. So perhaps we should start by looking at the rational. And because the best evidence for reincarnation lies in the memories of past lives, we should start by looking at memory.