6

REINCARNATION

As we have seen, there is evidence that at least some, and possibly all, people have previously existed in another body and lived another existence. When anomalous “memories” appear as personal recollections, those who experience them tend to believe that they stem from their own previous life. However, the memories that surface in consciousness are not likely to be past-life recollections. Instead, they appear to be “experiences of the reincarnation-type.” The latter are widespread as well. Experiences suggestive of reincarnation are not limited, whether geographically or culturally. They occur in all corners of the planet and among people of all cultures.

There is of course more to reincarnation than memories. For reincarnation to have actually taken place the consciousness of the foreign personality must have entered the body of the experiencing subject. In esoteric literature this is known as the transmigration of the spirit or soul. It is said to occur in the womb, perhaps already at conception or shortly afterward, when the rhythmic pulses begin that develop into the heart of the embryo.

The spirit or soul of an individual does not necessarily migrate to another individual. Buddhist teachings, for example, tell us that the soul or spirit does not always reincarnate on the earthly plane and in a human form. It may not reincarnate at all, evolving to a spiritual domain from where it either does not return or returns only to fulfill a task it was to accomplish in its preceding incarnation.

But what concerns us here is the possibility that reincarnation could truly occur. Can the consciousness that was the consciousness of a living person reappear in the consciousness of another? In his book The Power Within, British psychiatrist Alexander Cannon wrote that the evidence on this score is too strong to be dismissed:

For years the theory of reincarnation was a nightmare to me and I did my best to disprove it and even argued with my trance subjects to the effect that they were talking nonsense. Yet as the years went by one subject after another told me the same story in spite of different and varied conscious beliefs. Now well over a thousand cases have been so investigated and I have to admit that there is such a thing as reincarnation.¹

VARIATIONS AND VARIABLES IN REINCARNATION-TYPE EXPERIENCES

There are significant differences in the frequency and the quality of experiences of the reincarnation type. Belief appears to be a major factor. Where reincarnation is recognized as a reality, reincarnation-type experiences occur more frequently.

Another variable is the age of the person who comes up with reincarnation-type experiences. Those who do are mostly children between the ages of two and six. After the age of eight the experiences tend to fade and, with few exceptions, vanish entirely in adolescence.

The manner in which the reincarnated personality has died is yet another variable. Those who suffered a violent death seem to be more frequently reincarnated than those who died in a natural way.

Reincarnation-type experiences tend to be clear and distinct in children, whereas in adults they are mostly indistinct, appearing as vague hunches and impressions. The more widespread among them are the déjà vu: recognizing a site or a happening one sees for the first time as familiar. The sensation of déjà connu, encountering a person for the first time with a sense of having known him or her before, also occurs, but less frequently.

Whether reincarnation-type experiences convey veridical information about places, people, and events has been tested in reference to eyewitness testimonies and birth and residence certificates. The experiences often turn out to be corroborated by witnesses as well as by documents. Sometimes even minute details correspond to real events, persons, and sites.

Vivid reincarnation-type experiences are accompanied by corresponding patterns of behavior. Behaviors suggestive of the reincarnated personality appear even when that personality was of a different generation and a different gender. A young child could manifest the values and behaviors of an elderly person of the opposite sex.

The pioneering research on recent reincarnation-type experiences is the work of Ian Stevenson, a Canadian-American psychiatrist who worked at the University of Virginia School of Medicine. During more than four decades, Stevenson investigated the reincarnation-type experiences of thousands of children, both in the West and in the East. Some of the experiences recounted by the children have been verified as the experience of a person who had lived previously, and whose death matched the impressions reported by the child. Sometimes the child carried a birthmark associated with the death of the person with whom he or she identified, such as an indentation or discoloration on the part of the body where a fatal bullet entered, or a malformation on a hand or the foot the deceased had lost.

In a path-breaking essay published in 1958, “The Evidence for Survival from Claimed Memories of Former Incarnations,” Stevenson analyzed the reincarnation-type experiences of children and presented narratives on seven of the cases.² These cases turned out to be veridical, with the incidents recounted by the children recorded in often obscure local journals and articles. Stevenson’s study was read by Eileen Garrett (the medium whom we have already encountered in regard to medium-conveyed messages). She had heard of similar cases in India and invited Stevenson to come to that country to conduct firsthand research. Stevenson uncovered robust evidence for reincarnation in India as well as in Sri Lanka, Brazil, Ceylon, Alaska, and Lebanon. In 1966 he published his seminal work, Twenty Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation.³ He discovered additional cases subsequently in Turkey, Thailand, Burma, Nigeria, and Alaska and published reports on them in four volumes between the years 1975 and 1983.

A SAMPLING OF REINCARNATION-TYPE EXPERIENCES

The Case of Ma Tin Aung Myo

A case reported by Stevenson involved a Burmese girl called Ma Tin Aung Myo. She claimed to be the reincarnation of a Japanese soldier killed during the Second World War.⁴ The case spans huge cultural differences between the person reporting the experiences and the individual whose experiences she reports.

In 1942 Burma was under Japanese occupation. The Allies regularly bombed the Japanese supply lines, particularly the railways. The village of Na-Thul was no exception, being close to the important railway station at Puang. Regular attacks made life very hard for the villagers, who were trying their best to survive. Indeed, survival meant getting along with the Japanese occupiers. For villager Daw Aye Tin (who was later to be the mother of Ma Tin Aung Myo) this meant discussing the relative merits of Burmese and Japanese food with the stocky, regularly bare-chested Japanese army cook who was stationed in the village.

The war ended, and life returned to a semblance of normality. In early 1953 Daw found herself pregnant with her fourth child. The pregnancy was normal, with the odd exception of a reoccurring dream in which the Japanese cook, with whom she had long lost contact, would follow her and announce that he was coming to stay with her family. On December 26, 1953, Daw gave birth to a daughter and called her Ma Tin Aung Myo. The baby was perfect with one small exception: a thumb-sized birthmark on her groin.

As the child grew up it was noted that she had a great fear of aircraft. Every time one flew overhead she would become agitated and cry. Her father, U Aye Maung, was intrigued by this, as the war had been over many years and aircraft were now simply machines of transport rather than weapons of war. It was therefore strange that Ma was afraid that the aircraft would shoot at her. The child became more and more morose, stating that she wanted to “go home.” Later “home” became more specific; she wanted to return to Japan. When asked why this was the case, she stated that she had memories of being a Japanese soldier based in Na-Thul. She knew that she had been killed by machine-gun fire from an aircraft, and this is why she feared airplanes so much.

As Ma Tin Aung Myo grew older she accessed more memories of the life of her previous personality. She was later to tell Ian Stevenson that she remembered that the previous personality came from Northern Japan and that he had five children, the eldest being a boy, and that he had been an army cook. From then on the memories became more precise. She remembered that she (as the Japanese soldier) was near a pile of firewood next to an acacia tree. She described wearing short pants and no shirt. An Allied aircraft spotted him and strafed the area around him. He ran for cover: as he did so, he was hit by a bullet in the groin, which killed him instantly. She described the plane as having two tails. This was later identified as being a Lockheed P-38 Lightning, an aircraft used by the Allies in the Burma campaign.

In her teens Ma Tin Aung Myo showed distinct masculine traits. She cropped her hair short and refused to wear female clothing. This eventually led her to drop out of school.

Between 1972 and 1975 Ma Tin Aung Myo was interviewed three times by Ian Stevenson. She explained that she wanted to be married to a woman and had a steady girlfriend. She said that she did not like the hot climate of Burma nor its spicy food. She much preferred highly sweetened curry dishes. When she was younger she loved to eat semi-raw fish, only losing this preference when a fish bone stuck in her throat.

The actual memories of the Japanese soldier were incomplete in Ma’s mind. For example, she had distinct knowledge of his death circumstances but did not remember the soldier’s name, the names of his children or wife, or his place of origin in Northern Japan. Stevenson could not inquire into the veracity of these experiences in Japan.⁵

Other Cases in the Indian Subcontinent

Stevenson described how a Sri Lankan girl remembered a life in which she had drowned in a flooded paddy field. She described that a bus had driven past and splashed her with water just before she died. Subsequent research found that a girl in a nearby village had drowned after she had stepped back to avoid a passing bus while walking on a narrow road above flooded paddy fields. She fell backward into deep water and died. The girl who manifested this experience had, from a very early age, shown an irrational fear of buses; she would also get hysterical if taken near deep water. She had a fondness for bread and had a liking for sweet food. This was unusual, in that her family did not like either. However, the previous personality was noted for both of these preferences.⁶

Another typical Stevenson case was that of Swarnlata Mishra, born in a small village in Madhya Pradesh in 1948. When she was three years old she began having spontaneous past-life memories of being a girl called Biya Pathak, who lived in a village more than a hundred miles away. She described that the house Biya lived in had four rooms and was painted white.

She began to sing songs that she claimed she used to know, together with complex dance routines that were unknown to her present family and friends. Six years later she recognized some people who had been her friends in the past life. This stimulated her father to start writing down what she said.

Her case generated interest outside of the village. One investigator who visited the city discovered that a woman who matched the description given by Swarnlata had died nine years previously. Investigations subsequently confirmed that a young girl called Biya had lived in just such a house in that town.

Swarnlata’s father decided to take his daughter to the town and to have her introduced to members of Biya’s family. As a test the family introduced people who were not related to the child. Swarnlata immediately identified these individuals as being imposters. Indeed some details of her past life were so precise that all were amazed. For example, Swarnlata described a particular wedding that her previous personality had attended in which she had difficulty in finding a latrine. This was confirmed by those in the family who also attended the wedding.

In all, Ian Stevenson recorded forty-nine separate points regarding the life of Biya as described by Swarnlata that were subsequently confirmed by one or more independent witnesses. He considered this as one of his strongest cases related in Twenty Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation.⁷

Some Western Cases

Stevenson’s investigation of Western cases included one that involved four children of the same family. On May 5, 1957, the sisters Joanna and Jacqueline Pollock were killed by a car on their way to school in Hexham in the North East of England. Joanna was eleven, and Jacqueline was six. The sisters were very close, and the family was devastated by the loss. A year later Florence Pollock discovered that she was pregnant. Her husband, John, was insistent that his wife was carrying twins even though the physicians involved insisted that the pregnancy was normal. John was right; on October 4, 1958, Florence gave birth to twins: Gillian and Jennifer.

Although the girls were identical twins, they had very different birthmarks (identical twins usually have identical birthmarks). Jennifer had two birthmarks, one on her forehead and another on her waist. These were not mirrored on the body of her twin sister, but they mirrored marks on the body of her dead sister, Jacqueline. Jacqueline had a birthmark in exactly the same location as one of them, as well as a scar in the same place as Jennifer’s second birthmark.⁸

When the twins were four months old, the family moved from Hexham to Whitley Bay. Two and a half years later the family returned for a visit. Much to the surprise of the parents, the little girls knew their way around the area well. One of the girls pointed and said, “The school is just around the corner.” The other pointed to a hill and said, “Our playground is behind there. It has a slide and a swing.”

John believed that his two lost daughters had returned. Florence, a practicing Catholic, had great reservations, as the concept of reincarnation was at odds with her beliefs. However, when the twins were four, what happened made Florence accept the possibility of a double rebirth. After the deaths of Jacqueline and Joanna, John had placed their toys in a locked box. It had not been opened since, and the twins had not been aware of its contents. John placed a selection of the toys outside the girls’ bedroom and, with his wife watching, called the twins. The girls identified the toys that had belonged to each of them in what appeared to be their previous lives. Jennifer picked up a doll and said, “Oh, that’s Mary” and identified another doll as “Suzanne.” She then turned to Gillian and said, “And that’s your washing machine.” Florence thereafter revised her opinion about reincarnation.

Stevenson considered birthmarks one of the most powerful proofs of reincarnation. His interest in birthmarks was followed up by Dr. Jim Tucker, who claimed that a third of all cases from India involve birthmarks that mirrored injuries sustained by the previous personality, and that 18 percent of those among them who had medical records confirm the match.⁹

Tucker, who succeeded Stevenson at the University of Virginia Medical School, focused his investigations on evidence for reincarnation in American children. One case was that of Patrick Christenson, who was born by cesarean section in Michigan in March 1991. His elder brother, Kevin, had died of cancer twelve years earlier at the age of two. Early evidence of Kevin’s cancer was presented six months prior to his death when he began to walk and had a noticeable limp. One day he fell and broke his leg. Tests were done, and after a biopsy on a small nodule in his scalp, just above his right ear, it was discovered that little Kevin had metastatic cancer. Soon tumors were found growing in other locations in his body. One such growth caused his eye to protrude and eventually resulted in blindness in that eye. Kevin was given chemotherapy, which resulted in scars on the right-hand side of his neck. He eventually died of his illness, three weeks after his second birthday.

At birth Patrick had a slanting birthmark with the appearance of a small cut on the right side of his neck, exactly the same location as Kevin’s chemotherapy scar. He also had a nodule on his scalp just above his right ear and a clouding of his left eye, which was diagnosed as a corneal leukoma. When he began to walk it was with a distinct limp.

When he was almost four and a half he said to his mother that he wanted to go back to his old orange and brown house. This was the exact coloring of the house in which the family had lived in 1979 when Kevin was alive. He then asked if she remembered him having surgery. She replied that she could not because this had never happened to him. Patrick then pointed to a place just above his right ear. He added that he didn’t remember the actual operation because he was asleep.

In 2005 Tucker published a book entitled Life Before Life: A Scientific Investigation of Children’s Memories of Previous Lives. A case he cited is that of Kendra Carter from Florida. Four-year-old Kendra had started taking swimming lessons at the local pool. She developed an instantaneous attachment to her swimming coach, Ginger. When she was with Ginger, Kendra was happy and contented, but on the days she was not seeing Ginger she was quiet and withdrawn. This behavior worried her parents. One evening she explained to her mother that Ginger had a baby who died and that the coach had been sick and pushed the baby out. This intrigued Kendra’s mother. She had been with Kendra at all times during the swimming lessons. It was impossible that Ginger had told Kendra anything about her past; indeed, this was hardly the kind of subject a woman would have told a four-year-old child. However, things became not only strange but somewhat worrisome to Kendra’s mother, a conservative Christian, when, in response to the question of how she knew about Ginger’s baby, Kendra replied, “I’m the baby that was in her tummy.”¹⁰ She then went on to describe how she had been pulled out of Ginger’s tummy. It was subsequently discovered that nine years previously Ginger had had an abortion. This was totally unknown to Kendra’s mother or any other person around her.

Another case involved an eighteen-month-old boy called Sam Taylor. As his diaper was being changed he looked up at his father and said, “When I was your age I used to change your diapers.” Later Sam disclosed details about his grandfather’s life that were completely accurate. He said that his grandfather’s sister had been murdered and that his grandmother had made milkshakes for his grandfather using a food processor. Sam’s parents were adamant that none of these subjects had been discussed in his presence. When he was four years old, Sam was shown a group of old family pictures spread out on a table. Sam happily identified his grandfather every time with the announcement, “That’s me!” In an attempt to test him, his mother selected an old school class photograph showing the grandfather as a young boy. There were sixteen other boys in the photograph. Sam immediately pointed to one of them, once again announcing that that was him. He was right.¹¹

REINCARNATION: WHAT THE EVIDENCE TELLS US

Reincarnation-type experiences can be vivid and convincing to the extent that they appear to be testimony that a previously living personality has been incarnated in the subject. This belief is strengthened by the observation that birthmarks on the body of the subject correspond to the bodily features of the person whom he or she seems to incarnate. This is most strikingly the case when the alien personality suffered bodily injury. The corresponding marks or deformations sometimes reappear in the subject.

Many observers of this phenomenon, including Stevenson himself, held that matching birthmarks are significant evidence for reincarnation. However, the coincidence of birthmarks and other bodily features in a child with the fate of a previously existing person is not necessarily assurance that that person is reincarnated in the child. It could also be that the brain and body of the child with the given birthmarks and bodily features are especially adapted to recall the experience of a personality with analogous birthmarks and deformities. (The nature of this recall—from the deep dimension we shall call the Akasha—is explored in chapter 9.)

This explanation of “experiences of the reincarnation type” is vividly illustrated in an unusual case reported by Stevenson.¹² It concerns a woman who later in life—not in early childhood—appeared suddenly possessed by a consciousness that seems to have been that of a woman who lived 150 years ago.

Uttara Huddar was thirty-two years old when a personality named Sharada appeared in her consciousness. Huddar did not remember a foreign personality before then. She was an educated person with two master’s degrees, one in English and the other in public administration, and lectured at Nagpur University in the town where she was born. Sharada, the foreign personality, did not speak the languages Huddar could speak (Huddar spoke Marathi and a little Hindi in addition to English), but she spoke Bengali, a language Huddar spoke only in a rudimentary way. Moreover the Bengali Sharada spoke was not the modern Bengali but that spoken around 1820–1830, the period in which she appears to have lived. She asked for foods and other ethnic particulars of that epoch and did not recognize Huddar’s family and friends.

Huddar had a phobia of snakes. Her mother said that while she was pregnant with Huddar she had repeatedly dreamt of being bitten on the foot by a snake. Sharada, the foreign personality, recalled that when she was seven months pregnant she was bitten by a snake while picking flowers. She became unconscious, but had no recollection of having died. She was twenty-two at the time.

This suggests that Sharada was not “incarnated” in Huddar, as before the age of thirty-two Huddar did not know anything of the existence of Sharada, or of the language and the milieu of Sharada. But the shared experience of being bitten by a snake could provide an alternative explanation. As a young woman herself, this experience could have prompted Huddar to “call up” the Sharada personality from the plane we will call the Akasha dimension.

A similar explanation applies to cases where the friends or relatives of the subject and the foreign personality have the same cultural identity. The fact that Virginia Tighe (“Bridey”) had Irish acquaintances and relatives is not evidence that she acquired her remarkable knowledge of the Irish milieu by ordinary means. But it is an indication that, thanks to these influences, she was better adapted to recall the experience of an individual who lived in Ireland.

But regardless of the interpretation we attach to the evidence, the fact stands out that, whether the person who is reexperienced has been “reincarnated” in the individual or if the deceased consciousness is just “called up” (assumedly from a deeper level of reality), it is beyond all reasonable doubt that a deceased person can be reexperienced, and seemingly relived, by a living person.

CONSCIOUSNESS BEYOND THE BRAIN

A First Conclusion from the Evidence

What conclusion can we draw from the evidence reviewed in the six chapters of this part? Our conclusion can be summed up as follows: It appears that in near-death experiences, in the perception of apparitions and visions, in after-death communication, in medium- and instrumentally transmitted communication, in past-life recollections, as well as in reincarnation-type experiences, “something” is experienced, contacted, and communicated with that appears to be a human consciousness. The evidence tells us that this “something” is not a passive record of the experience of a deceased person but a dynamic, intelligent entity that communicates, exchanges information, and may exhibit a desire to communicate.

If this conclusion is sound, we have good reason to maintain that consciousness persists beyond the brain. How could this be? The persistence of consciousness beyond the brain and body with which it was associated calls for an explanation. In Part 2 we shall suggest an explanation that is not ad hoc and esoteric, but based on insights now emerging at the cutting edge of contemporary science and consciousness research.