The interview was conducted and edited by Dr. K.S.Rawat, who is a Stevenson-style researcher based in India. Dr. Rawat welcomes comments, and is a frequent contributor to the Past Life Forum.

Dr. Ian Stevenson, a Canadian-born psychiatrist and member of the faculty of the University of Virginia, is the leading authority in the scientific world with regard to reincarnation research. His research into promising case studies over the past three decades has taken him all over the world many times, often to India, where he was interviewed by a colleague, K. S. Rawat, director of Reincarnation Research Foundation in Faridabad, India.

Dr. Stevenson’s landmark book, 20 Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation, has been followed by several others. His contribution to the literature in this specialized field is unsurpassed. An interview with Dr. Stevenson appeared in the premier issue of Venture Inward. Dr. Rawat, incidentally, says he found his eminent colleague “seemingly shy and scared of publicity, (but he) did agree ultimately to my rather persistent request.” This interview was conducted in 1986, and updated by Dr. Stevenson more recently.

 Dr. Rawat: Well, let me first of all congratulate you, Dr. Stevenson, for your vast and deep study of cases suggestive of reincarnation throughout the world. May we start with a personal question? What reasons led you to study in this field?

Dr. Stevenson: In recent years my interest came from dissatisfaction with modern theories of human personality. By this I mean that I do not believe that genetics alone and genetics combined with environmental influences can explain all the peculiarities and abnormalities of human personality that we psychiatrists see.

Q: Do you think you are in a position to explain them better now?

Dr. Stevenson: Yes, I think so. I think reincarnation offers a third possibility. I don’t think it replaces our understanding of genetics or environmental influences, but I think reincarnation offers a better explanation for some unusual behavior that occurs very early in the life and often persists throughout life. This is behavior that is unusual in the person’s family. He could not imitate it from other members of the family or inherit it from them. So I think reincarnation is a possible explanation for such behavior.

Q: For some diseases also?

Dr. Stevenson: Yes, possibly. On that point we have much less information, but possibly so.

Q: With regard to sexual disorders?

Dr. Stevenson: Well, particularly with regard to what we would call transsexualism in which people believe that they really are members of the opposite sex. They often dress in the clothes of the opposite sex and behave as if their body should be really that of the opposite sex. These persons in the West often request surgical operations, wanting to be changed anatomically. We have a number of subjects who claim to have remembered a previous life as members of the opposite sex. They have been discontented with their physical bodies.

Q: What is the percentage of such cases?

Dr. Stevenson: It varies from none at all in certain countries like northwest North America (tribal cases), Lebanon, and Turkey. People in these regions believe that sex-change is impossible, and they have no cases of this type. That is one extreme. And the other extreme would be Thailand where sex change cases occur in 16 percent of cases and Burma where the incidence is as high as 25 percent, and then India, where, as in most other countries, it is about 5 percent.

Q: This way we are led to understand some sort of cultural differences among the cases suggestive of reincarnation.

Dr. Stevenson: That’s right. The matter of sex-change between the previous life and the present life could be one example.

Q: What are the other examples? There might be some other cultural differences too.

Dr. Stevenson: Yes, there are. Another that occurs to me is the freedom in which the children give details of names. For example, in India the children tend to give many specific details. They often give 20 or 30 details that usually include proper names. Cases very similar in general features in Sri Lanka do not have that quality. The children there do not give many proper names. That is also true of American cases. American children, if they seem to remember previous lives, have some features similar to Indian cases, but they do not remember many specific details– especially proper names. As a result we have in the USA a large number of what we call “unsolved cases.” In these cases we are not able to verify what the child had said; whereas in India we have rather few (about 20 percent) unsolved cases.

Q: In all, how many cases are there in your files at Virginia?

Dr. Stevenson: We have about 2,500 now.

Q: And how many out of them have you studied so far?

Dr. Stevenson: I have probably studied, more or less, maybe one-third of them. Some, of course, much more thoroughly than others. And then the other two-thirds have been studied by my associates and colleagues.

Q: Well, what is your conclusion so far?

Dr. Stevenson: My conclusion so far is that reincarnation is not the only explanation for these cases, but that it is the best explanation we have for the stronger cases, by which I mean those in which a child makes a considerable number (say 20 or 30) of correct statements about another person who lives in a family that lives quite remote from his own and with which his family has had no prior contacts. When we talk about remoteness, we don’t necessarily just mean physical distance. We know that two families can live only 10 kilometers apart and yet they can be very remote because they belong to different economic and social classes.

Q: Well, then you are still in search of say an ideal case, a perfect one?

Dr. Stevenson: Yes. I would like to find better cases. However, the ideal or perfect case, I don’t think we will ever find. I don’t know if such cases really exist, but we are always trying to get at the cases sooner and get to them before the two families have met so that we can make a written record of what the child says before the families meet. We wish to observe the first meeting ourselves. And we try to find other cases that have stronger evidence.

Q: A past personality’s prediction, for example?

Dr. Stevenson: Well, a past personality’s prediction is of interest but actually it may weaken some cases by setting up an expectation of that person’s return. But that could be an additional feature in many cases.

Q: Well, when the subject and his family do not know the past personality at all?

Dr. Stevenson: Yes. That could really be good if the past personality’s prediction is totally unknown to the subject’s family.

Q: And then say, it is combined by having birthmarks, remoteness of time and placement, etc.

Dr. Stevenson: Yes and other features such as numerous statements.

Q: These would strengthen the case.

Dr. Stevenson: They would, yes, I think so.

Q: Could you tell me about some cases that interested you most?

Dr. Stevenson: Yes, they could be those where we had made a written record or somebody else had.

Q: Like Swarnalata’s case.

Dr. Stevenson: Like Swarnalata’s case. Swarnalata Mishra. That’s one. Another one …

Q: Jagdish Chandra, Bishan Chand …

Dr. Stevenson: Yes, those were also two good cases. Jagdish Chandra’s father was a lawyer trained in evidence. He made a written record and then verified his son’s statements. It may be a little weak because it was his son’s case, but still it was very well done. And, Bishan Chand’s case. The case of Kumkum Verma in Bihar was in that group also. One of her aunts made a written record there. There was also a case in Lebanon – Imad Elawar – in which we could make a written record before verification and we have a few other cases like that.

Q: In some cases the past personality might have predicted about his rebirth. Could you recall some good cases of that type?

Dr. Stevenson: Yes, I think the best case of that type was in Alaska among the Tlingit tribe.

Q: Could you give some details?

Dr. Stevenson: Well, I recall one in which a man had predicted to his niece that he would come to her and he pointed out to her two marks on his body. They were scars of operations. One was on his nose. He had had an operation at the corner of his eye (right) at the upper part of his nose, and another on his back. I don’t know what that was from. Anyway, he said to his niece: “You will be able to recognize me because I will have these scars reproduced on my body as marks.” So he died and about 18 months later his niece had a baby boy who was born with birthmarks precisely at these places. I remember seeing and photographing these birthmarks. This boy was about 8 or 10 years old when I first saw him. The birthmark on the back was especially clearly seen. It had small round marks at the sides that looked exactly like the stitch marks of a surgical operation.

Q: But don’t you think such a case becomes somewhat weaker scientifically since it was in the same family?

Dr. Stevenson: It does, yes, it does become weaker. That is true also of the cases where prediction is made in a dream. The family expects the person who appeared in the dream. On the other hand, the birthmarks are often very unusual. And it’s quite unusual, I think, for someone to have two birthmarks at two different places, each corresponding to scars of an operation on the past personality. So cases like that have both weaknesses and strengths.

Q: Well, with regard to the birthmark cases – couldn’t these birthmarks be caused by the mind of the mother when she was carrying the child in her womb?

Dr. Stevenson: Yes, some could be. The mother knew about the wounds on the dead uncle in the case in Alaska that I mentioned to you. She obviously saw the scars on her uncle. And in other cases, the mother had gone and seen the dead body of someone who was shot. She knew where the wounds were on the body and so her thoughts might have influenced the embryo of her baby. However, we have about 20 cases in which we questioned the mother and father carefully, and they didn’t know anything about the previous personality. In some instances they might have known or heard of that person, but didn’t have any idea where the wounds were. So I think in those cases the mother’s mind could not have influenced the baby directly.

Q: What do you think is the importance of the study of these cases or, I should say, the importance of reincarnation research in the present world?

Dr. Stevenson: Well, I think it has several importances. I think it promises to throw light, as I said earlier, on certain psychological problems. I think it has also some implications for biology and medicine through the study of birthmarks and birth defects. Some children, as you know, have some birthmarks, or missing fingers on a hand, or deformed ears, or other birth defects. And, science still knows very little about the cause of birth defects. I think reincarnation will shed light on that. Then, of course, it also has a very wide implication for the whole question of life after death. The meaning of life. Why am I here?

Q: On some philosophical questions?

Dr. Stevenson: Yes, on the nature of mind, the mind’s relationship with the body.

Q: On the controversy between spiritualism and materialism?

Dr. Stevenson: Yes.

Q: This could also be better understood if reincarnation could be proved as a fact?

Dr. Stevenson: Yes, that is true.

Q: Do you think it could have a bearing on the ethical life of human beings?

Dr. Stevenson: I thought about that a good deal … once I met an Indian swami of the Ramakrishna order and he asked me “What are you doing in India?” I explained that I had come in search of actual cases which could be evidence of reincarnation. That was in 1961. I remember that after I had spoken, there was a very long silence. He didn’t say anything. I didn’t say anything. He sat there, the venerable swami, looking at me. Finally, he said, “Yes it is true,” meaning reincarnation, “but it does not make any difference, because we in India have all believed in reincarnation and have accepted it as a fact, and yet it has made no difference. We have as many rogues and villains in India as you have in the West.”

Q: Well, I would rather disagree with him because we Indians only believe superficially in reincarnation. It hasn’t gone very deep into us, at least during these days.

Dr. Stevenson: Yes, I too. I thought about this remark. I agree that many Indian people themselves haven’t grasped all the implications of reincarnation.

Q: Well. So far as India is concerned, what do you think about its potential for research in reincarnation?

Dr. Stevenson: India is perhaps the best country in the world for research in reincarnation. We know that cases are common–we don’t know how common– we have done only one systematic survey– we know that anywhere we look, particularly in the North, we can find cases very easily. One of the difficulties has been insufficient funds and insufficient numbers of qualified people to investigate the cases. Once the idea of reincarnation research is spread around and more investigations are undertaken, India would be the best country in the world for conducting them.

Source: September/October, 1995 issue of Venture Inward Magazine, the magazine of the A.R.E., (the Edgar Cayce research organization)

A Lecture about Science and Reincarnation

By Dr. Ian Stevenson

Some of My Journeys in Medicine

The Flora Levy Lecture in the Humanitie sThe University of Southwestern Louisiana Lafayette, Louisiana1989

This lecture delivers the most complete look into the amazing mind of Dr. Stevenson I’ve ever found. He puts his work into the context of the history of science, and explains his unique quest to answer one of the central scientific and philosophical question: can the mind exist independently of the body. It’s long, but it’s an intellectual feast.

* * * * * * * *

I noticed with some misgivings the announcement that this is the Levy Lecture in the Humanities. It may seem tactless therefore for me to state at the beginning of the lecture that after intending to study history and indeed doing so for several years, I abandoned history for medicine. History became for me Robert Frost’s “the road not taken.” Frost’s metaphor, however, does not fully suit my care because I have continued to have a strong interest in history and other humanities. If I shall later seem to have accomplished something original in science, I may owe this to my study of history. Let me explain.

I do not believe that what history teaches is that history teaches nothing. What it has taught me is the transience, not of our aspirations, but of our material accomplishments and, even more, of our ideas about the nature of man. In particular, the history of medicine shows a humbling succession of ideas about disease, each appearing inviolable for a short period only to prove degradable by the next idea that—at first also hailed an ultimate—is overthrown in its turn. Knowledge in science, as Whitehead said, keeps like fish. An awareness from my reading of history of the ephemeral nature of most concepts about the nature of things freed me to challenge received opinions in medicine. For me everything now believed by scientists is open to question, and I am always dismayed to find that many scientists accept current knowledge as forever fixed. They confuse the product with the process.

Reductionist Opinions

Early in my medical career I undertook some research in biochemistry. To this I brought some ideas, but the success of our experiments on aspects of the oxidation of the kidney tissue was largely due to the technical expertise of my collaborator, who later went on to become a distinguished biochemist. An unexpected result of our experiments was the destruction by our data of a dogma concerning oxidation that the great German chemist Otto Warburg had pronounced. I thought little of that and was astonished one day when a German biochemist who learned of our results told me that it would have been impossible to publish them in Germany. He meant that the awe in which Warburg was held would have led to editorial rejection of our report. From this episode I may date my strong interest in all the obstacles that confront the conduct of original research and the communication of its results.

Sir Peter Medawar described reductionism as “the most successful research stratagem ever devised: it has been the making of science and technology.” Quite so, but science can study more than parts considered separately. While killing harmless rats (in order to use their kidneys in the experiments on oxidation mentioned earlier) I experienced a revulsion for this kind of scientific activity and decided that I wanted to devote myself to something more than the study of parts and to something closer to whole human beings.

Psychosomatic Pioneers

My mother had believed strongly in the influence of thoughts on physical well-being, and I may owe to her my initial interest in psychosomatic medicine. Even as a medical student I was keenly interested in the physical accompaniments of emotion. One of the first patients assigned to me had angina pectoris, the dreadful pain which comes when the heart, through blockage or spasm of the coronary arteries, receives insufficient oxygen. One day I was on this patient’s ward when he became angry at a nurse and instantly gripped his chest in the agony of this disease. I can still recall vividly the suffering in his face.

The impression from this and similar observations led me, when I abandoned reductionism, to take up research on the physical accompaniments of stress and the emotions it induces. The group with which I was associated in this at the New York Hospital in the late 1940s showed, for almost every organ of the body, that strong emotions inducted by life stresses, and even by talking about such stresses, included markedly altered physical functions, often to the point of experienced symptoms.

In these researches we thought of ourselves as pioneers, but we could not long sustain this view unless we stopped reading and also forgot what we had already read. Solomon had said in Proverbs: “A merry heart doeth good like a medicine: but a broken spirit drieth the bones.” References to what we call psychosomatic medicine occur frequently in Shakespeare and in many other writers outside the medical profession. One can find reports of psychosomatic symptoms in Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year, Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy, and Wesley’s Journal. This is to mention three authors only. However, what needs emphasis is not the frequency of references to the effect of the mind on the body, but the acceptance without question through centuries of this relationship. Doubts and neglect of this knowledge came later, at least within the medical profession, with the discovery of the role of microorganisms in disease. Louis Pasteur said as he was dying, “[Claude] Bernard was right. The terrain is everything.” He was wiser than many who built on his discoveries, and it was the middle of this century before physicians discovered again the power of the mind on the body.

If our group at the New York Hospital has a rightful claim to originality, it may lie in our having asked (and provisionally tried to answer) the question: “Why during stress does one person develop asthma, another high blood pressure, and a third a peptic ulcer?” W.B.Cannon had already shown that many of the physiological accompaniments of fear and rage correspond to those that occur during strenuous physical exertion; the body reacts as if the person is going to respond to the provocation by fighting or running away. This rarely happens in civilized society, but the atavistic physical changes occur anyway. Some of my colleagues extended Cannon’s hypothesis with conjectures about the symbolic meaning of various localized psychosomatic symptoms. For example, a woman who reacted to her stresses with a running nose was said to be trying to wash away her troubles; the man whose bronchi closed in the spasms of asthma was trying to shut out the truth of some unpleasant aspect of his situation. This kind of thinking led to even wilder surmises, from the more ridiculous examples of which I shall spare you.

None of these interpretations seemed satisfying to me. The organ whose psychosomatic relationship I investigated was the heart, and I published numerous papers about our observations. However, I could never believe that arrhythmias have any purposeful function for those afflicted by them.

My discontent with the interpretations by some of my colleagues of psychosomatic phenomena increased when I became aware that not infrequently the same physical symptoms occurred in a person not only when he was angry or frightened, but also when he was unusually happy or joyful. I began to collect instances of physical symptoms that had occurred during pleasurable emotional states. Here my habit of reading outside medicine brought me some useful examples. I learned that both Beethoven and Goya could be fairly described as having died of joy. They had been ill, to be sure, but their final relapses occurred just after they had received news that made them excitedly happy. Other examples occurred among the appallingly emaciated prisoners held in German concentration camps at the end of World War II. Some of them literally died of joy when they saw the Red Cross buses approach the camps to bring them food and liberty.

In trying to publish these and similar reports I encountered another instance of the resistance to deviant ideas on the part of otherwise first rate scientists.1 I owe more to H. G. Wolff than I can take time here adequately to acknowledge. He has had few equals in the standards of rigorous investigation and clarity in the presentation of results that he demonstrated himself and demanded of his associates. However, he was much attached to the teleological interpretation of psychosomatic symptoms. He believed they must have some meaning, some protective purpose in the economy of persons manifesting them. Not surprisingly he reacted with noticeable coolness to my data on the occurrence of physical symptoms during pleasurable emotional states. A crisis was avoided, because it was time for me to move to another position, and I published my results in two papers after I left the New York Hospital.

Although our studies at the New York Hospital failed to answer the question of why a person develops one particular disease instead of another, I have never lost interest in this problem. If my professional work has a recurring theme, this is it, and I shall have more to say about the subject later.

Unscientific Freudian Psychoanalyst

In the 1950s there seemed some prospect that a medical specialty or subspecialty of psychosomatic medicine would develop. This did not happen, and eventually all physicians who had been active in this field had to move decisively toward either internal medicine or psychiatry. Psychiatry then seemed to offer a better opportunity than internal medicine for the further study of the effects of mental states on bodily ones. So I chose psychiatry and accepted an appointment in a Department of Psychiatry. However, I had had comparatively little training in psychiatry; and it was partly to remedy this deficiency that I enrolled in a psychoanalytic institute and in due course graduated from it. Some of this training was beneficial, but the atmosphere of a psychoanalytic institute was foreign to my eclecticism.

The Arabs have a proverb: “Beware of the man with a single book.” I enlarge the proverb to say “Beware of those who read only the works of a single man.” In the psychoanalytic institutes the works of Freud and a few of his disciples were treated as having the authority of an oracle. The works of other authors were not read, let alone discussed. “Where all men think alike, few men think at all.”

Having left the reductionism of the biochemistry laboratory, I found psychoanalysis to be equally uncongenial. Given the concepts of Freud, it might follow that art and religion could be reduced to expressions of infantile cravings and frustrations. But what was the factual basis for his concepts? A reading of Malinowski’s Sex and Repression in Savage Society in which Malinowski reported his failure to find the allegedly universal Oedipus complex among the matrilineal Trobrianders stimulated me to look more closely at psychoanalytic evidence. The psychoanalysts’ inability to accept Malinowski’s evidence, if only as an exception to a generalization, made me realize that psychoanalysis had lost its right to reduce religion because it had itself taken on the negative attributes of a religion: the uncritical acceptance of what its founder says.

There are other means of attaining knowledge besides the scientific method. Art, music, poetry, and other types of literature give us knowledge. I can also believe that in mystical experiences we may have direct access to important truths or, more specifically, to the most important truth of all, which is that we ourselves are part of a Great All. I do not know whether you would call William James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience a work of the humanities or one of science. It partakes of the best of both, and for me is one of the greatest books ever written; I know no better defense of the value of mystical experiences. But inspirational and mystical experiences are, as experiences, incommunicable, whereas scientific observations are and must be communicable: there is no science without public demonstrability. This means independent verification of a patient’s (or informant’s) statements. But in psychoanalysis, independent verification has been almost entirely lacking. Thus for me, Freud’s greatest mistake was in not attempting to inquire into the truth of his patients’ claims about sexual seduction in childhood. To say that there is no difference between being sexually abused and imagining that you have been sexually abused is to take oneself out of science.

As if the foregoing were not enough to turn me away from psychoanalysis, I found unconvincing its assertion that a person’s later character depends almost exclusively on the events of infancy. This seems to me like smuggling in predestination; for what infant can avail against the follies of his parents? But then these wicked parents must have been mistreated during their infancies by their parents, and so on back to Adam. One of my earliest papers in psychiatry questioned whether human personality is more plastic in infancy and childhood than it is in the later years of life. This provoked much annoyance among psychoanalysts; and because they were then the dominant force in American psychiatry, Sir Aubrey Lewis, who was professor of psychiatry at the Institute of Psychiatry in London, asked me (soon after the paper’s publication) whether I could go about on the streets unarmed.

In sum, Freud now appears to me to have been an emperor without clothes, and I am less surprised that he developed the concepts he espoused than that he succeeded in persuading so many persons to accept them.

We must leave to the historians of science the task of explaining why, of the several concepts of unconscious mental processes current in the early twentieth century (including those of Pierre Janet, Morton Prince, William James, C. G. Jung, and F. W. H. Myers), Freud’s attained such popular acceptance and almost crushed the others into oblivion. The concepts of the unconscious mind developed by the other thinkers I have named, especially James, Jung, and Myers, allowed for unconscious mental processes to be the sources or the conduits of man’s higher creative achievements (as well as some of his pathological aberrations); they allowed also for the experiences we call paranormal and even for a soul. How the facts on which they based their larger concepts of the unconscious mind became overlooked during the Freudian period remains a mystery. Perhaps the very extravagance of Freud’s claims to be able to explain psychopathology, art, war, and religion made his ideas attractive to uncritical thinkers craving for certitude. Be that as it may, the widespread acceptance of psychoanalytic ideas among psychiatrists and anthropologists shows that the social sciences cannot yet claim to be obtaining cumulative knowledge as physics, chemistry, and biology are doing. I do not mean to be querimonious about Freud, but it is necessary to learn from mistakes in scientific method if we are to progress.

Freud’s psychoanalysis has recently been in decline, and not only because its inherent weaknesses were exposed to damaging criticism. It received challenges as well from new observations about the nature and treatment of mental disease in psychology, genetics, and neurobiology. I regard these replacements as mixed blessings. Psychoanalysis, despite its taint of determinism from infantile experiences, had preserved an awareness of the importance of mental processes in human disease. This element is minimized or openly denied by most investigators in psychology, genetics, and neurobiology. For them mind is a by product of cerebral processes and free will an illusion.

A Role for Psychedelics

While I was still involved with psychoanalysis, I began experimenting with hallucinogenic (perhaps better called psychedelic) drugs. I have taken or had administered to me a number of drugs and anesthetics as part of a search for drugs that would assist psychiatrists in interviewing or in psychotherapy. However, here I shall speak only of the effects on me of mescaline and LSD.

The sensory apparatus of my body is defective: I have had poor eye-sight since youth, my hearing is imperfect, and my sense of smell extremely dull. My first wife was a gifted amateur artist and also a lover of natural beauty, especially that of forests and jungles. Her senses were extraordinarily acute, and I was often aware that she could perceive aspects of the world that I did not. Mescaline could not improve my vision, but it vastly bettered my appreciation of what I saw. The beauty of the colors that I inwardly saw under the influence of mescaline made me ever afterward far more sensitive to color both in nature and in art than I had been before. From my experience with mescaline I also became more aware than I had been of the subjective element in our sense of the passage of time.

With LSD I had less experience of beautiful colors and much more of memories of my early life. With one of my experiences with LSD I also had a mystical experience by which I mean a sense of unity with all beings, all things. After the second of my LSD experiences I passed three days in perfect serenity. I believe that many persons could benefit as much as I did through taking psychedelic drugs under proper medical supervision, which is the only sensible way to take them.

I have mentioned these experiences here to say that they increased my conviction of the dual nature of mind and body. This may seem paradoxical, because if a small amount of a drug acting on the brain can markedly alter our mental experiences does this not prove that our thoughts are only our subjective awareness of our brain’s activity? For me it does not. I admit certainly that the chemical changes in my brain that the drugs induced released the extraordinary images and feelings that entered my consciousness. However, this does not account for the images themselves, which (apart from those that I could identify as memories) had no correspondence to anything that I had earlier experienced. Here I need to add that my experiences included nothing that I could prove to have originated outside my mind and, if you like, my brain. I had no verifiable extrasensory experience when under the influence of drugs. My interest in extrasensory perception did not derive from my experiences with drugs, although they enhanced it.

Psychical Research

For many years I had had a keen interest in extrasensory experiences and kindred phenomena. My dissatisfaction with prevailing theories of human personality led me to extend this interest, and in the 1950s I began to read systematically in the literatures of theosophy and psychical research. These had both arisen in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, but their methods were altogether different. Theosophists presented a potted version of Buddhism to the Western world, but they combined this with the teachings of alleged Masters channeled through the imperfect minds of frail humans. Like psychoanalysts, theosophists eschewed verifications of their claims, and however valuable the moral teachings of theosophy are, it forms no part of science.

Psychical research, on the other hand, does. The Society for Psychical Research was founded in 1882 in London, and within a few years a sister society, the American Society for Psychical Research, was established in New York. They exist “to examine without prejudice or prepossession and in a scientific spirit those faculties of man, real or supposed, which appear to be inexplicable on any generally recognized hypothesis.” In simpler words, the Societies study evidence of communication without the known sensory organs and of movements occurring without the usual motor forces. Implicit in their programs is the possibility of obtaining evidence that human personality survives bodily death. However, the societies hold no views as a group, and a belief in mind/body dualism or even a belief in extrasensory perception is not a requirement for membership in them. A member need only believe that the question of paranormal phenomena is worthy of inquiry and amenable to scientific investigation.

Investigators of these phenomena use two different methods. One group of researchers seeks to produce or observe the phenomena in laboratories, which provide conditions for excluding normal means of communication and which also, at times, permit varying the conditions in order to learn more about the requirements for the occurrence of the phenomena and their processes. There have been important successes with the experimental method, and I could list for anyone interested a dozen experiments for which I am satisfied that normal explanations fail to explain the observations. However, it must be admitted that experimental results in psychical research are unpredictable. Although experiments have been successfully repeated, they are not voluntarily repeatable as are most experiments in the more developed branches of science. A further weakness of laboratory experiments is that (with rare exceptions) the positive effects are meager and only detectable by statistical methods. A large number of trials is required in order to show an effect, but then one cannot say which successes are due to chance and which to paranormal processes. This necessarily limits what one can learn about processes from experiments. Hopes once held that laboratory experiments in extrasensory perception would convince the majority of scientists to take the phenomena seriously have not been fulfilled.

Nevertheless, an appreciable number of scientists (thirty percent in one recent survey) do believe that something like extrasensory perception is either an undoubted fact or a likely possibility. However, it seems that most of them have reached this judgment through personal experiences instead of from reading reports of laboratory experiment. The study of such experiences—those that occur spontaneously in everyday life—forms the second division of psychical research, and it is the one to which I have given nearly all my attention for the past twenty years.

The study of spontaneous cases of extrasensory perception sometimes needs defending against the disapproval of those who have come to equate science with the controlled conditions that laboratories can offer and naturalistic situations cannot. Here the first point to make is that some important phenomena, such as the weather, volcanoes, fossils, earthquakes, and meteorites, do not occur in laboratories under controlled conditions, and yet wt study them with scientific methods. We do this because science is not a physical location where we obtain evidence, but instead a process for appraising evidence where ever we find it.

In the study of spontaneous paranormal phenomena we must usually interview and cross-question informants about events that have happened before we arrive on the scene. In principle, the methods are those that lawyers use in reconstructing a crime and historians use in understanding the past. Once we have the best account possible of the events in question, we consider one by one the alternative explanations and to try to eliminate them until only the single most probable one remains. Then we try with further observations to confirm or reject the initially preferred explanation. In addition, we search through series of apparently similar phenomena for recurrent features that may provide clues to causative conditions and processes of occurrence.

The investigators of paranormal phenomena have tried to find a middle way between the gullible and the skeptical, the former saying (usually from the perspective of a religion) that everything relevant is already known, the latter that there are no genuine phenomena to be investigated. Nevertheless, although psychical researchers have never been more than a handful in number and never possessed of adequate resources, they have managed somehow to survive. They have now passed on a tradition of systematic inquiry through four generations. With quiet persistence they adhere to Bacon’s assertion that “rarities and reports that seem incredible are not to be suppressed or denied to the memory of men.” In my library the publications of the British and American Societies for Psychical Research almost fill one large bookcase. What distinguishes the work of these societies is an almost ruthless insistence on corroboration of an experiment’s statements and equal insistence on independent verification of the correspondence between these statements and the apparently related event of which the percipient claimed paranormal knowledge. “Were I asked” William James wrote “to point to a scientific journal where hard-headedness and never-sleeping suspicion of sources of error might be seen in their full bloom, I think I should have to fall back on the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research. The common run of papers, say on physiological subjects, are apt to show a far lower level of critical consciousness.”

EVIDENCE FOR SURVIVAL AFTER DEATH

I have had some interest in nearly all the phenomena subsumed under the term "psychical research." However, I have concentrated most of my effort in examining the evidence for the survival of human personality after death. I have studied and written reports on apparitions, the visions of dying persons and of persons recovered from near death, and certain types of mediumistic communications. The evidence that I have found most promising has been that provided by children who claim to remember previous lives. I have studied their cases more than those of any other group in this field.

From my childhood reading I had become familiar with the idea of reincarnation. The concept made sense to me, but I never thought until many years later that there could ever be any evidence to support a belief in it. Certainly the theosophists had offered none. Here again, my habit of wide reading proved useful. In the course of this reading I came across accounts of persons who actually claimed to remember the details of previous lives. These accounts mostly appeared as individual case histories or in small groups of case reports. Moreover, I found most of them in newspapers and magazines or in books for general readers. Still, there seemed to be more than a few of them, and I decided to tabulate and analyze them for recurrent features. They had some. For example, the great majority of the persons who claimed to remember previous lives were very young children when they first spoke about these lives; and in most instances the children stopped speaking about the previous lives when they were still young children of between five and eight years. I could tell also that, although some of the reports I had collected were of low quality and little more than journalistic anecdotes, this was not true of all. In several cases cautious adults had inquired searchingly into the claims of the children, and in three instances someone had made a written record of what the child had been saying before its statements had been verified.

In 1960 I published in the Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research an essay reporting these observations. My report discussed the various interpretations of the cases and recommended accepting reincarnation only after excluding all others. My main conclusion was that if more cases of the same general type could be found and investigated carefully, we might obtain better evidence of survival after death. I added that "in mediumistic communications we have the problem of proving that someone clearly dead still lives. In evaluating apparent memories of former incarnations, the problem consists in judging whether someone clearly living once died. This may prove the easier task."

INDIA

I do not think that it occurred to me then that I would be the person to undertake the task.2 Although the American Society for Psychical Research awarded a prize to me for the essay, its journal was (and still is) one of the most obscure journals in the whole of science. Nevertheless, the essay attracted some attention, and within a few months I received a telephone call from Eileen Garrett, who had (about ten years before) established the Parapsychology Foundation. She had learned of a case in India that seemed to resemble the ones whose reports I had reviewed, and she asked me whether I would be interested in going to India to investigate it. I was indeed interested, and the following summer (August 1961) I made my first visit to India, where I spent about five weeks before going on to Ceylon (as Sri Lanka was then called) for another week. Before leaving for India I had learned of some other cases of fairly recent origin, and I also had the addresses of some subjects figuring in cases I had reviewed in my essay. I thought they might still be alive, and I wanted to meet them if I could.

On reaching India I underwent considerable culture shock; yet this was less than the shock of learning how little I knew about India and Sri Lanka. I have subsequently thought that if I had known how ignorant I was of Asia I should never have had the nerve to begin these investigations. However, shielded by this ignorance I pushed on with them. I soon found that the cases were much more numerous than I had been led to expect from the scattered reports I had summarized for my essay. (Altogether, during this first trip, I learned about and studied—not all with the same thoroughness—about twenty cases in India and five in Sri .Lanka.)

Also unexpected by me were the informants' often lively reports of the unusual behavior that most of the subjects showed-behavior that harmonized with the child's statements about the previous life it claimed to remember. I had expected that the cases would consist exclusively of statements the subjects would express neutrally about the previous lives. Instead, I found that the children often talked with strong emotions about the previous lives, and they sometimes behaved as if still living in the past life. For them it seemed still present, not past. For example, a child of low-caste parents who said that he remembered the life of a Brahmin would show snobbish behavior toward his own family and might even refuse to eat their food: from his perspective it was polluted. A child remembering a previous life as a person of the opposite sex might dress for that sex and play its games. One who remembered being shot would show a fear of guns and loud noises. As I mentioned, many of the reports I had used for my essay had appeared in newspapers or other popular publications, and one expects that journalistic accounts will exaggerate the basic facts of an event; however, this example shows that such accounts may also miss important details.

Back in Virginia after this first trip to Asia I tried to assimilate a mass of information about the cases that far exceeded my initial expectations. I wrote and had accepted for publication in 1964 a monograph about some of the cases that I had investigated. At this point doubts were publicly expressed about the honesty of the man who had been my interpreter for several of the stronger cases in India. Learning of these suspicions, the publisher halted the publication of my monograph. Although the man in question undoubtedly had been dishonest in some matters—something I did not know during my first journey to Asia—I did not think he had deceived me as an interpreter. However, rather than lose the extensive work involved in the cases in which this man had helped me, I decided to return to India and study again these cases (and some others) with new interpreters.

The happy side of this misfortune was that the cases I investigated again proved to be even stronger than they had earlier seemed to be. Moreover, I learned the value of repeated interviews. From this experience I date my habit of trying to return to cases for second and third interviews whenever possible. Too often after leaving the site of a case I think of questions that I should have asked when I was there; I can ask them on a second or later visit.

After my second visit to India I revised my monograph, and it was published, in 1966, without further difficulty. If I were inclined to equate market success with scientific worth, I should be more than satisfied with this book. It had been translated into seven foreign languages, has sold about 50,000 copies since 1966, and is still in print. However, I am well aware that these sales figures reflect public interest in the subject of reincarnation and little else. In 1977 I achieved what was for me a more gratifying success. In that year I published in a scientific journal an article entitled "The Explanatory Value of the Idea of Reincarnation." For this I had more than 1,000 requests for reprints from scientists all over the world, This was far more than I had ever had for any of my numerous articles derived from what I call orthodox research. In this paper I drew attention to reincarnation as a hypothesis of explanatory value for a wide variety of unsolved problems in psychology and medicine. The interest it evoked among other scientists assured me that I was not alone in my discontent with psychoanalytic and other current theories of human personality.

At about the time of my first visit to India, Chester Carlson, the inventor of xerography, (encouraged by his wife, Dorris) began to offer me funds with which to expand my investigations. I remember being at first conscientiously unable to accept as much money as Chester Carlson offered, because I was then heavily involved in administrative and teaching duties as Chairman of the University of Virginia's Department of Psychiatry. However, I was able gradually to change my situation, and Chester Carlson then offered matching funds for an endowed chair that would enable me to devote myself full-time to psychical research. The risks of giving up the secure position I then had were obvious; but the unique opportunity offered warranted the risks, and I have never regretted my decision to engage full-time in this research.

I am sometimes asked what my colleagues at the University of Virginia think about my research. It has had a mixed reception among them. A few have openly disapproved of having such research at the University, but the majority (at least of those whose opinions have reached me) adhere to the maxim of the University's founder, Thomas Jefferson: "Here we are not afraid to follow truth whereever it may lead, nor to tolerate any error so long as reason is left free to combat it."

EVIDENCE FOR REINCARNATION

Since 1967 I have widened and deepened the research as much as available time and financial resources have permitted. I have published some sixty-five detailed case reports, mostly in books. And I have published each year three or four articles about various aspects of these cases and about other types of cases that I have studied. In late 1987 I published a book written for general readers in which I described my methods of investigation and summarized the results and my present conclusions about children who say they remember previous lives. Before telling you about these conclusions I should briefly describe for you the scope of the research.

Between my first visit to India and the publication, finally, of my monograph reporting, as its title says, twenty cases suggestive of reincarnation, I had extended my investigations to the tribal peoples of northwest North America, and to Lebanon, Brazil, Turkey, and Thailand, In the 1970’s I began investigating cases in Burma and West Africa. I have also investigated whatever cases came to my attention in Europe and in North and South America.3 The number of cases now available for our analysis has gradually increased to about 2,500; but I wish to stress that the cases are of varying quality and we have not investigated all of them with the same thoroughness.

Adults sometimes claim to remember previous lives, but with rare exceptions their cases have much less value than those of young children and most, in my view, are worthless. This is because in the case of a young child of only two or three years of age one can reach reasonably satisfactory conclusions concerning the information to which the child might have been normally exposed. In contrast, the mind of an adult and even that of an older child has been filled with a large amount of information that becomes available for the ingredients of an imagined previous life. Accordingly, I have concentrated my efforts increasingly on the cases of young children.

I mentioned earlier that in the cases I first reported in 1960 I had discerned some recurrent features. We have since found other recurrent features. One of these is a high incidence of violent death in the persons whose lives the children remember. This feature occurs in the cases of all ten cultures for which we have examined groups of cases; although the incidence of violent death in the cases varies from one culture to another, it is far higher among the cases than in the general populations from which they are drawn. Other recurrent features also vary from culture to culture. These include the occurrence of dreams in which a deceased person seems to announce to the dreamer the intention of being reborn (usually in the family of the dreamer), the incidence of claims to have been a person of the opposite sex in the previous life, and the interval between the concerned deceased person's death and the subject's birth.

These and other variations in the cases tell us that culture—by which I mean here the beliefs of a group of people-powerfully influences the features of the cases. This being so, it may fairly be asked whether beliefs are not the sufficient causes of the cases. We do not know the actual prevalence of cases (except from one survey in India), but we do know that the cases can be found much more readily in cultures having a belief in reincarnation than in ones not having this belief.4 Critics of the cases have therefore suggested that a child's fantasies, perhaps of an imaginary playmate, may become shaped by its parents and peers, through their questions and suggestions, until the child assumes an identification with a deceased person. In this way the child becomes the subject of a factitious case suggestive of reincarnation.

This argument has considerable force, and its cogency can hardly be denied when we consider the numerous cases in which the subject of a case and the deceased person with whom he or she identifies belong to the same family or same village. However, it will not suffice to explain the smaller, but not negligible number of cases in which the two families live widely separated and, from all the evidence, have had no acquaintance with each other before the case developed. Moreover, in the stronger of such cases the child has furnished specific details (sometimes written down before verification) about the deceased person; there can be no question in such cases of imaginings, confused memories, and pseudo-identification. In examining the cases of this group we are almost forced to believe that the child has somehow acquired knowledge about a deceased person by other than normal means. If this be granted, one has still a choice among several explanations all of which suppose some paranormal process; and reincarnation is only one of these.

Journalists have sometimes incorrectly (and unjustly) described me as trying to prove that reincarnation occurs. This allegation is wrong as a description both of my motive and of science. Outside of mathematics there is no proof in science; scientists make judgments about probabilities, and they rarely express themselves in statements of certainty. It is true that I search for stronger evidence than we now have for paranormal processes in the cases I study, and if that evidence points toward reincarnation I am not displeased. I have never hidden my interest in the results of my research. William James pointed out that "if you want an absolute duffer in an investigation, you must, after all, take the man who has no interest in its results…the most useful investigator…is always he whose eager interest in one side of a question is balanced by an equally keen nervousness lest he become deceived."

The search for stronger evidence is therefore not with an aim at developing some coercive proof. Instead, it recognizes that different persons require different amounts and qualities of evidence before they alter their opinions. Although most educated Westerners have some acquaintance with the idea of reincarnation from at least a slight knowledge of Hinduism and Buddhism, few are familiar with concrete instances of children's claims to remember a previous life. It is not surprising that the truth of the claims seems to them antecedently improbable. As Charles Richet, a great French physiologist (and psychical researcher) observed: "Pour croire complètement à un phénomène il faut y etre habitué." Perhaps my main contribution will be that of making Western persons familiar, not with the idea of reincarnation—it must be one of the oldest ideas in the world—but with evidence tending to support a belief in reincarnation.

I am frequently asked whether I myself believe in reincarnation. I decline to answer this question because my beliefs should make no difference to anyone asking such a question. As Leonardo da Vinci said, "Whoever in discussion adduces authority uses not intellect but rather memory." Everyone should examine the evidence and judge it for himself. As I have just said, the evidence that my colleagues and I have obtained gives some support to a belief in reincarnation. Before the modern investigations a belief in reincarnation had to rest on the basis of faith, usually inculcated by the scriptures or oral teachings of a traditional religion. Now, one may, if one wishes, believe in reincarnation on the basis of evidence. However, the evidence is not flawless and it certainly does not compel such a belief. Even the best of it is open to alternative interpretations, and one can only censure those who say there is no evidence whatever.

BIRTHMARKS AND BIRTH DEFECTS

Has then an impasse been reached without a way forward? I do not think so, because I believe we will advance further with the publication of cases of subjects who have birth marks or birth defects that seem to derive from previous lives. These marks and defects correspond closely in size and location to wounds (occasionally other marks) on the deceased person whose life the child later claims to remember.

Apart from their relevance to medicine, the cases with birthmarks and birth defects raise the standard of evidence for the cases in which most of them occur: the birthmarks (or defects) can be photographed, and for many of the corresponding wound, we have obtained medical records, such as autopsy reports. These are important steps toward greater objectivity in the research. You can readily understand how these cases have brought me back to my principal interest in medicine: psychosomatic relationships. However, now we are tailing about a mind's influence on a body across the gap of death.

Most of the marks and defects of these cases are on the skin or extremities. However, in a small number of cases the subject has had some internal disease similar or identical to one which the person whose life the child remembers had had. For such a case to be significant the disease must be one from which the subject alone of all members of his family has suffered. We have a few such cases, and they have returned me to that topic in which I have never lost interest: Why does a person acquire one particular disease instead of another?

I think that for most scientists today this last question is absurd. They believe that there is no person apart from a body. For them, any disease a person acquires derives from the combination of the genes he draws in the lottery of parenthood modified by the environment into which he is born and in which he later lives. No one is more aware than I of how subversive it is to talk in the West today5 of a soul that may survive the death of one physical body and later become associated with a second body which it influences, at least to some extent, in form and function. Nevertheless, the accumulated evidence, which I shall be publishing in detail next year, warrants conjectures of this kind.

Here I need to add and to emphasize that the evidence suggestive of reincarnation imperils no present knowledge. I do not question the findings of genetics or even that environments have some effect on us (although I do deny any primacy for the events of infancy among all environmental influences). I am suggesting that instead of a single line of evolution—the one of our physical bodies—we also participate in a second line of evolution—that of our minds or, if you prefer, our souls.

The claim to have evidence of a second line of evolution is, I need hardly say, a large one, and if it does not challenge any substantial knowledge it certainly does throw into question many common assumptions about the nature of man, especially those concerning the relationship between mind and brain. To this I add the heterodox idea that certain birth defects and even some internal diseases may have mental causes anteceding the conception of a person's body. In presuming to doubt the ideas about the nature of man that most Western scientists hold, I can take comfort in an aphorism of the great French neurologist Charcot: "La théorie, c'est bon, mais ¸ a n'empeche pas d'exister." Those who would judge my conclusions should first examine the evidence that has led me to them.

It is tempting to conclude this lecture by invoking the names of the many great philosophers and poets who have believed in reincarnation and thereby obliquely exhort you to believe in it yourself. I have already said that such a path is closed to me; authority has no place in science. Yet science acknowledges leaders, and it particularly pleases me to remember that some of the greatest encouragement for the scientific methods of psychical research has come from humanists like William James and Henri Bergson. Each of these great men accepted the Presidency of the Society for Psychical Research, and James was for many years at least a part-time investigator of psychical phenomena. I venerate them less for the particular views they held than for their endorsement of the scientific method applied to paranormal experiences as a means of attaining important new knowledge of man's nature.

Such are some of my journeys in medicine with occasional wanderings in the humanities. I do not agree with a great writer who said that "to travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive." Certainly those who do not travel hopefully may never arrive, but hope alone cannot long sustain a journey in science. Accordingly, I have tried to describe for you some of the choices that I made of roads to take during my journeys.

Copyright ©1990, The Levy Humanities Series

Past Life Sleuth, How Dr. Ian Stevenson Investigates Cases

This excerpt from the pages of Children’s Past Lives demonstrates how incredibly thorough and methodical Dr. Ian Stevenson is when he collects and screens data for his cases. His methods go to great lengths to refute critics who, beginning with the premise that past lives are impossible, say, “There must be some normal explanation.” Dr. Stevenson systematically eliminates all normal explanations until the only explanation left standing is reincarnation. It is as rigorous as the methods in any scientific field. This method that Dr. Stevenson developed over four decades, is now imitated by researchers all over the world and yields the same results: cases strongly “suggestive” of reincarntion. 

* * * * * * * *

Once I learned how to decipher Dr. Stevenson’s abstruse writing style, I discovered the drama in his books. The cases are detective stories. He himself, of course, is the chief sleuth, aided by his sidekick research associates. He follows leads anywhere they take him, often down miles of muddy jeep roads to remote rural villages in Third World countries, never knowing what he will find. He runs into all sorts of colorful characters, many dead ends, and some danger. He’s interested in just the facts but has developed a keen eye for the subtle details, the contextual clues that mark the difference between a mere investigator and a master detective.

Like a detective, his immediate goal is a solved case, which to Dr. Stevenson is a well-defined objective. A case is “solved” when he finds a child with spontaneous and detailed memories of a past life, and is able to match the child’s memories to the life of one (and only one) deceased person. (He uses the term previous personality for this deceased person.) Finally, to be deemed “verified,” he has to be satisfied, after rigorous investigation, that the child had no possible opportunity by normal means–no matter how improbable or absurd–to learn about the previous personality. (Normal is anything other than a past life connection; Dr. Stevenson even screens cases that could be explained by telepathy or spirit possession.)

In other words, a verified case is one where both sides of the equation match convincingly, and where the only explanation–beyond even an unreasonable doubt–is past life memory. Dr. Stevenson has more than eight hundred verified cases in his files.

Where do these cases come from? Because he is studying the natural phenomenon of spontaneous memories, they can’t be created in a clinic or laboratory. Dr. Stevenson has to wait for the cases to come to him. He relies on a worldwide network of scouts and colleagues to collect reports and rumors of young children claiming to remember a past life. One of the reasons he has so many cases in India is because his network is more fully developed there than in any other country.

Each of these cases begins when a young child, usually two to four years old, without prompting from anyone, begins talking about a past life. The child will name people and places that nobody in the family has ever heard of before, or he will exhibit odd behavior. In most cases he will describe intimate details of the death–often a violent one. In extreme cases the child will tell his surprised parents that he is really someone else and that he has different parents or even a spouse and children who live in another village or city, and then insist that he be taken there.

The child usually persists in talking about his memories for months or years, despite the sometimes harsh attempts of the family to suppress the memory. (Dr. Stevenson reports that in over half of the cases the family tries to suppress the memory.) Stories about the child’s past life memory leak out to the village and spread across districts, finally reaching the ears of a family who have a deceased relative that matches the description the child is giving. This family, upon hearing the news, seeks out the child, curious to see if this is really their deceased relative reborn; or the child’s family finally gives in to his pleading and takes him to find his former home.

Typically on these first visits the child will lead the way unaided through the streets of the village to the homestead of the deceased, spontaneously recognize family and friends of the previous personality and call them by their pet names, comment on changes to the house, inquire about people and possessions that he finds missing, and reminisce about obscure events from the past–all from the unique perspective of the deceased. In some cases he will reveal knowledge of hiding places for the family gold, or of secret debts, or of family scandals that no one else knows about. Most amazingly, the child will know nothing about what happened after the previous personality died. The memory is frozen in time. Changes in buildings, in the rooms of the house, or in the appearance of family and friends since the death will strike the child as new, strange, and disorienting.

At some point one of Dr. Stevenson’s scouts hears of the case, and the researchers rush to the scene while the memories of the child and of witnesses are still fresh. When Dr. Stevenson arrives, he does everything he can to disprove the child’s past life memories. Using interview technique adopted from the field of law, he interviews the child, the family, relatives, and villagers, probing to test the validity of their statements, matching one against the other, and looking for patterns of inconsistency. He refuses to accept secondhand accounts and insists on interviewing only people who witnessed the child speak. Without the knowledge of the family, he discreetly finds and interviews villagers not directly involved with the case to get unbiased character references on the family. He makes surprise visits to the family months and years later to repeat the interviews.

Dr. Stevenson takes every precaution not to make mistakes himself. If he doesn’t speak the native language (he knows five languages), he will use two interpreters, and sometimes three, for the interviews. In addition to the notes taken by the team of interviewers, the sessions are taped. He collects and photographs hard evidence, like written records and birthmarks. He transcribes and organizes his notes within days of the visit and carefully builds a chronology of the unfolding of the memories, looking for flaws and gaps.

With the same meticulous care he reconstructs from witnesses exactly what happened when the child met the previous personality’s family for the first time and made the first recognitions. He probes especially to discover if any cues were inadvertently supplied to the child. He verifies every fact about the previous personality that the child remembered. On average, in all of his solved cases, 90 percent of these statements check out. Then he investigates any contact the two families might have had between them, no matter how indirect or remote. He presses to find any other opportunity the child might have had to learn the facts he alleges to remember.

When Dr. Stevenson publishes a case, he includes every scrap of raw data that may have a bearing on its validity. Within the text he explores the pros and cons of every possible flaw in the case, every opportunity for normal communication, every way the case might be discredited. These issues are described and dissected in enormous detail. He wants to assure the reader that he has followed through on every possible way the child might have acquired the knowledge, no matter how farfetched. Some of these individual discussions continue for several pages, which make for slow reading.

Dr. Stevenson carries his strict, empirical attitude through to the end. I was amazed by the many direct hits the children make with their memories–these cases are full of them–but in his writing he never gets excited, never calls special attention to the extraordinary things these children say and do. These gleaming nuggets of past life evidence, along with some of the most profound and bizarre human stories I’ve ever read, are buried among the tailings of technical data and commentary.

Copyright 1997 by Carol Bowman and Steve Bowman

A reincarnation case consists of episodic, semantic and emotional memories, behaviours, physical traits and other signs that associate the case subject with a deceased person. The systematic study of reincarnation cases began with Ian Stevenson in the 1960s and continues today. Enough cases have been studied now that universal, near-universal and culture-linked patterns can be discerned in the dataset as a whole.

Contents

1. Overview

2. Three Case Examples

Purnima Ekanayake

Nathan

Marta Lorenz

3. Universal and Near-Universal Patterns

Patterns Related to the Case Subject

Patterns Related to the Previous Person

4. Culture-Linked Patterns

Incidence and Solvability

Sex Change

Relationship Status

Intermission Length

5. Interpretations of the Patterns

6. Literature

7. Endnotes

Overview

Early in his field research, Ian Stevenson realized that he was learning about far too many cases to thoroughly investigate all. He chose to concentrate on a few cases and to collect basic data on as many others as possible in order to search for common patterns. In 1986, he compared features of cases from the Igbo of Nigeria to cases from nine other countries or tribal societies, India, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Burma (Myanmar), Lebanon, Turkey, the United States (nontribal cases), the Tlingit of Alaska and the Haida of Alaska and British Columbia.1 In 1994, Antonia Mills contributed data from three other first nations in British Columbia, the Gitxsan, Beaver and Witsuwit’en.2 That same year, Richard Slobodin supplied data for the Kutchin (Gwitchen) of the Canadian Northwest Territories.3 We also have figures on some variables for Brazil.4

In addition to these feature comparisons, studies have been made of the correlates of violent death in the previous life,5 memories of the intermission between lives,6 and of the age of the subject in relation to whether or not the initial past-life memories were cued.7 Jim B Tucker introduced a scale that assessed the strength of cases and validated it on a cross-cultural sample.8 Emily Cook et al compared cases in which the previous person was identified (‘solved cases’) to cases in which a satisfactory identification was impossible (‘unsolved cases’).9 James Matlock used samples of published cases to examine cases of reincarnation across national boundaries (‘international cases’) and cases in which the previous persons took their own lives (‘suicide cases’).10

This work builds on individual case studies and complements them. The patterns provide a context in which to assess the cases. Unfortunately, many of the pattern analyses are some years old. They rely on the collection compiled by Stevenson and his successors at the University of Virginia and were done in the 1980s and 1990s. The UVA collection presently includes 2,500 cases that are being entered into a computerized database. As of 2013, the database was still far from complete, and updated figures based on it are not yet available.11

Not only the UVA case collection but also the dataset of published cases is largely confined to children. Fewer past-life memories have been studied with adults and although the patterns in adult cases for the most part resemble those of child cases, there are not enough solved adult cases to make possible a statistical comparison between them and child cases. We do not know how well the findings from children’s cases represent reincarnation and past-life memory for everyone, so we should be cautious in generalizing from them. However, they provide a starting point for theorizing about reincarnation and past-life memory.12

Three Case Examples

The following examples illustrate the main features of the reincarnation cases that have been studied.

Purnima Ekanayake

A Sri Lankan maker and seller of incense sticks, Jinadasa Perera, was hit by a bus while riding his bicycle. The bus’s wheels ran over the left side of his chest, crushing several ribs and causing massive internal injuries that killed him instantly. Purnima Ekanayake was born two years later in a different part of the island. She had a large birthmark running obliquely up the left side of her chest, which she said was the result of having died a traffic accident with a ‘big vehicle’. She told her family that she had been a man who made incense sticks, named the brands and described the process of manufacture. She said she had been married to her sister’s husband’s sister, whose name she gave. She also remembered her mother’s name, and added that she had two brothers. Purnima said that after her death she had floated in semi-darkness for a few days. She saw people mourning for her and witnessed her funeral, then saw some light, went toward it, and found herself in her present life.

When she was four, Purnima visited a Buddhist temple, which she recognized. She said she had lived across the river from the temple, but nothing was done to verify her memories at the time. Two years passed before one of her father’s colleagues made inquiries and located a family of incense makers fitting Purnima’s description. When she met Jinadasa’s sister and brother-in law, Purnima recognized people and asked pertinent questions about the business, which the brother-in-law was continuing.13

Nathan

Nathan is a member of the Gitxsan first nation of British Columbia, Canada. He was identified at birth as the reincarnation of his great-grandfather, Mark Peters Sr, who had died of natural causes in his eighties, a few years before. In middle age, Mark had suffered a serious logging accident which had left a permanent scar on his chest. Nathan was born with a similar-looking mark in the same place. Before his birth, his grandfather, Mark Jr, dreamed that his father’ spirit appeared to him and said, ‘I’ll stay with you guys by Karen’. Karen was Mark Jr’s daughter and, as it turned out, Nathan’s mother.

As he grew older, Nathan behaved in many ways like Mark Sr. He recognized places and articles with which Mark Sr was familiar. He knew where to find the oldest and best fishing sites, and, without being taught, knew how to hang and salt fish and how to pick berries properly. When he saw Mark Sr’s smokehouse, he recognized it, but was sad that it had been neglected after his death. He recognized Mark Sr’s fishing boots in the smokehouse. When a helicopter flew overhead, he said he had ridden in one, which he had not done, but Mark Sr had.14

Marta Lorenz

Maria Januaria de Oliveiro, known familiarly as Sinhá, was the daughter of a prosperous rancher in southern Brazil. Her father twice forbad her to marry men to whom she had become engaged. The second of these suitors killed himself in response and Sinhá decided to take her own life. On a visit to carnival in a nearby city, she allowed herself to become sick by exhausting herself and going out without adequate clothing. Shortly before she died of tuberculosis, at age 28, she told her good friend Ida Lorenz that she would be reborn as her daughter. She promised Ida that she would identify herself by telling her many things about Sinhá.

Ten months later, Ida Lorenz gave birth to a daughter whom she named Marta. While still an infant, Marta appeared to recognize Sinhá’s father when he visited the Lorenz house and when she was two and a half years old, she began to speak about Sinhá. Over the next several years, she made more than 120 statements about her. She shared many personality traits with Sinhá as well. Like Sinhá, Marta enjoyed dancing, was afraid of rain and was fond of cats. She was said to resemble Sinhá physically and she suffered from chronic upper respiratory infections. She was 54 when Stevenson last saw her, but she told him that she sometimes still thought about Sinhá, especially at night, when she was praying or going to sleep.15

Universal and Near-Universal Patterns

Some features of reincarnation cases appear so regularly, they may be regarded as universal or near-universal. Some of these universal and near-universal features relate to the case subject, whereas others concern the deceased person whose life the child remembers.

Patterns Related to the Case Subject

Case subjects are predominantly male. Boys outnumbered girls as subjects in Stevenson’s collection by a two-to-one margin (63% to 37%) in 1986. The highest incidence was found among the Igbo, where 77%, or 44, of 57 subjects were boys. Girls outnumbered boys in Sri Lanka, but by a slim margin: 51%, or 60, of 117 subjects were girls.16

One of the strongest universal patterns is the young age at which children speak about previous lives. The majority of children in every culture begin between the ages of two and five,17 although the first reference to the previous life may be made as early as eighteen months.18 The younger the child when first speaking of the previous life, the stronger the memories tend to be overall,19 and the less likely they are to be cued by something seen or heard.20

Most children stop speaking about their memories after a few years and the memories seem to have faded from their conscious awareness. The fading of the memories, which generally occurs between ages five and eight, was once assumed to be a near-universal feature of the cases.21 However, in follow-up studies in Sri Lanka22 and Lebanon,23 Erlendur Haraldsson found that as many as a third of children retained some memories past that age, at least into young adulthood, when they were tested. Fading of past-life memories by middle childhood is common, but it is by no means as universal as it was once thought to be. Marta Lorenz is an example of someone who retained memories well into adulthood.

In addition to relating episodic memories of previous lives, many children (about 20% in both the UVA collection24 and in published cases25) talk about events they say occurred between their deaths and births, as Purnima Ekanayake did. Intermission memories, as they are called, sometimes include perceptions of the material world that can be verified.26 Child subjects also typically behave in ways similar to the persons whose lives they recall. These behaviours may be highly developed skills, including language skills.27 The children may also have birthmarks, birth defects and other physical abnormalities related to the previous persons, or they may resemble the previous persons in stature, facial structure and so forth.28  Birthmarks and birth defects are often related to the way a person died, but they need not be. Other common case features include announcing dreams29 (Nathan’s grandfather’s dream is an example) and cravings during pregnancy.30

The social statuses of the previous person and case subject have not been compared systematically, but usually subjects are of the same ethnic, religious and social group as the previous person. In India, two thirds of subjects lived in poorer socioeconomic circumstances than they had in the previous life.31 There are other examples of social changes, for example, the studies by Antonia Mills of Hindu/Moslem cases in India.32 However, there is no noticeable cultural variation in the frequency of such changes across the dataset as a whole.33

Most children remember having died close to where they were born. Long-distance cases (with distances greater than fifty kilometers, or 31 miles, from the place of death) occur in larger countries such as India and the United States, but cases that cross international boundaries are unusual and solved international cases are rare.34

Most children who recall previous lives do so in the waking state, with no apparent alteration of consciousness. Sometimes memories come in dreams or nightmares, but there are usually waking memories as well. With older subjects, dreams and other altered states become more important in connection to past-life memories.35

Patterns Related to the Previous Person

Stevenson counted stated intentions to be reborn to certain people as a recurrent or universal feature of the cases, notwithstanding the fact that such ‘planned reincarnation’ is unusual, except in tribal societies and among the Tibetans.36 Sinhá told Ida Lorenz that she would be reborn to her, but this is not typical of Western cases.

One of the most important universal factors on the side of the previous person is the manner in which that person died. Violent deaths – by accident, murder, or suicide, during war, etc – figured in 51% of solved cases and were claimed in 61% of unsolved cases in 1983.37 These figures are far higher than the incidence of violent death in the general populations during the same periods in any of the countries or tribal societies in which cases have been studied.38 Violent deaths are associated with significantly shorter intermissions between lives, and children who recall having died violently begin to speak about the previous life at a significantly younger age than when deaths are natural, by illness or in old age.39

With natural deaths, age at death is important: The younger a person is when he dies a natural death, the more likely his life is to be recalled later.40 This does not necessarily mean that those who die young are more likely to reincarnate quickly. Premature deaths –  by violence or illness – are lives cut short and might produce the sense of things left undone, an effect Stevenson termed ‘unfinished’ or ‘continuing business’. He noted some sort of continuing business in the great majority of his cases.41

Another factor that has turned out to be an important correlate (or predictor) of past-life memory is the previous person’s mental qualities. Previous persons were practiced meditators in several cases.42 Many who died natural deaths at an advanced age were devoutly religious or had practiced meditation regularly.43

Matlock found indications that the expectedness or unexpectedness of a death affects mental quality after death as well. In each of fourteen solved international cases, deaths were expected due to prolonged illness, during war, et cetera, and there was some identifiable motive for reincarnating abroad. Similarly, of ten solved suicide cases, all involved reincarnation either in the same family or among friends. This may be because an expected death would give the psyche time to prepare and that could result in a greater degree of mental control after death. By contrast, sudden, unexpected deaths are more often associated with reincarnation among strangers, which suggests less say over who the new parents will be.44

Culture-Linked Patterns

Several case features, although not exactly culture-bound, have been found to be closely culture-linked. These features include how often cases occur and are solved; the rate of sex change between lives; the relationship between the subject and the previous person; and the length of the period between the lives.

Incidence and Solvability

Researchers do not yet have a good understanding of how common reincarnation cases are. To date there has been only one systematic survey, conducted in a rural development block in northern India and reported in 1979. The survey takers estimated that there were about two cases per 1000 people in that region, one of the areas of the world from which a large number of cases have been reported.45 There may be a greater incidence among the Druze of Lebanon, but since no surveys have been conducted there, we cannot be sure.46

Other areas in which a considerable number of cases can be found are other parts of South-East Asia, West Africa, and north-western North America.47 However, the incidence of cases is not uniform within these areas. Very few cases have been reported from South India;48 in Lebanon, except among the Druze; in Turkey, except among the Alevi; or in North America, except among the indigenous peoples. Stevenson’s collection includes cases from every continent, but only a few cases have been reported from most areas.49

Cases vary not only in how regularly they are reported, but in how strong they are, as measured by number of statements, behaviors and physical signs they include. Tribal cases tend to have weaker phenomena than Asian cases and past-life identifications are frequently made on very slender evidence (Nathan’s case is one of the most developed tribal cases on record).50 In Western countries, not only are fewer cases reported, those which come to light are for the most part relatively weak.51 The weakness of the phenomena naturally has a bearing on how easy it is to identify the previous person and is reflected in the ratios of solved to unsolved cases cross-culturally. In Stevenson’s collection as it stood in 1983, 80% of Burmese, 79% of Lebanese, and 77% of Indian cases were solved, in contrast to only 20% of American nontribal cases.52

There may be cultural reasons for some of these variations. In Western and other countries whose cultures oppose reincarnation, it is likely that many cases do not come to the attention of investigators. This explanation appears unlikely in India, however. A genetic component in past-life memory retrieval would explain why more cases develop in some populations more readily than in others and cannot be ruled out.53

Sex Change

The case feature with the most pronounced cultural linkage is sex change between lives. In countries and tribal societies in which this is believed possible, such cases are found, whereas in countries and tribal societies where it is believed impossible, no such cases have been reported. As of 1986 in the United States, 15% of sixty nontribal cases involved a change of sex. In Burma, 33% of 230 cases did. In Sri Lanka, the figure was 10%.54 The Kutchin traditionally held that all persons changed sex between lives. Only 22 (50%) of 44 of cases Slobodin heard about between the 1930s and 1960s featured changes of sex,55 but on a brief visit in 1977, Stevenson discovered that six (86%) of seven of Kutchin cases did.56  The Druze of Lebanon, the Alevi of Turkey and the Haida of Alaska and British Columbia believe that one cannot change sex between lives and no sex-change cases have been found among them.57

When there is a change of sex, boys and girls do not remember being of the opposite sex equally often. Three times as many girls claim to have been boys or men than boys claim to have been girls or women in Stevenson’s collection as a whole. In the United States, fourteen of fifteen children who remembered the life of a person of the opposite sex was a girl.58 Only among the Igbo did an equal number of boys and girls say they were of the opposite sex in their previous lives.59 Interestingly, a similar imbalance was found by Karl Müller with a sample of mostly Western cases, drawn from published sources.60 Müller’s finding is especially striking, given the disproportionate number of male subjects in most cultures.

Relationship Status

There is cultural variation also in how the subject is related to the previous person: as a relative, as an acquaintance or as a stranger. In tribal societies the great majority of cases fall in family lines. As reported by Stevenson in 1986, 96% of Tlingit cases, 94% of Haida cases and 92% of Igbo cases had family relationships.61 Mills found family relationships in 100% of the Gitxsan, Witsuwit’en and Beaver cases she studied.62 Even more strikingly, the case patterns follow the kinship structure of the society. The Tlingit, Haida, Gitxsan and Witsuwit’en are all matrilineal, and their cases fall on the mother’s side. The Igbo are patrilineal, and their cases fall on the father’s side.63 The Beaver reckon kinship bilaterally, through both parents equally, and their cases show a preference for neither side.64 The same is true of the Kutchin, who have an usual number of reincarnations of outsiders as well.65

The patterns are very different in other societies. In India, only 16% had family relationships, 41% had acquaintance relationships and 43% were strangers. In Sri Lanka, 19% of cases had family relationships, 29% had acquaintance relationships and 52% were strangers.66 These figures relate to Stevenson's case collection, which includes many unpublished cases. The figures are very different for Western cases, reports of which have been published. Of 32 solved European cases, 60% have family relationships, 10% have acquaintance relationships and 30% have stranger relationships.67 Of 27 solved published cases from the Americas (including Canada and Cuba along with the United States), 56% have family relationships, 11% have acquaintance relationships and 33% have stranger relationships.68

Intermission Length

Stevenson found the median intermission length (death to birth) in 616 solved cases to be fifteen months, based on the 1986 figures.69 There was a great deal of cultural variation, however. The median intermission was four months among the Haida and eight months among the Druze, but longer than nine months in most other places. It was twelve months in India, sixteen months in Sri Lanka, 21 months in Burma, and 34 months among the Igbo. In nontribal American cases, it was 141 months (almost twelve years).70 If cases that have come to light since 1986 are included, the median for American cases is much longer.71 Muller claimed an average intermission of seventy years in his sample of largely Western cases, but this apparently included estimates regarding unsolved cases along with the known lengths of solved cases.72

In the 22 published cases from the Americas with reliable information in intermission length, the median intermission is 8.5 years.73In the 32 solved European cases, it is 33 months, just under three years.74 However, with American and European cases, there is a marked difference between the median intermission with family and acquaintance relationships versus stranger relationships. In the American cases, the median intermission in family and acquaintance cases is three years, whereas in stranger cases it is forty years.75 Of the European cases, the median intermission for family and acquaintance cases is eighteen months, whereas in stranger cases it is ten years (120 months).76 This pattern is not as evident in Asian cases, perhaps because the intermission in all of them is comparatively brief and there are fewer cases with family and acquaintance connections.

Interpretations of the Patterns

Sceptics of a reincarnation interpretation of the cases point to the association between beliefs about the reincarnation process and case features such as the presence or absence of sex change and argue that this is proof that people are imagining or constructing the cases in accordance with their culturally-mandated ideas.77 This proposition has been called the sociopsychological or psychosocial theory of past-life memory claims.78

Ian Wilson found variations in intermission length and other variables suspicious, because they did not allow him to discern the ‘rules’ by which reincarnation is governed. He could not make out whether there is a ‘waiting period’ between lives or whether we reincarnate internationally or close to home.79 Wilson evidently expected reincarnation to work the same way for everyone, everywhere, but as Matlock points out, human experience varies tremendously. There is no reason to expect uniformity in reincarnation, when it is not seen in any other department of life.80

Wilson analyzed seventeen published cases from India, looking for changes of caste and socioeconomic circumstance. He found that in all but one case the previous life was in better circumstances than the precent life, which suggested to him that the case subjects were fantasizing better past lives for themselves.81 In Stevenson’s collection as a whole, only two thirds of Indian cases had previous persons in better circumstances, a rather different ratio. Moreover, Wilson’s rationale for the change in circumstances is culturally insensitive. In India, a past life in better circumstances would imply a karmic demotion into the present life, something unlikely to be imagined by most children.82

Sceptics have not commented on the patterns on the side of the previous person, which are not easy to explain on the psychosocial theory. Stevenson83 and Matlock,84 however, have proposed an explanation for the cultural variations that takes the previous person into account: Perhaps the beliefs and convictions we hold in life continue with us into death and help to determine what we do next. If we do not expect to change sex, we will avoid doing so. If we expect the reincarnate in either our father’s or our mother’s line, we will strive to make that happen. This proposal supposes that we can exercise some control over our destinies when we are discarnate, a notion supported by Matlock’s findings regarding motive in international and suicide cases.85

James G Matlock

Source: https://psi-encyclopedia.spr.ac.uk/articles/patterns-reincarnation-cases

By Meryle Secrest

This interview was published in 1988. It shows yet more of the many fascinating ideas and views that Dr. Ian Stevenson holds, as he draws from his fifty years of education and research into the foundations of human personality.

INTRODUCTION

The idea that some children of ages three to five not only remember a previous existence, but can identify loved ones from it, strikes most Westerners as so bizarre that it compels disbelief. Perhaps this is why the world's foremost investigator of the phenomenon, Dr. Ian Stevenson, has attracted so little attention.

Since the late Sixties Dr. Ian Stevenson, Carlson Professor of Psychiatry and Director or the Division of Personality Studies at the University of Virginia, has documented cases in India, Africa, the Near and Far East, Britain, the United States, and elsewhere in which young children have astonished their parents with precise details about the people they claim to have been. Some of these children have recognized former homes and neighborhoods as well as still-living friends and relatives. They have recalled events in their purported previous lives, including their often violent deaths. Sometimes their birthmarks resemble scars that correspond to wounds that led, they claim, to their deaths.

All this is the stuff of lurid fiction and pulp journalism, presumably unworthy of serious investigation. In this context Stevenson is considered unique: His studies are scrupulously objective and methodologically impeccable. The late Herbert S. Ripley, former chairman of the psychiatry department at the University of Washington in Seattle, noted, "We are lucky to have someone of his ability and high integrity investigating this controversial area. Wrote Dr. Harold Lief in the Journal of Nervous and Mental Diseases: "Either he is making a colossal mistake, or he will be known as the Galileo of the twentieth century."

Born in Montreal on October 31, 1918, Ian Stevenson was the son of a Scottish lawyer, John Stevenson. A writer at heart, the elder Stevenson became chief correspondent in Ottawa for Times of London. His wife, Ruth Preston Stevenson, had an extensive library on psychic phenomena. But Stevenson cannot recall any incidents that triggered his interest in psychic matters. "Virtually nothing has happened to me of that nature," he says. "I wish it would; I sometimes wonder what my trouble is." Stevenson studied medicine at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland and then transferred to McGill University in Montreal after the outbreak of World War II. His studies in internal medicine led to an interest in psychosomatic illness and then in psychiatry. Although he trained as a Freudian psychoanalyst, he now says, "I feel sure that Freud will one day be considered a figure of fun. After his first book, which was clinically based, he became involved in theoretical musings and practically lost interest in investigation. He ended up inventing an inverted cone of theory supported by a tiny base of data."

In 1957 Stevenson was appointed chief psychiatrist at the hospital of the University of Virginia, and today he heads the Division of Personality Studies. The author of many papers in professional psychiatric journals, Stevenson has written two standard texts on psychiatric interviewing and diagnosis. In 1964 he abandoned psychiatry to devote himself entirely to research into psychic phenomena and reincarnation. Buying time for his work took money. Luckily, Stevenson's first essay on past lives, "The Evidence for Survival from Claimed Memories of Former Incarnations," published in 1960, caught the eye of Chester Carlson, inventor of the Xerox machine. Carlson promptly took the first major step toward funding the studies that Stevenson has been conducting ever since. Such studies are exhaustive as well as expensive. Between 1966 and 1971, for instance, Stevenson logged an average of 55,000 miles a year, often making return visits and interviewing as many as 25 witnesses for a single case. He now has 2,500 such cases on file from all over the world, most still unexamined for lack of money and researchers. Carlson, who died in 1968, endowed a chair at the University of Virginia, along with bequeathing the funds that still support Stevenson's research.

Even decades ago, as he was finishing his first paper on memories of persons claiming previous lives, Stevenson saw the shortcomings of most evidence from adult cases. Focusing on the memories of very young children, he concluded that one might distinguish between "imaged" and "behavioral" memories. Although a child might have no conscious memories (imaged memories) from a former life, his interests, aptitudes, and phobias (behavioral memories) might have been formed by experiences he or she had forgotten. Perhaps reincarnation could explain features of the human personality that other theories have failed to elucidate.

Lately Stevenson has scrutinized evidence based on physical characteristics such as birthmarks and birth defects. This latest body of work, which will be published in several volumes over the next few years, Stevenson says, may tip the scales between evidence supporting reincarnation and evidence making any other conclusion difficult to sustain. All of Stevenson's books have been published by the University Press of Virginia, and all are in print. They include Twenty Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation; Cases of the Reincarnation Type (four volumes). Unlearned Language: New Studies in Xenoglossy, and Telepathic Impressions. A Review and Report of Thirty-five New Cases.

For several years Stevenson declined my request to interview him, explaining that his reluctance stemmed from previous experiences in which he had been tricked by the press and badly misrepresented. Finally, in the fall of 1987, he relented, just before leaving Virginia for Cambridge, England, and then India. Stevenson and his staff work in an old house on a Charlottesville street that long ago lost its residential status and is now filled with parking lots and apartment buildings. The interior is comfortable and modern without being in any way memorable, except for the souvenirs of Stevenson's travels, which line the walls: Indian and African masks, drums, fans, and swords. Now sixty-nine, Stevenson is a courtly and attentive listener with a reputation for being diffident. He is rather an intensely private person and, as might be gathered from the set of his jaw, secretly tenacious. Stevenson, it would appear, is much more concerned with painstakingly accumulating, clarifying, and classifying evidence than with drawing resounding conclusions.

* * * * * * * *

Omni: Your newest book [in 1988], Children Who Remember Previous Lives, is a rare discussion of the evidence presented, it seems, after much questioning. How does this book differ from your previously published books, which were predominantly case histories?

Stevenson: It occurred to me that my case histories were not being widely read---to understate the matter--although Twenty Cases has now become a best seller as far as scientific books go it has gone into seven languages and has probably sold fifty thousand copies, but that's over a twenty-year period. Judging from the mail, the readership was not among scientists but rather from the public at large. My paper "The Explanatory Value of the Idea of Reincarnation," published ten years ago, suggested that the study of these cases might illuminate problems in psychology and medicine.

I had become dissatisfied, you see, with the methods that had been developed in psychiatry for helping people. Orthodox theory conceives human personality as the product of a person's genetic material inherited from his ancestors through his parents, and the modifying influences of his prenatal and postnatal environment. But I found that some cases cannot be satisfactorily explained by genetics, environmental influences, or a combination of these. I am speaking of such things as early childhood phobias, about uncanny abilities that seem to develop spontaneously, of children convinced that they are the wrong sex, congenital deformities, differences between one-egg twins, and even such matters as irrational food preferences.

Omni: Is this work the only study of its kind in the United States?

Stevenson: Yes, and it's unique for the rest of the world. In India, however, scientists who have worked with me are now beginning to do independent research.

Omni: Do you wait for people to get in touch, or do you pursue cases?

Stevenson: It's sort of mixed now. I've got so much data I've been trying to withdraw from fieldwork myself. I want to write more so that not too many of my books will be posthumous.

Omni: When did you hit on the idea of dealing just with children?

Stevenson: It evolved in the late Sixties, probably after I went to India. Adults would write to me, and I eventually began to see that most of their cases were worthless. You can't really control the subconscious influences to which most adults are exposed. It's so much easier to be confident about the amount of information a small child might have learned, especially one living in an Asian village. I saw how fascinating and valuable these cases were.

Obviously children are too young to have absorbed a great deal of information, especially about deceased people in some distant town. In the better cases, they couldn't have known about them. In many of our cases in northwest North America and Burma, people in the same family or village are involved. So there's a likelihood that some adult or older child has talked about a deceased person and the child has absorbed the information, as our questioning makes clear. This is not, however, an issue in most cases I cite in India, many of which involve long distances, twenty-five to fifty kilometers or more, with no contact between the villages. Often the child has quite precise details.

Omni: You've found children with intense interests in subjects having no relation to anything in their family background or up-bringing. And you’ve directly linked the phobias and addictions of children to traumas that transpired in the lives of people these children claim to have been. Are you talking about aspects of their personalities that heredity does not explain?

Stevenson: That's right. It's easy to see environmental influences, say, with such composers as Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven, all of whose fathers were fine musicians. But what about George Frederic Handel? His family had no discernible interest in music; his father even sternly discouraged it. Or take the cases of Elizabeth Fry, the prison reformer, and Florence Nightingale, the founder of modern nursing. Both had to fight for their chosen callings from childhood onward. One can find endless examples that are difficult to explain given our current theories. But if one accepts the possibility of reincarnation, one can entertain the idea that these children are demonstrating strong likes, dislikes, skills, and even genius that are the logical results of previous experiences. I have found some children with skills that seem to be carried over from a previous life.

Omni: What about cases of childhood mental illness?

Stevenson: There again you will find cases of children acting as if they did not belong in their families. They treat parents and siblings with indifference, even hostility. This phenomenon is usually thought to have been caused by infantile trauma. Some theorists even try to explain it as the result of parents rejecting the child--before it has been born. Researchers look to the parents for the first cause. Comparatively little attention is given to the child, even though there is evidence that some children reject their parents before the parents have a chance to reject them. I suggest that such behavior could result from unhappy experiences in a previous life.

Omni: What about one's own child? Are there ways to introduce the subject?

Stevenson: I see no harm in asking a child if he remembers a previous life. I would be particularly interested if a child has a large birthmark or a congenital malformation. I've reported on a case of a child who claimed to have been his own paternal grandfather and had two pigmented moles in the same spots on his body that his grandfather did. It's said in such instances that genetics is responsible. But one wonders why the one grandchild in ten who had the moles claimed to remember his grandfather's life. Or take congenital malformations: Children born with deformed limbs--or even without fingers, toes, and hands--have claimed to remember being murdered and state that the murderer had removed these fingers, toes, or hands during the killing. In such situations the approach would be to ask the child to explain the birth defect. But I don't approve of pumping children if they don't want to talk.

Omni: Do the child's parents often "ruin" a case before you arrive?

Stevenson: All too often we reach the scene after the subject and his family have met the family about whom he's been talking. We sometimes have to pare away a great deal of extraneous information. I always prefer to record the child's account, but sometimes the boy or girl is too shy to talk, and I have to fall back on what parents say about his or her statements. My colleagues and I try to separate what the child said before meeting the other family from what he said later. Obviously the latter has much less value.

I cannot emphasize too strongly that a child who is going to remember a previous life has only about three years in which he will talk about it. Before the age of two or three he lacks the ability. After five, too much else will be happening in his life, and he will begin to forget.

Omni: How frequently do children claim to have memories of a past life?

Stevenson: We don't yet know the incidence of cases. All we know are those that come to us. One survey of a township in northern India found one case for every five hundred persons. This would almost certainly understate the matter, as many cases never go beyond the immediate family. Even in cultures where reincarnation is accepted, parents sometimes think such memories are harmful. They are often upset by what the child remembers. Parents would not be particularly pleased to have a murdered child, not to mention a murderer, reincarnate in their family.

Omni: What would predispose someone to remember a previous life?

Stevenson: Violent death is a factor in our cases. In more than seven hundred cases in six different cultures, sixty-one percent remembered having died violently. But are these cases actually representative? Those involving accidents, murders, and suicides are bound to get more attention than others in which the child remembers a quiet life. Children also tend to remember the final years or a previous life. Almost seventy five percent of our children appear to recall the way they died, and if death was violent, they remember it in vivid detail

Omni: You’ve stated that boys remember more often than girls.

Stevenson: Yes, but boys are presented to us more often than girls A girl may not be marriageable if she is the notorious subject of a case, so she may be kept in the background. In a series of one thousand ninety-five cases from around the world, sixty-two percent were male. I can't explain this, unless men are more likely to die violent deaths

Omni: Why do most Westerners ridicule the idea of reincarnation?

Stevenson: It's hard to find any single explanation. Some southern European Christians believed in reincarnation until the Council of Nice banned such beliefs in 553 A.D. In The Republic, Plato described souls about to be reborn as choosing their future lives. Schopenhauer took it seriously, and Voltaire's observation that it is no more surprising to be born twice than once is wellknown. Yet most scientists nowadays do not believe in survival after death. I suppose Darwinian ideas contributed to a sort of dethroning of the soul. Reincarnation may be particularly uncongenial because it's so much identified—mistakenly I think—with the Hindu and Buddhist ideas of being reborn as an animal.

Omni: What has it been like to swim against the tide?

Stevenson: Invigorating! (Laughs)

Omni: What criticism is most frequently leveled at your work?

Stevenson: That the cases occur most where people already believe in reincarnation. If a child seems to refer to a previous life, it's argued that his parents encourage him and may unwittingly feed the child information about a deceased person. I call this the sociopsychological interpretation of the cases. It is said that despite all my efforts, I have not eliminated the possibility that the subject of a case learned everything he knew through normal channels. Once a child comes to believe he or she was a particular person in a previous life, the argument goes, the other elements follow naturally. If you believe you had been stabbed to death in a previous life, you might have a phobia, for example, of knives.

While this is a valid argument for a small number of cases, especially those occurring in the same family or village, it's inapplicable for long-distance cases where a child shows a detailed knowledge about a family his parents have never heard of, let alone met. But my critics say I must have overlooked something, that the child must have learned about the deceased.

Omni: Why do all the cases seem to be in Asia? Couldn't critics find any in the West?

Stevenson: Oh, absolutely. I am convinced that if child psychologists and psychiatrists, as well as pediatricians, family doctors, and parents, would listen to children and observe them with reincarnation in mind, they would make valuable discoveries Children often seem to express memories of previous lives in their play and sometimes in their drawings.

Omni: Scientists usually dismiss reincarnation as some sort of wishful thinking. Yet William James noted that our desire to believe in survival after death does not automatically negate its possibility. We do want to believe in it, don't we?

Stevenson: No, in fact we don’t. That's a misunderstanding concerning Hindus and Buddhists. They believe in it, but they don't particularly want to. Hindus see life in terms of a constant cycle of births in which we are doomed to struggle and suffer until we have reached perfection and can escape. Fear of death is almost universal; and some two thousand years ago Patanjali, an Indian sage, said it was due to our fear of having to undergo a postmortem review of our lives, to be judged and presumably be found wanting.

Omni: Your new book discusses some misconceptions about the idea of reincarnation. What is the most common?

Stevenson: The idea that reincarnation must include what Hindus call Karma, especially retributive Karma.

Omni: Retributive Karma being the idea that whatever bad you do in this life is paid for in the next by having the same amount of evil done to you?

Stevenson: Something like that. It can be more specific, so that if you put out someone's eyes, you will be blinded. There is no evidence for the idea of retributive Karma. The notion of a succession of lives with improvement in each, on the other hand, is precisely the view of the Druze, a Muslim sect of Lebanon, a people I’ve worked with a lot. They believe God sends us into different sorts of lives, perhaps as a fisherman, then a banker, then maybe a pirate. But in each life we should do the best we can, if a banker, one should be thoroughly honest—and rich! Whether pirate or peasant, it's all summed up at the day of judgment. But one life has nothing to do with the next. Your conduct could be vicious in one life, and in the next, you might be reborn into elegant circumstances.

Omni: In your new book you speak reprovingly of people easily persuaded by your evidence. Is your position that reincarnation can never really be demonstrated?

Stevenson: I don't think I rebuke anybody for being convinced by the evidence. All I say is that maybe they shouldn't believe on the basis of what's in that particular book, because the detailed case reports are in my other books. Essentially I say that the idea of reincarnation permits but doesn't compel belief. All the cases I've investigated so far have shortcomings. Even taken together, they do not offer anything like proof. But as the body of evidence accumulates, it's more likely that more and more people will see its relevance.

I'm not much of a missionary. Most of that was drained out of me on my first trip to India. I did have a certain zeal when I first went there. When I talked to Ramakrishna Swami in Chandigarh, he asked me what I was doing, and I replied with a certain enthusiasm. After a long silence he finally said, "We know that reincarnation is true, but it doesn't make any difference because here in India we have just as many rogues and villains as you have in the West" End of interview.

Who is Dr. Stevenson? Omni: Many claims are made for the authenticity of previous lives based on memories supposedly recovered under hypnosis. You have pointed out why these are likely to be fraudulent.

Stevenson: In my experience, nearly all so-called previous personalities evoked through hypnotism are entirely imaginary and a result of the patient's eagerness to obey the hypnotist's suggestion. It is no secret that we are all highly suggestible under hypnosis. This kind of investigation can actually be dangerous. Some people have been terribly frightened by their supposed memories, and in other cases the previous personality evoked has refused to go away for a long time.

Omni: Yet there are some cases that might argue in its favor. You seem persuaded by the evidence for Bridey Murphy. [In 1952 a Colorado housewife claimed that under hypnosis she relived memories of a previous life as an Irish girl, Bridey Murphy, living in 1806.]

Stevenson: Yes, I think it is one of the few. We've discussed cases of children and adults who have been able to speak a tongue they could not possibly have learned; the term for this is xenoglossy. Although rare, they do occur. One that I published concerns the wife of a Methodist minister who, after having been hypnotized by her husband, began to speak German--not very well, but German nonetheless--and described the life of a teenage girl who may have lived in Germany in the late nineteenth century. So I'm not saying that hypnosis is never a useful tool, but I do deplore the commercial exploitation and misleading claims that are often made. A large part of what emerges under hypnosis is pure fantasy. Some of these "previous lives" have been traced back to historical novels.

There is another English case going back to the turn of the century that was studied by a Cambridge don, in which a young woman seemed to be describing the life of one Blanche Poynings, a person around the court of Richard II in the fourteenth century. She gave a lot of detail about the people concerned, including proper names and the sort of life she lived. The investigators kept on probing, and a little later they began asking her about sources of information. In her trancelike state the girl herself came out with a reference to a book, Countess Maud, published in the latter part of the nineteenth century, a classic Victorian novel all about a countess at the court of Richard II. The subject had modified it a little bit, but basically it was all in the novel, and it turned out that her aunt had a copy of the book. She didn't remember reading it, but she remembered turning the pages. So you have that kind of case.

Omni: Have you found evidence of conscious hoax?

Stevenson: There are a few. In a recent paper on seven cases of deception and self-deception, my colleagues and I describe hoaxes or informants who had deceived themselves about the strength of evidence. I may have been hoaxed in other cases without knowing it, but I think not often. The average villager in Asia and Africa doesn't have time to devise a hoax. He or she often begrudges us the time it takes to conduct an interview. There is no money to be made and no particular local renown to be had. Successful fraud takes the cooperation of numerous witnesses and a child drilled to perfection. It's not a serious problem for us, although gross self-deception can happen. For instance, I was shown two Alevi children in Turkey who were said to be the reincarnation of President Kennedy: These kinds of cases are uncommon and relatively easy to detect.

Cryptomnesia, or source amnesia, is another matter. A child could obtain some information normally and then forget it. It's a possibility I consider in every case, but it's not a satisfactory explanation for most long-distance cases, since too much information is needed to put together a believable set of previous-life memories. Sometimes, though, there may be paramnesia—a mixing up of memories. The Druze, who often have such a strong desire to trace a deceased person that they may be too anxious to find the child they're looking for, jump to conclusions on the basis of very slender evidence. You might call it unconscious wish fulfillment.

Omni: Do you see in reincarnation a glimpse of a larger purpose?

Stevenson: Well, yes, I do. My idea of God is that He is evolving. I don't believe in the watchmaker God, the original creator who built the watch and then lets it tick. I believe in a "Self-maker God" who is evolving and experimenting; so are we as parts of Him. Bodies wear out; souls may need periods for rest and reflection. Afterward one may start again with a new body.

Omni: Do you disagree with most bioscientists, who hold that what we call mind or soul is actually a part of brain activity?

Stevenson: The assumption that our minds are nothing but our brains appears to receive support when you consider the effect of injury, surgery, a high fever, or one or two drinks of whiskey on our mental processes. Some neuroscientists ac knowledge that they have only just begun to show how brain processes account for mental ones. But they claim to know that they or their successors will work it all out. They are sure there can be no other explanation, therefore they consider no other. We are not pledged to follow all the received opinions of neuroscientists, however. Recently, a small number of psychologists and philosophers have begun to ask whether mind can ever be fully explained in terms of brain functioning.

Omni: You've said that more girls remember boys' lives than the reverse.

Stevenson: That's right. The overall ratio is two to one. Of one hundred sex-change cases [cases in which the child recollects having been a different sex in a previous life], sixty-six will be females remembering previous lives as boys. I've discussed this in some Burmese cases. It may be culturally more acceptable in Burma to say that you, as a girl, were once a boy than the reverse. A boy would be teased mercilessly. It is easier to come up with statistics than to interpret them. In a culture in which to change one's sex is not acceptable, perhaps such cases are never reported even when they do occur.

Omni: The possibility of sex change puts the question of homosexuality and gender confusion in a new light, doesn't it?

Stevenson: Yes. When it was fashionable to ascribe all emotional disorders to the ineptitude of one's parents, cases of gender-identity confusion were blamed on parents. A biological explanation, such as Klinefelter's syndrome [a genetic condition in which a male is born with an extra X, or female, chromosome] can explain some but not all cases. Western psychiatrists and psychologists do not have a satisfactory explanation for this, whereas in Southeast Asian cultures, gender-identity confusion is considered one result of reincarnation and taken calmly. Reincarnation ought to be considered as a possible explanation at least some of the time.

Omni: Do you have a research staff?

Stevenson: Yes, we have two full-time assistants. So far most overseas cases have been investigated first by people on the spot. Obviously they have the immediate advantage over me in that they need no interpreters. On the other hand, not many Asians have been trained in science. Those who are trained have usually come to think of reincarnation as a superstition of their childhoods and one they'd rather forget. But a few Asian scientists have been extremely helpful. In contrast, I remember a Harvard-trained psychologist in Burma who could barely be polite to me. There he was, sitting up in Mandalay, surrounded by cases, and he had no interest in them.

Omni: What's next for you?

Stevenson: I'm mainly working now on a massive study of birthmarks and birth defects. I published a few of them in Twenty Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation without much special mention or photographs. I now have about two hundred cases. I hope the first volume of thirty will be published this year. This first group contains cases from India, Burma, Turkey, Lebanon, and northwest North America. They'll all have photographs, and I've been able to match up about fifteen of them with postmortem reports. It's my most important book, and I've been writing it for about ten years. [Note: Stevenson’s truly massive study, Reincarnation and Biology, was finally published in 1997. Find more information in Carol’s Bookstore.]

Omni: Do birthmarks occur very often?

Stevenson: Some birthmarks are common. But it depends on what you call a birthmark. The average American has about fifteen. I'm talking about a raised, darkened mole, or what we call an elevated nevus. Some marks are simply areas of increased pigmentation; in other cases, the birthmark is three-dimensional, the area being partly or wholly elevated, depressed, or puckered. I have examined at least two hundred of this kind, and many of them cannot be distinguished, at least by me, from the scars of healed wounds.

In many cases I've had to rely on memories of surviving relatives and friends for information about the exact location of wounds or other marks on the previous personality in question. This has led to the sensible objection that relatives might have tailored their memories to fit the circumstances for a variety of reasons. I have been able to overcome this objection in about thirty cases by obtaining autopsy or other medical records. Such records provide the strongest evidence we have so far in favor of reincarnation.

Omni: You are also interested in the phenomena of precognition and telepathy, aren't you?

Stevenson: Precognition is just a clearer idea of a possible future. Imagine a person in a canoe paddling down a river. Around the corner are rapids he doesn't see. Someone on the cliff above, seeing the whole river, can see what's likely to happen to that person. At any point, of course, the canoeist might pull over to the bank. He doesn't have to go over the rapids.

What is interesting about precognition, telepathy, or any other form of paranormal communication is the number or people who believe they've had at least one experience: between ten and seventeen percent in the United Slates and Great Britain, according to some surveys. Most can be put down to coincidence, suppressed memories, or any number of plausible explanations. You can discount ninety-five percent of these cases; but for an impressive number there is no natural explanation. Present understanding of our brains leaves no room for these phenomena.

Omni: What prevented Hamlet from committing suicide was the suspicion that death might not be the end of things. Haven't you cited cases of children who have committed suicide?

Stevenson: That's rather rare. We haven't followed them, of course. Children who remember a previous life that ended in suicide sometimes still have the suicide habit. If things go wrong, they'll threaten to commit suicide. That we've had. We've had twenty-three cases involving fear of retribution for suicide in the previous life; and several had phobias about the instrument of suicide--that is, guns in some cases, poison in others. One person told me that her memories of suicide had deterred her from killing herself. The thought that nothing would be over or solved so one might as well face one's troubles is, in my view, a very effective deterrent.

Omni: In Memories, Dreams, and Reflections, Carl Jung wrote that as a boy he remembered in great detail being a very old man in the eighteenth century.

Stevenson: Children we have studied often act as if they had been transferred without warning from an adult's body into a baby's. When one of our Turkish children began to speak, almost the first thing he said was, "What am I doing here? I was at the port." Later on he described details in the life of a dockworker who had fallen asleep in the hold of a ship. A heavy oil drum had fallen on him and killed him instantly. Cases like this remind me or a woman who had a stroke while playing bridge. When she came around several days later, her first words were, "What's trumps?"

Omni: You briefly mentioned your new studies in chronological discrepancies. Are you talking about personalities that are reborn into new children before the end or the previous life?

Stevenson: There are a few of those. In Twenty Cases there’s the case of Jasbir, also a different kind of discrepancy story. He was about two and a half when he appeared to die of smallpox. When he revived he claimed that he was somebody totally different, a man who had just died and stumbled into the body. In his new personality Jasbir said that after death he had met a mahatma, or a sage, who had told him to take over this body.

There was also a case in Thailand in which a monk, Chaokhun Rajsuthajarn, claimed to have been born a day before the death of Nai Leng, the personality he remembered. These cases are extremely rare in Buddhist countries; Buddhists tend to regard them as suspect and even bogus because they do not harmonize with the Buddhist concept of rebirth. I studied this case with much care but couldn't find an explanation for the discrepancy.

Omni: Why do American children have so many less concrete and verifiable memories than Asian children do?

Stevenson: I have speculations and conjectures. First, Americans are nomadic. A fifth of all Americans move from one community to another each year, and a quarter move within the community, changing their neighborhood and environment. Some of the Asian children's memories are stimulated by their noticing slight environmental differences. If the difference is great, that stimulus may be missing.

Turning the question the other way around, why do certain Asian cultures have so many cases? To begin with, these cultures remember their dead more than we do and see them as still being actively involved in life; they also have stronger family ties. To them there is no such thing as random fate. Everything happens for a reason, and that reason often has to do with someone who wishes them well or ill. They also believe, much more than we do in the West, in telepathy. the paranormal, and that dreams foretell the future. They are not clock-watchers as we are; they have time to reflect on their lives. All these factors may have some bearing on this question and perhaps put them in closer touch with their past lives.

Omni: When you're dealing with Asian children, couldn't you be involved with people whose past lives did not get completed?

Stevenson: That's right. In dealing with people who died naturally rather than violently, we can distinguish several broad groups. In the first we might place people who were well one moment and dead the next, before they or anyone else had a chance to adjust to the idea. In the second category one might place those who died before the age of twelve of whatever natural causes; in the third there are those who died with unfinished business--mothers who left infants or young children, for instance One would also have to include people who had not been particularly young when they died but left life in the middle of some absorbing project. Any one of these people might have felt entitled to a longer life than they turned out to have.

Omni: Is the average space between death of one personality and that personality's rebirth in a new child about fifteen months?

Stevenson: Yes, but I think our figure comes mainly from Asian cases because, of our roughly one hundred Western cases, only fifteen to twenty have been verified, or, as we say, "solved." In my paper American Children who Claim to Remember Previous Lives" I analyzed seventy-nine cases. They are nowhere near as rich in detail as, say, the Indian cases. American children named few names, for instance, and we could match them up with a deceased person in only sixteen cases; and the person nearly always turned out to be a family member, thus making the case not significant for our purposes. Not a single child claimed to have been famous in a previous lifetime. The majority seemed to be ordinary, undistinguished people, just like the majority of our Asian children.

Omni: Even so, if the interval is fifteen months for each of us, doesn't that argue for a staggering number of lives relived?

Stevenson: Well, these cases of children who remember may be exceptional. They may become cases because they do remember, not because they are reborn. How many others may be reborn without remembering, or not reborn? The fifteen month average is perhaps true only for people who are murdered in India.

Omni: One of your American cases involved a person who remembered a life in which she had been scalped, which would argue for an enormous interval.

Stevenson: Yes, since the eighteenth century in that case. Our analyses have not shown that longer intervals between lives mean fewer memories. We do have to be prepared for the possibility that memories can fade in a world or discarnate minds, just as they can in our own. So we would rarely expect to be able to verify cases in which the interval was greater than twenty-five years. For most people it's possible the interval between death and rebirth is much longer than the cases we've studied so far. With only two thousand cases to go on, I'd hardly dare speculate about the billions of human beings since the beginning of the human race who have disappeared without a trace.

Omni: Would you speculate on why certain children show up in certain families?

Stevenson: If they are Muslims, they will say God did it. If they're Hindu or Buddhist, they'll attribute it to Karma. It might be that the purpose is to live and learn together. Someone who wants to evolve morally, for instance, should try to be reborn in a saint's family if he can. The most serious punishment I could imagine for a Mafia murderer would be to be reborn in a Mafia family, with their limited outlook on life. Why a person appears to be reborn in one family rather than another interests me passionately. It's a question for the next century.

Omni: Do you have children or your own?

Stevenson: Unfortunately not.

Omni: Isn't it often a disadvantage to remember a previous life?

Stevenson: Oh. I think so. These children become embroiled in divided loyalties. In many cases children have rejected their parents, saying they are not their real parents and have often started down the road toward their so-called real homes. In other cases, they insist on being reunited with their former husbands, wives, or children. One Indian boy was passionately attached to the woman he said had been his former mistress and was trying to get her back, causing himself and her real distress.

Omni: Might someone consider where and how one would like to be reborn?

Stevenson: I think an even more important question is. Who would want me as a baby?

Omni: Can I ask where and as whom you would like to be reborn?

Stevenson: No. I think that's too personal.

Omni: You must have been somewhat curious about what previous lives you might have led, because you consulted eight sensitives, or mediums.

Stevenson: Consulted is too strong a word. Some gave me these "readings" spontaneously. It just sort of happened along the way. When I was visiting an Indian swami, I didn't ask him, he just blurted something out. I've forgotten what it was. I think he said something about a previous life in India. You could say they were picking up different lives; some had me in different places at the same time. I had two talk about eighteenth-century lives in the same period, and they were completely different. They're all totally unverifiable. There are people who charge money for this, and it's a ridiculous waste of everybody's time.

Omni: What advice do you have for those who have no memories of a previous life?

Stevenson: Some persons have said it is unfair to be reborn unless you can remember details of a previous life and profitably remember your mistakes. They forget that forgetting is essential to successful living in the present. If every time we walked, we were to remember how we stumbled, we would fall again. I've also had people envy children who remember previous lives, as if these children had special wisdom. In fact, it makes more sense to look upon them as suffering from an abnormality, almost a defect. The memories they have are often more of a handicap than a blessing; and they nearly all become happier as they grow older and forget their previous lives. To paraphrase Jesus Christ, sufficient unto one life is the evil thereof.

Omni: Has your work influenced your own attitudes toward life and death?

Stevenson: I think so. I wouldn't claim to be free of the fear of death, but it is probably less in me than other people. These children sometimes provide reassurances to adults. We’ve had two or three incidents of children going to, let's say, a woman who has lost her husband and is inconsolable and saying, "You shouldn’t be crying. Death isn’t the end. Look at me. I died and I'm here again."

Source: Omni Magazine 10(4):76 (1988)Copyright 1988, Omni Magazine 

Ian Stevenson’s scientific search for evidence of reincarnation

By Tom Shroder

Washington Post Magazine, August 8, 1999. Adapted from Old Souls: The Scientific Evidence for Reincarnation, a book by Tom Shroder, (Simon & Schuster). This article is a good summary of some of the important ideas in Tom Shroder’s book, and a preview of the excellent story telling that “takes you there” on Stevenson’s sometimes hair-raising journeys to research cases of children’s past life memories.

It is late, nearly lightless. Smoke from a million dung fires hangs in the headlamps as the Maruti microbus bangs along the narrow, cratered hard pack that passes for a paved road in the Indian outback. We are still hours away from the hotel, and the possibility that we will never get there looms as large as the absurdly overloaded truck hurtling toward us dead in the middle of the road.

Using every inch of the rutted dirt shoulder, we barely escape. I can feel the truck vibrate through the thin tin of the Maruti, smell death in the exhaust pumping from the truck’s tailpipe, passing at eye level. And even in escape, there is no relief: We bounce back onto the road’s pitted surface and immediately overtake a wooden cart moving at the lumbering gait of yoked oxen. Our driver, leaning on his horn, swerves around the cart and into a blind curve that I can only pray is not already occupied by a bus loaded to the dented metal ceiling with humans and farm animals.

I try not to think about the lack of seat belts, or the mere half-inch of glass and metal that separates the front seat from whatever we might plow into. Or the article I read that said fatal accidents were 40 times more likely on Indian roads than on American highways. I try not to think about dying 10,000 miles from home, about never seeing my wife and children again. I try not to think about absolute darkness.

But even within my bubble of fear, I am aware of the irony. Sitting in the back seat, apparently unconcerned about the mud-splattered torpedoes racing toward us, is a tall, stoop-shouldered, white-haired man, nearly 80, who insists he has compiled enough solid, empirical evidence to prove that physical death is not necessarily the end of me, or anyone else. His name is Ian Stevenson, and he is a physician and psychiatrist at the University of Virginia. He has been braving roads like this for almost 37 years to bring back reports of young children who speak of remembering previous lives, providing detailed and accurate information about people who died before they were born — people they say they once were. While I struggle with my fear of dying, he is wrestling with his own fear of annihilation: that his life’s work will end all but ignored by his peers.

“Why,” he asks for the third time since night has fallen, “do mainstream scientists refuse to accept the evidence we have for reincarnation?”

On this day, and for the past six months, Stevenson has shown me what he means by “evidence.” He has allowed me to accompany him on two extensive field trips, first to Beirut and now to India. He has responded to my endless questions, and even allowed me to participate in the interviews that are the heart of his research.

The evidence he is referring to does not come from fashionable New Age sources, past-life readings or hypnotic regressions. It is homely and specific: A boy remembers being a 25-year-old mechanic, thrown to his death from a speeding car on a beach road. He recalls the name of the driver, the exact location of the crash, the names of the mechanic’s sisters and parents and cousins, and the people he hunted with.

A girl remembers being a teenager named Sheila who was killed while crossing the road. She names the town Sheila lived in, plus Sheila’s parents and siblings. When Sheila’s family hears of the little girl’s stories, they visit with her — in front of witnesses who say the girl recognized them by name and relationship without prompting.

From the time he learns to talk, a boy in Virginia named Joseph calls his mother by her name and calls his grandmother Mom. As he grows, Joseph begins recalling obscure events from the life of his Uncle David, who died in an accident 20 years before Joseph was born — and who has been rarely mentioned because of the family’s abiding grief.

It goes on and on. In scores of cases around the world, multiple witnesses confirm that children have spontaneously supplied names of towns and relatives, occupations and relationships, attitudes and emotions that pinpointed a single, dead individual — often apparently unknown to their present families. Trying to make sense of these cases is what has involved Stevenson for almost 40 years. It is what we have been doing in Lebanon and India: examining records, interviewing witnesses and measuring the results against possible alternative explanations. And it is only now dawning on me, as we careen down a deathtrap of a rutted Indian highway, that I have no easy explanations for what I’ve seen, and no sure answer for the question the man in the back seat is asking.

If Stevenson is largely ignored by his mainstream peers, in some circles he is a scientific legend. His dogged collection of cases — closing in on 3,000 now — his meticulous documentation and cross-checking, his prodigious and scholarly publication have made him a hero to many people who would like respectable reasons to distrust the radical materialism of Western science. For his own part, Stevenson has reached this conclusion:

“I think a rational person, if he wants, can believe in reincarnation on the basis of evidence.”

When I first came across mention of his work, in 1989, in a footnote to an article on hypnotic regression, I wondered if he might be the kind of wacko who also had a drawerful of fragments of the True Cross or a radio that communicated with a race of blood-red dwarves on the fifth moon of Jupiter. But reading further, I found that this was clearly not the case. A 1975 article in no less than the Journal of the American Medical Association said Stevenson “had collected cases in which the evidence is difficult to explain on any other grounds” besides reincarnation.

The article cited a book in which Stevenson had compiled his field studies, Twenty Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation. I visited a couple of book-stores and found nothing by Stevenson. The public library listed several volumes by him but could locate only Twenty Cases. The prose reminded me of some of the eye-crossing anthropology texts I’d read in college, but it was worth the read — the cases were compelling, even astonishing. Each had distinct particulars, each hinted at narrative enough for a novel, but all of them shared some essential aspects: A young child was said to have spontaneously asserted another identity, recounting details of memory and knowledge that appeared to conform to someone else’s life.

Twenty Cases and a bookshelf of similar volumes Stevenson has produced are stuffed with elaborate examinations in which he sought to determine if the things these children said and the ways they behaved could be explained in any “normal” way. His methods are those of the social scientist, the detective, the investigative reporter. He methodically tracked down and interviewed firsthand witnesses to statements a child made, especially those uttered before any contact had been made with the friends or family of the deceased (in Stevenson’s terminology, the “previous personality”). He cross-examined the witnesses, noted possible motivations for bias toward or against, and meticulously charted confirmations and conflicts in testimony.

Stevenson has cases on five continents. Most he has found in cultures in which the idea of reincarnation is widely accepted — places like India, Sri Lanka, Burma and Lebanon, and among tribal groups in northern Canada. Many of those cases involve families who did not believe in reincarnation, or had other powerful motivations to disbelieve the claims of their children, or the children claiming to be their dead relatives.

American skeptics often find the apparent lack of cases in their own environment a powerful argument against crediting evidence from Uttar Pradesh or the Shouf Mountains. “Everyone wants a case in Iowa,” Stevenson remarked at a dinner party in Beirut early in our travels. “Well, I’ll give them a case in Iowa. They aren’t as strong as the Lebanese cases, but they exist.”

In fact, Stevenson has collected more than 100 accounts concerning non-tribal North American children who claim previous-life memories. As a group, the North Americans have fewer specific memories than the children in places like Lebanon and India. They tend not to talk about place or personal names as much, or at all, making identification of a specific previous personality unlikely. The only American cases Stevenson has found where children have said enough to clearly identify a previous personality and included verifiable statements about their lives are “same-family cases” — cases like Joseph’s, in which a child remembers the life of a relative.

Such cases have at least two built-in weaknesses: There’s a clear motivation — grief and the desire for the return of a beloved family member — for the child’s family to unconsciously manufacture a fiction. And no matter how extensive a child’s statements about a dead relative, there is no way of ruling out the possibility that he came by the knowledge from other family members.

So the cases Stevenson has investigated most intensely are those in which it can be reliably established that the life a child claimed to recall belonged to a stranger, unknown to the child’s family, or anyone the family had contact with. Cases like that of the girl who kept telephoning “Leila.”

This was Suzanne, a middle-class Druze girl living in Beirut who believed that she remembered the life of a woman who had died undergoing heart surgery in Richmond, Va. Her parents told Stevenson her story: When she was 16 months old, she pulled the phone off the hook and said, “Hello, Leila?” into it over and over. Soon Suzanne claimed that she was Leila’s mother. By the time she was 2, Suzanne had mentioned the names of this woman’s other children, her husband, and her parents and her brothers — 13 people in all. At 3, she had recited portions of a funeral oration for the woman’s brother. Ultimately, Suzanne begged her parents to take her to her “real” home, and they made inquiries in the Lebanese town the girl insisted she was from. There they found a family who fit the particulars Suzanne had mentioned.

And there they learned that minutes before undergoing her heart surgery, the woman in question had tried desperately to call her daughter Leila.

This family, including a sister of Leila’s, confirmed much of what Suzanne had been saying: names, places, the funeral oration. Suzanne identified members of the dead woman’s family from photographs. Though she was a child, she treated the dead woman’s grown children as a mother would. She asked if their uncles, when they returned to Lebanon, had distributed “her” jewels to Leila and her sisters — which had been a deathbed request known only to the family.

Stevenson arrived on the scene after the two families met; any new statements the girl made about the woman’s life would be tainted, because Stevenson would have no way of proving that the information didn’t come from the woman’s family. His recourse in such cases is to concentrate on obtaining firsthand testimony about what the child said before the first meeting, and how he or she behaved during it. The dead woman’s relatives gave it, but grudgingly — they had been rocked by Suzanne’s claims. That reluctance made their testimony all the more valuable, in Stevenson’s view.

Suzanne’s case is appealing in part because of its American connections: The woman died in Virginia, some of her children live in this country, almost everyone involved speaks English. But the fact remains that Suzanne was born in the hills descending into south Beirut, not in Rockville or Woodbridge. Until someone else with memories of such detail and apparent veracity is documented in the United States, the relative weakness of American cases will inevitably suggest that the more persuasive foreign ones are somehow artifacts of a cultural belief in reincarnation.

Still, this view leaves several questions unanswered. Why, for example, do the American cases exist at all? Why are they identical, in form at least — the age of a child when the first statements are made, the type of statements and accompanying behavior — to the foreign ones?

And if a society’s belief in reincarnation could be powerful enough to create hundreds of elaborate falsehoods, then why couldn’t a society’s disbelief be capable of suppressing or blunting genuine cases, if they existed?

As my interest in Stevenson grew, I read further. Beyond general, mostly uncritical mentions of Stevenson’s work in literature dealing with New Age topics (one paranormal researcher compared him to Galileo), there was very little serious discussion of the meaning of his cases. But I did learn the basics of his biography:

Stevenson earned his MD from McGill University in Montreal in 1943, graduating at the top of his class. In 1957, at the age of 39, he became head of the department of psychiatry at the University of Virginia School of Medicine.

From there he began his research into reports of children who remembered past lives, and eventually gave up his administrative duties to become a full-time researcher of paranormal phenomena, his professorial chair endowed by Chester Carlson, the man who invented the Xerox process.

Apart from that early, positive review of Stevenson’s research in the Journal of the American Medical Association, mainstream science had almost completely ignored him. I began to look through the indexes of more obscure journals on the scientific fringe, notably the Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research and, more recently, the Journal for Scientific Exploration. There, I finally found serious scholarly articles that critically assessed Stevenson’s work, including some by researchers who had investigated similar cases themselves.

These researchers, psychologists and anthropologists, produced case reports almost identical to Stevenson’s, although the conclusions tended to be somewhat more cautious. After investigating 10 cases in India in 1987, for example, anthropologist Antonia Mills wrote: “Like Stevenson, I conclude that while none of the cases I studied offer incontrovertible proof of reincarnation or some related paranormal process, they are part of a growing body of cases for which normal explanations do not seem to do justice to the data.”

In 1996, Paul Edwards, a philosophy professor at the New School for Social Research in New York, published Reincarnation: A Critical Examination, an energetic attack. In his introduction, Edwards wrote:

“The writer most frequently criticized in this book is Professor Ian Stevenson of the University of Virginia. I should like to make it clear that there is nothing the least bit personal in these comments. I have never met Professor Stevenson . . . He has written more fully and more intelligently in defense of reincarnation than anybody else, and this is the only reason he features so prominently in my discussions.”

In general, Edwards wrote, Stevenson’s cases may look good in aggregate, but on close inspection are “fatally flawed.” He quoted a former associate of Stevenson’s as criticizing him for asking leading questions, conducting superficial investigations, taking insufficient account of the “human fallibility” of the witnesses he interviews, and reporting the cases in a way that makes them sound more impressive than they are.

“Which is more likely,” Edwards wrote, “that there are astral bodies, that they invade the womb of prospective mothers, and that the children can remember events from a previous life although the brains of the previous persons have long been dead? Or that Stevenson’s children, their parents, or some other witnesses and informants are, intentionally or unintentionally, not telling the truth: That they are lying, or that their very fallible memories and powers of observation have led them to make false statements and bogus identifications?”

Here Edwards was hammering at a central vulnerability of Stevenson’s research: No matter how much evidence suggestive of reincarnation Stevenson accumulates, he cannot begin to say what a soul is, much less show how it might travel from one body to another.

On the other hand, in trying to make Stevenson’s suppositions seem absurd, even Edwards was admitting that if these cases are not the product of lies, bogus identifications and fallible observations — if somehow they could be demonstrated to be honest and accurate accounts — then they would constitute legitimate evidence for reincarnation, even if we can’t explain how reincarnation works.

Before I actually met Stevenson, the only insight I had into him personally came from a reprint of a lecture he had given at Southeastern Louisiana University in 1989, in which he explained how he progressed from analyzing rat livers in a medical lab to interviewing children who claimed to remember previous lives. His remarks read like something from the 19th century, a time when scientists could also be writers, historians and philosophers, when they weren’t afraid to think aloud and puzzle over imponderable things in public.

But I was also intrigued by a subtle underlying tone of bitterness, or at least hurt and puzzlement, apparent in the text. Stevenson clearly felt that his life’s work had been scorned, or merely ignored, by those mainstream scientists he considered his peers.

He didn’t even wait for the second paragraph to say, “For me, everything now believed by scientists is open to question, and I am always dismayed to find that many scientists accept current knowledge as forever fixed.”

In his darker moments, Stevenson felt like an outcast, a heretic damned for his affronts to scientific orthodoxy. Once, in a particularly bleak frame of mind, he told me, “There’s a saying, ‘Science only changes one funeral at a time.’ ”

I first met Stevenson in January 1997, at his office on the University of Virginia campus. It was in an ancient two-story frame house sandwiched between an apartment building and a high-rise parking garage. A plaque on the exterior read “Division of Personality Studies.”

When I was shown into Stevenson’s office, we sat in facing armchairs. He spoke formally and thoughtfully. There was a sense of the past in the house, in his dress and manner and the way we were sitting there like gentlemen taking after-dinner brandy. In that conversation, and in subsequent ones, his seriousness of purpose was constant. He was reserved, but as I got to know him in the months that followed, I found him quite willing to consider any questions, even pointed ones about his motives and background.

Over dinner in a Beirut hotel, he explained what had diverted him from a successful career in conventional medical research: “What happened was that as I was a very extensive reader, I began to find in books here and there, and in newspapers and magazines, reports of what were usually individual cases of reincarnation memories. In the end I found 44 cases here and there.

“The thing that came out when you got them all together was that they predominantly featured young children, ages 2 to 5, who spoke of previous life memories for a brief time, until they were about 8. But you had to get them all together first before that was obvious. Many were little more than journalistic anecdotes, but some were considerably more serious . . .

“Numbers count in science, and these 44 cases, when you put them together, 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 a deception. My conclusion was that this might be a promising line of investigation if more cases could be found and studied earlier and more carefully. I don’t think it occurred to me that I might be the one to carry out the investigations.”

After Stevenson published a paper on his survey of the literature in 1960, he began to hear reports of similar claims in India, and received invitations to investigate.

“By the time I arrived, I had leads on five cases. To my surprise, in four weeks I had found 25 cases, and the same happened in Sri Lanka — I had a lead to one or two there and I ended up with seven. I didn’t pay much attention to the behavioral aspects of these cases. There was one where the child claimed that he was a Brahman and he was born in a low-caste family and he wouldn’t eat his family’s food. He said, ‘You’re all just a bunch of Jats, I’m a Brahman, I’m not going to eat your food.’ ” The boy persisted in his belief into an unhappy adulthood.

“I thought: Well this is interesting, but what really concerns me is how many of his statements can be verified, and what were the chances he could have learned this normally.”

Over time, Stevenson concluded that in the strongest cases, no normal explanation comfortably fit the facts. And in aggregate, they all but demanded an explanation beyond the range of our current understanding.

He published his first collection of the cases in 1964.

When I asked what kind of response the book received, Stevenson said nothing for long enough that, though I had spoken plainly, I began to wonder if he hadn’t heard the question.

Just when I was about to ask it again, he said, “The short answer is: none. It was just ignored. It was reviewed in the journals of psychical research, and that was about it. I was disappointed, but I couldn’t say I was surprised. I was well aware of the isolation of my work.”

Did he get any negative response from the university?

“Not precisely at this point, that I knew of. I think it was growing, though, because I learned later that the president of the university had received mail and telephone calls from alumni protesting what I was doing. And my wife was very distressed. She said, ‘You’re just ruining a promising career. Everything is going great for you. Why do you want to do this?’

“She was herself very materialistic and very oriented toward biochemistry as the answer to disease. So she didn’t have sympathy for what I was doing [though they remained married for 25 years, until she died, in 1983]. But that wasn’t the worst of her troubles. What was more distressing was that other people, instead of coming to me and saying, ‘I’d like to see your data,’ would make cracks to her at cocktail parties in my absence, tease her, and I thought that was shameful . . .

“But by that time, I was convinced that there was really something substantial in what I was seeing, something that should be pursued no matter what the cost. So I devoted more and more time to the cases.”

Stevenson faced another crisis when his benefactor, Chester Carlson, dropped dead in a New York movie theater. Stevenson’s grief combined with a sense of personal doom: “I thought, ‘The bottom has dropped out of this. I’ll have to go back to ordinary research.’ And then his will was read, and it was found that he’d left the university a million dollars and a little more for my research.”

Stevenson now had the backing to investigate full time, whether he got any mainstream respect or not. But he wasn’t satisfied with operating in the comfortable margin.

“I thought that most parapsychologists were too isolated,” he told me once. “They were just talking to themselves and not talking enough to other scientists, and far too inattentive to the fact that the rest of the world wasn’t listening to them. They were too locked into a rather narrow laboratory program and they tended to be neglectful, if not contemptuous, of what happened in the field, of spontaneous experiences.

“Those interested me more. Modern psychologists imitated physicists by only being interested in what happened in a lab, not in things like love and death, and parapsychologists imitated psychologists. That is, you have tight control of conditions. But it seems to me that it’s far better to be 90 percent certain of something important than 100 percent certain of something that is trivial.”

Despite his craving for professional acceptance, Stevenson has shied away from publicity. He didn’t trust journalists not to sensationalize his work, and many of his field trips were logistically complicated, arduous and even dangerous, not to mention expensive. He wasn’t eager to have to look after a noncontributing member on these expeditions.

But after several years of correspondence, and no doubt because of his impending retirement, I persuaded Stevenson to take me along.

Even though he was on the eve of turning 80, his stamina was astounding. Ranging far outside the cities in both Lebanon and India, relentlessly logging 12-hour days seven days a week in often inhospitable environments, he rarely betrayed the slightest fatigue. It was all I could do to keep from begging him to take a break.

But I could understand his compulsion. The cases we encountered were every bit as difficult to explain away as he had advertised. As he readily acknowledges, no one of them could, on its own, rule out any normal alternative. But in many of them, the only way to account normally for what people were telling us was to hypothesize some massive, multi-sided conspiracy, either conscious fraud or some unconscious communal coordination among people from different families and communities with no obvious motive or clear means to cooperate in a deception.

It was also obvious that Stevenson wasn’t ignoring contrary evidence or manufacturing support for his thesis. He was possibly even more energetic in pursuing a line of questioning that could puncture a claim than the contrary.

Ultimately, it was the accumulation of cases, across culture and circumstance, all with multiple, independent witnesses matter-of-factly testifying to things that were inconceivable, that began to take a toll on my skeptical bias.

But what about Stevenson’s bias?

On one of those interminable return trips on rutted roads unlit even by starlight, the evening fires encasing the world in an acrid smog, I asked him directly: Doesn’t his own passion threaten the objectivity of his findings?

“Show me a researcher who doesn’t care one way or another about the results, and I’ll show you bad research,” he said.

The car lurched off the road to avoid a truck burdened like an ox with sacks of grain overhanging its frame, but Stevenson didn’t seem to notice.

“It’s like line calls in tennis,” he went on. “I care very much about winning my weekly games in Charlottesville, so I pay very close attention to whether a ball is in or out. It is a matter of honor to be scrupulously honest, so I’m not going to lie. But I’m not going to miss a call, either.”

Besides, he said, his fondest hope is that other line judges will be called down from the stands to inspect the smudges in the clay and either endorse or dispute his conclusions. What was unbearable was the possibility that nobody would even look.

As he spoke of it, his steady imperturbability finally deserted him, the dangers awaiting outside the tinny van on the mayhem of India’s roads vanishing in the overwhelming glare of the world’s indifference.

Because one thing was certain. In this life, Ian Stevenson was running out of time.

Tom Shroder is the editor of The Post’s Sunday Style section. This article was adapted from “Old Souls: The Scientific Evidence for Reincarnation” published by Simon & Schuster.

© Copyright 1999 The Washington Post Company

The Structure And Function Of Near-Death Experiences:

An Algorithmic Reincarnation Hypothesis based on Natural Selection

By Todd Murphy

Todd Murphy is an associate researcher with the Behavioral Neurosciences program at Laurentian University under the direction of Dr. Michael A. Persinger.

This article is a popular version on an article published by The Journal of Near-Death Studies, a peer-reviewed scientific journal. 

Summary: In this article, we hypothesize that NDEs are the experience of having the state of consciousness in which a person experiences the last moment of their lives being turned, in stages, into first the state of consciousness experienced as the life review, and then "the point of no return" (PNR). The life review is crucial in our hypothesis, as we interpret it as more of a review of the states of consciousness (states) we experienced during our lives. Our responses to looking at how we behaved while in specific states during or lives reinforces our behaviors and 'tags' them for repetition or avoidance in future lives. The traditional doctrines of reincarnation are modified so as to take biological and cultural evolution into account. This allows us to understand how the attributes of NDEs could have selected even though all opportunities for mating have already passed at the time of death.

According to one study (wells, 1993), 70% of NDEers return from their experiences believing in reincarnation. In many cases, NDEers tell of being counseled about the life they lived, and given help in planning their following lives. Not only NDEers, but also a large group of 'past life regression' hypnotherapists (cf. Whitton, 1986), as well as several major religious traditions all accept the doctrine of reincarnation as the truth.

Dr. Ian Stevenson, at the University of Virginia,has uncovered several types of evidence relating to reincarnation (Stevenson, 1974). In the cases he examined, he found children who seemed able to recall details of their past lives, and was able to verify their stories firsthand. His work spanned several cultures, including India and the Pacific Northwest Native Americans.

The pressures favoring the exploration of reincarnation as a postulate in the explanation of NDEs are growing. Although polls have found that in America only 25% believe in rebirth, the figure reaches nearly 100% in other cultures, most importantly in the Hindu and Buddhist worlds. The present author is a Buddhist, and in Buddhism it has become a convention not to use the word `reincarnation', as it has connotations that conflict with the Buddhist teaching of 'no-self' (or annata)in which the notion of the entry of a self into a body is specifically rejected. Nevertheless, we should acknowledge that `reincarnation' is the term most in use in English at the present time, and so we use it in the first paragraph and title of the present work.

Traditional theories of rebirth don't describe NDEs. They were almost certainly devised to account for meditation experiences rather than the experience of death. The database of experiences that related to death was almost nonexistent, while the database of mystical and transcendent experiences was quite large. It was believed that those who went deeply into meditation were able to see 'beyond death's door', and that spiritual practice was a way to defeat death by breaking the cycle of rebirth. Descriptions of meditation experiences were used, it appears, as templates from which speculations about death were traced. The idea becomes somewhat reasonable when we recall that there are many phenomena that appear in both, such as the light, bliss, the void, and several others. The theory of rebirth was not designed to account for NDEs, but we can impose some reasonable parameters on it, allowing an exploratory hypothesis to be formulated that will explain why NDEs appeared in our species even though death prevents the breeding opportunities that select for positive traits. 'Survival of the fittest' cannot explain NDEs in our species, because nobody survives death.

The first thing we need to do is accept the Darwinian theory of natural selection. If we do so, we are left with the conclusion that rebirth is an adaptation which contributed to our survival at some point in the history of our species. If this is so, then the specific mechanisms by which rebirth operates must be the same for everyone, because we all share a common evolutionary ancestry. A simple, first statement about rebirth is that : Information which enables individuals to adapt is conserved at death, and passed on to other individuals still undergoing prenatal development elsewhere. To say that anything more than information is reborn would involve making assumptions for which there is no evidence. Unless this information is somehow adaptive, it is unlikely that any evolutionary mechanism would have favored its conservation.

A second statement (this one is a deliberate assumption-a postulate)is: each person experiences the same state of consciousness in the final instant of each life. This implies that the point of no return' (PNR) reported by many NDEers, beyond which they felt resuscitation would have been impossible, will eventually appear in each NDE unless it is interrupted by resuscitation.

Although it appears that there could be a universal grammar to NDEs, the specific vocabulary of any given case is determined by a variety of factors including age, culture, the specific circumstances in which the patient dies, their psychological history, and possibly many other factors that haven't been noticed yet. Each individuals PNR; its vocabulary, will be individually confabulated according to these and other factors. The underlying state of consciousness will be the same for everybody. The idea that a singlestate can appear in many different ways was first proposed in 1970 (Horowitz, i970), and since then, it has become widely accepted within consciousness research. LSD, for example, induces the same state each time a person takes it, but the phenomenon it can create for a single individual will be different each time.

No matter what state of consciousness a person happens to be in at the onset of death, their NDE must eventually arrive at the PNR , even if their initial state is accompanied by pain or fear. No one knows how or when they will die, or what state of consciousness they will be in when it happens. The circumstances in which a person begins to die appear at random, and can vary widely from person to person. The state that appears at the end of the death process, being the same for everyone, must be non-random.

We propose that NDEs are the subjective experience of having one's (randomly appearing) state of consciousness at the time of death brought, in stages, to the nonrandom life review, and 'point of no return'.

Algorithms and NDEs

A process that converts randomness to nonrandomness is called an algorithm. : "An algorithm is a certain sort of formal process that can be counted on-logically-to yield a certain sort of result whenever it is 'run' or instantiated." Daniel C. Dennett (1995 Pg. 50-51)

Dennett tells us that there are three important features that characterize an algorithmic process:

"(1) Substrate neutrality: The procedure for long division works equally well with pencil or pen, paper or parchment, neon lights or skywriting, using any logical system you like. The power of the procedure is due to it's logical structure, not just the causal powers of the materials used in the instantiation, just so long as those causal powers permit the prescribed steps to be followed exactly.

(2) underlying mindlessness: Although the overall design of the procedure may be brilliant, or yield brilliant results, each constituent step, as well as the transition between steps, is utterly simple. How simple? Simple enough for a dutiful idiot to perform-or for a straightforward mechanical device to perform. The standard textbook analogy notes that algorithms are recipes of sorts, designed to be followed by novice cooks. A recipe book written for great chefs might include the phrase "poach the fish in a suitable wine until almost done," but the algorithm for the same process might begin "choose a white wine that says dry' on the label; take a corkscrew and open the bottle; pour an inch of wine in the bottom of a pan; turn the burner under the pan on high; ..."--a tedious breakdown of the process into dead-simple steps, requiring no wise decisions or delicate judgments or intuitions on the part of the recipe-reader.

(3) guaranteed results: Whatever it is an algorithm does, it always does it, if it is executed without misstep. An algorithm is a foolproof recipe."

NDEs seem to show these features. Substrate neutrality emerges if we assume that findings about hallucinations also apply to NDEs. Hallucinations are dependent on states of consciousness (Horowitz, 1970). The same state of consciousness can produce different experiences for different people. Looking at this carefully, we see that the breathtaking variety of NDE phenomena might be manifestations of just a few states of consciousness.

It has been theorized (Horowitz, 1970) that the hallucinatory phenomena associated with temporal lobe epileptic seizures arise as expressions of altered states of consciousness. The similarity between NDE phenomena and this type of seizure has been noted by several researchers (Saavedra-Aguliar, 1989 & Persinger, 1994). We can reasonably suppose that similar mechanisms might be operating in both cases. If so, then it follows that Horowitz's conclusion might also apply to NDEs. The series of experiences that constitute NDEs are better understood as a series of states of consciousness. The underlying 'mindless apparatus' that brings a dying person to their PNR operates on their states of consciousness. The succession of experiences are just their subjective manifestations. The bewildering variety of NDE experiences, as we shall see, can be resolved into a few basic states of consciousness, each of which has a specific functional role.

Underlying mindlessness can be derived from the observation that NDE episodes unfold automatically. No NDEer has ever reported that they "willed" themselves into the tunnel. The specific mechanisms whereby one episode follows another are unknown, but the fact that NDEs are outside the control of their experiencers, together with the observation that there are significant similarities in many NDEs suggests that they could be following an automatic sequencing.

We have already made Dennett's third feature of algorithmic processes, guaranteed results, a postulate of our model. The guaranteed result is the point of no return (PNR) and eventually, rebirth.

Patterns in NDEs

There seem to be certain grammatical rules governing NDEs. Although the research elucidating them is far from complete, a pattern of rough (we cannot emphasize this too strongly: rough; approximate) rules of thumb' appears to be emerging. Examples include:

(1) In India, instead of an autoscopic out-of-body experience (OBE), the death process may begin with seeing' messengers of death (Pasricha, 1986). When they call you, you must come. There are also a number of Indian NDEs that begin with an OBE (Blackmore, 1993). The same rule applies to Thai NDEs (Murphy, in press)

(2) For those under seven years old, the Life Review is avoided (Serdahely, 1990) and instead, a visit to heaven or a fairyland is in order.

(3) In preliterate cultures, delete the Life review, and substitute a spirit world , where the significant events of one's life will manifest symbolically, as features in the spirit world (Kellehear, 1993).

(4) If an NDEer has been able to anticipate their death, (and presumably has had the chance reflect extensively on their life), they may skip the life review (Greyson, 1985).

(5) If your death has appeared unexpectedly, review your life (Greyson, 1985)

(6) If one believes strongly in a particular religious tradition, they may experience the being of light as they have been taught it appears (Osis, 1977, Pg. 37)). If one is an atheist, they may experience it as a 'presence'.

(7) If one has come to believe that 'all mysteries will be revealed at death', they may have a transcendent experience in which the mysteries' are revealed to their satisfaction. (cf. Eadie, 1992 & Brinkley, 1994)).

(8) If an NDEer needs help, guidance, or an escort during their NDE, they will encounter an Angel (Lundhal, 1992), or a Yamatoot (Murphy, in press). Long discussions are possible in which their concerns are dealt with.

(9) If an NDEer needs reassurance that it's OK to be dead, they can see their deceased relatives and beloved friends. A joyful reunion with a beloved friend who have passed on may be just the thing to help them have positive affectual post mortem states of consciousness. One too young to have known anyone who has died, but you has lost a pet, can see the pet instead (Serdahely, 1989). If they have not lost a pet, they might see whatever comforts them; A toy for example (cf. Morse 1994, Pg. 62).

(10) If an NDEers life was marked by destructive behavior patterns, the affect of their life review may widen to include the effects of those behaviors on others (cf. Brinkley 1994 & Atwater, 1994, Pg.11).

This list of 'rules of thumb' should be taken as being both speculative and incomplete. Each item on the list could be regarded as an approximation of a real grammatical 'axiom' that influences the algorithmic progress of NDEs. Because NDE researchers haven't been looking for them, it is not possible, at present, to state a real series of rules that will explain the functional connections between specific NDE episodes and their predisposing factors in all NDEs. Lundhal (1993) has been able to find a series of NDE rules, but these deal with likelihoods of NDE episodes, rather than their functional roles. In any case, it must be emphasized that the rules or axioms that govern NDEs will not be applicable so much to the experiences as they are to the states of consciousness that produce them.

The different instantiations of the different phases of NDEs (or their absence), presumably, reflect the differences in set, age, culture, health etc. found between individuals experiencing the same state. For example, the life review can occur as a serial re-experiencing of one's life in one NDE, a viewing of multiple TV screens in another (cf., Atwater, 1994 Pg.59), the experience of watching one's life pass before one's eyes' in yet another, and might only touch on significant events in still another. These dramatic differences might be accounted for by theorizing that each represents the most efficient phenomenology for the state that produced it.

Karma and the Life Review

The idea of karma plays an important role in all the traditional teachings concerning rebirth. In order to adopt karma as a legitimate postulate in building a theory of NDEs we need to pare it down to its simplest possible form. The traditional teachings on karma are filled with implications that can never be either proven or falsified, and this puts them outside the bounds of science. Nevertheless, one meaningful statement may be derived from these traditions: Individual behaviors in one life can have an impact on following lives. The theory of natural selection requires that the postulated death and rebirth process should have increased our chances for survival in some way. If so, then it seems reasonable to conclude that if behaviors in one life can influence those of another, that influence must tend to increase the adaptivity of our behavior. Natural selection has no foresight. Adaptations are permanent traits that preserve past expediencies. If natural selection has provided us with the capacity to take rebirth, it will have done so to bring us away from extinction, rather than towards nirvana. Evolutionary theory dictates that the potential for enlightenment is a by-product (or 'epiphenomena') of human consciousness rather than its purpose. Natural selection has no long-term purposes. Adaptations happen, as it were, in the here-and-now. Evolution is not a conscious entity, so it doesn't know what will happen later. It doesn't know what to prepare for, so it can't make any preparations. Writing is one of the best examples of an adaptation like this. Our brains are wired to use language, and that ability was the result of a stringent selection. later on, our enhanced motor control, developed for other things, was combined with our newfound language skills, and the eventual result was that we learned to write. To say that rebirth is a mechanism to produce enlightened people is like saying that language is a mechanism for producing writing, as though language had no purpose before it was invented.

Karma, if it is real, must function to somehow increase the adaptivity of human behavior. Because we are a social species, it makes sense to look at how it might do so with respect to our cultural environments. Especially so because the traditions concerning karma hold that it applies to both negative and positive behavior, and the evaluation of behavior is both culture-bound and culture-specific. Our rule of karma says: karma is a mechanism that labels states of consciousness that facilitate adaptive behavior in a given cultural environment in one life for repetition in following lives, and states that facilitate counteradaptive behavior are labeled for avoidance.

We will define karma as the records of specific states that facilitate or suppress behavior. If this postulate is accepted, it follows that the function of rebirth is to pre-adapt us to our cultural environments. However, the conclusion that karmas are reborn in no way implies that we ourselves are 'reincarnated', however comforting the idea might be.

It seems reasonable to suppose that there is a difference between the karma of a living person and that of a person who has gone past PNR. Not in the information it contains, but in the way it's stored. A piece of computer software is the same whether it's on a disk or actually being used in the system. The recorded behaviors are the same whether the records are in our brains or downloading to a next birth. The PNR might be likened to transferring a computer program from the RAM to a floppy disk. The life review, we suggest, is the phenomenological manifestation of a state of consciousness which uses the effects of states of consciousness experienced in one's lifetime to create suggestions for states that enable adaptive behavior during the next life, reinforcing culture-bound behavior and at the same time preparing to download them to a future birth.

The life review can require an NDEer to re-examine everything they have ever done. Not as they remember their experiences, but as they actually happened. When they remember having done something adaptive, and recalling it induces positive affect, the correlative state is marked for repetition in their next life. If they've done something bad, and it makes them feel bad to remember it, the state is marked for suppression in their next life. Remembering that it's our cultures that tell us what is good or bad, the possibility arises that (if our argument up to this point is accepted) life reviews sorts states according to how likely they are to generate culturally adaptive behavior. Perhaps the life review is usually concerned with behavior because behaviors are state-specific. States of consciousness cannot be viewed directly, but the behaviors that act them out can. Re-experiencing an event will include a recurrence of the state one was in at the time of the event, including its emotional content.

Culture and NDEs

Perhaps the reason why so many features of NDEs are culture-specific is that the death process is an evolutionary adaptation that favored those who took rebirth' by enhancing their ability to gain status in the context of the more complex cultures that appeared in the most recent phases of our evolution. Individuals who cannot follow the rules don't have much status. Karma, we suggest, is a set of positively and negatively reinforced states of consciousness that enable adaptive behaviors. Having karma might have given individuals an advantage in following the culture's rules (not to mention preserving them), eliminating an important obstacle to achieving rank. High rank individuals have much better chances for mating than low-rank individuals. In this way, the effects of rebirth would tend to be amplified over time if the first individuals taking rebirth were consistently able to get to the top of the social ladder. We can speculate that those who had life reviews at the end of one life were more likely to be reborn to become alpha individuals, who usually have better mating opportunities than betas and deltas. The culture-bound character of NDEs could prove to be a case of form following function.

'Hellish' NDEs

One important pattern emerging is that a consistent percentage (although there is no consensus regarding the exact number) of NDEs involve profound negative affect. Nevertheless, these 'hellish' experiences bear striking structural similarities to positive ones. One researcher, P.M.H. Atwater commented (1994 Pg. 40): 'During my own interviews of experiencers...I discovered little difference between heavenly and hellish near-death episodes in consideration of how elements unfolded in sequence."

LSD, usually a pleasant experience, can also turn out to be a 'bummer'; a frightening or hellish ordeal. When we consider that both types of 'trips' are created by the same chemical, it seems unlikely that any specific affect is integral to the LSD experience. The same is true for TLE seizures (LaPlante, 1993). If Horowitz's (1970) hypothesis applies to NDEs as it does to TLE, and apparently, to the LSD experience, then the possibility that negative affect is integral to unpleasant NDEs can be reasonably ruled out. The best candidate for the cause of hellish NDEs in our model is resistance, as we shall see.

A) Neurology

The source of the hellish affect is another question. Recent temporal lobe research by Dr. Michael Persinger (1994) supports the possibility that single states of consciousness can evoke very different affects, implying that temporal lobe affects may be implicated in both hellish and blissful NDEs.

The involvement of the brain's temporal lobes in NDEs appears to be well established. It has been theorized (Persinger, 1987) that when our species first evolved it's unique cognitive abilities, two parts of our brains enlarged more that other portions. The frontal lobes (generally specialized for extrapolating out into the future) and our temporal lobes (generally specialized for remembering the past). When this happened, people learned a new skill; The ability to remember death, and to realize that the same thing would happen to them in the future. The then-new neuromorphological upgrade software included a program for death anxiety. The fear of impending doom. However, the adaptive value of being able to project into the future to imagine hitherto unknown ways of dying (and so avoid them) would have been canceled out by the dysphoria it would also have produced. A compensatory mechanism seems to have appeared at the same time. Arnold J. Mandell, (1980 Pg. 411) spoke of: "...(the) affective specialization of the brain, with `negative' emotions like fear and paranoia and dysphoric feelings like sorrow ... lying ...(in)...the the left temporal lobe, and with the mute, geometrically cognitive, musical right temporal lobe specialized for joy." This statement applies to the neocortex only. The deeper structures are specialized for the opposite emotions(Persinger, personal communication). Dr. Melvin Morse (1990a) contends that portions of the right temporal lobe mediate the entire NDE experience, calling them the "circuit boards of mysticism". The Left temporal lobe's neocortical functions, on the other hand, include profound negative affect. Wilder Penfield, discussing the results of temporal lobe surface stimulations (1954 Pg. 451) described: "...ictal emotions which (his) patients described as fear, fright, (a) scared feeling, terror, sadness, (and) loneliness ...(which)... may be said to have ganglionic representation within the fissure of Sylvius and their underlying (structures). ...The ictal emotion is produced as a distinct experience and is the result of cortical discharge." Illustrations accompanying Penfield's text show that this refers to the left temporal neocortex.

These findings allow the possibility that the reason why some NDEs are hellish is that the positive affect that usually accompanies NDEs, out of the right temporal neocortex togtether with the left amygdala, is replaced by negative affect out of the left temporal neocortex together with the right amygdala. If this were so, then it might explain how an NDE can be unpleasant, but not why it is so.

B) Psychology

We propose that one reason why some NDEs are unpleasant is that the person is resisting the death process. Atwater (1994) has suggested that it is because of an individual history of repressed guilt, while Greyson & Bush's accounts of distressing NDEs, (1992) all contain comments to the effect that the person didn't want to go. The most commonly reported emotion in negative NDEs is fear. Whether the crucial factor is guilt or fear, both feelings inspire resistance. If so, this idea, together with the algorithmic interpretation of NDEs we are proposing here, implies that a specific affective state must be achieved. That affective state, we will suggest, can be called surrender, the opposite of resistance. We do not propose that surrender must be achieved only in order to enable PNR. Rather, it looks more likely that it also might enable the life review. In our interpretation of NDEs, in which each phenomenon is an expression of a state of consciousness, and each state of consciousness (whether utilized in any specific NDE or not) has the specific function of increasing the likelihood of reaching first the life review, and then the PNR. The Life Review is less of an anomaly in evolutionary terms if it is seen as contributing to the survival of those who undergo rebirth.

If the human death process involves going through some form of the life review then there is a strong possibility that any negative affect must be changed to a positive one before life review is achieved. The life review can require that a person examine, re-experience, or witness their own maladaptive behavior. When this same thing is needed in psychotherapy, it often evokes resistance. Resistance often occurs in conjunction with negative affect. If this kind of resistance were to occur during the death-process, the experience might well be negative. If this negative affect arose out of the left temporal neocortex, as described above, the result might well be hellish. Atwater (1994) suggests that negative NDEs are a result of repressed guilt, while Greyson & Bush's (1992) case studies of distressing NDEs all contain allusions to the subjects not wanting to die. Both of these mechanisms implicated in hellish NDEs may be grouped together as resistance. As any psychotherapist can tell you, resistance makes meaningful self-examination impossible in therapy. Perhaps it's the same during life reviews.

Hell: Special case #1

Not all negative NDE episodes are necessarily the product of resistance. A different type of negative affect might arise in conjunction with the life review, as in the famous case recounted by a former Vietnam war assassin (Brinkley, 1994).

The following narrative (Greyson & Bush, 1992) suggests a symbolic, aversive life review:

"I was unconscious ... yet something weird was happening to me. ...I was in a circle of light. I looked down upon the accident scene....I looked into my car and saw myself trapped and unconscious. I saw several cars stop and a lady taking my children to her car to sit and rest until the ambulance would arrive.... A hand touched mine, and I turned to see where this peace and blissful feeling was coming from ... and there was Jesus Christ - I mean the way he is made out to be in all the paintings - and I never wanted to leave this man and this place. I was led around to a well, because I wanted to stay with him and hold his hand. He led me from a side of bliss to a side of misery. I did not want to look, but he made me look - and I was disgusted and horrified and scared ... it was so ugly. The people were blackened and sweaty and moaning in pain and chained to their spots. And I had to walk through the area back to the well. One was even chained to the evil side of the well - I wanted to help them to help him, but no one would. - and I knew that I would be one of these creatures if I stayed. I hated it there. I couldn't wait to get to the well and go around it. He led me to it, but he made me go through it alone as he watched. ... I leaned over (to look in) the well ... There were three children calling "Mommie, Mommie, Mommie, we need you. Please come back to us"....The little girl looked up at me and begged me to go back to life - and then all at once ... I saw the accident scene again...

The aversive episode in this NDE centers around images of children. It's possible that the woman in this case wanted to have a child, or more children, saw her life in terms of a hell in which she was to rescue the souls of unborn children, by bringing them into the world. If we recall our assumption that karma functions to increase the adaptivity of one's behavior from one life to the next, and that, during most of our evolutionary history, having and raising a child is one of the most adaptive things a woman could do, this unusual life review makes sense. It seems to be confined to only one behavior; not having had a child. If only that one karma were resolved in her next life as a result of this experience (by having a child, and thus, passing on her genetic material), the net adaptivity of her behavior in her next life would have increased dramatically as a result of this review, even though it dealt with only one behavioral issue.

Hell: Special Case #2

One phenomena that does not appear in typical, 'core' NDEs is the experience of a vacuum. Although the word void has been used to describe it, it does not seem to be the same as the void which occurs in the stage often occupied by the experience of the tunnel. That void is often induces highly positive affect, while the vacuum is, as far as we are aware, always hellish. The vacuum has been described as "Empty,...and dark. Not like night dark, somehow, it was thinner - whatever that means. It was very dark and immense all around, but somehow I could see them (negative-affectual beings); the voidness seemed to thin out somewhere off by the horizon, but it wasn't lighter, just thinner. It seemed to go on forever. ...That utter emptiness just went on and on. ...there didn't seem to be any end of it, and no way out." (Greyson & Bush, 1992 Pg. 102). Other descriptions include: "(being) suspended in a total vacuum with nothing to see or do for eternity", and "hours going by with absolutely no sensation, there was no hot, no cold, no light , no taste, no smell, no sensation whatsoever, none, other than (a sensation of movement)... (after a certain) point it became unbearable, it became horrific ...".

Interestingly, the majority of cases of the vacuum in one study (Greyson & Bush, 1992) occurred during childbirth under anesthesia. Perhaps pregnancy provides a fail-safe' that delays the onset of PNR until the last possible moment; an adaptation that would have greatly enhanced the chances for survival of infants born to mothers who hemorrhaged heavily during childbirth. Deaths due to violent trauma or old age were probably far less likely to end in resuscitation that those in childbirth. Historically, one of the most common causes of death in childbirth has been loss of blood. Blood can be replenished more easily than most other human tissues. Death due to it's loss might be more easily reversed. An NDE 'Fail safe' for childbirth would have increased the chances for survival of two individuals, not just the one who had the NDE.

Like most NDE phenomena, the vacuum does not occur only at death. It has also been found in sleep paralysis; a neurological disorder that affects the ability to wake up (LaPlante, 1993). In these cases, the victims find themselves suspended in a vacuum, trying to wake up, but unable to. It seems to be a problem with whatever mechanism shifts states of consciousness from that of REM sleep to waking. Because both sleep and death involve moving through many different states of consciousness, it could be that symptoms occurring in sleep disorders might also appear in NDEs. If so, the vacuum, occurring in both, could be the phenomena confabulated out of the inability or unwillingness to move from one state to another, and that suggests an interesting possibility.

Both NDEs (in our model) and sleep involve moving through multiple states of consciousness, and this suggests an interesting possibility. Perhaps the adaptation that created the death process was a new application of the same neurological mechanisms which previously been responsible only for sleep. This speculation is lent further credence by reports of NDEs induced through lucid dreaming (Rogo, 1990 & Green, 1995)

Speculations on the functions of typical phases of NDEs'

Death can often be anticipated (as in protracted terminal illness), and that can have an impact on the death-process. Greyson, (1985), Morse & Perry, (1994), and Osis (1977) have demonstrated that the incidence of spontaneous altered states can increase dramatically in premortem periods. Dying patients frequently report seeing the light in their rooms, visitations by angels and beloved dead friends and relatives. The appearance of NDE phenomenology in premortem states implies that the same states of consciousness that appear during the death-process begin to operate whenever we become cognizant that life will end. If so, then when such a person begins their death process, they will be familiar with many of the percepts they encounter, and thus be less likely to resist as they orient themselves.

The OBE might function to convince the dying person that they are dead. Remember that through much of our evolutionary history, deaths were often traumatic. Males often died violently, during war or on hunts. Women, as we tend to forget in our safer, modern times, often died in childbirth. An autoscopic OBE would often find it's experient looking back on itself and seeing a very distressed corpse.

In Thailand and(Hindu) India, on the other hand, NDEs are more likely to commence with a visitation by a Yamdood, one of the messengers of Yama, the lord of the dead (Murphy, in press, &Pasricha, 1986). When a Yamdood appears, it's time to go. Resistance is futile. Fear of Yamdood occurs frequently in Osis's (1977) study of premortem states in India. It's not impossible that the incidence of distressing NDEs varies from one culture to the next. We also cannot rule out the possibility that the Grim Reaper once served as a sort of Yamdood in western culture, and that just centuries ago, many more death-processes were hellish in Western countries than at present. Perhaps Europeans once ran from the Grim Reaper as Hindus sometimes run from the Yamdood sent to take them.

The typical core' NDE finds the tunnel or void after an autoscopic OBE, in which one continues to sense the environment. These experiences might convey that sensory perception ended, and that the defense mechanisms which are valid in states that accompany it are now obsolete. The symbolism of the tunnel as meaning a transition from one world' to another in NDEs has already been explored (Chari 1982). Perhaps the tunnel or the void reflect a state of consciousness which functions to take one from sensory perception to wholly endogenous percepts.

The appearance of dead beloved friends and relatives might evoke the feeling that it's OK to be dead. Feelings of loneliness, separation anxiety or feelings of being abandoned, guilt at leaving those who are dependent on us, or grief at the loss of beloved living people might be mollified by the creation of an inner, death-contextualized., social environment. One could feel safe there, and thus, be less likely not resist out of fear.

The being of light, which typically precedes or appears at the same time as the life review, might function to prevent resistance. The all - pervading love and feelings of acceptance it evokes is incompatible with the kind of negative affect resistance creates.

Conclusion

NDEs can be seen as an algorithmic process that alters the many states of consciousness possible at the time of death so as to produce first, the life review, and then the PNR. There can be positive or negative affect in any state of consciousness that comes up in NDEs, although these states will always tend to average toward the positive affect that will inhibit resistance to the experience. The life review, we propose, has a special function: to sort out behaviors to repeat in future lives from those to avoid.

An enormous amount of work needs to be done for this hypothesis to be extrapolated out into a theory. The previous list of grammatical 'rules of thumb' needs to find a more rigorous expression, as well as being expanded to include other rules. Perhaps the most obvious are those culture-bound effects specific to major cultural groups. Southeast Asian, traditional African, Latin American, Chinese, Himalayan, Islamic, and Oceanic NDEs might demonstrate culture-specific patterns that will become apparent as their NDEs are studied. Some age-specific NDE features have been noted, but there may be features which are characteristic of specific phases of life. Are there common elements in the NDEs of newlyweds? Adolescents? Pregnant women? A system of classification for the factors that influence the succession of states of consciousness needs to be devised and tested. Are age, culture, psychological set at time of death, expectations regarding what death will feel like, and the length of time one has to anticipate one's death the only factors? When we consider how young (and poorly funded) the field of NDE research is, it seems reasonable to assume that there are determinative influences still waiting to be discovered.

Predictions and Applications

Before looking at the potential applications of our hypothesis, we should note that the validity of an hypothesis is not determined by its initial applicability, but rather by its falsifiability. The present hypothesis' first prediction is that NDEs of all cultures will exhibit a typical sequencing. Because we have hypothesized that 1) karma is a set of states of consciousness and implied 2) that states of consciousness have a neuromagnetic component and/or basis, we are left with the implication that the brain might emit complex magnetic signals at some point in the death process. If we assume that these signals will be propagated within the earth's magnetic field, then we are left with the prediction that these signals will be in the 15 to 45 nanotesla range (Persinger, 1995). At present, there is no way to read these signals (Persinger, personal communication), but if a way were found, and the brain was not found to have such emissions, it would cast doubt on the present hypothesis.

An implication of the algorithmic NDE hypothesis for research is is that a catalog of NDE phenomena needs to be built up in order to provide a database that can allow for the states of consciousness involved in dying to be meaningfully analyzed and classified. Eventually, perhaps, therapies for the post-NDE personality syndrome (Atwater, 1988) might be devised that treat, not the after effects of NDEs, but rather the after effects of the specific states of consciousness experienced during specific experiences. The understanding that death will involve multiple states of consciousness, each one run' as clear experiences, and that the content of those experiences will be deeply meaningful can only tend to reduce death anxiety in those terminally ill people who experience premortem altered states of consciousness. If, for example, the functions of the various kinds of hellish NDEs were understood, it might lead to the development of techniques in premortem psychology that would allow some of those at risk for hellish death processes to be identified and given counseling that might reduce their risk. If the premortem and post mortem altered states really are similar (as is implied by their similar phenomenologies), the affects associated with those states before death will be the ones most likely to occur after death.

Finally, one distant possibility comes up. One so improbable as to invite dismissal by many scientists. Nevertheless, it could produce vast benefits for humanity.

One not uncommon NDE experience involves miraculous cures. A terminally ill person is visited by an angel who tells them they are healed, and then it turns out that there is no sign of a tumor, or that their T cell counts have risen by an order of magnitude. If the state of consciousness associated with this phenomena were to be isolated and all it's manifestations and predisposing factors were known, it might open up avenues of research into miraculous' cures. Recognizing that such miracles are correlates of specific states of consciousness might allow common factors associated with a variety of miraculous' cures to be discerned. This, in turn, might suggest ways to induce them In a clinical setting. Chinese medical tradition records many such cures associated with poisonous mushrooms, some of which, in small enough doses, act as hallucinogens (Dr. Bernard Yeh, personal communication, 1988). Much NDE phenomena has been induced in a laboratory setting by the application of low-intensity complex magnetic signals to the temporal lobes(Ruttan, 1990). These studies reveal that NDE phenomenology and presumably at least similar states of consciousness can be induced by stimulation of the temporal lobes with magnetic signals. Perhaps there is a way to induce the state of consciousness in which miraculous cures occur, and so eventually add them to the tools of modern medicine One of the most promising avenues of research in this area is offered by NDE research, which is one of the few fields prepared to acknowledge the validity of miraculous' cures, and which can compile the reliable reports that will be needed in any serious studies of the phenomena.

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