To begin with, I would like to welcome you all again to my blog. I got a lot of feedback from my last blog article and many felt it was too heavy to have it sent every week. So I have changed the format according to demand and made it once a month or would spread them as much as possible. Today, we will be covering, Re-incarnation, a very controversial and fascinating topic. Discussions on this topic have always evoked reactions, even from the usually unemotive. This is not particularly a motivational piece but is a very interesting topic for many of us.
Reincarnation: A Scientific Approach
Jesus Christ in Gnostic Gospels: Pistis Sophia
"Souls are poured from one into another of different kinds of bodies of the world."
Socrates
"I am confident that there truly is such a thing as living again, that the living spring from the dead, and that the souls of the dead are in existence."
William Wordsworth
"Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting; The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star, Hath had elsewhere its setting. And cometh from afar."
Jalaludin Rumi (Islamic Poet of the 13th century)
"I died as a mineral and became a plant, I died as a plant and rose to animal, I died as animal and I was man. Why should I fear ? When was I less by dying?"
Benjamin Franklin
"I look upon death to be as necessary to the constitution as sleep. We shall rise refreshed in the morning." And, "Finding myself to exist in the world, I believe I shall, in some shape or other always exist."
Mark Twain
"I have been born more times than anybody except Krishna.
George Harrison
"Friends are all souls that we've known in other lives. We're drawn to each other. Even if I have only known them a day., it doesn't matter. I'm not going to wait till I have known them for two years, because anyway, we must have met somewhere before, you know."
In all India based religions (Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, Sikhism etc ;) it is common parlance. The same holds true for many of the esoteric aspects of the major religions of the world like Sufism (Islam), Kabala (Judaism), Gnosticism and Esoteric Christianity (Christianity).
Several of us are intrigued when we see great talents in little children for example “How did Mozart read & write music at the tender age of five? He didn’t go to Julliard!” Why do we see so many children exhibit mastery over certain traits even though they have not learned it in this life? To answer these questions, I thought of taking a different approach to the issue, in early 2000, I posed a question to myself: Is it possible to prove Reincarnation scientifically (even though I consider myself a firm believer in the doctrine)?
I have always been uncomfortable believing blindly in the paranormal without being able to accord some level of scientific explanation or logic. Every theory, belief, should be subject to relentless scientific scrutiny, though at times, science may not have the tools(or the vocabulary) to explain them to our satisfaction. I thought to myself, I would be satisfied if my search leads to somebody who could at the least take a logical approach, or to take me to the threshold of being open to the possibility scientifically.
The next question that followed was, what is science then? “Science is empirical evidence, a proof of a hypotheses testable using observation or experiment” (Refer Wikipedia). Can we get empirical evidence for reincarnation? Yes, it seems so…
My search led to the usual theories, proofs from theologians, saints, philosophers. Another site got my attention; I was pleasantly surprised to see an article on the University of Virginia’s medical school website by a Dr. Ian Stevenson. I wrote two emails to Dr.Stevenson in 2001 and did not get a response. I read that he was extremely media shy and never agreed to come on TV to publicize his findings.
Dr. Stevenson, a fascinating character, was one of the first to take a scientific approach to the doctrine of reincarnation and spent his entire life as a scientist on the study of the paranormal. He studied several cases of reincarnation from around the world ranging from India, Srilanka, Myanmar, and Thailand including the U.S & Europe. He was always received with apprehension (though an active faculty at the medical school) by the scientific community for his research on the paranormal, in later years he was more accepted and published several articles in leading scientific journals.
Here is an interesting excerpt from an interview with Dr.Stevenson in the New York Times
“AFTER years of mockery from colleagues, Dr. Ian Stevenson, Director of the Department of Personality Studies at the University of Virginia, is finally getting respect. In ''Old Souls: The Scientific Evidence for Past Lives,'' (Simon & Schuster, 1999) Tom Shroder, a Washington Post editor, reviews the 80-year-old clinical psychiatrist's research on reincarnation and finds it hard to refute.
Mr. Shroder joined Dr. Stevenson on evidence-gathering trips to India and Lebanon, where they questioned subjects like Suzanne, 25, a nurse in Beirut who recalled her life as a woman who had died months before she was born. By age 2, Suzanne knew the names of 13 of the woman's relatives and could recount parts of the eulogy delivered at her funeral.
Mr. Shroder concludes: ''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.''
In a recent interview, Dr. Stevenson discussed his (present) life's work, but wouldn't say whether he himself remembers a past life. ''Readers should make up their own minds,'' he argues, ''not on the basis of what I believe or what anybody else believes.''
Click here for the full article http://query.nytimes.com gst/fullpage.html?res=9F0CE5DF133FF935A1575AC0A96F958260&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=1
Dr.Stevenson was known for this thoroughness and rejected hundreds of cases of children claiming to remember their past lives, if he found an anomaly. He needed all this questions answered accurately, only those cases with 100% accuracy were presented to the scientific community.
In one of the articles, his colleague mentions about his “stickler for accuracy” attitude: “Sometimes, word will get around about the child's statements, and someone in another village will recognize the story about the past-life person. The past-life family is contacted, and arrangements are made for a visit. Most of the time Dr. Stevenson has had to interview the families after this meeting happens, but a few times he has been able to be there when the meeting took place. Dr. Stevenson always takes very careful notes and has other people observing and taking notes as well, to safeguard against him making mistakes and to make sure the reporting is accurate and fair.”
Most of his subjects were children between the ages of 2-7; he believed that, it was the time the child remembers its past best. After the age of 7 the child gets too engrossed with the present environment and starts to lose much of the memories from the past lives. One of the salient features of Dr.Stevenson’s research is his study of birthmarks in children who remembered their past. He believed the study of birthmarks as the window into a child’s past incarnation.
He observed and discovered that in children who had these birthmarks, it was due to the child (in his/her past life) being injured in that spot while being killed. The child retained the mark in the present incarnation. Please see some of the pictures attached.
Figure 1.
Hypopigmented macule on chest of an Indian youth who, as a child, said he remembered the life of a man, Maha Ram, who was killed with a shotgun fired at close range.
Figure 2
The circles show the principal shotgun wounds on Maha Ram, for comparison with Figure 1. [This drawing is from the autopsy report of the deceased.]
Figure 3
Large verrucous epidermal nevus on head of a Thai man who as a child said he remembered the life of his paternal uncle, who was killed with a blow on the head from a heavy knife.
Figure 4
Severely malformed ear (microtia) in a Turkish boy who said that he remembered the life of a man who was fatally wounded on the right side of the head by a shotgun discharged at close range.
Figure 5
shows congenital absence of the lower right leg (unilateral hemimelia) in a Burmese girl. She said that she remembered the life of a girl who was run over by a train. Eyewitnesses said that the train severed the girl's right leg first, before running over the trunk. Lower hemimelia is an extremely rare condition, and Frantz and O'Rahilly (1961) found it in only 12 (4.0%) of 300 cases of all congenital skeletal deficiencies that they examined.
Dr.Stevenson’s research group gives several tips on their website to recognize if your child has past life memories:
Types of Statements a Child Might Make in This Kind of Case
Statements made by a child who seems to be remembering a previous life can be quite varied. The following is not an exhaustive list by any means. It is designed to give an idea of the kinds of things a parent or caregiver might hear, and in our Western culture, tend to dismiss as fantasy. It is also true that a child might say one or more of these things and not be remembering a previous life. It is probably best not to pump a child for information, nor to try and prevent him or her from saying such things.
"You're not my mommy/daddy."
"I have another mommy/daddy."
"When I was big, I ...(used to have blue eyes/had a car, etc.)."
"That happened before I was in mommy's tummy."
"I have a wife/husband/children."
"I used to...(drive a truck/live in another town, etc.)"
"I died ... (in a car accident/after I fell, etc.)"
"Remember when I ...(lived in that other house/was your daddy, etc.)"
Who sponsored his research?
His research was funded entirely by, Chester Carlson, the inventor of Xerography or Xerox. Mrs. Carlson, a believer in paranormal, was responsible for encouraging her husband to fund Dr.Stevenson’s research. After a few years, Mr.Carlson passed away which put a lot of pressure on Dr.Stevenson’s research as he had no support from the conventional scientific community. To Dr.Stevenson’s astonishment, Mr.Carlson had left over a million dollars in his will for his research, this fund helped for the next 35 years. Please read more here…
http://www.healthsystem.virginia.edu/internet/personalitystudies/Stevenson.pdf
Somethings to ponder?
As the world comes closer, with amazing technological advances don’t you think that we are ready to explore the paranormal scientifically as done in some of the leading universities in the U.S. This line of questioning is very interesting to scientific minds, because, as in the words of great saints, true spirituality is provable, yes, empirically with proof. Many of the beliefs of early religions are being scrutinized with relentless accuracy. History books are being rewritten, throwing new light into ancient civilizations. It is an exciting time to be pondering about the paranormal don’t you think? The next time somebody mentions: “Talent is inborn and cannot be developed” we would look at the statement a little differently, wouldn’t we?
Here are some quotes on reincarnation from famous people
http://www.reincarnation.ws/famous_people.html
Discussion:
I would love to see some lively discussions on this topic, please feel free to share your experiences/stories you have heard of in the comments section.
References:
http://www.healthsystem.virginia.edu/internet/personalitystudies/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ian_Stevenson
http://www.ial.goldthread.com/interviews.html
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