Is reincarnation real?

You’re going to die.

So am I, as we all are.

We rarely, if ever, give much thought to what happens once our body goes limp and cold – after rigor mortis sets in and there’s as much activity in our body as there is in a rock or Eminem’s face.

The scientific establishment’s sanitised, sterilised, safe-for-public-consumption answer is that nothing happens. Richard Dawkins, the high priest of the physicalist worldview, calls us “lumbering robots”. By that logic, at death, we are “lumbering robots” who have simply stopped lumbering.

We are told that our body’s sudden state of disrepair at death means we cease existing and start on the slow process of decay and disintegration till our bodies turn into nothing but dust and fertiliser.

Death, we have been led to believe, is irrevocable. And final.

Mainstream science dismisses any belief in reincarnation, despite the fact that throughout the ages there have always been groups of people, even civilisations, which have believed in it.

But now, the highly credentialled researchers at the University of Virginia’s Division of Perceptual Studies (DOPS) are uncovering evidence that reincarnation is not pure balderdash.

Founded by the late Dr Ian Stevenson in 1967, it is one of the exceedingly few mainstream universities which study paranormal phenomena such as reincarnation, near-death experiences, and altered states of consciousness.

The fact that he managed to set up an entire department at a respected institution like the University of Virginia devoted entirely to what’s considered by mainstream science as woo-woo or pseudoscience – something that’s often choked out by the stifling straightjacket of the scientific establishment – speaks volumes about how compelling his cases were. They simply couldn’t be ignored.

One of the most eerily scintillating cases to date was one that his protege, Dr Jim Tucker, also from the University of Virginia, was alerted to in 2009.

From the tender age of four, Ryan Hammons of Oklahoma would cry and beg his mum to be taken to Hollywood, California, where he insisted he used to live. Perplexed and perturbed by his frequent paroxysms, his mum picked up some books about Hollywood to help her son process his inexplicable angst.

While they were riffling through one of them, a picture from the 1932 movie Night After Night caught Ryan’s attention and while pointing at a person standing on the periphery of it, he animatedly exclaimed: “That’s me! I found me!” He was pointing to a man who was an uncredited extra with no lines in the movie.

Realising it was about time she got professional help, his mother contacted Tucker and together they got in touch with a Hollywood archivist to uncover the name and identity of this mystery man Ryan was claiming to have been in a previous life.

After poring through a library in Hollywood, they found out that his name was Marty Martyn and that the details Ryan had disclosed about him were uncannily accurate. Ryan said he had danced in New York. Marty had been a dancer at Broadway in New York. Ryan said he had worked at an agency. Marty had started a successful talent agency.

Ryan said he had travelled to Europe on a ship. Marty had travelled to Europe on a ship. Ryan said he had been married five times. Marty had been married five times. Ryan said his street address had the word “rock” or “mount” in it. Marty lived on Roxbury Drive in Beverly Hills.

In total, Ryan got a whopping 55 personal details about Marty right – details that he couldn’t have obtained in any logically conceivable way.

Keep in mind that this was a time when internet usage was not nearly as ubiquitous as it is now. Besides, details about Marty’s life were not online, hence the reason Tucker had to go to the lengths he did to obtain them. This clearly rules out foul play on the part of Ryan or his mother.

The kicker?

Once, Ryan mentioned that he was puzzled as to why God would have him live till 61 and then come back as a baby. The problem was, Marty’s death certificate stated that he’d died at 59. Thinking Ryan had made a mistake but still wanting to be sure, Tucker cross-referenced it with census records, marriage listings, and passenger listings. To his amazement, he found that they all indicated that Marty had in fact died at 61 and that his death certificate was incorrect.

Ryan was right yet again.

And if you think this is an anomaly, a fluke of nature, or a curious but insignificant glitch in the matrix, you would be wrong. Ryan’s case is but one of more than a stunning 2,500 “suggestive of reincarnation” cases that have been documented by the University of Virginia in over 50 years of exhaustive research. They’ve found cases in every continent, except Antarctica.

These cases share some striking similarities. Most of the children who claim to remember a past life speak of them from between the ages of two and seven. After this window, it peters off and they seem to carry on with their current lives. They also speak very passionately about it, often considering their past life more “real” than their current life.

Additionally, a disproportionately large number of children who have past life experiences say that they succumbed to a violent, premature death in the previous life. This accounts for 80% of all cases in the US.

Of these, there are some who have phobias about the mode of death in their previous life. For instance, if they drowned in their previous life, they had a phobia for water bodies in their current life.

Even more spookily, there are many who bear birthmarks or physical deformities suggestive of their mode of death in their previous birth. A Thai boy who claims to have been shot in the head with a rifle in a previous life had round, puckered birthmarks on the front and back of his head, indicative of entry and exit wounds from a bullet.

A Burmese girl born without her lower right leg reported having it run over by a train in a previous birth. An Indian boy was born with boneless stubs for fingers – the result of unilateral brachydactyly – a condition so uncommon that Stevenson couldn’t find a single case of it in the medical literature. The boy had memories of a past life where he lost his fingers in a fodder-chopping machine accident.

A good chunk of these cases have been solved – meaning they found records of the deceased person whom the child reported to have been and verified that the details divulged by the child matched the deceased person. About 20% of all cases in the US and a whopping 77% of all cases in India have been solved.

The discrepancy in the data between the regions is thought to be due in part to the cultural acceptance of the concept of reincarnation. Eastern cultures have a long history of belief in reincarnation, which means they are more likely to entertain it and give it credence, unlike in the west.

Well aware that there’s always the possibility that bad actors might try to make false, fictitious claims, the University of Virginia team is methodical and rigorous to a T: self-aggrandising and unclear accounts are disregarded, retaining only the credible, verifiable ones.

If you’re still inclined to dismiss their groundbreaking research, saying Stevenson and the academics at the University of Virginia are conniving kooks feeding us pseudoscientific poppycock, pay heed to what the prestigious Heyn Medal-winning physicist Doris Kuhlmann-Wilsdorf had to say about it: “The statistical probability that reincarnation does in fact occur is so overwhelming … that cumulatively the evidence is not inferior to that for most if not all branches of science.”

Stevenson, though not usually one with a proclivity for grand, prophetic proclamations, stated that once the inner workings of the reincarnation phenomena were uncovered, it would result in “a conceptual revolution that will make the Copernican revolution seem trivial in comparison”.

This is such a monumentally consequential area of research that I just can’t imagine it not being the case. The fact that it doesn’t garner a lot more attention and is not given a lot more importance boggles my mind.

It is, after all, a question of life and death.

And life again.

 

The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of FMT.

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