The ARGNY Blog

That Darn Kid Keeps Coming Back!

Ian Stevenson, the late rock star of scientific research of reincarnation has documented several cases of children being born with birthmarks that correspond to wounds and scars that were present in the previous life. Read all the about it in my previous blog posting.

Some colleagues of Dr. Stevenson, following in his rather large footsteps, have also found cases of "Experimental Birthmarks." These are marks that are made on a dying person, so that when they reincarnate they can be identified by the family as who they were. Dr. Jurgen Keil and Dr. Jim Tucker found 18 of these cases occurring mainly in Thailand and Burma, with a few in Turkey.

The cases primarily occur within the same family. In a few, the mother actually saw the marking, while in others she had heard about it but did not see it, and in still others, the mother did not know about the expected birthmark. For instance, in Thailand, an older sister died of heart disease and some friends preparing her for burial marked her on the back of the neck with lipstick. They never told the mother until after a child was born with the analogous birthmark.

Most markings are ash or soot, things that do not penetrate the skin, however, a few more serious marking cases occur in Africa. In Nigeria, they believe in what are known as ogbanje spirits, children who are born into a family, live for a while and then die in a repetitive cycle to harass the parents. When this happens a number of times, parents will mutilate the body of the dead child, which is believed to stop this process. They will typically cut off a fingertip or remove part of the ear, acts which are not drastic enough to cause a full deformity but allow recognition of the ogbanje.

Occasionally, the mutilation is more severe. In one case, a father chopped off the fingers and toes of the supposed ogbanje and a subsequent child was born with grossly deformed and missing fingers and toes. An interesting dimension of this story is that the enraged father had cut off the fingers and toes, performed a ceremony, and hung them in a bag in the home to ward off the ogbanje spirit. He married a new wife who cut down the bag without knowing the story. The birth-deformed child arrived shortly thereafter. An alternative explanation to actual reincarnation is the maternal impression hypothesis, in which the psychological impression in a mother's unconscious mind affects the developing fetus.

 Moral of the story: if you see a bag of fingers and toes hanging from a tree, leave it alone.

Even More Basic Instinct

Ever wonder how a bird knows to fly south for the winter? Or how a salmon knows to swim upstream to spawn? It’s instinct—duh! Right. But what IS instinct? And if the birds and the bees do it (instinctually), why can’t we do it (instinctually)? Well, we probably do. Ever notice how successful musicians, doctors, carpenters and insurance salesmen often have successful musician, doctor, carpenter and insurance salesmen parents? Scientists are just now beginning to understand how some knowledge is passed down through generations of animals genetically. This is called “genetic memory” or “inherited memory.” The idea is that genes can not only pass down physical traits, but can "remember" conditions from your forebearers' lives (right down to the things they've seen and smelled) and that this memory is passed down from generation to generation.

I mention this because one possible interpretation of reincarnation cases is “inherited” memories of the previous personality. The theory goes that the subject is not remembering events from his own previous life, but events experienced by his parents or grandparents and that these experiences are genetically transferred down the line to the subject. The problem with this theory, however, is that although a spider may know how to spin a web because his parents and his grand-parents and his great-grandparents knew how to spin webs, it is doubtful that the spider is remembering specific webs that his predecessors had spun. More likely he is only remembering the idea of webs and the process for going about making them. So, “inherited memory" would not explain why the subjects of Dr. Ian Stevenson, Dr. Satwant Pasricha and others would remember specific details, such as names, places, occupations and ownership of property.

And there’s another problem with the “inherited memory” theory when applied to reincarnation. In many of the documented cases of the reincarnation type, the subjects remember the means of their death. So, if a person remembers dying then, obviously, they would not be around to procreate and genetically transfer that knowledge to their offspring.

It is going to be interesting to see many of the common beliefs about instinct, innate knowledge and skills and even intuition transform from the mysterious and paranormal to being simple statements of genetic fact. It’s not “instinct”, it’s DNA—DUH!

Waiting In A Tree

So, if you're an American and you snuff it, how are you spending those 12 or so years before you reincarnate, anyway? Well, it seems, from the testimony of those children that can remember this interval (as per Dr. Stevenson), that you're a ghost. However, a few also report some kind of short intermediate life between death and reincarnation, which just may just be a mis-communication on the part of the child in his memory of the ghost life. But, some report genuine weirdness. Things like, "I waited in a tree for seven years and and when I saw  my new father I accompanied him home on a bus " or "I was in a strange netherworld where an old man guided me to the new life". Of course, there can be no verification of most of these reports, so they are pretty suspect. Interestingly, Ian Stevenson was actually able to confirm some of the details of the story of the kid who remembered sitting in a tree. His father-to-be, actually did walk by a particular tree each day on his way to and from work and then did board a bus. Again, though, this seems to be a report of a ghost state of the personality prior to reincarnation. But why you would sit in a tree for seven years is another question altogether.

What Took Ya?

According to Dr. Ian Stevenson, "...the interval between the previous personality's death and the subject's birth is usually less than 3 years..." In other words, it usually takes someone about 3 years to reincarnate after death. However, that's the average, around the world. How long it will take YOU depends largely on the culture in which you lived. Dr. Stevenson goes on to explain that the interval ranges from 4 months for the Haida tribes of Alaska and British Columbia to 141 months for non-tribal peoples of North America. But for 616 cases, across 10 cultures, the median interval was fifteen months. So, if you're an Eskimo, expect your a new body in 4 months; a Tibetan, a year and 3 months; and if you're a New Yorker, it'll be like trying to get a table in the West Village on a Saturday night at 8 PM: about 141 months or about 12 years. However, don't fret. If you die a violent death, your time to reincarnation is significantly shorter. Something to consider when you find yourself without a reservation on a Saturday night.

So, what's going on during that interval between death and reincarnation? Stay tuned for Part 2 of this post.

Say What?

Xenoglossy is the ability to speak a language that has not been learned by normal means. Dr. Ian Stevenson documents many of these cases in his book, Unlearned Language: New Studies in Xenoglossy. Dr. Stevenson's theory is that these languages were learned in the previous lives of the kids in question. Here are a few of his cases:

• Swarnlatta Mishra: A girl in India who lived entirely among Hindi-speaking people but was able to sing songs in Bengali, as identified by Professor P. Pal of Itachuna College in West Bengal, who studied the case after Professor Stevenson and transcribed some of the songs.

• Uttara Huddar: Uttara was a woman in India who normally spoke Marathi but, after participating in a meditation during a hospitalization, began speaking in Bengali, much to the bewilderment of her parents.

• Two hypnotic regression cases: Professor Stevenson is quite skeptical of most hypnotic regression work but he did have two cases that included responsive xenoglossy; that is, hypnotic subjects who could converse with people speaking the foreign language, instead of merely being able to recite foreign words. One is that of Jensen, an American woman who, while under hypnosis conducted by her physician husband, described being a Swedish peasant farmer and was able to converse in Swedish. The other is Gretchen, an American woman who was hypnotized by her Methodist minister husband and began spontaneously speaking in German. She described the life of a teenaged girl in Germany, and Professor Stevenson, who is able to speak German, was able to converse with her.

And although it's a couple of years old, there's a nice little debate on the subject from the blog of Calvin College in Michigan.

Sprechen sie Deutsches? Sorry, not since I died.

I'll Meet You On the Corner of Reincarnation & Biology

Another interesting finding of Dr. Ian Stevenson is that people who have reincarnated, after dying a violent death in their previous life, will often carry over marks of their wounds into their reincarnated life. Dr. Stevenson has documented many of these types of cases in his book, Where Reincarnation and Biology Intersect. Here is a passage from an excellent review from The Journal of Parapsychology, published by the Rhine Research Center:

The night before the birth of Cemil Fahrici in Turkey, Cemil's father dreamed that a distant relative, Cemil Hayik, entered the home. Hayik, a folk hero and bandit, had committed suicide during a shoot-out with the police. He had placed the muzzle of his gun to his chin and had set off the trigger with a toe. When the parents of the newborn boy found a birthmark under his chin, which actually bled and required stitching, they thought he was the reincarnation of Cemil Hayik and named him Cemil. Their impression was reinforced when the boy began to speak and described events from the life of his namesake. Ian Stevenson, who investigated the case, discovered that the fatal bullet had exited at the top of the skull, lifting out part of the bone. He therefore asked Cemil Fahrici if he had another birthmark. "Without hesitating," said Stevenson, "he pointed to the top of his head, and we quickly discovered a linear area of hairlessness on the left side of the top of his head" (p. 75).

Right Now My Head Is Small

The Return of the Revolutionaries web site  tells of one of Ian Stevenson's cases:

At 16 months of age, Suzanne pulled the phone off the hook as if she was trying to talk into it and said, over and over, “Hello, Leila?” The family didn’t know who Leila was. When she got older, Suzanne explained that Leila was one of her children and that she was not Suzanne, but Hanan. The family asked, “Hanan what?” Suzanne replied, “My head is still small. Wait until it is bigger, and I might tell you.” By the time she was two, she had mentioned the names of her other children, her husband, Farouk, and the names of her parents and her brothers--thirteen names in all.

To read the entire case description click on the Return of the Revolutionaries link above.

But check this out. This is a photo that Dr. Stevenson took of Suzanne, compared with a photo of Suzanne's previous personality, Hanan. The resemblance is amazing. Remember, the photo of Suzanne was taken decades after she began claiming that she was Hanan which was decades before this resemblance would have become known. The entire case is detailed in Tom Shroder's Book, Old Souls.

Photo courtesy of Return of the Revolutionaries

By the way, just for the record. I do not agree with many of the purported cases of reincarnation presented on the Return of the Revolutionaries web site. I ESPECIALLY don't agree with their encouragement of past life regression techniques, which are wholly unscientific and unverifiable. However, much of what they present is useful and legitimate.

I've Always Been Like This

This amusing beer commercial illustrates the opposite of what Dr. Stevenson has found in the majority of the cases of reported reincarnation.

Unlike the person in this video, common belief and the teachings of Buddhism, it seems that people tend to reincarnate into bodies that are very similar to their previous ones, in all respects. So, an Indian boy from a small village close to Mumbai will reincarnate into an Indian boy from a small village close to Mumbai. It probably won't be the same village and he may or may not be from the same caste, but he will probably be similar to his previous personality in most respects.

So, boys come back as boys, girls as girls and humans as humans. You probably won't come back as a tree or a wombat or as a stick insect, unless you were one of those things previously.

Also, if you died in Mumbai, you will come back in or near Mumbai, not in Tokyo or Albuquerque or on a distant planet. What's interesting about that is if you are, say, American and you die while traveling in Italy, you will come back as an Italian in Italy, close to where you died. You will not come back in America, close to where you lived or were born. Dr. Stevenson writes of the case of a Bulgarian sailor who died in a bar fight in Sri Lanka and was then reincarnated as a Sri Lankan boy, who was able to innately speak Bulgarian.

Sources: 20 Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation by Ian Stevenson, Old Souls, by Tom Shroder.

You're Not My Mommy

Up until a few years ago I thought that reincarnation was a load of shait. This is because the only context within which I would hear about reincarnation was either religious or New Age shenanigans: insurance claims adjusters suddenly remembering that they were the Earl of Sandwich and a Tibetan monk in previous lives. How did they suddenly remember this? Past life regression hypnosis.  Very exciting, completely impossible to prove and utter shait. However, that was until I read about Dr. Ian Stevenson, the first scientist to present verifiable evidence of cases of reincarnation. Yes, that is correct: verifiable evidence.

Stevenson has documented thousands of cases of children who, from the time they begin to talk, claim not to be who their parents tell them they are, but to be people that died, usually by violent means. These kids are able to provide intimate details on the lives of their "previous personalities": full names, the address of their previous home, their occupation, their relatives' names, details of their death, etc. Stevenson was able to meet these kids, collect their information and then track down the families of the previous personality for verification. In many cases, he brings the kids with him to verify the facts. The kids are able to identify previous family members, personal affects, even guide him by the hand to their previous homes. Of course, in their present lifetime, they never had any contact with the people, places or things they are able to identify.

Although, the book tends to drag toward the end, Old Souls is a documentation of several of Dr. Stevenson's investigations by journalist, Thomas Shroder. The cases are amazing and the photos stunning. I highly recommend it.