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• I have recently re-edited "In Another Life: Reincarnation in America," the documentary which this website supports, for various minor technical issues. This new edition, version 3.2 (or v3.2) has finally resolved most of the nagging little flaws that no-doubt concerned broadcasters when I shopped it around for distribution in 2006*. If you are a broadcaster or distributor and have an interest in the program, e-mail me, Stephen Sakellarios. The re-edited version can be seen in its entirety at Vimeo.com.
  *There have been no content changes; it still is heavy on interviews and light on narration. It still has several convinced, former skeptics plus one unconvinced skeptic. It still contains an interview with a man on his own grave; it still has interviews with a series of highly intelligent, impressive personalities. It still pulls no punches and does NOT leave the viewer with the impression that science can probably explain most of it away, or that "it's intriguing but we can never know for sure."

• This article about a sculptor whose work was rejected by the Royal Academy--sort of--and yet also accepted--sort of--is for all the station managers, film distributors, and festival judges who saw nothing particularly noteworthy in "In Another Life". Perhaps they just thought it was mediocre...

• An interview with Dr. Jim Tucker, successor to Dr. Ian Stevenson, about their research into past-life memory and reincarnation. See also the video interview with Dr. Tucker on the "Interviews" page of this website.

• A science writer describes a recent "Sages and Scientists" symposium at the Chopra Center, including a presentation by Dr. Tucker.

• Remember this commercial? "If I've only one life, let me live it as a blonde..." Pretty insidious, and typical of the kind of mischief that suppressing the truth about reincarnation can play in society. How many foolish things have people justified because "we only go around once"?

• A small break in the glass at a huge, shark-filled aquarium in a mega-mall in Dubai (see "Mindsight," five items below, for why this is relevant...)

• Honestly, I don't plan these things to fit together, but speaking of aquariums, SeaWorld's public relations department has a real challenge on its hands to convince the public that the seas' greatest predators are quite safe despite one having recently shaken a trainer like a ragdoll in its jaws, in plain view of the audience. Some day, materialistic skeptics will face as big a challenge trying explain away reincarnation proof cases like the Leininger case, the Bruce Kelly case, and others listed below and presented elsewhere on this website.

As of today, 2/21/10, this website is back on the second page listings on Google for keyword "reincarnation," currently sitting at the #3 spot. It is #14 out of 4,360,000. For years, it rode at the top of the second page; then about three years ago I removed all my reciprocal links to new-age directories (because I wanted more control over what quality of information I was referring people to), and also pulled the site entirely for 10 days or so, out of concern that my name was so easily linked online with this work that it was ruining my career. That didn't help so I reinstated it, but my search engine ranking fell and never recovered until today. (Also, there are many more websites on reincarnation now, so there's more competition.) I get approx. 250 visits on this site per day, and approx. five people per day view "In Another Life" on Vimeo.com. Only one of those viewers, so far, has indicated they liked it. I get a question about reincarnation on AllExperts.com occasionally, maybe twice a month. On very rare occasions someone will write me thanking me for the work I'm doing. Otherwise, it's a "thunderous silence." People watch the interviews, read the personal accounts, occasionally read this news page or my Updates (blog), and silently leave. Today, someone voted, in the poll at the bottom of the home page, "consider it possible." That's my reward. For those sharp-eyed graphic artists out there, I've pulled the keyword results line over left a bit to leave more room for type.

• I've updated my radio interviews archive page, reformatting all the progams in Windows Media (rather than Real Player). I don't actively seek radio interviews anymore, but I am certainly willing to do them if requested, so feel free to contact me or to recommend me to your favorite radio host. I've also finally gotten around to figuring out how to get the pages where I have background music to play it when viewing them with Firefox. If it annoys you, see the last paragraph of the home page opening remarks for a way to block it (I don't know how safe it is to install). Then, there is always the volume knob...

• A writer for Psychology Today has gotten around to blogging about Dr. Ian Stevenson's work in a respectful tone, but still concludes his studies were not fully scientific (as though "Psychology Today" was known for being fully scientific!--sorry, that's probably uncalled for but I couldn't resist it...). I think he's wrong, and here's my commentary as to why I think that.

• An article about near-death experiences, including those in which a blind person was able to see once out of their body, and details of what they saw were corroborated. See also this video on YouTube. If these reports are accurate, they put to rest the idea that NDE's are mere hallucination. See also this review of "Mindsight" by Kenneth Ring and Sharon Cooper. The book is only $12.95, but apparently it's out of print and used copies are going for over $100. There's an address for the publisher at the bottom of this review. I recently obtained a copy through interlibrary loan. It describes a pioneering study which provides clear evidence, if not proof to a scientific standard, that there are, in fact, cases in which people who could not see were suddenly able to see--at least in some sense--from a vantage point outside their physical bodies, and that details of their reports were independently corroborated. In what I felt was one of the strongest cases, a blind man was hurriedly given a tie, not told what it looked like, suffered a medical emergency, and reported afterward the pattern on the tie. Maddeningly, the person who had given him the tie was contacted, and told researchers that after many years she could not remember the details of the tie's pattern, but confirmed the rest of the story. In a second case, a woman who could not possibly have seen, described her ex-husband and then-lover standing in the hallway as the hospital staff frantically wheeled her down the hall and tried to get into the elevator. She claimed that the gurney ran into the elevator doors--neither of the two men could confirm this crucial point, but did describe frantic activity. These kinds of frustrations in the research were typical. In at least one of the cases, there is a clear corroboration--a blind woman, while out of her body, viewed the kitchen dishes piled up unwashed. Her husband, embarrassed, admitted that was the case. Another blind woman, while out of her body, went to a friend's home and saw her throwing up after having drunk too much, and described her holding her long hair aside with her left hand. The friend confirmed the details. A much larger sample size is needed. But there is, I would say, just barely enough evidence here to indicate to any reasonable person that the NDE is a real phenomenon rather than being a brain-based hallucination. And that means that the materialistic paradigm is indeed cracking. This may be a "hairline fracture", but a hairline fracture in a huge dam is highly significant.

• It rained fish recently over this small Australian town... this used to be considered a flaky legend; now it's accepted and has a scientific explanation. Reincarnation will be accepted as well, and scientific explanations will be attempted; but reincarnation will transform science before science explains reincarnation.

• Fox TV pulls their reincarnation-based detective show, Past Life, from its Thursday slot due to poor ratings, though they may find another place for it later on. The first two episodes will be available for awhile on Hulu.com. To me, this is like a scientific experiment for prejudice; there is no other variable I can think of to account for its failure, because it was on a major network, well-funded and well-publicized. It was an excellent show and it was fictional (and hence didn't require the viewer to take a stand on belief or non-belief). That suggests to me that my documentary, "In Another Life," has been so much ignored primarily for the same reason.

• Here's a real case...

• "Past Life" filmed in the Georgia State Capitol in Atlanta, Georgia. Back in 1998, I accompanied Jeff Keene (who is interviewed in "In Another Life" sitting on John B. Gordon's grave in Oakland Cemetery in Atlanta), to the Capitol Building, where John Gordon had been governor of Georgia. We met there Steve Smith, a teacher from a school for psychic studies, who coincidentally was also a relative of Gordon (I recall he said Gordon was his great-great uncle). After the two-hour visit, the teacher thanked Jeff, saying it had been an "honor to meet him." I videotaped the meeting, thinking I might use it in "In Another Life," so I've posted a clip of the final couple minutes. Jeff (now retired) was an assistant fire chief in Trumbull, CT; John B. Gordon, before he served as governor, was a general for the Confederacy. We see here Steve and Jeff in the Georgia State Capitol Building in Atlanta. Ironic that Fox TV filmed an episode for a major television series based on reincarnation there, 12 years later. Who would have thought it?

• Public service announcement... Late 2006 or early 2007, I posted here a notice that I had concluded that cell phone use could cause brain tumors. My reasoning was that, in trying to market my video company by e-mails, I had gotten onto the website for a large Atlanta law firm, which had individual listings for each attorney--and I noticed that several of them specialized in cell phones. I had videotaped legal depositions for many years, and I knew that an attorney in a prestigious law firm would not list "cell phones" as one of his two or three specialty areas, unless they could win cases--and they can't win cases unless they have very strong evidence. Now it's coming out, as you see in this article. (See also this more recent development, plus this article, which confirms cell phones as a potential cause of brain tumors, and also implicates the increased electrical field we've artificially created, in general.) Sadly, I get to say, "I told you so." I also suspect there's at least one cheap, effective cancer cure that's being suppressed--here (I videotaped his seminars some years ago). By way of comparison, take a look at this old cigarette commercial, which actually goes so far as to say you'll "feel better." Especially chilling is the way it ends: "...feel something wonderful happen to you!" It's even more chilling when you remember that they knew exactly what they were doing. Reincarnation is real. Regardless of what mainstream science, religion and media tells you, dismissing it as nonsense will not make you "feel better," at least not in the long run.

• Past-life therapy is catching on in India, where there is less religious prejudice against the idea. I recommend past-life regression only for therapeutic purposes under the guidance of an experienced therapist, because there are potential side-effects.

• "Butterfly Kisses," a lyrical novel by Sharmila Jayasinghe Niriella which includes a reincarnation theme.

• A fun article discussing the markings and symbols of a dollar bill, but denying that any of the symbols relate to Freemasonry. I don't know a lot about Freemasonry, but I do know this much, that Benjamin Franklin, one of the three men credited with designing the bill, believed in reincarnation.

• An article about past-life regression therapy.

• Oscar the cat sits vigil with dying patients in a nursing home, having been right some 50 times, and even out-guessing the nursing staff. What's of interest to me is the insistence on a materialistic explanation about "ketones". I Googled keywords "ketones, death" and came up with plenty of ways that increased levels of ketones can kill you, but no references to ketones always showing up whenever people die of various causes. Googling keywords "ketones, cancer" I see references to ketones increasing when there is not enough insulin; I also see references to ketones fighting cancer. In short, although I'm no medical expert, I see no indication that no matter what you die of, ketones increase to the extent that a cat could smell them right before you die. Must we explain everything away in materialistic terms? And if someone else does this, must we believe it because "science says so"? The internet is a powerful tool--I suggest using it to check any such "science says" statements. After all, "science says" is not "Simon says"...

• An open-minded article in the Times of India about past-life regression.

• The Leininger family was on Larry King Live, with Deepak Chopra, on Dec. 22nd, and I just got a chance to watch the recorded program today, 1/30. (See also a transcript of the show.) The Leininger case is one of Carol Bowman's, which was first shown on ABC's "Prime Time". It's a very strong proof case (see below), and is even more remarkable because it has gotten mainstream media exposure. The Leininger family was interviewed for a few minutes, long enough to describe their case briefly. Dr. Jim Tucker was also interviewed, and with his usual aplomb, simply stated what the evidence is and how strong it is. Deepak Chopra came out like a lion, and he and skeptic Michael Shermer (see below) locked horns. Mr. Shermer sounded the same old skeptical note--it can't be proven or disproven, we can never know for sure, etc. It's the skeptical mantra now...but it isn't supported by the facts anymore. It's like continuing to claim that man can never fly, even past the point when planes are already flying. A three-year-old boy (if I understand the Leininger case correctly) cannot name his past-life ship, plus a fellow crew member, and be accurate, due to coincidence. A three-year-old boy is not "into airplanes" the way a 10-year-old boy might be. Let Mr. Shermer take any three-year-old boy and get him to correctly name an obscure WWII aircraft carrier plus correctly name one of its obscure crew members. Let him find a three-year-old who knows that the bulbous object on the bottom of a Corsair is a drop-tank. If he does, he will have found yet another past-life case....

Here is a highly sarcastic article by Mr. Shermer, and here is my own response to his article.

"Soul Survivor," a book describing the reincarnation of James Leininger, has recently been released. This strong case was featured on ABC's program "Primetime." (Watch a portion of the show segment here.)

The Leininger case also made it to Yahoo.com's front page
on 6/8/09 and again on 6/9/09. I think it was essentially the same video
as from the Primetime episode, linked above. Somebody in ABC is
reincarnation-friendly, or trust me, it wouldn't be there.

• A child prodigy artist. Here's a musical prodigy. Child prodigies are one type of evidence for reincarnation. More examples can be found elsewhere in this News page.

• An audience member is interviewed about a Chinese theatre production with a reincarnation theme, put on by "Shen Yun Performing Arts." The interviewee, a chiropractor, comments, "I have a personal belief, that if people understood reincarnation, if we understood that we come from these diverse lifetimes, we would understand ourselves better, and each other better. So, it's very gratifying to see the reincarnation principle expressed from a cultural perspective. And I think it's so important to know in the United States--we don't have that at all. But, if we got that, we would understand that we have been in all kinds of cultures and races. And then we would all have a deep understanding of each other. So I was gratified to see that come up." I couldn't have said it better myself...

• A writer muses about reincarnation, karma and cosmic justice in light of the recent earthquake disaster in Haiti. Here are my comments.

• The movie "Avatar" is a blockbuster. The word "avatar" is commonly used to mean an icon, a representative image. But if God is, as Paul Tillich said, the "ground of all Being," then what would His Avatar be? For a comprehensive answer to this question, see "Avataric Advents". The author was assisted by Rick Chapman, who also assisted me with my article, "A Tapestry of Meher Baba's Connections with the West." (Chapman, a former student of Timothy Leary at Harvard, became Leary's opponent in televised debates and the media when he met Meher Baba and Baba instructed him to try to get the youth of America off drugs.) To me, there's an interesting parallel between the title of the movie "Avatar" and Bobby McFerrin's hit song, "Don't Worry, Be Happy" (McFerrin got the idea from a poster designed by Chapman)--both have inadvertently functioned to give the masses a tiny contact with Meher Baba. The movie has been playing here in Myrtle Beach in the mall opposite the Meher Spiritual Center--everyone goes to the movie, oblivious to the fact that the real Avatar actually had his Western home across the street from the marquee.You can see that I really don't give a damn anymore about how many hits this website gets or who might dismiss me as a nutcase. I just keep on telling the truth. The day I stop doing that, this site will immediately cease to be of any value.

• The Vatican responds to the movie, "Avatar.", warning against its theme of nature worship. They've totally missed the real challenge to traditional Christian dogma, that the Avatar comes repeatedly and that Jesus was not His only Incarnation. In other words, it is the name of the movie, and not the movie itself, they should be concerned about. It reminds me of a joke about a man who rode a bicycle, carrying a sack of sand on his shoulder, through a checkpoint every day. Every day the guards sifted through the sand and found nothing, though they suspected he was smuggling something in. Finally, they realized he had been smuggling bicycles... As regards nature worship, it is quite valid to worship God in and through nature; just as it is quite valid to worship God in and through an organized religion like Christianity. Worshipping nature as though it were God is a side-track, just as worshipping the rites, rituals and dogmas of an organized religion as though they were God is a side-track. You see that I have managed to offend both the Catholics and the Pagans here--but this is the nature of truth, that it sees itself in both sides but also offends both sides at the same time.

• An open-minded Christian reporter responds to another reporter who lost his religion reporting on Christianity. Interesting, to me, is his comment about finding portions of the Bhagavad Gita inspiring, and that, in response to a comment made by his meditation teacher, Dr. Mehta, "I don’t believe in reincarnation--at least not at this point of my spiritual journey--but I celebrate Dr. Mehta’s candid and pure faith in Hinduism as much as I celebrate the unwavering faith of any Christian who believes in Christ’s redemptive death and resurrection." Open-mindedness is an admirable quality, but I could never rest with this kind of attitude. The contradictions bothered me too much, and I insisted on knowing the truth of it and dissolving the contradictions in some deeper, more inclusive understanding. Thanks to Meher Baba's teachings, I was able to do that, up to the limits of the intellect and my own capacity, which is why I periodically point people to them. I don't care if anybody follows up on it, but I would be remiss not to at least put up a signpost here and there. Whatever you see in this website that I seem to know, comes primarily from that source.

• An open-minded pastor discusses his near-death experience when he was seven years old. This kind of open-mindedness is a bit more to my liking. What he knows is based on experience--what he doesn't know yet remains to be seen. Most importantly, he cares deeply what's real and what isn't real, but he simply takes stock of what he knows for sure and what he doesn't. It's a scientific attitude, but not a materialistic scientific attitude. With so much evidence for the afterlife and the immortality of the soul, cynical materialism can no-longer claim to be a scientific attitude in its true sense.

• A colleague has just brought to my attention Dr. Peter Ramster's website, including this order page for his films and books, which includes an extended excerpt from his second film, "Reincarnation Experiments." The except describes one of his reincarnation proof cases.

• The "Unsolved Mysteries" episode featuring the Bruce Kelly/James Johnston case (James the Submarine Man) has been posted on YouTube. See also the review for the book, "James the Submarine Man" in the Book Reviews section of this website, and the article in the Articles section. The book is out of print and is very difficult to find, but if you take the time to write me personally, I may be able to help you find one. I consider this to be one of the strongest hypnosis-based proof cases on record. Note that linked from my review is a list of questions I submitted to Bruce Kelly, clarifying certain points in the book that have a bearing on its strength as a proof case. It is clear from the record that the core facts regarding the submarine's name and number, James Johnston's first and last name, the location where the submarine sank, and at least one other crew member's first and last name, came up before Kelly had any normal way of knowing the information. Here are the links to segment 1 and segment 2 of the episode.

• The scientific establishment in India reacts to the entertainment-based past-life regression reality TV show there (see next article). What is fascinating to me, as always, is the psychology and sociology of the thing. The people quoted in this article supposedly represent the bastion of objectivity (i.e., Western objectivity), as it has been transplanted in a society which has understood reincarnation for millenia. (If one wants to accuse all Indians who have taught reincarnation of being ignorant and superstitious, one had better be prepared to accuse Swami Vivekananda of being ignorant and superstitious--if one has the balls!) But several of the statements in this article are simply lies. I would go so far as to say they are intentional lies. Here's one: "So-called past life regression through hypnotism has been tested and debunked, and besides, it has dangers." It has not, actually, been debunked at all. On the contrary, it has been proven through multiple cases that past-life regression can uncover memories of actual past lives. If you don't believe me, watch this. (See also this article where a past-life therapist discusses a few of her validated cases--and remember that as William James, one of the founders of modern psychology, said, it only takes one white crow to prove that all crows are not black.) Okay, you may or may not be convinced, but an objective scientist would at least cite Ramster, who is a colleague. The quote is correct, however, in stating that there are dangers (of which this humorous example represents the least worrisome). Regression practitioners rarely mention this part! Another quote from the article: "Past life regression therapy claims to use hypnosis to delve into the memories of people’s past lives. It has no scientific basis and there is no evidence to show that hypnosis helps recall past life events. 'Science has not been able to establish that we have a past life. Psychologists and psychiatrists do not accept it either,' said Dr Yusuf Matcheswala, a practicing psychiatrist." Well, I think psychiatrist Dr. Jim Tucker might disagree with him (see Dr. Tucker's interview in the Interviews section of this website). The point is, this article is making sweeping generalizations that are demonstrably false. Some scientists, psychologists, and psychiatrists do publicly accept that past-life therapy is valid, can retrieve real past-life memories, and is based on solid science. We don't know the full numbers, because many more accept it privately, afraid to go public for fear of their careers. (See, for example, my archived radio interview on WRFG, where I was joined by psychologist Paul Schenk who told me that was the first time he had gone public.) Therefore, whenever you see anyone make the sweeping statement that scientists, psychologists and psychiatrists all agree that past-life therapy is without substance, you can know they are speaking an untruth, and that either they do know better, or they could easily know better.

• An Indian TV reality show will consist entirely of past-life regressions performed before an audience. Fortunately the sessions will be conducted by an experienced clinician. I don't like the circus atmosphere but it will certainly serve to educate people, especially if the idea catches on elsewhere. If it's a live show, it may also occasionally serve to educate people as to why one shouldn't toy with this technique, if a subject stumbles on a particularly gruesome past-life memory. Nor do I see any plans for follow-through, to see how it may affect them in the weeks and months after the session.

• By way of illustration, here is a tongue-in-cheek example, on The Onion, of the same kind of logic as skeptics are currently using in their attempts to suppress reincarnation.

• A cynical, light-hearted article about a "reincarnation bank". I think you'd have better luck playing the lottery than actually locating and claiming assets in your next life, assuming this "bank" is genuine. I'm with the author, more likely it's an out-and-out scam. But people don't reincarnate as squids. So, I am gradually beginning to see skeptics and shysters and ill-informed reincarnation advocates as all kind of swimming around in the same "ignorance soup". Everybody has to be raised out of it together.Update...for better or worse, the operation is closed down with swift international cooperation.

• A new book is published, exploring reincarnation from the vantage-point of astrology. Note the closing comments, indicating that reincarnation can be controversial even among astrologers: "Most astrologers agree with her work, she says, but 'some don’t believe in reincarnation. People get nervous about it. I guess they’re afraid of it.'" Note also that the editor chose a title which was the most belittling thing he or she could possibly pull out of the article, i.e., that the author had formerly been a crossing guard. My point is that by far the greatest portion of prejudice against reincarnation is not wisdom-driven, as it appears to be--it is fear-driven.

• Periodically I share my Garage Band musical compositions on this page, which are really just amateurish efforts for fun. So, I thought for a few days I'd share what I'm really good at, photography. Here's my Flickr page. Keep in mind, if you're comparing my work with that of any established photographers, that I can't afford to travel. Just about everything you see here is just what I ran into around town or at most on a day-trip. People who can afford to travel the world and take thousands of images have it easy. If you like good photography, here's the work of a British professional photographer, who also happens to be a fellow-follower of Meher Baba, whose work I admire a great deal, Tony Howell.

• A recent poll shows Americans who believe in reincarnation at nearly 25 percent, roughly the same percentage as evangelical Protestants. Of the latter group, still, 10% believe in reincarnation. It's very tricky interpretating such statistics. For example, some portion of this 25% who believe in reincarnation accepts it uncritically as a belief, without having studied it carefully. Some have studied it and are intellectually convinced; while some have had personal experiences (including with objective proof, like their daughter naming and pointing out a deceased relative in a photograph whom she had no way of recognizing) and are convinced for that reason. The poll, on the other hand, fails to tease out these distinctions. Instead, it assumes reincarnation is (merely) a belief. Another subtle bias is in grouping the question about reincarnation with other topics, some of which have much less objective evidence to support them than reincarnation does. This subtley makes the poll-taker feel he may be ignorant if he gives a positive answer to any one of them. If, on the other hand, belief in reincarnation were grouped with things like quarks and anti-matter, the number of positive responses might be higher. I would hazard a guess that the evidence for reincarnation is actually stronger than the evidence for quarks and antimatter, but we are socially conditioned to dismiss the former and accept the latter.

• The Harris poll finds that only 20% of Americans believe in reincarnation. Apparently the question was worded that they "were once another person," which could be misconstrued. I mean, I would take that question to mean "have I ever had a psychotic break where I totally assumed another identity," especially if the question didn't specify a past life. At any rate, something accounts for a 4% discrepancy between this poll and the one cited above. Incidentally, there's a historical error in the closing statement of this article. Reincarnation is not a pre-Christian belief. Inasmuch as one insists on defining it as a (mere) "belief," it was a belief held by Christians, including some prominent Christian leaders, for several centuries until it was banned. Come on Harris, I thought you guys were more professional than that...

• A young college student in India kills himself after watching a reincarnation-themed movie 25 times. The writer's take on it is that myths are dangerous; the filmmaker's take on it is that myths are entertaining. Neither take reincarnation seriously--only the boy did. Unfortunately, what he took seriously was a half-baked interpretation by people who were using it as entertainment. What's dangerous here is toying with a powerful concept which has, in modern society, degenerated into myth and entertainment. Suicide is less likely to result in reincarnation than it is to lead to a hellish state of consciousness between lifetimes, or to being stuck as an earthbound "ghost" near the physical plane. If good information were provided about reincarnation, and if it were taken seriously by those presenting it to the public, people would never consider suicide based on that information. Depending on their real motives, I think that a gullible and ill-informed person like this would probably be assisted by helpers on the other side--but all my studies tell me that suicide is a very unwise choice.

• Doctors mistakenly assume for 23 years that a fully-conscious, paralyzed man is in a coma. Materialism causes medicine to take the entire subject of consciousness far too lightly, and coma is one particularly neglected area. Conventional wisdom has it that people in comas can still hear you, which is quite plausible when you consider what we're learning about near-death experiences (search on "Mindsight" below). See also Roger La Bord, who claims to be able to communicate psychically with people who are in a coma.

• Galileo's missing fingers, vertebra and tooth are found! At the time he advanced his theories, he was condemned (see the last paragraph of the article). No-one is after Dr. Ian Stevenson's fingers yet, but at some point it might be a good idea to install a gate or something...

My friend, Jay Mohler, makes these magnificent yarn mandalas, which he calls "Ojos de Dios" or "Eyes of God". I don't usually promote anything on this website, but he does a really nice job with these and I'd like to send him some business (click on the image).

• Here's an article about a retiring professor who had expertise in statistical analysis, and who came to a different conclusion about Stevenson's work (I reproduced the article on this website after it went offline):
  Prof. Doris Wilsdorf, Professor of Applied Science at the University of Virginia, teaching her last seminar on Science and Religion. Note the statement, referring as I assume to the work of her colleague at that school, Dr. Ian Stevenson: "Using the mathematical 'Theory of Theories,' Wilsdorf has shown that reincarnation can indeed exist by multiplying the probabilities of the unusual aspects of particular cases together, convincing her students that there is a point when 'coincidence' cannot describe thousands of scientific cases and studies."

• On this 60-Minutes segment, Lesley Stahl meets the inspiration for the lead character in the classic film Jurassic Park and reports on how famed dinosaur hunter Jack Horner is shaking up the paleontology world. Of particular interest to me is the resistance his findings have encountered from mainstream paleontologists, which is reminiscent of mainstream science's reactions to Dr. Ian Stevenson's reincarnation studies. In particular, it strikes me that many of the objections are irrational. Isn't that a fascinating paradox in terms of the psychology and the sociology of science?

• Alfred Russel Wallace developed a spiritually-based theory of evolution parallel with Charles Darwin's materialistic version. I ran across an article about Giuseppe Sermonti, an Italian geneticist who is criticizing Darwin's theory. The text read that if one believed in reincarnation, one might think he had been a poet in a past life because of his writing style. So, it occurred to me on a whim to compare photographs. I had originally listed all the websites where I found these images, but the Sermonti link which contained the photograph has gone offline. This portrait can, however, still be found via Google Images last time I checked. Understand I have no idea if this is a genuine past-life match, except that it would be consistent with commonly-observed patterns and it makes intuitive sense. I do not feel that these kinds of comparisons are proof to a scientific standard, in and of themselves, but they are very interesting.
  Source of Wallace image (website in Spanish)
  Brief article about Wallace with photo
  

• I think that psychologist/columnist Terry Stawar is taking the long-way around in this article to dismiss past-life therapy as a fad. It will, of course, be a fad at the most superficial level of social consciousness. Whether something (usually a very watered-down version) comes to the mass consciousness briefly has little in and of itself to do with whether it has merit or prolonged utility. I think we will find that past-life therapy has extraordinary utility and effectiveness. I would put it even more strongly--it will replace current psychology the way CD's replaced vinyl records. That's because, especially for certain types of issues like phobias, while standard psychology is handing out pills and blaming your parents for years, past-life therapy gets to the root of the problem in a few sessions and you're cured. In other words, if past-life therapy is not bastardized too badly by popular culture and charlatan practitioners, it will make standard psychotherapy obsolete. However, I also predict we will find out the hard way that it must be used judiciously and with a deep understanding of its potential side-effects, including ramifications for the patient's future lifetimes.

• A humorous article based on the mistaken notion that human beings can reincarnate backwards into insects. I'm reminded of a popular joke that was making the rounds among the boys in my sixth grade class which assumed that girls had testicles, in which the hearer was supposed to keep repeating after each statement, "rubber balls." That joke vanished abruptly and was never mentioned again...

• A play with a reincarnation theme written by a Texas Tech grad student from Thailand, based on Buddhist principles.

• Some magnificent time-lapse nature photography you might enjoy, which has no relevance to reincarnation except, of course, that all of nature is cycles...

• While we're at it, here's a very brief video with water closeups, which I did as my very first video project using a VHS camcorder I had bought used from a rental store. I didn't even know what a video tripod was and used my still camera tripod. But I had been doing still photography for awhile. Music by Steven Halpern and Dallas Smith, from the Lifetide album. The falls are Cullasaja Falls near Franklin, NC. Do you think I've had any past lives in Japan?

• Author Ann Bradshares has penned a new novel with a reincarnation theme entitled My Name is Memory. Here's some more news--looks like the movie rights are already sewn up. Meanwhile, there's an excerpt, and let me tell you, the metaphysics here are total nonsense (for example, we all reincarnate a vast number of times, and nobody lives just once). Too bad the author didn't study the subject thoroughly, or, perhaps, study it from better sources. Still, it's fascinating to note that reincarnation is becoming a hot topic.

• A writer asks columnist David Inman about a reincarnation movie he remembers. What's of interest is Inman's response--not the joke about "carnations," but his opening line, "What's all this I keep hearing about reincarnation?" It suggests that reincarnation awareness in Western society really is rising. This effect, which has registered in Inman's consciousness, is the result of tremendous work over the last 100 years or so by many people the world over who have dedicated their lives to this cause. They have come and gone with little reward or recognition, risking their reputations, relationships, finances and careers for what is about to happen.

• Billy Graham answers a question on reincarnation in his column. For my comments on two earlier columns, see the Articles page of this website. This column's response, based on simplified Christian dogma, is, from my perspective, such a mixture of truth and falsehood that it would take yet another lengthy article to try to separate them. One would have to deconstruct it sentence by sentence. I'll just start it here for purposes of illustration. The Incarnation of the Avatar--who repeatedly incarnates at certain intervals through history, one of those incarnations being Jesus the Christ (Christhood being a state of spiritual authority and consciousness), is not the same as the reincarnation of ordinary individuals. One does not preclude the other as Rev. Graham suggests--this is an apples-and-oranges comparison. The Word is the primal vibration from which and by which God created everything. The Christ can be described as an embodiment of that primal vibration, the first manifested thing down from God the Absolute (also called the "Son" of God).

• Yet another Graham response about reincarnation, and another. Apparently reincarnation is giving him quite a headache! From what I can tell, reincarnation--or, more specifically, the pre-existence of the soul and the entire "Perennial Philosophy" that went with it--was the true path until the Roman government got involved with the Church a few hundred years after Jesus and they made a watered-down version of Christianity the official religion (which gave them carte blanche to continue to persecute anybody who stuck by the original teachings).

• A plastic surgeon in India uses past-life therapy. The article includes two cases in which physical illnesses were cured by remembering past-life trauma. The claim about "wiping out karma" is, I feel, a bit grandiose and underestimates the problem. I would guess that saying past-life therapy "takes the edge off" would be closer to the truth than "wipes out." Theoretically, it could actually lead to greater karmic complications in future lifetimes, which is something that has not yet been considered by the field of past-life therapy as a whole. It would depend on the circumstances, how willing the client is to face their karmic lessons, whether their suffering is forcing them to work through something they would otherwise prefer to avoid, and so-on. This whole business of educating people about reincarnation is kind of like driving through a wall where, on the other side, you have 50 feet and then a lake. You have to build up enough speed to break through the wall, and then immediately you have to hit the brakes to keep from plunging into the lake. Another way to put this is that in order for us all to move forward toward a deeper spiritual understanding, Pandora's box is going to have to be opened. Those who open it have an obligation to sound the warning at the same time.

People all over the world reportedly have been seeing this man's face in their dreams. The reason I post it here is to point out the list of possible explanations posted on the home page. One explanation is not offered: that a non-incarnate person is entering people's dreams for some reason, say, to prove that there is an afterlife. I've had the experience of seeing a face looking directly into mine for several seconds just as I was waking up, and many people have had a visitation from a loved one in their dreams (occasioanlly, with validation, like two family members having that same dream the same night). Usually this happens some months after the person's death. I suspect, in this case, it's just social suggestion, inadvertent selection (present it to enough people, and a certain percentage will have coincidentally dreamt of someone looking like that), an "internet viral" phenomenon or even a hoax. Skeptics claim similar effects as the explanation for Dr. Ian Stevenson's results in his studies of children who remember past lives--but in that case the logic simply doesn't play out. Not when a child correctly remembers 25 first and last names (see the video interview with Dr. Tucker in the Interviews section of this website). The important point is to really be objective, not just pretend to yourself that you're being objective. If a non-incarnate person could contact people in a geograpical pattern that spelled out the same message, in different languages on different continents, that would be impressive--but my guess is that there are rules on the other side and such things aren't usually allowed.

• This four-year-old has become famous on the internet for delivering a inspiring locker-room speech from the hockey movie "Miracle". It's clear enough to anyone who's studied reincarnation, and knows that no strong childhood interest comes out of a vacuum, that this young fellow has had a strong interest in hockey before...

• A nice introductory article on reincarnation, which I link to here primarily to show the ongoing effort to introduce it to the public. I would only comment on the New-Age concept of us being "co-creators with God," which I think has some truth in it but can be misleading, if one takes it to mean that I, as an individual personality, am standing shoulder-to-shoulder with the Almighty creating things. At risk of seeming to push my own path, one can get a deeper grasp of this by studying Meher Baba's "God Speaks."

• An interview with author Stacy Horn about her new book, "Unbelievable: Investigations into Ghosts, Poltergeists, Telepathy, and Other Unseen Phenomena, from the Duke Parapsychology Laboratory." The writer of the article mentions being turned down for an interview with the head of the University of Virginia’s Division of Perceptual Studies (formerly headed by Dr. Ian Stevenson), because of some kind of "gag order". I don't know what that's about but on this website there's a long video interview with Dr. Jim Tucker, who has taken up Dr. Stevenson's work there (see the "Interviews" section).

• Even country singer Reba McEntire, as popular as she is, comes under fire when she admits she believes in reincarnation.

• Dan Whitney, in his column, "Basic Biitner," muses about his personal preference for city life despite living in the country, and considers reincarnation as a possible explanation. Personal, emotional preferences that one feels one has "always had" are actually fairly reliable clues about past lives. Through a careful process of elimination, if one has developed the capacity to be extremely honest with oneself, they can actually be used to ferret out specific historical verifications, as I am attempting to do in proving my own case.

• Israeli government bans the practice of past-life therapy. I have reproduced this article on a separate page within the "In Another Life" site because I got a suspicious pop-up when I visited the original article website. I have been warning on this website for some time that there are potential side-effects from hypnotic past-life regression, and recommending it only for therapeutic purposes under the guidance of an experienced therapist, or for legitimate research purposes. One of the dangers I've warned against is "past-life bleedthrough". Based on such instances, the Israeli government has gone to the extreme of banning the practice altogether, ignoring the many instances of impressive cures. The fight has just begun. I'm sure the therapy will take place whether it is banned or not. Ultimately it will displace the mighty drug companies, when a large percentage of what is currently addressed by drugs is found to be curable through two or three sessions of past-life therapy. It's coming, folks, because it's real and it works. But there will be quite a fight, and some of that fight will be backed by special interests. I would guess they already know, though publicly they would ridicule it.
  One of the main professional organizations for past-life therapy is the IARRT, International Association for Regression Research and Therapies. If reincarnation were accepted as being real, and past-life therapy were accepted as being valid, such issues should logically be handled by the field's own professional association, rather than banning the entire practice.

• An interview with Victor Zammit, who, as an attorney, applies the legal standard to the afterlife and paranormal phenomena. I disagree on one point, as regards the relationship between evolution and reincarnation. For a detailed explanation of the profound relationship between evolution and reincarnation, see "God Speaks" by Meher Baba.

• To give you an idea of the kind of work Victor Zammit is doing, here is a segment of a video featuring laboratory studies of OBE's, or out-of-body experiences taken from one of his weekly newsletters. The experiments were successful and repeatable. (I did not feature the topic of OBE's in "In Another Life" because I was concerned that there might be a certain number of casualties from young people trying to induce them.) Victor takes a hard line on empiricism, and makes a distinction between what he calls "objective authority" and "subjective authority". This website is ultimately based on subjective authority, and secondarily on objective authority. Actually, Victor's website is based to a significant degree on the guidance of Silver Birch, a person on the astral plane currently non-incarnated. Mine is based on the teachings of Meher Baba, who taught from direct, first-hand knowledge about my primary topic, reincarnation. Christians base their understanding on the teachings of Jesus, who also taught from direct, first-hand knowledge--except, that some portion of that teaching has been watered down and distorted over 2,000 years. So there are really two directions that the information is coming from, on both this website and on Victor's: from empirical studies, and from advanced teachers with direct knowledge. I don't think the argument is correctly framed as "objective" vs. "subjective" authority. As I wrote to Victor some time back, how does his wife know he loves her--through objective proof, or through subjective proof? Therefore, is subjective reality any less real for being subjective? Ultimately, reality turns out to be beyond both subjectivity and objectivity. In short, it's not because something is "out there" that it is real. Nor is anything "in here" necessarily unreal. This dichotomy is, itself, a remnant of the materialistic paradigm. Reality bears the stamp of reality whether it is objective or subjective, "out there" or "in here". Truth and falsehood are not a function of objectivity and subjectivity--they are a function of the degree to which Truth is manifested or not so much manifested. This is precisely why a person who is not manifesting Truth inwardly can take strong objective scientific evidence like Tart's experiment, and distort it. If it were not so, such a person would immediately be convinced. It is because that person does not experience subjective truth that he cannot make use of objective truth. The person who is consciously aligned with subjective truth can immediately recognize and respond to objective truth.

• U2 lead singer Bono is compared with Beethoven. I had read someone making this comparison in reincarnationist circles some time ago, but hadn't followed up on it because I wasn't very familiar with U2's music. Awhile back, however, I watched a 3D IMAX movie of U2 in concert (see excerpts). Very powerful, and it reminded me of the proposed reincarnation match, so with the memory of Bono's personality fresh in my mind, I compared photos. It looks to me as good a match as the ones I've studied which have historical verification, which, of course, we don't have here. It struck me that the musical phrasing on a couple of U2's songs is, indeed, reminiscent of what I remember from Beethoven's Ninth, and it has a very similar energy embedded in it. And I can well-believe that Bono and Beethoven had a similar force of personality (based on seeing Bono perform from about three feet away for an hour and a half in 3D--this guy is sincere and he's giving 150%). So I think it's a possible match from everything I've studied. (See also my speculation for a past-life match for Georg Frederic Handel if you haven't read it already.)
  Okay, let's try a little experiment here. Launch the "excerpts" link above. Watch the clip through the first and second samples. When you get to the third sample clip in the edited piece, whistle the theme from Beethoven's Ninth Symphony--you know the hymn, "Joyful, joyful, we adore Thee"--along with it. Works for me. Okay, Bono could have been influenced by Beethoven--but put the musical similarity, the vibes or spiritual power, the similar visage, the talent and the personality all together...

• An organized trip to Egypt for those who feel they may have lived there in a past life. Sounds crazy, doesn't it? If there's one thing I want to get across in this website, it's that the search for truth doesn't care what something looks like to anyone else; it doesn't care about popularity, or losing popularity; it doesn't care about looking foolish. It doesn't care about superficial plausibility based on societal assumptions. All the search for truth cares about is whether something is true or not. What I do know about this particular trend, is that the Omm Sety case was actually a strong one in terms of objective evidence--it was just so outlandish, on the surface of it, that nobody could take it seriously, and she, herself, was a colorful character (which in itself does not make one crazy). I also know from theory that individuals, or cultures, which pried open the natural "amnesia door" between lifetimes, will have that door remain a bit ajar in their later lifetimes, which means it is predicted on the basis of that theory that people who were involved in such practices in ancient Egypt will be more likely to have past-life memories of it now. See also the Rosicrucian Egyptian Museum in San Jose, California.

• Instead of linking to this article, I'm just going to reproduce it here to the point where I stopped reading, which is really as much as you need to read. The title is "The Quantum Theory of Reincarnation," by Roger Ebert, and it begins like this: "Is reincarnation possible from a scientific, rationalist point of view? For my purposes today I'm going to argue that it is. We will never, however, be aware of it, and indeed 'we,' as we like to think of ourselves, will be completely out of the picture. I'm going to approach the problem from the point of view of quantum mechanics--a field about which I understand almost nothing,..."
  I know--this is a little harsh. But my point is that if you respect a topic--including reincarnation or quantum mechanics--you don't write on it until you've studied it thoroughly. Would you stand up in the middle of a physics lecture and start lecturing yourself as an equal, if you had only a passing knowledge of physics? I have a master's in counseling with a minor in sociology; I've studied reincarnation in Eastern mysticism for 35 years, and I've studied the Western research for 12 years, so I approach it from that perspective. I know nothing about quantum mechanics so I never mention quantum mechanics. I'll make a radical suggestion--that nobody has any business making any pronouncements or speculations about reincarnation at all, until they have read (not skimmed, but thoroughly studied with an open mind), at a minumum, the works of Dr. Ian Stevenson and his successor Dr. Jim Tucker, Carol Bowman and Roger Woolger, along with some of the proof cases like Jenny Cockell, Bruce Kelly, Robert Snow, Jeff Keene and Angela Grubbs (see the Recommended Books section of this website).

• A cat that has been taking the same bus route on his own for four years. (Special thanks to Sarah who sent this in for the News section.) It's my understanding, from my studies, that people do not reincarnate "backwards" as animals. However, according to these sources, animals do also reincarnate on their way to eventually becoming human beings. My best guess is that this cat was a pet in an earlier life, which was taken on the bus by its owner every day. Now, because the propelling force within reincarnation is repetition, the cat wants to continue the pattern and does so even without the previous owner. Update: sadly, Casper is hit by a car...

• A review of a book entitled "Persons, Souls and Death" by David H. Lund. The whole thing is by philosphers, for philosophers, but what fascinates me is the reviewer. He sounds highly rational, but he dismisses the evidence for paranormal phenomena with a wave of his hand, as follows: "As Lund recognises, most people, and I include myself here, would think that whatever the logical possibilities allowed for by the argumentation in the first part, the claims about the paranormal examined in the second hardly deserve serious attention." This isn't rational or objective thinking at all. It's a sophisticated way of saying, "we all know it's nonsense because we've all agreed it's nonsense." The hospital patient who had a near-death experience and told her nurse that there was a blue tennis shoe on a ledge under a window on the opposite side of the hospital, had the answer to all of this reviewer's sophisticated objections. Basically, it shows you that the most sophisticated intellect can go into denial, and when it does, the result is no more sophisticated than the child who claims he didn't steal cookies from the cookie jar.

• The winner of the "irrelevant to reincarnation" category...I received this wrong number message on my answering service a couple weeks ago--which also means that the message didn't get to who it was intended for (probably a building superintendent or a wedding planner). Even though it was several hours later when I heard the message, and the situation had long resolved itself somehow, I felt vaguely responsible...some weird bit of karma left over from a past life? From what I've read, every single interaction with another human being is a result of karma from past lives, even a seemingly random mistake like this one. (Identifying name and phone number deleted.)

• Another parent explores Carol Bowman's work, after her three-year-old daughter piped up suddenly mentioning a past life. I sometimes tell people, if you dare, ask around in your circle of family, friends, acquaintences and co-workers, and I'll bet you that if they trust you enough to tell you--which is probably a function of how respectful or disrespectful you are about the topic--you'll discover at least one instance of a child relating a past-life memory. It's that common. (You'll note that this is a Catch-22--if you are disrespectful, you are not going to be told about these events, which then reinforces your belief that they don't occur. This is the answer to the skeptical argument that reincarnation cases seem to occur most often in countries that believe in reincarnation.)

• To give you an idea how common this is, here is a blog in which the writer relates a family story wherein his father, at age six, would talk about his ship, its crew, and various other specific details. Unfortunately, there was no attempt at verification.

• Comedienne Joy Behar has a past-life regression with Dr. Brian Weiss on "The View". She reports experiencing a past life in the court of Louis XIV as an observer of some kind, but remains unconvinced and sarcastic about it. Quite consistent for someone connected with the 17th Century French court. In reincarnation, you find, if you study it, that there is no free lunch. Every habit, every tendency, has a past-life history and came from somewhere. In short, it's hardly proof but it would certainly make sense. As to which came first, the chicken or the egg (i.e., did she create a symbolic past that fit with her personality, or did she remember an actual past that has shaped her personality), for that you have to study cases that have clear proof in the form of historical validation, and there are quite a few of those.

• A recent edition of the newsletter of the Atlanta Vedanta Society (pdf file). Of particular note, the first article on Girish Chandra Ghosh's wonderful relationship with the God-Realized master, Sri Ramakrishna. Such a Being as Sri Ramakrishna has no karma of his own, and thus, as a Force beyond karma, is in the unique position of being able to help others regardless of their lifestyle or situation--if only the person's heart responds. (Swami Yogeshananda, former head of the Atlanta Center, now retired, is featured in "In Another Life").

• After a long hiatus, I've begun answering questions about reincarnation again on "Allexperts.com". Here is my sample questions page.

• A writer's ruminations on how past-life memory may affect sexual preferences. My studies suggest that homosexuality is not simply a result of having been the opposite sex in a recent incarnation; I think it has to do with mental impressions of homosexual activity, in past-life situations where it was either socially acceptable, the most practical alternative, or due to some other particular circumstance (as for example being a monk or nun, a prisoner, or a sailor). The key to understanding the effects of past-life memory is to understand that it works on a type of repetition compulsion or addiction (see Meher Baba's "Discourses" for a thorough explanation, and pay particular attention to the explanation of "sanskaras"). I think that a past life as the opposite sex results in some androgenous qualities, but is not usually enough, by itself, to cause predominate sexual desire for the same sex. In any case, whether my theory is right or not, past-life memory clearly has a very strong impact on relationships, sexuality and mate selection.

• "How A Non-Believer Suddenly Believed." I'm aware that social acceptance of reincarnation is just around the corner--very quickly, the issue will be quality of information and avoiding mis-use of the concept. Two comments on this article--past-life regression is potentially dangerous. In the hippie era, we (I was a hippie) all assumed that drugs were harmless, or nearly harmless, well worth the risk. Now, people interested in reincarnation assume that hypnotic past-life regression is similarly harmless. There will be casualties. Potential dangers are both immediate, as in stumbling upon a traumatic past-life incident without a skilled therapist present, to longer-lasting problems like past-life personality/mood "bleed-through". Some large percentage of the general population won't be able to safely integrate the information. So I continue to recommend past-life regression only for the purposes of therapy, under a skilled therapist, or for legitimate research. Secondly, all my best sources say that human beings do not reincarnate backwards into animal bodies. That means that the animal portion of this writer's account was imagined by her (i.e., assumed, interpreted or extrapolated). If you use that as a yardstick, you can see the degree to which imagination can enter into these memories. Remember that some of these past-life memories have been historically verified. So imagination does not, logically, account for all of them--but it probably accounts for a good many of them. A balanced approach is needed, somewhere between wide-eyed gullible and totally cynical.

• A woman who had an abortion explores how reincarnation relates to that issue. From my studies, it's my understanding that the soul (i.e., the subtle body or body made of light and energy) generally enters the fetus at about 5 months, corresponding to the time of "quickening". After this point, abortion could, I would say, aptly be considered as killing a child. Before the soul enters the fetus, it may still be hanging around, in and out, or in some kind of connection or state of anticipation (depending on the sources you read).

• I often introduce something on this page as "not being relevant to reincarnation," and then some relevance occurs to me, which is kind of my way of showing just how relevant reincarnation is to everyday life. But this time I'm stumped... I suppose we can ask, did my warped sense of humor come from Mad Magazine, or did Mad Magazine trigger my past-life sense of humor? This tune, It's A Gas, was released on a record inside one of the magazines in 1968, and I was just reminded of it recently.

• An article in the Times of India about past-life therapy. Note that it includes a verified case.

• People of various faiths, including some who believe in reincarnation, share their thoughts about what it means to die well.

• How Science and Religion Affect Our Beliefs.

• A poll taken in the UK shows a high percentage of people in Wales believe in reincarnation.

• Past Life Memories: Reincarnation once again? is the title of this article. The author opens with, "Past-life memories and reincarnation have long been subjects of fascination but their existence may never be conclusively proven or disproven." Where do people get this idea? Do they assert it because it makes them sound credible, lest they be dismissed as flakes? It simply isn't true anymore. Nevermind whether it's politically correct or incorrect (you can see how popular I am). Let's say the truth when we are called upon to say the truth. Reincarnation has been proven many times over to both a legal standard and to a scientific standard, inasmuch as there is any such thing as "proof" in science, despite Dr. Stevenson's famous use of the phrase "suggestive of reincarnation". You may unconsciously assume that I take this strong stance in the spirit of having an ax to grind, of pushing my agenda. I take it because of my love for the truth and my dedication to the truth. If so many clear proof cases didn't exist, and someone asserted that reincarnation had been proven, I would object to that statement just as strongly.

• Former Law Enforcement Officer Does Past Life Regression in Omaha. (I recommend past-life regression only for therapeutic purposes using a qualified and experienced therapist, as there are potential dangers and side-effects.)

• Dr. K.S. Rawat conducts a seminar on reincarnation research. Dr. Rawat provided images of children who remembered past lives for the documentary this website supports, "In Another Life."

• A biased piece of skeptical propaganda against reincarnation, pretending to be rational and objective. Really, I'm not kidding. You wouldn't necessarily know it if you haven't studied the subject in depth as I have for the past 12 years. Just for starters, people having past-life memory is not rare at all (see the "personal accounts" section of this website), past-life regression has not been discredited, but rather the opposite as far as its potential to stimulate verifiable memories is concerned (see Dr. Peter Ramster's research). Past life regression is by no-means the only, or even the most common source of such memories, especially if you consider that practially all of our children appear to be trying to tell us about a past life until we shame them out of it. The Bridey Murphy case was not really debunked at all--in fact, it was the debunking which was a deliberate scam, and skeptics have repeated the scam until it "stuck" in the public mind that the case had been debunked, on the principle of whoever shouts loudly enough, for long enough, wins. When I use the word "propaganda," I do so because the misstatements are constructed in such a way that it looks like deliberate lying instead of just ignorance about the subject--as though they know full well how much of a threat the evidence for reincarnation is to their point of view, and they have to try to counter it much as a politician running for office might conduct a dirty campaign. These are not "skeptics," but cynics with an agenda, and they do not hold the high ground of rational, objective inquiry into the truth of the matter.

• An article about Jenny Cockell, who has one of the strongest known reincarnation proof cases (outside of Dr. Ian Stevenson's research). (See also the Books section of this website.)

• For those of you conversant with astrology, here are 15 possible reincarnation proof cases with comparison charts. Mine is Case #5. Although the author rates it as "probable," I would consider it "speculative" as regards objective evidence. I would consider it "probable" only based on my own knowledge of my personal patterns and how very closely they match to Matthew's patterns; and on some limited subjective past-life memory and sense of recognition. (I recently tried to verify it, but could not get cooperation from those holding his papers and effects. If that situation changes, I'll post the results on this site.) I don't know enough about astrology to evaluate the results shown here. When this author wrote me some years ago, I provided the first few cases, some of which were very solid in terms of objective evidence. He has since expanded the list. The Paul Gaugin/Peter Teekamp and the John B. Gordon/Jeff Keene cases I consider likely; I've speculated about Georg Frederic Handel and Eric Johnson (which I suggested to the author), but have no objective evidence for it, only intuition and some educated guesswork (and maybe, a faint past-life memory of living in Handel's era and being aware of him as a fellow musician--which is to say, that would make this my second life as a fan of his). Keep in mind that in that case, I am guessing there have been quite a few lifetimes in-between, so the comparison chart is not going to look like a comparison for a more recent past life. The solid cases in this list that I personally know of, in terms of objective evidence, are: James Carroll Beckwith/Robert Snow, James Edward Johnston/Bruce Kelly and Francine Donovan/Angela Grubbs. Additionally, if Roy Stemman, former editor of British journal "Reincarnation, International" says he was somebody, it should be taken seriously, though I'm not familiar with that case. Interestingly, of all 15 cases, mine was the only one that upheld "Bailey's theory" (see conclusion at bottom of page).

• Another astrologer analyzes the Bruce Kelly/James Johnston case (case #2 in the article above).

• Reincarnation: Real or Delusion? is the title of this abc News article. It's more balanced than similar articles I've posted here as recently as a couple of years ago. Usually, the bigger the news source, the more cynical the reporting. I've noticed, however, that reporters who actually undergo a past-life regression, as a whole, write less cynically than those who don't. Of course, objective students of reincarnation do take into account factors such as cryptomnesia and confirmation bias (see the "Lighter Side" link on my home page for humor built on an intentional exaggeration of confirmation bias). Another very common factor, where past-life regression is concerned, is too-rapid hypnotic induction which leaves the person not actually hypnotized, but still encouraged to use their imagination. However, there are also many cases with very clear historical validation, such as the Cockell case mentioned in the article (several others are presented or linked to in this website). Such validation means that past-life memories can, in a certain percentage of cases, be real memories. Logically, as psychologist William James pointed out with his "white crow" analogy, it only takes one and the entire materialistic paradigm is set on its ear. That question is no-longer up for grabs, but that is precisely the question that skeptics are still attempting to debate. It simply isn't rational, which is why people like myself and Victor Zammit have been pointing out for years that the skeptics do not, actually, hold the high ground of rationality in this business. Note the subtitle of the article: "Though Many Believe in the Existence of the Past Life, Experts Urge Caution." This statement is biased. Know how? It's inherently paradoxical because the "experts" they are referring to are not really experts. They are "experts," alright, in certain realms of knowledge, but they are not "experts" in this field. When you examine this more closely, you see that there is a "brain drain" of skeptical experts. The experts who study reincarnation carefully and who are unbiased, become believers because it's a real phenomenon. The "experts" who are left, by-and-large, either have not studied it carefully or are biased. Therefore this statement is bogus (or at best, based on belief and emotion).

• A new website dedicated to media about Meher Baba, including photographs, video, music and audio books. The video includes a portion of a documentary by Tim Thelen which includes teachings on reincarnation, and there is also a newsreel from 1932; the audio books are narrated by Don Stevens, who originally edited them for Meher Baba (I audio-edited these narrations and proofread them very carefully, so they are accurate). These books are also available in printed form online (see below).

• Several of Meher Baba's written works have recently been published online. "God Speaks," which lays out the entire circular theme of creation, evolution and the involution of consciousness, also explains how integral reincarnation is to this process, and thus ties it in with its deeper meaning. "Discourses" includes several chapters on "Reincarnation and Karma." "Listen, Humanity" contains a jewel of a discourse opening Part II called "Death and Immortality" which, in my opinion, is the single finest source on the subject of death.

• The first third of a new (as of 5/09) introductory film about Meher Baba.

• "God in Human Form," another online film about Meher Baba.

• A Malaysian doctor considers the pros and cons of past-life therapy. He expresses a few inaccuracies born of skepticism. In particular, there are too many strongly verified cases involving adults regressed by hypnotic and non-hypnotic methods, as part of past-life therapy or research, to ignore. Dr. Peter Ramster's research provides strong evidence and was carefully conducted. Similar results have been obtained using the non-hypnotic, association-based method pioneered by Dr. Morris Netherton and carried forward by Dr. Roger Woolger. However, these points aside, in a Buddhist country, you see that past-life therapy is at least being openly-acknowledged, along with its benefits and potential drawbacks (I am one of the few people you will see discussing its drawbacks and dangers, but this, also, will eventually become a hot topic of debate). It suggests to me that the Christian countries will follow suit later on, and that we are seeing the very beginnings of a movement that will sweep the practice and understanding of psychotherapy.

• Country singer Reba MacEntire goes public with her belief in reincarnation. What's interesting is not that she believes it, but that she is risking losing the Christian portion of her fan base by admitting it. It may be a bigger risk than she realizes. It's also an indication that the old order is cracking and the change is in full swing. Basically, Christians will now have to wake up to the fact that what they have been accepting is a watered-down version of Christianity, originally forced upon Christians by the State in earlier centuries; and that reincarnation was an integral part of what Jesus originally taught, that had erroneously been banned as "anathema".

• This is a program about near-death hell experiences. It's from a Christian perspective. I've watched through the first account, and it's deeply moving. Even though I disagree with traditional Christian doctrine on some points, I believe in recognizing truth where you find it. In my opinion, many of the things that traditional Christians teach are true if you regard them as principles (because Jesus taught in universal principles). In the reincarnationist view, a person can enter a hell(ish) state in-between incarnations. Whatever is in the heart becomes the environment, as I understand it. So although traditional Christians may make the whole thing seem to hinge on conversion to their particular religion (either sign up or you're doomed), which I don't believe, they are trying to warn people about something that's quite real. Hell is not "eternal"--the theological implications of that doctrine are really monstrous if you extend them out. However, it certainly must feel eternal, which is basically the same thing as far as being warned is concerned. Rumi said that the sufferings we experience here on earth are as a "sport and a pastime" compared with the hell state in the afterlife. It's a pity that people feel they have only the two choices, either buy the entire fundamentalist package, or else "live for today". Because it has encouraged a lot of people to do the latter. You know the most popular excuse for hedonism: "We only go around once." Show me anything in nature that only goes around once...

• A documentary entitled "Coming Back: Reincarnation" has been posted (with or without permission) on Google Video. I've known about it for years and considered it one of my own film's "competitors". They were able to do quite a few of the things I wasn't able to do, either for lack of funding, cooperation or copyright permission, such as a host who follows through the entire film, recognizable stars, genuine cases in hypnotic sessions, and so-on. My program ended up with its own strengths, however, and the limitations I worked under actually drove me toward those things. I don't feel competitive about it anymore; I see "Coming Back: Reincarnation" as a good contribution.

• In this British survey of Roman Catholics, 38 percent report believing in reincarnation. The writer goes on to add "even though it has never been part of the church's teaching". This simply isn't true--in fact, Pope Vigilius actually boycotted the meeting, called by Emperor Justinian, in which Origen's teaching of the pre-existence of the soul (which teaching includes reincarnation) was declared "anathema". The article itself is written from a muddled perspective and would require yet another article to sort out its various assumptions. Just as an example, reincarnation is not a "tenet" of Hinduism--it is a fact that Hinduism recognizes, and that the Christian Church used to recognize. A second "muddle" concerns hell--from a reincarnationist perspective, there is a hell(ish) state through which people may pass in-between incarnations, if they have lived in a certain manner against their conscience. (This is commonly understood by people who study reincarnation in depth, so if that 38% of Catholics who accept reincarnation study deeply enough, they will find that the error was thinking that hell was a physical place you are sent to for eternity.) So the article attempts to paint a picture of Catholicism weakening, and cites belief in reincarnation as an example, when actually it may be that people are seeking a purer Catholicism. In that purer Catholicism, Catholics may choose, along with Pope Vigilius, to "boycott" the political move of Emperor Justinian, who tried to make the teachings of one of the great Church Fathers "anathema".

• A documentary about Australian psychologist Dr. Peter Ramster's work in hypnotically regressing four subjects and then bringing them to the location they remembered, carefully researching and filming each step in the process. The film is broken into 11 segments on YouTube.com. I doubt it's posted with permission so I don't know how long it will be there, but it's important work that most people won't have the opportunity to see otherwise, so I've decided to link to it for as long as it's available (with apologies to Dr. Ramster). Thanks to Jeff Keene for bringing this to my attention.

• Also on YouTube.com, someone has posted the "Proof Positive" episode about Capt. Robert Snow. See also the telephone interview with Capt. Snow on the "Interviews" page of this website.

• A brief video of a reincarnation case reminiscent of those studied by the late Dr. Ian Stevenson and colleagues on YouTube.

• An interview with Dr. Jim Tucker, successor to Dr. Ian Stevenson. See also the video interview with him on the "Interviews" page of this website.

• An article reacting to a half-baked interpretation of reincarnation and karma, in which the interviewee fell neatly into the trap of agreeing that the Jews in WWII Germany deserved the Holocaust or brought it on themselves with negative thinking. This really requires a separate article to comment on, but first of all, I have been stressing in this website for a long time that the subject of karma is much more complex than reincarnation. In a sense the answer is no, of course not; in a sense the answer is yes, what else could it be (i.e., not "negative thinking" in this life but negative actions in past lives); and in a sense the answer is something more profound than either at the level the question is asked. Basically, as I personally understand the matter, you can't suffer unless you created it in past lives. Period. Look back at history--all the torture, all the cruelty, all the ignorance, all the arrogance. Who was it? It was us, in past lives. Pogo the cartoon character said, "We have met the enemy, and he is us." All of us. No exceptions. We have all--pardon my slang--been assholes. Then, there are mitigating factors as to when, how, and how much of this unbearable load comes back on us. Those factors get very complex, and they involve things like whether you are stuck in a feedback loop, whether you are learning your karmic lessons or refusing to acknowledge them, whether you are avoiding your shadow or working to transmute it, whether you are hopelessly entrenched in redefining your weaknesses as virtues, how many lifetimes these things have gone on for you, and much more. For the record, I find the idea that any group or any individual brings unbearable suffering on himself by attracting it with "negative thinking" to be absurd and insensitive. For one thing, if that were really the case, we all would be walking around terrified of inadvertently thinking of "three green frogs". For another thing, those people caught in the Holocaust ran the gamut of personalities, so it doesn't make sense.
  

• The writer of this article underwent a past-life regression, and had a profound experience. You will note his tone is not skeptical.

• A woman writes, describing her past-life memory experience as it relates to a relationship attachment.

• This article, which is basically a kind of blog, muses about reincarnation believers and reincarnation. It's mis-informed, but it does bring up some of the ways that the concept of reincarnation is misused. It is not accurate as regards the attitudes of people who have studied the subject in depth.

• What if Reincarnation is Real? An article bringing scientific thinking to bear on the question of reincarnation. My intuitive reaction is that it's still somehow reductionistic, but I can't put my finger on it. My sense is that this is what happens when science is forced to admit that the evidence is overwhelmingly for reincarnation; as that realization dawns, science will have to regroup and do "damage control". I could be entirely wrong, but that's my gut sense. Bottom line, unless one gets from the reality of reincarnation that man is a spiritual being having a physical experience, one has missed the point. One has to flip-flop the entire materialistic paradigm. Anyone who is forced to admit the evidence and yet resists that turnover, still hasn't quite gotten it. It will be found, I believe, that genetics is the tool of the incoming mind. The incoming mind, guided by its past impressions, chooses (or is drawn to) the new parents with their genetic material, and then guides that genetic material in the growth of the embryo. Otherwise, it would not be possible for someone like Jeff Keene to be an almost exact physical duplicate of his past-life match, and still have absolutely no known genetic link to the past-life person's family tree. Dr. Stevenson's birthmark studies point in the same direction.

• An article in Newsweek on reincarnation which is mostly notable because it's in Newsweek. People who are skeptical and approaching the subject superficially seem only able to be aware of what confirms their perspective. Without dismantling the entire article, I'll point out two obvious errors in skewed reporting, one of commission and one of omission. First, Kaballah is not a "new-age movement". It is an ancient tradition being passed down through generations, a result of the hard-won insights of brilliant, deeply intuitive men of the past. It has been newly-discovered and has become popular as a result of the current hunger for deeper knowledge, because of the spiritual poverty of our current materialistic culture. Secondly, Carol Bowman is briefly mentioned as a therapist. Actually, she has become a therapist relatively recently. For years before, she was, and remains, an author and researcher, extending the findings of Dr. Ian Stevenson and colleagues into the Western world, popularizing them, and acting as an advocate for parents and children who remember past lives. She has presented a number of stunning proof cases, one of which you can find (on James Leininger) in the Articles page of this website. For the writer not to mention these things was tantamount to artificially weakening the case for reincarnation.

• "Janne, Beyond Life," a free downloadable book by the parents of a young lady who died after being struck by a car, and then contacted them from the other side. I've read it, and if you've lost a child (I have), read this book. If you haven't lost a child, read this book.

• Retired attorney Victor Zammit, an Australian, who is bent on showing that the evidence for the afterlife is plenty strong enough to meet the legal standard of proof, has been kicking it into high gear with a series of video presentations. Here is one entitled "The Afterlife on Trial."

• A report of a rigorous scientific study on mediumship conducted at the University Arizona (link courtesy of Victor Zammit).

• Yet another link courtesy of Mr. Zammit. This paper is entitled "Pathological Disbelief" by Brian D. Josephson of Cambridge University (pdf file). See also my Update of 8/2/06, which, based on my website stats, seems to be getting quite a few direct hits lately on its own.

• A child in India may be the reincarnation of Indian astronaut Kalpana Chawla, who died in the space shuttle Columbia.

• A cynical article from India on reincarnation, citing a couple of recent cases in the popular press (one of which is linked to, above). Note that 66% of the readers who answered the poll disagree. There are three serious errors in the logic of the presentation. First, the statement that there is "no scientific basis" is simply false. Such a statement is often cited by skeptics as though it is true by mutual agreement--if they repeat it often enough amongst themselves, they can believe in it (sounds like some other belief systems, doesn't it?). Secondly, the author indulges in the logical error of "straw man", which is, purposely citing weak examples and inferring that they represent all cases. Another logical error is to group reincarnation in with several other unrelated topics, damning by association. Lastly, if you look at the people posting responses, the "pro" responders sound more intelligent, generally, than the "con" responders. If the premise of the article were true, that reincarnation is a superstition, it should be the reverse--the "con" responders should generally sound more intelligent.

• A review of a Christian cautionary book entitled The Deceived. The error lies in blanket condemnation, which is based on black-and-white, dogmatic thinking. However, the author is not entirely incorrect, inasmuch as there is plenty of room for imagination, deception and misuse of the concept of reincarnation. Quite a few cases have come across my desk over the years that I've had a public presence, where people have gotten into trouble with a misapplication of reincarnation principles. For example, people can become obsessed with their past life; they can enter into and justify extra-marital affairs based on the concept; they can have persistent, lingering negative feelings or impressions from a past life, when that door is opened via hypnosis. They can also get a "big head" about who they mistakenly believe they were in a past life; they can make an inappropriate career move based on something they mistakenly believe they did in a past life. The list goes on. It is absolutely necessary, in my opinion, for the truth about reincarnation to come out; but it is not something to take lightly. In contrast to our Christian, above, this writer takes the opposite position. He views exploration of past lives as a completely harmless panacea for all ills. Some of what he says I know to be misleading. For example, any beginning student of the afterlife knows that there are unpleasant realms and entities in the astral world, and that one must know how to protect oneself and not tinker with things one doesn't understand. These two extreme views--that reincarnation exploration is entirely false and dangerous, or that it is entirely harmless and beneficial--are both erroneous. (For the record, in this website I am concerned about a correct understanding of reincarnation, rather than exploration of past lives; I recommend exploration, per se, only in a therapeutic context with a well-qualified practitioner.)

• The famous Reader's Digest study in which realistic-looking wallets with $50 in them were strategically placed where they could be found. This study has received far less attention than it deserves. If it suggests, as I believe it does, that a huge percentage of people will look after "number one" when they believe no-one is looking, this explains a great deal about society and its struggles. If this phenomenon cuts across all organizations and institutions, suddenly a number of enigmas become much clearer. It explains, for one thing, why reincarnation has been proven but mainstream academia continues to ignore it--i.e., experts do not want to admit they have been wrong, and that everything they have ever published has been wrong, and thus lose their status and position. Therefore this same percentage of academicians and scientists, who by the very nature of their work are supposed to be torchbearers in the quest for truth, are prepared to lie. By the way, be careful about mentioning this study to your friends and acquaintences. Some of them will be outraged--but some of them may surprise you by not being particularly impressed.

• A new mystery novel incorporating reincarnation concepts.

• A study reported in Scientific American which reports that past-life regression subjects were more likely to commit a "source monitoring error" in remembering. Dr. Jim Tucker, successor to Dr. Ian Stevenson, responds suggesting that it was a poorly-designed study, because of potential selection process issues inherent in those who seek out past-life therapy and are hypnotizable. (See Dr. Tucker's complete comments as given to the reporter.) I have two comments of my own on this one. First of all, there is, in my opinion, a lot of imagination going on in past-life therapy taken as a whole. I videotaped four hypnotic past-life sessions for my documentary, "In Another Life," and I was not convinced that any of them were genuine instances of past-life memory; for that matter, in three of the four, I was not convinced that the subject went under hypnosis at all. So such a study should only include, in my opinion, people like Bruce Kelly, Capt. Robert Snow and Angela Grubbs (a corporate executive, the head of homocide investigation for the City of Indianapolis, and an attorney, respectively), whose past-life memories were historically verified. That immediately cuts out the issue of whether the subjects were having real memories or not, anyway. There are enough of these cases that that issue is a moot point. If Scientific American thinks it is impacting the issue of whether the memories can sometimes be real via this study, then they are committing a gross intellectual error in not taking into account and respecting the obvious validity of the historically verified cases. Not an error, actually, it goes further, to the use of psychological denial on their part. My second thought is that mainstream science must be running scared if they include a study about this phenomenon in Scientific American at all, photo of Napoleon notwithstanding.

• A story about the reincarnation of a Tibetan spiritual master.

• Actress Cameron Diaz's thoughts on reincarnation. The article title seems wholly inappropriate, suggesting that the editor who titled it completely missed the point that this soul has had the experience of fame and would prefer to pass on it next time.

• Another case in which a child is recognized as a reincarnation of a former Tibetan master and taken from his parents. I'm going to stick my neck out to suggest that the purpose of reincarnation is to provide varied experience; and one of the primary bases of Buddhism is non-attachment. So it may go contrary to both the underlying purpose of reincarnation, and Buddha's teachings, to try to make a soul repeat his former occupation, even if that occupation is that of a spiritual teacher with a high position in an organized religion. In short, this may sometimes be a misuse of reincarnation understanding. It could be, for example, that being an accountant in New York City would further this soul's spiritual growth more than repeating the life as a Tibetan spiritual teacher.

• The website for PBS's Antiques Road Show. Sometimes you have those little insights, and it just occurred to me that, from the point of view of consciousness, each one of us is a walking "Antiques Road Show". We carry around with us so many lives from the past, which are part of our daily life but which we hardly notice or appreciate. And then buried beneath those is what Jesus called the "Pearl of great price," the real Self, so valuable that sacrificing all those lives would be no sacrifice at all; but we're unaware of it.

• A new book with a reincarnation theme entitled "The Road Back to Heaven" by Linda Lewis.

• A British woman from Bath begins "babbling in French for weeks," and it is attributed to a rare brain disorder which can be brought on by stress. Having found a shorter article, I had thought this could be a case of "xenoglossy" brought on by the emergence of past-life memories, perhaps triggered by changes in the brain. However, when I passed the article on to Dr. Jim Tucker, he sent me this one, which states that the woman lived in France. So there is no proof of reincarnation here. From my perspective I would continue to suspect past-life French influence, because that's the most likely source for an obsession with any locale or culture. Apparently, when the brain or brain function is altered, it is more likely that past-life memories will bleed through. This is true in hypnosis, LSD intoxication, and apparently in certain types of brain illnesses. I don't believe it's logical that a brain disease could act, as the sole agent, in so specific a manner as to cause a person to adopt the particular delusion that they are from another country. But for proof of xenoglossy, one will have to go to the literature. A few unproven examples are also included among the personal accounts on this website.

• The skeptical viewpoint of the ongoing debate on Darwinian evolution vs. intelligent design. Comments

• This fascinating article suggests to me what can happen when my work is successful--when I, and others attempting the same kind of work, manage to convince an atheistic skeptic of reincarnation. Note that he pricks the balloon of irrational fundamentalist beliefs--as I do--and takes the work of Dr. Ian Stevenson seriously--as I do. But he also advocates torture, apparently, suggesting that it works and it is a small price compared with the deaths of large numbers of people in war. Well, justifying things like this is a very tricky business. I think that morality is in the smallest act as well as in the biggest. It is a "holographic" model of morality--the whole is contained in each of the parts. If each part of your life is moral, then your life will be moral. How you treat a store clerk on Friday is as important, in this sense, as how you administer your corporation. Besides, if one believes in reincarnation, one then very quickly encounters the idea of karma. I am not sure I'd want the karma of torturing someone to come back around, which it will if my motives are not 100% pure. (Fooling yourself with regard to your motives does not impress karmic law.) Remember when we talk about reincarnation, we are talking about something that has now been scientifically proven to exist. If the sages were right about reincarnation, it follows they were probably right about karma also.

• A new book entitled Renaissance II which explores the history of early Christianity and reincarnation. (See also the Links section of this website for more information on this subject.)

• A little reincarnation humor...the "PPPPPhd." We reincarnationists can take a little ribbing...but the reality is, whenever a student shows natural ability, this didn't come out of thin air, and it's not (solely) due to "genes" (modern society's equivalent to "the gods")--it's due to abilities brought forward from past lives.

• Exiled Chinese poet Huang Xiang includes frequent references to reincarnation in his oceanic poetry.

• Daredevil stuntman Evel Knievel, looking back on his life and thinking about ultimate matters, "wishes there were such a thing as reincarnation." (No comment)

• A magnificent essay in Jason Stern's "Esteemed Reader" column for Chronogram.com exploring the deeper issues around being a "revolutionary." (see also the page on this website about compassion and karma)

• Rock guitarist, Pete Townshend of The Who, believes he may have been a Sufi mystic in a past life. The reporting is a little bit askew in this article, inasmuch as Townshend did not physically meet Meher Baba, but he continues to be a follower (see the Meher Baba Film Archive International website, which includes a preview of his film about Meher Baba, "O Parvardigar").

• A Canadian television series in which people were hypnotically regressed, and then the memories were investigated. Keep in mind that a handful of these hypnotic regression cases have been solidly proven, in my opinion, at least to a legal standard, i.e. "beyond a reasonable doubt." See the "submarine man" case, Capt. Robert Snow's case, or the work of psychologist Peter Ramster in the Articles page, Cases page, and Recommended Books page of this website.

• An interview with Dr. Jim Tucker, successor to Dr. Ian Stevenson at the University of Virginia, who investigates reincarnation cases.

• A woman feels she has found the reincarnation of her cat.
  

• A mother describes her son's reincarnation case.

• Catholic theologians consider getting rid of the concept of "limbo." This is the mess that resulted from the political intrigue that made Origen's teachings about the pre-existence of the soul anathema in 553 AD, at the urging of then-emperor Justinian, against the protests of then-pope Vigilus, resulting in reincarnation being banned as a heresy. I am having trouble commenting on this without being disparaging. These people have used the beauty of Jesus's teachings to convince grieving parents for hundreds of years that their unbaptized babies are hanging for eternity in some blah existence, and now a group of theologians are going to change the policy--and presto-chango, all the babies from now on (and all the babies of hundreds of years in the past, if the policy is made retroactive, I suppose) will graduate into heaven. Is this fair? Do the theologians imagine they have this kind of power? Isn't anybody questioning this nonsense? Would a loving, all-powerful God allow these theologians to decide such a thing--not only for Catholics, but for everybody else? Or, if the Catholic church made a mistake and they are admitting it, what happened to the dogma that the Catholic church is infallible? If it is infallible, could it have been wrong about reincarnation? Wouldn't anybody like to know about what really happens? Does anybody doubt the kind of suffering that clinging to mistaken dogma can cause? So the result is that people lose yet more respect for the teachings of Jesus, associating this stuff with him, when he actually taught with an understanding of reincarnation.

• A new age interpretation of reincarnation, citing the popular concept of "parallel lives." This idea draws on the teaching that everything is happening in the Eternal Present, something taught by some of the genuine spiritual masters (as listed on the Links page). However, while it is correct in a sense, I think it is off in the sense that you, as a 16th century merchant, are obviously not currently alive in some other dimension. That's why they call it the past, you know? Because while you can relive the impressions of that life, you can't go back in time and change it (all the time-travel movies we've watched notwithstanding). So this teaching must mean something else. The problem is that in the state beyond time, where everything is in the Eternal Present, nothing is happening. It is a state beyond "things happening." It is also a state beyond "things," period. Further, there are not separate individuals in that state. Therefore, this concept attempts to intellectually imagine a state beyond time, but it conveniently neglects to move beyond a state of individual people. What this means--and you can't intellectually grasp the whole truth, but I think this is closer to the truth--is that each of our lives on the planet is, right now, one of the parallel lives. Somewhere, there is someone right now being the merchant. Right now, there is someone being the rich man, and the poor man, and so-on. The roles keep trading off, but all the roles are going on all the time, like a huge game of musical chairs (represented in Hinduism, I believe, by the Dance of Shiva). Each of these is "Us." Even on this plane of existence it is all happening right now, but we experience it in a fragmented way--fragmented into linear time, and also fragmented into separate, individual selves. The master who has reached the highest state of consciousness, however, experiences the true Self simultaneously in all these supposedly individual selves (note it is Shiva's dance, not my dance). So you, the reader, are one of Our "parallel lives," and so-on. This is still not the whole truth of the matter, but I think the idea of parallel lives is somewhat misleading and I want to put in my two cents to question it, while so many reincarnationists are accepting it as reincarnation dogma. I get a sense that it's potentially troublesome for the future. Certainly, it makes the general public shy away from reincarnation as nonsense, just as the idea of incarnating backwards into animal bodies does, because intuitively it just doesn't make sense. We all know people can't go back to being animals; and we all know that the past isn't alive and can't be changed. So, whatever other problems these kinds of teachings may lead to in the future, they have the immediate effect of decreasing the overall credibility of reincarnation, as a concept, in the general population. Further comments

• An Indian article [POP-UP WARNING ON THIS LINK] about one of Dr. Walter Semkiw's reincarnation cases, written in a skeptical tone. My reaction to Dr. Semkiw's work is mixed. I like and admire him personally, and appreciate that he gave me 15 minutes to speak at one of his presentations (thanks in part to my friend Jeff Keene also being on the bill). I think he's sincere, and I think his major premise, that it is possible to identify famous people in recent history who have reincarnated and who often show similar personal traits and facial features, is correct. His methods concern me because he has the authority of being a medical doctor and he claims that they are scientific, but in my opinion they fall short of a scientific standard. For that matter, most of the time they fall short of even the legal standard of proof, i.e. "beyond a reasonable doubt." Still, some portion of the cases are genuine, in my opinion. More troubling is his reliance on one medium to confirm his findings. I had the opportunity to see that medium in action at the presentation where I spoke, and I thought he was acting. He supposedly channeled two spirit entities, but used the same idiosyncratic mannerism in both personalities, which was a strong indication of fraud in my opinion. Using mediums is not necessarily a bad idea--but one would need to use several of them under controlled conditions, and then compare their responses. They would have to be given less information in advance. You can't just approach one medium, present a proposed match, get their official stamp of approval on it, and call that science. So the good news is that Dr. Semkiw is creating public awareness of reincarnation case comparison. The bad news is that he is inadvertently tempting the public to ridicule it even further, especially if it is ever shown publicly that, as I suspect, the one medium he relies on (made famous by his association with actress Shirley Maclaine) is fraudulent. How will the public ever get past a knee-jerk, black-or-white reaction to reincarnation? Maybe this is part of the protective function of the universe. People who aren't ready for reincarnation come across pseudo-science and reject the whole idea out-of-hand. People who are ready for reincarnation encounter pseudo-science and say to themselves, "That's a little fishy but something about it is intriguing--I wonder what else there is being done in that field?" And then they look into it a little more and find Dr. Jim Tucker or Carol Bowman. Meanwhile, the people who weren't ready for it are left (safely) ridiculing Dr. Semkiw's work, when there are actually some genuine matches and some valid ideas in it. Famous person cases are comparatively easy to find, so Semkiw can find quite a few of them, and out of such a large number, patterns and principles emerge. His observation that one can compare facial architecture, personality traits, abilities, and life-course are, in my opinion, correct, and it's actually a significant contribution. It's not completely invalid science, it's just extremely sloppy science (I would encourage him to tighten it up by combining Dr. Gary Schwartz's methods of working with several proven mediums under controlled conditions, plus Dr. Ian Stevenson's methods of insisting on documented and verified past-life memories). It's going to take a balanced approach to come to grips with it adequately, but very few people are willing to approach it in this way so far.

• A brief essay on the Buddhist perspective on reincarnation. Comments.

• A rather dramatic movie made for LMN.tv, entitled "Past Tense." In a way it's a shame that past-life therapy has to be overly-dramatized and sensationalized in order to break into the popular consciousness, but I suppose it's a start. The trailer seems to suggest that, like a ghost who hangs around to right some wrong, the girl had to reincarnate to set things right, which is, well, true in a way, but since everybody reincarnates to get things right, it's a bit misleading. I'm curious as to whether it has a trick ending like "Birth" which negates the reality of the reincarnation premise.

• An article on rebirthing. An interviewee in "In Another Life" describes a past-life memory experience which occurred during a rebirthing session, which apparently is not unusual. Dr. Roger Woolger explains that past-life traumas create a knot of unresolved emotions which in turn creates a pattern that can manifest in the birth experience, in childhood experiences, and in adulthood as phobias and other psychological problems. In short, these are all part of a whole and are not mutually exclusive. Note the sad report of misuse of rebirthing techniques, and the legal overreaction. The same types of issues may surface in past-life therapy, and the same kind of overreaction may prevail for awhile.

• Oriundi, Anthoni Quinn's last film, about reincarnation. Similar to "Birth," "Oriundi" builds up a conviction that a lost love has returned through reincarnation, only to undo that conviction with a trick ending. I have watched a screening copy of the film (my distributor lent it to me), and I thought it was extremely well shot, directed and acted, despite my copy being very badly reproduced. The film appears to be languishing in no-man's land--a film set in Brazil, in Italian, with English subtitles about reincarnation, and the producers can't even send out a copy that doesn't freeze throughout playback, or bother to write back to the distributor who has an interest in it. A thousand obstacles appear in any effort to bring ideas about reincarnation to the public, apparently.

• A five-year-old who is physiologically male, but since she could talk has said she feels she is a girl. Given all of the data we have about reincarnation and past-life memory, this is almost certainly a past-life recall issue, the etiology of which modern materialistic science is completely ignoring.

• Although discussing them is discouraged even in grief support groups, people are beginning to acknowledge that at least some signs from people who have passed on may be actual phenomena and not just coincidence. Note the Afterlife Discussion Groups and Sign Registry, and the Forever Family Foundation radio program. (Note that the Sign Registry requires a fee to participate.)

• A brief exposition on the true nature of death, as carried by the Nassau Guardian.

• "Miss Witherspoon," a theatrical comedy with a reincarnation theme playing at ACT Theatre in Seattle. Although the metaphysics are a tad off-the-beam when the main character reincarnates as a dog, basically it sounds like the playwright had some knowledge of the subject and treated it respectfully.

• A 20-month old prodigy drummer. We are entering an age when people who lived in the 1960's and 70's, and then passed on, are starting to reincarnate. I predict we're going to see more child prodigies with advanced skills in areas specifically related to modern life. Here's another video of prodigy Tony Royster, Jr., who was 12 years old at the time this was filmed. I'm not a drummer, but when I say this is good, I mean this is one of the best, and most mature, drum solos I've ever heard. Here's another link to it in case the first one goes offline.

• Skeptical mainstream article about Near-Death Experience (NDE) research, "The Science of Near-Death Experiences." See my article on Reductionism on the Articles page of this website. The entire study, its guiding hypothesis and its interpretation, are based on the erroneous assumption that wakefulness, sleep, dreaming, and consciousness itself are solely biological phenomena. It's circular--once that assumption is made, the interpretation of the results can never transcend it. In effect, near-death experiences are interpreted as being caused by biology, because consciousness itself is interpreted as being caused by biology--and this is a belief. There are no solid philosophical grounds for this assumption. It's a paradox, because if the mind is purely a biological phenomenon, then no intellectual theories or conclusions beyond physical observations and measurements have any substance or reality. Therefore, the intellectual theories and conclusions of science (including these theories and conclusions about near-death experiences) would have no value. What began in science as a decision to study only those things that can be measured physically (while respectfully leaving non-physical realities to philosophy and religion), has gradually been distorted into a belief (an irrational belief) that only the physical exists to be studied, combined with derision for anyone who believes in non-physical realities.(To see just how irrational it can get, see the next item.)

• A moderately skeptical popular article about reincarnation, entitled "Do you think that it's possible that we've lived before?" See also my response to him (unanswered to date).

• Higher Education Fuels Stronger Belief in Ghosts.This strongly skeptical article expresses concern that higher education increases a belief in "...haunted houses, psychics, telepathy, channeling and a host of other questionable ideas" (this was supposed to be a straight news story by the science editor). In their poll, however, the movement from the 2001 poll to the recent poll indicates a drop in belief in reincarnation from 25% to 14% (the most recent Gallop poll for the general population I have seen went from 25% to 21%--though a Harris Poll taken in 2003 cited 27%). Almost all the movement went from the "believe" category to the "not sure" category. A possible interpretation is that we are in the middle of a movement from a naive acceptance of reincarnation as an uncritically examined belief, through a state of uncertainty, toward a mature acceptance of reincarnation as a phenomenon. We will see. Higher education, at least what I experienced of it in college, is heavily skewed towards materialism, with the occasional exception. There is a war raging for the minds of students in colleges today. Students who have had class after class of reductionistic explanations, may yet run into information like "In Another Life" in a philosophy, religion or psychology class.

• Another reporter undergoes past-life regression, having an experience of a past life of an obscure person, which she was unable to verify historically with a brief internet search. However, in this case the regressionist was also a psychic, and in the psychic reading which followed he made a number of strong "hits" on specific information he had no normal way of knowing (which is what genuine psychics are capable of doing, and what separates them from the charlatans).

• A reporter undergoes a past-life hypnotic regression, has a vivid, emotional experience, and finds at least one possible historical verification, but remains personally unconvinced of reincarnation because she has had experience with the country and culture of the memory in her current life. Note that it would be typical to have some recapitulation of the previous life in the shape of a phase or contact in one's present life. The interpretation that this contact caused the past-life memories is a reductionistic one (see article on Reductionism in the Articles page). This was also the rationale used by skeptics to dismiss the famous "Bridey Murphy" case. The headline of this article puts quotes around the phrase "past lives". When journalists can do without these tiny marks, we will know we've taken a huge step forward.

• Boxing champion Johnny Nelson undergoes a hypnotic past-life regression for British television show "Inside Out."

• The holographic model of reality. Link courtesy of Victor Zammit's site, an excellent source for information on afterlife research and evidence.

• A wish to die well--story of Stephen Keale.

• Here is a British article about reincarnation, primarily focusing on Dr. Stevenson's work. The skeptics--and journalists always must quote a skeptic--continue to drag out the same tired argument that it would be possible to find matches for the child's statements in any city. This is nonsense. Why? Because, just for starters, the child will name the town where they lived in the past life. Then without any assistance they will locate the house, give people's names, and describe details, including intimate details. These kinds of specific details--20, or 30, or 40--simply do not exist in any other town with people of those names. But as a fair debunker, you don't get to sift through an entire town, because in many of the best cases I've read this is not a selection process where an entire city is sifted for a matching situation. You only get to choose one house, because in these studies, the child knows exactly where he or she lived. The odds of a child picking one house in a single town, with 30 or 40 specific memories including people's names at that house being accurate, are astronomical. So this skeptical theory evaporates when you compare it with the actual cases. The thing is, it is not poor science at all. It is excellent science, and these kinds of objections were already anticipated in the investigation design. The problem is that it's poor criticism. What the skeptics do is a version of "straw man"--they set up poor science when they test the theory and then criticize their own bad mockup, claiming they've debunked the method. If you wanted to try to fairly debunk these findings, you would have to choose one house only (as the child does) at random in a particular town. You would have to create (in some random way which prevented unconscious use of psychic abilities), say, 30 specific imaginary details including names, and some of those details would have to be intimate details not generally known except to one or two people. These are the kinds of details that would apply only to those people, like details of a couple's sex-life, or where money was buried (actual examples from Stevenson's cases). And then, all or most of those imaginary details including names would have to turn out to be spot-on for that one real household and the people in that household. No debunker I know of has tried this, because of course they know they would be checkmated before they started. You could probably run this fair version of the test for a thousand years and never get a match, but it would still not replicate some aspects of Stevenson's findings, like the child's emotional reactions to the past-life family, xenoglossy and birthmarks. In order to do that, you'd have to randomly choose a young child who would turn out to be able to speak a language he had never been taught (as a debunker you're dead in the water right there), and would have birthmarks corresponding to the death wounds of a child that the family just happened to have lost in the house that you randomly selected from the one town. He would also have to display appropriate, sincere behaviors and emotions toward the people in that randomly-selected household (it would not be easy to randomly select a very young child who could convincingly feign great joy at being reunited with total strangers, for example, no less persuade one to insist on staying with the strangers). See additional comments.

• The most recent Gallup poll shows 20% of Americans believing in reincarnation, down a full 5% from the 2001 poll [note this was in June 2005; a November 2005 poll has risen to 21%]. I have no explanation for the result, assuming it is not a polling artifact of some kind. Perhaps current political upheavals and disasters are driving people back into familiar religious beliefs, or the converse, driving them into cynicism about all beliefs. Meanwhile, a Harris poll from 2003 is quoted at 27% of Americans believing in reincarnation. One cause of these fluctuations may be that belief in reincarnation is generated partly by personal experiences, which cuts squarely across all demographic categories. Thus, if I am understanding statistics correctly, ordinary demographic categories wouldn't apply for this variable, and a larger than normal sample size would be required. A too-small sample size might inadvertently skew the results by capturing more or less people who had had these experiences. (Anyone versed in statistics, please correct me if I'm mistaken.) Here's a fascinating thought--the people who constructed the poll may, perhaps, assume that there is really no such thing as reincarnation--i.e., that it is simply and only a belief. Therefore, they built this subtle bias into the poll by not taking into account the possible variable of personal experience. Which goes to show that one's unconscious assumptions can skew even professional pollsters' results. I'm guessing they would be very surprised if they asked those people who profess belief in reincarnation, whether or not they had had a personal experience which proved reincarnation to them. See also the poll I maintain on the home page of this site, and the comments attached to that link. My poll (which cannot be directly compared with the Gallup or Harris polls) has gone up over time from 54% "firmly convinced" in reincarnation, to 55%, as of this writing on 10/08/06. See also this informal online "About" poll on assessments of the evidence for reincarnation.
  
  
  

• From "Today in History," for October 22, 1926:
  "The Ladder," J. Frank Davis' drama about reincarnation, opens today for a 789-performance run. Among its stars, Antoinette Perry, later namesake of the Broadway awards. The show is unusual in that its producer will keep it running long after it begins to lose money, often allowing people in for free, because he thinks the world needs to hear its essage. He will lose a half million pre-Depression dollars on it. I learned recently reading Jess Stearn's "The Door to the Future" that the story behind the story is that Mr. Davis won a huge amount of money based on a tip from Edgar Cayce, and so keeping this play running was pay-back.