Dr. Ducasse's honest skepticism leads him to the conclusion that the cases he examines indicate some kind of extra-physical transmission of memories and abilities originating from identifiable people in history, expressed through a new, living person. He is reluctant to say that these cases prove reincarnation, citing the question of what it would take to show that a person has been reincarnated, thus ruling out other forms of transmission such as ESP and possession. His definition would be that a person has continuous memory and identity, not just glimpses or temporary states. Meher Baba said that precisely this kind of recall does come to a person when they have reached a certain level of spiritual maturity, in the natural course of spiritual development, i.e., rather than as an aberration.

In any case, Dr. Ducasse's argument ignores, in my opinion, two aspects of these cases. Firstly, the person subjectively experiences the memories in the first-person, acting and re-acting (especially with persons from the past life) emotionally as the previous personality would act and react. The child does not simply recognize his lover from the previous life--he longs to be reunited with her. He does not simply recognize his parents from the previous life; he begs (and continues to beg) to be allowed to stay with an adult who in his current life is a complete stranger. The facts simply do not fit the theory that these are memories somehow "borrowed" from someone else through ESP.

Secondly, one of the most striking aspects of past-life therapy is that the memories dovetail in extremely complex ways with the client's entire current-life history, emotional makeup and personality patterns. One can see in them the origins of many previously inexplicable traits and long-standing tendencies, including, in some cases, debilitating phobias. And those phobias, along with related physical diseases, are often cured, sometimes within one or two sessions.

These two factors combine, for me, to form a very strong indication that past-life memories (or, at any rate, some of them) are not borrowed through ESP or some other means, but are a result of reincarnation, i.e., this is the manifest personal history of one mind, not the borrowed memories of other minds.