Updates

3/1/10

In addition to maintaining this website, I volunteer as an "expert" on allexperts.com. It's relatively easy to be an expert in a new field. Not that reincarnation is new, but it's new to Western culture because it's been banned, ignored and ridiculed here for centuries.

I began studying reincarnation from the vantage-point of Eastern philosophy (I use the term very loosely, because it includes the teachings of people who have direct perception) when I was in my late teens, beginning, most notably, with the Bhagavad Gita. That was an eye-opener.

But I started studying the Western research into reincarnation when I began work on my documentary in 1997. And what occurred to me this morning is that I've learned a few things. I'm beginning to see patterns, principles of how reincarnation operates. Many of them have been cited by other authors, but perhaps not all. So I thought I'd take a moment to set them all out.

These are what one might consider the very beginning of scientific inquiry--the stage of observation and hypothesis. One starts to observe patterns, one forms them into postulated principles, and one lists them. They are then testable, at least in the sense of making systematic observations and running statistical analyses. But before you can test anything, you have to have some idea of what you're looking for.

So I'm going to list, briefly in paragraph form, some of the patterns and principles I've seen cropping up as I've been studying reincarnation cases for the past 13 years or so. Though it is difficult, I'm going to try to set aside, for now, what I know from my earlier study of Eastern teachings. The principles are listed in no particular order.

Past-life memory operates on a kind of repetition compulsion. The memory creates pressure in the new lifetime to repeat itself. This profoundly affects every aspect of life, from personal relations, to career, to addictions. Very likely these effects cannot be fully understood or appreciated without postulating them building up over the course of several lives. Many illnesses that are mysterious to modern science will be understandable when this principle is understood. Past-life therapy will move from focusing exclusively on the effects of past-life trauma, to incorporating an understanding of the gradual build-up of tendencies.

Emotionally, we approach every new situation with the assumptions and emotional charge that we have brought in from similar past-life situations, without consciously remembering the details of it.

Previous lifetimes that are influencing the current life the most heavily, recapitulate as "stages" in childhood.

The stronger an emotional "complex," the earlier it recapitulates in childhood.

A person usually, but not always, looks physically about 80% similar to the way he or she looked in the past life. The resemblance is reduced proportionately when there are intervening lifetimes. Clearly, if this is true, there is something fundamentally wrong about our current understanding of genetics and the development of the human embryo, because many of these cases have no apparent genetic link.

Reincarnation is like playing a looping movie, with each new loop having been edited to a greater or lesser degree. From one lifetime to the next, certain aspects of a person and/or their life are opposite, while others remain the same or similar. This functions much as the scientific method functions, by changing only certain variables in an experiment.

Reviving memory of past lives creates a risk of "past-life bleed-through." Attitudes and emotions that one had thought one had worked through, can surface and begin influencing behavior. This is one potential side-effect of past-life therapy.

Opening the natural memory barrier in past-life therapy could leave that barrier loosened in the next lifetime. In the next life or subsequent lives, the person may be plagued by past-life recall they don't want and can't safely asssimiliate. However absurd it may sound now, this may be the reason why we have people remembering lifetimes in ancient Egypt, where such practices, apparently, were common.

Emotional memories are more accessible than intellectual memories. One possible explanation is that the emotional part of the brain is not so complex and doesn't change so much from life to life; hence, the brain can better pass those memories through to consciousness.

It is possible to deduce a past life from clues once you understand the patterns well enough by systematically gauging one's emotional reactions, even in the absence of specific intellectual memories.

There are two levels of proof: legal, and scientific. There are enough strong cases today to satisfy both types of proof, so that the mere existence of reincarnation should not, rationally, be in question anymore. Therefore, if reincarnation is not accepted by the mainstream culture, it is primarily a matter of fear and prejudice; which means, the issue is a social one, not a scientific one.

There are far more people having reincarnation-related experiences than the media indicates. When 24 or 25% of Americans state that they believe in reincarnation, some significant portion of these people must be answering in the affirmative because of personal experiences, not simply out of belief. Prejudice inherent in the poll question itself (the assumption that reincarnation is merely a belief) prevents this distinction from being tapped.

When a person reaches roughly the age that they were in a past life when something emotionally powerful occurred (positive or negative), they can re-experience that emotion, or even experience physical reflections of the past-life event.

Increased incidents of synchronicity can occur when a person begins to encounter places, people, scenes or information relating to a past life. (To go into theories about the cause of this, I would have to tap my study of Eastern metaphysics--but it has been observed in actual cases.)

The idea that human beings can reincarnate "backwards" as animals has caused thinking people to reject reincarnation out-of-hand. Although this is obviously beyond the scope of research at the present time, my sources in Eastern philosophy tell me that this idea is erroneous. We do have a small percentage of people seemingly remembering past lives as animals in hypnotic regression, although it's very difficult to discern when such people were or were not actually under hypnosis during the session, and how active a part imagination was playing. Eastern philosophy tells us that in the evolutionary process, reincarnation extends upward through all the kingdoms until the human being is reached, after which point reincarnation is only as a human being.

Christians are blocked from considering the possibility of reincarnation due to passages in the New Testament which preclude it. These passages are almost entirely, if not entirely, found in Paul's writings. Meanwhile, other quotes from Jesus in the New Testament seem to clearly imply that reincarnation was taken for granted, if not explicitly taught, by Him, and understood as part of the ABC's of spirituality by His disciples, hardly worthy of specific mention. There are several possible causes of this discrepancy, which include well-meaning or malicious "editing" over the centuries, and the possibility that St. Paul continued to teach some of his previous doctrines even after his conversion. There is a possibility in my mind that his conversion was faked--but this is such a radical suggestion that I have kept it in a very obscure part of my website, and from time-to-time have even erased the link to it. That idea is not required, however, to posit that he simply kept many of his old ideas and tried to meld them with what he heard from the direct disciples, resulting in the admixture we take as official Christianity today. It is, therefore, Paul's teachings that I see as the biggest impediment to Christians' openness to the emerging research findings on reincarnation.

It hardly bears mention, now, after the detective show "Past Life" aired, that people sometimes experience flashbacks of past-life memory, usually triggered by something that reminds them of that past life. It's not nearly as common as that show would have you believe, but it happens; and when it happens, it's quite a convincing experience. Some percentage of these flashbacks do get verified historically. They are, I would say, on the whole more reliable than the memories obtained through hypnosis, and the core memories contained in these flashbacks are certainly more reliable than any "extrapolations" made after the fact.

The great moving force of therapy is validation, and validation is the reason past-life therapy is so effective in curing phobias. Validation is the opposite of what psychiatrist R.D. Laing called "mystification." In our current lifetimes, we are "mystified" by society and by our identification with the body, into believing we don't, or shouldn't, feel what we feel. Past-life therapy shows us that it is quite understandable to feel what we feel. In the East, there is a tradition of channeling energy to its proper and appropriate conclusion. A thief is not told simply to stop stealing; a man who gets into fights is not told simply to stop fighting. They are told to continue stealing, and to continue fighting--but their tendency is directed, channeled, into a noble cause, or somehow channeled so that it winds up helping others and ennobling them.* Quite possibly, for example, the man who used to slice others with the sword in battle becomes, in this life, a surgeon who now slices people to cure them. (You will see, for example, in Jeff Keene's case that whereas he once led men into battle, in this life he led teams of firemen to save lives.) This is the same principle as one finds in judo, where the opponent's energy is not blocked full-out, but is redirected. The process of validation in therapy is akin to judo; the energy is not blocked (or "mystified"), but rather channeled. Energy always must be channeled and transmuted rather than simply blocked or repressed--and phobias are cured by channeling them into their proper understanding and perspective, by validating them properly. Validating them improperly would be like telling a person, "It is true, taking a shower is so frightening that I don't blame you for being paralyzed with fear when you think about taking a shower." But proper validation is, "Yes, it was terrifying when you drowned under the waterfall in that past life, but that was then and this is now, you have a new body." There is a great deal more potential for this principle in therapies which incorporate an understanding of past lives, whether or not actual regression techniques are utilized.

I'll add to this list as new insights occur to me. Note that I have not included here principles arising from the results of Dr. Ian Stevenson's research, such as recurring birthmarks and physical deformities, which should also be taken into account in any comprehensive list. I will say, as regards Dr. Stevenson's research, that those results are not limited to the strongest cases which they study. Those same principles are found, to a lesser degree of proof, in many other reincarnation cases (see, for example, the birthmarks in Jeff Keene's case on this website).

I've made so many editorial comments in my Updates recently, that I want to give that a break. I'll just comment briefly that I see my function these days as offering insights to pioneers in academia, who I like to think may keep tabs on this website, and who may find it occasionally amusing as well as a useful resource on the subject. There seems to be no interest in me as a lecturer, radio show guest, or for any other public function, and that's okay with me. I'm just a guy with a master's in counseling who produced a documentary, and who claims that his Guru was an Incarnation of God. That thoroughly disqualifies me (or so the logic goes). But one can still find my ideas entertaining and/or useful...and I suspect that professors, students, and other liberal thinkers do find them so. Either I'm like the guy on the street corner with the "end of the world" sign, or else I'm a social pioneer. Either way, maintaining this site is an enjoyable hobby for me.

Best regards,

Stephen S., Producer

*I feel I must add that one must be very careful not to use this principle to justify things that look superficially noble, but which actually are not, like political suicide bombings.

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