by Jeff Danelek
Perhaps the strongest and best documented evidence in support of reincarnation comes from the work of Dr. Ian Stevenson, a Virginia psychiatrist of impeccable credentials, who began studying cases of conscious past life memories in children in the late fifties. Since then, Dr. Stevenson has collected almost 3,000 cases of children, most of them between four and ten years of age, who were allegedly able to recall having lived past lives, complete with names, dates and even the villages in which they believe they previously lived. Many were able to instantly identify members of their ‘former’ family and were even often able to recount ‘pet names’ and intricate details of their previous lives with uncanny accuracy. Additionally, many of the children Stevenson studied could even recount how they had died in their previous life, providing details of their death with a degree of certainty and knowledge inexplicable for a child.
What’s most impressive about these memories is that these children had not been hypnotized or ‘regressed’ into remembering previous lives, but had exhibited conscious memories of past lives spontaneously from a very early age. In fact, Dr. Stevenson specifically made it a point to ignore past life memories acquired through hypnosis precisely because he considered them unreliable and fantasy prone. While children are, of course, capable of fantasizing as well, what impressed Dr. Stevenson was the wealth of personal and often intimate details the children were able to recount, details he thought it unlikely a child would be either likely to imagine or learn from an adult. Children were simply not capable of retaining anything like the vast amount of information his subjects frequently provided, even after lengthy coaching, nor were their stories consistent with the type of imaginary stories children are famous for.
Even more impressive than the sheer quantity of detail the children could provide was the fact that much of it proved to be verifiable. Names often (though not always) proved to be accurate and, in most cases, turned out to be those of complete strangers who had died just prior to the child’s birth. They correctly recalled former spouses, siblings, parents and even children they had parented in their previous incarnation, and were able to describe the home they had lived in with remarkable accuracy though they had never been within fifty miles of the spot during their present life. In a few cases, the children identified so strongly with their past life that they insisted on being called by their former name and even felt alienated from their present family, preferring (and, in some instances, becoming clearly upset when not permitted) to spend more time with their ‘previous’ family. While these memories and inclinations tended to fade after a few years and disappear almost completely by adolescence, they remain among the best evidence for reincarnation to date.
Jeff Danelek is an author from Denver, Colorado, who specializes in writing about the paranormal, religion, spirituality and a host of other subjects. His most recent book, Friend of God, is the story of the passion of Christ as told from the perspective of Judas Iscariot, with a secular, spiritual emphasis. To learn more about Jeff and his work, you can visit his website, http://www.ourcuriousworld.com.