Reincarnation Part 2

Well, as Rafi mentioned, this is the second of two Sangha Shares on reincarnation, or more specifically, the, um, on the effort to find empirical evidence that it is or might be real, factual, not just an attractive and in some cultures widely accepted religious myth, but an actual fundamental factor that frames our earthly existence. Last week we looked at reports of past life regressions in psychotherapies and other forms of self-exploration which utilize hypnosis or other means of inducing trance states that, that delve deeply into the unconscious mind. We saw that such regressions could be curative of psychological and even physical maladies, and that in those trance states, somehow, subjects could know historical details customs and cultures that they could not have acquired in their normal state of consciousness.

We observe though that even among practitioners of regression psychotherapy, there are discussions about whether the imagery results from fantasy or actual memory. Or perhaps some combination of both. And we stated that scientifically minded observers consider that imagery weak evidence, since it’s very seldom subject to verification, to empirical demonstration that the lives they’re talking about actually place.

Now, David Lester is one of those observers. He’s a social scientist who maintains that afterlife in general has not been, not been demonstrated in ways that meet exacting professional scientific criteria. Nevertheless, Lester consents that reincarnation could explain various phenomena for which psychology has no firm explanation, such as genius in the forms of extraordinary skills present from birth.

And you think of an example of a Mozart, or unusual interests or appetites that can be associated with past life memories. It can explain multiple personality disorder, which conceivably it could be due to persisting remnants from other lifetimes. Innate phobias or a strong sense of déjà vu that can’t be attributed to traumas or experience in a current lifetime.

We saw such a case last week with Brian Weiss’s Catherine, who traced her, her fear of water back to prehistoric times. And also gender dysphoria, the desire to be the opposite sex, conceivably engendered when a subject reincarnates in a different sex. Than in the previous lifetime.

All of that, of course, is only speculation. Ah, we got it. Nice.

For the most systematic study of reincarnation, evidence for it, we take up the story at the University of Virginia and the investigations of this fellow, Ian Stevenson. Both investigations do not involve trance state, and they, they focus heavily on verification. What Stevenson probed was children’s memories of immediate past lives.

Now, in, in 1958, he was the brilliant young chairman of the Virginia, University of Virginia’s Department of Psychiatry, had a professional focus in psychosomatic medicine and a side interest in paranormal phenomena. In that year, he wrote an essay entitled The Evidence for Survival from Claimed Memories of Former Incarnation. It reviewed some 44 cases, most involving children who reported memories of former lives.

In 1967, he founded a small research division called the Division of Personality Studies, or DOPS. And by the time of his death, 40 years later, he and his staff at the university had investigated cases throughout the world writing multiple volumes, 14 of them, and accumulating records of some 2,500 cases. Those investigations continue to this day, and the number of cases continues to mount.

It’s well over 3,000 now. Most of the— but not all of those of these have been about children from countries where reincarnation was a common belief, but it nevertheless covered a wide range of cultures, and they found that despite the various cultures, those, um, those cases had some common characteristics. Children who gave such accounts began talking of their memories around age 2.

Watch for this. Um, but they tended to cease and forget such stories by the age of 6 or 7. Usually they spoke only of an immediate past life, and for whatever reason most of those earlier lives ended violently or suddenly.

70% of the cases in the DOPS database died by, quote, unnatural means, including drownings, murder, suicide, and accidents. And that’s far beyond the proportion of deaths like that in the general population. All of that suggests some kind of a connection between trauma and memory.

Investigators can consider a case solved, uh, and all those 2,500 I mentioned were solved, uh, when they can plausibly identify and confirm the previous personality. Bringing the child into contact with that person’s environs and family, the child often seemed to recognize places, homes, artifacts, and people. Often they have shown tastes and preference of that person.

The children have shown tastes and preferences of that person, like food preferences. Or displayed phobias related to his or her former death, such as aversion to baths when the previous personality died by drowning. Frequently— and this gets even more weird— they have shown birthmarks or birth deformities that match the previous personality’s fatal wounds.

Stevenson himself was a specialist in psychosomatic medicine, and he was particularly interested in those, those, uh, kinds of cases. Eventually he wrote a massive two-volume study of them with, uh, 225, quote, solved cases. In a separately published study, he located postmortem reports of the previous incarnations in 49 solved cases involving children with birthmarks.

In other words, they had clearly identified this person as that to which the child was referring, and, um, And in 88% of those cases, the terminal wound or birthmark were in the same anatomical location as the fatal wound. If there’s any validity to these analyses, that says something really profound about the connection between body and mind. So as illustrations of solved cases of reincarnation, we’ll look at two of them.

The first one from a Buddhist culture. This is about a kid called Sujith. Sujith was from a suburb of Colombo, the capital of Sri Lanka.

When he was still under a year old, he began showing an intense fear of trucks. Once he could talk, he said that he had lived in a nearby village called Gorakana that’s Gaurakanda there, and that he had died by being hit by a truck. A monk from the local temple heard of Sujit and met with him when Sujit was 2 and a half years old, and he took notes.

The monk took notes of conversations they had before they made any attempt to verify who the previous person could be. Susith reported that in his previous life, his father was named Jomas and had a bad right eye, that he had a teacher named Francis at the local school, that he paid a woman a little later in life named Kasuma for street food, and that later in life he donated to the temple where there was a monk named Amita. He described his house as whitewashed like these, with a lavatory by a fence.

To his mother and grandmother, he stated that his name had been Sammy and that he sometimes called himself Gora Konka Sammy. He said that Kasuma was his younger sister’s daughter, that his wife’s name in these later years was Maggie, and that they had a daughter named Nandini, Nandani, that he had worked for the railway, transported a liquor called Arak, and once had climbed a particular mountain called Adam’s Peak. Well, the monk, armed with all these particulars, went to Gorakana to look for a family that might fit this description.

He discovered that a 50-year-old man named Sammy Fernando, sometimes called Gorakonka Sammy, had died after being hit by a truck 6 months before Suja’s death— I mean, birth. Suja’s birth. All those other particulars mentioned by Suja held true for Sammy Fernandes.

Suja was subsequently taken to Goa Kana. He reportedly recognized people from Sammy’s life commented accurately on changes in the Fernando property. Stevenson arrived to research the case when Sujith was 3 and a half.

Now, our second illustration— whoops— is the most publicized American case. And a couple of you have heard me recite this story before. I apologize for the repetition, but it’s too good a story not to tell again.

It involves one James Leininger, still very much alive, born in 1998, the son of a middle-class Christian couple from Lafayette, Louisiana. The case was revealed by James’s parents It was later thoroughly investigated by Stevenson’s successor, whose name is Jim Tucker. When he was still just under 2 years old, James’s father took him to a flight museum in Dallas.

And there James showed great enthusiasm for the exhibition, especially of planes from World War II. You can see his enthusiasm here. Shortly after a second visit there, he began to have terrifying repetitive nightmares, eventually screaming, “Airplane crash on fire! Little man can’t get out!” When his parents asked who the little man was, he replied, “Me!” Still just 2 years old, related that his plane was shot by the Japanese.

As the nightmares persisted, James reported more details: that the little man’s name, like his, was James, although he did not remember the last name; that he flew airplanes called Corsairs— that’s 2 years old, he said— Corsair, that his plane took off from a boat. His father asked him, can you name the boat? He said the boat’s name was Natoma. Well, James’s father Bruce was a devout Methodist, and he roundly rejected any notion of reincarnation.

So he started researching James’s story Initially with the intent to reveal it as fantasy, but then on the internet we found a photo of the Natoma Bay, a small aircraft carrier that later fought in the Pacific in World War II. Still 2 and a half, James reported that he had a friend a fellow pilot by the name of Jack Larson, and that his own plane had been shot in the front, hitting the engine right in the very front. Looking through a book that Bruce had bought to give as a Christmas present to his own father, James, sitting in Bruce’s lap, identified an aerial photograph as the site of his plane being shot.

It was a photograph of Iwo Jima. Bruce’s further research indicated that the Natoma Bay had been at Iwo Jima supporting the U.S. Marines’ invasion of March in 1945.

Eventually contacting a veteran of the ship Bruce, the father, asked if he— if the man knew a Jack Larson, and he said, yeah, he did, but he had not seen him after the battle. Bruce assumed that Larson was real but was dead. James, meanwhile, was obsessively drawing his crashing planes, signing them James 3, because he said he was the third James.

In Bruce’s research over the next 2 years, he found that Jack Larson was in fact alive, living in Arkansas. He found too that on a— he found a Natoma Bay casualty list and it showed that one and only one of its airmen was killed in the battle. His name was James, James Houston Jr.

Because Houston was a junior, James was, yes, in fact, the third James, James Leininger. Just after James turned 5, Bruce located the pilot of another squadron who had seen Huston’s plane take the hit, and it was, his log reported, on the nose. Two other witnesses eventually confirmed the report.

So the reluctant Bruce was converted into a believer in James’s incarnation. So might there be some other way to explain these cases of detailed knowledge of a previous life? The youth of the children seems to rule out something we talked about last week of cryptomnesia, hidden memories in this, in the person’s past. And the fact that these visions are experienced by children as memories undermines the argument that they spring from living agent psi or super ESP, another possibility we talked about last week.

By and large, these children have not otherwise shown extraordinary paranormal powers. Despite that, Stevenson and his cohorts certainly have had their critics. Stephen himself retained the posture of scientific objectivity, and he never claimed that he had proved reincarnation.

What I do believe, he reported to an interviewer, is that of the cases we now know, reincarnation, at least for some, is the best explanation that we have been able to come up with. I think a rational person, if he wants, can believe in reincarnation on the basis of evidence. I began these lectures by mentioning the potential spiritual value in the doctrine of reincarnation, and let me, let me close by returning to that theme.

By no means is it necessary for a rich spiritual life. But for some, an openness to it might help. For Brian Weiss, whose work we reviewed last week, the past life regression experiences with his patient Catherine and the messages that she seemed to channel from angel-like entities that she called the Masters prompted a powerful spiritual opening, vastly amplifying the materialistic outlook that he had imbibed associated with his scientific training.

My life, he’s right, he writes, has changed almost as drastically as Catherine’s. I have become more intuitive, more aware of the hidden secret parts of my patients colleagues, and friends. My values and life goals have shifted to a more humanistic, less accumulative focus.

Psychics, mediums, healers, and others appear in my life with increasing frequency. I have begun to meditate. Something that until recently I thought only Hindus and Californians practiced.

Remembering the deeper meaning of life and of death as a natural part of life, I’ve become more patient, more empathetic, more loving. I also feel more responsible for my actions. The negative as well as the lofty.

I know that there will be a price to pay. What goes around truly does come around. Together with the— that’s the end of that quotation— together with the idea of karma, reincarnation does imply an overarching connectedness in all of life, and it implies a vast spiritual intelligence behind and operating through the process.

It suggests that our lives, each of them, have a purpose, a karmic script aimed towards spiritual awakening. And that the external circumstances of our individual lives— the families we come from, the people we know, the professions we choose, the joys and disappointments and sufferings that we encounter— are all means towards that end of spiritual awakening. Our higher selves within us have— so the doctrine would say— a grasp of that karmic script.

And it is when we are aligned with it moment to moment in the present that we gain true satisfaction and peace. As a final note, I leave you with these words from the patron saint of this Vipassana Sangha, Jack Kornfield. Jack says this: After years of sitting with the dying, many of whom describe going in and out of the light as they hover near death, I have come to trust the reality of consciousness beyond the body.

When I witness the mysterious and sacred moment of their consciousness leaving the body, I see that what is left behind is only the shell of flesh. I have remembered other past lives in my own meditation, and using deep meditations, I have led past life regressions for people in countries around the world. Surprisingly, whether they believe in reincarnation or not, many remember being in families, villages, and farms in cultures past, and they see and learn from these past life images.

And when when they let themselves re-experience how they died in that previous life, they too feel spirit leaving their bodies, entering realms of light and luminous darkness, until there arises the pull to enter the womb again. There is no need for you to believe in any of this. Simply keep an open mind.

Thus saith Jack Kornfield. I thank you for your kind attention. Thank you.