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Is reincarnation real? Is communication from the “beyond” possible? A small set of academics are trying to find out, case by case.
CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va. — In an otherwise nondescript office in downtown Charlottesville, Virginia, a small leather chest sits atop a filing cabinet. Within it lies a combination lock, unopened for more than 50 years. The man who set it is dead.
The code, a mnemonic of a six-letter word converted into numbers, was known only to psychiatrist Dr. Ian Stevenson, who set it long before he died and years before he retired as director of the Division of Perceptual Studies, or DOPS, a parapsychology research unit he founded in 1967 within the University of Virginia’s school of medicine.
Stevenson called this experiment the Combination Lock Test for Survival. He reasoned that if he could transmit the code to someone from the grave, it might help answer the questions that had consumed him in life: Is reincarnation real?
The survival of consciousness after death continues to be at the forefront of the division’s research. The team has logged hundreds of cases of children who claim to remember past lives from all continents except Antarctica. “And that’s only because we haven’t looked for cases there,” said Dr. Jim Tucker, 64, who has been investigating claims of past lives for more than two decades. He recently retired after having been the director of DOPS since 2015.
Tucker, who set out to solely become a child psychiatrist and was, at one point, the head of the university’s Child and Family Psychiatry Clinic, was running a busy practice when he first learned about DOPS. It was 1996, and entranced by the pioneering work, Tucker began volunteering at the division before joining as a permanent researcher.
Each of the division’s researchers has committed their career — and, to some extent, risked their professional reputation — to the study of the so-called paranormal. This includes near-death and out-of-body experiences, altered states of consciousness, and past lives research, which all come under the portmanteau of “parapsychology.”
The question of life after death has been an existential preoccupation for humans throughout time, and reincarnation is a central tenet of belief in many cultures. Buddhism, where there is thought to be a 49-day journey between death and rebirth; Hinduism, with its concept of samsara, the endless cycle; and Native American and West African nations all share similar core concepts of the soul or spirit moving from one life to the next. Meanwhile, a 2023 Pew Research survey found a quarter of Americans believe it is “definitely or probably true” that people who have died can be reincarnated.
When it comes to past life claims, the DOPS team works on cases that almost always have come directly from parents.
Common features in children who claim to have led a previous life include a verbal precocity and mannerisms at odds with the rest of the family. Unexplained phobias or aversions have also been thought to have been transferred over from a past existence. In some cases, the remembrances are extremely clear: the names, professions and quirks of a different set of relatives; the particularities of the streets they used to live on; and sometimes even recollections of obscure historical events — details the child couldn’t possibly have known about.
Stevenson traveled the world extensively, recording more than 2,500 cases of children recalling past lives. In this pre-internet time, discovering so many similar accounts and trends served to strengthen his thesis. The findings from these excursions are stored by country in filing cabinets and are in the slow process of being digitized.
From this database, researchers have yielded findings they believe are interesting. The strongest cases, according to the DOPS researchers, have been found in children younger than 10, and a majority of remembrances tend to occur between the ages of 2 and 6, after which they appear to fade. The median time between death and rebirth is about 16 months, a period the researchers see as a form of intermission. Very often, the child has memories that match up to the life of a deceased relative.
Each year, DOPS receives more than 100 emails from parents regarding something their child has said, “but as far as the case having enough to investigate, enough to potentially verify that it matches with a past life, those are very few,” Tucker said.
Last summer, Tucker drove to the rural town of Amherst, Virginia, to investigate a case of possible past life remembrance.
A few months earlier, Misty, 28, and one of her children, age 3, had been looking at a wooden puzzle of the United States, with each state represented by a cartoon of a person or object. Misty’s daughter pointed excitedly at the jagged piece representing Illinois, which had an abstract illustration of Abraham Lincoln.
“That’s Pom,” her daughter exclaimed. “He doesn’t have his hat on.”
This was indeed a drawing of Abraham Lincoln without his hat, but more important, there was no name under the image indicating who he was. After weeks of endless talk about “Pom” bleeding out after being hurt and being carried to a too-small bed — which the family had started to think could be related to Lincoln’s assassination — they began to consider their daughter had been present for the historical moment. This was despite the family having no prior belief in reincarnation, nor any particular interest in Lincoln.
On the drive to Amherst, Tucker confessed his hesitation in taking on this particular case — or any case connected to a famous individual. “If you say your child was Babe Ruth, for example, there would be lots of information online,” he said. “When we get those cases, usually it’s that the parents are into it. Still, it’s all a little strange to be coming out of a 3-year-old’s mouth. Now, if she had said her daughter was Lincoln, I probably wouldn’t have made the trip.”
Lately, Tucker has been giving the children picture tests. “Where we think we know the person they’re talking about, we’ll show them a picture from that life, and then show them another picture — a dummy picture — from somewhere else, to see if they can pick out the right one,” he said. “I had one where the kid remembered dying in Vietnam. I showed him eight pairs of pictures, and a couple of them he didn’t make any choice on, but the others he was six out of six. So, you know, that makes you think. But this girl is so young that I don’t think we can do that.”
On this occasion, the little girl decided not to engage and pretended to be asleep. Then she actually fell asleep.
After the first meeting, the only course of action is to do nothing and wait, to see if the memories develop into something more concrete. Since the onus for past lives research is on spontaneous recollections, the team is largely unconvinced by the concept of hypnotic regression. “People will be hypnotized and told to go back to their past lives and all that, which we’re quite skeptical about,” Tucker said. “You can also make up a lot of stuff, even if you’re talking about memories from this life.”
For a child, recalling a past life can be trying. “They might be missing people or have a sense of unfinished business,” he said. “Frankly, it’s probably better for the child that they don’t have these memories, because so many of the memories are difficult. The majority of kids who remember how they died perished in some kind of violent, unnatural death.”
The researchers ultimately hope the idea of the mind surviving bodily death will be better understood in the years to come — and taken more seriously. They believe a greater acceptance of life being a continuous cycle could have a positive effect on the way we live.
“It could certainly impact how people view their lives,” Tucker said. ”I think it’s a more hopeful view than the idea that this is just a random universe that is meaningless. Of course, people find this in their religion, but if people could see that there is this aspect of themselves that continues, it could help with grief and death anxiety and, you know, hopefully help people treat each other a little better. There would be a stronger sense that we’re all kind of in this together — that, again, this is not just a pointless existence.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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