HAUNTED BY PAST LIVES?
ACADEMICS WRESTLE WITH TREATING THE 'REINCARNATED'
By Tom Blackwell
National Post
May 30, 2009
Original LinkA teenage boy in Newfoundland is certain he has been here before.
On his first trip to his parents' hometown in India, the youth became consumed by vivid memories of a past life, started viewing his mother and father as "alien" and insisted he belonged with another family, his doctor recounts in a recently published medical journal article.
The memories corresponded eerily with the profile of a person known to locals in the Indian town of Jaipur. "He remembered with a strong, emotionally charged tone," said Dr. Amin Muhammed Gadit, the St. John's psychiatrist who eventually treated the boy. "He is convinced that he had a previous life." The strange case and its dramatic impact on the boy proved an unusual challenge for Dr. Gadit, who could find no sign of a mental disorder in his patient. But it parallels hundreds of experiences investigated by a little-known -- and controversial -- fraternity of academics who maintain that something such as reincarnation is often the only apparent explanation for what they discover.
The cases have included many where birthmarks on the children corresponded with wounds suffered by the people whose existence they purport to recall. Though most of the documented incidents have been in Asia, dozens have been recorded in the United States, and one research unit there is regularly contacted by parents who believe their children are immersed in past lives.
In Canada, a professor at the University of North British Columbia has studied native children who claim to remember having been someone who died before they were born.
Dr. Jim Tucker, a psychiatrist at the University of Virginia who has carried on research in the field pioneered by the late Ian Stevenson, another psychiatry professor at the college and a Montreal native, said he and colleagues stop short of arguing that reincarnation is a fact.
"My conclusion is that the strongest cases provide evidence that there are times when memories and emotions seem to have survived death," he said.
"Whether that exactly means what people think of as reincarnation -- as sort of a soul moving from one life to another -- that's hard to say ... [But] there is a lot of reason to think that consciousness is sort of an independent force in the universe, and as such it may well exist separate from the physical brain, at least at times. This would be an example of that."
While reincarnation is a fundamental belief in religions such as Hinduism, the idea that some part of a person carries on after death has, not surprisingly, been a hard sell in the scientific community.
Critics note that researchers, despite their best efforts at being scientific, often investigate cases after they have been discussed widely by friends and family, opening the door to embellishment or the power of suggestion.
"The bottom line is that it's really difficult to take this out of the realm of anecdote, and an anecdote told dozens of times," said Mary Roach, a California journalist who followed around a past-life researcher in India for her 2005 book, Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0393329127/newheavenneweart
Robert Carroll, author of The Skeptics' Dictionary, is more blunt in his assessment of Dr. Stevenson, writing, "I see no way to move forward using his methods or his data, so I see his work as a colossal waste of time."
And yet a 1975 book review in the Journal of the American Medical Association praised the psychiatrist's painstaking research and acknowledged the evidence is difficult to explain on any grounds other than rebirth. Even Carl Sagan, the reknowned astronomer who sought to debunk belief in UFO landings and other questionable science, once stated that past-life memories of young children were one of three claims in the field of "para-psychology" worthy of serious study.
Dr. Gadit's patient, whose case he described recently in the Journal of Medical Ethics, first came to the psychiatrist with his parents in March, 2006, shortly after the trip to visit relatives in India.
The young man was born and raised in Canada but when walking through Jaipur, a city 300 kilometres southwest of New Delhi, became confused, saying, "This is the place, I was here before," the doctor recalls.
Then 12 years old, he began to describe in detail the inside of a house where he had supposedly lived, and offered up other details of a life there. He stated that he had died at age 29 of a hole in the heart -- the lay term for a common congenital defect -- had three brothers and a sister, and that his name had been Ram.
Locals in the neighbourhood of Jaipur verified details about the house and said they recalled a family matching the boy's description, including a man named Ram, who lived there about 30 years earlier, said Dr. Gadit. The youth continued to be "haunted" by the memories after the family got home to St. John's.
"It was a frightening experience for him.... The parents started appearing like aliens to him," said the psychiatrist, a professor at the Memorial University of Newfoundland medical school.
The recollections were vivid but a battery of tests revealed no recognizable psychiatric condition. "He did not appear to be a person who had an altered level of consciousness or disorientation," said Dr. Gadit. Reluctant to prescribe medication for a condition he could not diagnose, he used psycotherapy, telling the boy that he might have had a previous life, but should now "forget about the past and live in the present."
The approach seemed to work and the youth, whose family declined to comment for this story, returned to school and a relatively normal life, though he continued to have the memories, indicating to the doctor that he kept them to himself to avoid upsetting others.
Dr. Gadit said the case did not convince him that reincarnation occurs, but left him open to the possibility. "There are so many things to discover in the world."
Details of the case mesh with those investigated over the past 40 years, though usually the memories crop up when children are about three years old, and fade away by the time they are six, Dr. Tucker said.
The University of Virginia team has investigated most of about 2,500 past-life memory cases documented, some more convincing than others. It has tried to tackle them skeptically, comparing the memories with details, where known, about the past-life personality.
The recollections often involve the previous individual's death, especially if it was violent, sometimes triggering symptoms similar to post-traumatic stress disorder, Dr. Tucker said.
Dr. Stevenson recorded 200 cases where birthmarks seemed to match injuries suffered by the past-life person. They included a Thai boy who at three began insisting he was a teacher in another town who had been shot dead years earlier. The deceased teacher was identified, and witnesses who had seen his body said there was a small entry wound on the back of his skull, and a bigger, more jagged exit wound at the front. The boy had two birthmarks: a small round one at the rear of his head and a larger, more irregularly shaped one toward the front, according to Dr. Tucker's paper in the journal Explore.
Dr. Tucker acknowledges that no known scientific phenomenon could explain how such people might recall a previous life.
"It conflicts so much with the over-arching materialist view of the world that the scientific community, by and large, just dismisses it or ignores it," he said. "But I do think, over time, that materialist view is probably going to be altered."
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NHNE On Past Life ResearchSummary Of 'Life Before Life':
40 years of research into young children's reports of past-life memories