Introduction

James Leininger was born a normal healthy boy, but it became clear at an early age that he had an abnormal obsession—airplanes. He would play with nothing else. Around the time he reached his second birthday, however, the planes he loved so much had begun to disturb his sleep. He would wake up from nightmares screaming, telling his mother, “Airplane crash on fire; little man can’t get out.” Eventually, his mother began to wonder if there was more to James’s fascination with planes than just boyhood fancy. She remembers watching him go over one of his toy planes as if he were doing a flight check. She once bought him a model plane and pointed out the small bomb that was attached to its underside. “That’s not a bomb, Mama, that’s a drop tank,” James corrected her. His mother had never heard of a drop tank and was certain that this three-year-old boy never had either.

As time went by, James began to reveal more about his nightmares, and the outlines of a past life slowly came to light. James told his parents that he was once the pilot of a Corsair on a boat named the Natoma, and he even came up with the name of one of his friends on the boat: Jack Larson. James’s father, who had initially been skeptical of the idea of past lives, decided to do a little research. Soon, he hit pay dirt. The Natoma Bay had been an aircraft carrier stationed in the Pacific during World War II and Jack Larson (who was still alive and living in Arkansas) had been one of the pilots on board.

One day while looking through a book on World War II with his father, James pointed out the island of Iwo Jima, Japan, in a picture and indicated that it was where he had been shot down. He said that the plane had been hit directly in the engine. Curious to know more about his memories, his parents asked him what his name had been in his previous life, but James would only answer “James.” However, they noticed that he was signing all of his drawings with the name James 3. His father did some checking and found out that only one pilot on the Natoma had actually been shot down over Iwo Jima. His name: James M. Houston, Jr.

Krishna taught it; Plato believed in it; the Buddha revised it; Augustine considered it; Emerson wrote about it; Freud rejected it; Tolstoy was passionate about it; Sagan was curious about it. All of these great minds were fascinated, entranced, or troubled by one powerful idea: reincarnation. Of the many ways in which humans have tried to understand what happens after death, reincarnation is one of the most common and most enduring. Contrary to popular belief, it is not merely an Eastern notion but one that has flourished in cultures around the world, from indigenous tribes in Alaska to Islamic sects in the Middle East, from Christian cults of the Middle Ages to Nigerian tribes of today. Even some of the great founders of the Western worldview—Plato and Pythagoras, for example—believed that the soul would be reborn after death. And if you think that modernity’s forward march has managed to put an end to this ancient metaphysical idea, think again. Recent surveys have shown that twenty-seven percent of the American population believe in reincarnation. That’s over seventy-five million people who are convinced of the existence of past lives. While I doubt that many have stories that are as dramatic as James Leininger’s parents’, in a predominantly Judeo-Christian culture, seventy-five million should raise a few eyebrows.

And reincarnation is just one part of a larger story. Today, across the country, there is a broader transformation occurring in the way we look at life after death, a transformation that is perhaps most obvious in the extraordinary amount of cultural attention dedicated to the subject. From popular books (Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife) to hit TV shows (Crossing Over, Medium) to the scripts of Tinseltown (The Sixth Sense, Birth), there is a resurgence of interest in what some scholars call survival, a term that is short for “survival of bodily death.” Survival research explores whether or not any part of the human self is actually capable of surviving the death of the physical body. Some say there hasn’t been such an active interest in the issue since Spiritualism swept America in the late nineteenth century, back when table-rapping, trance-channeling mediums entertained the intelligentsia and Theosophy was a prominent new religious movement. But if you have somehow missed all of the excitement, don’t worry. Just head down to your local Barnes & Noble, where you can pick up a copy of The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Reincarnation or check out the inevitable bestsellers by popular mediums before coming home to watch Ghost Whisperer on CBS.

Now what makes this resurgence of interest in survival all the more noteworthy is that it’s not happening just in pop culture or on the outer fringes of the New Age but in private institutes, academic research centers, and professional conferences that span a number of different disciplines. Esalen, the legendary human potential center, has been sponsoring a yearly private gathering of scholars from around the country, many from major universities, to explore the subject. In fact, a surprising number of scholars are working within the usually conservative confines of the academy. What is stirring the excitement of these researchers is a large and growing body of evidence that can be objectively and empirically analyzed, all of which is suggestive of the existence of an afterlife. Some data is coming from near-death experiences, some from out-of-body experiences, some from past-life memories, some from experiments with mediums, and some from visions of apparitions. None of these experiences are, in and of themselves, new to human culture. But never before in the history of knowledge has there been such a wealth of cross-cultural, cross-disciplinary data converging from so many different streams of experience, all of which is providing hints of what lies beyond the physical veil. It is leading us into territory that until recently was the sole province of mythology, esoteric philosophy, and religious tradition. In some cases, the data being uncovered correlates remarkably well with traditional religious conceptions of death and rebirth. In other cases, it radically diverges. All of it, however, is contributing to a potential new science of survival, rebirth, and the nonphysical dimensions of existence.

So when the idea to pursue a feature article on reincarnation was broached in an editorial meeting last year, I was intrigued. I knew that reincarnation was one of the most active areas of survival research and one of the most controversial. Indeed, if it were ever to be proved that reincarnation is a fact, that would immediately upset the apple cart of a great deal of accepted scientific thought and raise some provocative questions. Some of these have been debated by philosophers for millennia—questions regarding past and future lifetimes, the nature of the soul, theories of karma, and so on. But the question that really began to fascinate me as I considered the notions of survival and rebirth was not just philosophical but also quite practical. If reincarnation is true, I wondered, where do we actually go after death? What happens in between lives? That is not a small question. And as I embarked upon my research, I wasn’t entirely sure if it was even possible to look at it objectively. Maybe, in the end, it all comes down to subjective beliefs and personal opinions. Maybe all speculations about what happens after death are just that—speculations.

Well, maybe and maybe not. What I learned as I began to look into the evidence for rebirth, both empirical and anecdotal, is that what I thought I knew about the subject is just the tip of a very big iceberg. Reincarnation may be a premodern belief but for some it has become a postmodern obsession. And the contemporary evidence being gathered in support of this ancient notion is making a powerful case that may forever change the way we think about what happens after our corporeal form kicks the bucket.

Part I

Is Reincarnation Real?

“At the time of this writing there are three claims in the ESP field which, in my opinion, deserve serious study. . . . [One of these is] that young children sometimes report the details of a previous life, which upon checking turn out to be accurate and which they could not have known about in any other way than reincarnation.”
- Carl Sagan

Seven hundred years ago, the Tibetan Buddhists gathered together all of their knowledge about reincarnation and the afterlife and recorded it for posterity in a one-of-a-kind manual, a guidebook to the bardos, or the states that exist between lives. Called TheTibetan Book of the Dead, it described exactly what the dying person could look forward to as he or she walked along that mysterious road that traverses the terrain between death and rebirth. In the last nine months, I’ve learned that a few radical and innovative researchers are in the early stages of gathering the data that may one day fill the pages (or web pages) of a contemporary version of this ancient guidebook. Indeed, we live in an age of great discovery, and the veil between this world and whatever lies beyond seems to be yielding its secrets as never before to the endless curiosity of the human mind. And like explorers setting foot on a new continent that was once only the subject of rumor, belief, and speculation, we are establishing beachheads on the subtle sands of the nonphysical realms and getting a sense of the initial landscape. Much to my surprise, I discovered that one of those beachheads is in Charlottesville, Virginia.

“At this point, we have registered over twenty-five hundred cases of children from all over the world who remember their past lives.” The man speaking to me was practicing child psychiatrist Dr. Jim Tucker, a researcher at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. With his warm southern accent and gentle demeanor, Tucker didn’t strike me as a nonconformist, but he has one of the most unusual academic jobs in the country—researching young children who spontaneously recall previous lives.

Tucker is part of the Division of Personality Studies, a branch of the university’s psychiatry department that is dedicated to survival research. In a nondescript two-story house that sits on the corner of the main campus, a staff of almost a dozen researchers and assistants is exploring the diverse aspects of survival: near-death experiences, out-of-body experiences, visions of deathbed apparitions, after-death communication, and reincarnation. The department was founded in 1967 by Ian Stevenson, who has become a legend in the parapsychology community for his four decades of meticulous investigations of children who claim to remember previous lives. As philosopher and author David Ray Griffin writes, “Nowadays reincarnation research in the West is virtually synonymous with the work of Stevenson.” Stevenson himself is in his eighties and rarely makes an office appearance, but Tucker is probably the closest thing he has to a successor, and he has taken the research baton and run with it. Each case in the department’s voluminous files tells a unique and unconventional story.

For example, I came upon the case of William, a young boy who was born with a serious heart condition called pulmonary valve atresia—a birth defect in which the main pulmonary artery has not formed completely. When William was about three years old, he began to talk about his grandfather’s life in ways that shocked his parents. For example, one day when he was misbehaving, his mother exclaimed, “Sit down, or I’m going to spank you,” and William replied, “Mom, when you were a little girl and I was your daddy, you were bad lots of times, and I never hit you!” William seemed to know details of his grandfather’s life that often left his parents scratching their heads trying to figure out where he could possibly have come by the information. He surprised his mother by accurately remembering the names of long-dead pets that had belonged to her when she was a young girl. He also recalled the exact circumstances of his grandfather’s death, and even the day of the week on which it had occurred. William’s grandfather had been a New York City policeman killed while attempting to prevent a robbery, shot six times. The killing bullet had entered his back, cutting through his lung and slicing open a major artery—the main pulmonary artery.

Another file tells the story of Mehmet Bekler, a Turkish man born in about 1940. He grew up in a small town called Ekber and worked in the family’s flour mill. One day, a local customer arrived at the mill and proceeded to start an argument with Mehmet. The argument became physical, and at some point the customer attacked Mehmet with a flour shovel, delivering a sharp blow to the head and wounding him fatally. The year was 1965. Sometime later, a pregnant woman in a nearby village had a memorable dream. In it, a young man approached her and said, “I was killed with a blow from a shovel. I want to stay with you and not with anyone else.” Soon after, in 1966, the woman gave birth to a son, Süleyman, who was born with a marked depression in the back of his skull. As soon as Süleyman was able to speak, he began to reveal details of a previous life, including his former name, “Mehmet.” The child insisted that he had been a miller in his past life and had been killed in an argument with a customer. From an early age, he would point across the Turkish countryside and say he wanted to go to “the stream.” Eventually, his parents relented and let the young boy lead them to the nearby town of Ekber where the mill stood, next to a stream. In Ekber, the parents were able to verify many of Süleyman’s memories, and they also encountered the family of Mehmet Bekler. Eventually, all family members from his past and present life were persuaded of the legitimacy of his memories. As Süleyman grew up, he would occasionally see the customer from the mill who he claimed had murdered him. He always expressed anger toward the man, and one day he even asked his father to give him a gun so that he could take his revenge.

These are only two out of the twenty-five hundred children who have told their stories to researchers in Virginia. Cases have been found in the U.S., India, Burma, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Brazil, Lebanon, Britain, Nigeria, and elsewhere. And they have many striking similarities. For example, most of these children report past lives that occurred in places that are geographically close to their current lives, helping to make their memories easier to verify. Most of them begin speaking about their former lives soon after they can talk, around two or three years of age. Many seem to have knowledge way beyond their years and outside of their life-circumstances—like the three-year-old Sri Lankan girl who stunned her parents by knowing obscure details about incense-making and naming specific brands of incense not available in her local area. Or the six-year-old Turkish boy who accurately recalled features of a house that he claimed to have lived in, decades before his birth in a city he had never seen over five hundred miles away. Some children even remember secrets that were known only to their past life personality—like a hiding place where money is discovered to be stashed.

Tucker and Stevenson are like crime-scene investigators, and each case in their files has detailed notes attached to it. They often interview the children, the parents, and family members from both the present and previous life, and any friends or acquaintances who might be able to shed light on the memories. They are looking for answers to questions such as: How accurate was the child in describing the past life? Does the child exhibit any unusual traits, behaviors, or phobias related to previous life memories? Was there any alternate way the child could have come by the information? The stronger cases, Tucker explained, are those in which “the child makes a number of specific statements and—this is the critical part—somebody writes down the statements before anyone goes to verify that they’re true. At the last count I think there were thirty-three cases where there was documentation written beforehand. But even in many of the cases where there isn’t prior documentation, the children have made these statements repeatedly, dozens or hundreds of times over a number of years.”

It seemed significant to me that there are no Napoleons or Cleopatras in these files. The old joke that past-life memories always seem to involve famous people didn’t apply to these kids. “They are remembering ordinary lives,” Tucker told me. “Usually just somebody in a village who lived maybe twenty miles away.” But there is one factor that is extraordinary about a large number of the cases. Over seventy percent of the children, Tucker said, have reported previous lives in which they died of unnatural means, often violently. Car wrecks, bus accidents, murders, gunshot wounds, fatal fights—all of these causes of death are littered throughout the files. There is no shortage of speculation as to why violent deaths figure so prominently. The most common suggestion is that perhaps something about the shock of these sudden or untimely ends caused memories to be retained that would otherwise be forgotten. “It implies that the usual process has somehow been short-circuited,” explained Tucker.

As I stood in the dusty hall closet of this one-of-a-kind university department examining the floor-to-ceiling file cabinets filled with case reports, I was struck by the sheer quantity of evidence that has been painstakingly gathered since Stevenson began his field research in the early sixties. I simply had no idea, prior to beginning this article, that such a formidable body of scientific research had been conducted, and at a major American university no less. Individually, the stories are striking and convincing, and many simply defy prosaic explanations. Indeed, the explanations that immediately come to mind—fraud, fantasy, faulty memories, wishful thinking on the part of the parents—do not readily apply to a significant number of these cases. The stories have been carefully researched, and family members and friends have been interviewed. Taken as a whole, these files constitute what is probably the single best collection of evidence for reincarnation on the planet today. What may be a matter of faith for billions of people around the world has been, for the last forty years in this small office, a matter of empirical study.

I was curious whether Tucker felt that the evidence in these files was enough to prove that reincarnation is real. “We certainly don’t use the word proof, because these are not cases that are done under tight laboratory conditions where you can rule out everything,” he cautioned. “This is the messy real world. If you’re studying naturally occurring phenomena, you take what you can get. Ian Stevenson has said that reincarnation is the best explanation, but not the only one, for the strongest cases. They provide evidence. But they are not proof.” While they may not amount to proof, the stories of these unusual children certainly force us to temporarily suspend our disbelief (or our beliefs) about life after death. But I had not yet finished my journey down this Charlottesville rabbit hole. Tucker’s next stories surprised me even more, and after seeing the cases, I can honestly say that I’ll never look at birthmarks the same way again.

The Body Remembers

Kathy was an unmarried young woman who became pregnant at sixteen and had a son, James, in 1978. Initially, James seemed like a healthy young boy, but at sixteen months he began to limp, and he soon developed a prominent nodule about an inch above his right ear. Eventually, he was diagnosed with neuroblastoma, an often fatal form of cancer. As his young mother tried to care for him, the cancer spread over James’s body, and his condition deteriorated. A tumor blinded his left eye, and his weakened body could no longer keep food down. In desperation, the doctors attempted to feed him with an IV through his right jugular vein, leaving a nasty scar. The medical efforts were in vain and James passed from this world in April of 1980.

Two marriages later, Kathy was in her thirties when she had another son, Chad. As she was emerging from anesthetic after the delivery, one of the doctors approached her cautiously. “Has your husband told you yet?” he asked. Petrified that her baby had died, Kathy was relieved to hear that he was in fact alive. But her relief soon turned to shock when she saw Chad for the first time. The newborn boy had a cyst one inch behind his right ear, was blind in the left eye, and had a dark birthmark that looked like a scar running down the right side of his neck near the jugular vein.

As Chad grew up, he began to exhibit other similarities to James, both physically and emotionally. He had the same temperament, and as he began to walk, he developed a limp. When he was four years old, he turned to his mother and asked about their “other house.” He then proceeded to accurately describe the apartment where James and Kathy had lived almost two decades before, recalling details even Kathy’s husband would not have known. “Why do you want to go back to this other house?” she asked Chad. Without hesitating, he answered, “Because I left you there.”

Kathy’s story was originally researched by Carol Bowman, author of Children’s Past Lives, a book that, with its numerous stories from American families, helped to shatter the illusion that children who remember past lives exist only in cultures that believe in reincarnation. What makes the case of Kathy and Chad so remarkable is the physical similarities between the two boys—particularly Chad’s birthmarks and birth defects that corresponded to James’s physical ailments. As it turns out, such things are not uncommon in the Virginia case files.

For example, there is the Turkish child who, at the age of two, remembered a past life as an outlaw. This particular criminal had been well known in Turkey and had died in a standoff with the police only a few days before the child’s birth. Trapped by the authorities, knowing he could not escape, he had committed suicide, holding his gun under his own chin and pulling the trigger. The child grew up remembering accurate details of the criminal’s life and death, but what was even more striking was that he also had a birthmark underneath his chin that precisely matched the bullet entry-point of the criminal’s self-inflicted wound. When Stevenson investigated the case, he inquired about a second possible birthmark at the top of the head. Pulling the young boy’s hair back, he discovered a hairless birthmark on the scalp at the exact location of the bullet’s exit wound.

I learned that there are, in fact, fourteen different cases that follow this same pattern. In all fourteen, Stevenson has documented a small, round birthmark corresponding to a bullet wound that a child remembers suffering in a previous life. And in each case, the birthmark is accompanied by a larger, more irregular-shaped birthmark on the opposite side of the body. “As much as possible, we verify that these birthmarks do in fact match wounds on the body of the deceased,” Tucker told me. “When we can, we get autopsy reports or medical records. If those aren’t available, then we try to obtain eyewitness testimony from people who saw the body and can talk about where the wounds were. Sometimes we even get police reports.” As Tucker showed me one picture after another of birthmarks taken from cases they have investigated, I couldn’t help but consider the implications of what I was seeing.

These types of cases provide some of the most suggestive data in support of reincarnation, yet they also raise fascinating questions. We know that genetics is the source of the physical makeup of any individual and that environmental circumstances play a role as well. This evidence, assuming for a moment that reincarnation is the best explanation, suggests that perhaps there is another factor in our development. It would seem to indicate that whatever matrix of energy is passing from one body to another is interacting in some way with the physical form—even with the genetic code—and impacting its development. Perhaps physical trauma, as well as memories, may survive death and carry on in nonphysical form, destined to affect the makeup of future incarnations. As I looked at the slide of a sixteen-year-old boy with round birthmarks littered across his chest, who remembered dying of a shotgun wound in a previous life, I wondered: How often does this happen? Why does it seem to happen in some situations but not in others? How might this affect our understanding of biology? Whatever the answers, there is certainly evidence of a remarkable correlation between memories of trauma suffered in a previous life and birthmarks or birth defects in the current life.

Birthmarks and birth defects were some of the more incredible aspects of the stories I heard in Virginia, but there were plenty of other mind-stretching cases hiding in those file cabinets. Some are simply hard to categorize, and they challenge one’s ideas about reality no matter what perspective one approaches the material from. For example, in some Native American tribes, there are cases of more than one child having accurate, documented memories of the same previous life. “You see this in the Pacific Northwest tribes,” one researcher told me. “There have been cases investigated where there will be half a dozen grandchildren who remember being the same grandmother in a previous life.” There are the cases of Burmese children who remember being Japanese soldiers stationed in Burma during World War II. They grew up complaining about the spicy Burmese diet and the hot climate, using words that their parents could not understand and requesting to eat raw fish. There are even cases where a child remembers having been aborted. For example, in one case a young girl formed an intense bond with her swim coach immediately upon meeting her, a bond so strong that it surprised both the mother and the coach. Soon the child began to make strange statements to her mother. She insisted that she had once been a baby in the coach’s “tummy” and that a “bad man had come and pulled her out,” though she “desperately tried to hold on.” As it turned out, the coach later admitted that she had had an abortion years before, and she was shocked that the child could possibly have known.

Superpsi Me

Even for researchers who recognize in Stevenson’s children a legitimate phenomenon, there is a great deal of disagreement over how to account for it. One of the most popular and enduring alternative explanations has come to be called “superpsi.” Psi stands for parapsychological phenomena and is the more accepted name in research circles for what used to be known as ESP, or extrasensory perception. Superpsi refers to a particularly powerful version of psi. In this case, it would mean that the information is being obtained not from an actual past life but from a powerful psychic perception.

There are several versions of the superpsi hypothesis. One is that the children are telepathically reading the minds of existing individuals—maybe friends and family of the deceased—to obtain the information. Or perhaps the children are actually traveling back in time and clairvoyantly reading the mind of the person who they claim to have been in a “past life.” While some may balk at the idea of such abilities, the theory is attractive for one particular reason. As philosopher Michael Grosso puts it, “superpsi is . . . preferred [by some] because it appeals strictly to the abilities of living people.” In other words, accepting the superpsi hypothesis means that one need not believe in the existence of reincarnation and the whole metaphysical Pandora’s box that comes along with it. No rebirth. No soul surviving the death of the physical body. No afterlife. One need only believe that individuals are capable of powerful psychic perceptions. Very powerful psychic perceptions. In fact, that’s also the problem with the theory. These kids would have to be psychic superheroes in order to account for much of the data. And there is little evidence that such abilities exist at all—certainly not in these relatively normal children, many of whom are now decades older and show no extraordinary psychic capacities.

Most of the researchers I spoke with were highly skeptical of superpsi. Transpersonal theorist Chris Bache voiced the feelings of many when he told me that “Stevenson has done a very careful analysis of superpsi and explained in specific cases why the hypothesis doesn’t really fit the data. Besides, no one has ever really demonstrated superpsi in the laboratory. The psychic ability which they are proposing is just astronomical.”

Still, even as superpsi has been widely discredited as an explanation, more sophisticated variations on the theory have arisen to take its place. For example, in his recent book, Science and the Akashic Field, systems theorist Ervin Laszlo attempts an explanation that sounds like something Jean-Luc Picard might refer to in a rather wild script of Star Trek. First, he theorizes the existence of a metaverse beyond the universe. (Nothing radical there. Physics journals these days are full of metaverse theories.) Then he proposes that this metaverse (or quantum vacuum, or Akashic field, or A-field, as he refers to it) contains within it both the universe itself and, more importantly, all the experiences of living things in the universe—a universal quantum memory bank, if you will. It’s not a new idea, just new to science. Clairvoyants such as Edgar Cayce have long referred to something they called the Akashic Records, the metaphysical name for an astral record of everything that has ever happened. Laszlo has taken the name, added a healthy dose of contemporary science, and created a new version. And he uses it to explain reincarnation memories. The children aren’t recalling previous lives, Laszlo suggests toward the end of his book; they’re accessing information from the A-field.

These alternative explanations may have some merit and may be applicable in certain instances. But I could find no expert on the subject who believed that any one of these theories was sufficient to account for the data in total. Some cases may be explained, but sooner or later one runs into particular examples that just don’t fit the model, at least not without some major leaps of logic.

“Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence,” the great cosmologist Carl Sagan famously declared. Sagan was one of the original skeptics. In fact, one of his last books, The Demon-Haunted World, was specifically dedicated to debunking the pseudo-science in our culture. Yet in that same book, Sagan expressed interest in Stevenson’s data and felt that it deserved a fair scientific hearing. That hearing has, for the most part, yet to occur. Very few scholars outside the field of parapsychology have seriously considered the cases collected by the University of Virginia. A few have been supportive, but most have been dismissive or extremely critical. Indeed, Stevenson’s most oft-quoted critic is the late philosopher Paul Edwards. In his book Reincarnation: A Critical Examination, he critiques Stevenson’s work on a number of counts. But his primary argument against the reincarnation hypothesis is not actually an argument against the data itself but against the paradigm-shattering notion of reincarnation as a theory. Edwards writes that reincarnation simply clashes with too many accepted scientific conventions to be considered seriously. Therefore, he bases much of his argument on what he calls the failure to overcome the “formidable initial presumption against reincarnation.”

This is perhaps the primary reason why curious researchers and fascinated scientists haven’t been beating a path to Tucker and Stevenson’s door. Of course, many do have questions about the evidence. They worry about faulty memories, sloppy methodologies, problems with translators, biased investigators, etcetera. But the more I studied the critics, the more it became clear to me that the main problem Tucker and Stevenson are encountering with their peers in the academic community has to do with exactly Edwards’ main concern—that the reincarnation hypothesis simply overturns too many precepts sacred to certain branches of science.

For example, most neuroscientists and cognitive scientists believe that consciousness cannot exist independent of the physical apparatus of the brain. And that fundamental assumption effectively rules out reincarnation. And even if we presume for a moment that consciousness can exist outside the brain, we still have absolutely no idea how a “soul” or an immaterial component of the human personality might survive a transfer between bodies. Try bringing up that possibility at the next conference of biologists or neuroscientists and see how quickly they escort you to the door. As Susan Blackmore, a former parapsychology researcher turned skeptic, told me, “The problem with reincarnation is that there is absolutely no sound theoretical basis for it, whatsoever, of any kind.”

Tucker understands that the lack of an acceptable theoretical framework for reincarnation makes scientists reluctant to take the data seriously. However, he was quick to point out that this is not a new story in science. “It used to be anecdotal that French farmers complained that rocks were falling out of the sky and landing on their farms,” he told me. “Scientists completely scoffed at that, because how could rocks fall from the sky? There aren’t any rocks in the sky. Of course, once they figured out what meteorites were, then it changed. So they should’ve been paying attention to what those farmers were saying. But often, you just ignore the anecdotes until you have a theory that lets you make sense of them.”

Stevenson and Tucker are also not without high-profile supporters. One of the most vocal has been retired Georgia State University philosophy professor Robert Almeder. He carefully reviewed the research over a decade ago, refuted the critics, and presented a more positive assessment. In fact, Almeder felt that Stevenson himself was underestimating the power of his own evidence. According to Stevenson’s conclusions, Almeder writes, “It is not unreasonable to believe in reincarnation in order to explain his best cases.” But the “proper conclusion,” Almeder claimed, was that it was “unreasonable” for someone to categorically deny reincarnation. In other words, he felt that while the jury might still be out on the subject, given the evidence, a rational mind would have to consider it as a possibility.

Somewhere between the believers and skeptics lies a public largely unaware of the data. And the scientific community is still investing few resources in pursuing such unconventional research. The current head of the Division of Personality Studies, Dr. Bruce Greyson, told me during my visit to Charlottesville that the new chair of the university’s psychology department strongly disapproves of their studies. Despite their self-sufficient endowment and the impeccable credentials of the staff, Greyson is worried about their status and wondering how long their affiliation with the school will survive.

In the meantime, novel theories—some conventional, some unconventional, some skeptical—will continue to try to account for these unusual children who keep appearing in our world. And now, with Carol Bowman’s pioneering books on American children who remember past lives, we are likely to hear much more about this phenomenon in the West. Over time, I imagine that more research and new theories will shed further light and perspective on this complex enigma. But as the green lawns of the University of Virginia faded into my rearview mirror, I was left with an inescapable conclusion: at this point, reincarnation seems to be the theory that best fits all the facts.

Memory, Memory, Quite Contrary

One of the interesting characteristics common to young children who spontaneously remember past lives is that almost all begin speaking about those lives soon after they learn to talk, between eighteen months and three years of age. Parents report particular circumstances under which the children tend to share these memories: when they are relaxed, when they are between sleeping and waking, when they have just had a bath, when they are on a long car ride, and so forth. Some are not even conscious of the memories outside of these specific conditions. When speaking about their past lives, most of these kids seem unusually lucid, clear, and serious, in contrast to those times when they’re just engaged in childish fantasy or imagination. And most of them lose the memories at around seven years of age, no matter what culture they are raised in. Significantly, this corresponds with the beginning of a specific developmental stage in psychology—“concrete operational,” if you’re using Piaget’s scheme—a stage associated with the development of the logical, rational part of the mind. And the amnesia is not just in relationship to past lives—as developmental psychologists have shown, children lose memories of their infancy and early life experiences at this same age (a phenomenon known as infantile amnesia).

Given these consistent patterns, it seems reasonable to hypothesize that these particular memories somehow operate within a different frame of reality than do everyday memories. As children grow up and become more connected to this life, they become less connected to whatever they may be remembering from the past. In the recent documentary Experiencing the Soul, based on the book of the same name by Eliot Jay Rosen, one psychologist relates a powerful story told by a couple who had a three-year-old daughter and a newborn baby boy:

During a period of several days, this little girl kept coming to the parents and saying, “I’d like to spend some time alone with my new baby brother.” The parents were a little nervous about this. They had heard of sibling rivalry, so they thought, “Well, maybe it’ll pass.” It did not pass. She persisted in her request, so they decided that they would allow her to do this. But they had a monitor in the room so they could listen over the intercom to what was going on. So the day came; they let her enter the room, and as they listened on the intercom, all was quiet for a few moments. And then they heard their daughter’s voice to the boy-child: “Tell me about heaven. I’m forgetting.”

Now, exactly what she meant by “heaven” is not entirely clear, but myth and literature have long supported the notion that growing up involves a process of forgetting. Plato, one of the original philosophers of reincarnation, wrote about the river of forgetfulness through which all souls pass before their rebirth. And Wordsworth evocatively described birth as “but a sleep and a forgetting.” But whatever amnesia we fall under as we come into this life, it would seem that for some of us, traces of a previous existence, and sometimes much more, survive, even well into adulthood. One of the most dramatic examples of this is a case from the 1960s, related in the book The Cathars and Reincarnation by British psychiatrist Dr. Arthur Guirdham.

In 1961, a woman walked into Dr. Guirdham’s office with an acute and confusing problem. She had been the victim of unrelenting nightmares since the age of twelve, and sometimes she screamed so loud she worried that the neighbors would awaken in distress. The content of the dreams was usually something related to horrible murders and massacres. After months of pursuing normal psychiatric approaches, the doctor discovered that when she was much younger, she kept a diary in which she had written some of her dreams as well as other odds and ends that came to her mind. As it turned out, the contents of her diary contained information about life as a Cathar in Toulouse, France, in the thirteenth century. The Cathars were a Christian sect that was persecuted in the Inquisition, and one of their heretical ideas was a belief in reincarnation. Her diary also contained verses of songs written in Medieval French, a language spoken in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.

Moreover, the woman had unknowingly recorded, in horrifying detail, the massacre of the Cathars. They were burned at the stake, and she included a gruesome description of having been burned at the stake herself. She recalled details of the event that only later were recognized by historians to be factual. Her memories of family names and aspects of relationships between different members of the Cathar sect were later verified by a detailed analysis of the records of the Inquisition. She even claimed, in contrast to the accepted history of the time, that Cathar priests wore dark blue. Historians insisted that they always wore black—that is, until 1966, when new facts from the Latin archives were discovered and the history updated. Cathar priests, we now know, did wear dark green and dark blue.

Whether or not these revelations helped this patient is unknown, but some swear by the healing power of unearthing memories of past lives. This particular example occurred long before the phrase “past-life therapy” came into vogue, but the intervening years have seen an explosion of people seeking to explore the healing effects of reliving past-life memories. And it’s not just psycho-physical healing. Many have reported profound spiritual breakthroughs, deep experiences of the soul, and powerful transformations of relationships—all through coming to terms with psychological patterns that have driven them not just in this life but through multiple incarnations. Sometimes it’s accidental. The therapist tells the patient, under mild hypnosis, to go to the source of his or her problem, and suddenly the person sitting opposite is no longer Dick or Jane of twenty-first century America but a seventeenth-century watchmaker in Europe, a peasant in India, or a monk in Japan. Therapeutically, it’s a mind-boggling proposition. Just think of common psychosocial issues rooted in childhood—the Oedipal complex, repression, defense mechanisms, problems in ego development—and then add a hundred variations over thousands of years. I think even Freud would feel overwhelmed.

Yet across this country, thousands (if not millions) have tried this experimental therapy, reliving times long since forgotten and experiencing cultures and epochs that historians would love to get a glimpse of—all from the comfort of the therapist’s couch. Everything from asthma to eczema to stuttering to nightmares to anxiety attacks has been cured, the stories tell us, using this therapeutic practice that takes depth psychology to a whole new level. It is a movement that has helped Dr. Brian Weiss become a New Age star and inspired Shirley MacLaine to walk out on a limb. It has helped convince many in the Judeo-Christian West—which Arthur Schopenhauer once described as the part of the world that does not believe in reincarnation—that rebirth is a fact. And it has motivated serious therapists to test the edges of their own profession, walking well outside the boundaries of mainstream psychology and donning a mantle more commonly associated with Madame Blavatsky than Sigmund Freud.

However, there is a snake in the grass when it comes to hypnotic regression—a problem technically known as cryptoamnesia. It means that we may not be consciously aware of all of our memories and that long-forgotten pieces of information, stored forever in the obscure byways of the human brain, can easily emerge under hypnosis. In other words, I might remember a World War II lifetime under hypnotic suggestion and be able to describe that lifetime in detail. When questioned closely, however, it would become clear that I was unconsciously weaving together a mixture of memories gained through watching television shows or perhaps reading books. It may sound unlikely, but a number of tests have shown that it is possible. As well-known science author Martin Gardner writes, “Almost any hypnotic subject capable of going into a deep trance will babble about a previous incarnation if the hypnotist asks him to.”

For many therapists engaged in past-life hypnosis, however, the veracity of the memories is not what’s important. Indeed, the goal in a therapist’s office tends to be wholeness and healing. Popular author and past-life therapist Dr. David Hammerman explained, “People will often ask me, ‘How do I know if this past-life memory is real or not?’ And my own stance is that I don’t think it’s terribly important to therapeutic purposes whether the story that somebody’s coming up with is totally made up by their mind. Does it have healing power? That’s the most important thing. Is the narrative that comes through therapeutic?”

Nevertheless, all of the therapists I spoke to were clearly convinced that at least some of the memories their clients relived were real. For example, Dr. Hammerman, who has had clients reexperiencing past lives that go all the way back to prehistoric times, conveyed to me a story of a patient who relived a past life in which she remembered a dramatic wartime scene in sixteenth-century Germany. The patient pursued information about the past life and eventually tracked down all of the relevant records, confirming her memories. And there are probably hundreds of cases like this scattered through the literature on reincarnation, some more fully documented than others. One of the most remarkable accounts is told by well-known past-life therapist Roger Woolger in Stephen Sakellarios’s 2002 documentary In Another Life: Reincarnation in America.

One day in a hypnosis session, a client of Woolger’s remembered a previous life in which she was a minor painter living in Italy during the Renaissance. Of the many details she remembered, one was the name of the painter. After the session, she decided to do a little investigation, but an exhaustive search through records of the Renaissance at local libraries revealed nothing. Then, almost a year after the initial experience, a friend recommended that she try a particular art institute that kept records of European painters. Buried in a five-volume history of Italian art, she found the name she had been looking for. The painter, as it turned out, had lived in Siena, Italy. Inspired by this discovery, she decided to take a trip to Italy, her first visit to the country. Immediately upon arriving in Siena, she was overcome with a powerful sense of familiarity and was able to walk straight to the house where this painter had lived. There on the wall outside was a historical plaque making reference to this Renaissance artist.

Few attempts have been made to study past-life hypnotic regression in a more systematized, scientific manner. What may be the most impressive and ambitious foray into this territory did not take place in a therapist’s office at all. It started in a Quaker library in New Jersey in 1966.

Helen Wambach was a practicing psychologist and teacher in Long Branch, New Jersey, when her life took a surprising turn. Visiting a Quaker center, she found herself unexpectedly transported to another time. Describing the event in her 1978 book, Reliving Past Lives, she writes:

As I mounted the stairs to the second floor, a feeling of being in another time and place came over me. As I entered the small library room, I saw myself going automatically to the shelf of books and taking one down. I seemed to “know” that this had been my book, and as I looked at the pages, a scene came before my inner eye. I was riding on a mule across a stubbled field, and this book was propped up on the saddle in front of me. The sun was hot on my back, and my clothes were scratchy. I could feel the horse moving under me while I sat in the saddle, deeply absorbed in reading the book propped before me. . . . I seemed to know the book’s contents before I turned the pages.

Deeply impacted by this event, Wambach was compelled to ask: Were such unexplained and subconscious memories buried deep in the psychology of all human beings? How could we know, she wondered, if these past-life memories were actually genuine? Ten years after her initial experience in the Quaker library, Wambach thought she found her answer to the question. It came in the form of two numbers—50.6 and 49.4.

50.6% and 49.4% are statistics that came out of Wambach’s research in the late seventies. In the most extensive experiment ever conducted using past-life hypnosis, Wambach regressed over one thousand people to different time periods in history, asking them to record any past lives that they experienced. After the sessions, participants would fill out forms answering specific questions about the lives they had remembered—questions about gender, clothing, skin color, types of food eaten, living arrangements, and so forth. Many participants reported numerous past lives from different time periods—some male, some female. When all was said and done, Wambach tallied up the results, and she found that 50.6% of the reported lives were male and 49.4% were female. And this statistic did not seem to depend on the percentage of men and women participating in her research sessions. In other words, if there were 75% women and 25% men in a session, the gender of the reported past lives remained steady, right around the 50.6%/49.4% split. This statistic is striking because it matches our best projections of what the global gender distribution has been throughout history.

Some people have called Wambach’s results the best evidence yet that at least some of the lives remembered under hypnotic regression are actual past lives. Could thousands of fantasy lives, they ask, conjured up by individual psyches really succeed in nailing such a key statistical figure so precisely? Her regression research was the first of its kind, in terms of the careful quantitative analysis of such a large volume of data. And it is an experiment that has never been repeated.

Despite Wambach’s efforts, past-life regressions ultimately count for little as empirical evidence for reincarnation within the academic community. Given the problem of cryptoamnesia and the hypnotic subject’s propensity to create imaginary memories, that is understandable. Stevenson himself has been highly critical of the whole field. But I found myself unable to dismiss all of the anecdotal accounts as mere fad or fantasy. There are simply far too many unexplained pieces of the puzzle and impressive stories from reputable sources that seem difficult to account for in other, more conventional ways.

Waiting for the Jury

Past-life memories obtained under hypnotic regression and children who remember previous lives are the two most common sources cited as evidence for the existence of reincarnation. Those hoping that these two fields of study can provide concrete proof will not, at the end of the day, be satisfied by the accumulated data. At this point, strong evidence has been gathered, but it is far from irrefutable. Reasonable people can disagree on what the evidence means. And we must also remember that there is much at stake in this debate. Worldviews, religious beliefs, and many deeply held convictions about the nature of life itself are all called into question by the idea of reincarnation, and it’s going to take more than twenty-five hundred unusual children and some impressive anecdotes from hypnosis subjects to overturn the status quo.

Nevertheless, the sheer volume of data suggestive and supportive of rebirth presents an impressive case for all but the most predisposed skeptics. I could not escape the fact that no one I spoke to—skeptic, agnostic, or believer—could come up with convincing alternative explanations for many of the cases I came across. At best, they would come up with a theory—fraud, faulty memories, cryptoamnesia, psi—that might fit some of the cases. And I began to see that there is a big difference between possible alternatives and convincing alternatives.

Before I began my research into the subject, I had little investment in reincarnation as an idea. It was never a part of my own religious beliefs and it was never a subject I felt strongly about. After months of looking into the stories, examining the literature, and interviewing the researchers, I still had no final answers, but I certainly felt that there was sufficient evidence to warrant a deeper exploration of survival studies. You see, if we assume for a moment that reincarnation is real, then that brings up an important question: What happens when we are freed from our physical moorings? If we do, in fact, survive death and exist beyond the body, then where exactly are we? What is the nature of that nonphysical experience?

Of course, there are many traditional answers to this question. However, I began to notice something interesting. As I read through the latest research in the field of survival studies, I realized that there were some intriguing similarities between stories of reincarnation and accounts from the strange and captivating world of near-death experiences and out-of-body experiences. And I started to wonder: Could all of these experiences be pointing to the same dimension of existence?

Part II

Glimpses of the Beyond

“There is the fear that there is an afterlife but no one will know where it’s being held.”
- Woody Allen

I don’t know if heaven exists. But if it does, then some part of it must look a little like central Virginia on a warm September evening. Though I saw more of the countryside than I had planned to as my rental car and I tested the precision of Google Maps, in the end I did make it to my destination. Situated in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains is the cluster of red-roofed buildings that make up the Monroe Institute, an organization that probably is unique in terms of both its founding and its mission. The Institute was started by Robert Monroe, a former business executive whose name, in the 1970s, became almost synonymous with the idea of astral projection, or what is generally referred to as out-of-body experience (OBE). It is a phenomenon, now well documented, where one temporarily experiences oneself as being disconnected from one’s physical body. Monroe’s first book, Journeys Out of the Body, was a fascinating and mind-bending voyage through his many years of experimenting with this unusual state of consciousness, and it caused a minor sensation when it was released in 1971. His second, Far Journeys, was a travelogue through his subsequent explorations and included his own conclusions about the nature of what he began to call the nonphysical world. Monroe’s initial OBEs were spontaneous and unexpected. But he was eventually able to develop the capacity to leave his body almost at will and pursue his own adventures in nonphysical dimensions. Monroe, who died in 1995, was more of a bold explorer than a spiritual practitioner, but the maps of the nonphysical world he constructed from his OBE journeys are full of intriguing similarities to near-death experiences as well as some traditional metaphysics—in particular, the Tibetan Buddhist bardos. While I had long been curious about the out-of-body phenomenon in and of itself, my visit to the Monroe Institute was inspired by the relationship I saw between OBEs and reincarnation.

I had begun to notice that in many accounts from those who remember past lives, there are intriguing descriptions of time spent in the afterlife, or the “interlife,” as some have called it—meaning the time spent between lives. These accounts may give us a tantalizing glimpse into the nature of what lies beyond the physical veil. What I wanted to know was: Are those who remember an interlife referring to the same dimension or realm as those who are having out-of-body experiences? Dr. Carlos Alvarado, a researcher at the University of Virginia who studies the out-of-body phenomenon, confirmed the possible link:

Reincarnation is a form of survival of bodily death, but whatever comes back must have existed at some point and there must have been a point of transfer between personality one and personality two. So we could speculate that at some point when you die, you have to be out of your body and survive before you reincarnate again. Where you are at that moment may be the same as what people experience as an OBE or out-of-body experience. In fact, spiritual traditions talk about death as basically a permanent out-of-body experience. So if you accept these types of ideas, then there is a clear link with phenomena such as reincarnation.

Monroe’s initial explorations were done before near-death experiences (or NDEs, as they’re often called) became such a widely discussed phenomenon. But the similarities between the two states are clear. In some respects, NDEs are simply OBEs that occur when a person is close to death. Moreover, descriptions of both OBEs and NDEs do have many similarities to the interlife descriptions from reincarnation research. Indeed, Dr. Bruce Greyson, who studies near-death experiences, informed me that there have already been some studies examining these connections:

One of the medical students who was working with Jim Tucker last year compared the reports of Burmese children who remember the interval between lives with the reports of Buddhists who have had near-death experiences. And she found that the descriptions were very similar. There’s a period of hanging around the body, often watching the funeral; there’s a period of waiting around while you’re being reassigned or waiting to choose your next life; and then there is the period of entering into the next life.

Now if that doesn’t sound like your idea of a heavenly afterlife, you’ll be glad to know that there is some variation in the reports—in fact, tremendous variation. And yet, “waiting around” in some way, shape, or form does seem to be a popular theme. In his recent book Life Before Life, Tucker writes that out of 217 children in the Virginia files who remembered time spent in an interlife period, 112 recalled existing at least temporarily in “another realm,” 45 spoke about memories of their conception or rebirth, and 69 said that they had witnessed their “previous personality’s funeral.” Most of the memories are just brief snippets, bits and pieces of information, fleeting descriptions of an existence before birth.

For example, there is the child who remarked to his parents one day that “when you die, you don’t go right to heaven. You go to different levels—here, then here, then here,” and he moved his hand up as he referred to each level. Or there is the four-year-old girl who announced to her family that “when you go to heaven, you have a little time to rest, kind of like a vacation, but then you have to get to work. You have to start thinking about what you have to learn in your next life. You have to start picking out your next family. . . . Heaven isn’t just a place to hang around forever. . . . You have work to do there.” Some speak of other planets, other realms; some remember seeing a light, going toward it, and then being reborn; some remember going through a tunnel and then “meeting God”; some talk about time spent in “heaven” and describe their activities while there.

One of the most common themes in afterlife accounts is what is often called a “life review.” Kenneth Ring, author of Heading Toward Omega, analyzed NDEs from all over the world and noted that a life review was one of the most commonly reported features. It usually consists of an almost instantaneous retrospective of one’s entire life, sometimes in fine detail. It has been described as being similar to “viewing a three-dimensional hologram of your life in full color, sound, and scent” or “viewing hundreds of television screens with each screen showing a home movie of one event in your life.”

Life reviews are common in NDEs and in past-life regressions but are only hinted at in reports from children who remember an interlife existence. The experience can be positive and it can also be unpleasant, even hellish. Most report that during the life review one is unable to employ the usual ego-defense mechanisms. There is no self-deception or pretense possible. The life review echoes, in many respects, traditional accounts of the individual soul facing some sort of judgment after death, though in this case the judge is one’s own self. The Tibetan Book of the Dead even mentions the “Mirror of Karma” that is held before the soul in which the previous life’s actions are reflected clearly. “It is, in a sense, remorseless,” explained one person after a powerful NDE. “Nobody judges you; you judge yourself. You cannot lie; you cannot cheat. Not there, you can’t. You just cannot. You’re faced with it . . . and you have to accept it. Nobody says ‘you’ve been bad’. . . . You do it. You know. You know better than anyone, because it’s your thoughts and your motives. . . . And one gets precisely and exactly what one deserves. It’s utterly fair.”

Another common element reported in the interlife state is the experience of being in the presence of a higher power or intelligence. Sometimes that presence takes the form of light or a feeling of love or a “being of light.” Sometimes it’s a review board composed of masters or elders—three Egyptian gods, twelve wise men, three forms of Jesus or Krishna, several Native American elders, etcetera. They are very common in past-life regressions, children’s interlife memories, and NDEs. These review boards, we are told, assist individuals in reviewing their karmic situation and choosing their next birth.

One has to tread very carefully in drawing any conclusions about this data, especially given that there seems to be a highly subjective element to these experiences. Christians often see Jesus; Native Americans may experience a review board of their “ancestors”; New Agers tend to talk about light beings; Indians see Krishna. There is also some evidence that reports of the afterlife have changed dramatically over the years. In the recent book The Rise and Fall of the Afterlife, scholar Jan Bremmer tours some of the more notable examples of NDEs throughout history and concludes that individuals tend to report afterlife experiences that are consistent with the beliefs of the time they live in. For example, during the Middle Ages, NDEs were filled with heaven-and-hell images and souls being tortured for their sins. Some contemporary Christian accounts contain similar images.

Another reason for caution in drawing conclusions about this data is that even if we could be confident in the veracity of all the reports, we may still only be seeing a narrow slice of the death/reincarnation process. Crucial pieces of the picture may still be missing because of the limited scope of our vision into this other world. Yet I don’t think the highly subjective nature of these accounts nor the limited nature of our perception means that there is nothing objective to glean from the stories. In fact, the more I learned about the afterlife or interlife realm, the more I realized that the subjectivity of the reports may be one of the keys to understanding how this subtler dimension of reality actually operates.

Creative Thinking

“You and I sit in this room and we call this reality, because we have a common experience of a chair and a couch. What if people are having common experiences in some nonphysical place? Does that make it real?” The person sitting across from me nonchalantly talking about nonphysical realities was Skip Atwater, director of research at the Monroe Institute. A former army counterintelligence officer, Atwater has spent the last several decades working closely with individuals exploring the limits of the human capacity to perceive subtler realms of reality beyond our normal three-dimensional existence. The Monroe Institute has published many scientific papers on this topic, and they pursue a rational, left-brained approach to experiences that would leave most of us pinching ourselves to make sure we weren’t dreaming. Reincarnation is not a focus of their work, but Atwater told me that many of the people who participate in their programs do at some point “become aware” that they have lived during other time periods.

I asked Atwater if he thought there was a common experience of what happens after death. “We just pose a model,” he replied. “It’s like we’re saying it might be helpful to think about it this way. We’re not saying this is the way it is. But there seems to be something like a ‘reception station,’ and it can be different for different people. It can look like a transit station, an auditorium/gathering place, or some sort of healing/regeneration center. It might be a library where you can look things up and review past lives or a planning center where you decide what the next course of action is.”

In the literature of survival research, there are numerous accounts in which a person describes exactly the sort of place Atwater is talking about. “It was like a train station,” said one person after returning from a near-death experience. A man who witnessed his grandfather’s passing in a lucid dream recalled, “We ascended through a blue mist until we came to a huge, beautiful campus in the sky. . . . We walked . . . to a gigantic dome-shaped auditorium.” He woke up to find that his grandfather had indeed died. Another man who underwent a dramatic near-death experience remembers: “The heavenly structure resembled an amphitheater similar to those found in ancient civilizations.” Therapist Roger Woolger similarly describes how one of his patients told him that she reviewed her past lives in the interlife state: “[She] reported being taken by . . . a luminous being to a celestial temple, where she was shown a huge book in which the life she had just remembered and ‘many more’ were clearly written.”

So does that mean that a celestial temple or an amphitheater or an auditorium or a bus station really exists? Well, remember that we’re navigating a world in which reality, if most accounts are to be believed, is very plastic, almost in the same way dreams can be. As the great religious scholar Huston Smith once wrote, “Everything we experience on the bardos is a reflection of our own mental machinations.” Dr. Alvarado confirmed that most OBE accounts report something similar. “A lot of people say that their thoughts and their expectations and their fears can create astral reality or phenomena in the out-of-body state,” he said. “They say that it is a real dimension, a different plane, but that it interacts with the mentality of the individual.” Professor Chris Bache also echoed those descriptions when he told me that “a number of teachers have said that your experience of the bardo is self-generated. It’s psycho-plastic.”

This potentially explains the subjective nature of the accounts we hear about this in-between world. No wonder Buddhists often experience Buddhist realms and Christians often see Jesus. In fact, in Monroe’s cosmology of the nonphysical world, there is a place he calls the “Belief System Territory” where all of the afterlife experiences that correspond to various belief systems around the world exist as possible destinations for individuals after death. “I was given a tour of all the heavens that have been created,” claims one well-known NDE account. “The Nirvanas, the Happy Hunting Grounds, all of them. I went through them. These are thought form creations that we have created. . . . I saw the Christian heaven. . . . Some heavens are very interesting, and some are very boring. I found the ancient ones to be more interesting, like the Native American ones. . . . The Egyptians have fantastic ones. It goes on and on.”

The great Indian philosopher-sage Sri Aurobindo constructed an elaborate metaphysics of the nonphysical realms. In his system, the “mental” plane was a place in which the “stuff” of reality is very malleable to thought. He wrote:

This world contains not only the possibility of large or intense or continuous enjoyments almost inconceivable to the limited physical mind, but also the possibility of equally enormous sufferings. It is here therefore that there are situated the lowest heavens and all the hells with the tradition and imagination of which the human mind has lured and terrified itself since the earliest ages.

There are several other characteristics, described in Monroe’s books and confirmed by Atwater, that are near-universal when it comes to describing the nonphysical dimension—descriptions that apply across almost all accounts, from OBEs to NDEs to children who remember their past lives, and even to mystics like the eighteenth-century Swede Emanuel Swedenborg. One is the nature of communication in these realms, which is described as being nonverbal or telepathic. For example, Monroe, in his book Far Journeys, explains that in his travels through the nonphysical worlds, the primary method of communication was a powerful version of mental telepathy. He writes that “NVC [nonverbal communication] . . . is direct instant experience and/or immediate knowing transmitted from one intelligent energy system and received by another.” Swedenborg, in his classic Heaven and Hell, described “heaven” as being a place where “people actually speak directly from their thought, so that we have there a kind of thoughtful speech or audible thought.” And that description from a mystic philosopher in the eighteenth century dovetails neatly with a description from a five-year-old child in the twenty-first century who remarked one day to his parents that “when you die . . . you don’t talk in words. God doesn’t use words like English or Spanish. He hears thoughts.”

Another important element that we find corroborated across many accounts is the description of the way navigation works in the nonphysical world. As Atwater explained:

When we think about navigating in the physical world, if we want to go someplace, we have to go in this direction for this amount of time at this speed to get from here to there. But in the afterlife or the in-between life or at the level of the bardo immediately after death, navigation has to do with the relationship and interconnectedness we have with people. Some people call it the “realm of the line of forces” where you and I now have a permanent string between us, because we will always remember this conversation and each other. And so navigation after death doesn’t become, “How do I find Mike again? Do I have to travel east for five hours at a walking pace to get to Mike?” All I have to do is to think of Mike. Navigation becomes a matter of the interconnectedness between people and not a matter of physical dimensions.

Dr. Eric Weiss, a professor at the California Institute of Integral Studies, is one of the few scholars alive today who has made the study of nonphysical worlds the focus of his professional career. Like Atwater, he told me that travel in these subtler realms is a matter not of locomotion but of attention. “I don’t move through the astral world by putting my legs one in front of another. Rather, I move in the astral world by refocusing my thoughts and feelings,” he explained. “I can focus on the overall ‘feel’ of my memory of [a person], and then I would immediately either be in communication with that person, or else I would find myself in their presence.” Dr. Weiss is also working on an entirely new geometry that he feels can begin to explain the nature of form and movement within these realms, one that is fundamentally different from the basic Euclidian system that defines our everyday experience of the physical three-dimensional world of space and time. He hopes that understanding the geometry of these nonphysical worlds will help us to discover more about how they work. “Understanding the spacetime of a world is the key to understanding its causal interactions,” he told me, “and thus is the key to forming a scientific understanding of what is happening there.” Indeed, the laws of the nonphysical world may be mysterious to us now, but then again, so were the laws of the subatomic world just a couple hundred years ago.

This kind of cross-discipline, cross-tradition, cross-experience analysis is in its most preliminary stages, but already the results are intriguing. I have listed only a few of the corroborating stories here, but there are many, many more. They indicate realms that are being experienced independently by multiple witnesses. The overall landscape they are describing and the characteristics they report paint a remarkably consistent picture across different types of experience, different ages, different cultures, and different belief systems. There is therefore compelling evidence for the existence of these nonphysical worlds, but . . . where? Where are they? How do you speak of a “place” when these realms exist outside of normal spatial realities? Indeed, it may be more accurate to think of the interlife realm not so much as a place that exists separate from the physical universe, a place where one goes after death, but rather as a dimension that interacts with and is interrelated with the physical dimension. In this paradigm, death would be less a journey into another world than a falling away of the physical body, revealing deeper structures of reality and levels of consciousness that are in some sense always present. Integral philosopher Ken Wilber echoes this conception of the subtle worlds when he writes, “We see that the energy fields thought to be hovering metaphysically beyond matter actually [exist] in intimate correlation with . . . matter. These subtle fields cannot be reduced to matter, but neither are they ontologically disconnected from matter.”

For the most part, however, there is simply so much that we don’t know about the nature of the nonphysical world. Like prehistoric humans witnessing the phenomenon of lightning, we may recognize that there is a dimension of reality that we do not yet understand. We may know some of its effects and observe that it interacts with the physical world in significant ways. We may even be able to understand many of the characteristics of this phenomenon through anecdotal accounts of its occasional appearances. But we are still infants in comprehending its true nature. Indeed, whatever knowledge may be emerging through recent investigations of the nonphysical realms, there is little doubt that we are still at the beginning stages of our education.

Part III

Reincarnation 2.0

“The soul is not bound by the formula of mental humanity:
it did not begin with that and will not end with it; it had
a pre-human past, it has a superhuman future.”
- Sri Aurobindo

“Man has never yet applied the methods of modern science to the problem which most profoundly concerns him—whether or not his personality involves any element which can survive bodily death.” Those words are from the founding father of survival research, Frederick Myers, whose groundbreaking book Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death was published in 1903. In the intervening century, interest in the subject has waxed and waned, but Myers himself could not have foreseen just how much the field he pioneered has expanded in the last decades. With a tremendous influx of new data and a growing number of scholars subjecting that data to rigorous analysis, there is hope that we may soon have a scientific answer to the question of what happens after death. But even as we consider the growing evidence for reincarnation and survival, we also need to ask another question: How does the way we think about death and rebirth—the philosophical framework through which we interpret the data—need to be updated for a postmodern, post-traditional world? As I spoke with many of the contemporary scholars who are pioneering this field, this question kept arising in my mind. Indeed, as reincarnation becomes more accepted through the work of people such as Ian Stevenson and others, and as we begin to dip our exploratory toes into the nonphysical dimensions of existence, it makes sense that many of the traditional metaphysical systems associated with these concepts may need to be reexamined. Otherwise we may be in danger of defaulting to old assumptions and outdated conclusions about how it all works and what it all means.

Reincarnation is, after all, a premodern notion that came to prominence around the same time as many of the world’s great wisdom traditions. Those traditions developed elaborate metaphysical systems of death and rebirth and detailed maps of the nonphysical realms. But they constructed their philosophies based on an understanding of the world that was significantly less developed than our own. As profound and important as these ancient systems are, they can often be problematic in a modern context. They tend to contain many elements—mythologies, beliefs, and superstitions—that no longer seem relevant given what we have learned about the world during the last two thousand years. For example, premodern traditions knew nothing about evolution. They did not know what science has come to understand—that we live in an unstable, evolving universe full of flux, change, and contingency. That is exactly the opposite of the picture painted by most traditional maps of reality. So it is no wonder that many of the metaphysical systems given to us by our religious traditions do not mesh well with the world revealed by modern science. Ancient belief in a static universe once begat a static metaphysics; contemporary knowledge of a living, evolving universe should give birth to a living, evolving metaphysics.

Ken Wilber is one of the first philosophical voices to recognize this. He points out that the esoteric maps and cosmologies of our religious traditions were based upon “interpretations of living experiences.” And those interpretations were consistent with the philosophical assumptions of the time. These maps, he explains, should not be related to as if they were “fixed, rigid, ontological grids that are true for all eternity.” Indeed, as we examine the data revealed in our own “living experiences” of these same nonphysical realms—as we analyze OBEs, NDEs, interlife memories, and other such experiences—we have to be willing to update our maps for our own time and, even more importantly, keep updating them.

What would this mean? Well, let’s start with a common premodern idea associated with reincarnation—the soul. It is natural, if we believe in reincarnation, to acknowledge the existence of something like a soul—an aspect of the self that is able to survive death, navigate the nonphysical world, and eventually incarnate in a new physical body. Stevenson has called this entity the “psychofore,” and physicist Amit Goswami has taken to referring to it as the “quantum monad.” Wilber himself equates the traditional soul with what he calls the “subtle body.” But regardless of what we call it, the essential point is: How would an updated philosophical context change the way we understand the soul?

In most premodern traditions, the soul is thought of as immortal—a permanent entity created by a higher power designed to interact with physical form. Some traditions talk about “the descent of the soul into matter” or describe the soul as being “sent down to be mixed in with this material world.” That was similar to how many religious traditions used to see human beings—designed in God’s image and placed on earth by a divine hand. Darwin’s revolution helped overturn that entire worldview, and we took our place within a much larger developmental stream of life. With the advent of this perspective, humans were no longer seen to have been fashioned in the workshop of a creator but were instead the latest step in a journey of evolution that has been in process for billions of years. Like all plants and animals, humans were understood to have emerged over time, products of the evolutionary process. But thus far, evolutionary theory has been applied only to the physical dimension, the spiritual dimension of life having been left out of the revolution. As the great French philosopher Henri Bergson noted in the early twentieth century, “The great error of the doctrines on the spirit has been . . . isolating the spiritual life from all the rest, by suspending it in space as high as possible above the earth. . . .”

Indeed, we have not yet extended the evolution revolution to apply to the nonphysical dimensions of existence. But why shouldn’t we? What if souls, for lack of a better word, didn’t just emerge out of creation fully formed but were actually created through the process of evolution in the same way that brains were? That would mean that the soul is not a permanent, ever-existing entity any more than a cell is a permanent, ever-existing entity. It has, instead, evolved over time and will continue to evolve in the future. While many of the people I spoke with talked about the “evolution of the soul,” what they were referring to is individual development from lifetime to lifetime. I began to realize that very few were really looking at the soul as being part of the larger stream of ongoing cosmic evolution. Dr. Bruce Greyson speculated with me about how we might understand the evolution of an entity called a “soul”:

You can look at the evolution of a soul from a physical perspective and try to make hypotheses about why having a soul makes your survival and your reproductive potential higher—what function did souls serve in terms of keeping our bodies alive? Or you can also look at it from a spiritual perspective and say that souls are evolving spiritual entities and that the body developed as a way of helping the soul develop. In that context, the development of the soul is the evolutionary process that’s important and the body is just a tool that the soul uses to further its own development.

Or you can take a more wave/particle view and say that the physical and the spiritual evolve together and you can’t have one evolving without the other; they’re two sides of a coin. Then, when you talk about physical evolution, there’s also a corresponding spiritual evolution that goes along with it. So at what point did primitive molecules organize enough to be called a cell? When can you say that something becomes an animal? That something becomes a human being? I think you can ask the same question about a spiritual entity—at what point does something become a soul?

What if we applied Greyson’s line of reasoning not only to the soul but to the subtle worlds we have been examining? Indeed, the nonphysical dimensions of existence are also easy to leave out of the evolutionary drama of life. Like our traditional notions of the soul, these realms, when they are acknowledged at all, are considered to be permanent, always existing, and outside the stream of evolution that most of us have come to accept as affecting all of physical existence. They are considered to be, to borrow Wilber’s phrase, “fixed, rigid, ontological grids that are true for all eternity.” But what if we didn’t assume that? What if the nonphysical dimensions of life are evolving in the same way that the physical dimensions of life are? What if it is all tied together? Indeed, if there is anything the data from NDEs, OBEs, and children’s interlife memories seem to agree on, it is that the subtle worlds of the interlife are, to some degree, psycho-plastic to our own consciousness. They are deeply affected by our thoughts, motives, and intentions, and we can surmise that they are themselves changing and evolving in accordance with our own psychological, spiritual, and cultural evolution. That would mean that it’s all—physical and nonphysical, material and immaterial, gross and subtle—part of one evolutionary process.

Viewing nonphysical dimensions of existence within an evolutionary context has a rather dramatic result. It means that the actual process of reincarnation is probably not entirely the same as it was two thousand years ago, and two thousand years from now it won’t be the same as it is today. It suggests that its evolution is likely intrinsically tied to our evolution. And that would mean that our own actions and our own consciousness—our own evolution, in other words—will profoundly contribute to the unfolding and development not only of what we call the material world but also of all the realms, dimensions, and processes that are interacting and interconnected with it. Perhaps even the process of reincarnation is destined to evolve in ways that we cannot now foresee.

Many of the great revolutions in human thought have had two important consequences—they have brought greater humility and new perspective to human life. The revolution of Copernicus placed humans outside their privileged place at the center of the universe for the first time in history, forcing a dramatic change in our collective self-perception. And it simultaneously opened up whole new vistas for our attention and exploration. The revolution of Freud showed us that the conscious ego is not necessarily at the center of the self and that there are other unconscious influences, personal and collective, that make up who we are. And it simultaneously opened up territory for inner exploration. The revolution of Darwin placed humanity within the context of a much larger evolutionary scheme, embedding us within the overall matrix of life on earth. And it opened up the doorway for us to take responsibility for our own development and dream as never before of a brighter future. Could the recognition of reincarnation and a new appreciation of the nonphysical dimensions of existence ultimately have the same humbling and expanding effect on human consciousness? Could it be that we will yet again be awed by the recognition of how much more there is to this vast universe than is yet dreamt of in our philosophy, how much more there is to human life and the human self than we could possibly understand by referencing only one brief lifetime? Will we begin to comprehend that we are deeply connected to other processes, forces, and dimensions, seen and unseen, physical and nonphysical, that are acting on us and influencing us at levels of which we are barely conscious? And could that recognition in turn inspire us to take greater responsibility for those forces and to create a future in which we are no longer unconsciously stumbling through the cycle of reincarnation but evolving in such a way that might ultimately transform the very nature of death and rebirth itself?

The trouble with statements about death, as one popular aphorism points out, is that 99.9 percent of them are made by people who are still alive. Death continues to be, at this point in time, one of life’s enduring mysteries. Whatever the miracles of modern science, and whatever glimpses we have been afforded of the world beyond, an objective understanding of what happens after death may always an enticing but ultimately ungraspable goal, a mirage forever receding on the horizon of our culture. But we live in a rapidly changing world, and in so many areas of life, the previously unthinkable is becoming possible. Perhaps one day in the not-too-distant future, we may wake up to find that, miraculously, death itself has become transparent to the ever-expanding field of human knowledge. And like the Tibetans hundreds of years ago, we may find ourselves rewriting the book on what happens at the end of life . . . and at the beginning.