Evidence For Life After Death: Part 1 with Dr. Ian Stevenson | Theosophical Classic 2004

well ladies and gentlemen uh on thursday night i gave a very short biographical introduction to our speaker ian stevenson that was at his request this morning i am going to give a somewhat longer one but it is not going to be a conventional biographical introduction instead i am going to focus on one fact in dr stevenson's life and i'm going to draw some speculative conclusions from that fact now dr dr stevenson is a scientist so he is concerned with facts right i alas am an irresponsible humanist and so i am concerned with speculation so i hope that dr stevenson will forgive my speculation this morning now the fact i'm going to start with pertains to his education dr stevenson ian stevenson he wasn't a doctor then you were not born a doctor ian stevenson was born in canada and his family were of scottish extraction so when he came to go to university he went back to scotland and he went to the university of saint andrews where he got his bachelor's degree now that's the fact i want to talk about here's the speculation universities are called particularly one's undergraduate university is called one's alma mater one's dear mother and dear mother universities have an effect on the people who are associated with them which is not unlike one's biological mother there's a kind of imprinting which is made i want to point out to you three facts about saint andrews university which i think have some effect whether consciously or unconsciously whether objectively or subliminally on ian stevenson the first fact is that this this all comes a surprise to him he had no idea i was going to do this the first fact is that in the 19th century there was associated with saint andrews university a very distinguished scholar who was an anthropologist a folklorist and a literary man by the name of andrew lang now that name may not mean anything to most of you but andrew lang went all over the british isles collecting folklore and then he wrote up that folklore in a form suitable for children and a series of books were published based on them which are known as the rainbow books there was the red book of fairy tales the yellow book of fairy tales the green book of fairy tales the blue book of fairy tales etc etc etc i grew up on andrew lang's rainbow books of fairy tales and i expect some of you did too all right now uh what has that got to do with anything well second fact in the early 20th century in the 1920s a distinguished scholar from oxford went to saint andrews university which had established a special lectureship called the andrew lang lecture and this distinguished scholar from oxford gave the andrew lang lecture one year and his subject for the lecture was on the fairy story and the name of that distinguished scholar was j.r.r tolkien now in that lecture tolkien defined what is the essence of a fairy story from his standpoint and in fact he outlined the characteristics of the fairy story which corresponded with a series of fairy stories he already had written in his mind although they were not be published until many years later and we know them as the lord of the rings right now now uh tolkien said that the basic character characteristic of a fairy story or one of the basic characteristics is that it has a happy ending how do all fairy stories end and they all lived happily ever after right now tolkien contrasted the fairy story with another literary genre namely the tragedy and what is the characteristic of all tragedies well aristotle told us it is that they they have um a catastrophe now catastrophe is actually a greek word meaning a turning point but the turning point is in the tragedy that the central character the protagonist is killed or destroyed demolished right so that all tragedies end that way now tolkien said that the opposite of the tragedy is the fairy story which has always a happy ending of course being a scholar tolkien couldn't say that fairy stories have a happy ending after all happy ending is something everybody understands a term everybody understands and scholars have to use terms that nobody understands or else you suppose that they don't know anything more than you do so tolkien invented a term from greek and his term was you catastrophe which means literally a good turning so all fairy stories end with a good turning at the end now the question is and this is a question tolkien asked what is life is it a tragedy with a catastrophic ending or is it a fairy story with a you catastrophe and a happy ending that's a fundamental question in life it's a question all human beings whether they are aware of it or not ponder now the third fact relating to the university of saint andrews the university of saint andrews has one college which has a motto which is carved on stone entrance stone archway at the college and that motto is written in middle scots and i won't attempt to say it in middle scots but in contemporary english it is they have said what say they let them say now that model happened very close to me because for 10 years i edited an academic journal the american speech which was the journal of the american dialect society it was founded in 1926 the same year as the theosophical society moved here and it was founded by three very distinguished american academics plus a baltimore newspaper man named h.l mencken and when that journal was founded it took as its motto this motto of the college at st anders col a university i don't know why but it did now that motto is kind of irregular you can interpret in different ways but i believe the sense that the motto had originally was something like this they have said there are many opinions about many things throughout society what say they we need to be aware of what those opinions are let them say we must not be bound by opinions right i think that and in fact that interpretation of that model comes very close to being the same thing as the model of the theosophical society the model of theosophical society was borrowed from the motto of the maharaja of banaris and it was it's a sanskrit motto satya nasty parodherma and the society translates that as there is no religion higher than truth but in fact you cannot translate that motto into english easily because several words particularly the word dharma has meanings that we have no english word for so a paraphrase of the motto which i think captures more or less accurately its basic meaning is the opinions of humanity on any subject do not exhaust the reality of that subject or to put the words into to use hamlet's words at the beginning of shakespeare's play there are more things in heaven and earth horatio than are dreamt of in your philosophy now what is the what why am i telling you all of this why am i taking up so much of dr stevenson's valuable time to tell you this my speculation dr stevenson's career has been to study facts particularly about survival after death right a subject we are all interested in what is the dominant view in our time and in our society on that subject well the dominant view of scientists is that there ain't nothing right that's it dr stevenson has said in effect what say they they have said what say they let them say let's look at the facts to see what we can find and what are the facts is life a tragedy ending with the catastrophe of death or is life a fairy tale with a you catastrophic ending a happy ending with something that goes on beyond it that i would suggest is the subject of dr stevenson's remarks this morning in this survey so without further ado it is gives me great pleasure to present uh dr ian stevenson talking on the subject evidence for life after death [Applause] thank you very much dr aljo i could almost prefer to listen to him and hear what i'm going to say [Laughter] however i'm only speculation he's [Laughter] fact well i'm to talk about evidence for life after death and i'm going to stay away from children who claim to remember past lives and i think it's important to understand that there are other kinds of evidence additional to those provided by the children there are at least six sources of evidence for life after death and i'm going to try to touch on each of these i'll tell you in advance what they are the first and possibly the most important are apparitions sometimes called hallucinations of the mentally well and then there are experiences of persons who come close to death and survive they have attracted considerable popular interest in recent years then there are experiences of people who come close to death and die and make various statements that deserve attention just before they die then there are experiences that are best described as possession in which a person's personality the characteristics by which we ordinarily identify a person as a separate person become abolished and replaced by the characteristics of another person and then there are experiences that we describe as mediumship in which a particular person seems to have the gift of bringing credible communications from persons who have died and who are presumed to have survived death and we may call them discarnate personalities there are also dreams and i think this afternoon i want to tell you about some vivid dreams experienced by a colleague of mine that i think provides some additional evidence for life after death well let's go back to apparitions and start by by reminding you that they're really quite common at surveys have shown and some of these surveys go back to the late 19th century others are more recent they show that between 10 and 27 in one series of ordinary people like ourselves have become aware in some way usually visually but perhaps through some other senses of a discarnate person or persons some of these surveys have focused on particular people particular groups of people i should say one very notable one that created quite a stir among my colleagues in medicine about 15 years ago it was conducted by a general practitioner in the united kingdom and he wrote a paper called the hallucinations of the bereaved and he served surveyed widows and widowers and he found that as many as 25 of them believed that they had had some kind of experience of a spouse who had died now not all of these by any means were visual apparitions some consisted only of a strong sense of presence others went into further detail and perhaps a widow might have a hallucination of a characteristic cigar that her husband had smoked and be convinced that he was somehow communicating with her in this way apparitional experiences that are visual are very commonly associated with death and the circumstances of death are sometimes communicated by the aberrational figure here's a typical case reported by the society for psychical research an officer an army officer in london is sleeping and suddenly wakes up and sees a fellow officer who he was sure was in south africa in the army fighting there this was during the time of the so-called first boer war when the british undertook to subdue the transvaal which was occupied by the dutch farmers the boers the apparition startled the percipient and then it said i'm shot the recipient said shot good god when and where the apparition then said in the lungs and he slowly lifted his right hand and raised it up until it came to the right chest and then he disappeared it was possible for the recipient to as he was an army officer himself to communicate with the military authorities and he learned that the person whose apparition he saw had in fact been shot in the right chest so that was a vertical operation vertical meaning that the operation included features that were that corresponded to ascertainable facts there have been many cases of that sort and they commonly occur as i've said in relation to an unexpected and violent death why is that some have said that that's because death is memorable and people simply hang on to memories of death and death itself doesn't have anything to do with the occurrence of apparitions that's been rather thoroughly studied and it it seems more likely than not that death itself especially a violent death somehow facilitates the occurrence of these operational experiences i'll tell you about another operational experience it also has to do with death this occurred in scotland it was first described by the recipient who had some reputation [Music] in scotland and elsewhere for what the scottish called second sight which is particularly common in the highlands but second site usually involves the perception of someone just before they die it's regarded as a kind of premonition or it may be uh that person is seen just after death but the death is not known to the percipient and that was true in the case that i'm about to describe in this case the precipitation as i said had some reputation for uh paranormal powers she was coming out of her house to collect milk bottles that dates it doesn't it it shows that the milk was still being delivered in the 1930s when she had this experience so she was going outside her door and she saw a neighbor walking down the street and she picked up the milk bottles went in and said to her husband i see the mckayser back he didn't think much about it and about half an hour later a man came to the door and asked to speak to her husband and they conferred for a few minutes and then this man it turned out was an employer of the factory where the apparitional figure as it now appeared had been formen and said that they had just received news that he died and where had he died he died in the town of northern england where he and his wife had been on vacation how about the clothing the recipients saw this man dressed in a cotton shirt and flannel trousers and she had him under observation for at least 10 seconds because she could see him emerging from behind their house and walking down toward the factory where he worked how was he dressed when he died he was not dressed at all he was stark naked he had the custom of sleeping naked and that was his way that morning he had awakened with some unease and felt some discomfort his wife had given him a mild analgesic and he'd apparently gone back to sleep she went to rouse him a little later and could not do so found that he'd died what was the time interval between his death in england and the operational experience in in scotland it was probably a couple of hours i did obtain a death certificate and it showed that he had died of what are sometimes called coronary sclerosis that's more often now spoken of as a heart attack but it sometimes carries off the victims suddenly i went to the site of this apparition twice i wasn't sure that i was sufficiently familiar with it after my first visit and i went back and walked along the route so to speak and talked with the widow of the deceased man and became fully impressed by the fact that this recipient had seen this friend at a time when she could not have known that he had died just an hour or two before if a considerable number of these experiences are what we call collective and by that we mean that if two or more persons are present then the apparitional figure will be seen by more than one person and if that's the case that is if there are uh two or more persons present then in about a third of the cases more than one person has the experience well that suggests of course that some persons are more sensitive than others and going back to the surveys and some of the surveys if one paranormal experience is claimed then the respondent to the survey very commonly about in about at least 30 percent of the cases says that he or she has had other experiences of the same or a different type i think one of my messages today is to impress on you if if you need impression with the frequency of these experiences and it's unfortunate that they're not better known and not more adequately studied i mentioned the surveys but the surveys didn't penetrate very much into the circumstances of the experiences and in the second half of the 20th century there were very few reports of operational experiences published i became interested in in that and that was one stimulus for my own endeavor and i put together a paper recording six what i call modern aberrational experiences and these were all experiences i've mentioned one of them these were all experiences known to friends or colleagues of mine and they tell them to me but very often they had not been told to other people or very little and sometimes the recipients had been advised or more abruptly told not to talk about such things and so they didn't i think that's one reason why they're they're so little known and so little studied well i've run dry on talking about operations so let me open this now to any questions you may have about them yes sir uh dr stevenson uh all of the examples he gave suggest some sort of paranormal experience between a sender and a receiver but none of them sound like they're necessarily after death experiences they don't sound let me see after death experiences in other words i can imagine from the examples we gave that these apparitions were with people that were maybe near that but they hadn't necessarily died yet am i missing something may i oh yeah i i am the recording in the sake of the audience who won't encourage your question let me repeat the questions for the uh the virtual audience the question is uh in the accounts of apparitions which dr stevenson has made uh it is not clear whether the uh the the person behind the apparition had died yet or not uh um and he wants to know whether or not of you you can comment on that that apparent conclusion he has drawn that's a very good point but i think [Music] in the case of the soldier who was shot in the chest in the 1880s in those days shot through the lungs would have been quickly fatal and i think he must have been dead when he appeared but it would be impossible to ascertain the exact time he was in a battle the time of the precipitation of course was was well known and recorded in the scottish case again we can't be sure it may be that he was he the appearing figure was communicating just as he was dying the timing was very close to be about two hours and it's uh i was trying to think of an irrefutable case and right now i can't and i think there may may be such cases it's certainly true that they occur very close to death yeah well i second hand could report not a visual case i worked with electrician his sister died he was very angry that he didn't get to say goodbye i worked with electrician and his sister died and he was very angry he didn't get to say goodbye so he called her on the phone and got her voice on the answering machine the next day he called and the husband says we don't have an answering machine that sounds like a technical innovation [Laughter] that's what this gentleman reported and he could say got the wrong number and had a loose nation or something but uh a a few years ago when the noetic sciences had their on human survival of death there was one session on aberrations with electronic devices yes yes i've heard of that i'll speak to something very similar that happened to me i used to work as a hospice nurse and i had one lady that i was on call and she was close to death and my cell phone rang about one o'clock in the morning i was at home and it rang with a ringer that i'd never heard before and private number came up on the machine there when i answered it nobody was there so i hung up went to bed five minutes later i got a call from the nursing home ina just died so i really felt that that was her calling to tell me she was leaving yes a case in my family is where my father-in-law had a very close friend and he died and they went to the memorial service or the funeral and when he came when they came back to their house his friend was sitting in the chair where he normally sat when he visited he was just sitting there he didn't he didn't say anything and i said to my father-in-law he told me the story many times i said are you really sure of that didn't you imagine it and he said i saw him as clear as he was alive and it was after the funeral or after the memorial service this happened when i was very young i remember i was i think about five years old and at the time i shared a bedroom with my brother which was very common and i had two older sisters that shared another bedroom and it was very early in the morning and i woke up and i saw a beautiful lady dressed in i was i'm guessing about five years old but she was wearing a pink dress a long pink dress which i thought was very pretty and she was standing at the opening to the bedroom to our bedroom and she was kind of waving she wasn't speaking but she was waving at me to i thought to follow her and i didn't think anything of it and i did follow her out the bedroom into our kitchen and then she walked around the stove she went into the bathroom and i didn't follow her there because you don't go into the bathroom when someone else is there and i heard and she but she didn't close the door and i didn't see her feet i saw the dress the flowing dress but i didn't notice feet and she fought the toilet flushed not she flushed the toilet the toilet flushed and then i waited for her to come out and when she didn't come out i i looked you know i thought i hope i don't get in trouble but i looked and there was no one there and it was on a saturday morning so when my mother got up i said mom you know i told her what i had seen this lady in this pink dress and she said tell me what this dress looks like you know and i said it just it was a beautiful pink dress it was a pretty pink gown it was a gown and and and that's i don't remember what else i might have described but it was my mother's sister who had passed away and they had buried her in a long pink dress and that's that's pretty much all i remember my mother is gone now since you mentioned a correlation between violent death and apparitions the occurrence of apparitions i wondered if you'd communicated with any of the 9 11 survivors and had anything to share on that event have you had any contact with no no i haven't no we have one more yeah that's this is the last there is a physician out of a houston area who has been working as a hospice physician has written a book and in that she has made a comment that people who die violent death or sudden deaths often see the whole life kind of going by as opposed to people who are dying slow or chronic death where they seem to be even visited by their relatives who have died before them any comment about there have been reports of people particularly who die a sudden death experiencing a flashback vision of their whole life uh as they are dying and uh sometimes also are greeted by relatives or people they have known who have died earlier do you have any comment on this yes i was going to come to that topic later but that is an important topic any other questions well all right let's go on to the next topic which is the uh the visions of persons who are just about to die one of the most impressive cases of this kind that i've investigated was sent to me first in a letter from the precipitant who was caring for her grandfather step grandfather more accurately um he was dying and had been so much weakened by his illness which is uh seriously fatal leukemia that he was going to be taken to the hospital and it happened that the recipient in this case was caring for him in their home pending assistance in helping him into the ambulance that was going to take the patient to the hospital and so she was alone and expecting later in the day other members of the family to return but they were not there at the time she heard her stepfather step grandfather calling out for help and then she heard him calling hazel hazel and she went back to his room and tried to lift him up and give him a drink of water but she was too weak to raise him and so she left him alone and he continued calling her rather calling hazel hazel and she tried to telephone for help to her mother who was at work and the mother said well we can't help you now your stepfather won't be home until later and there's nothing you'll just have to do whatever you can to help your step grandfather as much as you can and so she went back to the room where the dying man was and found that it was brilliantly lit it was full of light and the step-grandfather was sitting up with his arms held out in front of him as if he were going to embrace someone and then the recipient in this case saw that his wife was actually there and um illuminated by the light she was elevated somewhat she could not that is she the percipient in this case could not see the the feet it seemed as if you just saw the upper half of the body of the wife of the dying man and the brilliant light and the most impressive feature for her was the extraordinary beatitude the the peacefulness the the tranquility the happy smile on the face of both the dying man and the uh appearing figure of his wife the dying man had hello helpless ten minutes before he had actually managed to sit up and extend his arms toward us he believed his wife and the recipient who wrote me about the experience was quite clear that she had recognized the wife of the dying man and after a moment he just sank back the apparition vanished that's the kind of experience that occurs more often than is generally realized and it's a commonplace to that seems a little strong not uncommon i think it's a nicer word here uh to learn from hospice nurses and caregivers of the dying that they have witnessed some experience of this kind i corresponded with the precipitate in this case and then traveled to the town where she was living the experience that happened many years before i've forgotten now how she got our name but she did somehow and wrote me about it i pursued it as well as i could um a book has been written by two nurses and they report experiences of this kind an entire book was written by sir william barrett who was one of the founders of the society for sexual research in the 1880s his book is called death bed visions and he collected a large number of these cases his wife was a doctor and she had an opportunity to learn about experience of this kind i think they're much more common than we realize and we are now in our little research unit we're trying to approach the hospice workers to inform us about such experiences and maybe interview persons who are witnesses of them it's not easy to investigate these cases understandably death is a private matter with family members and they may not want the intrusion of investigators least of all scientists who may be thought of as more skeptical than they are but nevertheless we do welcome reports of experiences like that and take them very seriously not many of them have vertical features but a few do and soon after i went to virginia i learned of one but i was too young and uninformed to investigate it thoroughly however i'll all narrate it it was told to me by a minister of one of the local churches in charlottesville who came to call on me and not surprisingly the conversation turned to paranormal phenomena and he he told me about the death of his grandmother as she was dying she seemed to brighten up and she said oh will are you there and nobody attending her had any idea about will they'd never heard of a will and soon after making this unexpected remark she died and then some weeks later it was learned that she had a brother her death occurred in the united states the brother was in england and apparently unknown to members of her family whether through some ill will or not i don't know but he was not known to the people present they'd asked among themselves whose will where is will what is will who is will at any rate to get to the point they learn that the dying the woman who had just died and who had asked said she'd that will was there she had a brother in england and he had died just two days before she did now that's the kind of case that nowadays we would try to investigate more thoroughly with an understanding of dead dates and we could have had precise dates but as i said i was a beginner then and all i did was listen and make notes the following program was produced by the theosophical society in america where we were interrupted and and i think we had a hand up before the break so let's get a microphone my question is related to the case about the step-grandfather and the case of hazel it's a two-part question my first question was did you discover how long since hazel had passed away herself and with relation to the near-death bed apparition experiences did you discover a common thread this is the second part a common thread like fear of death in the individual who was near death or perhaps a particular illness that many of them had or perhaps the age of the individual dying were there common threads that would link these near-death experiences and then this the first part was how old i mean excuse me how many years or months before had hazel passed away in that case hazel had passed away many years before a dying person had quarreled with a member of the family not hazel he had a happy marriage uh but so the recipient when she heard the step grandfather calling for help had some idea that he wanted help in perhaps meeting this relative with whom he quarreled and making it up many dying people do wish to heal any wounds that maybe may be persisting but that wasn't apparently the case here as to ages uh they vary a lot i think some of these cases have occurred among quite young children i believe um sir william barrett's book which may still be in print on deathbed visions has some instances of children having such experiences okay yeah do you wanna well all i was gonna say is i was wondering about into the microphone please i was wondering about um auditory uh things happening when people die because before my mother died she was staying with me and and i had this technicolor dream it was a small autopsy amphitheater and they were doing an autopsy on her and all i remember now is the color green a very lovely green and then um soon after i was the night before she died she was saying to me who are all those people as if there was a gathering of people i was new to all this so i didn't know what was happening by morning she had passed on and then um i guess it was soon after the funeral either that night or the night after i was going to sleep and i seemed to be sinking into a kind of a dark well you know as if i was going to pass out and i heard her call my name you know marge you know and i kind of came to with a shock my heart beating and um and that was that but for two or three years after that fairly often friends i knew would call me by her name dorothy and then they'd say oh no you're marjorie you know and i don't know how that ties in but the idea of someone calling you by name like that and if other people have had that experience i i don't know don't know how to answer that question but the frequency of names uh dr stevenson one of the things that helps me understand the person who does research such as yours is to really better understand your life specifically could you comment on three aspects of your life the first what brought you to this kind of work secondly what are your personal beliefs regarding life after death and thirdly have you had any experiences that are similar to the ones that you've researched i don't know the answer to the first question i really don't the second question i declined to answer because i think it's important for everyone to make up their minds for themselves and you know authority is the enemy of science and scientists personal beliefs should never influence anyone i'm sorry i've forgotten your third question have you had any experiences yes i've had one or two minor experiences thank you i wonder dr stevenson if you would comment on your view of the book written by osis and harold's son on death bed visions where they compared us with i believe people from india and found i believe they concluded that the experiences were substantially the same although of course they reflected cultural differences but there were some essential similarities between death bed visions and the two very different cultures and i i'm trusting that you're familiar with the book and wonder what your view of it is uh from a scientific perspective kind of a critical scientific perspective would you repeat the name of the book or i can't remember the name but the authors are carlos osis and erlander haraldson i'm not familiar with that book okay thank you i've not studied deathbed visions except in the west so i don't know about the differences between the western experiences and those agents would have there are differences in the experiences of persons who come close to death and survive and we talk about that perhaps this afternoon yes have you ever been able to document any cases of people who had horrific deathbed experiences seen visions that frightened or terrified them no i don't think so i i've heard of such um louis xi the king of france was in some ways a dreadful person although he was in some other respects the founder of modern france but he his death was just terrible there are records of his tormenting days as he was dying and apparently included a great deal of repentance for his wicked behavior um dr stevenson dr algio mentioned that he was the humanist and you're the scientist and that there's this issue of you know facts versus observation and also mentioned that science basically doesn't believe in life after death and so in a certain sense you're an anachronism that is you're a man i don't know any other man who spent more of his time and done such beautiful work trying to prove the existence of life after death and yet you're working in a scientific way and have you ever how do you feel what do you think is the present situation here where you have done purely scientific work you've never taken a religious or philosophical position on this so you've done this all scientifically yet you're in a field where all your colleagues believe what you're doing is is not important and do you feel that [Music] you have been fighting against what i would call a scientific bias all your lifetime that it's almost as if you can never prove and and that science will never accept anything that you've ever done or your colleagues in the same area that are working with you do you feel that [Music] do you feel that the present position which science takes is not legitimate i mean if science says life does not exist you know once we die we're dead and that's it we're dust do you feel that that is scientifically correct to say that in an absolute sense well i think the most important point is that scientists are just members of a club who have got together for particular endeavors which they may share at the current position in science uh although does seem to be rigidly fixed it changes i mean you just have to think of the little of the history of science to realize how much it has changed think for example of the struggle to have the idea of evolution accepted by scientists and the 18th century erasmus star one the grandfather of charles conjectured that there might be some origin of species other than instant creation once and for all but nothing came of that and then a french scientist lamarck put forward a substantial idea about the evolution nothing much came of that he was ridiculed by the leading french biologist cuvier it was even cast aspersions on the mark at his funeral which is taking hardness of view rather seriously and then charles darwin had this idea it took him 20 years to evolve a reasonable exposition of his ideas and he encountered uh tremendous opposition both from other scientists and and from established clergymen but nowadays nearly all scientists believe in evolution so science science changes because scientists are mortal they die max planck said that you can't expect ideas to be changed quickly you have to wait for the funerals [Laughter] have you documented any um uh research that has um shown that that animals can sense people that have been deceased that that have just recently just you know died that they can sense spirits or that would would you answer that one if you had any experience with that in your research i wanted to is uh i'm a cat lover and i've heard of one or two claims of reincarnation and cats i remember studying a human case in scotland and this was in the highlands where as i mentioned earlier there's a widespread belief in what they call second sight and i interviewed at some length the mother of the subject whom i later met she was then grown up this is a child who remembered the previous life and on the uh an immense cushion there was an almost equally immense cat who sat slipped i should say through the interview and i as a cat lover i became interested in the cat and so finally i inquired about the cat and the mother of the students said that she was convinced this cat was her own grandfather reborn no evidence [Laughter] if i could just add a comment along the original line well my wife and i had a pair of cats that they were siblings very very close growing up together extremely close the the male cat developed an illness and we had to take him off periodically to the vets and leave him overnight and that was fine the female sibling had no problem with any of that finally got the place where the male cat had to be put down he was just he was in suffering and there was no hope for him so we sent him off for that and the female cat unlike all of the other times we had sent the mail off to the vet went into a state of severe decline she refused to eat she refused my wife had to sort of feed her by hand she was she looked as though she were grieving and she knew that the male sibling was not coming back anymore and it was just a very very clear difference in the females behavior on this occasion and all previous occasions when the male cat had been sent off so you know for whatever that's worth it seems to me that animals do have some kind of sense sometimes we have some one question back there and then up here again dr stevenson are you familiar with a book called across time and space where a woman recalls her just prior life in england and then goes there and finds her past life children who later actually accept her as their mother because she remembered details such as instances at their birthday or illnesses etc that only she would have been aware of what was the name of the book across time and space i can't recall across time and space no i'm not familiar with that mr one up here just to answer the previous question didn't lord canarvoran's pet dog in england howl when he passed away in cairo i've read that several times and i imagine it's documented maybe [Music] yeah a general question um have you any comments about what type of person may experience these apparitions are they more sensitive than others and has there been any real serious research by anyone in that area would you repeat the question for us sorry would you say that there's a particular type of person who would be more apt to experience an apparition would he be more sensitive or not has anybody done it done any work in that area is there any correlation between a personality type or perhaps i would be interested in knowing belief assumptions and the experience of apparitions are some people more likely to experience apparitions than others has any work been done on that no i don't think so i don't think so one of the troubles um one of the difficulties is that one doesn't learn about these experiences except exceptionally except rarely until sometime after they've occurred but that's a matter that should be investigated i really don't know but the person who comes to my mind would be carl young has he done any work in that area carl jung did any work in that area no i don't think so i don't know you're just aware just a comment on this gentleman's question hasn't dr kenneth ring done a study where he has taken about 100 of these cases and found that prior belief did not matter personality did not matter that the experiences really happened to all kinds of people i think dr kenneth ring has written a book i think there are two books he has written the last one was called heading toward omega and then there is one book before where he actually has taken 100 cases and he actually has tried to show a statistical analysis of some of these cases what is the name of the author kenneth ring arai kenneth rang yeah his la the the book that in which he did these cases i think it i forget the title but the book following that was called heading toward omega where he was trying to synthesize all this material together was it life after life possibly that might be it as a follow-up to the question on personality types have you um noticed that people of certain nationalities or races are more likely to have uh these experiences than others for instance are the irish more likely to have such experiences or uh or the east indians um cultures lifestyles that's of course there are claims of this sort especially about the scottish islands and the irish i studied a case in hungary that is i studied it in switzerland but the people concerned were hungarians and the principal informant the mother of the of the child in fact said that central europe when she was talking about france and germany and england holland belgium all that block of countries that could be called central europe had been dominated by the christian religion and that this had uh led to the suppression of reports of paranormal events whereas countries on the periphery such as hungary and finland and iceland had escaped from that dominance and therefore had more paranormal experiences and i think that there may be some truth to that uh certainly finland has been a rich source of paranormal experiences to those who look forward so is iceland i've been to both those countries and so perhaps perhaps it's true that certain peoples are more sensitive than others but there isn't much evidence on this it's largely opinions and of course it's naturally colored by nationalistic pride or perhaps simply certain cultures encourage the reports of experiences and it's hard to know whether the experiences are more frequent or less frequent uh we have a question uh dr stevenson from atlanta georgia from brian james who i might add is a descendant of william james good ancestry the question is do you have any comment on the skeptical or scientific view that deathbed visions are related to physiological processes taking place in the body of the dying person yes i think they must have i think the the mind becomes loosened from the brain and that makes the dying person more sensitive to unusual experiences it was a notable and now largely forgotten unknown english genius called myers who wrote a book the anniversary of which just two years ago one year ago was published posthumously in 1903. it's called human personality and its survival of bodily death and he believed that scientists should take into their surveys all kinds of experiences that were then neglected including apparitions of course and deathbed visions and the experiences of dying people and to some extent mediumship that deserved credence but his book has been largely ignored by psychologists since then many people who might be better informed who would hope never even heard of myers but two of my colleagues are now working on a book in which they're going to revive interest in myers and um in the uh the extraordinary scope of meyer's purview of what should be accounted for in any complete account of human personality it's a great book and it should should be ready it's still in print human personality and it's survival of body death it's astonishing to think that it was written in the 1890s and very largely ignored except by a few exceptional people like william james who is a friend of myers i think your your comment your on that matter is very interesting because i believe the questioner was uh in fact asking about the reductionist view that everything is due to the failure of bodily processes and your answer suggests that perhaps the failure of bodily processes in fact liberates or frees the consciousness to experience things which are blocked when when the body is functioning normally that's a very interesting approach i think to that question there's been several people earlier asking about the issue of the differences in people either ethnic factors or age factors or whatever in terms of being sensitive to the concept of of apparitions or life after death and so forth then there is abraham maslow i would recommend that anyone who is interested in this would read abraham maslow he and i and others did a lot of work in this area uh we studied for example the difference between college students and and peak experiences big experiences meaning a feeling of immortality you might have it with someone you love and all of a sudden you're on the beach and narragansett beach in rhode island or something and and you're terribly in love with this woman and all of a sudden you enter into another realm and you feel eternal this is the so-called peak experience of immortality no no death and we spent several years working on this we found the differences for example that college students were more sensitive to these and had more experiences than older individuals sorry about that and that children for example had more a connection shall we say with the spiritual world which i think other researchers already have known in fact you yourself with your work you did with indian children and so forth and their memories from a past life so uh there is research and what i'd recommend at least to start with if you're interested in that it's a book you can get at most bookstores i think it's there's also the bookstore right here uh the theosophical bookstore is the maslow's book toward a psychology of being it's a paperback it's not very expensive and you can get started on that and it will give you some concept i think you're going up here that's i agree i i think maslow should be better recognized than he is today among psychologists my question is people who aren't necessarily facing death but perhaps a major surgical procedure people who claim to have watched the surgery from above or what have you can remember conversations between the nurses and the doctors how would that kind of fit in with these near-death experiences or some disassociation with a physical body or a visual or auditory remembrance of something that they perhaps by the scientific community could not have possibly experienced have you had any experience with that kind of telling or cases yes we've had quite a few cases of that sort people in surgery or being wheeled into the operating room they have unusual experiences and one of my colleagues bruce grayson has studied the case of man who underwent cardiac surgery and he said i was up above and looking down and the surgeon was flapping his wings and he went like this and he seemed like a chicken was about to take into off into flight so dr grayson became curious about this and he interviewed the patient of course and then he looked up the the surgeon and it turned out that the surgeon was a cardiac surgeon was a somewhat impatient man and he would get scrubbed up a surgeon should before the operation then he'd become impatient and his assistance would be say opening the patient but he wouldn't be satisfied and he'd scrubbed up he couldn't touch anything but he would go like this to signal to them what they should be doing so he did indeed resemble a chicken in flight we have cases like that but that one was particularly vivid um another case that's in a way the most impressive of all uh was published in a book by a friend of mine mike sabaum who has earlier written a book about the patients he's his cardiologist and he wrote about experiences cardiac patients who during a period of unconsciousness ostensible unconsciousness would nevertheless describe the equipment that the cardiologist would use such as defibrillators which of which they could have had no normal knowledge so the ultimate case of this kind occurred in arizona where a neurosurgeon was removing an unusually inaccessible aneurysm a small protuberance of the artery of the brain and they they froze the patient that is lowered the patient's temperature by maybe as much as 20 degrees then they tipped the patient up and drained the brain of all blood and the eeg came flat and this person was just as as dead as could be without being dead uh all the usual signs of life uh were arrested or stopped she was on a heart pump and they succeeded in the operation and afterwards the patient described certain unusual instruments used by the surgeons and gave details of which she certainly could not have learned normally that's perhaps the strongest case that opposes the idea that well these folks are not really dead they're just in a low state of somnolence and they really are capable of watching what's going on anyway i hope i hope this is along the same lines but i'm wondering uh what about if say for instance a people that move into a house and if particularly if it's an older home and you know it's possible that people may have died there and you don't know particularly about any of the dynamic of what went on but you feel perhaps a presence in the home have you done any research that kind of thing i don't mean the types of things that are televised but i mean where you feel the presence of a of another body in the home or in a room and yet you you can't see a person no i've heard about such cases haunting sick they're called i don't doubt that some of them are are quite authentic but i personally haven't had any experience but a good many of them have been published principally by the london society of recycled research you

Channel: Theosophical Society

Views: 31,448

Keywords: theosophical society, theosophy, Ian Stevenson, Life After Death, afterlife, evidence, proof, apparitions, visions, ghosts

Id: CRcDOH9H0VM

Length: 86min 51sec (5211 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 08 2021