Jim Tucker - Buddha at the Gas Pump Interview

[Music] welcome to buddha at the gas pump my name is rick archer buddha at the gas pump is an ongoing series of conversations with spiritually awakening people and conversations about topics relevant to spirituality and enlightenment and all that kind of stuff we've done over 600 of them now and if this is new to you and you'd like to check out previous ones please go to batgap.com where you'll see them all organized in several ways under the past interviews menu this program is made possible through the support of appreciative listeners and viewers so if you appreciate it and would like to help support it there's a paypal button on every page of the website and there's also a page about alternatives to paypal my guest today is dr jim tucker dr tucker is the bonner lowry professor of psychiatry and neurobehavioral sciences at the university of virginia he is the director of the university of virginia's division of perceptual studies where he is continuing the work of ian stevenson with children who report memories of previous lives he is the author of before children's memories of previous lives a two-in-one edition of his books life before life and return to life which together have been translated into 20 languages and which i downloaded from audible.com and listened to both of them in the in their entirety over the previous week it was very interesting and um i've mentioned dr stevenson and dr tucker numerous times over the years on gap whenever the topic of reincarnation comes up because well jim will explain it in a minute but well let me just ask you a question right now jim i mean is there anybody else in the world other than you you two guys and dr stevenson is deceased but doing any significant research on reincarnation well there have been there have been several of us who have studied these cases that we're going to talk about um one was erilander harrelson who is quite prolific he passed away last year but there's still tonya mills up in um northern british columbia san juan pasriccia in india jurgen kyle was another person in australia so there are there are a few of us uh who have been sprinkled around the world studying these cases yeah it's funny i was i was i think first question i should ask you well now it'll be the second is um you know what motivated you to do this it's um obviously something that is really meaningful to you you wouldn't be devoting your life to it or is it your full-time gig or do you also have other responsibilities at the uva and this is just sort of a sideline well i definitely have other responsibilities but it's more than a sideline okay so yeah i'm a child psychiatrist uh so i see patients and and supervise the clinic and help the residents and the fellows uh learn how to do child psychiatry but then a significant part of my time is it's been doing this research yeah um as far as my motivation for it goes it's a bit of a long story but um i became intrigued by this question which i guess we all are to some extent is there a life after death and i was here in charlottesville virginia and discovered the writings of ian stevenson who you know had gone from being chairman of the department of psychiatry here in the 1960s to stepping down his chair and then spending decades studying this question in particular these children talking about a past life so i was motivated by trying to answer the question or explore the question of life after death but also struck by kind of the serious minded nature of his work that it was analytical just like you would be trying to explore and analyze anything else and that really appealed to me a question came in a little while ago um from anna szudinska and warsaw poland who hopefully is watching right now and um this is very much along the lines of one of the first things i wanted to discuss with you so i'm going to ask it right away she says the cases gathered by ian stevenson and yourself are very strong they definitely prove if not reincarnation then something very similar to it why do you think science still ignores such a powerful and suggestive evidence a serious approach to this could add so much to psychiatry cognitive sciences medicine genetics biology etc to humanity well first i suppose a little bit of a disclaimer so we wouldn't say that our work proves reincarnation or life after death you know science is about accumulating evidence or data and determining the best explanation with that that being said i think the best explanation for our cases is that some of these children do actually have memories of a past life why are people slow to accept that well because it undermines the basic tenets of many people's understanding of reality you know you in science in particular um the thought is that everything emanates from the physical the the physical essentially is all there is and that consciousness just kind of was an accidental thing that that our brains produce a sense of consciousness as through evolution but that ultimately everything comes down to particles and waves and so forth well this really challenges that to the core if you decide that when the brain dies and decays and everything else that there's still this consciousness piece that is continuing on that that gets pretty hard to explain if you're not open to there being more than physical yeah i mean didn't quantum mechanics kind of undermine that world view a century ago well it certainly shows that reality is a heck of a lot more complicated than what our day-to-day experience tells us and you know that that's kind of a huge topic there but the um the idea that observation is is necessary uh for events to occur uh it's certainly been demonstrated or is a very reasonable explanation for the things that have been observed uh or determined on the quantum level meaning the smallest particle's smallest level of reality it does look that things don't exactly exist until they are observed and um that holds true not just for the present but actually the past and it you know it gets we get into pretty funky territory pretty quickly with that but uh ultimately you can surmise as max planck the founder of quantum theory did that consciousness is fundamental and that matter is derived from consciousness uh and if you know once you're open to that then it's certainly then our cases seem quite reasonable right that that consciousness is primary and for whatever reason it has continued on from one brain and somehow become attached to another but but if if consciousness is at the core then what's going on at the physical realm wouldn't determine the beginning or end of consciousness yeah um a good friend of mine her mother just had a stroke and she's in pretty bad shape i guess and this this friend is a deeply spiritual person and you know naturally they're all the human emotions one would expect to have when one's mother is apparently dying but you know her deep spirituality brings a whole different quality to the situation than if you know she just thought well this body is my mother and when this body dies that's the end of my mother so it seems to me that you know if reincarnation well yeah it seems to me that reincarnation were really a prevalent understanding in the world society would be quite different in many ways and individuals be quite different but then i think of asia and you spent a lot of time in asia where reincarnation is the predominant belief do you see a difference in the way that asian societies function because of that belief than western societies where it's not yeah well that's a good question and ian stevenson had a story about that he said who he was over i think it was in india talking with the monk and being maybe a little bit too enthusiastic about the potential for his work and and the monk said over here reincarnation is accepted as fact but we have just as many rogues and criminals as usual and you know we're all affected both by sort of our baggage from the past but also we have a natural i think inclination to look at the short run and the um immediate benefit of things and and you know being the products of evolution i mean we are both perhaps spiritual beings but also certainly physical beings and being the products of evolution evolution rewards um um individual beings who look after themselves and look to stay alive and and you know um do things that are selfish and uh that that's an aspect that we all have to continue to deal with even hopefully as we become less selfish and become more spiritual has has this work made you more spiritual has it for instance inspired you to take up a spiritual practice of some sort well i would say yes to the first part but unfortunately no to the second so i you know i view myself as being in the category of spiritual but not religious and i mean i wish that i meditated every day um i i have at different points but i haven't been able to keep it up but even so i think um it has made a difference for me i mean i think i have a better appreciation of uh that we're all in this together that is you know there's this sort of spiritual or consciousness um piece of reality that we are all a part of then we all share more than what it seems like with our um um separateness uh in the physical world that below that you know sort of like islands and in the sea below that they're all connected and and you know that i think seems to be that way here so i you know i hope as i have matured that i've kind of become a better person and and i certainly hope that i treat everyone i encounter with respect and and i think this work makes it easier to do that um yeah i mean i've talked to people who feel like that when you die you're dead that's it and it's polar opposite of my perspective but they say well it doesn't really bother me that much because if i'm completely if i completely cease to exist it won't bother me i won't be around to be bothered by that um but my my view is that um you know life is a continuum and that there's this sort of we could say spectrum of evolution that it's possible to ascend uh you know to move upward on and that you can't accomplish it all in one life and that the name of the game is really to um you know to to accomplish it to to evolve as a soul and that you know if you're on a journey someplace let's say and your your car breaks down you might need to get a new car but it's still the same journey and of course that's just one of many metaphors it's sometimes referred you know the bhagavad-gita talks about changing your clothing and putting on fresh clothes but you still continue on living yeah and i think right uh even with that journey though i mean what it comes down to in a way is each individual moment and being present in each moment so in a way i'm kind of sympathetic to the idea that whether we continue on or not in some ways doesn't matter in the sense that we should just fully experience every moment that we can and help others fully experience and and you know that's kind of enough i mean i don't know if it's acceptance or resignation but i i see i'm not going to figure it all out at least in this lifetime and you know that's kind of okay so you know we'll find out one day or we won't find out one day but but either way we've got this lifetime at least to work on uh growth and and work on helping others with their growth and you know making the most of it that's true i mean whether or not we have future lives um might not have that much impact on the way we live this one if if we make the best of of this one um you know and as you said with that monk in india even in societies where people think their multiple lives they can still act like creeps you know so i don't know what they think maybe they they don't believe in it or maybe they think well i'm just going to grab all the gusto i can get and face the consequences later or whatever well it's just like in the middle ages where you know people many people in the western world believed absolutely in heaven and hell and yet they did some truly horrific things sometimes in the name of yeah of those beliefs so um just the belief of something in and of itself doesn't necessarily make you a better person right anyway as you said earlier um it's not that you have proven this and i think probably most scientists in most fields are very leery of the word proof anyway you know it's science is a matter of continuing to accumulate evidence which could eventually be falsified or you know changed in different ways um but we do gain greater and greater confidence in certain things you know i mean we're not even though we've changed our understanding of the way gravity works we don't doubt its existence or something yeah yeah absolutely i mean again more evidence is certainly more persuasive than less evidence yeah and uh yeah i think with our cases over the decades we've now accumulated enough cases and enough evidence to to say that one may conclude based on the evidence that consciousness does continue that these kids have memories of a life from the past yeah a question came in from a fellow named victor anderson in norway relates to what you just said how can memories of a past life be stored in a brain that has only existed and experienced the current life are there any theories or hypotheses around this well i think it i mean it's a great question i think it would suggest to me anyway that you have to go to sort of a higher realm that there's this consciousness that exists outside of any of the brains and that it impacts uh the developing brain um so you know memory is kind of a funny thing and and you look at even with this life i don't have any memories of when i was a baby but i certainly have those experiences but but the memory has not matched up one-to-one but beyond my individual consciousness this time around in my individual brain what i would posit is that there is sort of this i have this larger consciousness that can experience multiple lives and at times can impact the brain leading to these memories uh even though that it's it's not as simple it's just the memory being stored in the brain yeah i mean computers are a good metaphor for that you know the way we have stuff on our computers but then we also back it up to the cloud and can download it from the cloud onto a different computer and so on yeah exactly yeah well let's get a little bit more concrete through the course of this conversation i'll have you tell stories of several children that you've worked with um what would be a a nice uh one to start with that really knocked people's socks off how about that kid oh you go ahead you choose uh no yeah that's all right i was going to suggest uh the kid who was a who crashed his plane on iwo jima or nearby right that was the one i was going to choose that's probably the most well-known case actually certainly the most well-known american case um so she kind of wants the full story so it's a little boy named james linenger well he's not little anymore actually he's a young adult but he was a little boy uh who was the son of these um this couple in louisiana and uh who had absolutely no belief in reincarnation in fact his father was quite opposed to the idea until his son started seeming to remember past life so when james was around his second birthday at age two he started having these horrific nightmares multiple times a week in which he would kick his legs up in the air and scream airplane crash on fire little man can't get out and during the day he would talk some about how he had been a pilot who had been shot down by the japanese and um said how he uh flew his plane flew off of a ship so his parents asked him the name of that ship and he said natoma which you know it's kind of a weird guess for a u.s aircraft carrier but um his father then went and did a internet search maybe before google but did an internet search and eventually came across this information on the uss natoma bay which was a u.s aircraft carrier that was stationed in the pacific during world war ii and um james also gave various details of the crash how his plane had been shot in the engine that had crashed in the water and quickly sank um and one time his parents asked him well several times his parents asked him who he was then and he would always just say me or james which they didn't make anything off uh but one time he said that his uh they asked him who else was there and he said jack jack larson and this was all when he was still two and then and clearly he had strong verbal skills which many of these children do and we know from testing that they they tend to be quite verbal um then when he was two and a half his father bought a book on iwo jima to give to his own father james's grandfather and they were looking through it one day when james pointed at the picture of iwo jima and said my plane got shot down today i got shot down there daddy and his father said uh what and he said uh that's where my plane was shot down so then his dad realized that the uss natoma bay was in fact involved in the iwo jima operation eventually when james is four and a half his dad went to natoma bay reunion and learned that in fact there was a jack larson on the uh the ship and jack larson was there during the iwo jima operation and he also learned that there was only one pilot from the ship who was killed during the iwo jima operation this young man from uh pennsylvania named james houston so that man of james leininger was remembered in a past life that had to be houston's because he was the only pilot killed the ship and what we see is that james's statements match up perfectly for houston's uh incident he he was a pilot on the uss and pema bay um his plane did get hit in the engine crashed in the water quickly sank and on the day that he was killed the pilot of the plane next to his was jack larson so you have a case like that along with a lot of behaviors whereas james was just fascinated with planes and had seemingly uncanny knowledge about planes as well as various details about life on the ship they really become very hard to explain through some sort of ordinary means and you know this was a guy who died 50 years before james was born in another part of the country it seems impossible that he would have learned about it through uh just overhearing uh so you're left with what seems to be a case where a child had memories of a past life yeah and you've only covered some of them i mean he mentioned the the corsair as a kind of plane he had flown and and some other things um yeah absolutely yeah i kind of hit the highlights but you're right the corsair was was another good one um um houston wasn't actually flying of course around the day he was killed but he had definitely flown when he was part of the squadron that tested it for the navy and it was a big deal uh yeah and james had talked about how he had fun of course yeah he's a two-year-old kid who never otherwise heard of a corsair uh that's uh that's right yeah i've interviewed quite a few people who you know like dean rayden and david lorimer and rupert sheldrake and and quite a few others who explore these kind of areas and um not only reincarnation but near-death experiences and psychic phenomena and you know various other things and you know they're generally ignored by the greater scientific community in fact david larimer was involved in setting up something called the galileo foundation because of the way galileo was ignored by people in his day who wouldn't even look through his telescope because they refused to believe that what he saw through it could actually be there and so they weren't going to bother and you know dean raiden talks about you know people reacting that way well i'm not going to look at your research because it couldn't be true um so that that really seems kind of unscientific to me um then you mentioned something in one of your books there was the word cass cosillions or maybe this might have been in one of those youtube videos i i listened to and it was you know about the conservative nature and the of the scientific process and resistance to change and that actually has good and bad qualities to it it has its advantages maybe you could elaborate on that a little bit well that's right so yeah consilience is the idea that sort of new material gets accepted as it's fits in with what's already known and e.o wilson wrote a book i think with that title i started talking about that the good side of that is we don't jump willy-nilly with with our understandings of how the world works the downside is that so there's a lot of material accumulates that it goes against the current belief system that gets ignored until it finally can't be ignored uh anymore so that then leads to a paradigm shift and you know this all this kind of work in parapsychology and and then you know reincarnation near-death experiences they all would essentially require a paradigm shift to really incorporate them into understandings of reality yeah i was a big fan of thomas kuhn's book the structure of scientific revolutions back in the day and i'm by no means a scientist but i just kind of took a college course on philosophy of science and i just i just think it's it's so interesting um the kind of the way knowledge progresses and there is you know the resistance to it and i mean there's so many historical examples and even current examples um it's just fascinating but maybe there's a yeah so so in the meantime it means there are a lot of people who aren't open to this you know but that's okay i mean we're putting it out there and then people who are open to it can hopefully read it and learn something from it um and you know for the people who aren't well okay i mean that they can believe what they want to believe um and and you know we'll keep trying to learn what we can yeah you mentioned max planck it might have been him i forget who one of those guys who said that science progresses through a series of funerals yeah yeah that uh yeah progressive with the one line i've heard is one funeral right yeah that whole thing may be slightly apocryphal i think that that quote probably evolved kind of out of something a similar um statement of yeah i mean partly science advances because people with the old ideas die off and the younger people tend to be open to newer things to reconsidering things so you know you maybe you target graduate students as opposed to full professors if you're trying to get people to really consider something yeah but it's it's funny in a way because i mean you know there are so many people working on so many things and and they get into very very specific niches you know of studying some tiny little such and such in biology or physics or some other area you know and these things may or may not have any significance whatsoever sometimes they do um but you know if in fact we reincarnate if if consciousness is fundamental and material universes emergent from that that's huge i mean it's a radical shift in our understanding of the way the universe works you think it would be on the front burner of of scientific inquiry and yet it's and yet it's not well maybe it's a little too big you know it's a lot smaller yeah um but you know um ian stevenson said he'd rather be 90 sure something important than 100 sure something unimportant and you know this is not controlled laboratory science looking at you know some literal particle or what i mean that can be very important work but you know yeah it is it is looking at kind of the big picture and trying to see what we can learn about it um in one of the videos i listened to your colleague edward kelly was talking about physicalism or materialism versus the idea that consciousness is fundamental and he implied that he thought that that had major implications for kind of like even the survival of the human race i mean do you agree with that do you feel like climate change and many of the other problems that we face are somehow ramifications of our misunderstanding of the deeper nature of reality uh well i'd have to give that some thought to be honest um but i do think that recognizing the value of consciousness or the the primacy of it leads to more optimistic hopeful way of being so hopefully that would make us less selfish and you know hopefully destroy the planet less as we focus less on our immediate needs and and more on kind of the bigger picture and you know if the houses be less materialistic then i mean in an economic sense not a scientific sense um you know spend less and whatever use up the earth's materials less then that would certainly be great yeah here's a question from my wife irene she said children are the ones that usually come in with memories of a past life but usually forget them as they grow up but sometimes adults develop memories of previous incarnations like i sent you that thing about christian sunburg whom i'm going to interview in a month or so who at the age of 30 all of a sudden had this recollection um you want to speak about that yeah i mean there are several reasons why we focus on children uh and one is that as far as we can tell those are typically the people who have memories of a past life i mean there are exceptions like you say that through meditation or through uh psychedelics or whatever that you know people adults may uh develop memories of past life but for the most part it seems to young be young kids who largely bring the memories with them i mean once they get verbal enough to describe them they do describe them so at the average age when a child starts talking about a past life is 35 months so that you know they can be quite young but one advantage of that is that you know you you know a two or three year old has not read up on world war ii and the uss natoma bay whereas with an adult you don't know that and and you know if you look at like hypnotic regression for instance which we're quite skeptical of for a number of reasons but one is that sometimes people will come up with these details from a quote unquote from a past life and then there have been times where they've been been re-hypnotized and then asked where the material came from and it was from a book that read 20 years before and had completely forgotten about so this um we are all exposed to a tremendous amount of information i mean even before the internet a tremendous amount of information in our lives so it makes it harder to be certain that someone has not gotten that information through some sort of ordinary means they may be completely sincere but during meditation or hypnosis or whatever that that information gets put into a story that then to them feels like a memory of a past life yeah the only memory i ever i thought i might have might have been a past life was i was on a long meditation course a six-month course and i had a dream in which i was running in a panic along a beach at night and there was this rumble of jet of bombers or something flying overhead and i was just running over my life and then i kind of woke up in a cold sweat and feeling like oh wow i just went through something so heavy i thought i wonder if i was killed in world war ii that's the only thing i've ever had yeah and you know ashley in one of my books the i think the second one i did write about a couple of dream cases just like that but they were uh one was having to do with the tsunami but it was i mean with one dream you think well you know maybe that was a glimpse of a past life but with these cases is what people had them repeatedly for years yeah and again starting actually in childhood uh so with that you think what something's going on there yeah now you know like with your dream it's completely unverifiable i mean you have no way to know but emotionally it may feel i mean it may i value what emotion tells us as well and you know there's sometimes where people do have a dream or something where it really feels like it was something extraordinary to me yeah it felt like a big release too like i just released the the stress of that death or that experience i felt kind of lighter afterwards you mentioned hypnotic regression i've read i read both of michael newton's books many years ago before i started this show and um you know i found them interesting and compelling i mean one thing that was kind of interesting was that there seemed to be such a what would be the word such an agreement among such a variety of people that he hypnotized and he and he you know hypnotized well over a thousand i guess but they all kind of sketched out a similar territory um and you know then in his books he kind of stitched it all together and and gave a general outline of what he felt might be happening between lives um i presume you've read those books um a little bit uh i've got journey of souls and actually several of us underwent newton-like hypnos uh hypnosis at one point um for my own self and this made me through no fault of the technique but more just me um i didn't feel like i experienced anything that was not coming from my mind that was my mind was not creating but that's not to say obviously that other people you know can't have meaningful experiences but but i will say that you know if you're open to unconscious connections between us the expectations that the hypnotist brings to the session may well impact what the person experiences i mean sometimes by accidentally leading them on obviously but also in that state that sort of the boundaries get make it more blur than usual so you know you get a telepathy kind of thing where the the hypnotist does affect the the hypnotic subject even when they're they're certainly trying not to um but in any event i mean i'm not trying to discount his work um i'm not an expert in it but you know i think there are reasons to be cautious about it yeah um okay there's so many questions i could ask you we'll just keep poking along here um all right i think i'll ask another question from a listener first um sure and this actually was about what i was almost tempted to ask you just now this is from carol mccracken in bloomington indiana she asks them how many of your interviews recalled the period they experienced between lives and if so are there any similarities in their description this is what we're talking about yeah about 20 percent of the kids will talk about events between lies and they can vary um some of them describe what essentially seems like a near-death experience so where they're floating above their bodies they may then um see other beings or guides or that sort of thing some describe going to another realm like heaven the american kids may use the word heaven and then some talk about either watching their parents or choosing their parents or being led to their parents to then lead the next life and you know we published a paper years ago now sort of comparing this phenomenon with near-death experiences and what we see is that there are a lot of similarities uh particularly in sort of the transcendent kind of experiences that people report now people in near-death experiences often kind of reach a point of no return and are either told they have to go back or choose to return to life obviously that doesn't happen in our case every childhood member in a past life because they didn't go back they you know they died and then seemingly were reborn but there's certainly a lot of similarities there and sometimes they will give verifiable details so there are cases where they will describe the previous funeral accurately that there was one case in thailand where the little girl complained uh because her ashes had been scattered rather than buried the way she wanted them to be and the previous person was a woman who um studied at the temple and wanted her ashes buried under the bow tree there well when her daughter went to berry then the root system of the tree was so extensive she couldn't bury them so she scattered them instead uh and james leiniger you know that we were talking about in a minute ago his was verifiable on the other end of coming back because he he one day told his dad that he was glad that he had picked him to be his father and his dad asked him what he meant and he explained how he had seen his parents at a big pink hotel in hawaii eating on the beach and decided he wanted to be born to them well before he was born his parents took a trip to hawaii stayed at a big pink hotel and on the last night had dinner on the beach and that was is during that trip that they began trying to conceive so they didn't actually get pregnant then but the intention started then and that was the time that james seemingly had had uh observations of that yeah i know that um some people in the indian tradition and probably some other of those eastern traditions say that we do choose our parents and some some say that you know we're kind of a s well michael newton would say this kind of thing that we're assisted by some wise guides or elders or something on the other side who help us decide what would be the most appropriate life to live next yeah do any of the any of your cases um provide evidence for that um yeah i mean some kids will report similar things i mean not necessarily sort of sitting before a panel of guides and kind of mapping out your next life but um but i will say also i mean there are some kids who seem so miserable in the families they're in it doesn't seem like they chose them i mean there are some kids who just complain bitterly that and want to be taken back to their previous family and then you know back to their previous lives basically but it may well be that the level of control that an individual has is not necessarily the same from person to person that and for whatever reason some individuals may have more control over the process than others yeah people might ask well why would you choose to be born in a syrian refugee camp or in the barrios of you know rio de janeiro or something um in these horrible circumstances but then we get into the whole karma thing and you know what whether there's an evolutionary agenda to the universe and whether suffering in difficult circumstances can actually be conducive to our evolution in some way i i don't know if we want to speculate about that here or not yeah i mean certainly there's something to be said for the idea that we you know we gain more resilience by going through stressors but you know with this some of the horrible suffering that some people experience it's a little hard to say there's a whole lot of meaning there i mean i i think you know it may well be sort of a combination of things there may be sort of a naturalistic process that that unfortunately some people unfortunate things happen to them and there's not necessarily a plan or a cause for it um even though in the bigger picture it may well be that there is growth um that can happen through difficult circumstances yeah this is just a matter of belief on my part but but i feel like all is well and wisely put and um there are no mistakes no accidents and that there's a kind of a divine orchestration of of the universe and it might be hard to understand how from a human perspective it might seem cruel you know and and you can't blame somebody for doubting the existence of god when considering what happened in the holocaust for instance but um but i mean you know at some point the earth will become a red the sun will become a red giant the earth will be a molten blob long before that happens life will get very difficult on earth and everyone will die and yet you know the in the big scheme of things the death of stars is necessary for our very existence so it's kind of a cosmic perspective you can take yeah well i hope you're right i mean i hope that there are no pointless uh events that that everything has meaning uh it can be awfully hard to to see that and and some of the things people go through but but i certainly hope you're right yeah you have to really zoom out and try to take a god's eye view as best you can um and of course you know i mean i'm not hammering this as some kind of belief that one should adopt i just find it makes sense to me um all right so here's a question from jay in victoria british columbia have there been any children who have talked about future events that have come true well as so so the larger question which i think he's asking is do some people some kids remember a future life um and the answer is not as far as we can tell i mean none of them talk about you know whatever flying around in spaceships or you know whatever um but i will say you know with we have plenty of cases where a child talks about a life but then no one's ever able to verify that it actually matches somebody who lived in the past and in that case especially in places where things change slowly it's conceivable that a child has remembered a future life um and you just don't know it because you're not not able to track it down um but there's no evidence that that happens yeah you know it could be i mean what do you think about this it could be that a majority of children at a very early age remember their past lives but um either they're too young to talk about it or they talk about it and they're ignored or something along those lines and and then they forget i mean who knows maybe when we're a week old we're like really clearly cognizing our our past life but obviously we can't talk about it yeah so yeah i mentioned that these kids tend to be very verbal and i'm going to have good verbal skills and it may well be that talking about these images that they have in their minds kind of um solidify the images in their minds and then they get you get sort of the complete story of the past life whereas with other kids that they're not able to verbalize things they have these images but they kind of fade before the kids are really able to process them um but it's not to say we have evidence that that happens i mean the the you know our cases don't really say whether we all have had past lives or not um and it it may be that we do and either we don't remember or we don't remember long enough to tell people about it but it may also be that these are exceptions that even if there is survival of consciousness it wouldn't mean that we'd all come back here necessarily that we may have another kind of experience after we die yeah well that's a nice scientific way of putting it my feeling is that we do actually have multiple lives but that's just my belief or feeling i don't have the kind of access to scientific methods that you do but also i think we need to take into consideration that the earth isn't the only place in the universe where we could live not only would would would there be perhaps trillions of other habitable planets throughout the universe but then there are all these other levels and dimensions and you know such as whatever it is people go to between lives and there could be many such levels or subtle dimensions that we don't ordinarily perceive so yeah absolutely so yeah i mean again i think my own personal belief is that consciousness does survive and continue on but whether it continues on here in another life on this planet in my own mind is an open question yeah yeah i was once with a spiritual teacher and he was pondering about talking about immortality and he said you know if we're interested in immortality there must be better bodies than these in which to do it [Laughter] right yeah and i mean as far as immortality goes i mean you think if consciousness can kind of step out of this space time then you know what is immortal mean exactly but a lot of things to think about here's another question from irene she asks good ones um some amazingly gifted children have highly developed skills at only two or three years old like playing the piano thinking mozart here or composing well or better than someone who studied all their life they may not have memories of a past life but is this not a good indicator of bringing a previous life development into the current one well it's certainly hard to explain those cases i mean you look at some prodigies um and mozart's obviously a good example because he was incredibly skilled at a very early age and it may be a mixture of environment with something else i mean in mozart's cases his father was what a music teacher um but that doesn't mean you know three-year-olds were composing symphonies or whatever my grandmother was a music teacher i didn't get very far with it so i will say we don't have um necessarily okay or we're not aware of prodigies who have recalled a past life with those skills um so you know mozart who but well that's right i was going to say that vests are the closest that that i've come tell that story well as a kid who seemed extraordinarily skilled at golf at a very early age i mean around the time of three or four and i got seen videos of him at at uh that age or four or five and then he had smooth swing and and um he talked about her past life and then a bit of a long story but his dad was going through the channels on the table one day didn't even know they had the golf channel i mean his parents weren't golfers but they hit it and and his son got all excited and eventually said how he had been bobby jones who for people who i don't know golf it was quite a famous call yeah even i had heard of him and i'm not in the golf yeah yeah um from a long time ago not something typically you know through a four-year-old would hear about uh and this kid remained extremely talented i haven't heard from the dad in the last few years but i mean he was scores of golf tournaments as he was growing up so that is one where whether he called a prodigy he was extremely talented at an extremely early age with no clear um explanation for how he was so talented and he did recall memories of the past life with that skill yeah and they were i should mention it in your books um when you tell these stories you you sometimes go on for a whole chapter or the better part of a chapter with all kinds of details so we're just kind of you know touching some of the highlights here but if people find this interesting they they could find much more detail in your books i had a friend years ago who claimed to have been abraham lincoln in his past life and one of his proofs was that he had a bump on the back of his head but that that does lead us into a whole thing about birthmarks and birth defects and various other markers of people who you know who might have had a gunshot wound or some other thing showing up again in their next body yeah that's right so that ian sort of discovered that phenomenon of where kids would be born with birthmarks or full birth defects that match wounds usually the fatal wounds on the body of the previous person and um he studied spent years studying a lot of these cases and then years more writing them all up and eventually publish this two-volume set of over 200 such cases and the set is 2 000 pages long uh there is a synopsis version uh for people who are interested but um you know some pretty remarkable stories or examples or pictures frankly of of these um like girl with very gnarled fingers uh she recalled the life of a guy who got his fingers chalked off as he was being murdered there's one case where the children remember the life of a man who had been killed by a shotgun blast in the side of his head and this kid was born with just a stub for an ear and an underdeveloped right side of his space he enlisted 18 cases where kids were born with double birthmarks two breath marks ones that match both the entrance wound and the exit wound on the body of a gunshot victim so they're you know they pose all kinds of questions about how that can be right i mean even if you believe in reincarnation why would a wound on one body then show up in the next life and he explored this summer and i write about some in my books where we know that that images sometimes can have um uh to really imprint a consciousness and can sometimes have physical effects so that they're um well one example would be stigmatic these people who deeply in prayer then develop what looked like the wounds of christ on their bodies um or i mentioned hypnosis but with hypnosis sometimes people can be um under hypnosis can be say touched with the finger and told there's a burning ember and they'll develop a burn so i mean their their consciousness or the images in consciousness can certainly have physical effects well the consciousness continues after traumatic death and then the the memories of that death then perhaps can affect the developing fetus so instead of a kind of a temporary uh mark from hypnosis uh you get a permanent defect as it affects the developing fetus um yeah let's talk about this a little bit more i mean there's the whole question of you know what is the vehicle through which we um which carries us from one body to the next there there might even be a 50-year lapse between lives or whatever or it might be a shorter one but you know what what what is the container for our personality between lives and i'd like to introduce and have you comment on the notion of subtle body which i'm going to show a graphic on the screen here which i'm afraid you can't see but it's uh there's a term kosha in sanskrit which refers to five sheaths and we're said to be like russian dolls in the sense that we have the sort of gross body that we all will see which is called the food sheath or the anemia kosher and then there's a there's subtle ones i won't go through all the sanskrit and all but there's a vital breath or prana sheath a mental sheath at the gyanamaya or intellect sheath and then ultimately the anandamaya or bliss sheath and it's said that when the the anamiya kosha or the food body dies then these other sheaths just carry on without the food body and then we exist in those bodies we can't function in the gross physical realm anymore obviously but we function in subtler realms for a while until we again take on a food body a gross body and uh and that those subtle bodies sort of retain all the samskaras or impressions that we've accumulated through our various lives and that's why so much you know carries over into the next life um any comments on that i know it's rather speculative perhaps but um what do you think is that intriguing to you yeah i mean those sorts of conceptualizations obviously have have been like for thousands of years that people have had those sorts of things and then you know there can be real value to them i sort of take it kind of i guess the one step uh or sort of the the you know view from 10 000 feet or whatever they i mean my um i don't get into those specifics for i mean for myself as i think about it i think there is this continuation and it you know seems to be something where not just that it retains the memories of the past life but can actually experience new things and and learn new things that you know with the intermission memories we were just talking about so that there is a active life uh force of some sort that is continuing on um but you know the different sheets and so forth and again many people find that very valuable i i'm just focused more on the fact that there is something like that yeah that that continues on i think we can take something like that as a hypothesis you know that could possibly be explored and um you know those of the tradition that came up with that sort of explanation consider themselves to have been exploring it for a few thousand years through a kind of a you know more introspective method sure you know mystics and yogis and so on who who don't do this kind of inner research and presumably are actually coming upon some kind of experiential verification for such things rather than just speculating right yeah i agree i mean again there may be great wisdom and value to those things um so okay that's great um we're jumping around a little bit because we're getting a lot of good questions so here's one that came in from ron gang in kibbutz urem in israel i understand that you have reservations about past life data attained through hypnosis that we were just talking about i have read dr brian weiss's first three books in which he has treated the traumas of thousands of patients through hypnotic regression if you're familiar with this i would like to hear your comments on his work sure so yeah i mean i've read several of dr weiss's books and i certainly believe that hypnotic regression can be therapeutic i mean he documents the cases where it is therapeutic um but whether people are actually accessing a life that they lived in the past is another question yeah um so hypnosis even for memories of this life tends to be a very unreliable tool meaning there are times where it's remarkably accurate and you know people uh recall license plate numbers at crime scenes or whatever but there are a lot of times where essentially the mind fills in the blanks and then once that happens it's very hard for somebody to know if it was an actual memory or if it was something that got created during hypnosis um there are very few not zero but there are very few cases where there's documented verification that the memories a person had came from an actual person uh who lived before uh there was not someone who's well known that again the people might have just learned about through ordinary means uh now some of that is you know if you're calling an ancient life in a room or whatever i mean you know it's unverifiable essentially um so you know maybe you shouldn't hold it against him but there's just um there are plenty of reasons to think that hypnotic regression is unreliable and not much reason to think that they actually are past lives but again with a um with a good therapist and somebody like dr weiss and you know other people who follow his work i if it can be useful to people and cure phobias or you know whatever it is that then by all means um use it but i'm a little bit um unsure about when people and i think brian watches one of these who say well it doesn't really matter if it's past life as long as it's therapeutic one one way it doesn't matter but on the other if it looks like you know you're sort of saying okay well we're doing hip past life regression but it doesn't matter if it's really a past life but it seems to me that's a little bit of a cop-out i mean if it's um if you're claiming it's past life then it seems to me it matters that it is but um but again people can be helped by there are also times where people are not skilled therapists they may not be therapists at all they may just have a you know sort of past life hypnotic certification or something and then i think it has the potential for harm as as well as for benefit uh the spiritual teacher once said that um he he once dissuaded people from trying to even look into past lives because he felt that it's a lesser developed state you know just don't bother about it just focus on the life you're living and proceed from here i mean i even though i passed lives of what i researched i agreed with that in many ways i mean that the present moment is you know what's important and certainly you know there are people who get really involved in trying to sort out their past lives well i mean just you know work on this one right now i remember as i recall michael newton was i guess maybe he was doing past life regression and then he accidentally there have been some cases where hypnotists have just been trying to regress people to childhood or something and then they go beyond that and next thing you know they're in a past life i think in newton's cases i recall and you can correct me uh he was doing past life regression but all sudden he found people kind of glomming on to between life period and so then he specialized in that yeah yeah and i i think brian weiss actually is more of the former where he his first patient you know many lies many masters his first book where he stumbled into it by accident that he had regressed the patient but then suddenly she was talking about her past life yeah and he used to be credited that he was open enough to to go with it and you know to see what he can learn yeah we have another question from lucy and war from anna in warsaw she asked one earlier um she said as a psychiatrist can you see any connection between multiple personality disorder and the research you are working on well there are similarities i mean the multiple personality disorder what's known as now as dissociative identity disorder does involve some um unusual things related to consciousness and the seeming simultaneous consciousness existing within one person but i think the resemblances are essentially i shouldn't say coincidence but i mean i think recalling a past life is is i think very different from people who have dissociative identity disorder uh that and even in our cases um it's not like someone suddenly like the child says that they're a different person and there's not this change in awareness um i mean some of the kids have their memories at all times there are a lot of the kids who have to be in the right frame of mind to talk about it is during kind of relaxed times but it's not like their primary personality leaves and then an altar comes it's more just than recalling things from when they were a different person so i i think the two phenomena are more different than they are alive yeah there's some relevance i think i mean you hear of people with multiple personality disorder in which maybe one personality is allergic to peanuts and the other isn't or something and they actually have different physiological reactions depending upon which personality is running the show but which kind of points to the possibility if we believe in disincarnate entities that you know different entities are kind of taking turns uh you know driving that particular vehicle and and then it's not a big step from there to think of you know disincarnate entities incarnating in a body usually one of them at a time which is a healthier arrangement than several trying to crowd in there yeah i mean there are some amazing remarkable cases with with multiple personality of just the kind of things you're talking about so the the interplay between consciousness and the physical and and the body are things that we still have a lot to learn about yeah one one thing that this brings to mind is that um people with multiple personality disorder are usually have been traumatized severely in their youth and a lot of the cases that you have studied have involved trauma of some sort of violent death uh or some such thing almost as if people who die you know suddenly or violently are are more likely to remember their past lives than people who just lived to a ripe old age absolutely so in 70 percent of the cases the child died by some sort of unnatural means murder suicide accident combat which of course is far more than what happens in the general population so that that's certainly a factor here um i view it more not necessarily connected with multiple personalities but more connected with ptsd i mean you know in this life unfortunately it's the traumatic memories that sometimes stay with us even if we don't want them to and and uh in in our cases it seems that dying a traumatic death makes it more likely that those memories stay and then continue on into the next life yeah i mean if you just had a nice quiet retirement and died peacefully in your sleep there's no big impression from that you know but if if something really horrible happened to you chances are well you still remember it and your next one yeah that's right i mean we do have those cases where somebody died of old age um but but i mean they're going to be you know the spectrum with any phenomenon but but certainly it's much more likely if it's a traumatic death yes carol in indiana is psychic she keeps asking questions that pertain to just what we had been talking about so carol has another question what percentage of your subjects have died suddenly from deliberate violence or tragedies such as burning to death or accidental drowning it seems that all of them have reincarnated rather quickly versus what is classically here's a new part of the consideration what is classically understood to be a two to three hundred year or more period between lives is the fact that their previous lives were relatively recent the reason they recall them so readily well that's a good question but it's certain she's certainly right that they do tend to be recent lives and the average interval between the lies in our cases is only four and a half years um so it seems with this phenomenon that we're studying for intact memories to come through that that i mean there are exceptions again but for antagonists to come through it's much more unlikely if it is a recent life that ended traumatically uh so it's you know you could look at that and say that sort of the normal process where we don't remember lives gets short-circuited and and either um led the spirit to be kind of held to this room and then come back quickly or perhaps held to this room and not go off to another kind of existence like other individuals do um i will say we occasionally do get reports where it sounds like it's an ancient life but but again those are completely usually completely unverifiable so to be verified i mean now with the internet and records it's conceivable you know you say from civil war or something you might be able to document things but for the most part it has to be recent enough like certainly with the ian's cases in asia it had to be a recent enough life where there were still people around who could confirm the things that the child remembered yeah i i was impressed with the guy who read the audio books uh on audible because he was having to pronounce these incredibly complicated names from sri lanka and thailand i can't even read them much less pronounce them it was kind of impressive yeah hopefully he did them confidently if not correctly but you know he convinced you that he was saying them correctly anyway yeah um there's some interesting verses in the bhagavad-gita about reincarnation i don't know if you've ever read it have you there's a i have not actually some cool things in there like one thing that came to mind just now because of what we're discussing is there's a point at which arjuna asks krishna well what happens if a person is on the spiritual path but dies before reaching the goal before reaching enlightenment and krishna said well he tends to spend a long period of time living in this sort of heavenly realm and then he's reborn in a pure and illustrious family or if he's really fortunate in a family of yogi's but the implication there was that if it's if it's a person who's really had a spiritual orientation he might have a long period of between lives um but my hunch is that anything goes i mean there might be let's say an urgency for him to come back and uh do something and so it might not be a long time but who i i he well right i mean can only speculate this idea of unfinished business which you know would apply for life in it suddenly and even once where people die of old age i mean you can always interpret you know come up with an interpretation but but certainly for many of them like there's one case where a child seemed to be his grandfather reborn and his his dad felt like that his own father the grandfather had not been able to express his love to his children the way that he would have wanted to um so the boy's dad again felt like if his own father has returned it was so that they could have more of a connection he did have a very tight connection with the child so um you know unfinished business this idea that there would be this emotional tie or emotional pull that would bring the individual back quickly and into the same family i mean there's certainly a logic to that yeah have you come across the concept of soul groups you're just kind of alluding to it really where it could be within families where there's a sort of sequence of incarnations where people play various roles within the same small family group and then there's sort of the thought of larger soul groups you know like people on in some kind of a larger mission that all incarnate together and to fulfill that mission yeah certainly i mean there are people especially with hypnotic regression who have reported that kind of thing in our cases it's extremely rare for the child to say that a family member was somebody else with them in the previous life i won't say it never happens but it doesn't happen very often uh no that wouldn't mean they i mean they still could be traveling together and the child just not recognized the other person but it is not something that's typically part of our cases yeah um this is a little bit off the topic of reincarnation it's more of a near-death experience thing but have you ever read danny and brinkley's books where he talks about his four near-death experiences and how he had this life review where he he ended up experiencing the effects of his actions from the perspective of the people who were affected by them yeah i think it's 25 years ago when i read those but i remember one in particular about i think where someone a general or somebody got assassinated and he could experience it through the soldiers who were so shocked by this death or something yeah he had been a sniper in vietnam and he and he also experienced it like from the perspective of the family members of that man and the you know the hardships that put them through and all kinds of stuff yeah i mean again i i think there may well be something to that of us being connected on the consciousness realm uh more closely than we are now so it's you know it's it wouldn't shock me that that in that other state that we could essentially experience things through other people's eyes and be empathic to other people's experiences that that makes sense yeah um i suppose as we were discussing earlier that people who are really skeptical of what you do don't even bother to look at it because they figure it wouldn't be worth their while have you had many encounters with people who who skeptics who do take the time to challenge you and have you ever debated any of them and what are some of the main objections they raise and how do you answer them yeah now i haven't done debates with people i don't think that would be particularly fruitful because we're not going to change each other's minds i don't think um but you know the objections uh can vary and sometimes to be honest the people who raise the skeptics who raise the objections don't really know the details of the cases but i mean their people have many of ian's cases no one wrote down the child statements before they went looking for the previous person so it's a fair criticism to say well once the families met and exchanged information then they credited the child with more information about the past life than he actually had um and that may well happen in some cases people have looked at that a little bit haven't really found much evidence for it because if if you look at cases where people did write down the child statements before the families met uh versus ones where they didn't um what you see is the ones without the written records the families are not crediting the kids with more information in fact actually a little bit less because they they forget the uh some of the details um over time if they didn't write down but that's a fair criticism um i think some of the cases people will say well maybe it's just coincidence that the child had these details in some cases that clearly doesn't work i mean if you know for a child like james leinerger to talk about the natoma and jack larson and the exact details of the one plane crash at iwo jima you know whatever the explanation is is not coincidence um so with the various criticisms there's not kind of one way to explain away the cases that will work for all the cases so some of the criticisms may well have value and we consider them but but i haven't heard anything that that makes me think it's easy to discount this phenomenon okay um there's so many different interesting aspects of your book but here's one thing that jumps out at me from my notes right now and that is um kind of unusual behaviors among children who remembered past lives like they might have an unnatural phobia uh regarding something that you know related to their their earlier death or they might have strange tastes like a two-year-old with a craving for cigarettes and whiskey um or children who play at things that they did during their previous lives perhaps he could tell us some anecdotes of those kind of things yeah i mean they're certainly there that's for sure so yeah with the phobias in the cases for a traumatic death was involved or an unnatural death uh 35 percent of those kids show an intense fear toward the mode of death um so like in the drowning cases where there's one that the little girl hated being in water so from the time she was an infant it would take three adults to hold her down to give her a bath and then when she got old enough to talk i talked about the girl from another village who was drowned in an accident um and yeah with the kind of the likes and dislikes um yes there are cases number of cases where the young child is trying to sneak cigarettes or even sneak liquor where the previous person was a heavy smoker heavy drinker um there there the ian found a couple dozen cases in burma of children who said that they'd been japanese soldiers who were killed in berlin during world war ii and a lot of them would complain about the spicy burmese food want to eat raw fish that kind of thing instead the behavior is sometimes in the play i mean it's compulsive compulsively playing themes from the past like most often the occupation where the kids will just spend hours on end and doing this occupation that had nothing to do with their current family so you know all this shows i think that it's not just information that has carried over but there is this emotional piece that has carried over as well uh that you know the the experiences as a whole have affected the child not just with what they know but also with their behaviors and emotions yeah do you think that um reincarnation is relevant and perhaps helps to explain um homosexuality or transgender issues and things like that where one has actually changed genders from one life to the next and that would explain their current orientation well i mean i wouldn't say it explains in the sense that a um that i would want to pathologize no i'm not pathologizing it's not i think it's bad i'm just saying you know maybe that's a go ahead yeah well i yes i mean i think we do have good reason to think at least in some of our cases that there has the past life has had an impact on on either sexual orientation or gender development so in 10 of our cases the child remembers a life as a member of a different sex in the general population most young children show what's called gender typical behaviors so for and sort of stereotypical behaviors so uh little boys tend to prefer to play with trucks and little girls with dolls and that sort of thing we can certainly discuss how that comes about the environmental influences and so forth but about three percent of young boys and five percent of young girls show gender non-conformity where they show behaviors that are more typically associated with with the other gender in our cases where the child remembered life as a member of the opposite sex eighty percent of those children showed gender non-conformity so certainly in those cases it seemed it seems that the past experiences have impacted uh their development in those areas in this life interesting um okay so this again is a bit of an abrupt segway but there i have a section here on opposing points of view you know materialist worldview other pieces of evidence unknown mechanisms the population explosion alzheimer's disease religious objections might be fun to explore a few of those because there might be people listening to this who are skeptical and you know it's good to well like for instance the population explosion one might say um you know where are all these people coming from if if you know if it's a one-to-one sort of relationship between you you die you get reborn you die you get reborn then you know the world the population is many times greater now than it was a couple hundred years ago so where did all these souls come from yeah so yes there's certainly more people alive now than there used to be um but there are still plenty of people who died there are a lot more people who have died than they are like now so you know if you look at sort of estimates uh of and what counts as human and how many people are around but anyway it looks like they've been i think i've got these stats right 105 billion people that have uh lived before and what are we eight or nine billion now um so you know there's certainly they're enough there now the time between lives would be have to be getting shorter of course those 105 billion people who lived before could actually just be the 9 billion people here on earth now who've gone through a bunch of lives and if you add them all up you get 109 billion well that's right but at the same time it may be that new souls get created i mean you know why would they have to all be there at the start and then as you as you were talking about earlier if you look at other planets or other um you know universes or or whatever for that matter the animal kingdom i mean there are plenty of ways where reincarnation could occur even as our population is growing yeah that's right i mean one indian belief is that there are several different kinds of animals i think it's cows monkeys dogs and some other thing that are either always or many times reborn as humans um cows especially which is why indians revere cows and they're not only born as humans but they're born as teachers supposedly and that if you don't um proper allow a cow to reach its full development as a cow you end up with an undeveloped teacher getting born who is incapable of teaching higher knowledge but you never heard that yeah so there are certainly those beliefs in a lot of places about transmigration across species and yet we have very few of those cases right you didn't have one or two questions with somebody who thought he was a snake right we have had cases uh yeah there's a snake case and i mean there i think ian i think he said somewhere maybe he had seen 30 cases um but anyway the it's a rare phenomenon and of course those can be completely unverified sure but um so it would suggest that these cases don't necessarily follow the the belief systems in the places where they're occurring uh and and it also you know i was talking earlier about how they tend to be recent lines they also tend to be fairly nearby and are usually from the same country and the same species so for intact memories to come through you know may have to be kind of a close life in a lot of different ways including a human life you know again with outliers but for the most part it has to be a human life for the memories to come through intact yeah so what you're saying is that maybe you were a snake or some other kind of animal but the likelihood of you remembering that when you're now a baby is much less than if you had been a human in your past life is that what you're saying yeah exactly yeah yeah and for me personally i don't mind the idea that i might have been an animal in the past life i wouldn't be too excited to think about being one in the future but hopefully we all have the experiences that we need to have for progress yeah um i personally i don't have a problem with the thought that you know we could actually have been incarnate lived on other planets and now we're living on this one because i don't think that the soul would be limited by the speed of light in terms of getting from there to here i think that probably that you know what's that complementarity or something where one one thing polarizes up and the other polarizes down even if they're separated across the galaxy yeah right so i mean i see no reason i mean if you're looking at consciousness um why it would be limited just to one planet and you know we now know essentially they're an infinite number of planets uh so sure i mean why couldn't we have experiences there yeah um i think you know probably some people in christian some christians would have objections to reincarnation because they don't think it's part of their tradition but i've heard various bits of evidence including from you that it actually is it just was edited out at various councils and and whatnot because for some reason the people who were trying to control things didn't think it was a good idea to for for their followers to believe it um you want to elaborate on any of that yeah well there are certainly early christian groups that did believe in reincarnation yeah and you know there's this big yeah yeah exactly and there's this big debate about the existence of the soul not even just in past life but even existing before birth or before conception i guess and eventually the other councils just said no um but again there are plenty of early christians who believed in it and there are actually plenty of christians today so that there have been polls that show about 20 of american christians believe in past lives um so it's it's part of their they have their christian beliefs but then they've also incorporated disbelief as well which is exactly what james linenger's dad did when he he was a you know conservative christian and he still is but he's he's convinced that his little boy remembered a past life so they you know they don't i mean yes it's it's mentioned a little bit in the new testament or one may infer it in the new testament for in a couple of places it's certainly not a central part of of uh christian dogma now but it's not necessarily in conflict with it i mean it it's the same idea of life after death and spirit and so forth it just is appearing in kind of a different way than what we usually think of yeah i mean if you're really attached to the idea that you know you only live one life and when you die you either go to heaven for all eternity or to hell for all eternity then i guess you'd have a hard time incorporating reincarnation but a lot of people are kind of fed up with that way of looking at things anyway well sure but even with it i mean you can you could say okay well maybe it's a series of lives and then you get judged yeah you can you know that you wanted to yeah yeah um but you know i think i mean people um don't try to dissuade people from their own religious beliefs but i mean if you think of people we're not typically all good or all bad right we're all shades of gray so um i don't know where you would make the cut off as far as heaven or hell goes but yeah maybe i'll find out hopefully on the good side if i find out one day buddha buddhism and hinduism both believe at least certain branches of them in multiple heavens and multiple hells they're different lokas they call it and you know they're higher and higher heavens and lower and lower hills and but none of them say that you just get stuck there forever it's more like you work out some karma then you move you come back or you go to a different one or something it's a very multi-faceted understanding uh well i kind of like that better yeah right you get a second chance or multiple chances as you evolve and develop yeah um all right so as i said when we before we started if uh any ideas pop into your mind that we're not talking about feel free to just launch into them and we'll do that um let's see here there's some other good examples of people who had i mean there was the uh that boy from bera and there was the hollywood example um a fire on c street there any other stories that you feel like it would be worth bringing up well certainly the hollywood case that one again is one that's now fairly well known uh because it we we had it on the nbc nightly news and and the today show but it's an interesting case uh it's it's a little boy named ryan who his mom uh mailed us actually not email but actually the u.s mail mailed us a letter one day saying that um she and her husband just ordinary folks in oklahoma but their little five-year-old ryan for the last year has had said how he had a life in hollywood and would beg his mother to to take him back there and to try to help him kind of process that she she went one day to the public library and checked out some books on hollywood and they were looking through one one day when they came to this picture from an old movie called night after night and he pointed to one of the guys and said hey mama that's george we did a picture together and then he pointed to another one and said and that's me i found me well the first person he picked uh he pointed to is george raft who you know those of us of a certain age may remember but the one that he said he had been was an extra with no lines in the movie so ryan's mom wrote to me to see if i could help determine who this was i went and visited ryan and his parents and and then afterwards as we're trying to figure out who this was his mom was sending me email after email documenting ryan's statements about a past life and describing frankly quite a life uh eventually with the help of a hollywood archivist we did figure out who this guy was the archivist she went to the library of the academy of motion picture arts and sciences got all the materials on night after night most of which is about the stars including may west it was her first movie but there was one picture of this guy who and he was identified and there's a guy named marty martin so with that then we can compare ryan stamos and and ryan said how he had danced on stage in new york and marty martin danced on broadway uh ryan said that he then went to hollywood and worked in the movies uh marty martin did that at working mostly on dance in the movies ryan said he then worked at an agency where people changed their names and marty martin started a successful talent agency ryan said how he had a big house with a swimming pool uh which martin did and that the street address had the word rock or mount in it and marty martin lived on north roxbury and ryan even said that he didn't see why god would let you get to 61 and then make you come back again as a baby um and you know which kind of an interesting question ponder but um marty martin's death certificate said he's only 59 but his daughter and stepson does that in fact he was 61 so i looked into it found three census records two marriage listings and a passenger list that all gave ages that meant marty martin was in fact 61. so even though the death certificates of 59 ryan was correct about 61 and all together we verified over 50 of ryan's statements matched marty martin's life interesting then the i should remind people that you know you're you're giving us some of the more maybe dramatic examples but um between you and dr stevenson you've you know researched how many thousand well it varies depending on what you count but uh over 2500 yeah and uh and do most of them have you know you know make you really raise your eyebrows and think well there's something seems to be something to this one well some more than others too sure um and of course some are unverified but we haven't identified in the past live most of them were two-thirds of the ones we have um but yeah i mean i'm i'm uh telling the ones with with the most the richest kind of cases with the most details but but there are a lot of them that are are persuasive and then you put them all together and you think uh yeah there's there's definitely something going on here yeah um so what are you working on now more of the same or are you like some new avenues of research and maybe well yeah go ahead yeah well i was just gonna say both really i mean that we are doing more of the same because i think continuing to study strong american cases uh can be persuasive so you know if if we had 50 case american cases as strong as james and ryan's that would get pretty hard to ignore uh so and we're hearing from a lot of american families these days we heard from over 100 of them last year again varying degrees of potential strength of the cases but there are a lot of these kids out there talking about a past life another thing that we're working on now is going back and interviewing adults who we originally studied when they were children and and looking at how the memories affected their development and that affected their lives now we're we're still crunching the numbers on that but that's something that is i think interesting what are some of them said some yeah well some of them say that you know while they're experiencing the past life members it can be quite difficult for for the child and for the parents you know there can really be suffering there you know crying about missing people but in the long run some of them say that it was a positive that it did it gave them a more spiritual outlook even after they lost the memories and even some of them who don't even remember that they talked about a past life but their families have told them that they did that has helped to give them uh a more spiritual outlook and sort of a bigger picture kind of view of things so you know that there there was real benefit to them and as well we're also talking with the parents and seeing how they were affected by the child's memories and again for many of them it was opened them up to possibilities about past lives that they'd never thought about before i'll be interested to hear what happened to that bobby jones guy i guess his name is hunter or something and yeah yeah that's a pseudonym actually but yeah uh yeah i should check in with the dad sometimes see if he's still playing golf i mean there you know there are some kids who are prodigies but then when they get older they they let those things go and of course their pressures on prodigies and it can all get complicated but yeah i should get some follow-up on him yeah i mean they might sort of feel like all right done that been there don't need to do golf anymore yes the bone biles might be a concert pianist next time around or something yeah really uh one one lifetime as a gymnast is enough yeah um so i think uh i don't know i'm sure there's more we could talk about but that's what comes oh wait a minute here's another question that was sent in earlier that we haven't talked about this could be interesting this is from a john david bannon in queensbury new york he said i am curious about whether a spirit returning to the earth plane always comes back in sequence if i now live in 2021 die and return do i always return in the future relative to the pre the the current time is there any indication that we reincarnate in the past say years before maybe i'd die now and reincarnate in the year 1600. i mean we talked about that a little bit earlier no there's not any evidence of that um i i kind of like the idea of it though uh that you know maybe it's be sort of a different reality or something but i think it'd be interesting personally i'd like to come back and say in boston in the revolutionary war period or whatever so i i hope we can do it but that's not what our cases report yeah there's a stephen wright joke he goes into a cafe in france and it says breakfast no no he just goes into a cafe and it says breakfast served anytime and he said i'll have french toast during the renaissance yeah why not um some people i've talked to do say i don't know how they know this but they feel rather confident that um time is not linear we just perceive it as linear we're kind of wired to perceive it that way because it makes living more practical but that in fact we are living all of our our multiple lives simultaneously in sort of different dimensions or something or other yeah there are also some near-death experiences that people report that they saw their whole life at once uh and sort of a kaleidoscope kind of thing so you know if you if consciousness exists separate from this space-time then it can be mind-boggling kind of to think about how what the interaction with time might be and yeah is it simultaneous and what does that mean to be simultaneous as time is marching on so it gets complicated yeah you have an interesting section in one of your books about you know physics and the relativity of time and so on you go into einstein's theories and i always love listening to that stuff i can never retain it well enough to tell you the difference between the special theory and the general theory of relativity but it's all very interesting i mean time is so malleable you know if you could ride on a photon so to speak you'd go from the andromeda galaxy to here instantly but from our perspective as a stationary observer it takes two million years for the photon to get here so yeah right it's not the constant that we think of it being yeah it's it's their different perspectives that have different times um here's a question from akshay in puna india um you've probably heard the phrase old soul you know the the idea that people have lived so many lives that they've accumulated a lot of wisdom and so on in in any of your cases do you have you felt like the child that you're talking to is an old soul is a really wise young person well they're mostly small children i mean some of them come out with kind of philosophical statements but but many of them not i mean it's you know they're they're often focused on the events at the end of the previous life um often missing people are often kind of traumatized by the death uh so it's they're kind of like everyone else um and you know i suppose that's good and and then you know most of the kids they seem to lose their memories of the past life they certainly stopped talking about them and then they just go on to be ordinary kids which you know again is is good so that they're experiencing this life without too much of a things overhanging from the previous life yeah there's some stories in india of child saints you know who just became extremely precociously wise at a very young age like shankara for instance it was you know giving lectures at the age of six and commenting on the brahma sutras at the age of 10 or 11 with disciples around him and stuff like that anyway it's kind of inspiring um here's another question from anna in warsaw she said many children talk about love as something crucial for their memories people who have had ndes also mention it yeah you often hear people with ndes say that you know the big lesson in life is how much you loved and they realized that when they had their nde she says and asked maybe love is the view maybe love is the vehicle that carries our consciousness from one life to another maybe it is the recent achievement of evolution well that's a little hard to respond to i think i i think um i certainly agree that love is what gives life meaning and um and we understand very little about consciousness and vehicles or anything else and how those tie in together you know spirit and love obviously there's a connection there so i i can't really respond to the specifics of her statement or question um but i get that that love is an important part of the story yeah it's a nice it's probably a nice note to end on obviously what the world needs now is love sweet love that's the only thing that there's just too little of it's an old song yeah yes and uh whatever the reality of all these things that we'd like to speculate on and in your case more than speculate you know you've done significant research on it you know we would like to be happy and we would like other ideally we should like others to be happy and you know i remember one time i was in the philippines and it was such a beautiful i was taking a bus ride to this waterfall and the country was countryside was so beautiful and it was like heavenly and yet my experience with so many of the people i had encountered there was that they were miserable and i was just thinking it's so sad and kind of ironic that they're in this heavenly place and feeling so desperate and suffering so much and and i kind of feel like you know the potential is there for our outer our inner experience to be as heavenly as the most lovely places on earth are outwardly outwardly and that we could kind of have a situation of 200 percent of life where it's you know 100 outer beauty and abundance and 100 inner fulfillment for all of us right so you know there there's a lot about the environment that as an individual you don't have control over but you do have control over your internal environment so you know we all it's an ongoing effort you know we all can get wrapped up in the various stressors that we have and of course some people have more than others but there's also an opportunity to appreciate what is here that that is good and to help those around us have the good things and appreciate them too and you know share the love and and uh have a good life even if if some of the exterior things are are not so good that they're so there's the internal work that continues on even while we also work on the outer world as well yeah good well let's keep working on it um thanks for what you're doing it's a it's very interesting and um we kind of touched on what your work is now but do you have any big future goals or you know aspirations in this line of work that you haven't even gotten to yet that you'd like to accomplish not exactly i mean i think again continuing to do to strengthen what we've already done i think is worthwhile i would like to i mean my big dream would be to connect this to you know the physics that we're talking about earlier in a way that would contribute to uh contribute more to the development of a new paradigm and you know probably have to wait until my next life maybe make a lot of progress with that but um but it's all there i mean you know there are plenty of people coming out from different angles as far as what reality is and and how is more than just the physical and in fact it may be basically the um idealism uh more than physicalism that really we should be focused on so anyway that i continue to explore in my mind that that connection uh between past lives and consciousness and also the physics and and um maybe at some point uh we'll all pull it all together and go from there yeah we were talking earlier about paradigm shifts and i i really do feel like we're in the midst of a big one and that it's hard to see you know from a ground level perspective exactly what's happening and how it's shifting and so on but i think the time will come when we look back at you know maybe you and i won't be alive anymore maybe we will but you know when we think whew that was a radical transformation of society unlike anything the world had ever gone through in recorded history well i hope so uh and you're right i mean you know if you're taking kind of a step at a time then then you you lose the kind of sense of the marathon but it's um um hopefully we're making progress and sometimes it's two steps forward and one step back but but yeah it's uh and then there'll be these leaps right yeah you know like with einstein or whatever so um maybe we're getting primed for a big leap so that would be great yeah could be you know in the way the way phase transitions work is you you often don't see them coming like as water heats up you know it could be 99 degrees centigrade nothing strange about it all sudden one more degree and it's boiling so we we could be closer to a big shift than we realized yeah yeah hopefully i hope so anyway what you're doing is an important part of the puzzle part piece of the work we're all on one big team pulling our various ropes [Laughter] so thanks uh i really appreciated you know delving into your work and and spending this time with you well i appreciate the chance to talk with him and um like to say we're all contributing and and certainly programs like this and clearly with all the thought that you've done um you know we're all kind of working together to uh to grow basically says thanks for the opportunity to share some time with you yeah and uh i'll be in touch um like i'm interested in your uh your comrade ed edward frances kelly down there that you introduced me to him on one of the things you asked me to watch and you know he sounds like he'd be an interesting guy to talk to maybe if you run into him tell him we'll be getting in touch at some point okay yeah i i he would be a great guest yeah he would all right so thank you and thanks to those who've been listening or watching um as always i will create a page on batgap.com about this interview with links to doctors dr tucker's websites and books and and so on and so forth and i think your your email address is right on your one of your website so people can get in touch with you if they have a kid that remembers past lives or if they want to get in touch with you for any reason you're pretty accessible yeah uh yeah but i'm confessed i've got enough emails where i'm not always quick to respond and to be honest may not always respond but i'll certainly certainly try good all right thanks to those who've been listening or watching and we will see you for the next one the next one is kind of it's going to be a kind of a one-two punch because next week i'm going to be talking to dr julie beischel of the windbridge institute and she's been doing scientific research on mediums obviously a little bit different than what we're talking about here but mediums are people who have talked to talk to people who have passed over so it's kind of related well give her my regard she does good work i will all right thanks see y'all next time you

Channel: BuddhaAtTheGasPump

Views: 17,487

Keywords: Reincarnation, science, consciousness, hypnosis, multiple personality disorder

Id: qC5gFvSwhaA

Length: 109min 13sec (6553 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 05 2021