Before and After Life

“I know that my mother and grandmother are with me,” said Ilia, my mother-in-law. “And once, when I was in deep pain, I felt a hand caressing my shoulder and I was so relieved….”

Well, Ilia should know a thing or two about all this—seven-and-a-half years ago, she went into respiratory arrest, sailed up to the Pearly Gates, and then told St. Peter she’d had a change of mind. She’s been unstoppable ever since.

So that might explain why I chose to listen to 14 minutes of Deepak Chopra talk about his book, Life After Death. And in the process, Chopra threw in the fact that there are 250 cases of children remembering previous lives that have been studied by the University of Virginia.

Well, that seemed a thing to look into, on a Tuesday morning. And is it true?

Well, it’s certainly true that in 1967, the University of Virginia created the Division of Perceptual Studies, under the direction of a Canadian psychiatrist, Ian Stevenson. Stevenson’s mother had been interested in the paranormal, and Stevenson had read widely in the field.

In the mid-60’s, Stevenson got a grant to go to India to interview a child who claimed to remember a past life. He came back, instead, with 25 cases.

What did he claim? Well, very often the child could remember quite specific details from a previous life, and often the details could be corroborated. In one case, a child remembered selling incense in a previous life, before he had been hit by a truck. And the incense he described wasn’t available in the village he currently lived in, but had been sold in the village he claimed to have lived in.

Children may make various other statements, claims Stevenson, such as:

• You’re not my real mommy / daddy
• I had another mommy before I was in my mommy’s tummy
• When I was big, I used to….

Children usually began talking about their past lives just as they were learning to speak—between two and four. And in that period, they displayed talents that they couldn’t have had: speaking a foreign language, or playing an instrument. At age 7 or so, they usually forgot their past life.

Nor was Stevenson going to leave it there—he claimed that children very often had the likes and dislikes of their previous lives. And going further, that children were born with birthmarks and scars in the same place as the trauma which had killed them in their past life. Oh—and speaking of which, Stevenson reported that 61% of the children remembering past lives had met with violent ends, or with an early or sudden death.

Stevenson’s work met with critics. First of all, the stories of children remembering past lives tended to come from places where the belief in reincarnation was strong. Was it possible that villagers were looking for resemblances, and subtly reinforcing or reinterpreting what the child said? More to the point, Stevenson relied on interpreters—could they be trusted?

Here’s what Wikipedia has to say:

Despite this early interest, most scientists ignored Stevenson's work. According to his New York Times obituary, his detractors saw him as "earnest, dogged but ultimately misguided, led astray by gullibility, wishful thinking and a tendency to see science where others saw superstition."^[6] Critics suggested that the children or their parents had deceived him, that he was too willing to believe them, and that he had asked them leading questions. In addition the results were subject to confirmation bias, in that cases not supportive of the hypothesis were not presented as counting against it.^[7] Leonard Angel, a philosopher of religion, told The New York Times that Stevenson did not follow proper standards. "[B]ut you do have to look carefully to see it; that's why he's been very persuasive to many people."^[6]

Stevenson died in 2007, and his work is carried on by Jim Tucker, a man whose delivery is so dry that it makes a fascinating subject almost dull. Nor is previous lives the sole interest of the Division of Perceptual Studies—they also look into near-death experiences (NDE). In particular, they look into veridical NDEs, in which a person reports information that he or she could not have known—such as someone coming into the room after he lost consciousness, or a medical procedure was going on.

Do I believe any of this?

Well, I give you the story of a friend of mine, fluent in French and raising a small child. And one day, the child was being absolutely impossible, and so my friend, wanting to scold the child, berated him in French. The child retorted, also in French. So, you’re asking?

My friend had never spoken French to her child before.