Wednesday, March 11, 1998
Where Reincarnation and Biology Intersect - Fohat book review
The world's leading scientific investigator of evidence for reincarnation is Dr Ian Stevenson, Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Virginia. For over 30 years he and his colleagues have been studying cases involving children who remember past lives. Most of the cases come from the Hindu and Buddhist countries of South Asia, the Shiite peoples of Lebanon and Turkey, the tribes of West Africa, and the tribes of northwestern North America. In 1997 Stevenson published details of 225 cases in a massive work Reincarnation and Biology: A Contribution to the Etiology of Birthmarks and Birth Defects. The same year he presented a summary of 112 cases in a much shorter book Where Reincarnation and Biology Intersect.
Stevenson has discovered that birthmarks and birth defects are often related to injuries sustained in the previous life, especially injuries associated with violent death. In many cases he has been able to obtain postmortem reports, hospital records, or other documents that confirm the location of the wounds on the deceased person in question. Birthmarks often correspond to bullet wounds or stab wounds; sometimes there are two marks corresponding to the points where a bullet entered and left the body. Birthmarks may also be related to a variety of other wounds or marks, not necessarily connected with the previous personality's death, including surgical incisions and blood left on the body when it was cremated. A boy who lost his fingers in an accident with a fodder-chopping machine and died of an unrelated illness the following year was reborn without the fingers of his right hand. A woman who had been run over by a train, which sliced her right leg in two, was reborn with her right leg absent from just below the knee. A man who, while resting in a field, had been mistaken in the twilight for a rabbit and shot in the ear, was reborn with a severely malformed ear.
Stevenson has found that most of the details that children remember about their previous life turn out to be accurate (he deals only with spontaneous memories and makes no use of hypnosis). Further evidence for reincarnation comes from 'behavioural memories'. Children sometimes display behaviour that is unusual for the child's family but fits in with what is known about the person whose life the child remembers. For example, there are cases where children of lower caste Indian families who believe they had been Brahmins -- and in their view still were -- would refuse to eat their family's food, which they considered polluted. Conversely, a child remembering the life of a street-sweeper may show an alarming lack of concern about cleanliness. Some children show skills that they have not learned in their present life, but which the previous personality was known to have had.
Many of the children express memories of the previous life in their play. ...
The world's leading scientific investigator of evidence for reincarnation is Dr Ian Stevenson, Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Virginia. For over 30 years he and his colleagues have been studying cases involving children who remember past lives. Most of the cases come from the Hindu and Buddhist countries of South Asia, the Shiite peoples of Lebanon and Turkey, the tribes of West Africa, and the tribes of northwestern North America. In 1997 Stevenson published details of 225 cases in a massive work Reincarnation and Biology: A Contribution to the Etiology of Birthmarks and Birth Defects. The same year he presented a summary of 112 cases in a much shorter book Where Reincarnation and Biology Intersect.
Stevenson has discovered that birthmarks and birth defects are often related to injuries sustained in the previous life, especially injuries associated with violent death. In many cases he has been able to obtain postmortem reports, hospital records, or other documents that confirm the location of the wounds on the deceased person in question. Birthmarks often correspond to bullet wounds or stab wounds; sometimes there are two marks corresponding to the points where a bullet entered and left the body. Birthmarks may also be related to a variety of other wounds or marks, not necessarily connected with the previous personality's death, including surgical incisions and blood left on the body when it was cremated. A boy who lost his fingers in an accident with a fodder-chopping machine and died of an unrelated illness the following year was reborn without the fingers of his right hand. A woman who had been run over by a train, which sliced her right leg in two, was reborn with her right leg absent from just below the knee. A man who, while resting in a field, had been mistaken in the twilight for a rabbit and shot in the ear, was reborn with a severely malformed ear.
Stevenson has found that most of the details that children remember about their previous life turn out to be accurate (he deals only with spontaneous memories and makes no use of hypnosis). Further evidence for reincarnation comes from 'behavioural memories'. Children sometimes display behaviour that is unusual for the child's family but fits in with what is known about the person whose life the child remembers. For example, there are cases where children of lower caste Indian families who believe they had been Brahmins -- and in their view still were -- would refuse to eat their family's food, which they considered polluted. Conversely, a child remembering the life of a street-sweeper may show an alarming lack of concern about cleanliness. Some children show skills that they have not learned in their present life, but which the previous personality was known to have had.
Many of the children express memories of the previous life in their play. ...
Labels: past lives
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