A positive review for reincarnation in Scientific American.

[DBT]

Surprising (for me), the writer for the magazine gave positive slant on the research of Ian Stevenson on reincarnation claims.

Quote:
''If you’re anything like me, with eyes that roll over to the back of your head whenever you hear words like “reincarnation” or “parapsychology,” if you suffer great paroxysms of despair for human intelligence whenever you catch a glimpse of that dandelion-colored cover of Heaven Is For Real or other such books, and become angry when hearing about an overly Botoxed charlatan telling a poor grieving mother how her daughter’s spirit is standing behind her, then keep reading, because you’re precisely the type of person who should be aware of the late Professor Ian Stevenson’s research on children’s memories of previous lives.''

''This Sri Lankan case is one of Stevenson’s approximately 3000 such “past life” case reports from all over the world, and these accounts are in an entirely different kind of parapsychological ballpark than tales featuring a middle-aged divorcée in a tie-dyed tunic who claims to be the reincarnation of Pocahantas. More often than not, Stevenson could identify an actual figure that once lived based solely on the statements given by the child. Some cases were much stronger than others, but I must say, when you actually read them firsthand, many are exceedingly difficult to explain away by rational, non-paranormal means. Much of this is due to Stevenson’s own exhaustive efforts to disconfirm the paranormal account. “We can strive toward objectivity by exposing as fully as possible all observations that tend to weaken our preferred interpretation of the data,” he wrote. “If adversaries fire at us, let them use ammunition that we have given them.” And if truth be told, he excelled at debunking the debunkers.''


“The mind is what the brain does,” I wrote in The Belief Instinct. “It’s more a verb than it is a noun. Why do we wonder where our mind goes when the body is dead? Shouldn’t it be obvious that the mind is dead too?” Perhaps it’s not so obvious at all. I’m not quite ready to say that I’ve changed my mind about the afterlife. But I can say that a fair assessment and a careful reading of Stevenson’s work has, rather miraculously, managed to pry it open. Well, a tad, anyway.''

 

[Treedbear]

https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Ian_Stevenson

Stevenson was an avid collector of such anecdotal stories, and primarily concentrated his attention on stories from people residing in countries like India where belief in reincarnation is common. Aware of this criticism, Stevenson later sought out stories from Europe and North America, but the subjects he found were typically predisposed to supernatural beliefs, such as a Native American tribe in Alaska or a Welsh psychic who had recorded his dreams about a past life.

 

[Politesse]

By the numbers, this is nearly the normative human belief concerning the "afterlife" (actually quite a poor term for the phenomenon if you aren't from a Christian background).

I am open to the possibility, as with most things; it seems to me that you would expect inconsistent results from studies like this even if the phenomenon is real, since the existence of occasional real insights would not prevent hundreds of other fanciful imagined ones. Having read many such accounts, I'm often appalled at the pseudo-historical tropes that populate most of them, but on the other hand, am sometimes surprised by the level of detail and nuance with which the occasional report manages to portray the past. Whether or not the cosmological claim is real, the method can clearly function as an excellent meditative technique for thinking critically about the past as a real community. I used to know a Native Dineh site monitor who regularly employed dreams of the past in helping archaeologists explain artifact distributions, often in an empirically confirmable fashion. I have no idea whether he was actually remembering anything, or whether this was a fueling prompt for a very keen intuition. I have come to suspect that some "oral traditions" are actually this in disguise, at least in their detail, and I think Will wouldn't even disagree with this, as he was always honest about the role of the storyteller in filling in the particulars around the edges of the more spartan framework of directly memorized phrases.

But this agnosticism is quite generous of me really, as past-life regression "therapy" (not mine) played a substantial role in the end of my first marriage. Whether or not reincarnation is legitimate, the idea has spurned an entire industry of overtly harmful charlatans here in the US. Like the Freudian childhood-regression hypnotists who paved the way for them, they are the worst kind of charlatans: the kind who believe in their own bullshit and feel entitled to destroy families with it as a result.

 

[Tom Sawyer]

I'm pretty sure I was a king in a previous life because, you know, I like it when people do what I tell them to do.

 

[steve_bank]

SciAmer has been a pop science magazine for sometime. Probably a question of readership.

The author sounds like yet another book writer of the paranormal.



Remember Shirley McLain?

They are not on the forum anymore, there used to be a crowd of people trying to prove parapsychology. One thing I discovered when you trace references to sources you find an interactive group of organizations that referenced by other organizations.

One experiment claimed to prove a person could affect physical reality. The test setup was problematic at best. Multiple sources for error. I told the poster who knew the experimenter pay my expenses and I would be glad to be an independent observer.

A woman on the forum claimed she was sitting with a Tibetan monk in NYC when he moved a pencil on a table without touching it. That track has been debunked on camera using directed breath control.

The monk claimed she said they keep the techniques secret because humans are not ready for it.

As to childhood memories I would go with genetic memory before any kind of disembodied spirit.

I read the Tibetan Book Of The Dead. When a person is dying it is whispered into the ear, guiding him through experiences and how to avid reincarnation if possible. The goal is to transcend the cycle of life and death. The true goal of Tibetan practices is stay completely aware and focused as one dies and traditions to what comes next. If you have unresolved karmic issues you fail and are pulled back into another existence.

Tibetans use divinations to determine if a child is a reincarnation of a past monk.

IMO reincarnation is largely metaphor.

 

[lpetrich]

A big problem is all the people who claim to have been some celebrity in the past, like Cleopatra. Only one present-day person could have been her in a past life -- at most. Also, why her and why not some nobody peasant?

Why doesn't anyone reveal anything that is little-known but still known? Like details of past languages? Some academics have long had an interest in this kind of subject, and in some cases, they have worked out a surprising amount of detail. Consider this bit of reconstructed Proto-Indo-European ( Schleicher's fable):

Owis eḱwōskʷe

Gʷərēi owis, kʷesjo wl̥hnā ne ēst, eḱwōns espeḱet, oinom ghe gʷr̥um woǵhom weǵhontm̥, oinomkʷe meǵam bhorom, oinomkʷe ǵhm̥enm̥ ōḱu bherontm̥. Owis nu eḱwobh(j)os (eḱwomos) ewewkʷet: "Ḱēr aghnutoi moi eḱwōns aǵontm̥ nerm̥ widn̥tei". Eḱwōs tu ewewkʷont: "Ḱludhi, owei, ḱēr ghe aghnutoi n̥smei widn̥tbh(j)os (widn̥tmos): nēr, potis, owiōm r̥ wl̥hnām sebhi gʷhermom westrom kʷrn̥euti. Neǵhi owiōm wl̥hnā esti". Tod ḱeḱluwōs owis aǵrom ebhuget.

(Lehmann's and Zgusta's version)

[On a hill,] a sheep that had no wool saw horses, one of them pulling a heavy wagon, one carrying a big load, and one carrying a man quickly. The sheep said to the horses: "My heart pains me, seeing a man driving horses." The horses said: "Listen, sheep, our hearts pain us when we see this: a man, the master, makes the wool of the sheep into a warm garment for himself. And the sheep has no wool." Having heard this, the sheep fled into the plain.

That Wikipedia page has numerous versions that various linguists have composed over the years -- versions that show differences in opinion about what PIE was like, as well as improved knowledge.

 

[T.G.G. Moogly]

A big problem is all the people who claim to have been some celebrity in the past, like Cleopatra. Only one present-day person could have been her in a past life -- at most. Also, why her and why not some nobody peasant?

Or an ET?

Lots of people like this stuff. SciAmer is just cashing in and satisfying its readership.

 

[steve_bank]

The human imagination is emense, and we all are susceptible to suggestion in some ways.

I thought it had been demons red that 'suppressed memories' could actualy be the result of the process of trying to bring unknown or remembered events to mind. Kids have nimagination but no experience. They could dream up anything depending how the interviewer asks questions.

Our brains naturally fill in the blanks sometimes.

In Buddhism reincarnation is part of a complete theology, or IMO a psychology. To me reincarnation is about transitions we go through as we grow.

 

[DBT]

The problem with these kind of claims appears to be our access to information. Which makes an investigation into what actually happened very difficult.

According to believers, a shining example of reincarnation is the Luke Ruehlman case, yet there are no alternative possibilities offered....perhaps the child picked up the story somewhere and his young imaginative mind wove a narrative, but we are not given sufficient information with which to determine the truth.

Quote:
''Ruehlman started weirding out his stay-at-home mom, Erika, at the age of 2, when he started talking about a mystery woman named Pam. Later, she would ask him directly who the heck Pam was.


''A five-year-old child is convinced that he was reincarnated as a boy after a past life as a 30-year-old black woman who, he claims, he remembers dying in a fire.

Luke Ruehlman, from Cincinnati, Ohio, believes that he was once named Pam and lived in Chicago until she jumped to her death from a burning building in 1993.

Luke claims that he was then reincarnated and says he even remembers being named Luke by his parents.

Erika said that at first Luke would simply name things Pam and would seem fixated with the name. Later, she explained, the boy would start making references to his apparent past life as a woman. She said:

He used to say: “When I was a girl, I had black hair.” Or he would say, “I used to have earrings like that when I was a girl.”

3. Pamela Robinson died when the Paxton Hotel in Chicago caught fire in 1993. According to his mother, Luke identified facts from the event with no prior knowledge of them.''

"He turned to me and said, 'Well, I was,'" she told Fox 8 (video above). "[He said] 'Well, I used to be, but I died and I went up to heaven. I saw God and then eventually, God pushed me back down and I was a baby and you named me Luke.'"

 

[T.G.G. Moogly]

The problem with these kind of claims appears to be our access to information. Which makes an investigation into what actually happened very difficult.

According to believers, a shining example of reincarnation is the Luke Ruehlman case, yet there are no alternative possibilities offered....perhaps the child picked up the story somewhere and his young imaginative mind wove a narrative, but we are not given sufficient information with which to determine the truth.

Quote:
''Ruehlman started weirding out his stay-at-home mom, Erika, at the age of 2, when he started talking about a mystery woman named Pam. Later, she would ask him directly who the heck Pam was.


''A five-year-old child is convinced that he was reincarnated as a boy after a past life as a 30-year-old black woman who, he claims, he remembers dying in a fire.

Luke Ruehlman, from Cincinnati, Ohio, believes that he was once named Pam and lived in Chicago until she jumped to her death from a burning building in 1993.

Luke claims that he was then reincarnated and says he even remembers being named Luke by his parents.

Erika said that at first Luke would simply name things Pam and would seem fixated with the name. Later, she explained, the boy would start making references to his apparent past life as a woman. She said:

He used to say: “When I was a girl, I had black hair.” Or he would say, “I used to have earrings like that when I was a girl.”

3. Pamela Robinson died when the Paxton Hotel in Chicago caught fire in 1993. According to his mother, Luke identified facts from the event with no prior knowledge of them.''

"He turned to me and said, 'Well, I was,'" she told Fox 8 (video above). "[He said] 'Well, I used to be, but I died and I went up to heaven. I saw God and then eventually, God pushed me back down and I was a baby and you named me Luke.'"

This is the kind of stuff that brings in pilgrims and money, we have an emotional attachment to believing this kind of stuff. And that's okay if we treat it the same way we treat seeing a movie. Some of us, however, want so badly for it to be real that we act and live like it is real.

 

[steve_bank]

Houdini went around debunking the occult. He gave a secret message to his wife. If he died first and could speak through a psychic he would speak the message. Never happened.

There was aguy who fell out of a tree, hit his head, and thereafter claiming he was reincarnated Tibetan monk, He called himself Lobsang Rampa and wrote books about psychic adventures of being a young mink. I read his books as a kid.

He still has a following today I be live.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lobsang_Rampa

Lobsang Rampa is the pen name of an author who wrote books with paranormal and occult themes. His best known work is The Third Eye, published in Britain in 1956.

Following the publication of the book, newspapers reported that Rampa was Cyril Henry Hoskin (8 April 1910 – 25 January 1981), a plumber from Plympton in Devon who claimed that his body hosted the spirit of a Tibetan lama going by the name of Tuesday Lobsang Rampa, who is purported to have authored the books. The name Tuesday relates to a claim in The Third Eye that Tibetans are named after the day of the week on which they were born.

Explorer and Tibetologist Heinrich Harrer was unconvinced about the book's origins and hired a private detective from Liverpool named Clifford Burgess to investigate Rampa. "In January 1957, Scotland Yard asked him to present a Tibetan passport or a residence permit. Rampa moved to Ireland. One year later, the scholars retained the services of Clifford Burgess, a leading Liverpool private detective. Burgess’s report, when it came in, was terse. Lama Lobsang Rampa of Tibet, he determined after one month of inquiries, was none other than Cyril Henry Hoskin, a native of Plympton, Devonshire, the son of the village plumber and a high school dropout."[3] The findings of Burgess' investigation were published in the Daily Mail in February 1958.[4] It was reported that the author of the book was a man named Cyril Henry Hoskin, who had been born in Plympton, Devon, in 1910 and was the son of a plumber. Hoskin had never been to Tibet and spoke no Tibetan. In 1948, he had legally changed his name to Carl Kuon Suo before adopting the name Lobsang Rampa.[5] An obituary of Fra Andrew Bertie, Grand Master of the Sovereign Military Order of Malta, claims that he was involved in unmasking Lobsang Rampa as a West Country plumber.[6]

Rampa was tracked by the British press to Howth, Ireland, and confronted with these allegations. He did not deny that he had been born as Cyril Hoskin, but claimed that his body was now occupied by the spirit of Lobsang Rampa.[7] According to the account given in his third book, The Rampa Story, he had fallen out of a fir tree in his garden in Thames Ditton, Surrey, while attempting to photograph an owl. He was concussed and, on regaining his senses, had seen a Buddhist monk in saffron robes walking towards him. The monk spoke to him about Rampa taking over his body and Hoskin agreed, saying that he was dissatisfied with his current life. When Rampa's original body became too worn out to continue, he took over Hoskin's body in a process of transmigration of the soul.[8]

Rampa maintained for the rest of his life that The Third Eye was a true story. In the foreword to the 1964 edition of the book, he wrote:


I am Tuesday Lobsang Rampa, that is my only name, now my legal name, and I answer to no other.

To Donald S. Lopez, Jr., an American Tibetologist, the books of Lobsang Rampa are "the works of an unemployed surgical fitter, the son of a plumber, seeking to support himself as a ghostwriter."[9]

The authorship controversy was dramatised in a radio play, The Third Eye and the Private Eye, by David Lemon and Mark Ecclestone, first broadcast by BBC Radio 4 in August 2012.[10]

Influence on Tibetologists’ callings[edit]

Donald S. Lopez, Jr., in Prisoners of Shangri-La (1998), points out that when discussing Rampa with other tibetologists and buddhologists in Europe, he found that The Third Eye was the first book many of them had read about Tibet: "For some it was a fascination with the world Rampa described that had led them to become professional scholars of Tibet."

Lopez adds that when he gave The Third Eye to a class of his at the University of Michigan without telling them about its history, the "students were unanimous in their praise of the book, and despite six prior weeks of lectures and readings on Tibetan history and religion, [...] they found it entirely credible and compelling, judging it more realistic than anything they had previously read about Tibet."[11]

 

[DBT]

An interesting story, I read a couple of his books on recommendation in the early eighties, but they didn't grab me.

 

[steve_bank]

An intersesting story, I read a couple of his books on recommendation in the early eighties, but they didn't grab me.

As a teen I read scifi. The Third Eye was a good story for a kid. Didn't realize who he was until the 80s.

 

[lpetrich]

Some more about Proto-Indo-European. Here is Grimm's law of stop-consonant correspondences, discovered by that famous folklorist. First, some examples of it:

English be ~ Russian bu- ~ Latin fu- ~ Greek phu- ~ Sanskrit bhu- ~ *bhu-
English is ~ Russian yest' ~ Latin est ~ Greek esti ~ Sanskrit asti ~ *esti
(this *es- / *bhu- alternation for "to be" is across the Indo-European languages)
English bear (to carry) ~ Russian ber- (to take) ~ Latin fer- ~ Greek pher- ~ Sanskrit bhar- ~ *bher-
English brother ~ Russian brat ~ Latin frâter ~ Greek phrater (clansman) ~ Sanskrit *bhrâtar- ~ *bhreH2ter- (or @bhrâter-)

English father ~ (Russian otets is not cognate) ~ Latin pater ~ Greek pater ~ Sanskrit pitar- ~ *pH2ter- (or *p@ter-)
English foot ~ Latin ped- ~ Greek pod- ~ Sanskrit pad- ~ *ped-

English the, that ~ Russian to ~ Latin istud ~ Greek to ~ Sanskrit tat ~ *to-
English three ~ Russian tri ~ Latin três ~ Greek treis ~ Sanskrit trayas ~ *treies

English two ~ Russian dva ~ Latin duô ~ Greek duô ~ Sanskrit dvâ- ~ *dwô
English ten ~ Russian desyat' ~ Latin decem ~ Greek deka ~ Sanskrit dasa ~ *dekm

English daughter ~ Russian doch' ~ (Latin filia not cognate) ~ Greek thugater ~ Sanskrit duhitar- ~ *dhugH2ter- (or *dhug@ter-)
English door ~ Russian dver ~ Latin forum (public place) ~ Greek thura ~ Sanskrit dvara ~ *dhwer-

English hundred ~ Russian sto ~ Latin centum ~ Greek hekaton ~ Sanskrit satam ~ *kmtom
English hound (hunting dog) ~ (Russian sobaka likely not cognate) ~ Latin canis ~ Greek kuon ~ Sanskrit svan- ~ *k'wons

English who ~ Russian kto ~ Latin quis ~ Greek tis ~ Sanskrit ki ~ *kwis

English quick (fast) ~ Russian zhivoi ~ Latin vivus ~ Greek bios ~ Sanskrit jîva ~ *gwiH3wos (or *gwîwos) (alive)
English queen (female monarch, orig. king's wife) ~ Russian zhena (wife) ~ (Latin femina, mulier not cognate) ~ Greek gunê ~ Sanskrit jani ~ *gwen- (woman)
English cow ~ (Russian korova probably not cognate) ~ Latin bôs ~ Greek bous ~ Sanskrit go ~ *gwous

English goose ~ Russian gus' ~ Latin ânser ~ Greek khên ~ Sanskrit hamsa ~ *gwH2ens (or *gwans)

 

[lpetrich]

So we have this grid of Proto-Indo-European stop consonants:

*p	*t	*ky	*k	*kw
(*b)	*d	*gy	*g	*gw
*bh	*dh	*gyh	*gh	*gwh

• Rows: location in the mouth: labial, dental, palatovelar, velar, labiovelar
• Columns: voicing (traditional reconstruction): unvoiced, voiced, voiced aspirate (with a puff of air)

English has non-aspirate and aspirate variants of its unvoiced stops: pit vs. spit, tick vs. stick, kit vs. skit.

Also, I'd written palatovelar as velar in my previous post, because they are often not distinguished in PIE reconstructions, likely because plain velars as opposed to palatovelars were not very common in PIE. Thus, *dekm and *kmtom ought to be *dekym and *kymtom

The voicing of the PIE stops has been a source of controversy in recent decades. That is because voiced aspirates are usually found alongside unvoiced ones, and also because if one of /b/ and /p/ is missing, it is almost always /p/ and not /b/. This has led to hypothesis like the glottalic theory: unvoiced with aspirate variant, glottalic, and voiced with aspirate variant. A glottalic or ejective stop is pronounced with a small pause between the stop and the following sound. Thus,

*p(h)	*t(h)	*ky(h)	*k(h)	*kw(h)
(*p')	*t'	*ky'	*k'	*kw'
*b(h)	*d(h)	*ky(h)	*g(h)	*gw(h)

If this issue seems almost impossibly arcane, then that shows what value it has in testing claims of memories of past lives.

 

[DBT]

The boy who thought he was a fighter pilot who got shot down in the war ''in his past life'' was probably influenced by a visit to the war museum;

''In the early 2000s, a sensational news story took the world by storm: a young boy was proven by experts — so said the reports — to have lived a past life as a World War II fighter pilot who was shot down. James Leininger, born in April 1998, is the subject of books and TV shows and countless articles citing him as proof of reincarnation, bolstered by an assailable mountain of undeniable proof. Today we're going to look into this amazing story of a young boy who thought he was reincarnated... and, in the process, also look at the people who helped him get there.''

Maybe...just maybe...James Leininger had a Morey Bernstein of his own.

Carol Bowman is the author of several books on reincarnated children and promotes herself as a "past life regression therapist", as if that's a thing. Hers is the book that Andrea Leininger turned to. Let's hear Bowman's own words from her website about her involvement in our case:

In 2001 I got an email from a mother in Louisiana, Andrea Leininger. She told me that she had just gotten a copy of my first book, Children's Past Lives, and she believed that her two-year-old son, James, was having nightmares about a past life. He would wake up screaming about 3 or 4 times a week about his plane crashing... I told her to follow the guidelines in my book for helping James work through his nightmares...

So from about the age of 3, James' parents were following the advice of a past life regression promoter to manage the boy's interest in WWII airplanes — having first already decided on their own that he was in fact a reincarnated pilot. Part of Bowman's advice was to repeatedly assure this toddler that he was, in fact, a reincarnated WWII fighter pilot. The Leiningers wrote in their book:''


''The basic facts of the case are that James Leininger was born in 1998, and while other children become obsessed with trucks or tractors or horses or plush toys, James' fixation was airplanes. He loved them. Every birthday or Christmas brought him a shower of new airplane toys. By the age of two, he knew many models by name, especially those most commonly produced as toys and featured in books: fighter planes, like Mustangs, Corsairs, and Spitfires. His parents took him to aviation museums, and he loved the WWII fighter planes. It even got to the point that his parents tried to distract him away from airplanes — unsuccessfully. It's a familiar experience to many parents''

 

[steve_bank]

There is so much stuff floating around it is easy for a kid to sunconsiously create something. One of the first book I remember reading as a kid was 30 Seconds Over Tokyo.

When I was reading Lord Of The rings in the 70s I fell asleep and dreamed the characters were calling to me. Human imagination.

 

[DBT]

Including the power of suggestion on developing minds;

''Most of the research that has looked at the nature of suggestion has focused on its impact on memory. Elizabeth Loftus, for example, has demonstrated how leading questions and suggestive information can seriously distort a person’s memory for an observed event (e.g. Loftus, 1979).

''The pernicious effect of suggestive procedures has also been explored in relation to the creation of false memories within therapy. Years of empirical research suggest that false memories of childhood sexual abuse (satanic or non-satanic), reports of alien abduction and vivid tales of past lives, often share a common feature. In many cases these fantasy-based ‘memories’ have come about in response to hypnotic or other suggestive procedures carried out by therapists and misguided enthusiasts. However, it is also likely that the client’s own pre-existing beliefs may be sufficient to generate false memories even in the absence of explicit suggestions from the therapist.''

 

[Gun Nut]

My problem with reincarnation claims is that they are all too much like ghost sightings...
What they have in common is a fad... a time-bound fad. What i mean is that all ghosts reported are from before the modern age... all ghosts carry candles for light, drag chains, and go wooowooowooo.. Never has anyone reported a ghost sighting of some kid on his cell phone that didn't realize he was hit by a car while texting and crossing the street. Similarly, all reincarnations are of famous people in history... deep history.. John Lennon's reincarnation should be about 30 years old now, right? You would think he would have discovered this by now and produced "Yesterday Again" by now... no one ever claimed to be the reincarnation of a used car dealer... only kings and queens apparently.

 

[Tom Sawyer]

My problem with reincarnation claims is that they are all too much like ghost sightings...
What they have in common is a fad... a time-bound fad. What i mean is that all ghosts reported are from before the modern age... all ghosts carry candles for light, drag chains, and go wooowooowooo.. Never has anyone reported a ghost sighting of some kid on his cell phone that didn't realize he was hit by a car while texting and crossing the street. Similarly, all reincarnations are of famous people in history... deep history.. John Lennon's reincarnation should be about 30 years old now, right? You would think he would have discovered this by now and produced "Yesterday Again" by now... no one ever claimed to be the reincarnation of a used car dealer... only kings and queens apparently.

And what about the cave man ghosts? Are they just kind of wandering around wondering why they haven't seen any brontosauruses to hunt since that big rainstorm back in the day?