1 Life before life a scientific investigation of memories of previous lives YouTube

Thank you for having me. So what I'm going to be talking about for a few minutes is over 60 years of research here at the University of Virginia looking at cases of young children from various parts of the world who say that they remember a past life. And I'll give you a little bit about the history of the work and then tell you some about the things that we're focusing on these days. As you've already heard that this work and the story begins with Ian Stevenson. He was a psychiatrist who came to the University of Virginia way back in 1957 to be chairman of the Department of Psychiatry in the middle of quite a successful mainstream career. And after he had been here for a couple of years he became intrigued by this phenomenon of cases that he heard where children said that they remembered a past life. And Ian decided to go investigate. He heard about some cases in India. By the time of his trip there he had heard about five cases and he went there for a month and found 25 cases. And he got similar results in Sri Lanka. He was there for a week found seven cases and he realized that this phenomenon of young children talking about past lives was much more common than anyone here in the United States had any idea about. This is him in Burma but he took trips all over mostly in Asia but other places as well including trips to Brazil. And you're going to hear about some Brazilian cases in a little bit. Ian in his first book actually published a couple of cases from Brazil older cases that he had was able to study. So he started the work in the early 1960s and it's been going ever since. And we've now studied over 2,500 cases from around the world. They are easiest to find with in cultures with the belief in reincarnation. So I've listed the countries where we have the most cases. But that's just because we've had people looking for them there. And they have been found wherever anyone has looked. They've been found on all the continents except Antarctica. And they can certainly be found here as well. So to tell you a little bit about what these cases involve. So it's typically young children who spontaneously start talking about a past life. Our work does not involve hypnotic regression but rather these kids just start coming out with these things describing typically recent ordinary lives. They are not talking about being kings or queens. They almost never talk about being famous people. But instead somebody usually who looked fairly close by and just had kind of a typical ordinary life. And when I say recent lives the average interval between the death of the previous person and the birth of the child is only four and a half years. Now there are exceptions. We have them that are decades long. 50 years between lives. But typically it's very recent ones. Some of the children describe being a deceased family member like a grandparent or sometimes a sibling. But others describe being strangers in other locations. And if they give enough details including the name of the location then people have often gone there and found that in fact somebody did live and die whose life matches the statements that the child gave. So one part of the past life that is often out of the ordinary is how the previous person died. In 70% of the cases the previous person died by unnatural means meaning murder, suicide, combat, accident, that sort of thing. So that certainly seems to be an important part of this phenomenon. So there are three areas of evidence that these cases produce of a connection between the child and the previous person. The first one involves birthmarks and birth defects. So these are wounds, ones that the children are born with that match wounds, usually fatal wounds, on the body of the previous person. And these cases certainly fascinated Ian Stevenson. He spent years studying them, years more writing them up. He eventually published a two-volume set of over 200 such cases and it was 2,000 pages long. So he has a lot of very interesting cases. I'll just show you pictures from a couple of them. So there was a little girl who remembered the life of a man who got his fingers chopped off as he was being murdered. And the little girl was born with her fingers looking like that. Then there was a boy who remembered the life of a boy in another village who had lost the fingers of his right hand in a fodder chopping machine. And the second little boy was born with his hands looking like that. And then there was a boy who remembered the life of a man who had been killed by a shotgun blast to the side of his head. And the little boy was born just with his stub for an ear and an underdeveloped right side of his face. Ian also listed 18 cases in which children were born with two birthmarks, ones that match both the entrance wound and the exit wound on the body of the previous person. Now, along with the birthmarks, of course, are the statements that the children make. So I've said that it's young children. It's typically very young children. So the average age when a child starts talking about a past life is 35 months. So it's usually a two or three-year-old who starts coming out with these things. Some of them do it in sort of a detached way, but many of them show strong emotional involvement with this material. And they may cry on a daily basis, beg their parents to take them back to their last life. And then typically by the time that they're six or seven starting in school, they will stop talking about the past life and then just go on with their lives. So as far as what they talk about, they don't tend to come up with enlightened words of wisdom. Instead, what they do is focus on the previous life in particular, focus on the end of that life. So three-quarters of them will talk about how the previous person died. And they will also talk about people or events from the end of the life. So it's as if their memory has just picked up where it left off at the last life. And some of them give details that match remarkably to somebody who lived before in ways that seem impossible to explain through some sort of ordinary explanation. So the best-known case here in the U.S. is a little boy named James Leininger who seemed to remember the life of a World War II pilot who was killed in the Pacific. And he gave remarkable details, including the name of the ship, the exact details of how the pilot was killed, where he was killed, and also the name Jack Larson, who he said was a friend of his. And Jack Larson was in the plane next to the pilot on the day that he was killed. So we get some remarkable connections between what the child is saying and, in fact, this life from the past. In addition, about 20% of the children will also talk about things that happened between lives, things that they say that happened to them after they died the last time but before they were born at this time. And they say different things. Some of them essentially describe a near-death experience where they describe floating over their bodies, floating up, and then meeting other beings and that kind of thing. Some of them say that they stayed near either where the previous person died or stayed near the previous family, sometimes giving verifiable details. There was one little girl in Thailand who made a lot of statements, but she complained that her ashes had been scattered rather than buried the way she wanted them to be. And the previous woman had wanted her ashes buried under the bow tree of the temple complex where she studied, but when her daughter went to bury them, the root system of the tree was so extensive that she couldn't, so she scattered them instead. Some of the children will talk about going to other realms like heaven, and the American kids may use the word heaven. And then some will talk about either choosing their next parents or being guided to their next parents or observing them and then starting their new life. In addition to the statements and the birthmarks and birth defects, a lot of these kids also show behaviors that seem linked to the past life. And I've mentioned a lot of them show very intense emotions. They also can show phobias. So in the violent death cases, 35% of those kids will show an intense fear toward the mode of death of any sort of unnatural death. So an example is where there was a little girl who, from the time she was born, basically hated being in water. It would take three adults to hold her down to give her a bath when she was an infant. And then when she got old enough to talk, describe the life of a girl in another village who had drowned in an accident. Likes and dislikes. The most obvious example would be addictive substances. So this picture I've put up here is not from one of our cases, but it could be as a child smoking a cigarette. Because it seems that if the previous person was a heavy smoker or heavy drinker, that that allure for those substances can even continue across lifetimes. So the young child can try to sneak cigarettes or even sneak liquor to continue on the habit that they had in the last life. And then some of them in their play will compulsively act out for hours on end a theme from the past life, most often the previous person's occupation, where they will just play at that occupation just over and over day after day. All right, now I want to tell you a little bit about our current focuses. So there are three things that we are focusing on a lot these days. The first is a database of cases. So with each case, we code them on 200 variables, and then we put all the information in a database. So then we can look at various trends in the cases that you can't see sort of at the individual case level. And one thing we've looked at is mode of death. I was saying earlier how that seems to be an important part of this phenomenon. So this is a graph going up and down as number of cases, and going across is the age when the previous person died. The green bars on top are the natural deaths, and then all the other colors are the various kinds of unnatural deaths that the previous person experienced. The main point of the slide is to show you that we have a lot of unnatural death cases, but it also looks like people are dying young. The tricky part is that people who die unnatural deaths tend to be younger. But what we can do is take out the unnatural deaths ones, look just at natural deaths to see if those people are dying young too, which would mean that dying young is a separate factor from dying a violent death. This is just when I got off the internet, but it's a typical graph of deaths by age. And again, going up and down is number of people dying, going across is the age when they died. And you see this typically upsloping curve going across the lifespan until finally there's so few people left that it drops off, but mostly this upsloping curve. Whereas with our cases, in the natural death cases, the curve actually goes out the other way. And a quarter of the cases are age 15 or less. So there's something about dying violently or dying young that makes it more likely that a child will later talk about. Another focus of ours is cases in the U.S. So Ian Stevenson studied cases where he could find them, and it was easiest to find them in cultures with a belief in reincarnation. But now with the internet, we don't have to try to find cases here because they find us. So families are emailing us all the time. We had 100 families emailed us last year, and we're well over that already this year. And most of the reports come from families who did not believe in reincarnation before their child started talking about a past life. And what we see is that the cases here have the exact same features that the ones do in other places. So it involves a young child talking about a life that often ended violently. Some of them have birthmarks or birth defects and have the behaviors. So these cases show that this phenomenon is not purely a cultural phenomenon, but it happens here where there's no general belief in reincarnation and happens in families with no belief in reincarnation. Since we are hearing from more American families, it means we're also hearing from them when the child is younger. And some of them are young enough and still have enough memories of the past life where we can do testing with them. So another area of our focus recently has been doing picture tests with the children where I will show them one picture from the past life and another one that's a controlled picture that's not from the past life and see if the child can pick out which is the picture from that life. So I want to finish up by telling you about one of these cases. It's a jungle. He's on the beach. It's 1969. His parents asked him if he was talking about Vietnam and he said he was and how he had been killed in an explosion there when he was 21 years old. He also gave his last name from then and the state where he was from. And this was an unusual name that he gave as his last name. So his mom went on the internet and found a site, a Vietnam Memorial website, and was shocked to see that a man with that name from the state that Grant had given was in fact killed in Vietnam when he was 21. So I visited Grant's family and brought with me some pictures. So I showed Grant pictures of two high schools and asked him if he remembered either one and he said he had been to the one on the right which in fact was correct for this man with the name that Grant had given. I also showed him, I was able to do some internet searching. I found the house where the man lived when he was in high school and I showed him pictures and Grant did not pick out either the man's house or the control picture. He didn't make a selection for that pair. But then I showed him the picture of the house across the street and he correctly pointed to the one on the left and said that he remembered that one. And then afterwards, after I visited the family, I came back, continued to do some searching, and I found some pictures from the man's old high school yearbook. And I sent them to Grant's mom by email for her to show Grant. And the good thing about these tests was the mom didn't know which picture was correct so there was no chance that Grant was picking up on cues from her. I sent him pages of the high school administrators, students, and teachers and Grant picked the correct one on all three. And then I got some family photos from a relative. I showed Grant a picture of the previous man's mother as well as the control picture and it wasn't a very good picture of his mother and he didn't make a selection for that one. I showed him a picture of the man's father with the control and he correctly pointed to the one on the right and said he remembered him. And then he said he was tired of looking at pictures. But altogether, I showed him eight pairs of pictures. He didn't make a choice for two of them, but for the others, he was six out of six, which would be certainly unlikely to do just by luck. So when we can do these tests, they certainly add to the evidence that the child is in fact remembering a past life. So I will stop there. You can see if you want more information, there's our web address. We are also on Facebook and YouTube.