Birth Marks and Past Lives Memories – Jim B. Tucker

Hello again. So this talk is going to involve one particular feature of the cases, and that would be when children are born with a birthmark or birth defect that matches a wound, usually the fatal wound on the body of the previous person. And Ian Stevenson had a longstanding interest in psychosomatic medicine before he ever got involved in this work, so psychosomatic meaning the connection between mind and body. So he was fascinated when he started seeing these cases of marks that seemed connected with past life memories. So I mentioned in the first talk that he has spent years working on a book. He actually spent years studying these birthmark cases and then years more writing them up, and he eventually published this two-volume set called Reincarnation in Biology. It has over 200 such cases, and it's 2,000 pages long. Ian was nothing if not thorough. So of course, I can't go over all 200 cases with you, but I'll share just a few with you. There was one girl who remembered the life of a man who got his fingers chopped off as he was being murdered, and the little girl's hands were like that. 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, which is quite an unusual defect, the way that one hand is so affected and the other one not affected at all. There was also 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 with just a stub for an ear and an underdeveloped right side of his face. Ian also listed 18 cases in which the kids were born with two birthmarks, ones that matched both the entrance wound and the exit wound on the body of the previous person. I'll tell you a little bit about one of them. It's a case in Thailand of a little boy named Chennai, and when Chennai was three years old he started talking about his past life. He said that he had been a teacher whose name was Buakai, and that he had been shot one day on the way to school. He begged his family to take him to his previous parents, and he named the place where he said that they lived. So eventually, when he was still three years old, he and his grandmother got on a bus and went to near where he had named. He then led the way to a house with an older couple in it that he seemed to recognize. They, in fact, had had a son named Buakai Lonak. He was a teacher, but apparently he was also a gangster on the side, and had had a lot of affairs, and anyway, he had made a lot of enemies, and one day one of them shot him as he rode his bicycle to school. There was not an autopsy report available, but Ian talked with Buakai's widow, who said that the doctor who examined his body told her that he knew that Buakai had been shot from behind because he had a small round entrance wound on the back of his head, and a larger irregularly shaped exit wound on the front. Well, Shanai was born with this small round birthmark on the back of his head, and a larger, more irregularly shaped birthmark toward the front. His parents said it was on his forehead when he was born, and then it had migrated back as he had grown. Now, in this case, we can't say precisely where the previous person's wounds were because there was not an autopsy report available. But as I'll explain in a few minutes, we wouldn't necessarily expect an exact match between the wounds on the previous body and the birthmarks on the child. Now I want to show you a video of a birthmark case. It's a little long, it's about 11 minutes, but it really does a great job of showing up close and personal what this phenomenon is like. This is a case where it was studied by Erlander Harrelson, he's a colleague of ours. It's a little girl in Sri Lanka named Pranima. To give you a little bit of a setup for the case, Pranima talked about a past life, and then one day she saw a temple on television. She said that she had lived across the river from the temple that she had seen on TV. This was a temple that was 140 miles away from the home, and it's with those statements that that led the case to be solved. If this works, here is the video. Dr. Erlander Harrelson has investigated over 60 cases in Sri Lanka. He has found that compared to the West, children here recall specific details, which makes it easier to discover the identity of the person the child claims to have been before. Dr. Harrelson considers the case of Pranima to be one of his strongest. I came to know the case of Pranima in 1996, and I published it in January 2000, so we studied it for some, well we can say like for three years. Dr. Harrelson and his interpreter have visited Pranima's family many times to investigate her story. They live in a small town called Bakamuna in the central province. Her father is the headteacher of a local school. All her family are practicing Buddhists. When Pranima was about school age, she asked me if I wanted to know where her mother and father were from. I thought she meant me and my husband, so I ignored her. Then she said her other parents were living in Kalania, about 140 miles away from here. She went on talking about her previous life. She talked about a fragrance, a sweet smell, anything she made at home, food or clothes. She said, I want to take it to my mother. Pranima was three years old when she started talking about her past life, but what's unusual is that now age 12, she still has the same memories. I was a man before. My real name is Jinnadasa. I was called Jinnasena, but they called me Jinnadasa. I had a sister and younger brothers. What I did in those days was to manufacture incense sticks and then distribute them to shops. We had vehicles, but mostly I went on pushbike. I spent a lot of time traveling from place to place. As a small child, Pranima could describe not just the way she used to make incense, but the names of the brands she sold, Ambika and Ketapicha. Her parents were baffled. In Kalania, Angoda, 140 miles away, live the Vijasiri family, who are incense makers. They are the only family in the country registered to make Ambika and Ketapicha incense, the brands Pranima talked about. One member of this family, Jinnadasa, was killed in an accident four years before Pranima was born. When Pranima first described her past life memories, these families, separated by distance and class, had never met. Jinnadasa was my brother. He manufactured incense sticks for a living. We worked together before he had his accident. That day, Jinnadasa and I, we started together from Garvandi Junction and separated at Willimpicha. We were on pushbikes, with our incense packed in boxes. Jinnadasa said he was going to Delkanda, so I sold my incense nearby. Then someone asked me, where is Jinnadasa? I got down to the Delkanda Junction and I had to cross the road. I got off my bike and tried to cross to the other side and I saw a bus coming. I didn't like the way it was heading towards me, but then the bus came right by and it knocked me down. When I opened my eyes, I was under the bus. At about two in the afternoon, the police came and showed me a packet of incense and said that the person who was selling this had been run over by a bus. It was the Nugagoda police and they had a packet of Ambika incense. And then I realized what it meant. When she was very young, Purnima's memories were overwhelming. She had difficulty in separating her past life from her present one. Then when she was five, a new teacher came to work at her father's school. He lived in the area where she claimed to have lived before. Purnima's father was my head teacher. I work in his school in the week and go home to Kelania at weekends. I told him that I could make investigations. He didn't tell me to do it. I went home and mentioned this and my brother-in-law said that he didn't believe in rebirth. He suggested we investigate the matter together to see if there was any truth to the story. We made inquiries here first because Purnima had remembered praying at this famous temple in Kelania before. We asked if there was anyone near here who made incense sticks. I was told there was a village across the water over there where there were several families who made them. We managed to find the place and eventually discovered that someone who made incense sticks had died in a road accident. When the teacher Suman Asiri reported back with positive information, we spoke to Purnima about it and decided to go there. I realized it was true because Purnima had directed the driver straight to the house. After we got out, she led us there. I couldn't believe how strong her memories were. She talked about how we'd pass a pond and described the house exactly as being on a higher level than the road. Purnima was only five years old when she first met the family. She has kept in written contact over the years. All the family, including Juna Dasa's wife and daughter, are convinced that this 12-year-old girl is his reincarnation. They said they were sure from the moment they first met. One day I was coming back across the paddy fields and a young girl was pointing at me and saying that I was her brother-in-law. I heard her saying it. She asked for her sister, my wife, who wasn't here. Then she asked where is she. She went right around the house looking for incense sticks that we used to sell. She asked for a particular packet of incense. The packet wasn't here when she came, but we made it at the time when Juna Dasa was alive. She asked why have we changed the colours. She was looking for the vans. She was asking lots of questions. On the day of the trial over Juna Dasa's death, we had to go to the police station first. Panima was there too. She went up to Juna Dasa's sister and sat on her lap and kissed her and called her my younger sister. The police were very confused and the magistrate said it was very unusual. She kissed me. She knew who I was. I was amazed. When a five-year-old is calling a grown woman her younger sister, it's a surprising thing. I think the fact that the Buddhists, that's the majority of the population, they believe in reincarnation. That certainly has an effect on the cases. I think here in Sri Lanka, when a child starts speaking about a previous life, I think then people here will listen more carefully than they would listen in Europe or America. In spite of that, there is an important additional factor in this case, and that is after this family was identified and somebody's statement found to fit, then additionally to that, it turned out that Panima had very marked birthmarks on the left side of her chest. These birthmarks correspond to the fatal injuries on Juna Dasa. We were able to trace the post-mortem report regarding the death of Juna Dasa. He was run over by a bus, and his ribs on the left side were broken. They penetrated his lungs, and probably the greatest pain he felt was on the left side. But of course, birthmarks start to form in the embryo. When I was little, I'd never heard of rebirth or reincarnation. I was going on my own memory. When I went to see the family, I came to realise that rebirth was something real, something factual. I learnt about it through my experience alone. Do you think these cases are suggestive of reincarnation? Someone said, in the night, I believe in ghosts, but never during the day. With that case that the teacher who went and investigated said that Panima's father had given him four items to check, that he was looking for a previous person who had lived on the other side of the river from the temple, had been making the two brands of incense that Panima had named, and these brands weren't even available in Panima's local area, but she had the names, was selling incense sticks on a bicycle when she had a fatal accident of getting hit by a big vehicle. I think you can see, if the case only involved those four statements, it would still be a really impressive case, and of course, in fact, the case involved a lot more, including prominent birthmarks. So that case, and most of the cases, the birthmarks involve fatal wounds that the previous person suffered, but they don't have to. So I want to tell you about one case that did not involve fatal wounds. It's an American case, a little boy named Patrick, and this was actually the first case that I was ever involved with. It was one that Ian and I studied together. Patrick's half-brother, Kevin, began to limp when he was 16 months old and eventually fell and had a broken left leg. This led to a medical workup and he was diagnosed with metastatic cancer. He also had a bulging left eye that was bruised. He started treatment, he received a central line, which is a large IV that was put in on the right side of his neck, and he got chemo through it. This side would get inflamed a little bit, but he tolerated the treatment fairly well, got discharged, came back six months later. At that point, he was blind in his left eye, got another short course of chemo, was discharged, but then died two days later. Kevin's parents then split up. His mother remarried and she had a daughter and a son, and then 12 years after Kevin had died, she gave birth to Patrick. She soon noticed some things about his body. In particular, his left eye, he had what's called a corneal leukemias in the opacity that made him virtually blind in that eye the way that Kevin had been. He also had a nodule above his right ear where Kevin had had a tumor biopsied, and this fortunately is not a tumor, but it was a nodule in exactly the same place above his right ear, and Ian and I met Patrick when he was five, and we could easily feel the nodule still above his right ear. He also had a birthmark on the right side of his neck that I don't know how well it projects. Hopefully you can see that. That was in the place where Kevin had the central line. So with this case, we got all the medical records and tried to verify all the history. The difficult part sometimes is that people don't document things in medical records as well as we would like, so we searched long and hard to find where the central line had gone, and eventually we found one handwritten note that said it had been inserted in the right external jugular vein, which in fact it was on the right side, the correct side of the neck that matched Patrick's birthmark. In addition, when he got old enough to walk, he walked with a limp favoring his left leg even though he had no medical reason to do so. He had also talked about Kevin's life. So he talked about wanting to return to the previous home, and he gave accurate details in describing it. He talked about the scalp surgery where Kevin had had the tumor biopsied. He saw a picture one day of Kevin, which typically his mom did not have pictures of Kevin up, but he saw a picture of Kevin and got very excited and said that that was him. And then he also talked about someone named Billy the Pirate. He said that before he was born, he had met a relative in heaven who was a young man who was tall and thin and had brown hair and brown eyes, and the man told him that he was called Billy the Pirate and that he had been shot and killed by his stepfather up in the mountains. He also said that he was upset that no one had talked about him after he had died. Well, Patrick's mother didn't know anything about any Billy the Pirate, so she called her mother, Patrick's maternal grandmother, who confirmed the story. The grandmother had had an older sister who had a son who was killed in just the way that Patrick described, three years before Patrick's mom was born. And the family had never talked about him after he died. And he apparently had a lot of wild behavior, and because of that, had earned the nickname Billy the Pirate. His name is Billy, but Billy the Pirate. And when Patrick's mom told her the name, she laughed and said she hadn't heard it since Billy had been killed. Patrick also talked to us about a couple of incidents from the past life. He described going to the zoo with his cousin, and Patrick had never been to the zoo with his cousin, but Kevin went with his cousin. He also talked about visiting a ranch with bulls, and Kevin had visited the cattle ranch. So in this case, Kevin didn't have any fatal wounds. He didn't die a violent death, but the things that showed up in Patrick were ones that would have impacted Kevin the most. So the blindness in his left eye, the surgery, the biopsy of the tumor above his ear, the central line going in his neck, and then the limping from the broken leg. So how do we explain these birthmark cases, either this one or the ones connected to fatal wounds? I confess that when I got involved in this work, even though I read a lot of really interesting cases, the birthmark cases I was not comfortable with because I didn't see how a wound on a dead body, even if we accept reincarnation, how a wound on a dead body would then show up in the next life. But Ian talked about in Reincarnation Biology, evidence in other areas of work showing that mental images can have specific effects on the body. So there are a couple of phenomena that really show this well. One is stigmata. So stigmata are wounds on usually very devout people that match the crucifixion wounds of Jesus that are described in the Bible. And there have been over 350 such cases reported. It's usually after prolonged prayer, although it can also occur during hypnosis. And there's a psychiatrist who worked with one very highly susceptible woman and induced stigmata in her. So the stigmata included a crown of thorns is not a very good picture, but I think you can see the wounds are even triangular like thorns would make. And she also developed wounds on her feet and wounds on her hands. She also had a wound on her side, which stigmata individuals typically do. So in the Bible, it says how a Roman soldier pierced Jesus with a spear on one side, but it doesn't say which side. So typically when the people develop these wounds, the side that they develop the wound on will match the side of the image of Jesus that they prayed on or contemplated. So again, it seems that this image that they saw and focused on then led to the marks in the same place. Hypnosis has also been shown to produce specific wounds like burns in some individuals. So if you have a really susceptible hypnotic subject, you can touch them with your finger or with a pencil. You tell them that it's a burning ember and they'll develop a burn and a blister. Now, in addition, memories can sometimes induce specific effects in susceptible individuals. So there was a Dr. Moody. This was not Raymond Moody who has written so much about near-death experiences, but a different Dr. Moody who published a couple of cases. One was about a man who vividly recalled a traumatic event from nine years before where he had had his arms tied behind him. And this man developed what certainly looked like rote marks on his arms. There was another case of a woman who recalled being beaten with a whip by her father when she was growing up. And specifically, she recalled an incident where she was struck on the left shoulder and she developed this mark on her left shoulder. So we see from these cases that memories can produce effects on the skin temporarily. Well, in our cases, if the person died and the consciousness continued, they could take those memories with them and then they would imprint the developing fetus. So in this case, the wounds would be permanent rather than just temporary marks on the skin because the fetus would continue to develop with that imprint. And the birthmarks that show up in these kids usually represent wounds that would impact the previous consciousness the most. So the fatal wounds, somebody being killed, which of course is a very traumatic experience presumably to go through, those wounds would stay with the consciousness or like in James's case, ones that would have impacted the person a lot. So this would mean that it's not the wound on the previous body itself that causes the birthmark, but more it's the effect that it has on the consciousness that then leads to the birthmark. And to me, that makes a lot more sense than somehow this physical wound literally producing the same thing in the next life. But it wouldn't necessarily be a precise match because it's filtered through the consciousness. So the birthmarks may not match precisely with what you find on the body during autopsy. We also have some cases involving internal diseases, but we don't have a lot of them, which is a good thing. But internal diseases, they don't have an image affecting consciousness in the same way that external injuries do. So I think that's probably why there are so few of them. Now, as if these cases aren't strange enough, there's also a phenomenon that Ian termed experimental birthmarks. And these involve a practice in several areas in Asia in which after someone dies, a person takes a substance, usually soot or paste, makes a mark on the body and says a wish or makes a prayer that they take the mark with them to their next life where it'll show up as a birthmark so that they can be identified. And this is usually done with the expectation that the child will be born into the same family as the person who died. So Ian studied 20 of these cases and then a colleague and I found 18 more. So I'll tell you about a couple of them that we found. One, it's a little boy who's thought to be his grandmother reborn. And before she died, she said that she wanted to come back as a male. She said it's because she wanted to have a mistress one day the way her husband did. And then after she died, her daughter-in-law took some white paste and just made a mark down the back of her neck. And then a year later, a grandson was born and he had this mark down the back of his neck. And then he didn't talk a lot about a past life, but he did make several statements recalling his grandmother's life. Another case from Thailand is this little girl who was born five years after her grandfather died. After he died, her aunt made a mental wish and then took some soot from the bottom of a rice pot. And I had one of the villagers put some soot on his finger just to show what it looked like. Took some soot from the bottom of a rice pot and made a mark on his right leg above his ankle. And then five years later, this little girl was born with this mark on her right leg above her ankle. Now, when we saw her, she was only two and a half. And at that point, she hadn't made any clear statements related to the past life. But of course, she was still quite young. And then the last case of this type that I want to tell you about is one of Ian's cases from Burma. And this woman, unfortunately, is a previous person in this case. She was born with a congenital heart defect. And then she died during open heart surgery when she was 20 years old. After she died, three of her classmates volunteered to prepare her body for cremation. They'd heard about bodies being marked, so they took some red lipstick and made markings on the back of her neck. And then a year later, her older sister gave birth to a little girl who had, I hope you can see, it doesn't show up real well, but a red area on the back of her neck. Now, as Ian pointed out, the women picked the worst possible spot to mark the body because stork-like birthmarks are pretty common and will occasionally persist into childhood. When Ian was studying the case and met the little girl, he also noticed, and I hope you can see without too much imagination, he noticed this pale white line running from about mid-sternum to mid-abdomen that looked very similar to a heart surgery scar, except it was lower, at least, by the time when Ian met her. And she had talked about the previous person's life, and in fact, she wanted to be called by the previous woman's name. And she would also call her mother the term for older sister and did the same with the other family members, calling them by the relation that the previous woman had had with them. So when Ian investigated this case, he interviewed the women who had marked the body separately, and he discovered that one of them had never met this little girl. So unannounced, he takes the woman to the family's home. They walk in, and he says to the little girl, who is this? And she immediately said, mint, mint, ooh, which in fact was the name of the woman who had marked the body. So how do we explain these cases? Well, if we're open to deciding they're more than just coincidence, then there are at least three possibilities that are worth considering. One is a concept called maternal impression. Back in the late 1800s, there were a lot of cases reported in the medical literature in which a pregnant woman would see a very upsetting sight like the sight of a deformed individual, and then would give birth to a child with that deformity. And the concept was eventually rejected because people couldn't imagine a physical explanation for it. But there were a lot of cases reported, and some of them were quite striking. There was one that Ian discusses in which a pregnant woman had a brother who had cancer of the penis and had his penis removed. The woman saw his wounds after surgery and then gave birth to a boy with congenital absence of the penis, which is an incredibly uncommon condition. Now, the difference is that with maternal impression, the idea was that the mother would see a very upsetting sight. Whereas with the experimental birth marks, the marks are not particularly upsetting. But in both, it would be that an image in the mother's mind then leads to the change in the baby. The hitch with that explanation for our cases is in the 18 that we studied, the mother only saw the mark in five of them. Now, there were five other cases in which the mother may have heard about the mark. But with the others, the mother didn't even know about it. So it doesn't seem that maternal impression could explain those cases. There's also the possibility that prayers and wishes of the mourning family or the marker then lead to the development of the birthmark. So it would be a psychosomatic effect where the minds or the consciousness of other people induces the mark on the child. So if a family is grieving somebody who died, they know about the mark, they intently want that person to return, then perhaps they could unconsciously really induce that mark in the child. The third possibility, of course, is that the child is the continuation of the consciousness of the deceased person. And they carry the mark with them as the marker had intended. And in the 18 cases that we studied, even though many of them were quite young, six of them, the children had reported memories of the past life. So that would seem to be the most reasonable explanation for those cases. But regardless of the explanation, which of these we choose, this phenomenon does provide evidence of an effect of consciousness on a physical body. Now, the last case that I want to tell you about involves a past life as a python. And I have to say, when I was looking online for a picture for this slide, I saw some truly disturbing images. But this one may be a little upsetting, but at least there's not half of something coming out of his mouth. So I was traumatized in order to provide this talk for you. I have to say we have very few cases reported of past lives as animals, even though the cases occur in plenty of places that believe in transmigration of souls across species. But still, we hear about very few of them. This case that I'm going to tell you about is one from Thailand that one of Ian's colleagues, Francis Story, studied. And it involves a boy who said that he had been a deer in his past life, he had been killed by a hunter, and then he had come back as a python. And just before this boy was conceived, his father had eaten snake meat that had been served by an acquaintance who had killed a python after a big struggle. So then when the boy was three years old, that acquaintance came to a party next door to where the family lived. Well, when the boy saw that man, he became infuriated and tried to attack him. And he explained that that man had killed him when he was a snake in his past life and gave a lot of details. He talked about a particular cave and how there had been this big fight between a snake and two dogs and then this big confrontation with the dog's owner who eventually killed the snake. And the man responded that all those details were correct. The boy also said that after he was killed, his spirit saw his future father and thought that he was kinder than the other men who had eaten the snake meat. So he decided to follow him home to be born into his family. And again, soon after the boy was conceived. So you may be wondering what kind of birthmark a past life as a snake would produce. Well, it produced this. The boy had a condition called ichthyosis where he had scaly skin really all over, but it was worse on his legs. And then this is him as an adult. It's much better, but you can see that he still had some scales on his legs. Now I show this case mainly because it's such a prominent, I don't even know what to call that, not necessarily birthmark, birth condition. But I also show it to make a point, which is I personally find it impossible to believe that a snake would encode memories where it could describe a particular cave and talk about a big fight with dogs and the owner of the dogs and all that. So what this case suggests to me is that there was a larger consciousness that remembered those details. So it was a larger consciousness that had a life with a snake consciousness and then existed between lives and then had a human life with a human consciousness. So it was the larger consciousness that continued on after the snake's death, not just the snake consciousness itself. And this recalls to mind the words of the French philosopher who said, we are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience. To me, these cases suggest that there is a larger consciousness or a spiritual being, to use the term from the quote, that is involved in our existence. So to wrap up, looking at all the cases, not just the birthmark ones, they provide, I think, pretty strong evidence that memories and emotions and sometimes physical trauma can survive after death and carry over to another life. But it's important to keep in mind that these cases with intact memories may be special cases. And in fact, they are special in the sense that the previous person typically died violently or died young and then came back very quickly with intact memories. So it may be that our cases are essentially just one end of the bell curve and that the patterns that we see in our cases may not be representative of the usual process. In our cases, the consciousness appears to have continued on and had another life here. But it may be that all kinds of existence can occur after we die. I don't assume that we all come back here. I think the possibilities may be more than we can even imagine. And in the overall picture, I think consciousness may be even bigger than we can imagine. So the birthmark cases are examples of consciousness affecting the physical. But they may just be the tip of the iceberg. And I think that not only can consciousness affect the physical, but I actually think it's the creator of the physical. I think that consciousness is the core of reality and the physical world grows out of it. And it's not just me who says that. Many people do, including some physicists. So I want to finish up with a quote from Max Planck, who was the father of quantum physics. So he's a huge name. Well, Max Planck said, I record consciousness as fundamental. I record matter as derivative from consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness. So I think if consciousness is indeed fundamental, then we should not be surprised if it continues on after we die. If you want to learn more about our work, here is our website, uva.ops.org, as well as our email address. We are also on Facebook and YouTube. And now I have time for some questions. Are there any questions? Thank you.