Cant past-life memories be coincidences among the earth’s eight billion people’s stories?
Question, can past life memories, the claimed past life memories be simply coincidences after all there are 8 billion people in the planet and somebody tells a story and there will be some other person somewhere who has lived whose story it will match so how can it be proven that this is not just a coincidence answer yes, the possibility is definitely there and there are methods by which that possibility can be examined and it can be rejected or it can be accepted so what are the methods, first of all yes, how is reincarnation research done by Dr. Ian Stevenson as well as the subsequent other researchers so there is a particular child who starts remembering now there are many different people who have remembered, Ian Stevenson primarily focused on children, so children because at that time their memory is vivid and when they start remembering certain stories at that time it is not that the children have access to a wide variety of knowledge of different people and different places and different cultures yes, quite often these stories occur in background, these cases occur in places where people have very little access to technology so they just can't know about other things they don't have internet access, they don't have even access to TV Ian Stevenson's research was done over several decades where technology had not spread so much so first of all, the children even if they are going to spin up a story, for them to spin up a credible story that might match somebody else's story that itself requires a certain amount of knowledge which is not so easy for them to have in many cases, but even if we argue for argument's sake that yes, there is a particular story over here and a particular story over there, so Stevenson went beyond just recollections to recognitions recognitions, recollections are somebody spins up a particular story of a particular person and it's a coincidental match if that's what we say then there are further cases of recognitions recognitions means now Stevenson and his other researchers they focus on those cases of reincarnation where they say the case has not become contaminated, what does contaminated mean? if there is a child who claims to be someone in a particular previous life then if that children's family already takes them to that place then if the two of them talk they might exchange the story and then the facts might get colored so this happens before the reincarnation researcher comes at a particular place then it is, they consider the case to be weak case, a contaminated case and now we have to understand that it is not that reincarnation is a widely funded subject and there are no major grants available for research to be done and it's not that the world is teeming with reincarnation researchers and that's why for a for a story for a case, say a child starts speaking certain memories then first of all the parents have to take it seriously and the parents have to explore and who might they be referring to and normally speaking it's not that the parents when they are dealing with the children they are concerned with providing scientific evidence for the case of reincarnation they are simply trying to deal with the mysterious and for them sometimes frightening behavior of the children so therefore they may not often go to the researcher first, they may just try to directly contact that other person but if the researcher comes to know and there are cases where there are a significant number of cases where the researcher comes to know first and then the researcher goes and meets the other party and the researcher first gets the report from this child and his parents, what all is being said over here, then the researcher goes to the other party and then gets a report of what they are saying, okay, so for example somebody says that some boy says, some boy says that I was Suresh Verma in my previous life, then first the researcher gets a report of facts from Suresh Verma, what this T2 is saying what T2 said, his parents are claiming they are saying, then he goes to the family Suresh Verma, say he has a widow Uma Verma, Suresh Verma has died now, so what, gets a report of those people and then compares those two and then finds out how many of those facts match now this is the case, these are the cases which are considered strong and then after that the researcher under careful observation takes the child from here to there and when he takes the child from here to there, at that time the researcher observes, does the child recognize, whom all does the child recognize so if the child recognizes this particular person if the child recognizes, oh many times there are children who actually without prompting, as soon as they come say T2 was born in Lucknow and Suresh Verma lived in Kanpur then T2, as soon as he lands in Kanpur station, he says I will take you and even although he has never before been in Kanpur, he himself shows the way, so now this is considered by coincidence someone might just come up with a name, but actually finding the way, going to that place and recognizing people over there recognizing certain people recognizing say his wife from his previous life, his father from his previous life and other relatives, so recognitions take the case to a much higher level than merely recollections or claimed recollections now this cannot come by coincidence the recollections, now again when you say okay that person might just have guessed and that guess work worked out right but then there are behaviors so first level is recollection, second level is recognition third level is behaviors the behavior means for example this T2 is a small boy 4-5 years old and when he meets Uma Verma his claimed wife from his previous life, you know he expects her, when they are talking he expects her to stand next to him and he says husband wife stand together and he wants to talk with everyone, so this is a behavior that is quite extraordinary especially in conservative Indian society for to happen, now beyond such behaviors which may be conscious, now for it requires certainly a mind that believes in conspiracy theories to an absurd degree to imagine that a child can fake this level of behavior, but even if we argue that way there are not just these behaviors but there are also subconscious behavioral patterns which children exhibit, so for example say Suresh Verma died because of a gunshot and in this life T2 has a phobia for gunshots or for that matter somebody died because of drowning and this life somebody has a phobia for phobia for water hydrophobia, so this sort of phobia is something which is very very difficult to replicate, to imitate to imagine to artificially it just, so researchers when there is a claimed there is a death and the death is well documented, this death happened by this particular way and then this particular person has that claimed phobia also so the behavior can be both ways, it can be positive, it can be negative, negative in terms of say great fear about a particular thing that is phobia or it can be positive in terms of certain learned traits certain traits which are carried over from the previous life to this life, but behaviors takes the evidence to a much higher level and then beyond behaviors there is there are birth marks and birth defects, so these so one of the final books final major research books that Stevenson wrote was where reincarnation and biology intersect and in that book he focused on birth marks so for example say Suresh Varma died because of a gunshot and that gun, that bullet entered in the right temple and exited from the left temple so this is well documented in the post-mortem report which is there with the police and T2 the story of T2 was shown in BBC in a program called 40 minutes and actually it was shown how T2 was shaved and he had birth marks right from his birth itself so there was swelling on his right temple and swelling on his left temple and normally when a bullet enters and the bullet exits quite often the exit wound the exit hole is bigger so there were birth marks on the body of T2 and at the point where there is on the location where there was the bullet entry and bullet exit wounds in Suresh Varma's body so now how do we explain this we can say this is also a coincidence but then when we have to talk about so many things as coincidences then it becomes more of a matter as William James said that to dismiss such stories he was talking not specifically about reincarnation, William James is one of the pioneering psychologists from the last century 19th and 20th centuries so he said that as long as such cases keep mounting and as long as we just keep dismissing them as bad data as coincidence or whatever then this is actually a bad method, we are not really progressing in allowing for the progress of knowledge by such a methodology so further so Stevenson what he did was he divided the body into grids and say 128 grids like we have x y coordinates so he divided the body into grids and then he studied the exact locations of the entry wound and the exit wound and he mapped and he found that within this if we divide the body into a grid like that the exact location of the fatal wounds from the previous life and the exact location of the birthmarks in the next life now they birthmarks or birth defects they match tremendously now another factor is again going back to natural explanation so for example if somebody in a previous life had been run over by a truck and that person was run over by the truck and that person died up because of that in this life this person has deformed legs so just as the person is run over by, legs are run over by a truck then the legs at that particular point will get completely contracted and crushed so like that this person in the next life has a leg which is contracted and crushed and that is at a location which is similar to the location where the past life wound is there where the past life wound occurred, fatal wound occurred so now there are some cases so for example there is a middle east case, a tibetan case where a person died of a wound attack and there were eight places where the wound, where the person was attacked by a knife and the knife pierced the body and all those eight wounds contributed to the death of the person and then the next life the person who is claiming to be who is remembering that person's life, the person who was the victim of this murderous attack now he has not just one or two but eight birth marks on his body at different places so how is this possible so to say one birth mark could be a coincidence, two birth marks could also be a coincidence but to have eight birth marks at the same location as the wound in the previous body and to have that in addition to recollections, recombinations, behaviors and then on top of that birth marks that cannot be dismissed as a explanation coming from merely coincidence and further to top it all many times these children have certain birth marks and birth defects which cannot be ascribed to genetic causes so normally if something is coming right from the birth then the current mainstream understanding is that, mainstream scientific understanding is that it must be caused by the genes that are passed down from the parents to the child so or the other cause could be that the, either it happened through the genes or it happened during pregnancy in the mother ingested certain substances or ate something or was affected by certain diseases because of which that birth defect occurred but again many of these cases, Stevenson did further research and found that say the person had a birth defect and in that person's family there was no history of either the father or the mother or the immediate sisters and brothers or father and mother or their grandparents having that kind of birth mark or birth defect, so the genetic causes ruled out and further he also investigated whether the mother had any serious diseases or had any serious habits like say smoking cigarette or drinking or whatever which might have contributed to those particular birth marks and birth defects and again there were no such causes so these birth marks and birth defects that appear in the children have no natural explanation in terms of genes or in terms of the disorder caused by pregnancy caused during pregnancy so therefore we have to look for alternative explanations and not just look, we have to actually the evidence demands some explanation beyond what is accepted by mainstream natural science, so this so mere recollections can be coincidences but recollections, recognitions, behaviors and birth marks and birth defects all these to call this evidence to call all this piled up evidence as coincidence is actually to not want to believe the evidence where the evidence goes rather to want to hold on to one's bias as one American comedian said that, I have already made up my mind, now don't confuse me with the facts so for such people who want to hold on to their beliefs in spite of the evidence, there is not much we can do, but for people who are open minded this multi-layered evidence is so strong that no open minded person will dismiss it as coincidence Thank you, Hare Krishna.