How can we scientifically explain reincarnation?

Answer Podcast

Transcript

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Can we scientifically explain reincarnation? In fact, I have a full book on this topic, Demystifying Reincarnation.
That is my latest book. There are broadly science, there is theory and there is experiment. Now, if you look at reincarnation, the strongest evidence comes from past life memories.
So, there are out-of-body experiences which suggest that consciousness can exist outside the body. But past life memories, let me say there is a small child who is born somewhere, in a particular place, and one day there are hundreds of cases like this, the child says, Mummy, Mummy, I want to go to my other mummy. What? So, there was a boy named Nesip Ullutaskiran.
He was in Turkey. And one day he just started telling his parents. And incidentally he said that, My name is Nesip.
His previous life also his name was Nesip. And he says, I live in Mansil, another place in Turkey. And I want to go there.
So, he started giving vivid recollections. He started telling, Oh, I live in this place. Small, 4-5 year old boy says, I am married, I have a wife, I have children, I want to go and see them.
Now, for several years his parents did not let him go. Finally, eventually, through one of his relatives, he managed to go there. So, first is recollections.
That is the first level evidence. Second level evidence is recognitions. Not only they remember facts which are right, they later prove to be right, but recognitions.
So, when he was taken there, as soon as he went there, he recognized the woman who was the widow of Nesip from the previous life. And he went and he started talking with her as if he was small 7-8 year old boy now. Talking with a woman who was middle aged as if she was his wife.
And he recognized her, he recognized the children, he recognized several neighbors. He went to that locality specifically. Again, there are many cases like this, recognitions.
The third is behaviors. Behaviors means that when, now Nesip’s widow, she had remarried after his death. When Nesip, this boy Nesip, in this life, he saw a picture of his wife with her new husband.
He felt so angry and jealous that he took up that picture and wanted to tear it apart. Says, you are my wife, not anyone else’s. Although his children were older than him now, he was fondling their hair and treating them like they were his children.
So, there are behaviors which are precisely according to the previous life. And then there are also, the last and most important, most empirical is birthmarks and birth defects. So, Nesip, in his childhood, he would say that I was stabbed to death.
And he had multiple birthmarks. So, six of his birthmarks, it was found that Nesip, in the previous life, Nesip Budh Bodak, had been stabbed to death. He was a drunk and in a drunken fight with someone, somebody had killed him.
So, Dr. Jan Stevenson, who is a pioneering researcher in this, what he did was he divided the human body into 120 XY coordinates basically to map how precise is the correlation if somebody has been shot. So, the bullet wound is here and the birthmark of the birth defect, how precise is the location, correlation between the fatal wound of the previous life and the birthmark of this life. And he found precise correlations.
In the case of Nesip, he had six correlating birthmarks. That means the probability is not just 1 by 120, it is 1 by 120 raised to the power of 6. It’s an astronomically low probability. So, he wrote a whole book documenting this evidence called Where Reincarnation and Biology Intersect.
And when we take all these four levels of evidence, recollections, recognitions, behaviors and birthmarks and birth defects, it makes a very strong case for the reality of there being some non-material entity that existed before in Nesip, in the earlier body and has now come to this body. Now, some people try to explain this all away. Maybe this whole thing is a fraud.
Maybe investigators made a fraud or the parents made a fraud. Nehan Stephenson focused on children because all the children have a good imagination. They don’t have the intelligence to orchestrate a whole fraud with many people involved.
But he found there was a researcher, Tom Schroeder, he is a Washington Post editor. He traveled with Nehan Stephenson for about a year. And he actually observed first-hand how careful and critical Stephenson was in his research methods.
And he wrote a book called Old Souls. And there, he went as a skeptic and he remained a skeptic. But he said that there is no normal explanation that is there.
What is the explanation? I don’t know. So, he is open to reincarnation. There is no normal explanation.
No fraud over here. No guesswork. No prompting.
Nothing like that. And most importantly, there is no parental fraud also. Why? Because the parents, some of them, many of them, especially cases in Western world, parents don’t believe in reincarnation.
So, Nesip parents, not only did they not believe in reincarnation, they actually disbelieved. Because in the Islamic tradition as it is presently, reincarnation is considered to be a heretical belief. So, they accepted the children’s words not because of their religion but in spite of their religion.
Even in cases in India, where people do believe in reincarnation, there is a widespread conception among especially rural people that if a child is remembering their past life, that means that the soul is not integrated well into the body. And therefore, parents feel that this child will die soon. The soul will go to the next body.
And therefore, they discourage their children from speaking their past life. Only when the children insist, then do they try to find out. And there are even cases where the parents, where the children behave in ways that are totally embarrassing to the parents.
There was one boy, Jasbir Singh, whose case is described by A. N. Stevenson. He was born in a Jat family, relatively. In India, there is a caste system.
He was not in a very high caste family. And at the age of around three, one day he suddenly said, I am a Brahmin. I can’t eat food cooked in this low caste house.
And from that day, he stopped eating food. And for the next three and a half years, his father had to pay a Brahmin to get food to his house every day. Now, how much more embarrassing can something be that a child in your own family refuses to eat food cooked in your own house? So, this is not… Why would a parent do a fraud like that? It’s only at the age of six and a half, he started accepting.
Okay, that was that life. This is this life. He started eating food in his own house.
So, there are cases where the fraud hypothesis also fails. So, there are strong cases like this. The past life memories provide strong scientific pointers towards the reality of reincarnation.