How sound is the scientific evidence of past-life memories?

Transcript

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Thank you Past life memories how do children remember that which they can’t know all over the world there have been children who have spoken things that have mystified their parents these children one day suddenly tell their parents mummy I want to go to my other mummy, they say I was big then I am small now and they speak about a person who lived far away another time, another place and who died some time ago Dr. Jan Stevenson who was at the University of Virginia heading the Department of Personality Studies spent over four decades travelling all the inhabited continents to document and examine cases of past life memories and such cases he found had four features that needed explanation first was recollections the children recollected places, persons events and things from other person’s life then there were recognitions when the children were taken to that place they themselves led the way and recognized people, places, things not only recognitions there were behaviors children behaved in ways that were reminiscent or even identical to the way the previous personality, the person whom they claimed to have been in the previous life that person behaved and fourthly, there are birth marks and birth defects the children had marks on their bodies corresponding to the fatal wounds in the body of the deceased person whom they claimed to be let’s look at one such case to evaluate the cases whether they are authentic or fabricated this is the case of Nesit Ulludas Kiran he was born in Adana in Turkey and as a small boy he started claiming that his name he had lived before and his previous life his name was Nesit Nesit Budak and his small boy said that he had a wife and he had children and he insisted that I want to go and see them for several years his parents refused to take him to Mersin which was where he had claimed to have lived finally when his request became insistent his mother took him to her father’s place who lived in that small village near Mersin and his father had just his grandfather had just married and he had remarried to a woman who was from Mersin and the small boy Nesit he recognized her as from Mersin and she recollected that there had been there had lived and died in Mersin a man named Nesit Budak then his grandfather took him there and there he identified several members of Nesit Budak’s family and especially he identified Nesit Budak’s widow and Nesit’s children not only were there recognitions and recollections there were also some significant statements which he made one statement was Nesit said that in his past life as Nesit Budak he had once had a fierce quarrel with his wife and in the heat of the quarrel he had stabbed her in her thigh and that had created a lifelong scar now Dr. Jan Stevenson who was investigating this case asked one of his female assistants to go and examine Nesit Budak’s wife in a private place and they found that she did indeed have a lifelong scar on her thigh at the precise location which Nesit Bunluthas Kiran had claimed she had got that wound and she said that that wound had been inflicted by a knife wound caused by her ex-husband now for a small boy to know about a scar in a private part of a body of a woman who had never we had never seen before whom we had never known before in this life it has no logical explanation if we don’t consider the explanation offered by the child himself that is he was the same person who had died and lived not only were there identifications recognitions but there were also behaviours Nesit was a small boy and his children from his previous life were now older than him but still he showed paternal affection towards them, hugging them and brushing their hair and his wife from his previous life she had remarried now and when Nesit saw his wife’s photo with her new husband he was so jealous that he caught the photo and he wanted to tear it apart you are my wife not anyone else’s wife such behaviours were just the tip of the iceberg the most significant were that Nesit had been born with multiple birth marks on his body and whenever he would talk about his previous life he would say that he had died because he had been stabbed at all those points where he had birth marks and Nesit, Budak had been a quarrelsome person who especially when drunk would get into fights and once when he had got into a fight with another person that person had stabbed him in multiple places and by the time he would be rushed to a hospital soon after that he died so his case had been documented by the police and Stevenson found that the location of the fatal wounds, six fatal wounds on the body of Nesit Budak their location exactly correlated with the location of the birth marks on Nesit Unidas Kiran’s body to find out how precise this correlation was Stevenson divided the human body into 128 XY coordinates 120 and he observed how much precise the correlation and that means one correlation to be precise the probability would be 1 by 120 or six correlations to be precise the probability would be 1 by 120 raised to the power of 6 and astronomically no probability and there is not just one or two cases like this, there are hundreds of cases documented by scores of researchers all over the world so skeptics try to dismiss these cases just as frauds but who would commit the fraud Tom Schroeder was a skeptic who accompanied Stevenson on his researches to observe first hand whether the case whether actually the children spoke like that and he wrote it down, he video shot his experiences and he wrote a book called Old Souls and in that he documented that there is no normal explanation for the information that these children gave so Stevenson’s research methods have been acclaimed in journals as prestigious as the American Medical Association these journals and several other journals so researchers themselves have not committed these frauds could the parents themselves have orchestrated these frauds actually it could be in some cases but in many cases there is no reason Stevenson had a strict policy of not giving any money to the parents who would be interviewed that way the parents had no incentive to sensationalize the cases in fact the parents had to spend a lot of time and energy to go through the rigorous interviewing that they went through and many of these parents were very poor and giving an interview would mean that they would lose their one day’s earning and none of these parents especially of the small children who had spontaneous past life memories none of these children or the parents claimed to be celebrities in their previous lives so there are almost a dozen girls who claim to be Marilyn Monroe in their previous life such cases already have a very obvious vested interest and Stevenson and other rigorous researchers like him refused to investigate celebrity reincarnation cases so there is no fame to be got by such investigation by fabricating such cases for the parents parents want to prove their own religious beliefs in many cases like Nassif the parents did not believe in reincarnation in fact they disbelieved in reincarnation and it was despite their religious beliefs that the children’s insistence forced them to reconsider their beliefs even among parents who believed in reincarnation among the Hindus there is a belief that children who recollect their past lives that means that their soul is not integrated into this body and the parents feel fear in a superstitious way that the child will die soon and that’s why even those parents although they believe in reincarnation they discourage their children from speaking about their past lives so there is no religious motive and more than that often these children behave in ways that are profoundly embarrassing to their parents based on their past life claims for example there was a boy Jasbir Singh when he was around just barely 3 years old one day suddenly told his parents that I am a boy born in a high caste Brahmin family I cannot eat the food cooked by you low caste people and he refused to eat food in his own house and for the next several years his father had to pay a Brahmin to cook 3 meals a day and get those meals to his house why would any parents orchestrate a fraud in which their own child would refuse to eat food cooked in their own house so these past life memories cannot be explained these cases they cannot be explained away as fabrications as frauds and they have no normal explanation the only explanation that suffices is the explanation offered by the children themselves that they had lived before and they are living now this implies there is no explanation other than the explanation offered by the children themselves they had lived before and they are living now that means that the source of life a source of consciousness is something different from the body something that survives bodily death what is that source of consciousness source of life that we will discuss in our next session thank you