Blast from the Past
Wednesday April 16, 2008 8:36 AM
Do children remember their past lives? This question occupied the life's work of Dr. Ian Stevenson, an insightful psychiatrist and founder of the University of Virginia's Department of Perceptual Studies (formerly the Department of Personality Studies).
Stevenson did not believe that only children can remember their past lives, but he felt that the most convincing proof could be found among children, particularly when they manifested knowledge that they could have no previous exposure to. Although there have been several very convincing cases of adults remembering their past lives (for example, the Bridey Murphy case), one of the problems with adult past-life memories is that skeptics can always argue that the memories are more related to a process called cryptoamnesia. In cryptoamnesia, a person learns something, such as details about a typical peasant's life in Ireland, and then forgets about learning the information. When they find that they know specific details about daily life in Medieval Ireland, they then mistakenly assume that this information is tied to a past life, rather than some documentary they happened to watch as a child.
In the case of children, however, there is far less information that they have been exposed to — especially children between the ages of 2 and 5, ages which also seem ideal for past life recall. Dr. Stevenson focused many of his studies in nations such as India, where children's stories about their past lives were less likely to be discouraged or suppressed because Hinduism, the dominant religion of India, allows for reincarnation. A side benefit was the fact that many of these children lived in isolated villages and were highly unlikely to have been exposed to much extraneous information.
During the course of his lengthy and pioneering career, Dr. Ian Stevenson interviewed thousands of children who reported credible details about previous lives, doing extensive case histories on both the child and the family. In many of these cases, the information provided by these young children was so detailed, that Dr. Stevenson was able to subsequently locate previous families as well as correlate the child's story with medical records and coroner's reports located miles away from where the child was reborn. Some of his most compelling evidence comes in the form of birthmarks and birth defects that bear an uncanny resemblance to scars and wounds suffered by the previous personality just prior to or immediately after death. His findings are detailed in several books, including Children Who Remember Previous Lives and Where Reincarnation and Biology Intersect.
Although Dr. Stevenson heartily believed in the reality of reincarnation, he was never forthcoming about his own past lives. In an interview in Omni Magazine he did admit to seeing hints of a larger purpose behind the reality of past lives.
Stevenson continued his work and travel into his 80s; he passed away in February of 2007. According to the data gathered during his lifetime, most people tend to reincarnate rather swiftly and they tend to find new mothers within approximately 15 miles of their place of death. If this is true, then perhaps Dr. Ian Stevenson is already back with us, somewhere near Charlottesville, VA. However, even if he remembers everything from this previous life, we'll have to give him another 20 years or so before we can expect him to get back into academia to continue his fascinating work.
