It is like the path of a fish in water or a bird in the sky. They do not leave any track behind. Thus when an enlightened person dies, he leaves no memories, to be picked up by other beings. Thus he is not born again. Psychiatrist Ian Stevenson, from the University of Virginia, is an authority in scientific research on reincarnation. He investigated many reports of young children who claimed to remember a past life. He conducted more than case studies over a period of 40 years and published 12 books, including Twenty Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation and Where Reincarnation and Biology Intersect.
Stevenson methodically documented each child's statements and then identified the deceased person the child identified with, and verified the facts of the deceased person's life that matched the child's memory. He also matched birthmarks and birth defects to wounds and scars on the deceased, verified by medical records such as autopsy photographs, in Reincarnation and Biology. However, a significant majority of Stevenson's reported cases of reincarnation originated in Eastern societies, where dominant religions often permit the concept of reincarnation.
Following this type of criticism, Stevenson published a book on European Cases of the Reincarnation Type. Other people who have undertaken reincarnation research include Jim B. Tucker, Brian Weiss, and Raymond Moody. Some skeptics, such as Paul Edwards, have analyzed many of these accounts, and called them anecdotal. Carl Sagan referred to examples apparently from Stevenson's investigations in his book The Demon-Haunted World as an example of carefully collected empirical data, though he rejected reincarnation as a parsimonious explanation for the stories.
Researchers such as Stevenson have acknowledged these limitations. Ian Stevenson reported that belief in reincarnation is held with variations in details by adherents of almost all major religions except Christianity and Islam. The authors reported that surveys have found about one-fifth to one-quarter of Europeans have some level of belief in reincarnation, with similar results found in the USA.
In India, Satwant Pasricha, Professor of Psychology, is the authority on the scientific study of reincarnation. Having worked as an assistant to Ian Stevenson, her research methods are similar to Stevenson. She documents the child's statements. Then she identifies the deceased person the child remembers being, and verifies the facts of the deceased person's life that match the child's memory. She has even correlated the birthmarks of the child with the physical trauma or deformity present in the deceased person of the past life the child has remembered, by verifying his medical records.
If reincarnation is to be examined from an unbiased scientific point of view, it is necessary first of all to find a way of bypassing such unscientific barriers as religious bias. Neither there is strong objective evidence nor specific research methods that can discover the mystery of reincarnation.
However, not everything can be known by the humans with their current mind and intelligence that are far limited to perceive such paranormal phenomenon. Thus there is nothing much to conclude. However, one thing is very clear. Human mind's greatest weakness is to make concepts that fit into its belief and then believe that this is the absolute truth.
Such diverse beliefs have led to the origin of masses called religions. Each religion and each spiritual teacher differs in their view of existence or mechanism of rebirths. However, there cannot be many truths. Death is inevitable. Thus, we all will find out sooner or later!
Source of Support: Nil. Conflict of Interest: None declared. National Center for Biotechnology Information , U. Journal List Indian J Psychiatry v. Indian J Psychiatry. Purushothama 1. Author information Copyright and License information Disclaimer. Address for correspondence: Dr. E-mail: moc. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3. See Indian J Psychiatry.
This article has been cited by other articles in PMC. Keywords: Hinduism and rebirth, reincarnation, religion and reincarnation. HINDUISM Reincarnation is the religious or philosophical belief that the soul or spirit, after biological death, begins a new life in a new body that may be human, animal or spiritual depending on the moral quality of the previous life's actions. The Buddhist concept of rebirth is also often referred to as reincarnation.
Companion to Philosophy of Religion. John Wiley and Sons; Obeyesekere G. University of California Press; Proof of reincarnation from your own experience, Proof of reincarnation: Evidence of super-karma. Brodd J. World Religions. Bhaktivedanta Swami AC. To become Brahma is not a very easy thing… But he is also a living entity like us. Bhagavadgita As It Is. New York: Bhaktivedanta Book Trust; Krishnamacharya E.
Lessons on Vedic Hymns. Vishakapatnam: The World Teacher Trust; Agni sooktham; pp. Bhaktivedanta Swamy AC. The three modes of material Nature. Tapasyananda S.
Saundarya Lahari of Sri Sankaracharya. Gupta CB. Adwaita Rahasya. The Search-2; pp. Surendra SR. Bangalore: Rashtrotthana Sahitya Trust; Book No R Mehta TU. Path of arhat: A religious democracy pujya sohanalala smaraka parsvantha sodhapitha. Jacobi H. Jaini P. Williams P, Tribe A. Routledge; Walpola R. London: Gordon Fraser Limited; After arriving in Charlottesville, however, his hobbyhorse in the paranormal began turning into a full-grown steed. As you can imagine, investigating apparitions and reincarnation is not something the college administrators were expecting of the head of their mental health program.
Stevenson was able to confirm that there was, indeed, a flower vendor in Kataragama who ran a stall near the Buddhist stupa whose two-year-old daughter had drowned in the river while the girl played with her mentally challenged brother. The man lived in a house where the neighbors threw meat to dogs tied up in their backyard, and it was adjacent to the main temple where devotees practiced a religious ritual of smashing coconuts on the ground.
The little girl did get a few items wrong, however. Otherwise, 27 of the 30 idiosyncratic, verifiable statements she made panned out. More often than not, Stevenson could identify an actual figure that once lived based solely on the statements given by the child. Some cases were much stronger than others, but I must say, when you actually read them firsthand, many are exceedingly difficult to explain away by rational, non-paranormal means.
But does our refusal to even look at his findings, let alone to debate them, come down to our fear of being wrong? Many of his subjects had unusual birthmarks and birth defects, such as finger deformities, underdeveloped ears, or being born without a lower leg.
There were scar-like, hypopigmented birthmarks and port-wine stains, and some awfully strange-looking moles in areas where you almost never find moles, like on the soles of the feet. A Turkish boy whose face was congenitally underdeveloped on the right side said he remembered the life of a man who died from a shotgun blast at point-blank range. A Burmese girl born without her lower right leg had talked about the life of a girl run over by a train.
First, he was convinced that there is only a brief window of time—between the ages of about two and five—in which some children retain these reminiscences of an earlier self.
Importantly, their statements are, in principle at least, empirically falsifiable. We can never say that it does not occur, or will obtain conclusive evidence that it happens. The cases that have been described so far, isolated or combined, do not provide irrefutable proof of reincarnation, but they supply evidence that suggest its reality. Abstract Worldwide, children can be found who reported that they have memories of a previous life. Publication types English Abstract Review.
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