Category: Reincarnation
-
There’s a major discrepancy in the evidence for the afterlife that’s always puzzled me. I don’t claim to have the answer, but I thought I would throw out a highly speculative suggestion. The discrepancy pertains to the always thorny issue of reincarnation. In most near-death experiences and in a great deal of channeled communications, reincarnation…
-
I’m always interested in near-death experiences that were reported before NDEs became popularized in the media. Recently I came across one in an unexpected place — a book about reincarnation by Peter and Elizabeth Fenwick, titled Past Lives: An Investigation Into Reincarnation Memories. In Chapter 1, the famous case of Shanti Deva is sketched out.…
-
Allan Kardec’s well-known 19th century volume The Spirits’ Book (full text online) collects answers given by a variety of trance mediums to philosophical and theological questions. It makes interesting reading even today. One of the main points raised by the purported spirit communicators is that reincarnation is a fact, and that every soul must undergo…
-
Apologies for the light blogging lately. I've been preoccupied with a personal matter and haven't been able to give much attention to this blog — or, unfortunately, to Chris Carter's new book, Science and the Near-Death Experience. From what I've read of it, I would say that the book is intellectually serious, comprehensive, and persuasive,…
-
In 1986 psychotherapist Joel Whitton and author Joe Fisher published Life Between Life, a book recounting Whitton's experiments in hypnotic past-life regression. Actually "past-life" is something of a misnomer, because while Whitton did explore his patients' alleged past lives, he was primarily interested in what he called the "interlife," the timeless and spaceless period between…
-
So far I've read about half of Michael Newton's well-known book Journey of Souls, a record of the author's experiments in past-life regression through hypnosis. Actually, past-life regression is a bit of a misnomer in this case, since what Newton actually focuses on is what he calls the "life between lives." That is, he places…
-
Here's an interesting example of past life recollection under hypnosis combined with xenoglossy — the ability to speak a language that one has never learned — as reported in Chapter 14 of Robert S. Bobrow's worthwhile book, The Witch in the Waiting Room: A Physician Investigates Paranormal Phenomena in Medicine. Bobrow, an M.D., covers a…
-
It seems that whenever the topic of reincarnation comes up on this blog, some rather intense conversations ensue. People clearly have strong feelings about reincarnation; some loathe the idea, while others are quite comfortable with it. Of course, it doesn't help that mediums have conveyed decidedly mixed messages on the subject, with some saying everyone…
-
Lately I’ve been reading Helen Wambach’s 1978 book Reliving Past Lives. Wambach was a somewhat controversial researcher in the field of reincarnation. Her technique, which evolved gradually, was to hypnotize groups of subjects, who then wrote down their posthypnotic recollections of past lives. Wambach tabulated these stories according to gender, age at time of death,…
-
Reader Bruce Siegel (in comments) pointed me to the reincarnation case of James Leininger, which is worth reading in its entirety. Certainly one of the best cases I’ve seen. Another article on the case features an amusingly lazy armchair rebuttal from uberskeptic Paul Kurtz, founder of CSICOP. Kurtz thinks the parents are "self-deceived." "They’re fascinated…