reincarnation

Reincarnation is the idea that a personality or some element of consciousness survives the death of the body and is reborn in a subsequent life. Two distinct strands of material address it: psychiatric research into children who report memories of a previous life, and a separate cosmological teaching describing reincarnation as a governed natural process. Jim Tucker is a psychiatrist and an expert on child reincarnation cases.¹ Ian Stevenson argued that, in addition to genetics and environment, previous lives might be a third factor contributing to the development of human personality.² Cases of past-life memories in young children were easiest to find in cultures with a belief in reincarnation.³ Tucker said he considers these cases as contributing to the body of evidence that consciousness, at least in certain circumstances, can survive the death of the body.⁴ In an interview with National Public Radio (NPR), broadcast on Weekend Edition (NPR programme) on 2014-01-05 and later referenced as “Searching for the Science Behind Reincarnation” (NPR Weekend Edition interview), Tucker said that the idea of reincarnation can be judged on its merits.⁵

In the case of Kevin Hammons, he reacted with anger at the suggestion of reincarnation, throwing a book about past-life memories across the bed, as observed by his mother Cyndi Hammons.⁶ Neither Cyndi Hammons nor Kevin Hammons came from a religion or belief system that supported the idea of reincarnation.⁷ In a separate case, Bruce Leininger’s Christian faith did not accept reincarnation, and he initially rejected the idea of a past-life explanation for his son’s statements.⁸

Intermission memories - purported recollections of a period between lives - tend to arise more often in stronger reincarnation cases, in which more statements about the past life were verified and more specific names were remembered, than in weaker cases.⁹ According to Surviving Death, Poonam Sharma and Tucker found, in a 2004 paper in the Journal of Near-Death Studies, that intermission memories tend to arise in the stronger reincarnation cases.¹⁰ Erlendur Haraldsson said that persons who suffered a violent death feature predominantly in cases of apparitions of the dead, in cases of the reincarnation type, and in mediumship, including both direct communicators and drop-in communicators.¹¹

A separate, non-academic framework for reincarnation appears in material associated with Billy Meier. Michael Horn said that Meier has written about reincarnation, rebirth, death and dying, fluidal forces and swinging waves.¹² In this creation energy teaching (Geisteslehre), a person’s creation energy form may already have had as many as two million incarnations as different people.¹³ Reincarnation in this teaching is described as real, but a person is never the same person again and does not remember past lives.¹⁴

Horn described the teaching’s governing mechanics. One law of creation holds that a spirit form which dies on a given planet reincarnates as a new personality on that same planet.¹⁵ If a spirit form dies in space or on a lifeless planet, creation law instead attracts it to the next inhabited planet with evolving human life at a commensurate level, none of which are said to be within our solar system.¹⁶ This process is governed by the evolutionary level of the human life forms on the destination planet, not by the planet’s electromagnetic field.¹⁷ Horn described human evolution as proceeding through countless millions of lifetimes towards a more refined, etheric, semi-physical creation-energy form, until eventual incarnation is no longer into a physical body but into the lower levels of creational energy.¹⁸