I. OF DOPS & CHILDREN OF CORT.
The late Dr. Ian Stevenson, MD, was a biochemist, professor of psychiatry, and ultimately the head of the Division of Perceptual Studies (DOPS) at the University of Virginia School of Medicine. There he spent some forty years investigating roughly three thousand cases of children who appeared to remember former lives, which he called Cases of the Reincarnation Type (CORT). This led to his publication of several books on the subject, all of which were geared toward the scientific community. Tom Schroeder’s book Old Souls, in which the author accompanies Stevenson on some trips to investigate these children, finally brought his studies to the attention of the public. He died in 2007 at 88 years of age, though the intriguing work he began has thankfully continued.
Child psychiatrist Dr. Jim Tucker, MD, worked with Stevenson for some time until taking over his role as director of DOPS upon Stevenson’s retirement in 2002. While he continues Stevenson’s efforts to sway the scientific community into taking the subject seriously, he is certainly more geared toward introducing the subject to the general public and exploring more cases based in the US. Tucker has spoken about the research in print and media and published an overview of the research in his 2005 book, Life Before Life. He subsequently published Return to Life in 2013 and another, in 2021, entitled Before: Children’s Memories of Previous Lives, which combined both books.
Throughout Stevenson’s investigations, his attitude and strategies remained as scientific and methodical as could be possible given the subject matter. Unlike most of those you hear about who explore apparent past life memories, for instance, he didn’t rely on regression hypnosis — a big plus, since many psychologists and the like scoff at hypnosis as an accurate means of retrieving memory, even when confined to a single lifetime. Instead, he interviewed young children from India, Burma, Thailand, West Africa, Turkey, Lebanon, Syria, and North America, all of whom spontaneously recalled past lives. He also interviewed their birth families and the families they insisted they formerly belonged to, sought out autopsy reports to confirm the mode of death, and utilized psychological tests and questionnaires. In his analysis of the cases, he sought out conventional explanations such as fraud, fantasy, cryptomnesia, and paramnesia. Having eliminated these possibilities, he would then consider various paranormal processes. Eliminating all else, there was reincarnation, which he concluded was the best explanation for the majority of the studied cases.
A common objection was that most of the cultures in which cases were found have some sort of belief in reincarnation, but the cases Stevenson has accumulated don’t seem to align with the cultural beliefs prevalent in the cultures in question. On the contrary, many cases seem to run into direct opposition as to what the religion believes in regard to the who, what, when, where, and why of life, death, and rebirth. I found this pattern continued throughout the two seasons of a television show called The Ghost Inside My Child, unassociated with DOPS, in which the parents of young children from the US claimed to have lived former lives, and even the period between lives, often the despite growing up in the context of various forms of Christianity.
With respect to DOPS, requirements for a case to be considered strong evidence for the existence of reincarnation involve the subject’s statements correctly corresponding to events in the life of only one deceased person (which they call the “previous personality,” and which for entirely immature reasons I refuse to abbreviate). They also seek out cases in which the two families had no previous knowledge of one another or the subjects’ statements were recorded before verification. Families will often be inspired or driven by a child to find the family of a previous personality before investigators get to them, but when that is not the case, the investigators investigate cases within a few weeks or months of their development. Aside from studying individual cases, they also subject groups of cases to analysis, which allows them to compare cases within a culture as well as cross-culturally.
Tucker has continued this effort as well. In his aforementioned book, Life Before Life, he gives results from their as-yet-unfinished computerized database, which had less than half of the case files they studied at the time of its writing. For instance, from this we know that the median age of death reported in CORT is 28, the median distance between the place of death and the place of rebirth is 14 kilometers, and the median interval between death and rebirth of the subject is sixteen months.
In other words, most of them died young, more than half the time violently, and neither waited too long nor traveled too far before completing what we might describe as the cosmic recycling process of consciousness. While some may interpret this to mean that the factors of dying a violent death and dying young are what compelled their reincarnation, as they had more life to live or had unfinished business to attend to, it could just as easily be the case that we all experience reincarnation and that these factors, particularly the emotional intensity of the memories regarding their violent death, merely made those in CORT more apt than most to recall aspects of their past lives.
II. AN AUTOPSY OF EXOSOMATIC MEMORIES.
What CORT suggests, if nothing else, is that memory is not dependent on the body; as a consequence, these cases suggest what we might call exosomatic memories. While the DOPS does not categorize them as such, it seems to me that the evidence of reincarnation amassed in their studies falls into three general categories of long-term memory: explicit memory, implicit memory, and what we might call, if only for lack of a better term, morphological memory.
Explicit memory, often referred to as declarative memory, deals with the conscious recollection of events and the data gleaned from and so associated with those events. It is subcategorized into episodic memory, or the memory of sensory events, and semantic memory, or the memory of the associated knowledge.
Typically in CORT, explicit memories are the first to arrive, or at the very least the first to be identified by others. Globally, the children in these cases often first begin speaking about events of their former lives as soon as they develop the capacity to speak, which is to say between two and five years of age, with the average standing at 35 months. Some children seem to retain these memories regardless as to their state of mind, whereas others only seem capable of doing so when in a relaxed, trancelike state, with amnesia often setting in once they snap out of it, and quite abruptly in some cases.
These bootleg, episodic memories typically include their death and the events surrounding it, and this may first surface in recurring nightmares. As mastery of the native language grows, the kid will continue to spill details of people, places, and events associated with the previous personality, though now they tend to become more elaborate. Sometimes they recall the life of a member of the family or friend of the family, but in other cases, an absolute stranger, and details that the child reports are subsequently verified once the individual’s family, friends, death certificate, autopsy reports, and other information are located. In many cases, the children’s stories are found to match the life of the deceased individual they claim to be with incredible accuracy, and far before being introduced to the family of the dead. They also recognize people, places, and objects that were familiar to the previous personality. While some of these children manage to hold onto their memories longer, perhaps all the way to adulthood, the memories most often begin fading around five years of age, vanishing altogether by the age of eight. They tend to stop speaking about past lives at an average of 72 months.
Semantic memory often manifests as information provided by the subject about their former life, though this is not typically data ultimately stemming from a single episodic memory. Though rare, there are also instances in which these children have displayed xenoglossy, or the ability to speak in a language they should not know – a form of semantic memory.
Around the time they begin speaking about their past lives, strange behaviors are also noted in the child – behaviors that don’t seem to make sense in the context of the present or past conditions of their present life, though it all makes perfect sense when placed in the context of the previous life that the child claims to have had. These are what are known as implicit memories – a kind of memory you don’t consciously recall but rather unconsciously and automatically enact or experience. Think of the mannerisms and expressions we use, the body postures we hold, the way we handle our voice, how we respond to specific stimuli, what phobias or philias we have, and all of our talents and passions: all of that is bound up in what is known as implicit memory.
In about a third of the cases the subjects in early childhood exhibit phobias or aversions which almost always directly correspond to the way in which the previous personality died. These phobias may be related to the instrument that killed them, the mode of death, or the site at which they claim to have died. Those who drowned will fear being immersed in water. Those who were shot to death will fear guns and loud noises akin to a gunshot. The kind of phobias, in other words, that are not difficult to imagine given the circumstances surrounding their death.
The subject may also exhibit the polar opposite of phobias, however – what Stevenson called philias, but which could also be referred to as fetishes, obsessions, fixations, attachments, or addictions stemming from a previous life. They may, for instance, display homesickness and an apparent inability to let go of their previous lifestyles and circumstances, demanding that they be taken to their “real” home and to their “real” parents, husbands, wives, mistresses, or children. They may beg to be taken to their “real home,” attempt to run away to do it themselves, or even accuse their present parents of kidnapping them. They may have cravings for alcohol, tobacco, or other drugs that the previous personality had been addicted to. They may be attracted to certain clothes, music, or foods related to their previous incarnation. In at least one case, there is allegedly also a suggestion that even their handwriting style may carry over. Children will also often act out their previous occupations, reenact death scenes, and even seek vengeance upon their killers.
They may also exhibit “sexual precocity,” specifically towards romantic or sexual partners of the previous personality. Those born into a body that is the opposite sex of their previous incarnation, Stevenson says, almost always develop gender dysphoria, where they cross-dress or behave like the opposite sex. This may fade over time; if not, he said, the personality becomes homosexual – and though he did not mention it, I feel that it would explain those who are legitimately transgender even better. Sometimes the reborn insist that their names be changed to the names they had in their former life — or, for those who switched biological sex in their present incarnation, they will prefer the other-sex forms of their previous names.
Most astounding of all, perhaps, is that the children may also display strange talents carried over from their previous incarnation. In an interview with Omni, Stevenson commented on how it was relatively easy to explain away the talents of, for instance:
“.. such composers as Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven, all of whose fathers were fine musicians. But what about George Frederic Handel? His family had no discernible interest in music; his father even sternly discouraged it. Or take the cases of Elizabeth Fry, the prison reformer, and Florence Nightingale, the founder of modern nursing. Both had to fight for their chosen callings from childhood onward. One can find endless examples that are difficult to explain given our current theories. But if one accepts the possibility of reincarnation, one can entertain the idea that these children are demonstrating strong likes, dislikes, skills, and even genius that are the logical results of previous experiences. I have found some children with skills that seem to be carried over from a previous life.”
Lastly, there is what I call morphological memory, which deals with the form and appearance of the body, which serves as a reference point and structure for all other forms of memory: when we recall explicit memories, specifically episodic memories, we necessarily experience it through the body as it was at the time; when we enact implicit memory, specifically procedural memory, it certainly involves the body as it was at the time.
Morphological memory manifests in CORT in two major areas.
The first arises out of the fact that sometimes the physical appearance of the subject roughly corresponds to the physical appearance of the previous personality, particularly with respect to facial architecture. The idea seems to be most passionately pursued by one Walter Semkiw, MD, though his research doesn’t seem to be very grounded in my eyes. More convincing is the specific case of one Jeffrey J. Keene, an Assistant Fire Chief who lives in Westport, Connecticut. He has come to believe he’s the reincarnation of John B. Gordon, who was a Confederate General of the Army of Northern Virginia during the American Civil War. Though Keene was not investigated by Ian Stevenson, as with many of Stevenson’s cases Keene and Gordon share physical marks that correspond to one another. Namely, there are six places on Keene’s body where he has either cluster veins, scars, or other markings that correspond to the wounds that Gordon suffered during the Civil War. More important, however, is the incredible likeness between the two in terms of physical appearance.
While Stevenson didn’t focus on this aspect of his cases, he has noted it. When he did follow-up studies years later on some of the children he had previously interviewed, what he found was that they had grown to bear a striking similarity to the physical appearances of the adults they claim to have been in a former life.
One aspect of morphological memory that he did focus on, however, are birthmarks and deformities of his subjects that were found to correspond with wounds and mutilations, in both appearance and location, of the body of the previous personality. In order to confirm this correlation between wounds and birthmarks or deformities, he often has to rely on the memories of surviving friends or relatives regarding the exact locations of the wounds, though in many other cases, he’s been able to get a hold of autopsy and medical records.
Though birthmarks are quite common, he focuses on those that bear an “elevated nevus” – a three-dimensional area that is either depressed, elevated, or puckered – and not merely the typical discoloration. He claims that they are indistinguishable from the scars of healed wounds. Some such birthmarks he’s studied have been found to correspond to bullet wounds (entry and exit, which is just weird) or stab wounds that were the cause of the death of the former body. Sometimes it’s more than a birthmark, though: it’s a deformity. He spoke of children with deformed limbs or even missing toes or fingers who claimed to remember being murdered in a past life, and that the killer had removed these toes or fingers in the process.
These birthmarks and deformities don’t always relate to the mode of death, however. He also has cases in which they correspond to injuries or marks from surgeries that happened at some point close to the time of death. There was, for instance, the case of a boy who lost his fingers in a machine accident, died of an unrelated illness the following year, and was born without those fingers on his right hand. Even more curious are cases that Tucker refers to as “experimental birthmarks.” As is a practice apparently common in some Asian countries, a person will mark a dying body in hopes that it will show up on the body the individual takes on in the proceeding incarnation. A family member or close friend will make a mark on a dead or dying person with ash, paste, or something similar, believing that when the person is reborn in another body — within the same family, it is usually suspected — that person will bear the same mark in the form of a birthmark and so be identifiable as the previous individual.
Even more amazing are the allegedly profound psychological as well as physical healings that take place in some of these cases. While, as formerly mentioned, DOPS doesn’t deal with past life memories recalled under hypnosis, many such cases in which an individual underwent hypnosis to face apparently past life traumas have cured them of debilitating phobias and other psychological ailments. It doesn’t stop at merely psychological ailments, either.
Take, for instance, the case of Edward Austrian, son of Patricia and Donald Austrian. He had a fear of rain — particularly ”dark, gray, drizzly, damp days,” his mother said — from the time he was about one year of age. He also had chronic throat problems, which he referred to as ”my shot.” Eventually, this throat problem was revealed to be a large, noticeable cyst in his throat, and the doctors decided to remove his tonsils as the first step in surgery. After the surgery at age four, Ed confessed to his parents that he had been an 18-year-old soldier named James during the First World War. He explained in detail how he had made his way through the mud in the rain and cold, how he held his heavy rifle, how he saw a field of trees, and, beyond that, deathly desolation. And he explained then how he had heard a shot ring out behind him, and how the bullet had evidently gone through someone else and then hit him in the back of the neck, after which he felt his throat fill up with blood. After he had broken the ice and could talk about the matter freely with his parents, his fear of rain vanished, as did the cyst — to the amazement of his doctor, Steven Levine, as well as Ed’s own father, who was a doctor as well.
While Stevenson has remarked that these past life memories have benefited the children who have recalled them very little, according to his own investigations, and in his eyes often quite to the contrary, the case of Edward Austrian would seem to suggest otherwise. The implication, in this case, is that if an individual can recall their previous lives, accept them, work through the trauma, and confess the experience to trusted and suitably compassionate individuals, it can not only be psychologically transformative to such individuals but perhaps even inspire physical healing,
III. ON THE NATURE OF THE PSYCHOSPORE.
In the midst of his research into CORT, Stevenson realized that if these cases did indeed constitute evidence of reincarnation, then some nonphysical medium must necessarily exist that was capable of carrying what I call the explicit, implicit, and morphological memories of an individual from one life to the next, and for this reason he gave birth to the notion of a psychospore.
In the field of astral projections, OBEs, Apparitions of the Living, and NDEs, this “psychospore” goes under other names, among them the subtle body, which I’ve personally adopted, if only out of convenience. Some of those who report OBEs, particularly when they have the experience frequently, describe the subtle body as existing both in and around the physical body, roughly corresponding to what many clairvoyants describe as the aura or energy field they perceive as existing in and around all living beings. An OBE occurs, then, when the subtle body to some degree detaches from the physical body, though even when traveling a long distance it becomes clear from the reports of their experiences that they somehow remain partially attached to the physical body, as noises or other things occurring to the physical body or in its physical surroundings can prematurely end the exosomatic excursion. In this light, NDEs would constitute coming to the very edge of severance before snapping back like elasticity to the physical – and death would then constitute the permanent and complete detachment of the subtle body from the physical body in question.
What the morphological memory aspect of CORT suggests is that a two-way avenue of influence between the subtle body and physical body exists, but that the dynamic changes over the course of corporeal existence. The older one gets, in other words, the more the physical body has an influence on the subtle body, whereas, in youth, the physical body seems more sensitive to the influence of the subtle body – to the point that the subtle form serves as a sort of template or blueprint for physical development. I can only assume the reason resides in the fact that the subtle body is incredibly sensitive and responsive to consciousness and that the older one gets, the more one tends to identify with the physical body they inhabit. There seems no other way to explain the likenesses between the facial architecture of an individual and who they recall having been in a previous life, or how death wounds and mutilations, surgeries, and “experimental birthmarks” can carry over as birthmarks and deformities in the new body. In addition, it also helps explains ghost encounters, apparitions of the living, and even the reports of some of those who experience OBEs.
When in their subtle bodies, I’ve personally noted that OBErs describe taking on one of three forms that correspond to how living individuals having encounters with ghosts describe their appearance. I call these three forms the Orb, the Mass, and the Apparition.
The Orb is when the exosomatic individual experiences their “body” as merely a point of awareness, sometimes one that can see in all directions simultaneously. In ghost encounters, this involves coming into contact with what is described as a transparent or glowing orb or sphere of light. Many intriguing videos and photographs have been captured of such Orbs, though others are clearly dust particles.
The Mass is when the exosomatic individual experiences his body as an ambiguous, fluid form and is seen by external observers as an amorphous blob, clump, or stream of fluid smoke.
Lastly, they can manifest as an Apparition, which is to say in a humanoid form, and while from the perspective of the exosomatic individual, it would seem that it’s all the same, from the perspective of observers, this clearly comes in degrees. At one extreme it can take the form of a three-dimensional shadow, but it can also take on the physical characteristics the person has or had during life, complete with clothing, and can appear as a partial apparition, manifesting just part of the body, or a complete, full-body apparition. It may be transparent or it may take on a solidified appearance as if a truly physical individual were standing before you, and in some bizarre cases seeming physical contact apparently indistinguishable from actual physical contact can even take place between the apparition and a living, embodied individual.
It is in the case of apparitions that some rare nay-sayers tend to have a field day in mocking such experiences. I have heard some point out that ghosts not only appear as they did during life but also wear clothes – a fact usually referenced in the context of an attempt to discredit such experiences. Never have I heard it pointed out that, from the perspective of OBErs, there is also the matter of their sense perception being just as it would be if they were experiencing the world through the sense organs of the physical, human body, even when they are not in Apparitional form.
What these two observations – and in fact, all three forms of the exosomatic, be they biologically living or dead – seem to imply is that the subtle body or “psychospore” is sensitive and as a result responsive to consciousness. The Orb represents the exosomatic individual in a highly-focused, active state, and the Mass the exosomatic individual in a state more akin to relaxed free-association and mental wandering. The state of the Apparition, however, would first imply some background, namely that during physical life the subtle body gets conditioned by its experiences in and through the physical body – and secondly, it would imply that the aforementioned conditioning has been so redundant and intense (as one would suspect) that even during an OBE (be one biologically alive or dead) that the subtle body often tends to default to that conditioned form, complete with its trappings, particularly when attempting to make contact with physical surroundings or embodied individuals. This would help explain why when complete apparitions appear they appear as they commonly did during life (repetition) and/or as they did at the time of death (emotional intensity), often manifesting the wounds given to them through the death experience as well. This may also influence one’s desire to reincarnate into a similar (which is to say human) form, but it also seems to affect the development of one’s specific physical appearance once reincarnated.
III. LAPPING FROM THE RIVER LETHE.
Accepting both the subtle body and reincarnation as a reality, however, leaves many questions in the wake, and serves to give those questions emphasis. Two such questions I’ll explore here both involve memory.
Firstly, why is it that most people don’t have access to explicit memories of their former lives, and even the children that do typically forget those memories as they grow older?
One possibility I find to be likely is that amnesia for previous lives serves as a survival strategy for the individual in the present psychological and social context. For some eleven to fourteen years, after all, the human infant is kept in the “second womb” of the home or tribe, mainly around the mother, to ensure survival, growth, and adaptation to the circumstances in which they were born. Here, the infant is not only nourished with food, water, and protection but provided with intellectual and emotional sustenance and behavioral training that allows the child to acquire the skills necessary for their eventual birth from that second womb. In this light, one could easily imagine that recalling previous existences or even the major portion of one’s present life would serve to hinder more than help, perhaps even constituting a direct threat to proper development. Implicit memory and morphological memory remain, of course, but explicit memories just get in the way, so they get buried in our minds.
To look at it from another angle, it may just be a far broader manifestation of the mechanism in our brains that allow us to screen out other conversations and chatter in a crowded restaurant so as to hone in on the conversation we are having with the person on the opposite side of our own table. In other words, our brains focus on our immediate needs and screen out all that is irrelevant to that end. Amnesia regarding former lives has survival value, so it constitutes a successful adaptation in an evolutionary context.
If that is the case, at least for most people, then the question becomes why some of us remember our previous lives at all.
One possible reason might reside in the fact that in 61% of Stevenson’s case files, the subject remembered a violent death (and a sudden one, of course, as violent deaths are typically unexpected by nature). Finding that the roughly 40% of cases in which the subject died of natural death too vague of a category, in his work 20 Cases of Reincarnation, Stevenson further divided natural deaths into four groups: (1) those who died suddenly, within a day or so of presumed health, (2) those who died young, which is to say under twelve years of age, (3) those who died with unfinished business – a mother dying, leaving children behind; debts to pay off or collect – and, last but not least, (4) those that died and, having been reborn, were intent on “continuing business,” which involves being in a state of ambition at the time of death that then carries over into the subsequent life.
Combinations of these five factors can be found in the majority of Stevenson’s cases. In all cases, be the deaths natural or violent, then, we could say that the individuals died with lives they naturally would consider to be incomplete.
This may also help explain why the past life memories collected by DOPS are predominantly “near-sighted”, which is to say that the children can recall with most clarity things that had happened closest to the time of death. This makes sense if you think about it. During life, we are pretty much the same way in regards to the history of our current lifetime: we remember most clearly events closest to us in a temporal sense or closest to us in an emotional sense. Certainly, such a violent means of expiration is close to the individual in both a temporal and emotional sense, and perhaps, therefore, triumphs over the amnesia that would have otherwise set in.
If this is the case, however, we might wonder why most of those children who do recall their past lives nonetheless fail to recall the interim between their lives – and, of course, why some of us do.
After all, in Steveson’s case files the average space of time between death and rebirth is usually about 15 months, and it’s rarely over three years, so surely something happens in the intervening period. So what happens? It’s not just that I haven’t read of many cases myself, either: in an interview, Stevenson explained how this is typical of many of the cases of reincarnation he researches. The children act as if they were leading the former life one moment and then, all of a sudden, poof, they wake up as a baby without warning. Adults trapped in little bodies.
Take the case of two-year-old Celal Kapan, a young Turkish boy in one of Ian Stevenson’s case files, who, almost as soon as he had mastered the language, asked his parents a peculiar question.
“What am I doing here? I was at the port.”
As he grew older, he would come to detail how he had been a dock worker and how he had fallen asleep one day in the cargo hold of a ship. While asleep, a crane operator, not knowing he had been there, was loading the ship and had dropped a heavy oil drum on him. He couldn’t understand what had happened, as it certainly hadn’t killed him — he wasn’t dead, after all. So how had he all of a sudden come to be here, with this strange family, in this strange body?
One hypothesis compares the interim period to a dream. We may remember a dream immediately upon awakening, but it slowly fades from our grasp the longer we are awake. Even so, we can remember quite clearly what happened the day prior. So it’s quite possible that those like Kapan did indeed have an intermission experience, even if they could not access those memories naturally, as they did when it came to their former life.
Some of us, however, tend to have good dream recall. Similarly, there are a minority of CORT cases, which DOPS has designated as Cases of the Reincarnation Type with memories of the Intermission between lives (CORT-I), where children not only recall their past lives but also recall the period between death and rebirth. This is where we shall turn our attention next.
IV. OF CORPOREAL COMMERCIAL BREAKS.
Jim Tucker and Poonam Sharma explored CORT-I in their paper, unambiguously entitled Cases of the Reincarnation Type with Memories from the Intermission Between Lives. At the time of the paper, of the some 1200 CORT cases which had been fed into their database, 276 qualified as CORT-I, and it was upon this that they based this paper. Tucker later expanded on the subject in his 2005 book, Life Before Life.
The paper was based on a study of 35 Burmese children in the CORT-I category, from which they identified a pattern and subsequently developed what they called a “three-stage temporal scheme” to outline how these intermission experiences tend to unfold. Though they emphasized that this was only preliminary, that not all subjects experienced every stage, that there may be changes in the sequence in some cases, and that “while the specific imagery may be culture-specific” (presumably in reference to experiences in “another realm,” a subject explored below), comparisons suggested that these three stages were applicable not just to the aforementioned Burmese cases, but to cases from all across the world.
While they did not emphasize it in the aforementioned paper, it’s also important to understand that at every stage the subject may also have intermission memories that involve them being in “terrestrial” locations and/or in “another realm,” which summons associations with related areas of paranormal study, particularly reports of out of body experiences (OBEs), ghost encounters, and Near Death Experiences (NDEs).
1. TRANSITIONAL STAGE.
In the first, Transitional Stage, the “discarnate” earn their title and must deal with the struggles inherent in emotionally detaching themselves from the previous lifetime. For some, this may involve the fundamental issue of coming to terms with the fact that one is dead. For others, this may be evident to them early on. They may hang around the body, and even witness their own funeral. Sometimes they hang around the family for a time or remain around the death site. Attempts at contacting loved ones may be made, often (though curiously, not always) attempts that prove futile, or they may find themselves driven away by the grief of their loved ones. Often this stage meets its end when they encounter an elder who guides them to an area that essentially becomes their residence for the length of their stay during the intermission period.
This stage brings to mind Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s concept of DABDA. In her 1969 book, On Death and Dying, she describes a five-stage emotional coping process that many people go through in the wake of the death of a loved one or the realization of their own, impending expiration. While every individual is unique and it may not apply to everyone, and while even when they do apply they may not manifest in the linear fashion she proposed, she adopted the acronym DABDA for the stages she defined as Denial, Anger, Bargaining, and Acceptance.
The Transitional Stage of CORT-I seems to deal primarily with overcoming Denial, and though Acceptance may be reached in this stage, it may go no further than Denial until one reaches the Stable Stage – and for some, perhaps, they may never arrive at Acceptance at all.
2. STABLE STAGE.
In the following stage, called the `stable stage’, the discarnate will settle in a particular location that becomes a sort of home or, perhaps more accurately, a temporary residence. This may be a holy temple, the place where one previously lived, the place of death, or — and this is interesting — they may even inhabit a tree. Here, they interact with other discarnates, and these interactions run the gamut. In other words, they may be pleasant, or they may be total assholes.
The reports of “terrestrial” experiences during the intermission seem in many ways to tell the same stories you hear in anecdotes regarding hauntings and encounters with the dead, the difference in this case being, of course, that the anecdotes are related not from the perspective of the haunted, but from the haunting. This leads one to suspect that many cases of enduring haunting may represent discarnate who have never managed to escape the disembodied state, never achieved the “Acceptance” stage of DABDA or the Stable Stage of CORT-I, and in support of this hypothesis the two categories share some intriguing overlap.
Interestingly, though perhaps not coincidentally, the same factors Stevenson identified in the children of CORT and CORT-I cases are said to be present in cases of haunting: their lives were incomplete. When dying too early, we might say, it would seem that individuals are prone to cling to the passions, people, and places that they had been attached to during life, and these attachments compel them to either haunt them like a ghost or quickly reincarnate following their deaths, typically in an area close in proximity to the place in which they died, or even within the family in which they died, and in any case having remembered who they previously were, at least for as long as they are able.
As mentioned earlier, this suggests that to one degree or another, they may be stuck in the initial, “denial” phase of DABADA, unable to accept their own premature deaths and adapt to their current circumstances in a healthy and productive manner. Or they may have moved past Denial, to Anger, where they remain. It would be interesting to subject these reincarnation cases to analysis and see if they follow the other stages of DABDA and if the final phase, Acceptance, has any relation as to when – or if – they began forgetting their past life memories.
To provide some semblance of hope: if the American cases of CORT and CORT-I displayed in the television series Ghost in My Child are to be believed, at least some of these children can gain a sense of closure and accomplish the final A in DABDA, and then go on with living their present lives.
During this stage, they often interact with other discarnates. They may also have successful communications with the friends and family of one’s previous life. They can communicate through departure dreams, as apparitions, and even through poltergeist phenomena.
To offer another example, Stevenson also writes of Veer Singh, a man who allegedly previously lived a life as a man named Som Dutt. After death as Som Dutt, he reports hanging around the Dutt family, following family members when they left the house in the evening. He was able to reveal details to Stevenson regarding the Dutt family — that children were born, that they bought a camel, that they were involved in a lawsuit — all stuff that had occurred after Som Dutt’s death and before his reincarnation as Veer Singh. Som Dott’s mother claimed that she had a dream that Som tattle-tailed on his brother, who he said he’d been following him as he snuck out of the house at night to attend local fairs. When she confronted her son about this, he admitted to doing so, and that was the first time anyone else in the house knew about it.
3. RETURN STAGE.
Assuming that the discarnate in question is ultimately recycled back into the flesh, they come to experience the third stage, the Return Stage. During this return stage, the discarnate may communicate with their past or future relatives through dreams and might again appear as apparitions or interact with the physical environment through poltergeist activity. And here is where we might hope to find out whether we chose our present life, or at least our present parents, and answer questions regarding our motivations and limitations as well as the process by which we become reborn.
With respect to this final, return stage, there is also the matter of seeming geographical and temporal restraints, specifically with respect to where one died and where they were subsequently reincarnated. One might like to imagine that after death, one has the ability to incarnate anywhere in the world – or even off-world – that one chooses, and at any time, but at least within the cases amassed by the Division of Perceptual Studies, that doesn’t seem to be the case. They almost always seem rather bound, geographically speaking, with respect to where they died – destined to be born within the same country, the same town or village, even, in some cases, in the same family – and within a limited amount of time.
In the aforementioned paper on CORT-I, they do their best to narrow down the distance between the place of death and the place of rebirth. The mean distance for CORT-I is 201 kilometers; the median distance, 20 kilometers. For CORT, the mean distance is 255 kilometers; the median is 14 kilometers. They added, however, that these estimates were skewed by a small number of extremely-long-distance cases.
In addition, there are temporal constraints: the average space of time between death and rebirth is usually about 15 months. I have thus far been unable to find any data that suggests a distinction between CORT and CORT-I in this area.
Within CORT, there is evidence that seems to suggest that there are circumstances or perhaps personality types that do not choose through whom they are born – or perhaps that they did choose their parents, but merely forgot having done so, or even their underlying motivations. After all, some children act as if they were in their last life one minute and had woken up in a child’s body the next (“I was just at the port!”). This, I confess, could be adequately explained by the amnesia regarding the period between lives that plague the bulk of CORT, but these don’t represent the bulk of cases I’ve come across. Very often, children of the CORT are very unhappy with their living conditions, circumstances, and parents, often demanding to be taken back to their family of the previous life or attempting to run away in an effort to return to their former home on their own. These children act as if they had been kidnapped and held prisoner, which makes perfect sense from their perspective – but it does not make it easy for me to believe that these children choose their parents during some forgotten period between death and rebirth. It seems far more likely that reincarnation in these cases was reactionary – an unconscious and automatic process rather than a conscious and deliberate one.
Within both CORT and CORT-I, however, there exists anecdotal evidence that at least in some circumstances, discarnates can choose their parents, and this evidence easily falls into three distinct categories.
First is what Tucker refers to as Predictions. This typically manifests as some elderly individual who declares to loved ones that they plan on reincarnating through a particular woman, and some time after the death of that elderly individual that particular woman has a child that bears explicit, implicit and/or morphological memories that correspond to the life of the aforementioned individual. Tucker maintains that they occur frequently among the lamas of Tibet and in the Tlingit, an Alaskan tribe.
Second, are the intermission memories provided by some children of CORT-I in which they explained the process of choosing their present parents out of their own volition, or perhaps through being unconsciously compelled, or how they were taken to them by guides or are directed by the old man mentioned earlier. A story that illustrates a possible manifestation of this stage is as follows. One rainy day, after hanging around that tree where he was murdered some seven years ago, Chamrat saw the man who would be the father of Bongkuch Promsin. He then followed Mr. Promsin onto a bus and to his home. Mr. Promsin later told Stevenson that shortly before his wife became pregnant, he had indeed gone to visit Hua Tanon, and that day it was indeed raining.
In some cases, they describe having fought to be born through a particular family, or even an individual.
In many American cases, Tucker points out, children talk about being in heaven and choosing their next parents. Some children report having followed them home as they pass by doing their daily activities. They may have memories surrounding the pregnancy, of their experience in the womb, of the actions of the parents during pregnancy, and even have memories of being born. While I was passionately interested in the manner in which they described the process of reincarnating, I didn’t expect that such details would be available, much less provided in the paper. I was pleasantly surprised, as nine of the 35 CORT-I Burmese children did:
“This was most often by transforming into a grain of rice or speck of dust in the water and being ingested by the mother. A few went to considerable lengths, having to try repeatedly when either they were rebuffed by guardian spirits or the water was thrown out as dirty.”
Third is what Stevenson referred to as “Departure Dreams,” which involve the discarnate saying goodbye to their former family and suggesting where they will next be incarnating, as well as the more common “Announcing Dreams,” where they either ask permission or provide a sort of statement of intent to a member of the family they wish to be born into. Of this, Stevenson writes:
“The announcing dreams, especially the petitionary ones, also suggest that a discarnate personality has chosen the family for his next incarnation. In a few announcing dreams one senses even a determination on the part of the discarnate personality for rebirth in a particular family. In one Haida case a deceased person appeared in the dream of a potential mother and grumbled to her about being kept waiting to reincarnate. In chapter 4 I described how Samuel Helander’s mother had a dream in which her brother Pertti (whose life Samuel later remembered) urged her not to have an abortion. A parallel case, that of Rajani Sukla, occurred in a family of India. A daughter of the family was killed in an accident. Later, her mother had a dream in which the daughter seemed to announce her wish to be reborn to her. Rajani’s mother, however, did not wish to have another child and induced an abortion. The deceased child appeared again in a dream and rebuked the mother for not letting her reincarnate. Eventually, the mother consented and gave birth to Rajani, who later remembered the life of her older sister.”
Elsewhere, he adds:
“Announcing dreams have been reported in all of the countries where we find these cases… The dreams vary in their form. Among the Tlingit, the discarnate personality appearing in an announcing dream often conveys symbolically his intention to reincarnate. For example, in the dream he may walk into the house with his suitcase and deposit it in one of the bedrooms; or he may enter the parents’ bedroom and lie down between them. In contrast, announcing dreams among the Burmese often represent the discarnate personality as petitioning to reincarnate in the family chosen. This suggests that the dreamer has the option to refuse such a request.”
In Children Who Remember Previous Lives: A Question of Reincarnation, Stevenson goes on to say:
“Much less frequent than announcing dreams are what I call departure dreams. In a dream of this type, a member of a deceased person’s family — his widow perhaps — dreams that the deceased person indicates the family in which he can be found after his reincarnation.”
While interesting, one might wonder why these relatively rare CORT-I merit anything more than a passing glance, particularly given the fact that typically little evidence can be provided in support of these intermission memories. Similarly, one might wonder why such cases would be so rare, anyway – why would some remember intermission memories, yet others do not? In the aforementioned paper, they explored these questions, and what they found was quite interesting indeed, as it turns out both the aforementioned questions have the same answer.
Though both CORT and CORT-I were found to be similar in all respect save for those characteristic intermission memories, the CORT-I proved to be supported by stronger evidence in four categories, all but one of which correspond to the categories of memory I used earlier to describe the evidence they’ve amassed in CORT. The evidence was stronger with respect to explicit memory, for instance, which is to say children with intermission memories made more statements regarding their alleged former incarnation that were subsequently verified. It was also stronger with respect to their implicit memory, or the behaviors, talents, phobias, and other unconscious and automatic tendencies associated with the previous personality. Even in the arena of morphological memory, in the birthmarks and birth defects that corresponded to the death wounds or other marks or scars on the previous personality’s body both prior to and even after death, there was stronger evidence.
What their comparisons revealed is that the only real difference between CORT and CORT-I cases is that the individuals in CORT-I have exceptionally better memories. As a consequence, CORT-I would seem to not only represent the strongest of the available CORT cases but also depict the most accurate portrayal we have available to us of what life after death is like – or, more accurately, what the interim between lives is like.
Taken as a whole, the structure of samsara seems rather clear: we die, we haunt for a stretch, then we succumb to the impulse to embody matter once again. During that haunting stretch, however, we not only reside as an often invisible and otherwise indetectable resident of the physical realm but have access to another place entirely – and though it may be related to the otherworldly realm we access during corporeal life, which is to say the dreamscape, that doesn’t diminish the implications at all.
V. OF DREAMS & OTHER REALMS.
As previously mentioned, during both NDEs and CORT-I subjects report experiences in two distinct contexts: the physical realm and another, otherworldly realm. In both NDEs and CORT-I, cross-cultural studies have revealed the nature of this otherworldly realm in both cases is clearly culturally influenced. The easy explanation is that discarnates dream just as the living do and this otherworldly realm is, in fact, the dream state we’re already quite familiar with, though clearly of a more lucid quality than that which is typically experienced during corporeal life. This may be due to the fact that the dreams of the discarnate are no longer regulated, influenced, and interrupted by biological functions.
No ears to pick up the irritating sounds of the alarm clock. No full bladder that nags you into waking up to relieve yourself. Perhaps even no NREM or REM stages to structure sleep in a cycle, nor any effects caused by caffeine or other drugs on that cycle.
That discarnates dream is already implied in CORT and CORT-I in what Stevenson has referred to as “arrival dreams” and “departure dreams.” In tandem, the telepathic effects of the dreams of the discarnate are implied as well. In departure dreams, a recently dead individual will contact living loved ones in the dream state indicating through whom they intend to reincarnate, whereas in arrival dreams the parents-to-be will be visited in the dream state with the discarnate announcing their intention to reincarnate as their child-to-be.
Interestingly enough, this type of telepathic dream phenomenon isn’t just known to be a characteristic of the dreams of the dead but has been reported between two or more living individuals as well.
In the field of parapsychology, there are experiments dealing with what are known as Telepathic Dreams in which a sleeping individual (“the receiver”) telepathically picks up on the thoughts, emotions, and experiences of a waking individual (“the sender”) and weaves them into a dream, with the content of the dream in question varying from symbolic on one end to literal on the other. Outside of the context of parapsychological experiments, this has occurred when the so-called “sender” is not, at the very least, deliberately sending, and the so-called “receiver” is not intentionally receiving, however, so it appears that the conscious intent of only one is necessary for this phenomenon to occur – or that it may occur spontaneously, without the conscious intention of either, and in any case making these titles rather arbitrary at best.
Though this isn’t exactly what seems to be happening in arrival and departure dreams (though for all we know it still could be), these dreams described by Stevenson do seem to be indistinguishable from what has been variously referred to as shared dreams, collective dreams, mass dreams, group dreams, reciprocal dreams or, as Linda Lane Magallón calls them in her book of the same name, the experience of Mutual Dreaming. Unlike Telepathic Dreams – and so far as I can discern, this is the only difference – mutual dreams occur when all involved individuals are asleep and dreaming. As a consequence (assuming only two are involved), unless it is borne out of the intent of one without the knowledge of the other, distinguishing the sender from the receiver is difficult if not impossible. For all we know, all involved could be sending and receiving simultaneously.
According to Magallón, mutual dreams come in two main types, Meeting Dreams and Meshing Dreams, both of which have a spectrum of intensity.
Most of the mutual dreams she’s collected come in the form of Meshing Dreams. At the weaker end of the spectrum, they are quite similar to Telepathic Dreams with respect to how the contents of the dreams of both dreamers appear to suffer from telepathic cross-contamination. They share elements, images, or themes, but the individuals involved do not encounter each other in the context of their dreams. At the most intense end of the spectrum, where the “meshing” is complete, while the involved dreamers will still not see each other within the context of the dream, they seem to embody the same point of view in an identical dream environment. Given the similarity with Telepathic Dreams, the natural assumption would be that in the case of two dreamers, for instance, one dreamer is having a personal dream while the other, the receiver, is telepathically picking it up and consequently weaving the telepathic data into the content of their own. In other words, the dream of the receiver will have elements that resonate with the dreaming experience of the target, or even share the dreaming experience of the target, though the target may have no role in the experience at all.
More interesting to me are what Magallón calls Meeting Dreams, which are distinct from Meshing Dreams in that they involve two or more individuals reportedly inhabiting the same dreamscape, but from their own, individual perspectives, just would be the case in the physical realm, and where they appear to one another as they do in physical life. They may even be in different areas of the dreamscape for a time before encountering one another, though at least one of the dreamers sees the other. Far more interestingly, often enough both dreamers see and even interact with one another. This can apparently also occur during false awakenings. She also cites cases in which the individual dreamers may also be in different states of consciousness, which is to say that one dreamer may be at a low level of consciousness while the other is lucid dreaming – which is to say the person is awake within the dream, and may even know they are dreaming.
All of this, taken together, became incredibly intriguing to me for two reasons. First, if the corporeal can share dreams with one another, and the discarnate can share dreams with the corporeal, then it would not be a leap to assume that discarnates can share dreams with other discarnates.
Most curious of all, however, is the fact that these meeting dreams are not limited to merely two individuals. On the contrary, she shares numerous reports of multiple dreamers inhabiting the same dream. This immediately led me down a rabbit hole of speculation, for even if dreams – personal or otherwise – only exist for as long as a dreamer is dreaming it, so long as at least one individual remains in a Meeting Dream it could potentially be sustained. If you take some time and consider this, you begin to imagine how it might be if one could learn to initiate meeting dreams intentionally and then train others across the globe with whom you could share dreams. If you factor in time zones, where the sleeping schedules of members of this global group were to always overlap in such a way that a meeting dream was never unoccupied, one could continue such a mutual dream indefinitely – especially if the network grew and elder members, once they died, remained as nodes in the network.
In essence, one could say that this would be like creating a stable, parallel reality – but then the real question arises: is it only “like” creating a parallel reality, or could it be the case that it is indeed one? Would this network of global mutual dreamers all constitute co-creators in a continuously-reinforced, ever-evolving parallel universe, though operating in accordance with laws that are distinct from our physical universe – which, as a consequence, would perhaps make this shared dream world more accurately described as an “alternate” universe?
To go even further, another question arises: have we done this already, through our religious belief structures? Could it be that when we die, or at least once we know that we’re dead, our expectations govern the collective “meeting dream” we ultimately find ourselves within – particularly so if we are a member of a religion and deeply connected with other followers who share our beliefs regarding what the afterlife is like?
Is this, perhaps, why the otherworldly experiences of many of those undergoing an NDE or CORT-I are so culturally-influenced?
There may be reasons to suspect this is the case. For instance, Tucker wondered why some of the children of CORT-I reported experiences in another realm while others did not, and while he stressed the results were only preliminary, he found suggestions of an answer that may work quite well with my aforementioned speculations. He found that if the previous personality died by natural means, the death was expected, and they meditated during life, they are more likely to remember another realm. The more they meditated, as a matter of fact, the greater the detail in their reports regarding that other realm. Whether these factors make them more likely to experience another realm or merely more likely to remember them cannot be ascertained, of course, but his overall findings are curious in any case.
If someone knows they are dying, they have time to anticipate their demise and – consciously or unconsciously – speculate on what an afterlife might be like. If their expectations have been shaped and ingrained into them by a particular religion and reinforced by those that they’re close to who hold the same beliefs, it would make sense, given what I’ve previously speculated, that they would, by psychological default, join their fellow believers in the discarnate dream-state in a mutual, “meeting dream” that has been fashioned by those collective beliefs. These aspects alone may naturally drive them toward such shared, exosomatic dream worlds, but it seems rather clear to me how the element of meditation might make them more liable to remember their experiences there when (or if) they subsequently reincarnate and are subsequently able to relate such experiences. While meditation has many benefits, the one that has relevance here is self-awareness and living in the moment, and it isn’t a stretch to assume how these qualities would serve to enhance memory — explicit memory most specifically.
VI. INTERSPECIES REINCARNATION.
While most cases amassed by the DOPS involve humans incarnating into other humans, I was rather surprised to find that lifetimes as animals are also reported in some cases. In Tucker’s 2013 book, Return to Life, he described that while Stevenson was initially inclined to dismiss and even mock cases of alleged previous incarnations as other animals, as they were typically both rare and unverifiable, he eventually opened his mind to them.
In Tucker’s aforementioned book, he provided but one, lone exception to the rule.
This was a case in Thailand investigated by Francis Story, and it dealt with a boy named Dalawong. He claimed he had been a deer in a former life, but was then killed by a hunter, and subsequently incarnated into a python. In that life, he was killed in a particular cave, where he had fought with two dogs, and was finally confronted by the owner of the dogs, one Mr. Hiew, who ultimately killed him. Mr. Hiew subsequently fed the snake meat to several people, among them Dalawong’s father-to-be. In spirit form, he saw his future father and found him to be the kindest of those who were fed the meat of his former body, so he followed him home and entered the body of his mother-to-be.
At three years of age, Dalawong saw Mr. Hiew when he came to a party he was attending with his family and tried to attack him. Dalawong then recounted the story of his own former death, all of which Mr. Hiew allegedly confirmed. Unexpectedly, he then forgave Hiew and, as he got older, began killing snakes himself, though as a sort of mercy-killing, stating that living as a snake was difficult. Some two decades after his interview with Francis Story, he still believed he had lived a life as a python, and continued to go to the cave where he had died every three months to meditate.
Given the desires unique to being human, it makes sense that our natural impulse would be to incarnate again into human form, but that may amount to merely a personal preference. After all, CORT and CORT-I cases suggest that a woman can die and incarnate as a man in the following incarnation, or a man may die and subsequently incarnate into a woman. And while many children of the CORT desire to return to their former family simply because they have been unable to let go of them, and were only forced away from them due to their death, and may even attempt to run away from their current family to their former one in their subsequent incarnation, as we have seen, the motivations of other such children are more shallow: they simply don’t like being born into a poor family, for instance. One could argue that either the individual in question felt at an unconscious level that they needed to experience these circumstances even though the conscious aspect of the personality isn’t quite on board, or that perhaps guides made this decision for them. One gets the sense that they had an intense impulse to return to the flesh, however, and only chose to be born into the families they were born into out of convenience mixed with a sense of desperation. Perhaps the cases of interspecies reincarnation were made for just the same kind of reasons: if not the only available option, it was the best one within reach.
I confess it’s difficult for me to take such accounts seriously, though ultimately, given contemplation, one wonders how, if indeed reincarnation exists, such interspecies reincarnation couldn’t be the rule. Perhaps this is merely due to my default assumptions, however. For all I know, perhaps, despite the capacity to live countless lives in organic bodies, souls are also born and also die, just as their temporary shells do. My personal opinion is that this is not the case, though I, of course, haven’t the slightest suggestion of evidence in support of this working hypothesis. If souls always have been, however, or at the very least cannot die once spawned into existence, this leaves us with some rather interesting questions.
One should consider where souls currently in human flesh found their fleshy homes prior to the evolution of the human species. An easy answer would be earlier forms of life on this planet. Prior to the first organic forms of life, however, where did such souls reside? Were they merely bodiless? Or is the universe perhaps teeming with life, and all souls ultimately migrated from other life-bearing planets?
As dismal as it is, consider that we may ultimately destroy ourselves, perhaps obliterate all life on the planet in the process – and if somehow we don’t and yet fail to establish human colonies off-planet, that in five billion years our star, the sun, will bloat to become a red giant that will obliterate our planet entirely. Is that then the end of reincarnation? Would we subsequently just be souls without bodies, or would we perhaps be able to migrate to other stars, other stellar systems, and happen upon other life-bearing exoplanets, through whom we could continue our spiritual journey?
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