To read Ian Stevenson’s work, you must have a strong will to study, as you will have to concentrate, you have to pay attention so that you don’t miss any detail. His material is dense, it is hard. It contains scientific terms, not easy to understand for the average person. I haven’t read all his books and articles yet, but I consider I know his work quite well and so there are stages in which I forget a bit about him. And I shouldn’t do it. Ian Stevenson is a referent for me. He was a real scientist, a real Truth Seeker, as I call them... a colleague, there is no use denying it. I realize we have many things in common. And I think it is very curious that the obstacles we both encounter along the way are basically the same: ignorance, materialism, mockery... and, of course, fundamentalism.
When I started my own path, creating a rational reincarnation forum, I already made it clear it was not a forum based on religious or New Age beliefs. People with spiritualist influence didn’t take long to turn up, though fortunately they left shortly after, possibly when they saw my approach was totally different. For some reason, spiritism is widespread in Spanish-speaking countries. We have the “original” spiritism of Allan Kardec, but the communications transmitted by various mediums such as the Brazilian Chico Javier, the American Jane Roberts, who channeled an alleged spirit called Seth, or the Theosophy figures like Madame Blavatsky —to give just a few examples—, are also very known. I studied them superficially, just enough to understand there was something amiss: the contradictions were constant in all of them, and besides, in many cases such teachings were highly influenced by the religion the medium professed. They never convinced me. But the worst thing is there are many people who do believe in these “teachings”. Many of them also get easily dazzled by what is told in those books and they take it as the Absolute Truth. They become fundamentalists. They and I have in common that we believe in reincarnation, but no more than that. The main difference is that I base on facts. If possible, facts studied and verified in a scientific way like the cases presented by Ian Stevenson in his books. If that is not possible, experiences and accounts of people (me included) that I have been following for some time and I know they are serious, people that usually have spontaneous past life memories and have researched their memories to verify them historically. I draw my conclusions from there, and so I consider that mine is something else than a simple belief.
And yes, all this causes me a lot of frustration... and yes, I confess, my emotional reactions are sometimes a bit explosive, but I can’t help it because proof is there for everyone who wants to see. And If you are so blinded that not even Ian Stevenson’s work is proof enough for you, you always have your own experience. That is why I always encourage everyone to remember by themselves, because that is the only thing that convinces you. Only when I read articles as the one I am going to comment next, I make peace with the world and accept this is a war I can’t win. Or, at least, it is going to be a very long war. It is likely I won’t win in this life... just like Ian Stevenson died, also full of frustration, due to the scarce attention he was receiving from the scientific community. Stevenson died in 2007, and today some researchers are trying to follow his line. The bad news is that, from what I have seen, they are not doing it as well. Among other things, they lack the imagination to make all the pieces of the puzzle fit and elaborate hypotheses with real validity. I say this for a specific reason, but I am already gone on for too long, so I won’t comment on it today.
In 2008, an article published in the Journal of Scientific Exploration highlighted this aspect in Ian Stevenson’s career. If you want to read it in full length, you can find it here. I am going to quote the excerpts I consider more important, those I particularly agree with.
“Here at the dawn of the 21st century, we see an alarming bifurcation in modern society, one that began in the West but has spread with science and technology into much of the rest of the world. On the one hand, the world view that now prevails among intellectual leaders and permeates all levels of society is that of a mechanistic and materialistic universe in which mind, consciousness, human personality, and the spiritual values by which many people try to live are, in the final analysis, merely byproducts of physical and biological processes. On the other hand, an increasing number of people clearly feel that this materialistic world view cannot account for a wide variety of important human experiences, and that it fails to satisfy their hunger for a sense of meaning and dignity in human life. Over the past several decades, proliferating New Age fads, the explosion of interest in alternative and complementary medical treatments, and the rapid growth of fundamentalist religious movements have all attested to a deepening dissatisfaction with the currently dominant materialistic world view. It has become increasingly obvious to some people, therefore, that our most urgent need is for systematic efforts to bridge the gap between scientific and religious views of the nature of the universe and especially to reconcile modern society’s respect for empirical science with the widely felt sense that our lives somehow transcend the boundaries of our current spatiotemporal existence.”
Those who are close to me know that is my struggle: to eradicate myths, whatever their origin. Unfortunately, in the reincarnation world, myths abound, and from what I have seen, they fundamentally derive from the New Age and old religious movements. Undoubtedly, this can be due, as the article says, to the dissatisfaction that the materialism of current science brings. In my own forum I have been able to see not long ago that one of those religious movements is Allan Kardec’s spiritism. I wanted to research to know if my impressions were correct, and I got scared, seriously. I didn’t want to look further. My purpose is not to attack believers, but their unsubstantial beliefs, beliefs that have not been adequately proven. The teachings transmitted by alleged disincarnate entities through mediums are in the lowest point of my reliability scale.
“Dr. Stevenson is in fact one of the extremely few individuals in the past century who have attempted to bridge this gap between scientific methods and knowledge and religious experience and faith by directly examining and strengthening the many and varied kinds of empirical evidence we actually have for the survival of human personality after death.”
As Ian Stevenson thought, my opinion is that we already have a lot of signs that, if not prove, at least point unmistakably to the reality of reincarnation. But as it seems his work fell on deaf ears, I keep wagering on a rational and empirical approach, on the accumulation of data that will allow us to clarify the mechanism by which consciousness survives death and returns to the physical life in a different body. Unfortunately, this is not being carried out at present, at least not at a scale that goes beyond the mere anecdote. While the reincarnation world keeps being ruled by regression therapists, self-dominated “Brian Weiss’ disciples”, we won’t get anywhere.
Maybe I am wrong, but I don’t know anyone else but me, at least in Spain, that knows in deep NDEs, OBEs and past life memories (two of them by personal experience), and is trying to explain all these observations and join all the pieces. And it is very curious that when I tried to speak with allegedly scientific people about reincarnation, in particular a Spanish psychiatrist who wrote a book about NDEs, they didn’t want to know anything about me, nor my experiences, nor my hypotheses. Fine, I didn’t write him a letter or anything in the like, I only posted in his Facebook group interesting scientific articles about Ian Stevenson and my own theory about sleep paralysis, shared by many people who control conscious out-of-body experiences. They didn’t take long to expel me from the group. I understand that among so much idle talk and lack of seriousness typical of a Facebook group, sensible words get lost, but at least I should have received a bit of interest from his side. It turns out we have several Jenny Cockell’s in Spain and no one knows yet... though, of course, it might be that Jenny Cockell is no more than a lunatic for many of these scientists.
I am glad to see I am not the only one who has noticed this tendency of many people, scientific as well as religious, to cover their ears when they don’t want to listen to something that could make their beliefs stagger.
“His encyclopedic knowledge of the history of science, religion, and ideas has instilled in him an acute awareness of the dangerous tendency shared by most of us, including scientists, to adopt fixed theoretical systems and thus to resist examining new ideas. As he put it: ‘We all tend to organize our experiences in various explanatory schemata which give us the impression (or illusion) of understanding the world around us. Any new idea impinges on the existing schemata and may by its simple strangeness arouse anxiety’ (Stevenson, 1965: 55–56). One important theme in his thinking, therefore, has been that progress in any area of human thought requires us to resist complacency and to incessantly question or probe deeper into all received views, systems, dogma, or authority. An implied corollary of this theme has been that progress in both science and religion requires us to recover ‘the wisdom that, as T. S. Eliot told us, we have lost in knowledge’ (Stevenson, 1990: 2).”
Very few people follow his example, because most scientists don’t want to know a thing about parapsychology. This, without mentioning the unsuccessful attempts to go further in the study of NDEs or OBEs by physicians that are barely familiar with the nature of the phenomena they are studying. While there is not a fluid communication between them, we will continue to be stuck.
“Although Dr. Stevenson originated and is probably best known for the work just described [past life memories in children], he has sought throughout his career to identify and pursue any and all kinds of empirical data that could shed new light on the survival question. Thus he has made unique and important new observations on topics as diverse as near-death experiences, deathbed visions, apparitional phenomena, telepathic impressions, poltergeist cases, and trance mediumship. He is also alone in having carried out and published intensive studies of so-called 'xenoglossy' cases, cases in which the subject appears capable of fluent and productive use of a language that he or she did not learn normally. The best such case, published in Unlearned Language (Stevenson, 1984b), involved a secondary personality in a young Indian woman; this personality spoke and wrote fluently an archaic form of Bengali appropriate to the life she claimed to have led some 150 or so years earlier, and she also provided certain factual details which Dr. Stevenson was subsequently able to verify, but only by means of an extremely laborious investigation of obscure historical records.”
“Most educated persons today —including highly educated religious persons— erroneously believe that such traditional concepts have little or no empirical support, and, perhaps for this reason, many of the more liberal or educated religious leaders have downplayed or even discarded the concept of survival as central to a religious view of the universe, emphasizing instead the social and moral importance of a religious life and perspective. Without some concept that human life transcends this finite material existence, however, the foundations of religion as a spiritual and moral force are gravely and unnecessarily weakened. Scientific research such as Dr. Stevenson’s, which specifically addresses deep questions about the nature and postmortem destiny of human personality, can and should have a powerful impact on the religious beliefs and spiritual well-being of many people, particularly if the research becomes more widely known.”
I feel totally identified with the following paragraph. So far, these attacks against my person have taken place in my blog or forum, but I wonder what would happen if one day I wanted to go further and started to give speeches about my experiences and the conclusions I have reached. Perhaps that is why, for now, I write from the safety of my home. The fear to be lynched, stemming from one of my past lives, is still there, latent.
“Like others who have attempted to apply the methods of science to traditionally religious questions, Dr. Stevenson has encountered much misunderstanding, resistance, and even hostility, both from scientists and from religious persons who, from their very different perspectives, too often assume that all such questions have already been answered.”
And, finally, I could not agree more with the following statement:
“There is a circular relationship between the low levels of funding currently available for such research, the unwillingness of most mainstream journals to publish it, the widespread lack of understanding of its purposes and methods, and near-universal ignorance about the scope, depth, and quality of the data already available.”
Hence my constant struggle to keep disseminating this knowledge, my effort to translate the lesser-known articles by Stevenson, and the ideas that are boiling in my head about how to perpetuate this work in the future. People are still sunken in ignorance. My objective is for them to know the reality of reincarnation, one way or the other. I am certain that the world will be a better place the day we know for certain that we reborn constantly in this planet, and that our grandchildren might be ourselves in the future, suffering the consequences of our past life actions.
References:
Where Science and Religion Intersect: The Work of Ian Stevenson, by Dr. Edward F. Kelly and Dr. Emily Williams Kelly (Journal of Scientific Exploration 22:73-80, 2008).
https://med.virginia.edu/perceptual-studies/publications/#Other