It has been many months since I first mentioned my interest in Dr. Jim Tucker’s 2005 book, Life Before Life, which recounts, in layman’s terms, over four decades’ worth of scientific research into the past life accounts of children. The stories of these children are considered by prominent scientists (including the late Carl Sagan) as the most compelling evidence in favor of reincarnation (or, as Dr. Tucker specifies, “memories, emotions, and even physical injuries [that] can sometimes carry over from one life to the next”) that exists. I apologize for the tardiness of this review, but I hope you will find it helpful in your exploration of the phenomena of past lives, past life regression, and reincarnation.
Dr. Jim Tucker is the protégé of the late Dr. Ian Stevenson, who in 1960 began publishing case studies of children who recall alleged past life memories. Since that time, Dr. Stevenson, Dr. Tucker, and their colleagues have compiled an unparalleled quantity of case studies (over 2,500 to date) in which young children, usually between the ages of two and eight, spontaneously discuss experiences and memories of a previous existence. The children often provide a wide range of evidence, including specific names of people and places from an alleged previous life, knowledge of specific events from that life, and even birthmarks in the same shape and location as the mortal wounds of the previous incarnation, to support the notion that a part of their consciousnesses have somehow remained intact and been transferred from one life to another. The cases become more exciting when a specific identity of an alleged previous incarnation is successfully discovered, usually by the family and neighbors of the child, and even occasionally with the help of Dr. Stevenson’s research team. Dr. Tucker has compiled a summary and discussion of many of these cases into the first account of this work intended for the general public.
Dr. Tucker presents his findings clearly and systematically throughout the book; in a typical middle chapter he will begin by summarizing a specific series of the children’s cases with a common trait, such as the presence of birthmarks on the child that correspond to injuries of the child’s previous personality, or the existence of written records detailing a child’s statements that are dated before the child’s alleged previous personality is identified. After thoroughly delineating the cases, he discusses the potential alternative explanations to reincarnation for those cases (‘normal’ explanations, which include fraud, faulty memory, and coincidence, or ‘paranormal’ explanations, which include possession and ESP) and then concludes whether reincarnation provides the most convincing explanation for each case. He brings the reader on a global journey into regions of the world with vastly differing views on reincarnation, into homes pervaded by widely-varying socio-economic circumstances, and into the lives of children with extremely diverse stories. However, his conclusion that reincarnation as he defines it is the most plausible explanation for most specific cases, and certainly for the body of cases as a whole, remains steadfast throughout the book.
In several of Dr. Tucker’s cases, the amount of information allegedly recalled by the child in question is quite remarkable. In one particular case, Dr. Tucker tells of a child from Sri Lanka who, at less than three years old, began recounting her life as a seller of incense in a village approximately 145 miles away. For four years she mentioned specific details about the life she led as this man, including the specific brand of incense he sold (a brand unavailable to and relatively unknown in the town where she lived), the specific location where he lived, the names of his mother, his wife, and the school he’d attended, and the manner of his demise, which was an automobile accident involving a large vehicle. One of the little girl’s teachers eventually traveled to this village with his brother-in-law, who did not believe in reincarnation, in search of information relating to someone fitting the description the girl made. After a series of inquiries they found a small family-owned incense company, the owner of which had lost his brother-in-law and business associate in an accident two years before the girl was born. En route to the local market to sell the family’s incense (which bore the names the girl described), the brother-in-law was hit by a large truck and killed. The young child and her family eventually visited the family of the deceased incense peddler, and the two families compared the twenty specific statements the girl had made about the family prior to meeting them. They determined that fourteen of the statements were correct (including the incense brands, the manner of the man’s death, and the names of the man’s wife, daughter, and school), three were incorrect, and the accuracy of three could not be determined. Additionally, the girl possessed birthmarks over her chest and ribs that corresponded with the injuries of the man described in his autopsy report, which included fractured ribs and abrasions running across his chest.
Dr. Tucker presents this case and several others that comprise large amounts of precise information reported by the subjects, and as the cases begin to mount through the progression of the book, the ability of the skeptic to explain away the information Dr. Tucker presents as the product of fraud, faulty memory, or coincidence is rigorously tested. Through the various chapters, Dr. Tucker analyzes whether these cases can be understood using any of these three ‘normal’ explanations, and invariably decides that reincarnation is as good as or better than any of them at explaining the various phenomena. While the reader can find herself continually convinced by Dr. Tucker’s logic that reincarnation is a better explanation than the alternatives he presents, she may also question whether Dr. Tucker has really provided a complete list of all possible alternative normal explanations. In the Christian faith, for example, there exist myriad accounts of the faithful who have been convinced of some specific moment of direct divine intervention on their behalf. Some report seeing angels or Jesus while others merely recount a particularly intense feeling of some sort that leads them to a particular decision. The believer later uncovers that this ‘divine intervention’ saved him from some catastrophe that actually happened, whether it be a traffic pile-up or the collapse of the World Trade Center buildings. In such cases a skeptic could potentially explain these stories as those of a believer using facts learned later on to support his or her belief system. While this sort of explanation could be related to the fraud or faulty memory explanations that Dr. Tucker mentions, it does seem to be at least subtly different, as at least the claimants would not consider their accounts to be fraudulent or faulty. Dr. Tucker could have only further strengthened the argument for reincarnation if he had discussed and refuted this specific possibility as it applies to cases of previous lives as well.
Despite such potential limitations, Life Before Life provides the reader with a substantial glimpse into a massive body of work, the size alone of which is effective at refuting the skeptic’s argument that the phenomena of these cases are mere products of fraud, false information, coincidence, or whatever other normal explanation we might consider. While some of the weaker cases could certainly be dismissed as mere products of misinformation, strange coincidence, or fraud, such an explanation begins to lose strength as Dr. Tucker repeatedly supplements his body of evidence with strong cases like that of the Sri Lankan girl/incense salesman. As the evidence mounts, Dr. Tucker delves deeper, relating accounts of children who describe the period of time in between their most recent incarnations, or some variation of the ‘life between lives’ that we have repeatedly discussed here at Past Life Answers. He then spends a chapter expounding on and refuting the various critiques of reincarnation, and in the style of What the Bleep Do We Know, invokes quantum theory and various notable scientific studies as predictors of or supporting arguments for the existence of a consciousness that is separate from our physical bodies. He counters science-based and faith-based arguments with equal vigor, and concludes that “we do not have an adequate reason to reject the concept and this body of work out of hand.”
Amidst the various speculations and conclusions of the final chapter, Dr. Tucker paints a rather gloomy picture of past life regression as a means to recapture the memories that these children experience spontaneously for ourselves, stating that, while “hypnosis produced some dramatic results… unfortunately, it is a very unreliable tool, whether being used to uncover memories from the present life or from past ones.” A proponent of past life regression might take a less pessimistic view, acknowledging the potential for the mind to create false memories under hypnosis, but also considering that the children in these accounts may hold the key to determining which of our memories are constructs of our imagination and which are real. As our ability to analyze brain activity continues to increase, perhaps we will eventually be able to compare the brain activity of children like those in Life Before Life to the brain activity of subjects undergoing past life regression, and uncover the similarities that would help us to determine whether a memory is real or imagined.
In the end, Tucker’s study provides compelling evidence for the optimistic believer in past lives and a substantial test for the determined skeptic. Dr. Tucker’s approach in analyzing this phenomenon, while not perfectly objective, is sufficiently even-handed in discussing the various potential explanations for these children’s accounts other than the existence of previous lives as well as the various criticisms of reincarnation in general. While Dr. Tucker leaves no doubt about his belief in the existence of previous lives, he makes no attempt to force-feed such a belief to the reader, which is an achievement for which Past Life Answers continually strives as well. On a personal note, I recommend this book to anyone remotely interested in this subject, and hope that you may find it as informative and enlightening as I have.
Matt Winfree
www.pastlifeanswers.com
