Jim Tucker from Charlottesville (USA) is the only academic scientist in the world who has researched children's past life stories for 15 years, thus providing evidence of reincarnation.
Tucker has collected selected cases from the United States in a new book and presents in it his own hypotheses on the scientific aspects that may be hidden behind the phenomenon of reincarnation. Below is a translation of the article The Science of Reincarnation, originally published in the University of Virginia Journal.
Spontaneous memories and childhood games
When Ryan Hammons was four years old, he began acting as a film director, and commands such as "Action" were constantly heard from his children's room. But soon these games for Ryan's parents became a cause for concern, especially after he woke up one night from his own scream, grabbed his chest and began to tell that he dreamed of his heart exploding when he was in Hollywood one day.
His mother Cindy went to the doctor, but the doctor explained this with nightmares, and that the boy would soon outgrow this age. One evening, when Cindy was putting her son to bed, he suddenly took her hand and said: "Mom, I think I was someone else once." Ryan explained that he can remember a large white house and a swimming pool.
This home was located in Hollywood, miles from their Oklahoma home. Ryan revealed that he had three sons, but he cannot remember their names. He began to cry and constantly asked his mother why he could not remember their names. “I really didn't know what to do,” recalls Cindy.
“I was very scared. He was so persistent in this matter. After that night, he tried again and again to remember their names, and each time he was disappointed that he could not. I started looking for information on reincarnation on the Internet. I even borrowed some library books about Hollywood in the hope that pictures could help him.
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I haven't told anyone about it for months. One day, while Ryan and Cindy were looking at one of the books about Hollywood, Ryan stopped at the same page with a black and white photograph from the 30s movie Night after Night. The picture showed two men threatening a third. Four more men surrounded them.
Cindy didn't know these faces, but Ryan pointed to one of the men in the middle and said, “Hey Mom, this is George. We shot the film together. " Then his fingers slid to the man in the jacket on the right side of the picture, who looked sullenly: "This guy is me, I found myself!"
Although rare, Ryan's claim is not unique and is one of a total of over 2,500 cases that psychiatrist Jim Tucker has collected in his archives at the Department of the Medical Center for Perceptual Research at the University of Virginia.
At two years old, children remember their past life
For nearly 15 years, Tucker has been researching the stories of children who, typically between the ages of the second and the sixth year of life, claim to have lived before. Sometimes these children can even describe in sufficient detail the details of these previous lives.
It is very rare that these previously deceased persons are famous or popular, and often not at all known to the families of these children. Tucker, one of only two scientists in the world studying this phenomenon, explains that the complexity of such experiences is different.
Some of them can be easily identified - for example, when it is clear that the harmless stories of children occur in those families where they have lost a close relative. In other cases, as in Ryan's case, the logical explanation is the scientific explanation, says Tucker, which is both simple and surprising at the same time: "One way or another, the child remembers memories from another life."
“I understand that this is a big step to understand and accept that there is something beyond what we can see and touch,” explains Tucker, who has served as the medical director of University Children's Hospital for nearly a decade (Psychiatric Clinic Child and Family).
"However, this is evidence that such incidents need to be addressed, and if we look closely at such incidents, it makes the most sense to explain that there is a transfer of memories."
The key to the existence of reincarnation
In his latest book, Return to Live, Tucker recounts some of his most compelling cases in the United States and presents his arguments that recent discoveries in quantum mechanics, the science of how tiny particles behave in nature, are the key to the existence of reincarnation.
“Quantum physics assumes that our physical world arises from our consciousness, - says Tucker. - This point of view is represented not only by me, but also by a large number of other scientists.” While Tucker's work generates heated debate in the scientific community, his research is based in part on cases that his predecessor, who died in 2007, Ian Stevenson, has collected cases around the world, which are no less misleading.
For Michael Levine, director of the Center for Reconstructive and Regenerative Developmental Biology at Tufts University and the author of the academic review of Tucker's first book, which he describes as "top-notch research," the controversy stems from the models of science currently in use that can neither disprove nor prove. Tucker's discoveries: “When you fish with a net with big holes, you will never catch a fish that is smaller than those holes. What you find is always limited to what you are looking for.
Current methods and concepts simply fail to cope with this data. " Tucker, whose research is funded entirely by the foundation, began research on reincarnation in the late 1990s after he read an article in the Charlottesville Daily Progress about the Ian Stevenson Clinical Death Research Fellowship: “I was interested in the idea of life after death and the question of whether the scientific method can be used to study this area."
After initially volunteering in Stevenson's department for several years, he became a permanent member of the team and passed on Stevenson's notes that date back in part to the early 1960s. "This work," says Tucker, "gave me amazing insight."
Reincarnation in numbers:
Tucker's research has revealed interesting patterns in cases of children reporting past life memories. The average age at the time of death of the previous person is 28 years The majority of children reporting past life memories are between the ages of 2 and 6 years. 60% of children reporting past life memories are boys.
Approximately 70% of these children say they have died a violent or unnatural death 90% of children reporting past memories say they had the same sex in a past life The average time between their reported date of death and new birth is 16 months 20% children report having memories of the period between death and rebirth.
What are the features of such children?
Further research by Tucker and others showed that children who have touched this phenomenon generally have IQs above average, but they do not have higher than average increased mental disturbances and behavior problems. None of the children studied tried to free themselves from painful situations in the family with the help of descriptions of such stories.
About 20 percent of the children surveyed had scar-like birthmarks or malformations that resembled the spots and wounds of those people whose lives they remembered, and which they received shortly or during death. Most of these statements of children decline by the age of six, which corresponds to the time, according to Tucker, when the child's brain prepares for a new phase of development.
Despite the transcendental nature of their stories, almost none of the children studied and documented showed other signs of "supernatural" ?? ability or "enlightenment," Tucker wrote. “I got the impression that although some children make philosophical remarks, most of them are absolutely normal children.
You could compare this to a situation where a child on his first day of school is actually no smarter than his last day of kindergarten. Growing up as a Southern Baptist in North Carolina, Tucker explores other more mundane explanations as well, and investigates cases of financial and publicity fraud as well.
"But most of the time, film contracts don't bring this information," says Tucker, "and many families, especially in the Western world, are embarrassed to talk about their child's unusual behavior." Of course, Tucker does not rule out even a simple childhood fantasy as an explanation, but that cannot explain the richness of detail with which some children remember the previous person: "This goes against all logic that it could all be just coincidence."
In many cases, the researcher goes on to say, false eyewitness accounts are uncovered, but there were dozens of examples where parents carefully documented their children's stories from the beginning. "None of the rational explanations put forward so far can still explain another pattern in which children - as in Ryan's case - associate strong emotions with their memories," Tucker wrote.
Tucker believes that the relatively small number of cases he and Stevenson have collected in America over the past 50 years can be explained by the fact that many parents simply ignore or misinterpret their children's stories: “When children are made clear that they are not being listened to or don't believe, they just stop talking about it. They understand that they are not supported. Most children want to please their parents."
A look at consciousness from the perspective of quantum physics
How exactly consciousness, or at least memories, can be transmitted from one person to another is still a mystery. But Tucker believes the answer can be found in the foundations of quantum physics: Scientists have long known that matter, like electrons and protons, creates events when they are observed.
A simplified example is the so-called experiment with two slits: if you allow light to fall through a hole with two small gaps, one of which is a photoreaction plate, and do not observe this process, then the light passes through both slits. If you observe the process, then the light falls - as the plate shows - only through one of the two holes.
The behavior of light, light particles, is thus altered, although the only difference is that the process was observed. In fact, controversial and powerful debate also revolves around this experiment and its results. Tucker, however, believes - like the founder of quantum physics Max Planck - that the physical world can be changed by non-physical consciousness, and it may even have evolved from it.
If that were the case, then consciousness would not need a brain to exist. For Tucker, therefore, there is no reason to believe that consciousness also ends with brain death: "It is entirely possible that consciousness manifests itself in a new life." Robert Pollock, director of the Center for the Study of Science and Religion at Columbia University, notes that scientists have long racked their brains over what role observation might have in the physical world.
However, the hypotheses put forward are not necessarily scientific: “Such debates among physicists tend to focus on the clarity and beauty of such an idea, rather than on circumstances that they simply cannot be proven. In my opinion, this is anything but a scientific debate. I think that Planck and his followers observed and observe this behavior of small particles, on the basis of which they made conclusions about consciousness and thereby expressed hope.
Although I hope they are right, there is no way to prove these ideas or disprove them. " Tucker, in turn, explains that his hypothesis is based on more than just wishful thinking. There is much more than just hope. "If you have direct positive evidence for a theory, it matters even when there is negative evidence against."
Ryan's meeting with his daughter in a past life
Cindy Hamons was not interested in these discussions when her preschool son recognized himself in a photo over 80 years ago. She just wanted to know who this man was. There was no information in the book itself about this. But Cindy soon found out that the man in the photo, whom Ryan called “George,” is now the almost forgotten movie star George Raft.
Who was the person in whom Ryan recognized himself, Cindy was still not clear. Cindy wrote to Tucker, whose address she also found on the Internet. Through him, the photo got into the film archive, where, after several weeks of searching, it turned out that the gloomy-looking man was a little-known actor Martin Martin during his lifetime, who was not mentioned in the credits of the film "Night after Night".
Tucker did not report his discovery to the Hamons family when he came to visit them a few weeks later. Instead, he put four black and white photographs of women on the kitchen table, three of which were random. Tucker asked Ryan if he recognized one of the women. Ryan looked at the photos and pointed to a photo of a woman he knew.
It was Martin Martyn's wife. Sometime later, the Hamons traveled with Tucker to California to meet Martyn's daughter, who was found by the editors of a television documentary about Tucker. Before meeting Ryan, Tucker spoke to a woman. The lady was reluctant at first to tell, but during the conversation she was able to reveal more and more details about her father, which confirmed Ryan's stories.
Ryan said that "he" danced in New York. Martyn was a Broadway dancer. Ryan said that he was also an "agent" and that the people he worked for had changed their names. In fact, Martyn worked for many years after his career as a dancer for a well-known talent agency in Hollywood that came up with creative aliases. Ryan also explained that his old address had the word "rock" in it.
Martyn lived at 825 North Roxbbury Drive in Beverly Hills. Ryan also revealed that he knew a man named Senator Five. Martin's daughter confirmed that she has a photograph of her father along with Senator Irving Ives of New York, who served in the US Senate from 1947 to 1959. And yes, Martyn had three sons, whose names the daughter, of course, knew. But her meeting with Ryan didn't go very well.
Ryan extended his hand to her, but hid behind his mother for the rest of the conversation. Later he explained to his mother that the woman's energy had changed, after which his mother explained to him that people change when they grow up. “I don't want to go back (to Hollywood),” Ryan explained. "I want to leave only this (my) family."
Over the next weeks, Ryan spoke less and less about Hollywood. Tucker explains that this happens a lot when children meet with the families of the people they think they were. “This seems to confirm their memories, which then lose their intensity. I think that they then realize that no one from the past is waiting for them anymore. Some children are sad because of this.
But in the end they accept it and turn their attention completely to the present. They pay attention to the fact that they should live in the here and now - and of course, this is exactly what they should be doing.
Translation by Alena Ivanova