Near-Death Experiences and Reincarnation

Claims of Past-Life Memories in Near-Death Experiences by Bruce Greyson

A new article of interest in the latest issue of the SSE magazine Edgescience, #46, at https://www.scientificexploration.org/do...nce-46.pdf.

"How do young children’s descriptions of past-life memories correspond to descriptions of NDEs? Medical student Poonam Sharma and child psychiatrist Jim Tucker examined
cases of Asian children who claimed to remember not only a past life, but also the period between the past life and this one.10 They found striking similarities between what these children say about the environment between lives and what Asian near-death experiencers say about the world of the NDE. That would seem to support the belief that these past-life memories may be real memories of another incarnation. In addition to that corroborating evidence, there are some NDEs that include apparent memories of past lives.
.......................................
There is David Moquin’s NDE, when he was hospitalized with double pneumonia at age 48. He described for me these visions as he was in and out of coma for several days:

"During that time, I experienced at least two events that felt like past lifetimes. The one that has haunted me for the past 24 years was that of burning to death in an airplane crash. I kept seeing myself on fire and trying to reach a field just past a line of trees and a barbed-wire-type fence. I crashed, hit my head, and tried to crawl out as I was engulfed in fire and couldn’t breathe.

Many years later a psychic told me that in my last lifetime I died landing a fighter plane on an odd single digit day in November 1944. I was born December 21, 1944. My daughter, hearing the recording of the reading, googled and found that Captain Fryer was the only pilot that died on an odd single digit day that November, and that he died trying to land his burning P-51 Mustang. My favorite plane has always been the P-51. The model sits on my desk. My daughter asked me questions and I seemed to know the names of my wing commander, squadron commander, mother, and father."

Unlike Anita Moorjani’s apparent memories of a past life, David Moquin’s included verifiable details that were subsequently corroborated as true for a particular person who died a month before David was born. Are David Moquin’s memories from his NDE—and those of young children that seem to be accurate accounts of the life of someone from the past—
compelling evidence that we live more than once?"

I think so. It appears that there are enough cases of past life memories and reliving experiences occuring during NDEs to conclude that both NDEs and reincarnation memories, though they are somewhat different and separate paranormal phenomena, are to be expected because they are both part of the same reality. 

It is a little discouraging that Greyson, one of the leading scientific authorities on NDEs, still poses this as a question, as if he is undecided himself.

Many years later a psychic told me that in my last lifetime I died landing a fighter plane on an odd single digit day in November 1944. I was born December 21, 1944. My daughter, hearing the recording of the reading, googled and found that Captain Fryer was the only pilot that died on an odd single digit day that November, and that he died trying to land his burning P-51 Mustang. My favorite plane has always been the P-51. The model sits on my desk. My daughter asked me questions and I seemed to know the names of my wing commander, squadron commander, mother, and father."

This got my back tingling! 
I wonder if he’s a pilot in this life? (pro or otherwise)
A month is a short time between lives, I wonder how quickly a turn about can be completed? As you can probably tell, I’m quite keen on the idea of reincarnation. I’ve heard it from too many relatively reliable sources. It vibes man! It just vibes! 

This got my back tingling! 
I wonder if he’s a pilot in this life? (pro or otherwise)
A month is a short time between lives, I wonder how quickly a turn about can be completed? As you can probably tell, I’m quite keen on the idea of reincarnation. I’ve heard it from too many relatively reliable sources. It vibes man! It just vibes! 

"A month is a short time between lives, I wonder how quickly a turn about can be completed?"

I know researcher Jim Matlock has talked about this quite a lot. There will always be exceptions, but often when a person meets a sudden or unexpected death at a young age, they tend to return relatively quickly, though I'm thinking of two or three years being quick. The argument being, there were things which were incomplete, experiences which didn't take place, opportunities not available, due to the shortened lifespan (a wartime pilot killed in action would tend to be young, this one was around 27 years old I understand).

But there will always be practicalities - if there is a queue of departed souls volunteering or wanting or needing or being obliged to return (I can't say which) and a finite number of births available, then things are bound to vary.

I'm tending towards the idea that those who die at a ripe old age may have no great hurry to do it all again, so the interval would tend to be longer. Again, there would always be exceptions.

Claims of Past-Life Memories in Near-Death Experiences by Bruce Greyson

A new article of interest in the latest issue of the SSE magazine Edgescience, #46, at https://www.scientificexploration.org/do...nce-46.pdf.


I think so. It appears that there are enough cases of past life memories and reliving experiences occuring during NDEs to conclude that both NDEs and reincarnation memories, though they are somewhat different and separate paranormal phenomena, are to be expected because they are both part of the same reality.

Thank for posting. This is an interesting topic. NDEs and past-life recall do sometimes give overlapping types of description. There was an NDE account which I read a few years ago and I've been unable to find again (there are so many now) where a woman saw a number of her past life selves during the experience. And likewise past-life recall sometimes covers the NDE-like part at the ending of a previous life.

Oddly enough, I find it harder to find anything which I particularly trust on the time between lives, much has been written but I often feel like it is very subjective and what we each experience may be very different. I'm just leaving it open, a kind of blank slate rather than lots of expectations.

It is a little discouraging that Greyson, one of the leading scientific authorities on NDEs, still poses this as a question, as if he is undecided himself.

Well, perhaps the clue is in the word 'scientific '. It implies he is addressing a particular audience, those interested in science. I'm not sure that the scientific world is quite ready to receive an announcement that we are all immortal. I'm not sure when that audience will be ready. Maybe these things go in cycles. During the heyday of spiritualism, it was already a fairly widely accepted idea, but got pushed into a backwater as time went on.

Quote from the article linked in the OP.

He [Ian Stevenson] particularly avoided memories recovered in hypnotic past-life regression because of the increased suggestibility of people when they’re hypnotized. The purported past lives recalled under hypnosis may be extremely plausible and convincing to the person having the experience. But experiments have shown how easily suggestions given by a hypnotist can influence the features of the purported past life to conform to these suggestions. It’s not that information acquired under hypnosis can’t ever be right, but rather that it’s not reliable enough to be trusted as scientific evidence.

Sorry, I'm not buying this argument. One could just as well argue that chemistry is not to be trusted because contaminants in the apparatus can influence the results. What is needed is some guidelines and control over the technique of the hypnotist - some do readily introduce expectations, much like leading a witness in a court case. But it needn't be so. Think of the controls in mediumship studies of Julie Beischel for example.

Quote from the article linked in the OP.

Sorry, I'm not buying this argument. One could just as well argue that chemistry is not to be trusted because contaminants in the apparatus can influence the results. What is needed is some guidelines and control over the technique of the hypnotist - some do readily introduce expectations, much like leading a witness in a court case. But it needn't be so. Think of the controls in mediumship studies of Julie Beischel for example.

I agree with Stevenson's attitude toward the veracity or validity of hypnotic regression-obtained past life memories. They are too often subconscious confabulations generated to satisfy both the suggestions of the hypnotist and the hopeful aspirations of the patient. From my own experience when I went in for a series of past-life regressions, I found them to be generally unrewarding. The hypnotist would (as is necessary) suggest that I go to the past life experience that was the root of my current problem (without suggesting the nature of this past life), and I could usually tell that my subconscious mind was going through some sort of mentally laborious process trying to come up with something. I was mentally tired afterward.

I think that my finding myself to be mostly unhypnotizable was an indication that I generally don't respond to suggestion in any deep way. And this was the underlying reason for the lack of useful results in the past-life therapy sessions.

[Laird]

I had a similar experience with past-life regression as you did, nbtruthman, although I only had a single session.

That said, I have no reason to doubt that others have credible experiences, especially when they contain such veridical content as that investigated by Robert Snow, as described in a series of videos posted a while back by Typoz in post #29 in the Reincarnation Multimedia Resources Thread (I haven't watched all of them).

I did find it curious that in the linked article, the word of some unidentified psychic was accepted as credible in the context of verifying past-life recall.

Many years later a psychic told me that in my last life-
time I died landing a fighter plane on an odd single
digit day in November 1944.

But still, I've always had reservations about hypnosis for myself and haven't consulted a hypnotist. I did try one (or several) self-regression recordings to be found on youtube. Even then I was very cautious, I first listened to the recording while I was wide-awake and alert, just to find what sort of suggestions or instructions it contained. After some time, I tried it for real, and nothing at all happened. It took several attempts, spaced out at intervals of days or weeks before I got anything - even then it wasn't much. What I did find is that it helped to find a very comfortable semi-reclining position so I could in effect lose awareness of my physical body - almost like preparing for an OBE. As I said I didn't get much, in part because it was like a short flight in an aircraft, most of the time is spent in take-off and landing.

The brief fragments I did get were plausible, but with no identifiable features, just a glimpse of a few moments in a very ordinary life, before any of the niceties of modern civilisation.

But there will always be practicalities - if there is a queue of departed souls volunteering or wanting or needing or being obliged to return (I can't say which) and a finite number of births available, then things are bound to vary.

I'll admit the concept of reincarnation isn't something I've studied, so this may be a rudimentary question....

With the growth in population on planet Earth, wouldn't the concept of a queue be somewhat incoherent?  This gets to the question of soul "creation" vs reincarnation.  Just curious how this is generally accounted for in reincarnation circles.

I'll admit the concept of reincarnation isn't something I've studied, so this may be a rudimentary question....

With the growth in population on planet Earth, wouldn't the concept of a queue be somewhat incoherent?  This gets to the question of soul "creation" vs reincarnation.  Just curious how this is generally accounted for in reincarnation circles.

Well, as I mentioned, I don't have any clear picture of the between-lives existence. In the article which nbtruthman posted at the start, Anita Moorjani describes the elusive nature of time, where she pictures everything happening at once. It is only our material world which gives us the familiar concept of events happening in a neat linear sequence (Though Einstein even dispensed with such things, instead having events occurring but it not always being possible to place them in sequence).

Suffice to say, I'm not able to fulfil your request for accounting for what takes place. It is as much a difficulty as trying to explain how non-physical consciousness interacts with physical matter at all. But that aside, we do know there are (at any point in our Earthly timeline) a finite number of births. How many souls there are out there, I have absolutely no idea.

Again the article at the start does describe a rather nice reincarnation case where a baby as it grows readily self-identifies as the reincarnation of a deceased relative. And then into that neat picture, two other children also identify as that same deceased relative. It is also mentioned that sometimes a person may have a past-life recall of having been two separate individuals who had lived at the same time.

Account for things? I cannot. But nor can we simply dismiss or ignore the evidence. It isn't all delusion or fakery.