Old Souls by Tom Shroder

Started reading this, figured I'd make a thread for the cases and my other thoughts.

The initial part of the book actually mentions Super Psi, which Shroder found amusing as an attempt to get around the idea of an afterlife. Also seems like part of what made Shroder take Stevenson seriously is how ridiculous and biased Paul Edwards' critique against Stevenson's work was.

Stopping the book for now right when they are heading off to war torn Lebanon. Stevenson really needs to be credited for the sheer effort he took as at this point in the story he is already 80.

Will post the first case...if not tomorrow then soon...

Sci, Did you intend to put a link into this?

David

Sci, Did you intend to put a link into this?

David

You mean to the book? I mean it's on Amazon and Barnes, as AFAIK the publisher still holds the legal rights.

I do plan to try and provide links to as many cases as possible, ideally Psi Encyclopedia has them!

I do plan to try and provide links to as many cases as possible, ideally Psi Encyclopedia has them!

I have not read Shroder's book, but I do know that some of the cases mentioned in the book DO appear in Psi Encyclopedia.

The case of Suzanne Ghanem is one of them I believe. It does appear in the Psi Encyclopedia but the details of the case were unpublished by Stevenson and was actually held as a monograph at DOPS but was supplied to Psi Encyclopedia by courtesy of Jim Tucker.

Even though the case lacks the so-called "eary-bird" testimony (records made before verifications) it seems like a strong one, even though there seems to be no discussion on Stevenson's part about what could be potentially "normal" explanations.

EDIT: I'm currently reading Life Before Life by Jim Tucker (2005) and it seems like the case is also mentioned there. Might be worth checking out!

I have not read Shroder's book, but I do know that some of the cases mentioned in the book DO appear in Psi Encyclopedia.

The case of Suzanne Ghanem is one of them I believe. It does appear in the Psi Encyclopedia but the details of the case were unpublished by Stevenson and was actually held as a monograph at DOPS but was supplied to Psi Encyclopedia by courtesy of Jim Tucker.

Even though the case lacks the so-called "eary-bird" testimony (records made before verifications) it seems like a strong one, even though there seems to be no discussion on Stevenson's part about what could be potentially "normal" explanations.

EDIT: I'm currently reading Life Before Life by Jim Tucker (2005) and it seems like the case is also mentioned there. Might be worth checking out!

Thanks found the entry.

More than anything, however, Saada wanted to see her eldest daughter Leila one last time. Leila could not come, having lost her passport. Shortly before Saada’s death on 11 March 1972, her brother attempted to call Leila in Venezuela, but Saada died before he could get through. Her last words were ‘Leila, Leila’...

... She began talking extremely early, and her first words were ‘Awo Leila’, which became more clear as ‘Hello, Leila’ as she grew. She would grip a telephone receiver while saying it repeatedly.

I really do appreciate cases like this where the reborn person, as a child, is thinking about the children they left behind. Sometimes as initially comforting as Survival might seem the idea this world is a meaningless video game and suffering is just part of the game's plot sets in...whereas these cases at least suggest there is a greater power at work - not a God per se but the love we feel for each other as humans.

There's another case in India that will be mentioned in Old Souls where a girl as a baby and toddler cradles varied objects and makes sounds that eventually become the the name of the daughter she left behind in her previous life.

And there's the case of a slain on duty cop - I'll have to look up the names - who becomes the son of the daughter he always assured he would keep safe. He even has defects to his heart in this new incarnation matching with [where] the bullets killed him in his prior life. To get a bit ecumenical calls to mind the Song of Solomon ->

"Make me like a seal over your arm, like a seal over your heart, for Love is as Strong as Death, as unyielding as the grave."

Perhaps all a bit sad but at least a sign the relationships we have in these brief lives are meaningful.

Anyway, will post the first case mentioned in the book tonight!

So first case in the book is Daniel Jirdi who in past life claimed to be Rashid. No log in the Psi Encyclopedia AFAICTell, but the case is mentioned in a few places online.

From Old Souls:

As I read the outline of the case in Stevenson’s notes, I was gratified: it had a number of important features, which, if they held up under scrutiny, would be very impressive. To begin with–and this is a common feature of Stevenson’s cases–the life Daniel Jirdi remembered was excruciatingly ordinary, virtually glamourless: a single, working-class man, childless, unmarried, unrenowned, killed in a completely routine accident–hardly a likely subject for a youngster’s fantasies.

However Shroder notes the case is imperfect:

Daniel’s case, however, also had one key weakness, one shared by all but a rare few of Stevenson’s cases: the two families had found each other and met before Stevenson interviewed either.

The case has a few discrepancies. Shroder also notes Stevenson essentially negatively weights any case where the families find each other before Stevenson interviews either one. This makes sense, especially for the Druze where reincarnation is both held as a sacred truth but also in "violation" of the local larger religion.

Also if the case is genuine it seems anger can also carry across lifetimes -

MAJD: Who was driving?
DANIEL: Ibrahim.
MAJD: Is he older than you?
DANIEL: Older by four years.
MAJD: Do you see him?
DANIEL: No. And if I see him, I’ll kill him.

While we were in the car, another car passed us and scolded us, so Ibrahim turned the car to go back and scold them, but the car spun and we crashed. They picked up my friend, who was near me, and left me. Everybody who was in the car was found outside after the crash. I also remember I was dropped from a balcony. That is all that I remember.

There ends up being another case in the same family of a 21 year old woman who claims in a past life she was tortured and killed during the fights between Christians and Druze. Sadly the evidence is pretty much nothing. Shroder does note the way the young woman tells the story seems very matter-of-fact and given the Druze belief in reincarnation as just a part of life accords no special status. However he also notes that this story could be a child internalizing the suffering they see around them.

The other important thing Shroder covers is the extent of damage the conflict caused, the way different sides can see the same war, and how humans -for better or worse- get on with life after horrific destruction and death.

They meet Daniel who is living with his wife and young son. His wife laughs about how she has two sets of in-laws from two lives. Shroder wonders about the advantage of a support system a past family might bring and if this could be motive for fabricating such a story. However he also notes:

On the other hand, it also meant that all over Lebanon, apparently, families in a position to know if a child’s statements were accurate, and with a reason to be cautious about accepting them as true, had accepted these claims unreservedly enough to enter into lifelong relationships.

Daniel seems to recall a few things, but has none of the mechanic skills Rashid has. However he claims to have met Ibrahim, the one who was driving the car in the fatal crash that resulted in Rashid's death which is new information for Stevenson. Also ->

You said you saw Rashid’s grave. How did that make you feel?”

Silence. A smile. “I thought, ‘Death is not a scary thing.’”

Majd, Stevenson's translaor, and Shroder go looking for some record of the accident. They find one, with some details matching Daniel's account of how his past life Rashid [had died] and some being different. Shroder feels more impressed by the possibility now than before.

Majd, Stevenson, and Shroder go to Rashid's house.

On a table in the center of the room, surrounded by a half dozen chairs and two deep burgundy sofas of crushed velvet, was a coffee table with a framed eight-by-ten-inch photograph: Daniel Jirdi’s wedding photo. The son whom they believed they had lost to death and regained through rebirth.

Muntaha had been knitting a sweater for Rashid before he died. One day, after they had begun to visit Daniel, the little boy said to her, “Did you ever finish that sweater you were knitting for me?” Muntaha immediately found the unfinished sweater where she’d put it away years earlier, after Rashid’s death. She unraveled the yarn, then used it to knit the sweater in miniature. She gave it to Daniel.

“No, we came without an appointment. We didn’t know the family. We just showed up at the door. Daniel was very happy when he saw us. He said to his mother, ‘Bring bananas for Najla and make some coffee, my family is here.’ We were astonished. Rashid had liked bananas so much that my mother and Najla had stopped eating them after his death because it reminded them of their grief.”

Shroder notes that Daniel doesn't remember Rashid's engagement to a woman named Muna, but seems to remember other details. There is apparently some potential connections between the families even prior to Daniel's claims, somewhat tenuous but enough to raise doubts for both Stevenson and Shroder.

I asked Majd about the Arabic vocabulary for reincarnation. I thought I had identified the word that kept coming up in her translations: takamous.
“Literally, it means ‘changing your shirt,’” Majd said. “The Druse believe that the body is just clothes for the soul, and when you are reincarnated, it is like changing clothes.
“Takamous is reincarnation in general, but when you are talking about someone who has been reincarnated, you use a different word: natiq for a boy, nataq for a girl. It translates to ‘one who talks about the previous generation.’”

And that’s what was so stunning about these Lebanese cases—they were all so checkable. The expectation was that the claimed memories could and would be tested against the living memories of relatives and friends of the deceased.

Next is the much stronger, aforementioned case of Suzanne Ghanem.

Next is the much stronger, aforementioned case of Suzanne Ghanem.

So already posted a link to the case but here it is again.

I do think, in the interest of discretion - not everyone in the families wanted to have their information published - the names have been changed as the names in the Psi Encyclopedia and the ones in the book are not exact match ups.

The basic facts are there, even a picture of Suzanne as a young girl trying to call her daughter from a previous life:

 

Suzanne was born on 21 March 1972 – ten days after Saada’s death – in Choueifate, a suburb of Beirut, to paint supplies store manager Shaheen Ghanem and his wife Munira, who were of the Druze religion.6 She began talking extremely early, and her first words were ‘Awo Leila’, which became more clear as ‘Hello, Leila’ as she grew. She would grip a telephone receiver while saying it repeatedly.

As Suzanne got older, she told her parents that Leila was her child, and gave her own first name as Saada. When asked for her surname, she said ‘My head is still small. Wait until it is bigger, and I might tell you.’

While I initially thought the above was humorous & cute, the book's excerpt about this felt especially poignant to me:

I asked Suzanne’s mother how she felt when her little girl began speaking of a previous life, claiming to belong to another family.

Majd translated.

“I was not concerned,” Munira responded. “This is very common. But when Suzanne was crying, suffering, picking up the phone receiver and crying into it the name of her little girl, Leila, over and over, I was concerned for my child’s pain.”

Also interesting that Saada died in the US but the reincarnation into Suzanne occurs in Lebanon.

I think the previous case was seen as more joyful, where everyone mostly gets along and accepts a reincarnation has occurred. This one has more complication and more sadness in it ->

Suzanne gave him an unreadable look. Hassam, though, continued talking to us, seemingly by way of explanation. “A boy who said he was Hanan’s brother reborn wanted to meet Suzanne. She refused, because she did not want to raise the emotions. Later, when the boy died, she was upset.”

Abruptly, Suzanne stood and walked out of the room as if she had suddenly remembered something she urgently needed to do elsewhere. It took a moment for me to realize that she had been crying.

Stevenson turned to her parents: “How old was Suzanne when she stopped calling Farouk every day?”

They smiled.

“I didn’t stop,” Suzanne said. “I still call him.”

“How often?

“Whenever I feel like it. Maybe more than once a week.” Her face twisted into an ironic smile. “He is scared of his new wife.”

Now she was speaking Arabic. Majd translated the answer. For a minute, I thought that I had misunderstood. New wife? And then I realized that “she” referred to the woman whom Farouk had married a quarter of a century ago, not long after Hanan’s death.

It makes you realize that as wonderful as the thought of Survival can be, great love that continues through lives can also cause issues with getting on with life.

Six months later, I would be paging through Suzanne’s thick file in Stevenson’s Charlottesville office and come upon a photograph of Saada Mansour at her wedding, when she was just a few years younger than Suzanne is now. I would see there the same eyes, the same heaviness, the same mystery.

Shroder also reflects on why he has trouble accepting the idea of reincarnation:

And my most profound learning about the deaths of the people I had loved the most was this: They had vanished. Their absence had palpable force, a stunning irrevocability. More than ten years after my father’s death, I still sometimes picked up the phone and began to dial his number, only to be stung by one inescapable certainty—there was no one to call. He wasn’t there. Or anywhere.

If reincarnation were fact, why hadn’t it touched my life? Why couldn’t I at least feel its possibility in my gut?

Stevenson also shares a darkly amusing anecdote:

“In general, I tend not to claim too much for the spiritual benefits of proving reincarnation,” he said. “When I first went to India, I met with a swami there, a member of a monastic order. I told him about my work and how I thought it would be quite important if reincarnation could be proven, because it may help people to lead more moral lives if they knew they would come back after death. There was a long silence, a terrible silence, and finally he said, ‘Well, that’s very good, but here, reincarnation is a fact, and we have just as many scoundrels and thieves as you do in the West.’ I’m afraid that rather deflated my missionary zeal.”

Stevenson also talks a bit why he doesn't think the children are just scanning memories using ESP:

Stevenson took a sip of his Scotch. “There’s more than memory involved,” he said. “When the subjects are young children, they say, ‘I have a wife,’ or ‘I am a doctor,’ or ‘I have three buffalo and two cows.’ They are the previous personality, and they resist the imposition of a new identity. Daniel told Latifeh, ‘You aren’t my mother, my mother is a sheikha.’ I had a case in Thailand of a man who, as a child, remembered having lived the life of his mother’s brother. He said that he has a clear memory from his infancy in this life: When he was on his back, he felt he was an adult man and had all the memories of a previous life. But every so often, meddlesome adults would turn him over and he was then nothing but a small little baby, helpless in the cradle. Like a tortoise, he would struggle to get himself flipped over on his back again.”

[Ninshub]

I've got the book but haven't read it. Maybe I should read it at the same time too!

I've got the book but haven't read it. Maybe I should read it at the same time too!

That would be great, I think it'd be good to have someone else chime in about what they find poignant about the cases.

[Ninshub]

OK, I'll do so Sci.

I'll probably be slow, though. You'll be ahead of me, doing all the hard work and the slogging of writing, and I'll just read what you write and add a few comments or 2 if they come up!