There are various sorts of empiric evidence offered in support of the idea of reincarnation. Much of it is weak or useless, some of it strong.
Let’s take a look at these.
Perhaps we’ve all had the feeling “I’ve been here before.” Could one feel that way because of experience from a past life? Maybe, but practically speaking there’s no reliable way to know.
Sometimes certain people—they may be called “mediums,” “psychics,” “sensitives,” or (a more recent term) “channels”—transmit what are purported to be messages from departed souls. The medium may speak in trance, or his or her hand may produce writing automatically. This is a field in which parapsychologists have done extensive investigation. It’s a problematic field. Frauds abound.
Much of the material transmitted tends to be stereotypical. The wisdom and insights dispensed by “departed spirits” often consist of a tired litany of new-age platitudes. For discriminating minds, this doesn’t create a lot of confidence.
Most material generated by mediums or channels is unfalsifiable—there’s nothing specific enough to either prove or disprove.
Even when material is specific and impressive and fraud seems ruled out, explanations other than communication with departed souls are available, and almost always more likely.
This doesn’t mean that all mediumistic communication or channeling can be dismissed as worthless. Some carefully investigated cases do seem to hold up under scrutiny and show evidence for possible survival of bodily death. But those cases are rare.
And even if there were genuine communication with a departed spirit, this wouldn’t in itself prove reincarnation. The spirit might presumably be communicating from heaven, from hell, or from some sort of limbo, without any “succession of births.” For that matter, even if a “departed soul” tells us there’s reincarnation, how do we know he’s telling the truth? When people here in this world can be such liars, why not people “there”?
A person under hypnosis may remember what might seem to be a former incarnation or re-experience events from a “former life.”
Sometimes the memories or experiences are dramatically vivid. For example, a woman remembering a trial and punishment for witchcraft may show signs of genuine terror.
And what the hypnotized subject says may be rich with little-known but accurate historical facts, or facts that “only such-and-such person could have known.”
Still, many of the problems afflicting cases of mediumship or channeling pertain to past-life regressions as well. And regression cases have other problems of their own.
A core feature of hypnosis is the tendency of the hypnotized subject to respond compliantly to suggestions. In response to hypnotic suggestions, even ones not deliberately given, a subject in trance may subconsciously construct a fictitious past life.
To do this, subjects may draw on information they have gained normally, or perhaps even paranormally.
In some cases, researchers have found that the rich, dramatic details of a “past life” match those of this or that historical novel, a novel the hypnotized subject must have read and then forgotten.
Hypnotized subjects may creatively draw on their inner resources to dramatize imagined experiences, and may thoroughly believe them true, even after the trance is over.
Regression to a “past life”—so-called past-lives therapy—may have therapeutic effects, even if that past life is fictitious. A skilled professional therapist, therefore, may knowingly invoke such regressions as a therapeutic technique.
Less discriminating therapists may themselves be overimpressed by the fictions they themselves have invoked and join their clients in believing them. The more discriminating will know better.
Among other such therapeutic techniques, by the way, are the deliberate creation of a fictitious childhood, one more comfortable and useful for the client than the true one. Another technique is hypnotic progression, in which the client experiences a time in the future—for example, seeing himself in a time when an issue troubling him has been resolved. The client may “experience” this imagined future as vividly and dramatically as an imagined past.
“Past lives” experienced in hypnotic trance are therefore unlikely to be objectively real. As evidence of reincarnation, nearly all such cases are scientifically worthless.
A few cases have shown features that make them more worthy of scientific consideration. But such cases are the rare exception, and the evidence they provide is far from conclusive.
If you’re interested in past-life regressions, there’s something else you should know: The “experiences” from a past life, however fictitious, may profoundly upset the person experiencing them and cause him emotional distress or confusion even after the trance is over. In some few cases, also, the hypnotically invoked “former personality” has spontaneously returned and resisted the usual suggestions to disappear. Like hypnosis in general, “past-life regression” should not be used as a plaything.
Dr. Ian Stevenson offers a further discussion about hypnotic regression to previous lives.
Sometimes an adult not under hypnosis may experience what seem to be memories of a past life.
Again, there may be rich details and sincere conviction. And again, almost always, these cases are easily subject to normal explanation and are scientifically of little or no value.
How can we know that the “memories of a past life” haven’t really been generated from this one? Nearly always, most likely they have.
A few exceptional cases are notable—for example, cases in which a person shows the ability to speak a foreign language he seems not to have normally learned. (This may also be a feature of cases hypnotically invoked.) Such cases are rare, and reincarnation is not the only possible explanation for them.
Here we come to the scientific evidence for reincarnation that is most interesting and persuasive.
Sometimes a child, perhaps at the age when he first begins to speak, will talk about a “past life.” He may give details about that life, sometimes enough to enable one to identify a particular deceased person as the “former personality” whose life the child seems to remember.
The child may yearn to go back to his “former home.”
He may show interests, habits, mannerisms or skills characteristic of the “former personality.”
He may show knowledge of personal matters that few but the previous person would have known.
He may show fears that match the cause of the previous person’s death—for example, a child who speaks of having been killed by a lorry may have a particular fear of lorries.
If the child is brought to the town or village where the previous person lived, he may be able to lead the way to that person’s house. And there he may show signs of recognizing the former person’s friends and relatives. He may show strong emotions towards them, emotions fitting for the previous person. He may act towards them in ways suitable for the relationships that the former person had—like a son towards that person’s parents, like a parent towards that person’s child.
When the subjects of such cases are small children, many of the normal explanations that could apply to adult cases are unlikely, if possible at all.
Small children have not learned anything from newspapers or novels. They cannot draw upon years of adult experience in the world. Their contacts with other persons and places are limited.
Fraud is a possibility, and may sometimes take place. But cases in which fraud seems ruled out, cases carefully investigated by scientists on the lookout for fraud, now number in the thousands.
When children speak of past lives, their parents often discourage them. And the parents, far from seeking to profit from the unusual circumstance, are sometimes reluctant for the case to become known.
Discrepancies in investigative technique? These are also possible. But merely alleging them is not enough. There are too many published cases in which the techniques and reporting appear meticulous.
Normal explanations may still be possible, of course, but they become harder to come up with and support.
Paranormal explanations are also possible.
A child might have powers of telepathy or clairvoyance and might use them to create and dramatize a fictitious past life corresponding to that of an actual deceased person. But why should he do this? And would the extent of the powers this would require—amounting to “super-ESP,” as it’s called—be any more likely than reincarnation?
Another possible explanation is that the child has been “possessed” by a disembodied spirit. For some cases, this explanation may in fact seem a better fit. But for others it seems to offer no explanatory advantage.
Particularly interesting are cases in which a child shows special skills characteristic of the previous person. Knowledge, it might be argued, could be passed normally to a child from some other person, or accessed by the child himself by super-ESP. But skills are forms of learned behavior. How could a child, without training, acquire the skills that another person had?
Cases of what seem to be spontaneous past-life memories in children have been extensively investigated for more than thirty years by Ian Stevenson, M.D., formerly Carlson Professor of Psychiatry and Director of the Division of Personality Studies at the University of Virginia.
He called his first book on the subject Twenty Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation. Years later, with some 3,000 cases on file, he felt justified to call a later, multi-volume work—reporting cases in India, Burma, Turkey, Alaska, and elsewhere—Cases of the Reincarnation Type.
Apart from the particulars of the individual cases, his collection of cases shows statistical regularities that strengthen confidence in the collection as a whole. For example, in 51% of the cases the “previous person” underwent a violent death. A tendency for the purported memories to appear in early childhood and fade as the child grows older are another statistically regular feature.
Dr. Stevenson’s published research, it should also be said, is notable for its rigor. Cross-verifications, searches of medical records, and reporting of discrepant testimony are standard in his work. Dr. Stevenson points out the weaknesses in his cases as well as their strengths. Also worth noting is the extent to which he discusses other possible explanations, both normal and paranormal, as alternatives to the hypothesis of reincarnation.
Other researchers with established professional credentials have independently studied similar cases.
Dr. Stevenson’s most recent contribution to studies of cases of the reincarnation type is an examination of cases in which birthmarks or birth defects seem to correspond to physical features of the "former person," often to fatal wounds. An unusual birthmark, for example, might correspond in shape and position to a previous person’s knife wound. Or severe and unusual birth defects in a person’s legs, defects in the form of ropelike constrictions, might correspond to the injuries of a previous person tied by the legs and killed
A child, one may suppose, might fantasize a previous life, with help from normally acquired knowledge or from what he has learned through ESP. Or adults might wishfully persuade themselves that a child’s statements were more accurate than they were. Or conniving adults might use a child to put up a hoax.
But how is it, we might ask, that a child would show severe and statistically rare birth defects corresponding to wounds verified by medical records to have been inflicted on the body of a person whose life he seems to remember?
Such are the questions dealt with in Dr. Stevenson’s two-volume work Reincarnation and Biology: A Contribution to the Etiology of Birthmarks and Birth Defects, a collection of case histories, with analysis, amounting to more than two thousand pages.
Dr. Stevenson has also dealt with this research in a more accessible summary, Where Reincarnation and Biology Intersect.
In short: Most of what is put forward as empiric evidence for reincarnation can and deserves to be dismissed. But some of it commands attention and is difficult to set aside.