More Notes on Rebirth

In pondering the notion of reincarnation, certain questions arise. The evidence available (and it is strong) suggests that people are born again; but the number of such cases is relatively small. If it were universal, we’d have much larger numbers who remember, not just a few. Therefore it may well be that some people are reborn after death, but not all. The generalization from a small sampling to all of humanity is not based on evidence but on philosophical projections trying to explain the few cases that seemingly always arise—and not just in regions where reincarnation is generally accepted.

In the West the general belief is that souls are created by God at or around a baby’s conception. In Catholicism reincarnation was anathamized by the Second Council of Constantinople (533), which declared both that the “fabulous pre-existence of souls” as well as “the monstrous restoration which follows from it” were wrong. In the East (Hinduism, Buddhism) the pre-existence is assumed—and souls are assumed to be, as it were, sparks of the Ultimate itself, entangled in the material realm by their own illusions and held here until, overcoming them, they rejoin the Ultimate.

The belief held in the East, however, was also articulated by Origen (185-254), an early theologian of the Church in his book, Peri Archon (I’m cribbing from the Catholic Encyclopedia here). He also held that souls pre-exist their incarnation, having been created outside of time; their presence in time, thus in bodies, is the consequence of their own willful behavior. To quote the Encyclopedia: “Origen’s theory excludes both eternal punishment and eternal bliss; for the soul which has been restored at last to union with God will again infallibly decline from its high state through satiety of the good, and be again relegated to material existence; and so on through endless cycles of apostasy, banishment, and return.”  If Origen used those words literally, he was surely mistaken about satiety, but never mind…

In any case, fascinating. Origen ultimately derives this cycling from the operations of free will—which is at least a coherent sort of doctrine. It assumes that each of us, individually, caused our own fall rather than, as it were, getting our original sin by mere genetic inheritance. The alternative, that of being created in a fallen state, at birth, is, for me, incoherent. In the latter instance all we must try to explain is why we don’t remember the initial act that sent us to a realm where, every morning, we have to put on socks.

Just a handful of those who remember having lived one life before also remember the intermediate state between lives in another and always rather magical realm. And some very few among them also recall having been urged by one or several angels to come back to earth again. Why? Because, evidently, they needed to do so to develop further. Those are interesting cases. In most others, it just happens.

So what does all this suggest? Is the model developmental? If so, the engineering of such intricate machines as bodies would not have been done by the fallen creatures themselves but would be part of the divine plan (which, of course, is the orthodox teaching, but I find it hard to believe); this is a big subject; I will have to enlarge on it later. Something more complex is going on here. I suspect, however, that I’ll have to wait until my own border crossing before the structure that brings us here and receives us back over there—and what’s really behind it—becomes clearer. I’ll put this in that notebook I’ll take with me when I die.

Almeder on Stevenson

I read an article today by Robert F. Almeder, retired professor of philosophy at Georgia State University, in the Journal of Scientific Exploration titled “A Critique of Arguments Offered Against Reincarnation” (link). In the article Almeder makes the point that strong cases that provide empirical evidence for reincarnation—which the work of Ian Stevenson does—that evidence per se falsifies the modern theory that minds are the product of the brain, thus shattering the materialistic stance on human experience.

I got to thinking about that. What other empirical evidence do we have that “mind” or “soul” or “personality” are radically different from bodies and their functions? Near Death Experience reports fail on that score because, while technically the person undergoing an NDE may be dead (“clinical death”), he or she comes back to life to render an account, hence that “death” was not really final. Reincarnation cases are very different. Those who remember a prior life most definitely died but retain memories of another life in a current and new body. My conclusion, in effect, is that reincarnation cases may be the only evidence for the agency’s survival of death, evidence of the kind that may be called empirical, thus discoverable multiple times by different researchers, as has indeed been the case.

My own views on this subject are scattered throughout this blog and may be gathered by clicking on Reincarnation under Categories to the left. Almeder’s article requires some time and attention. A summary of his views is presented in the YouTube I show at the beginning of this post.

Science, Materialism, and Beyond

In the course of looking into a very curious corner of science, an examination of the “weight of the soul,” I became aware of the Journal of Scientific Exploration (JSE), a publication of the Society for Scientific Exploration (SSE). Both SSE and JSE are serious entities, the latter a peer-reviewed and genuinely scientific journal in existence since 1987. SSE’s website is here, and a listing of publicly available articles from JSE (in pdf format) is here. Looking at many of the articles caused me to update my sense of trends in the area, meaning now the intersection between matters of the borderzone and serious science. But first about the weight of soul—and how I stumbled upon the JSE.

In 1907 a physician in Massachusetts, Duncan MacDougall, published results of a research study in Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research and shortly after that in American Medicine. He continuously weighed six terminal patients before and after their death. He rejected one of the six observations but used the other five and concluded that at or very near the point of death the body lost weight, very rapidly or in a very short time, ranging between half and three-quarters of an ounce. He also conducted tests on dogs and found that they did not lose any weight. What material I found on the web emphasized that nobody had been able to duplicate MacDougall’s results. This bare statement on repetition of the investigation intrigued me. I saw no citations of these studies. But in that process, lo and behold, I discovered a 2010 paper by Masayoshi Ishida titled “Rebuttal to Claimed Refutations of Duncan MacDougall’s Experiment on Human Weight Change at the Moment of Death” in JSE Volume 24, No. 10, 2010. It turns out that people refuted but did not replicate the studies. So there you are. That issue is accessible here.

Now for me the fascinating issue here is that in an age of materialism, a doctor would have been inspired to try to find a material proof for the soul’s existence—which was MacDougall’s aim. The fact that nobody bothered to replicate his study did not surprise me. People like me who are certain of the soul’s existence, wouldn’t be interested in its weight—and those convinced of its non-existence would not bother organizing a technically and sociologically difficult venture like that. My own interest was, and is, in the conjunction, namely the attempt to link the transcendent back to the physical in some way—which to me testifies to the narrowness of the materially-focused mind. And in that context, the JSE turned out to be a gold-mine.

For decades now (certainly since the 1950s) I’ve watched with fascination both the astounding increase in genuine experiential evidence for the soul’s survival of death and a parallel development whereby some people have attempted to make use of the ambiguities of quantum theory to materialize these phenomena. The positive evidence arose from near death experience (NDE) studies on one hand and scientific studies of reincarnation on the other. The late Ian Stephenson of Virginia University, largely associated with the latter, was also involved with the former. Another development in this period, indeed arising from the very cumulation of evidence, is a delightful debate about the nature of science, or, rather scientism, led on the one side by those who’ve presented the evidence and work in these fields and the professional skeptics who feel themselves called to conduct an on-going inquisition to stamp out such heretical claims.

The JSE, like a good scientific journal should, presents papers on all sides of this issue. Not, I hasten to say, ideologically motivated debunkers who simply “refute,” but those who wish to explain the experiential using approaches like quantum physics. The general stance of the journal, however, is openness and objectivity. Those who have evidence to present are welcome—if they are, as it were, well-behaved. Therefore we find, in the JSE, the very best presentations of actual evidence favoring the reality of things beyond the border stripped of the attention- (and money-) seeking tendencies of virtually all popular sites on such subjects.

One of the genuinely interesting facets of this subject that I encountered in three days of reading journal articles is that the hard, ideologically-motivated scientism so seemingly firm in the saddle in the United States seems not at all to dominate science as practiced in Asia, India, and in the Near East. An example of that, reporting on some truly astonishing research in China, is Dong Shen’s article, “Unexpected Behavior of Matter in Conjunction with Human Consciousness” in the same issue in which I found Ishida’s article.

The Dance Hall of the Dead

The knights of reason get things right in the hard world of concepts, but for inspiration we look to poets, visionaries, and to mystics. Storytellers belong to the latter tribe, albeit at the humbler working level, hence we often learn something about mysterious and hidden matters from novels and the like. From Tony Hillerman we have The Dance Hall of the Dead, a vivid glimpse into the religious life of the Zuni Indians, a tiny group, part of the Pueblo Indians, about 12,000 all told today, less than 8,000 living the Pueblo life. Yet in that obscure and ancient tradition lives a mythological conception you will find echoing the experiences of Swedenborg, say, of the Tao Te Ching, with hints of reincarnation included. But it takes poetic imagination to do the fusion I’m suggesting.

Here is a summary in Hillerman’s novel put into the mouth of a fictitious Franciscan, Father Ingles. Ingles is speaking.

“What made me think of Kothluwalawa was that business of the dance hall. If you translate that word into English it means something like ‘Dance Hall of the Dead,’ or maybe ‘Dance Ground of the Spirits,’ or something like that.” Ingles smiled. “Rather a poetic concept. In life, ritual dancing for the Zuni is sort of a perfect expression of …” He paused, searching for the word. “Call it ecstasy, or joy, or community unity. So what do you do when you’re beyond life, with no labors to perform? You spend your time dancing.”

Now it turns out that this place, in scholarship as well as in the novel, is a sacred lake near the place where the Zuni river joins the Little Colorado in Arizona. Its formal name is Ko-tluwallawa. Ko stands for “god” and “tluwallawa” for town, city, or pueblo. Thus the name really means “god-town” and also, as I will rapidly show, the Abode of the Dead.

To quote a scholar (A.L. Kroeber, link) here is the original myth of how the watery Dance Hall of the Dead came about: “As the ancient people crossed the [Zuni] river, the mothers dropped their pinching and biting children, who turned into tadpoles, frogs, turtles, and other aquatic animals and descended to the ‘god town’ in the sacred lake, and there at once became the kokko.”

Now the knights of reason will have some problem with that myth—and doubly so when they are told that for the Zuni the word kokko means “gods.” In the Zuni conception the dead are gods—much as in Swedenborg’s writings all angels are former humans. This view has greatly puzzled scholars; they’ve evidently ignored or dismissed voices like Swedenborg’s. The kokko, mind you, aren’t God. That person, in Zuni culture, is Awonawilona, the supreme being, thought of as bisexual, referred to as He-She, the giver of life and present everywhere. Parsed apart further (by Kroeber), the word really means He-She who owns all roads, paths, and ways—and someone like me can’t help but immediately to think of the Tao.

The hint of reincarnation I mentioned above comes from a Zuni belief that every person has an appointed path his or her own—completion of which is mandatory and may not be cut short by suicide, however caused, including excessive grief. Those who thus violate the dispensation must complete that path first before they can descend into the sacred lake and take up their dance in the Dance Hall of the Dead. What little literature is readily available to me does not describe how “finishing the interrupted path” might be accomplished, but it does strike me that in Ian Stevenson’s studies most of the cases of people who recall previous lives feature individuals who died young and by violent means. They remember interrupted lives.

Fact, Fiction, and In-Between

One of the more interesting lenses by which to examine the subject of “faith” is through the lens of reincarnation—a subject touched on in the last post. Those of us living now in wealthy, technological societies are unusually lucky. No other human era had access to as much information, not least to the results of sober and systematic studies of subjects in the hazy regions of the borderzone, reincarnation being one of these subjects. I’ve provided a brief summary on this blog to the studies of Ian Stevenson here. I won’t repeat what I said there but the post outlines what factual knowledge we possess of this claim—namely that people, or at least some people, had lived before.

Well-documented cases—to the extent that these cases can be documented at all—represent a fact difficult to explain away. They represent a “finding,” as it were, uncomfortable although it might be. Most westerners who say that they believe in reincarnation are expressing a feeling rather than a serious thought. It is reassuring in a way—in that death isn’t the be-all and the end-all here. But it isn’t really thought about or there might be a kind of pause. Reincarnation is not really a genuine continuity of any life left behind; the new life is not an expansion or enlargement of the last one—or, if it is, it isn’t a conscious one. The people who remember a previous life well enough for third parties to check the facts are very few in number. Most of us remember nothing—and the parsimonious explanation is that that’s because there is nothing to remember. In regions where reincarnation is part of religious belief, having been born again (but not in the Christian sense) is the mark of failure rather than a boon. We didn’t have what it takes to escape the wheel of karma.

Now reincarnation serves as a cosmological explanation in the Hindu world—as the Fall and its consequence, death, serves in ours. But there is an element of fact in each. Some people do remember having lived before, indeed insistently so. Fact. At the same time the troubles and tribulations of this life are experienced by all; and death is also certainly a fact. To this I would add Near Death Experience studies. Those elements of them telling of experience in another world, meeting a luminous being, relatives who’ve passed on, etc., cannot be objectively checked. But in the early stages of NDEs souls make observations about this world such that comatose individuals cannot possibly make, thus lending some weight by that to that which then follows. This body of information is also a fact.

The fiction—in my title—is the detailed elaboration accruing to these cosmological projections, as common in the East as in the West. It is produced by hypnotic regressions of living individuals who thus “recover” past lives. That literature isn’t even very good entertainment. The notions that bad karma can result in future lives as frogs or dogs or snakes belongs to the fictional category too. The West has produced its low level fiction of horrid devils torturing the wicked in fire with pitchforks—and the righteous harping on clouds. Both East and West have also produced grand and noble myths for which there is not even a shred of factual underpinning. But it is the fiction, largely, that underpins faith, as such.

The In-Between is where the thoughtful person finds himself—and in that zone we find all kind of markers but not a shred of certainty. Human consciousness and its upward potential are very hopeful markers—certainly for me. They point to the presence of meaning in the universe despite the incommensurable meaninglessness of the vastness of material reality. That there is more to reality than the unfathomable depths of burning stars—for that the few odd pockets of fact suffice. To make clear, sharp, conceptual sense of them is denied. A sensible approach, it seems to me, is to accept the visible facts and at least to think about underlying structures that might comprehensively explain all of human experience, not least reincarnation. It too appears to be an aspect of existence. But to assume that reincarnation is the universal fate of every person—that starts to feel like fiction.

To this I might add a third grouping of experiences—and the most puzzling of all. It is the ability sharply and in detail to dream the future. It suggests that there are more things in heaven and earth than dreamt of in our philosophy.

The Monstrous Restoration

In the context of yesterday’s post on a verse in Genesis, it is sometimes instructive to contemplate the vast process by means of which ancient writings have been raised to the rank of revelation and how orthodox doctrines are formed by a process that functions exactly like legislation—thus hammered out, voted in or voted out. How this observation fits the general thematic of the last few posts, the Fall of Man, will become plain as we proceed. The Genesis view is that the Fall was occasioned by sin and brought death as its consequence. (Paul: “The wages of sin is death,” Romans 6:23). One of the very prominent early Christian theologians, Origen (c. 185-254), held a view that is at least mildly conformant to this doctrine, at the abstract level, anyway, if not in detail. Whenever the Church Fathers are mentioned, there you will find a mention of Origen—but invariably followed by the annotation that, well, technically, he was not a Church Father because he had heretical views. Of that in a moment.

Origen’s fascinating view was that souls pre-exist their incarnation, thus that they were created at the very beginnings of Reality. The very fact that we are material bodies was proof for Origen of the Fall, but the disobedience took place before such objects as bodies existed. You might say that humanity’s disobedience took place in a higher realm and that all those here were personally disobedient. The problems associated with “inherited” original sin therefore go away. The disobedience produced a degree of nonbeing in those who disobeyed, and a consequence of disobedience was, is, bodily existence. Origen, therefore, believed in reincarnation, metempsychosis. “Every soul comes into this world strengthened by the victories and weakened by the defeats of its previous life,” Origen wrote. A source I found for that is here—on page 42 of the referenced book. Origen’s scholarly labor involved work in discerning the origins of the New Testament, thus he participated in the process that turns old writings into revelation. But some of his own theological ideas were later condemned as anathema by a legislative body, the Second Council of Constantinople, in 533. He thus exemplifies in person the processes by which doctrines evolve.

The Council declared the “fabulous pre-existence of souls” anathema and condemned those who believed in “the monstrous restoration which follows from it.” The use of those energetic adjectives pleases me—none of the usual bland-talk in the sixth century. The monstrous restoration, of course, is reincarnation. Well, perhaps it is monstrous—if seen from a much, much higher perch in the order of creation.

Two observations. First, it is interesting to note that a very broad hermeneutical interpretation of Genesis’ Chapter 3—viewed as a poetical take on a real state of affairs—could result in so enlarging the picture that Origen’s view becomes credible. Second, that view is widely held in Hinduism, not least the eternal nature of souls and the fact that their capture by Wheel of Karma is the consequence of desire for the low. In that context the death of someone who has become purified is, indeed, a blessing, devoutly to be wished.

Where Rigor is Necessary

In certain contexts rigor is simply understood as part of the situation. Mathematics comes to mind. If a famed mathematician claimed that he’d discovered rational irrational numbers (say numbers simultaneously odd and even), the world of mathematics would sadly assume that senility had set it. In other contexts rigor is present in the logical operations, but if no agreement exists about the elements of the argument, so what? Such is the case in philosophy where the crucial issue is agreement on a definition. Suppose a person refuses to accept that there is such a thing as an “accident,” thus that an attribute of something has a different mode of existence than its essence. Such a person might asserts that the redness of this apple and the greenness of that one is, in each case, part of each apple’s essential reality. For that person logical handling of essences and accidents in argument is neither here nor there.

But rigor is necessary for establishing the facts of reality, thus in reaching definitions or in determining the course of a series of events. We expect rigor in scientific and in legal investigations. The interesting difference between the two is that legal investigations are more comprehensive than the scientific. The latter excludes subjective testimony unless it can be corroborated by physical findings; in legal investigations one person’s subjective testimony may be corroborated by another’s; to be sure, the more people corroborate an alibi, for instance, the better. The legal world recognizes the reality of deliberate deception.

In the regions of the borderzone especially—and that region includes the paranormal—rigor is particularly necessary for establishing whatever claims are made. The claim that reincarnation really happens serves as an illustration. There are two approaches, both claiming scientific validity. One consists of the collection of past life memories from individuals and, once these are recorded, work to corroborate them. The corroboration takes two complementary paths. One is the discovery of evidence that the remembered life really did leave something behind. The complement is to establish that the person making the report could not have reasonably learned about that evidence in the course of his or her current life. The late Ian Stevenson (see elsewhere on this blog) undertook such studies. The other approach is to use hypnotic regression. People are put into trances and are then coaxed to “remember” earlier and earlier experience until they pass the threshold of their birth and remember an earlier existence. Once such trance reports are recorded, the corroboration takes the same route.

Now I submit that the first of these methods is at least potentially rigorous. The second contains a major flaw. Hypnosis is very poorly understood and powerfully associated with suggestion. People can be told to do things while in trance, told to forget that they were told these matters, and will then be observed to perform the actions suggested in trance after they are brought out of it. Hypnotic regressions, therefore, cannot be rid of the suspicion that the subject in trance is merely obeying the subtle suggestions of a credulous hypnotist. Now the famous cases of remembered lives all come from the second approach, not from the first. But that’s not a surprise. You might say that it is rigorous proof of human gullibility.

Forgotten Bricks

It amused me to note today, again, how selective humanity is in choosing what to remember and what to emphasize. I was looking up Plato’s views on the “simplicity of the soul,” which, I’d noted, reading another post, had come to be reduced, by twists and turns, to the simplicity of intellect. Now Plato’s doctrine of the soul’s immortality, based on its unity, immateriality, lack of any parts, and its invisibility is widely known, indeed has become a kind of token. But in the very same dialogue, the Phaedo, in which this conception of the soul is artfully developed, we also get the equally fascinating doctrine that souls pre-exist their births, that life results in death but that death generates life as well—a doctrine that Socrates explains by the analogy of sleep and waking, each generating the other. Ancient intellectual structures remain forever sound, as it were, but it is nevertheless possible to mine them for just those bricks and stones that fit a current fashion in architecture—while others are left untouched in their places. With Origen (185-254 AD), among the ancients, the notion of metempsychosis was still alive until purged from Christianity in the Second Council of Constantinople held in 553. That was at least one kind of fundamental change in the way doctrines of the soul had to be built in the future.

More Comments on Cosmic Maps

One of the reasons why cosmic models interest me is because the starting point for everything, for me, is to build up a big picture as rapidly as possible. Whenever in the past we’ve moved into a new area, I’ve always wasted a lot of gas getting a feel for the whole metro area, quickly and hands on, of course. Look and see. Long before I knew my own neighborhood even reasonably well just north of Detroit, I’d driven the whole length of Interstates 94, 696, 275, 75, 96 and the Lodge Freeway and knew what they were trying to do. I start with a map and then try to fill in the details, the big chunks first. In the process you discover that some freeways aren’t finished yet, that Outer Drives are broken, that beltways aren’t buckled, etc.

When it comes to border zones, particularly the regions beyond the border at the entrance of which barriers bar the way, the difficulties are much greater, but not insurmountable. Some people claim to have been over there. You can read reports and study ancient maps. In this process geographies of the beyond are possible—but they do resemble the strange things medieval authors produced, all from hearsay, just sitting someplace in a monastery. Foolish of me to be one of these monks, but the itch is irresistible.

A certain discipline helps in building or judging models. That discipline is to subject models to a test of comprehensiveness. Let me illustrate this. Despite my very strong conviction that the human mind, the soul, or consciousness (I tend to use these words interchangeably) is radically different from matter, a difference in kind, not merely of degree, I’m very resistant to cosmic models that make humanity the center of reality or of a divine project. Why? Because the visible universe is incomprehensively vast. It’s incommensurable with the human. Now, mind you, I’ve no problem crediting that an invisible, subtle, spiritual cosmos may coexist with the physical—indeed that the two may be meaningfully related. Such a hypothesis seems reasonable to me. But I’m forced to conclude that the human phenomenon itself (even extended to include all life) is most decidedly a minor something—even if I assume, as I actually do, that it is part of a greater spiritual reality. I see us as temporarily marooned, as it were, marooned in matter. That we should take ourselves seriously is good and proper. We have our own legitimacy. I merely object to making human fate central—because we are so incredibly small.

Another aspect of applying a test of comprehensiveness is to see if a model accommodates the whole range of reasonably discoverable experiences reported by humanity. Where dogmatic elements in some cosmology deny such experiences ex cathedra I see a problem. Two examples are Christian denial of the possibility of reincarnation and materialists’ denial of miracles. I also have problems with the way most faith systems explain miracles. But I have no difficulty accepting Thomas Aquinas’ definition in Summa Contra Gentiles: “Those things are properly called miracles which are done by divine agency beyond the order commonly observed in nature.”* My inclination, to be sure, is to understand “divine agency” in my own way, thus not in a manner that narrows the agency to the usual, narrow human conception.

A final comment on cosmologies derived from revelation as this word is usually understood in the Judeo-Christian and Muslim faiths. I accept the notion of revelation much in the same way as I accept miracles, thus as something that reaches us from a higher order. But revelation is acquired by means of the human consciousness and is therefore subject to filtering by existing knowledge, culture, and understanding. Genuine truth reaches us, but the interpretation of it as the literal word of God is, when subjected to a test of comprehensiveness, contradicted by the contents of these scriptures themselves. A real stumbling block, for me, for instance, is the concept of a chosen people.
--------------------
*I found this quote in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “Miracles,” here.

Reincarnation: Western Perspectives

Modern cases of reincarnation studied by westerners mostly involve children who remember a previous life in detail. They remember the names of previous family members. In many such cases, the child reports dying of violence or early in life in some traumatic fashion—while giving birth, for instance. The previous (remembered) family may live in the same or in a distant town. The child usually insists. It says that it does not belong here, in its current family. Some children carry birthmarks at those sites where they were injured in their supposed previous life.

Dr. Ian Stevenson, then at the University of Virginia documented such reports in Twenty Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation (University of Virginia Press, 1974) and in Reincarnation and Biology: A Contribution to the Etiology of Birthmarks and Birth Defects (Praeger Publishers, 1997). He maintained a database of some 3,000 reported cases; of these 200 were “suggestive” of reincarnation in his opinion. Stevenson was an original, erudite, and courageous figure. He was trained in medicine, worked in biochemistry, and, with a partner, made a discovery about oxidation in kidneys. He later took another degree and qualified as a Freudian psychoanalyst; but dissatisfied with Freudian approaches, he eventually began investigating paranormal phenomena. In the process he became the leading scientific investigator of reincarnation. I ought to put “scientific” in quotes because he was treated as an outlaw by many would-be spokesmen for science, described (because he had to be) as objective, careful, and disciplined—but he was said to entertain an “unacceptable hypothesis.” Here is a classical case of the clash between the search for truth on the one hand and of an orthodoxy on the other.

Stevenson labeled only those cases as suggestive of reincarnation where no other explanation of the data seemed as plausible. Even so he studiously avoided making any claims. Hence he used the word “suggestive” rather than some stronger term like “evidentiary.”

All such cases rely on memories—of children. The memories are vivid, including, for instance, the location where some money was buried or what the names of the reincarnated person’s children were. The child recognizes previous locations, the layout of residences and neighborhoods it had never visited before, and people who were its claimed relatives in the previous life. The child greets these people by name, sometimes by nickname known only in narrow family circles. In all of these cases, the will not to believe causes doubters to reach for concepts like telepathy to argue for an alternative means whereby information may have reached the child.

The cases are much more persuasive than the “super-psi” explanation, outlined here, used to explain them away. Indeed the raw data become almost banal, and the birthmarks, where present, suggest that the minds appearing now in new bodies actually participated in their formation along lines that remind one of stigmata, but here caused by unpleasant memories.

Stevenson’s cases come from all over the world, but many more from cultures where reincarnation is accepted. In cultures where the doctrine is taboo, children are shushed when they first begin to talk about such things. They are certainly not believed. No doubt they sense their parents’ anxiety and disapproval. In any case, these memories tend to fade away as the children grow older, no matter which culture they inhabit.

Now for some older western views of reincarnation. The concept has been around from very early on and seems to have been widespread. It was and is held by Hindus and by followers of the Jewish Kabbalah today. The Kabbalah calls the process gil-gul. One of the greatest if also admittedly one of the more controversial of the Church Fathers, Origen (185-254), taught the preexistence of the soul. Origen had an, ah, original view of the scriptures too, declining to follow the “letter” of the scripture strictly where he judged it unfit to be the word of God. He wrote: “Every soul comes into this world strengthened by the victories and weakened by the defeats of its previous life.” One source is here, on p. 42.

Platonist ideas influenced Origen, but he seems to have held his belief in “preexistence” as a matter of logical necessity based on an argument I personally find silly. Origen thought that souls coexist with God and thus have no beginning. Origen argued that God could not be omnipotent without subjects. No one is master without servants. Souls therefore had to coexist with God. Origen’s father died as a martyr; Origen himself was tortured for his faith. He was a teacher of great renown and wrote many books—a shining light, in other words, much admired by numerous people who were later canonized. He was not.

Belief in some Christian version of reincarnation seems to have been held by various groups for at least 300 some odd years in the West—dated from around the time when Christianity formed. With the coming of the Emperor Constantine (reigned 306-337), the Church gained power and began consolidating its ideological rule. The process took the form of various councils, the first of which Constantine organized himself. Bishops gathered at various places and hammered out the shape of orthodoxy. Until then all kinds of sects coexisted uneasily, snarling at each other in their tracts. All this had to be organized. Competing groups now morphed into heresies. At the Second Council of Constantinople, held in 553, “preexistence” was finally rooted out. Souls had to be created within time and only went round once. The council published some 13 anathemas in the summer of that year. One dealt with the “fabulous pre-existence of souls” and condemned those who asserted the “monstrous restoration which follows from it.” If the belief had not been common, it wouldn’t have required quite so firm a sanction. This event, in the sixth century, was not really a philosophical but a political resolution of an article of faith. It is well to hold that in mind. The organization of churches, while deeply intertwined with ideas and their meanings, is an expression of social force aimed at regulating society, not at clarifying thought.