Customer Reviews

Where Reincarnation and Biology Intersect

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This is basically the "Reader's Digest" version of a much longer, more technical work. Thus, the descriptions of some of the cases are very sketchy. Nevertheless, Stevenson's reputation is impeccable after something like 40 years in this field, and you can be pretty confident that he isn't seriously skewing the facts. He seems to be more up-front than in earlier works in acknowledging that reincarnation is really the only plausible explanation for many of these cases. The book focuses primarily on cases where birthmarks and other physical anomalies match up with injuries suffered in the prior life. The book is well-illustrated with photographs, and some of the cases are truly weird. Put this book together with something like his Twenty Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation, and your theology will be sorely challenged if it denies the reality of reincarnation.

Ian Stevensons book is a superb scientific exploration into the generally more esoteric realm of reincarnation. He has collected over 2600 reported cases of past-life memories of which 65 detailed reports have been published. It is correct, as one reviewer claims, that these reported cases are primarily from Buddhist, Hindu, African or Native American cultures where such phenomenons are more widely accepted than in the West. But this is natural, says Stevenson, as these cultures more openly will allow a child to speak about a previous life without being disbelieved or rebuked as they may be in the Christian West. Young children are very impressionable and will generally suppress whatever his or her parent or the culture does not permit them to believe in. Thus, it is reasonable to assume that there will be more such claims in these non-Western cultures to conduct such studies. One cannot accuse Stevenson of not following a scientific approach (instrumental injunction, direct apprehension, communal confirmation), his book brims with extremly detailed reports from children whose memories have been carefully collected and matched with the data of their former identity, profession, residence, and the way they died. If this is not believable science, what is? If reincarnation is a new concept to you, read and judge for yourself. If you already believe in reincarnation, read and get more rational reason to state your case.

This is definitely NOT the best book from dr. Ian Stevenson. The author has lost his skepticism and most of his scientific impartiality. The majority of cases included in this book lacks strong evidence sugestive of reincarnation, with the exception of a few very good cases. Because of these good cases, the book is still worth its value, but overall it is not a great work. "Children who remember previous lives" is a much better book from the same author.

Dr Ian Stevenson had reported several cases of reincarnation-type. His experience represents the best scientific evidence suggesting reincarnation as a natural fact. This book is a summary of the best examples, presented in a small brochure, focusing on an intriguing aspect: beyond memories of a previous life, reported by some children (usually between one and five year-old), some of them present birthmarks in their skin, or congenital organ damages, that are related to injuries suffered in the previous life. Some case reports reveal impressive concordance of children birthmarks and autopsy reports of the supposed previous incarnation. Could it occurr only by chance? Or this evidence represents a scientific basis for reincarnation beliefs?

This is not a book I would expect to read in one sitting. The author approaches the subject very clinically which makes it more credible, but a little dry. He has included photographs to support his material. Very convincing. An interesting read

Very Impressive work! This book is essentially a summation of Ian Stevenson's larger, more thorough volumes of case studies that make a very strong case for reincarnation from a medical doctor's perspective. As such, his beginning remarks can be a little tedious, but this is simply an example of how thorough he was in considering all the possibilities of the appearance of particular birthmarks in children-- birthmarks that correspond remarkably with the manner of another individual's death in a previous lifetime. If you are a skeptic or not quite sure what to believe about the existent of reincarnation, this book will definitely give you cause to reconsider. Dr. Stevenson has done us all a great service by helping us to better understand a reality that has been all too easily overlooked by western religions and culture.

In his book "Reincarnation--A Critical Examination (1996/2002)," the late Paul Edwards quoted Charles Darwin, together with other three well-known scholars, saying "To kill an error is as good a service as, and sometimes better than, the establishing of a new truth or fact." Hence, Edwards tried to kill his supposed an error, i.e., the idea of reincarnation, in particular, the scientific lifework on "Reincarnation" by the late Professor Ian Stevenson. In the last pages he quoted Stevenson's testimony in a BBC program (in 1976); let me quote the part:
Professors Cohen and Taylor regarded the notion of extra-cerebral memories as totally absurd. Professor Stevenson vehemently disagreed. "Memories may exist in the brain," he said, "and exist elsewhere also." The best evidence that they may exist elsewhere, Stevenson continued, comes from his own reincarnation research. On the question of the "storage" of memories he remarked that there "might be a nonphysical process of storage." The memories "might be in some dimension...which cannot be understood in terms of current physical concepts."

In the last chapter of his book Stevenson wrote "In saying this I declare myself an adherent of interactionist dualism." And Cartesian dualism is a notorious idea from the viewpoint of mainstream science as well as mainstream philosophy because the idea supposes the mind exists in a nonphysical dimension (probably, as well as in physical dimension during life, if not detectable physically). The nonphysical dimension for the mind is the problem because it "cannot be understood in terms of current physical concepts," as Stevenson stated. The supposed interaction between the mind and body may violate the cherished "empirical" physical law of conservation of energy. This violation is one of the bases of Daniel Dennett's rejection of Cartesian dualism. Why hasn't any dualist tried to demonstrate the violation to justify his/her being a dualist?? Even the late parapsychologist John Beloff tried to explain a PK (psychokinesis), the table-levitation performed by the medium D.D. Home, without violating the law of conservation of energy! This weak attitude of researches of paranormal phenomena has been one of the reasons to keep skeptics saying what they want to say against any paranormal phenomena claimed by parapsychologists.
And, in my opinion, the cherished law was violated a long time ago in 1907 in the weighing the soul experiment conducted by Dr. Duncan MacDougall. One may say: the 21 g of the soul MacDougall reported in his paper is a result of his wishful thinking, as the physics professor Robert L. Park criticized in his book "Superstition: Belief in the Age of Science (2008)." As a matter of fact no scientists, including Stevenson or any parapsychologists, have ever referred to MacDougall's paper in their relevant research papers or books (though if I should be more precise, there are a few).
It is true that MacDougall's paper has been ignored for the past 100 years in scientific community. But this does not mean that his experiment is wrong; it simply means that no other scientist has conducted an independent experiment to verify or refute MacDougall's result, and this simply shows the negligence of scientists' obligation! If they believe MacDougall being wrong, they should show it by conducting an independent experiment. An irritated author, Dan Brown, fictionalizes in his recent book, "Lost Symbol," a noetic experiment of weighing the soul, though his writing in the book (in chap. 107) is scientifically completely wrong.
Hence, I would like to refer to a scientific paper recently published in the Journal of Scientific Exploration in the 2010 Spring Issue, Vol.24/No.1/pp.5-39: "Rebuttal to Claimed Refutations of Duncan MacDougall's Experiment on Human Weight Change at the Moment of Death." (This Vol.24/No.1 is available from amazon.com.) This paper's conclusion is that (1) MacDougall's experimental results (of the four cases) are scientifically very much sound (this is confirmed based on theoretical computational simulations of the experiment to rebut existing scientific criticisms), (2) however, his result must be confirmed by some independent experiments by other scientists to eliminate any possible systematic errors, (3) if confirmed, this means that the cherished law of physics, the conservation of energy, is violated in human's Life-to-Death transitions if we confine ourselves in physical dimension and Stevenson's claim of "nonphysical process of memory storage" shall be justified, and (4) this type of the law's violation will not be rare but rather common in some psychological transition events (such as in OBE, dreams, trance channeling, alternating of personalities in MPD/DID patients), which most physicists are reluctant to consider seriously because of the involvement of human beings, who sometimes cannot be trusted in scientific experiments as a participant.
Finally I would like to say because of my being a non-materialist that I do not subscribe to Cartesian dualism, because modern dualism presupposes the Big Bang theory & the Darwinian theory of evolution in the physical dimension, even if it accepts the mind in the nonphysical dimension. I rather subscribe to the mental monism: Consciousness comes first, not the last as current science supposes!
<Added comment on 5 Oct. 2011>
In the final chapter (on p. 182), Stevenson wrote about how a rebirthing personality to select his/her parents. He wrote, for example, "In addition, we have seen in many cases that a previous personality had strong ties of affection to the subject's parents." Stevenson, naturally, never speculated about such a case that no previous personality selected an embryo prepared by a pair of parents.
According to Wikipedia for the entry "Stillbirth": "The causes of a large percentage of human stillbirths remain unknown...." "The mean stillbirth rate in the United States is approximately 1 in 115 births,...Many stillbirths occur at full-term to apparently healthy mothers, and a postmortem evaluation reveals a cause of death in only about 40% of autopsied cases." Certain psychical knowledge (which is referred to in the abovementioned paper in the Journal of Scientific Exploration) tells that if no soul/personality enters into the embryo until full-term, then results in a stillbirth.

This is an interesting book. Much of it dove-tails with what Rabbi Yonassan Gershom has written about those who died during the Holocaust and have been reborn as blond haired-blue eyed Gentiles. Except that Dr. Stevenson's cases seem to lose their memories of the events in their previous lives at about age 7 or 8 and Rabbi Gershom's cases seem to be forever haunted by their experiences. One other thing I found disturbing about Dr. Stevenson's work is that the majority of his cases are from India, Burma, and Thailand, where reincarnation has been acceptable many centuries longer than it has been acceptable in our Western culture. It makes it much easier to doubt his cases than if the majority of his cases were from a culture that was less accedpting of the theory.