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SPR-Lecture by Titus Rivas about the Interpretation of Reincarnation Type Cases
Lecture held on the 47th Study Day of the Society for Psychical Research on November 6th 2004 in London
Past-life Interpretations: We need all of them
Ladies and gentlemen,
As a Dutch member of the SPR I feel very honoured to have been invited as a speaker on this Study Day, because I consider its subject of great importance. In this respect I would particularly like to
thank Mary Rose Barrington and our chairman
Donald WestFor me, reincarnation research became a realistic scholarly concept
through the works of Dr. Ian
Stevenson. I think his courageous work on young children who claim to
remember a previous life will forever remain one of the basic sources for the
field. As my fellow lecturers of this Study Day
-Roy
Stemman, Guy Lyon
Playfair,
Archie Roy- have already explained, in a typical Stevensonian case, the child
starts to talk about memories of a previous life between the ages of two and
four. His or her memories often begin to fade at the age of 6 or 7. The child's
statements are frequently accompanied by emotions and behavioral patterns that
correspond to the personality the child claims to have been. In many cases there
are birthmarks or birth defects in the child's body that seem to be located on
approximately the same spot where the claimed previous body was fatally wounded.
Also, these cases often involve correct statements about a past life outside the
child's environment and unknown to his present family. In several cases,
investigators reached the child's family before any attempt at verifying the
story was made, and they made written notes of the individual statements. Cases
of young children who claim to recall a previous existence, or Cases of the Reincarnation Type
as they
are commonly known in the scholarly literature, do not only occur among cultures
that endorse a belief in rebirth. They are also found in Western countries,
including Britain, and I have personally found such cases in the Netherlands through 'my' Athanasia Foundation. It is
for these reasons that Cases of the Reincarnation Type are usually seen as one
of the most remarkable and promising types of evidence for survival after death.
Normal and abnormal
interpretations of Past-Life Cases
I share this view, but I think it remains important to exclude
alternative hypotheses for individual cases. In this, I am not alone. Although
Dr. Stevenson is sometimes described as being too naïve about the correct
interpretation of his findings, nothing could be further from the truth. In all
of his books, Stevenson stresses that individual cases differ considerably in
evidential strength and that several different types of processes may be
responsible for them. In fact, it has been Stevenson's meticulous discussion of
possible hypotheses for these cases that convinced me of the reality of
reincarnation. The same can be said about other researchers, such as Erlendur
Haraldsson, Jamuna Prasad,
Satwant Pasricha or Kirti
Swaroop Rawat. None of them would want to claim that all cases suggestive of
reincarnation are equally strong or that alternative interpretations should be
dismissed out of hand. In other words, the serious debate is not about whether
differentiation within the evidence for reincarnation is necessary, but whether
such a differentiation is carried out in an adequate manner.
For example, Stephen Braude holds that Stevenson is naïve about the extent to
which unlearned skills could be based on a child's genetic dispositions. In
other words, Braude does not accuse Stevenson of totally ignoring such
possibilities and he even holds that the reincarnation hypothesis is indeed the
most plausible one for some of Stevenson's cases. So only uninformed
or misleading skeptics will continue to spread the myth that Dr. Stevenson has
not given any serious attention to alternative interpretations.
The
debate about the right interpretation of individual cases is too complex to be
adequately summarized here, because several hundreds of cases have already been
published thus far. It would also not do any justice tothe detailed accounts of
these cases and I would like to advise anyone interested in the field to study
the original reports in order to evaluate the merits of each published case.
Instead, I will try to make the point that not all claimed
memories of previous lives are to be explained through one single hypothesis by
briefly looking at a few representative cases. There is no hypothesis that
covers all the phenomena described in
the literature of reincarnation investigations. As I said before, this
standpoint is entirely traditional, because no serious reincarnation researcher
has ever defended the view that one hypothesis could explain everything.
Fraud
Among the various hypotheses formulated to explain cases of young
children who claim to recall a past life, we can broadly distinguish between
interpretations based on normal
psychological mechanisms and specifically parapsychological interpretations that
introduce elements absent in mainstream psychology. Obviously, for
most debunkers this distinction is downright ridiculous, because for them any
serious parapsychological theory is by definition a theory in terms of normal
psychology. It is remarkable that psychical researchers and
debunkers seem to agree on one thing, namely that there are hardly any Cases of the Reincarnation Type that
should be explained by fraud. There are very few cases in which the parents
could be consciously motivated to drill their child to make statements about a
previous life and the few cases that were discovered have unusual
characteristics.
For instance, the child does not speak about the previous life
until after the age of five. The child claims he or she would have been famous
or powerful in his previous life and this status is exploited for selfish gain
by his present relatives. Also, there is no mention of the child having strong
emotions about his previous life. So, as Archie Roy just pointed out,
fraud is not a serious candidate for most of the cases studied in reincarnation
research.
Reversed
generations and other childish fantasiesHowever, there are other hypotheses derived from normal
psychology that seem more important. It was the early psychologist Ernest Jones who in the
1920s pointed to the existence of a special type of childish fantasy, which he
termed "reversal of generations". According to this fantasy, older people become
smaller and smaller until they have become babies again. Ernest Jones
writes: "For example, a little boy whom I know, when about three and a half
years old, often used to say to his mother with perfect seriousness of manner:
'When I am big, then you will be little; then I will carry you about and dress
you and put you to sleep." I have personally found a case of a Dutch
5-year-old girl who spontaneously remarked: "When I will be dead, I want to be
born again as your baby. But maybe you will be a baby yourself by then." When a
neighbour had passed away, this same girl wanted to know all about it. After
they told her about the coffin, in which the neighbour's body would be buried,
she remarked: "How can she ever become a baby again with those clothes
on?"
The fantasy of reversed generations described by Ernest Jones may
be related to the development of a concept of death in young children. Children
of the age group typical for Cases of the Reincarnation Type usually do not
realise what it means if a person dies. The idea that old age would be followed
by shrinking might be one of the phases towards a concept of death as an
irreversible physical state.
However, if reincarnation is real and if children
may have real memories of their previous lives, the idea of reversed generations
may also be related to a distorted memory of what it means to die and
reincarnate. It is sometimes very difficult to draw the line between possible
real memories of previous lives and possible false memories. Strange as this may
seem, this fact actually adds strength to the hypothesis that in some cases we
are dealing with real memories. This is because normal memory of events that
occur within one and the same life time can also be distorted. Gaps in one's
memory are very common and they are subconsciously filled in with processes akin
to fantasy. We should not expect that this would be any different if people are
sometimes really capable of remembering their previous lives.
One
thing is clear already: we should not look for hard evidence for reincarnation
in cases that can also be explained by a fantasy process. A few years ago, Richard Wiseman
further developed this idea in an experiment
conducted for a television documentary about reincarnation research. Wiseman
states that if you ask children to make up a story about a previous life, they
will sometimes construe a fantasy reminiscent of children's claimed memories of
past lives. However, his unpublished experiments are only superficially related
to spontaneous Cases of the Reincarnation Type. In real cases, children are
usually not encouraged to fantasize about a previous life. Also, they typically
show strong emotions and an identification in relation to their memories, as
well as behavioral characteristics and in some cases birthmarks or birth
defects. Moreover, the cases studied by Wiseman included much less specific
information about names and locations than the stronger Stevensonian cases do.
In other words, Wiseman's unpublished results fail to offer a satisfactory
explanation for typical Cases of the Reincarnation Type.
On the other
hand, we should not be naïve about the incidence of real fantasy cases. I have
personally found several cases of fantasy in the Netherlands.
Fantasy
and compensation
The most striking
one concerns a retired Dutch technical
engineer, who contacted me through the
Parapsychological Institute in Utrecht. As an , he began to have a series
of visions in which he saw himself as a young child involved in a tragedy on an
ocean liner. By piecing together the details of his visions, he concluded that
he had been aboard the Titanic with
his family and had died when it sunk. At the time of his death, he was two years
old. He remembered his second birthday, which was celebrated at his wealthy
aunt's home in Hampstead. At the birthday party there was a teenage girl, his
cousin. After the party, his aunt drove him and his mother to an underground
station, where they took a connection. The next day they boarded a ship and were
shown to their third-class cabin. He was the only child who spent the days with
his mother; the other children spent their days in a nursery school. During the
voyage, everyone was given a tour of the entire ship. There was an accident, and
the ship sunk. He drowned along with his mother. Their bodies were recovered and
buried in the United States. His father had gone to Canada or the United States
on an earlier ship and escaped death.He never saw the name of the
ship in any of his memories, but based on certain details such as the appearance
of the ship, he decided that it must certainly have been the Titanic. He vehemently opposed the
possibility thathis recollections
concerned another maritime disaster. He did recall that at his
birthday party, his cousin had asked his name. Although he couldn't see the name
clearly, he recalled that it sounded like "A-ed." He interpreted this to mean
"Alfred." By looking at the Titanic's passenger list included in a
famous book about the disaster, he came across the name of Alfred Peacock, a
young boy traveling with his mother and sister in a third-class cabin. Also, he claimed that he had personally verified Alfred
Peacock's day of birth in the archives at St. Catherine's House.
F.H. was
very determined to show that his memories amounted to the best evidence for
reincarnation and he tried to direct my investigations. I contacted Dr. Alan
Gauld and several historians specialized in the Titanic and their conclusions
were rather disappointing. The recorded Alfred Peacock was only seven months old
at the time of the trip, according to St. Catherine's House. He had been born in
September 1911, not April 1910. He traveled with his mother and his
four-year-old sister; they had spent their last few days in Southampton, not
London. Although his father had gone to the United States a year earlier, Alfred
did not have an aunt living in London, nor did either of his two aunts have a
teenage daughter. The historians told me that no nursery school existed on the
ship and that passengers had not been given a tour of the ship during the
voyage.
Despite these negative results, the respondent insisted that he
was not lying and that he knew for certain that he had been Alfred Peacock in his
past life. He even went as far as believing that the book, which included the
day of birth of the Titanic Alfred Peacock, had been tampered with rather than
accepting the disappointing outcome. He seriously entertained the idea of a
conspiracy related to the prevention of possible insurance claims and even
claimed that I myself might be involved in this supposed conspiracy.
If we
take his assertion seriously that apart from the Titanic there is no other
historical candidate for his detailed images, his so called memories must really
be based on fantasy. There seems to be a link between the delusions in this case
and the social and medical situation of the subject, which I found to be
horrible. He had lost a leading position with an industrial company due to
personal conflicts. And ever since, he also seemed to have lost control of his
personal life, his physical surroundings and his social environment. He was very
isolated and he felt frustrated in most ways. His fantasies may have
served as a kind of escape. What he lacked in real success, he may have tried to
compensate by grandiose delusions of being the very person with the strongest
past life memories in history. Also, spiritually surviving a catastrophe like
the Titanic's disaster may have served as a symbol of his own desired rescue
from the misfortunes of his professional and personal life.I think the
conclusion that he suffered from serious delusional fantasies is inevitable.
In other words, we have every reason to suppose that part
of what is presented as memories of past lives is really based on fantasy.
In
fact, I have found other similar cases in the Netherlands of subjects who
claimed they had verifiable memories of a past life and whose claims were shown
to be false by the documented facts. Typically, it involves a romantically
inclined personality with little success in society or less success than he or
she desires. The subject claims that he or she can write a whole book on the
memories and is absolutely convinced that they are real. After the so-called
memories are falsified, there are two possible responses. Either the subject is
very disappointed and tries to discredit my research or even the historical
records, or the subject simply adjusts his beliefs in that the memories might
have become more distorted than he expected. In no case found thus far did the
respondent accept the rather unavoidable conclusion that his memories were most
probably based on a subconscious fantasy process.
Although distortion certainly
plays an important role in normal memory processes and it may be expected to
play a role in real past life memories as well, distortion should not be invoked
as a hypothesis if the subject confidently claims that his or her memories
consist of reliable episodic images.
Some of you may recall the
case of Helene Smith studied by Theodore Flournoy who clearly suffered from
dissociative delusions while supposedly reliving memories of a life in India or
on the planet Mars. The difference between her delusions and those of the
subject I studied is that in the latter case it is not immediately obvious that
his memories consisted of fantasies.
Typical
CORTs
Nevertheless, I must stress that
the kind of fantasy cases we have found do not possess the same basic structure
as typical Stevensonian Cases of the Reincarnation Type. They do not concern young children but
s or teenagers and of course they do not involve remarkable accurate
statements or behavioral or physical correspondences with a specific deceased
personality. We therefore have no good reason to extrapolate from these fantasy
cases to typical cases of children who claim to recall a past life.
Let us look next at some Cases of the Reincarnation Type for which
normal hypotheses clearly do not seem to be suitable. These are cases with
paranormal information, behavior or physical characteristics. Please note that
my choice is rather arbitrary, as there are many other similar cases in the
literature.
Yusuf Köse
The
first case I would like to mention briefly here is that of Yusuf Köse,
a Turkish boy who was born around 1897 in Odabashi about 5 km from
Antakya in the Turkish province of Hatay. He was found to have a
birthmark around the back of his neck and unusual birth defects of two
of the fingers of his right hand. When Yusuf was about 3 years old, he
began to narrate events of a previous life. He claimed to have been a
person called Hallil Ridvan from the village of Deruziye about 15
kilometers from Odabashi.He described his house in that village, and
mentioned his wife and a prominent wallnut tree near the house. In a
quarrel with other men, who were enemies of his family, one of them had
drawn a large knife and had begun to cut his neck. Hallil had raised
his right hand to push away the blade of the knife and the knife had
then cut the fingers of his right hand. Because of the pain, he gave up
all resistance, after which his head was cut off. When Yusuf was about
6 years old, his older brothers took him to Deruziye where he
recognized the house and wife of Hallil Ridvan. A few years later, when
he was about 8, Yusuf also recognised the murderer and he even tried to
kill him.
This case was not investigated until 1966. From that
year till 1976 Dr. Stevenson and his Turkish colleague Reshat Bayer tried to
reconstruct it. They interviewed Yusuf Köse who was now in his late sixties and
his older brother. They also talked to a nephew of the murdered Hallil Ridvan.
They established that Hallil Ridvan was killed at Bakras, a place about 22 km
north of Odabashi, Yusuf's birthplace. After his murder, Hallil Ridvan';s body
had been brought into Odabashi where it was noticed by Yusuf's father and other
relatives. They did not know who he was and no one at the village could identify
the body. Similarly, Hallil Ridvan's family did not learn about his murder at
the time. They simply assumed that he had disappeared without a trace until
Yusuf claimed to be Hallil reborn. The investigators also established that
Yusuf's brother claimed Yusuf had had a phobia for knives and swords until the
age of 16.
From an evidential point of view, this case may be
regarded as weak in one respect, namely that it was not investigated until more
than 60 years after it developed. Still, if we take Stevenson's and Bayer's
reconstruction seriously, it can hardly be denied that the case needs to be
explained by a specifically parapsychological hypothesis.
Indika
Ishwara
The next
case I would like to mention is that of Indika Ishwara. Indika and his brother
Kakshappa Ishwara are monozygotic twins and they were born in Weligama, Sri
Lanka in 1972. They both started talking about a previous life when they were
about 3 years old.
Kakshappa claimed he had been an insurgent shot by the
police. He mentioned one or more places related to his memories, but his parents
laughed at his story and that is probably the reason why he stopped talking
about them.
His brother Indika Ishwara also talked about a previous life and he
gave details of names and places. He claimed he had lived in Balapitiya and that
his nickname had been Baby
Mahattaya.He said he had attended school in Ambalangoda, about 60 kilometers
by road or rail from Weligama. Balapitiya is located about 6 km north of
Ambalangoda. It seemed he described a life as a young schoolboy. Indika's father happened to have a friend who was working in
Ambalangoda and with the information furnished by the boy, this friend easily
found a family at Balapitiya whose eldest son Dharshana died from a disease at
the age of 11 in 1968. His life turned out to correspond to Indika's story in
most respects.
The case was investigated by Godwin Samararatne and later also by
Dr. Stevenson.
Stevenson recorded 41 statements and recognitions made by Indika
most of which turned out to be correct when compared with the life of Dharshana.
Of these statements, Stevenson concludes that 28 were made before any attempt at
verification. Ian Stevenson could not discover any normal connections between
the two families.
Furthermore, there were marked differences between
the monozygotic twins, such as that Indika was religious and Kakshappa was
indifferent towards religion, or that Indika liked to be spoken to respectfully,
whereas Kakshappa was indifferent as to how he was addressed.
Jagdish Chandra
Yet
another remarkable case concerns the Indian boy Jagdish Chandra, born in the
1920s in Bareilly. Jagdish was the son of a lawyer, K.K.N. Sahay and we owe it
to him that his memories were recorded before any type of verification was
undertaken. In 1926 while his mother was very ill, Jagdish Chandra asked his
father to get his motorcar. K.K.N. Sahay asked his son where his car was. He
replied that it was at the house of Babuaji at Benares and gave more details
about a previous life as the son of a so called Panda, i.e. a person charged
with giving assistance to pilgrims who come to bathe in the holy water of the
Ganges.
Sahay tried to ascertain whether his son's statements could
be verified and for this purpose he wrote letters to a regional newspaper in
English called the Leader. Sahay
stresses that he has no friends or relatives in Benares and adds that several
important local personalities asked Jagdish Chandra questions about his previous
life. K.K.N. Sahay received several inquiries regarding Jagdish Chandra's story
that confirmed most of his statements as applicable to a person known as Babu
Pandey living in Benares (Varanasi). His son Jai Gopal had died several years
before.
After the Leader
had published Sahay's letters, he received
many visitors interested in the case who wanted to hear Jagdish talk about his
previous life. After a while, Sahay decided to take his son to Benares. When he
arrived there, the boy pointed out the way through the labyrinth of lanes up to
the house of Babua. He recognised persons and places.
K.K.N. Sahay recorded the statements made by Jagdish Chandra before
they had left for Benares. All in all, Jagdish Chandra made 51
statements concerning his previous life. Of these, 12 were recorded in
writing before any verification was attempted. Then, 24 were recorded
in writing and verified before the two families met. Ian Stevenson also
made a list of 14 behavioral traits of Jagdish Chandra related to the
previous life, such as an insistence on eating before other members of
the family or a refusal to eat with non-Hindus. About these traits,
Stevenson comments that even if we could explain the informational
aspects of the case by normal means, we would still need another
hypothesis to explain its behavioural features.
Parapsychological
hypotheses
I think cases such as those of Yusuf Köse, Indika
Ishwara and Jagdish Chandra clearly show that normal psychological
hypotheses are insufficient to account for all varieties of cases of
children who remember past lives. It seems undeniable that some kind of
paranormal process must be involved. Some may welcome exact statistical
data on the probability that these findings are not based on chance
alone, but if in practice it were impossible to obtain such data, most
scholars would probably agree that it seems very unrealistic to simply assume that they are.
Let us see what specific type of parapsychological hypothesis could count as the most
parsimonious interpretation for such paranormal cases. It should be a hypothesis
that covers all the paranormal aspects, including information, behavior and
physical features.
The first parapsychological hypothesis we should
consider is that a child uses paranormal faculties to obtain information about
an unknown deceased personality and subsequently identifies with this paranormal
information. This hypothesis is often called the Super-ESP or Super-PSI
hypothesis, because the amount of Extrasensory Perception surpasses the
telepathy normally encountered in spontaneous cases. The Super-ESP hypothesis is
often considered more parsimonious than survival or reincarnation because it
uses a general concept already known from other parapsychological fields of
enquiry.
If we apply the Super-ESP theory to cases of the
Reincarnation Type, we have to assume that the socalled memories shown by the
subjects are actually not real memories. Instead, they would be based on
paranormal perception of information concerning a deceased personality. Some
data seem to suggest that paranormal cognition of the past or retrocognition
tunes in to a non-physical general source of information.
If we wish to discount
the Super-ESP theory for paranormal Cases of the Reincarnation Type we have to
concentrate on the strongest version of this theory. Now, it is sometimes
claimed by survivalists that a strong Super-ESP hypothesis based on in principle
limitless and unmediated retrocognition of information about the past is an
unacceptable hypothesis because it could never be falsified. Any type of
information could be explained by retrocognition and no case could ever show
that the Super-ESP theory is wrong.
However, in my view this is misguided. The
Super-ESP theory may be unfalsifiable if one exclusively looks at paranormal
information without taking into account the context in which the information
shows up. The falsification of Super-ESP is not primarily linked to its
explanatory power of informational aspects of cases, but to its capability to
explain cases as a whole.
As I have already stressed in this lecture, paranormal
Cases of the Reincarnation Type do not only contain paranormal information, but
also paranormal behavior and physical aspects. More than anything else, a good
theory for paranormal cases should be able to explain why children identify with
the particular information. The mere fact that they would have collected this
information by ESP is simply not enough. So, I am afraid that I do not agree
with Professor Roy on this particular point.
This is acknowledged by
philosopher Stephen Braude who accepts that Super-ESP may only explain a
case if it is accompanied by an account of the motivation that leads to the use
of the paranormal information for a process of intense identification. He also
acknowledges that such motives are extremely implausible for young a child, i.e.
for the average subject of Cases of the
Reincarnation Type.
Let us assume that ESP is used by the child
subconsciously to be able to choose a dead stranger as an identification object.
This must mean hat there is some kind of process through which the child tries
to find a deceased person that would correspond as much as possible to his ideal
self-concept. We should only expect cases with deceased objects of
identification that would be attractive to young children, primarily because of
their external characteristics. The deceased personality should not suffer
either from unattractive inner conflicts that are linked to his or her life,
because that would be very unappealing to any young child. Now, neither of these
two predicted properties are typical for paranormal cases of the reincarnation
type.
Therefore, the ESP-hypothesis clearly seems insufficient for the majority
of such cases from a motivational perspective. In other
words, Super-ESP of any type can indeed be falsified namely by cases in which a
motivated identification via ESP cannot be taken seriously. In that sense,
Super-ESP is an acceptable scientific theory and it is indeed falsified by the
empirical facts.
In paranormal Cases of the Reincarnation Type that
involve identification with a complete stranger, it is reasonable to suppose
that the information about the previous life is not collected through ESP but is
actually part of the child's memory and thereby also of the child's personality
itself. In my view, this is only possible if the memories in question have
survived death as part of a non-physical mind or personality. They cannot be
external as that would not explain the child's motivation to identify with them,
but they have to be internal to the child';s mind. In general, this means that
paranormal cases of the reincarnation type should be explained by a survivalist
hypothesis.
Overshadowing
versus reincarnation
Now, some cases may be best explained by possession or
overshadowing, as discussed today by Guy Lyon Playfair and Archie Roy, rather
than reincarnation, namely cases in which there are two distinct personalities
involved and neither of them claims to be both the child and the previous
personality. However, most cases are not like this, so that reincarnation
really seems to be a better explanation for them.
The cases presented by Guy
Lyon Playfair and Archie Roy are relevant, but not representative. Possession is
an interpretation for some cases, but not for most of them. I found a case of
possession in The Netherlands of a young Hindustani girl -Maya P.- who claimed
she was possessed by the ghost of a young girl she might have known from a
previous life. The ghost claimed she could furnish information about her
previous life, but it turned out that Maya had probably collected this
information herself. I concluded that the case was probably based on multiple
personality. Interestingly enough, she was freed from the spirit by a pundit
(Hindu priest), who acted as an exorcist.
Regarding some cases mentioned by Roy Stemman in which the child was
apparently born before his previous life was ended, I would like to
comment first of all that we need to be very cautious about the
accuracy of the dates. We also have to ascertain whether these cases
are reliable or not. Now, if they really are reliable, these cases
might imply some type of possession (comparable to the phenomenon seen
in the case of Jasbir/Sobha Ram), but one that is hardly
distinguishable from normal reincarnation.
The reincarnation hypothesis
seems to be further corroborated by Western cases collected by independent
researchers such as myself. In one of my cases, of a girl named Cerunne, the subject recalled the life of a sailor and though
the case remains unsolved, she supplied some data that suggest paranormal
knowledge of a specific period in the migratory history of Spain and its
colonies.
Personal Identity
Another question is whether our reincarnation hypothesis
should be personalist or impersonalist. In my view this question is not
empirical but ontological. It depends on your ideas of personal identity whether
you adopt a personalist or impersonalist reincarnation hypothesis. I for one
believe that it is obvious that the mind is always personal in that there can be
no consciousness without a conscious subject. In other words, within my
personalist perspective it is simply inconceivable that there could be a
conscious mind, which would not be a subject's conscious mind. This implies that in my philosophical framework
impersonalism does not make sense and therefore neither does any impersonalist
survival or reincarnation hypothesis.
So in my case I endorse a personalist reincarnation hypothesis
because the alternative really seems incoherent to me. Then, there
are some critics that claim that neuropsychological data would indicate that
personal survival is inconceivable. However, all the data that I know of only
suggest that the mind may to a large extent be influenced by neurological
processes. Now, the brain must necessarily also be influenced by consciousness and
if being influenced really amounted to being dependent, the brain would have to
be just as dependent on the mind as vice versa. Therefore, I see no reason to
believe in the mind's supposed ultimate dependence on the brain.
Not
even data concerning split-brain experiments are threatening to substantialist
personalism, because this position is compatible with
functional dissociation as long as it is assumed that the processing connected
to one hemisphere remains temporarily inaccessible to consciousness. Due to its
inherent private character, an actual co-consciousness is impossible to prove
conclusively, and one self with only temporary functional dissociation is even
the best explanation as split-brain patients normally show a remarkable
psychological and motoric unity that can hardly be reconciled with the
somatogenic creation of a new nonphysical subject by commisurectomy.
Neocartesian
theory I generally hold that substantialist Neocartesian dualism is superior
to physicalism for philosophical, analytical reasons, that it is well compatible
with neurological data and that it offers a rational explanation for paranormal
phenomena physicalism can only ignore or deny. Apart from the strong evidence
for reincarnation, remarkable results have recently been achieved by Pim van
Lommel,
Michael
B. Sabom and others, concerning mind-brain relations during Near-Death
Experiences in patients with cardiac arrest and a
flattened EEG, and these results are equally incompatible with a physicalist
doctrine.
So it is becoming increasingly clear which theoretical
side is going
to win the debate. We should confidently make our dualist or spiritualist
theories about survival, reincarnation or PSI more sophisticated rather than
being overwhelmed by baseless physicalist claims.
I hope
that this short talk has given you a general impression of my thoughts on these
important subjects.
Thank you for your attention!Titus Rivas
titusrivas@hotmail.comAcknowledgement
I would like to thank my brother Dr. Esteban Rivas for reading and improving
the first draft of this lecture.
Some other papers by Titus Rivas- Three Cases of the Reincarnation Type in the Netherlands
- Tre case di reincarnazione EU, Italian translation
- Três Casos do Tipo Reencarnação na Holanda, Portuguese translation
- Six Cases of the Reincarnation Type in the Netherlands
- The Survivalist Interpretation of Recent Studies into the Near-Death Experience
- Consciousness during Clinical Death and after Brain Death
- Exit Epiphenomenalism (with Hein van Dongen)
- Neuropsychology and personalist dualism
- Reincarnation Research
- A Hipótese Mais Parcimoniosa, Portuguese translation of Reincarnation Research, by Vitor Moura
- Reincarnation fantasies about the Titanic
- The Life Beyond: Through the eyes of Children who Claim to Remember Previous Lives, with Dr. Kirti Swaroop Rawat
Other relevant links
- Athanasia Foundation
- The Society for Psychical Research
- The International Survivalist Society
- The Society for Scientific Exploration
- Children's Past Lives
- Division of Personality Studies, University of Virginia
- Shanti Devi's Past by Dr. Kirti Swaroop Rawat
- The Case of Swarnlata Mishra
- Dulce Swarnlata(Spanish translation of article about Swarnlata Mishra)
- Ian Stevenson's Scientific Search for Reincarnation
- The Indian Case of Titu
- Cases studied by Dr. Kirti Swaroop Rawat
- Lecture by Ian Stevenson
- Birthmarks and Birth Defects Corresponding to Wounds on Deceased Persons
- The Similarity of Reincarnation Type Cases over many years
- The Case of Nazih Al-Danaf
- Near-Death Experiences and the Afterlife
- International Association for Near-Death Studies
- Visions and memories occur while brain death
- NDE evidence for survival
- Pim van Lommel in The Lancet
- Do Any NDEs Provide Evidence for the Survival of Human Personality after Death?
- New Dualism Archive
- Victor Zammit
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