(ORDO NEWS) — Renowned planetary scientist, cosmologist, astrophysicist, astrobiologist, writer and popularizer of science Carl Sagan, who was known as a “tough” and adamant scientist, was actually one of the founders of the Committee on the Scientific Investigation of the Paranormal (CSICOP).
Not many scientists even allow for the possibility that what we call “paranormal” can actually be real and somehow provable using the scientific method.
Sagan was quite famous, however his interest in the paranormal was not and is not really known among the population.
He once wrote that “there are three statements in the field (parapsychology) which, in my opinion, deserve serious study, and the third of these is that young children sometimes report details of a past life that, when checked, turn out to be accurate and about which they could not know in any other way than by reincarnation.”
He wrote this in 1996. Now more than two decades have passed, and the amount of examples and evidence that has accumulated that suggests that reincarnation, or at least some of its forms, is real is simply amazing.
Serious scientific research on reincarnation spans the last few decades. There are many interesting cases where children remembered details that they could not get from anywhere.
For example, a report published in 2016 in Explore titled “The Case of James Leininger: An American Reincarnation Case” by Jim B. Tucker, M.D. from the University of Virginia, explains,
Over the past 50 years, many cases have been studied of young children reporting memories of previous lives.
Although such cases are more common in cultures where it is common to believe in reincarnation, they also occur in the West.
This article describes the case of James Leininger, an American child who, at the age of two, began having intense nightmares about a plane crash.
He then revealed that he was an American pilot who died when his plane was shot down by the Japanese.
He gave details, including the name of the American aircraft carrier, the name of the friend who was with him on the ship, and the location and other details of the deadly crash.
Over time, his parents discovered a close correspondence between James’ statements and the death of a World War II pilot named James Huston.
Documentation of James’ claims prior to Houston’s identification includes a television interview with his parents that never aired, but which the author was able to view.
At the age of two, James’s father was looking through a book called The Battle of Iwo Jima 1945. According to his father, James pointed to a photograph showing an aerial view of the base of the island, where the dormant volcano Suribachi is located, and said, “That’s where my plane was shot down.”
His father asked, “What?” and James replied, “My plane was shot down there, dad.” Since this all started. This is one of many similar cases.
In this case, James demonstrated knowledge of events that took place 50 years before his birth. Many of his accurate statements were documented before the previous identity was identified.
On August 27, 2000, when James was 28 months old, he told his parents that his plane had fallen from a ship. When his parents asked him the name of the ship, he replied: “Natoma”.
After this conversation, his father searched the Internet for the word and eventually found a description of the escort aircraft carrier USS Natoma Bay, which was in the Pacific during World War II.
He printed out the information he found, and the footer of the printout shows the date he did it.
Eli Lasch was a well-known Israeli physician who worked as a senior consultant for the coordination of medical services in the Gaza Strip.
He passed away in 2009, but before that he was investigating a case of alleged reincarnation in which a three-year-old boy claimed to remember a past life.
In this life, he remembered that he had been hit hard on the head with an ax and had a long red birthmark on his head.
The boy’s father and several other relatives in the village decided to visit neighboring communities to see if his past life could be identified, and invited Dr. Lasch to join them.
During this journey, they visited several villages until the boy remembered the right one. He remembered his first and last name, as well as the first and last name of his killer.
According to the Institute for the Integration of Science, Intuition and Spirit:
One of the members of this community, who heard the boy’s story, said that in a past life he knew the person the boy was talking about. This man disappeared 4 years ago and has never been found.
It was assumed that some kind of misfortune had happened to this man, since it was known that in the border areas between Israel and Syria, people were killed or taken prisoner on suspicion of espionage.
The group passed through the village and at one point the boy pointed to a house in the past.
Curious passers-by gathered around, and suddenly the boy approached the man and called him by name. The man admitted that the boy correctly named him, and then the boy said:
“I was your neighbor. We had a fight and you killed me with an axe.”
Dr. Lusch then noticed that the man’s face suddenly turned as white as a sheet. Three year old said:
“I even know where he buried my body.”
The boy then led the group, which included the accused killer, into a nearby field. The boy stopped in front of a pile of stones and said:
“He buried my body under these stones, and the ax is over there.”
Chanai Chhumalaivong was a boy from Thailand who, at the age of three, began to say that he was a teacher named Bua Kai who was shot while riding his bicycle to school.
He begged and begged to be taken to Bua Kai’s parents, who he thought were his own parents. He knew the village where they lived and eventually convinced his grandmother to take him there. According to the study:
His grandmother said that after they got off the bus, Chanai took her to the house where the elderly couple lived.
Chanai thought he recognized the couple as the parents of Bua Kai Lounak, a teacher who had been shot dead on his way to school five years before Chanai was born.
(Children’s Reports of Past Life Memories: A Review by Jim B. Tucker, MD)
The most interesting thing is that Kai and Chanai had something in common. Kai, who was shot from behind, had small circular entry wounds on the back of his head, and larger exit wounds on his forehead; Chanay was born with two birthmarks: a small, round birthmark on the back of his head and a larger, irregularly shaped one on the front.
Can “consciousness” or “mind” survive “death”? Is reincarnation one of the many paths?
Reincarnation may not be the “answer” to what happens when someone dies. Perhaps this is one of many ways.
These questions have been pondered for thousands of years. In Plato’s Socratic dialogue Meno, the hero of Socrates tries to prove that life exists before birth.
Instead of innate knowledge that we are simply born with, knowledge that just comes naturally to us, Plato relies on prenatal knowledge to explain our ability to solve problems in mathematics and philosophy, and suggests that we should have known the answers to these problems with the very beginning.
Perhaps reincarnation is not really reincarnation? Perhaps these memories are just proof that all consciousness is connected in some way, and these children are just picking up aspects that are just another part of themselves?
Perhaps they just retain memories of a past life and that particular consciousness or “soul” didn’t actually reincarnate into another body, because if it did, there would be no more memories?
Perhaps there is another explanation why these children can remember such things that does not include the idea of reincarnation?
There are so many questions that cannot be answered.
The question of whether consciousness persists after death is the focus of many scientific circles.
For example, neurosurgeon Dr. Eben Alexander says that science shows that the brain does not control consciousness, that it is rather its receiver, a channel through which consciousness comes from somewhere else.
He believes that there is reason to believe that our consciousness continues after death, and that a physical body is not required for the existence of consciousness.
Here’s a great video from Dr. Gary Schwartz, Professor of Psychology, Medicine, Neurology, Psychiatry, and Surgery at the University of Arizona, discussing whether consciousness is a product of the brain or its successor.
There is also the topic of near-death experiences (NDEs), which are amazing. People who “died” and returned to the operating table were able to describe their out-of-body experience and give details that they would not have been able to tell if they were “inside” their body.
To read and learn more about NDE, you can check out the study here.
The idea that consciousness is a separate “thing” from our biology is supported by a wealth of evidence in the fields of quantum physics, parapsychology, and neuroscience.
Despite this evidence, the topic is still shunned in many mainstream academia, and perhaps this is because the idea simply challenges our long held belief systems about what we think we know and have already discovered.
Cassandra Wieten, Ph.D. and President/CEO of the Institute for Noetic Sciences, offers a possible explanation.
There seems to be a deep concern that the entire area will be tainted by the study of a phenomenon that is associated with superstition, spiritualism and magic.
Protecting against this possibility sometimes seems more important than encouraging scientific research or protecting academic freedom. But things can change.”
“When Skeptics Face the Evidence”.
Let us recall the eminent physicist Lord Kelvin, who in 1900 declared: “Now there is nothing new in physics … All that remains is more and more accurate measurements.” Shortly after this announcement, Einstein published his work on special relativity.
Einstein’s theories challenged the accepted framework of knowledge at the time and forced the scientific community to open up a broader/alternative view of reality.
Things like this will happen throughout human history, the only constant thing is changes and discoveries that expand and change what we once thought we knew.
—
Online:
Contact us: [email protected]
Our Standards, Terms of Use: Standard Terms And Conditions.