I have not searched RI for how much has been spoken about probable lives and multiple time streams
which is a area of interest for me.
but I recently finished a book that might be useful to death and dying angst.
THE BOWL OF LIGHT by Hank Wesselman
Wesselman is another reliable mapmaker for the study of the possible psychological evolution of the human species.
His book gives some solid GPS fixes for people willing to explore new territory.
I suspect some of the anxiety expressed in this thread is the precognitive radar some people manifest
who are picking up the early blips from our civilization's death spiral, eh?
see link for full story
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituar ... enson.htmlProfessor Ian Stevenson
12:01AM GMT 12 Feb 2007
Professor Ian Stevenson, who died on February 8 aged 88, was the world's foremost scientific authority on the study of reincarnation; the founder and director of the Division of Personality Studies at the University of Virginia, Stevenson spent more than 40 years travelling the world, accumulating more than 3,000 cases of children who appeared to have memories of previous lives.
A typical case involved an Indian boy, Gopal, who at the age of three started talking about his previous life in the city of Mathura, 160 miles from his home in Delhi. He claimed that he had owned a medical company called Sukh Shancharak, lived in a large house with many servants, and that his brother had shot him after a quarrel.
Subsequent investigations revealed that one of the owners of Sukh Shancharak had shot his brother some eight years before Gopal's birth. The deceased man was named Shaktipal Shara. Gopal was subsequently invited to Mathura by Shaktipal's family, where the young child recognised various people and places known to Shaktipal. The family was particularly impressed by Gopal's mention of Shaktipal's attempts to borrow money, and how this had led to the shooting — information that was known only to the family.
Stevenson's studies were informed by an encyclopaedic knowledge of history, philosophy and the natural sciences but characterised above all by an empirical rigour. He would travel vast distances to interview the children and their current and "previous" families, meticulously noting corroborative and conflicting statements in their accounts, and cross-checking official records, and police and autopsy reports.
Dense with statistical data, his studies avoided any theoretical speculation on Eastern philosophical theories about the transmigration of the soul. In fact, "soul" was a word Stevenson was always keen to avoid. He preferred the term "personality", and was always careful to state that the mountain of evidence accumulated in his researches "permitted", rather than compelled, a belief in reincarnation.
Ian Stevenson was born on October 31 1918 in Montreal, Canada. He studied Medicine at St Andrews University in Scotland and McGill University, Montreal, before embarking on a series of internships and residencies at hospitals in Montreal, Arizona and New Orleans.
As a physician he became particularly interested in finding some explanation for psychosomatic disorders, and, dissatisfied with the reductionism of biochemistry, he changed disciplines to psychiatry.
In the early 1950s, encouraged by a meeting with Aldous Huxley, he became one of the first academics in America to investigate the effects of psychedelic drugs in a psychiatric context. One encounter with LSD induced what he would describe as "a mystical experience" — three days of "perfect serenity" and the sense that "I could never be angry again. As it happens that didn't work out, but the memory of it persisted as something to hope for."
Unconvinced by the Freudian view that personality is fixed in early childhood, Stevenson began to explore other theories of the origin of individual characteristics and the development of personality. He became interested in accounts gleaned from newspapers and the journals of children who claimed to have memories of previous lives.
What struck Stevenson were the common patterns that emerged from these accounts; the fact that children started recounting these stories between the ages of two and five, yet seemed to have forgotten them by the age of eight or nine; the frequent mentions of having died a violent death, and the apparently clear recollections of the mode of death.
In 1960 he published his first paper on the subject, The Evidence for Survival from Claimed Memories of Former Incarnations, which caught the attention of Chester Carlson, the inventor of the Xerox machine. Carlson funded Stevenson's first field trip, in 1961, to India and Sri Lanka, where he was able to locate and study some 25 such cases, adding fuel to his theory that reincarnation might offer "a third possibility" in the development of character, along with hereditary and environmental influences.
By now Stevenson had been appointed chairman of the department of psychiatry at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. Immersed in adminstration and research, he could see no future in past lives. But in 1963 Carlson collapsed in a cinema and died. When his will was read, Stevenson was astonished to learn that Carlson had left $1 million to endow a chair at the University of Virginia, and a further $1 million for Stevenson himself to continue his researches into reincarnation.
Carlson's bequest enabled Stevenson to set up the Division of Personality Studies, the only academic department in the world dedicated to the study of previous life memories, near-death experiences and other paranormal phenomena. Stevenson travelled extensively in South-East Asia, South America, the Lebanon and West Africa in search of cases (between 1966 and 1971 he logged an average of 55,000 miles a year). The vast majority of his cases came from cultures where there is a belief in reincarnation — a fact that sceptics claimed undermined the credibility of the accounts.
Stevenson argued that in those cultures children's claims tended to be treated more seriously, and were therefore investigated, while similar claims in the West would be dismissed as mere fantasy: "I sometimes get letters saying, 'I wish I'd known about you when our Tommy was three years old and started telling us he used to be a pilot and we told him to stop telling fibs, and now he says he doesn't remember anything.' "
His empirical approach made him deeply sceptical of fanciful accounts of previous lives and practices such as hypnosis and "past life regression". He kept a file in his office which he labelled "Extravagant Claims", containing numerous Thomas Jeffersons, Mary Magdalenes, Napoleons and Josephines, and would speculate amusingly to colleagues about what would happen if they were all to be locked in a room together.
Stevenson was the author of more than 200 publications, from full-length volumes of case studies to smaller academic papers, analysing every aspect of past-life claims, from the "announcing dreams" that foretell a coming birth among the Tlingit people of Alaska to studies of 24 Burmese children who claimed to have been Japanese soldiers who died there during the war. (Common traits included a liking for raw fish and grumbling about the heat.) Two books were dedicated to examining the evidence of birthmarks and birth defects corresponding to the wounds of deceased persons.
In the course of his travels Stevenson assembled a collection of the types of weapons — axes, swords and knives — that had been used in previous personality deaths; these hung on the walls of the offices of the Division of Personality Studies.
A tall, stooping man who usually dressed in grey flannels and a blazer, Stevenson was the embodiment of academic rectitude. Diffident and quietly spoken, he grew accustomed to most of his academic peers finding his interest in reincarnation odd — "and that's putting it mildly".
The fact that his work received little or no recognition from the scientific community seemed only to reinforce his belief in its inherent conservatism: "It's been said that there's nothing so troublesome as a new idea, and I think that's particularly true in science." His greatest frustration, he maintained, was not that people dismissed his theories, but that so few bothered even to read the evidence he had so painstakingly assembled.
Stevenson regarded the prospect of his own passing with equanimity, maintaining that he was "apprehensive" but not scared of death. "I have a feeling I'm going to be confronted with memories, some of which I won't like, and would like to expunge. But I do wonder, what parents could possibly want me as a baby?"
