Professor Jim Tucker thinks that past lives are possible. Here are startling accounts of children who may have been reincarnated.
1981 RUSTIC STUDIO KAN/SHUTTERSTOCK
“When I was your age, I changed your diaper,” said the dark-haired boy to his father. Ron looked down at his smiling son, who had not yet turned two. He thought it was a very strange thing to say, but he figured he had misheard him.
But as baby Sam made similar remarks over the next few months, Ron and his wife, Cathy, gradually pieced together an odd story: Sam believed that he was his deceased grandfather, Ron’s late father, who had returned to his family. More intrigued than alarmed, Ron and Cathy asked Sam, “How did you come back?”
“I just went whoosh and came out the portal,” he responded.
Although Sam was a precocious child—he’d been speaking in full sentences from the age of 18 months—his parents were stunned to hear him use a word like portal, and they encouraged him to say more. They asked Sam if he’d had any siblings, and he replied that he’d had a sister who “turned into a fish.”
“Who turned her into a fish?”
“Some bad guys. She died.”
Eerily enough, Sam’s grandfather had a sister who had been murdered 60 years earlier; her body was found floating in San Francisco Bay. Ron and Cathy then gently asked Sam, “Do you know how you died?”
Sam jerked back and slapped the top of his head as if in pain. One year before Sam was born, his grandfather had died of a cerebral haemorrhage.
Is reincarnation real?
Thirty-three percent of Americans (including 29 percent of Christians) think it is, and some 10 percent of them report being able to recall their own past lives. The Dr. Oz Show has hosted Dr. Tucker as well as Dr. Eben Alexander, another medical doctor who believes in reincarnation, and there are several reality TV series on the topic of reincarnation that have aired in recent years, including Life, Death and Reincarnation, (extraordinary cases studies of people who recollect past lives), The Ghost Inside My Child (children with past-life memories), and Who Was I: My Past Lives, (a hypnotherapist guides people through life regressions that lead towards astonishing revelations). These are some of the signs you may have lived a past life.
Why this fascination? Part of reincarnation’s appeal has to do with its hopeful underlying promise: that we can do better in our next lives. “With reincarnation, there is always another opportunity,” explains Stafford Betty, a professor of religious studies at California State University, Bakersfield, and the author of The Afterlife Unveiled. “The universe takes on a merciful hue. It’s a great improvement over the doctrine of eternal hell.”
Yet despite the popular interest, few scientists give reincarnation much credence. They regard it as a field filled with charlatans, scams, and tall tales of having once been royalty.
Reincarnation is “an intriguing psychological phenomenon,” says Christopher C. French, a professor of psychology at Goldsmiths, University of London, who heads a unit that studies claims of paranormal experiences. “But I think it is far more likely that such apparent memories are, in fact, false memories rather than accurate memories of events that were experienced in a past life.”
Read More – Chilling Reincarnation Stories: Meet 6 People Who Lived Before
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