Could Reincarnation Be Real?
Chelsey Wang (ISB 11)
Chelsey is a beloved staff writer at BUDDY! and resident investigative journalist. Her interests are eclectic, (sometimes alarming), and incredibly thought provoking.
Keep reading for a thought-provoking Buzzfeed-Unsolved-esque deep dive into whether reincarnation could be real.
Have you ever thought about what happens to us when we die? I know I have. Although most people probably believe that nothing happens and that we’ll just turn into nothing (how morbid), religions like to take a more positive outlook. Many of us know about the belief in Heaven and Hell, but there are other afterlife beliefs as well. Reincarnation has become one of Hinduism’s most central beliefs. The idea of reincarnation may be baffling when you first think about it; I mean, how can we die in this life but continue living (with the same soul) in another life? So, in a sense, our souls are basically immortal. Nevertheless, countless mysterious cases suggest the possibility of reincarnation. So today, to answer the question of “could reincarnation be real?” we’ll be taking a look at some cases of possible reincarnation cases such as toddlers speaking in languages they’ve never learned and children having memories of their past lives.
According to a 2015 article on the National Library of Medicine (NCBI) site, many children have been found to have memories of a previous life, and “the revelations of the children have been verified and have corresponded to a particular individual, already dead.” Even spookier, many “of these children have marks and birth defects corresponding to wounds on the body of his previous personality.” Although the data collected shows that most of these cases came from areas where people believe in reincarnation, such as India, many others also came from countries with different cultures and religions that reject it.
This next section includes 3 case studies by Dr. Ian Stevenson, who has documented and analyzed from a pure scientific perspective, more than 3000 cases of children who spontaneously remembered a past life.
1: James Leininger
This case study focuses on an American child called James Leininger, who began to have extremely intense nightmares around the age of two. He started claiming that he was “an American pilot who was killed when the Japanese shot down his plane.” It’s absolutely crazy, I know. James proceeded to give several details about the crash, including “the name of an American aircraft carrier, the first and last name of a friend who was on the ship with him, and a location.” His parents eventually noticed a striking similarity between James’s account to the death of a World War II pilot named James Huston.
2: Cameron Macauley
Cameron Macauley was born in Glasgow, Scotland, to his mother, Norma. At the age of 2, he began to tell people around him that he used to live in Barra, an island off to the northwest of Scotland.
As he got older, the story stayed the same, but Cameron was able to recall even more details about his past life. He began to remember living in a white house with airplanes flying overhead and even a secret entrance that was in his old garden! He also began wishing to see his past mom, AKA, “Barra mom.” This desire to meet his Barra mother only increased with age; at one point, he even told Norma that he’d wish for his Barra mom to pick him up from kindergarten. Eventually, the family went to Barra, and, much to mine and everyone else’s disbelief, they found the white house.
When they arrived at Barra, Cameron’s parents did not tell him that they were going to his past house. Nevertheless, Cameron jumped at the sight of the white house and immediately recognized it. As he went through his old house, he knew all the nooks and crannies (probably more than I know about my own house). He even led his parents to the secret entranceway to the garden that he’d been talking about for years.
Interestingly, both Norma and Cameron have never been to Barra, meaning that there is a very little chance that Cameron had seen Barra before. When asked about how he’d ended up with Norma, he said, “I fell through, and went into [her] tummy.”
3: Shanti Devi
This case is probably the most famous one out of all the reincarnation cases we’re looking at today, and it has been used as evidence for reincarnation in countless studies. Shanti Devi was born in India in 1926, and, like many reincarnation cases, she began to recall details about her past life at a young age.
She remembered her past husband, Kedarnath, and son, Navneet, who both lived in another state in a village called Mathura. Despite being only 6, Shanti Devi was able to explain how she died after childbirth, and her parents even got their family physician to confirm what she said was medically accurate.
Shanti Devi even recognized her past husband’s cousin, Kanjimal, and told him where there was buried money near her old house. His cousin was so impressed that he convinced Kedarnath, her husband, to visit her in Delhi. As the girl grew older, she wanted to meet her husband and child more and more. So, Kedarnath came to Delhi on November 12, 1935, with his son, Navneet.
Kanjimal wanted to mislead Shanti Devi by telling her that Kedarnath was her former husband’s elder brother. She started blushing, and when asked about it, she responded that “No, he is not my husband’s brother. He is my husband himself.”
4: O’Neal Mahmoud
For our final case study, we’ll be looking at a Jewish child, O’Neal Mahmoud, who knows how to speak fluent English even though he’s never come in contact with it (ha, I wish I was like that for French). Although this study was not done by Dr. Ian Stevenson, I thought it was still an incredibly interesting case of reincarnation. From an interview with the boy’s family by The Times of Israel, it is said that “he began speaking fluent English” around the age of two even though “he has never been abroad and hasn’t watched a lot of English-language TV,” which rules out the possibility of him picking up English from his surroundings. Even stranger, “O’Neal has a level of Arabic far below other children of similar age in his town and speaks it in an accent typical for people from English-speaking countries.” The family also got linguistic experts to come in, and the experts placed his accent as a “Pakistani accent from South London,” while his parents described him as speaking like “the King of England.” I’ve watched several clips of him speaking, and it’s pretty hilarious to see this child yapping away in a British accent while his Israeli family has no idea what he’s talking about.
Now, you might be wondering why you or I can’t remember our past lives if these children were able to remember theirs so vividly. Well, Hindus believe that every person (every soul) evolves and carries with them not specific events but the mental impressions that they received during life. So, that phobia you have, or the hobbies that you enjoy, are all related to your past lives. And it’s only rarely that someone will remember specific moments from another lifetime, like those children from the studies.
As with many religious beliefs about the afterlife, many people probably will never accept the Hindu belief of reincarnation due to the “lack of evidence.” However, I believe that there is sufficient proof to suggest that reincarnation could be real because these children have seemingly been reborn. Dr. Ian Stevenson’s studies show that the impossible has happened: young children are able to recall things that they’ve never been introduced to! There is always skepticism about reincarnation because of the lack of “definitive proof,” but these skeptics have never set the guidelines for what this definitive proof requires. In my opinion, a two-year-old boy who’s able to recall a specific, undisclosed WWII plane crash in uncanny detail is DEFINITELY convincing enough to make me think twice about reincarnation.
