FREE OLD SOULS: COMPELLING EVIDENCE FROM CHILDREN WHO REMEMBER PAST LIVES PDF Thomas Shroder | 256 pages | 04 Dec 2001 | Simon & Schuster Ltd | 9780684851938 | English | London, United Kingdom Dr. Ian Stevenson's Reincarnation Research As soon as they learn to speak, some children are able to tell remarkably detailed stories of people, places and events in what might be their past lives. Have you lived before? Chiappalone in his book Keys to Reality. Like anomalien. The hit or miss theory of only one life in order to attain a heavenly goal appears absurd, when one views the varying conditions of particular lives. What evidence we have comes from the testimony of people who claim to recall — sometimes vividly — people, places, things and events from what they believe could be their past lives. The skeptical viewpoint is that these recollections are little more Old Souls: Compelling Evidence from Children Who Remember Past Lives flights of fantasy and wishful thinking. More difficult to dismiss, perhaps, are such recollections from Old Souls: Compelling Evidence from Children Who Remember Past Lives children who, without prompting, describe their memories of former lives. But the fact is, the people the children remember did exist, the memories that the children claim can be checked against real lives and their alleged feats of identification verified — or contradicted — by a variety of witnesses. When investigating with a therapist why her five-year-old son Chase was frightened by certain loud noises, the small boy described events that obviously did not occur in this life. I have dirty, ripped clothes, brown boots, a belt. The battle is going on all around me. Smoke and flashes everywhere. And loud noises: yelling, screaming, loud booms. I shoot at anything that moves. Another boy in India remembers a past life in which some of his fingers were cut off by a fodder-chopping machine. This boy was born with mere stumps for fingers. Past Life as a Nun Carol Bowman relates the story of a little girl named Elspeth who, before she Old Souls: Compelling Evidence from Children Who Remember Past Lives even two years old, spontaneously recalled becoming a nun. She even described her own death. I had never taught him to sew and he had never even seen me do it. He, myself and my wife all fell asleep watching TV in our den. I work third shift and set an alarm to awake me. I told my son to make sure I was awake so I could get ready for work. Well, the alarm went off and seemingly only awoke me. I called out to my son several times. He is a very deep sleeper and when he awoke, it was a startling awakening. He sat up and started talking in a foreign tongue for several seconds. Nothing I recognized. He is in his third year of Spanish, but it was not Spanish. His eyes were open the whole time and he does not remember his speaking. Add Comment. Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment. Post Comment. Newsletter Updates Enter your email address below to subscribe to our newsletter Subscribe. Hand- picked by the curators. Leave a Reply Cancel Reply. You may also like. Old Souls: Compelling Evidence from Children Who Remember Past Lives by Tom Shroder Ian Stevenson was a psychiatrist who worked for the University of Virginia School of Medicine for 50 years. He was Chair of the Department of Psychiatry from tothe Old Souls: Compelling Evidence from Children Who Remember Past Lives Professor of Psychiatry from toand a Research Professor of Psychiatry from until his death. He became internationally recognized for his research into reincarnation by discovering evidence suggesting that memories and physical injuries can be transferred from one lifetime to another. He traveled extensively over a period of 40 years, investigating 3, cases of children around the world who recalled having past lives. His meticulous research presented evidence that such children had unusual abilities, illnesses, phobias and philias which could not be explained by the environment or heredity. Stevenson's reincarnation research began in when he learned of a case in Sri Lanka where a child reported remembering a past life. He thoroughly questioned the child and the child's parents, including the people whom the child recalled were his parents from his past life. This led to Dr. Stevenson's conviction that reincarnation was possibly a reality. That same year, Dr. Stevenson published two articles in the Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research about this child who remembered having a past life. The more such cases he discovered, the greater became his ambition to scientifically quantify the possibility of reincarnation - one of the world's greatest mysteries - which had been virtually ignored by science in the past. InDr. Stevenson co-founded the Society for Scientific Exploration. He authored around papers and 14 books on the subject of reincarnation. His book, " Twenty Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation ," became a classic in the annals of reincarnation research. Stevenson published his second book on reincarnation, " European Cases of the Reincarnation Type ". In he published his major classic: the 2,page, two-volume book, " Reincarnation and Biology: A Contribution to the Etiology of Birthmarks and Birth Defects ," which focused mostly on deformities and other anomalies children are born with which cannot be traced back to inheritance, prenatal or perinatal created during birth occurrences. This monumental classic contains hundreds of pictures presenting the evidence he discovered. It documents cases of children having memories and birthmarks which corresponded with the lives and wounds of deceased people whom these children recalled as having Old Souls: Compelling Evidence from Children Who Remember Past Lives in a past-life. Stevenson published a condensed version of this book for the general public entitled, " Where Reincarnation and Biology Intersect. Jim B. Tucker www. Many people, including skeptics and scholars, agree that the cases presented by Dr. Stevenson offer the best evidence yet for reincarnation. During his original research into various cases involving children's memories of past lives, Dr. Stevenson did note with interest the fact that these children frequently bore lasting birthmarks which supposedly related to their murder or the death they suffered in a previous life. Stevenson's research into birthmarks and congenital defects has such particular importance for the demonstration of reincarnation, since it furnishes objective and graphic proof of reincarnation, superior to the - often fragmentary - memories and reports of the children and adults questioned, which even if verified afterwards cannot be assigned the same value in scientific terms. In many cases presented by Dr. Stevenson there are also medical documents available as further proof, which are usually compiled after the Old Souls: Compelling Evidence from Children Who Remember Past Lives of the person. Stevenson adds that in the cases he researched and "solved" in which birthmarks and deformities were present, he didn't suppose there was any other apposite explanation than that of reincarnation. Stevenson has now succeeded in giving us an explanation of why a person is born with these deformities and why they appear precisely in that part of their body and not in another. Most of the cases, where birthmarks and congenital deformities are present for which no medical explanations exist, have one to five characteristics in common. In the most unusual scenario, it is possible that someone who believed in reincarnation expressed a wish to be reborn to a couple or one partner of a couple. This is usually because they are convinced that they would be well cared for by those particular people. Such preliminary requests are often expressed by the Tlingit Indians of Alaska and by the Tibetans. More frequent than this are the occurrences of prophetic dreams. Someone who has died appears to a pregnant or not as Old Souls: Compelling Evidence from Children Who Remember Past Lives pregnant woman and tells her that he or she will be reborn to her. Sometimes relatives or friends have dreams like this and will then relate the dream to the mother to be. Stevenson found these prophetic dreams to be particularly prolific in Burma and among the Indians in Alaska. In these cultures the body of a newborn child is checked for recognizable marks to establish whether the deceased person they had once known has been reborn to them. This searching for marks of identification is very common among cultures that believe in reincarnation, and especially among the Tlingit Indians and the Igbos of Nigeria. Various tribes of West Africa make marks on the body of the recently deceased in order to be able to identify the person when he or she is reborn. The most frequently occurring event or common denominator relating to rebirth is probably that of a child remembering a past life. Children usually begin to talk about their memories between the ages of two and four. Such infantile memories gradually dwindle when the child is between four and seven years old. There are of course always some exceptions, such as a child continuing Old Souls: Compelling Evidence from Children Who Remember Past Lives remember its previous life but not speaking about it for various reasons. Most of the children talk about their previous Old Souls: Compelling Evidence from Children Who Remember Past Lives with great intensity and feeling. Often they cannot decide for themselves which world is real and which one is not. They often experience a kind of double existence where at times one life is more prominent, and at times the other life takes over. This is why they usually speak of their past life in the present tense saying things like, "I have a husband and two children who live in Jaipur.