The phenomenon of very young children, between the ages of three and six, claiming to remember details of their past lives is not unheard of in India.  A skeptic, however, might claim that such alleged memories, particularly occurring in a culture where reincarnation is a widely accepted belief, are simply a reflection of this prevailing belief.  Such stories certainly do not meet the rigorous standards of rational inquiry that would be needed for them to be accepted as scientific proof of rebirth.  Children are highly impressionable.  A story that might simply begin in the imaginative mind of a child could sound to an adult who believes in reincarnation like an event from the life of a person they know who has died.  Leading questions and prompting might lead the child, who wants to please adults, to craft a story that fits the details for which the adult is looking, and so thus reaffirms the adult’s belief in rebirth.  This is not science, but wish fulfillment.

It is much more difficult, though, to discount this phenomenon when it occurs in a culture in which belief in reincarnation is widely rejected, such as that of the United States.  Take the case of Ryan, a boy from Oklahoma.  Ryan’s parents are conservative evangelical Christians.  Belief in reincarnation is strongly rejected in this religious tradition as a false doctrine, and the broader American culture in which the family lives is strongly skeptical of the concept (though not all Americans reject the idea of reincarnation, with roughly twenty percent of the population accepting this idea, according to most opinion polls).

Around the age of four, “Ryan began talking about going home to Hollywood.  He would cry and plead for Cyndi [his mother] to take him home so he could see his other family.”  This account is given in Return to Life, a book by Dr. Jim Tucker, the child psychiatrist at the University of Virginia to whom Ryan’s parents took him for help.  Tucker, building on the work of his mentor, Dr. Ian Stevenson, has collected hundreds of cases of past life memory from children from around the world.  Collecting Ryan’s detailed accounts of his past life, and correlating them with carefully researched information, Ryan’s parents and Tucker concluded that the life Ryan was describing was that of Marty Martyn, an agent from the golden age of Hollywood, but not a person of any particular fame, and with no connection to Ryan or his family.  The details Ryan articulated were not readily available, such as on the internet, and no one in Ryan’s family, nor Tucker, had any knowledge of Martyn prior to engaging in this research.  In the most striking portion of the entire story, Ryan at one point said, with some frustration, that he did not understand why God would allow someone to live for sixty-one years and then make them come back as a baby.  All of Ryan’s information about Martyn’s life at this point had proven accurate, but on this one point of fact, he was at odds with Martyn’s official death certificate, which stated that Martyn had died at the age of fifty-nine.  Further research, however, proved that Martyn had in fact died at the age of sixty-one, and that the birth certificate was incorrect.  Ryan therefore not only had detailed information about the life of a man no one in his family had ever met and about whom they had no prior knowledge, but his information actually led to a correction of the public record of the death of that same man.

Is Ryan’s story scientific proof of rebirth?  Not necessarily.  The phenomenon described here is susceptible to a variety of interpretations, including a form of telepathic contact between the deceased Marty Martyn and the living Ryan.  It does, however, raise serious questions about the standard materialist paradigm that is used to explain phenomena such as consciousness.

In taking the implications of his research seriously, Tucker has raised the question, “What scientific model of reality might explain phenomena of this kind better than materialism is able to do?”  In response to this question, Tucker, in the final two chapters of Return to Life, explores some of the implications of recent physics, particularly quantum theory.  In these chapters, Tucker makes a number of significant points, including the fact that there are interpretations of quantum theory according to which consciousness is not merely a by-product or epiphenomenon of material processes, but that it is foundational to being itself, that our experience of the material world has the character of a collective dream, and, of course, that consciousness can survive the death of the physical body to be reborn in another form.

In Tucker’s work, importantly, he does not display an extensive or in-depth knowledge of Indian philosophical traditions such as Vedanta, Jainism, or Buddhism.  This is important because he cannot be accused of having a communal axe to grind in advancing his theory, one implication of which is that these traditions have been right about many things in the basic account of reality that they give.  Like Vedanta and Buddhism, Tucker’s theory puts forth the idea that consciousness is fundamental to the nature of being.  Certain aspects of quantum theory also fit well with Jain philosophy.  The fact that the same entity can be validly described as both a wave and a particle, for example, is consistent with the Jain teaching of anekantavada, the multi-faceted nature of reality, nayavada, the teaching that reality can be viewed from many perspectives, and syadvada, the teaching that truth can be expressed in a variety of seemingly contradictory ways.  And like all three traditions, of course, it affirms the phenomenon of rebirth itself.

What should one make of such developments?  Tucker’s work is of course exciting news to those of us who are drawn to ideas of this kind, and who practice one (or more) of the traditions in question.  At the same time, a cautionary note must be sounded in regard to placing too great a reliance on the latest science (which is subject to eventual change given further experimentation and speculation) in cultivating one’s worldview and way of life.  And yet science cannot be simply set aside, given its explanatory power.  Because of its many profound implications for spirituality and our understanding of who we are, research of this kind clearly deserves greater attention that it has heretofore received.