[Below is an article I wrote for my Buddhism class. The assignment was "write a 5-6 page paper on some aspect of Buddhism." To narrow the topic, I focussed on the "population problem" and when I ran out of ideas on that, I brought up other issues. To fully answer the question "is reincarnation possible?" would require a rather large book. The link at the bottom goes to a page which explores further issues which such a book should include.]
Is Reincarnation Possible?
Cilantron [not the name on my college paper, of course]
The following is from Twenty Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation, by Ian Stevenson:
In August 1951, a son was born to the wife of Sri Brijal Varashnay in Chhatta whom they named Prakash. As an infant, Prakash...showed no unusual behavior until about the age of four and a half. At that time...he would say he belonged in Kosi Kalan, that his name was Nirmal, and that he wanted to go to his old home. He said his father was Bholanath....He importuned his family to take him to Kosi Kalan so strongly that one day in 1956 his paternal uncle...took him to Kosi Kalan....he did not meet the [Bholonath] Jain family at that time. After returning from Kosi Kalan, his family adopted various measures to make him forget about Nirmal and Kosi Kalan...eventually, they beat him. After some time he seemed to forget, or at least no longer spoke openly of his desire to return to Kosi Kalan... In the early summer of 1961, Bholonath Jain was in Chatta on business with his daughter Memo. There he met Prakash, who recognized him as his "father." Prakash also partially recognized Memo, mistaking her for another sister of Nirmal named Vimla....Some days later, Nirmal's mother, older sister Tara, and brother Devendra vis-ited Prakash in Chaeta. Prakash wept with joy when he saw Nirmal's older sister Tara... The Jain family persuaded Prakash's parents to consent to his visiting Kosi Kalan again... At the house, Prakash recognized Nirmal's older brother, two aunts, and some neighbors, as well as various parts of the house where Nirmal had lived and died. [Stevenson, p.20-21]
Dr. Ian Stevenson, M.D., has studied this case and hundreds of similar cases. Given this, it might be reasonable to imagine that reincarnation could be possible. The idea of reincarnation appeals to me personally, but I have a little trouble completely accepting the idea as long as I don't have a satisfying answer to the "population problem": if the world's population is 6 billion, but 2000 years ago it was 200 million, where did all the extra souls come from? The question is based on many assumptions, and if these assumptions can be shown to be question-able, perhaps the question can simply be discarded.
Some of the assumptions are that humans souls reincarnate as human beings, animals souls reincarnate as animals, and the number of human souls is constant. If we assume instead that animals can reincarnate as humans and vice versa, this only increases the problem. We would now have hundreds of billions of insects waiting for the opportunity to be human. However, if you imagine that souls evolve, perhaps animals could progress forwards to become human, but a human wouldn't go "backwards" and become an animal. This "evolution" theory would imply that most people in the world (6 billion minus 200 million) have had very few human lives, which would lead us into the scary elitism of "which of us have been human longer?" There is admittedly a wide variety of capability among people, but to account for it in this manner seems to me both unwarranted and dangerous. We have little evidence from Stevenson that people have been animals in previous lives. Of course, there weren't any human beings 50 million years ago, so some sort of spiritual evolution does have to be taking place if reincarnation is true. Without enough evidence, though, maybe we should look at other assumptions.
There are other ways of dealing with the assumption that the number of human souls is constant. Perhaps one soul can split into two, and these two souls then lead independent lives. This theory could account for two different people remembering that they were Queen Nefertiti. They both actually were! Ian Stevenson has very scant evidence for such cases, though, and I think any evidence for this "fission" theory would have to come from researchers who use hypnosis.
I have a problem with alleged reincarnational memories obtained through hypnosis, since it appears that if you hypnotize someone over a long enough period of time, you will find whatever you're looking for. If you're looking for satanic ritual abuse, alien abductions, or reincarnational memories you will find them, whether they're memories of actual events or not. It may even be that hypnosis makes the patient telepathic, so he is able to tell the hypnotist what she wants to hear. For this reason, when it comes to evidence for reincarnation, I'm confining myself to the research of Ian Stevenson, who relies on the spontaneous remembrances of young children.
Back to the fission theory: Paul Edwards, in Reincarnation: A Critical Examination, tries to refute the fission theory this way:
If this is so, we should not find five billion separate souls, but a handful, perhaps a few hundred souls, each occupying millions of bodies. Yet that is not at all what we find. There are not, sad to say, millions of Newt Gingriches, George Bushes, William Rehnquists, Pat Buchanans, or, for that matter, Bruce Goldbergs [a proponent of reincarnation].[Edwards, p.231]
This is not a refutation at all, in fact it supports it. I could easily imagine that Newt, George, William, and Pat all stem from an original "Grog the caveman," can't you? Nevertheless, without much actual evidence, we should consider other possibilities.
In Buddhism, there is the concept of a kalpa, which is described as a period of time so long that if you took a handkerchief and rubbed it on a mountain once a year, a kalpa will have elapsed when you've worn the mountain down. It also seems to be an assumption in Buddhism that human beings have existed throughout all time. In modern science, the age of the universe is thought to be from 12 to 20 billion years old. Until recently, it's been thought that the uni-verse could go through cycles: beginning with a big bang, expanding, contracting down into a "big crush", exploding again in a new big bang, and so on. This could be thought of as a kalpa. We could then imagine that this earth, or a planet like it, existed in a previous kalpa. We could then have had previous human lives in this earlier kalpa. In this earlier kalpa, I could have been sitting in front of my computer, trying to figure out this question. If the number of human souls is constant, the kalpa idea would still lead us to the conclusion that some people have had more human lives than others.
After looking for an answer by expanding our scope of time, what about expanding the scope of space? Perhaps the "extra souls" are alien souls. One of my problems with animals reincar-nating as humans is that we have capacities that they seem to be lacking, so if aliens can reincar-nate as humans, they would have to be similar enough to us and have the same capacities. The only way this can actually answer the population problem instead of just increasing it is if we imagine that alien worlds are routinely blowing themselves up, and thus all the dispossessed souls have to find new planets to inhabit. A similar idea is that there could be more than one universe existing right now. Here, we don't have to rely on alien souls, we can just say that in alternate versions of the Earth, the human race died out, and their souls are coming here. I guess it's not inconceivable that either of these "immigrant" theories is happening, but, as usual, we have no reliable evidence to support it.
Here's one last unsupportable theory: perhaps reincarnation isn't confined by linear time. Perhaps after this life, I could go back in time and reincarnate as Queen Elizabeth, Louis XVI, a coal miner in the 1800's, Alan Ginsberg, and back again to Sir Walter Raleigh, Thomas Paine, Aleister Crowley, and Bill Gates. If you expand this idea further, there's really only one soul.
So, perhaps this phenomenon I've been calling reincarnation is actually something else. Perhaps there is one huge soul, like an ocean, and drops of this ocean detach from the main soul, occupy bodies for a time, then return to the ocean. When children remember a "previous life," they are really somehow connecting to something that hasn't completely dissolved back into the ocean. There's no way to verify this, of course.
Perhaps not everyone reincarnates, although now, I would argue that the phenomenon isn't reincarnation, but rather, possession. By possession, I'm not referring to "demonic possession," but the possession of a human body by a human soul which existed previously, which sounds like reincarnation. How I would distinguish the concepts of "reincarnation" and "possession" is: if everyone does it, it's reincarnation; if only a small percentage of people do it, it's possession. Also, part of the concept of possession is that the unborn child has a "rightful spirit" which is displaced by a previously existing spirit. One of Stevenson's twenty cases, the case of Jasbir, definitely looks like possession. The baby Jasbir almost dies of smallpox at the age of three. Before this, the child expresses no reincarnational memories, and after, he claimed to be one Sobha Ram, who had died in the May of that same year (1954). In this case, it looks as though Jasbir vacated the infant body completely, and Sobha took over.
Stevenson's argument against calling all cases of "reincarnation" possession is that there are cases of adults being temporarily possessed by dead people, but who then return to their normal selves. Stevenson seems to have defined possession in his own mind as "two souls occupying the same body," so, even though he spends many pages (Stevenson, p. 374-382) attempting to refute the idea of calling all cases of reincarnation possession, by failing to account for my "displacement" theory, he doesn't even account for the Jasbir case which he himself brought up. Well, I suppose he would simply say that not all "reincarnation" cases are cases of "displace-ment possession," as Jasbir seems to be. It seems as though he simply doesn't think of a previously existing soul taken over an unborn baby as being possession.
Stevenson's Twenty Cases was written in 1966, and since then he has been continuing to research in this area. I have not read all his books, so I don't know what his latest conclusions may be. In reading his work, it appears to me that he is sincere and aware of the limitations involved in his research. The prime problem is that in the vast majority of cases he arrives on the scene after the child has visited his "previous family," so doesn't observe for himself the child first recognizing his "former relatives," for example. However, it would be hard to consider that Stevenson has been the victim of thousands of cases of fraud, particularly when neither sets of parents have anything much to gain from this. A more serious allegation would be that somehow all these people, including Stevenson, are simply fooling themselves, and it's harder to simply dismiss this. The main counter-argument to this would be "how then did the child obtain this information?" Paul Edwards' answer to this seems to be that because the parents of both families tend believe in reincarnation, they engage in what he calls "holy lying" and somehow between themselves create a reincarnation story, which is then fed to the kid. He implies that these people may not be entirely conscious of their actions. [Edwards, p 274] This does not account for the emotional connections Stevenson observes that the child has for his "former" parents, but I suppose Edwards would say this is some form of hypnosis. Edwards attacks Stevenson on many other grounds, for instance that Stevenson had to rely on interpreters who had their own biases in favor of reincarnation [p. 261]. I don't have the space here to address all the issues Edwards raises, but in conclusion, I don't feel that he truly accounts for these cases of children spontaneously remembering "past lives."
Of all the various theories I've proposed, I don't particularly believe any of them, as there is little evidence to support them. As far as I am aware, Ian Stevenson has basically been collecting cases similar to those that he already has, while perhaps refining his techniques in answer to his critics, but I really don't see him or anyone else coming up with a convincing answer to the "population problem."
Sources
Edwards, Paul, Reincarnation: A Critical Examination 1996, Prometheus Books, Amherst, New York.
Stevenson, Ian, M.D., Twenty Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation, 1966, University Press of
Virginia, Charlottesville