Who wants to return as a can of milk?

The author of this study does not censor the accounts by young and poor claimants; however, it is aiming not at academic purity but at reflecting the experiences of the real people she interviewed

Claims of Reincarnation

An Empirical Study of Cases in India

Satwant K Pasricha

White Crow Books 2019 Pb, 304pp, bib, ind, £14.99, ISBN 9781786771032

There have not been many serious studies of ‘reincarnation’ since Professor Ian Stevenson’s prolific output through the late 1970s and 1980s, which built upon his acclaimed 1966 study Twenty Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation (revised in 1974).

Dr Pasricha, a leading clinical psychologist at the Himalayan Institute of Medical Sciences, here inherits Stevenson’s mantle. It is the first book with a systematic focus upon classic cases of the Indian type for more than 30 years. First published in 1990, it expands her 1978 doctoral thesis (which set out a methodology for investigating and evaluating cases) with a further 15-year research period in which she interviewed “hundreds” of subjects, mainly from northern India.

For those interested in what she learned, the case material is fascinating indeed. Stevenson himself acknowledges that they “may seem difficult to believe”, especially for a reader new to the subject, but offers his unequivocal endorsement for the fidelity of Pasricha’s work and her professional opinion. She is a curious scientist labouring at the coalface of what seems to be a genuine mystery.

It is all carefully presented, with an introductory chapter which reviews the history of the subject, and others outlining her methods of interviewing and evaluating responses. The results of over 300 interviews (of varying thoroughness) conducted by herself are sampled – with more attention to 45 cases which provide extra details or more confirmatory data – and followed by an equally interesting chapter exploring the effect of the circumstances upon the behaviour, psychology and beliefs (religious and otherwise) of the claimants and their families.

The Indian cases are also compared to cases from Turkey, Sri Lanka, and the North American tribes of Tlingit and Haida. Sceptics will shudder at the discussions of associated paranormal phenomena that Dr Pasricha encountered in the lives of her interviewees – many of whom were children in often poor families – but she felt, to her credit, that she could not ignore or censor their accounts. In conclusion, Pasricha discusses various associated theories and explanations.

Up to now, the subject of reincarnation in particular seems to trigger the outrage of militant rational sceptics. The claim that distinguishing marks and scars from a ‘past life’ have shown up on the new incarnate’s body, for example, a subject that interested Stevenson, has been dismissed as quintessentially preposterous because there is no known physical or genetic mode of transmission. While the sceptics draw their line there, Dr Pasricha freely admits that much about the subject is still mysterious.

In contrast, she is much more adventurous about testing alternative and ‘paranormal’ theories against her data. The more mundane explanations involve suggestion, fraud, fantasy, cryptomnesia and paramnesia. The more complicated psychological cases involve explanations based upon ESP and ‘personation’, hypnotic regression, neardeath experiences and even ‘possession’.

She examines her case material to show how these types were identified and rejected, and feels justified in proposing that the remainder support the theory of reincarnation.

In this, she crosses the limit imposed by sceptics and bravely tackles hypotheses which seem to arise out of the otherwise unexplained data; for example, some psychical form of transmission that transcends time and space, or some form of psychosomatic expression by the old ‘soul’ in its new body.

Her young and often poorlyeducated communicants go on to tell of stranger things, such as their existence beyond death and how they returned to a new life. These ideas, while heretical to Western medical science, heave been familiar to all classes of Indian society (and to some other cultures as well) as part of their religious and philosophical traditions.

Any reader who is unfamiliar with the Hindu and Theosophical literature on karma and reincarnation will welcome her chapters on this background which informs her conclusions. Sceptics will, no doubt, condemn this as a backward and nonscientific step, yet she faces up to the prospect of such criticism by resting her case material in a clear and logical presentation of the phenomenology derived from a statistical analysis of her cases.

One complaint might be that her presentation of her case material is not clinically detached or laid out to academic standards… but then, this is not a thesis, and her interviews clearly reveal Dr Pasricha’s sympathetic treatment of her ‘cases’ as real people. It also makes for easier reading.

Here, then, is the result of a rare and sober investigation which deserves to be read by all.

It would be quite ‘unscientific’ to shun Dr Pasricha’s research as ‘unbelievable’, fraud or selfdeception.

She pleads for further investigation and consideration of her work and the subject itself, and that should be the only intelligent and mature response from the Establishment. The general reader will find much in this careful and impressive study to stimulate their astonishment and wonder.

It seems to me to be a groundbreaking book with far-reaching implications. Dr Pasricha has dared to ask honest questions about a subject scorned by the arrogantly ignorant for too long. While she might not have any solid and satisfying answers, she is definitely asking the right questions.

For these reasons, I heartily recommend it.

Bob Rickard

★★★★★

“The subject of reincarnation seems to trigger the outrage of militant rational sceptics”