OK. I’m just going to throw this out there. You can believe it. Or not.
I’m going to share a story reported by Derek Askey in The Sun magazine (December) and Sean Lyons in Virginia Magazine (Winter 2023).
The story belongs to Jim Tucker, a professor of psychiatry and neurobehavioral sciences at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. And he is a reincarnation researcher and author.
The best part of his story is about Ryan Hammons, of Oklahoma, one of 2,500 cases of children who have vivid past-life memories … that Tucker has “solved.”
That means research verified 55 details shared by Ryan about the man he used to be. A man who died 40 years before Ryan was born.
“There’s this worldwide phenomenon of young children saying they remember a past life,” Tucker said. “We look at individual cases to see if they hold up, and at the phenomenon as a whole, to see what the patterns are and what we think it might add up to.”
When Ryan was 4, he began asking his mother to take him to Hollywood, his previous home. He also had nightmares of his heart exploding when he was in Hollywood. He detailed what it was like to die. He said everyone comes back and he’d known his previous mother. In fact he picked her to be his mother.
Ryan’s current mother flipped through books on Hollywood with Ryan until the day her son put his finger on an old black-and-white and said the man in the photo was him working in a movie with another man he called “George.”
The man was George Raft. The movie was “Night After Night.”
Based on details Ryan provided overall, they determined he had the memories of a talent agent named Marty Martyn, who was an extra in that film. Tucker tracked down Martyn’s daughter who confirmed many facts Ryan knew about her father.
Tucker’s research has determined:
• The median age at the time of the previous person’s death is 28.
• Most children having these memories are between 2 and 6. The memories fade after that.
• The median time between the remembered death and their next birth is 16 months.
• 60% of those claiming memories are male.
• 70% claim they died a violent or unnatural death.
• 90% say they were the same sex in their previous life.
Tucker also turns to science to help explain. He notes Max Planck, the father of quantum mechanics, supports a theory that our material world is derived from consciousness, not the other way around.
That would mean consciousness does not depend on our brain to exist and could move on when the brain stops. Perhaps to another brain. Another life.
“To my mind there may well be this larger self that has different lifetimes,” Tucker says. “It’s a core that continues, though the people it inhabits are different. …
“My feeling is that there is a part of us that survives, the consciousness part, but that doesn’t mean that we come back here. I would find it odd if we were limited to only this reality.”
There’s a lot more detail. Do your own digging. Check out Tucker’s books or the articles I mentioned. Or laugh it off.
Tucker says 25% to 30% of Americans believe in reincarnation. It’s also part of many religions. And perhaps it blends well with quantum physics.
I’m not sure what I believe. But I do feel something inside me that’s bigger than personality, DNA, bones and flesh. Call it soul or spirit or essence. Or consciousness. Whatever.
I like the idea that part of me — it’s the best part of me — will continue to float in the universe. Somehow. Somewhere.
