RESEARCHES IN REINCARNATION
I. Stevenson, at the University of Virginia, has long studied
claims of reincarnation. The method employed (and
there are precious few alternatives) focuses on children who
claim to have lived before and can provide
verifiable details about their past lives. If the details check
out, one can at least claim that reincarnation is a
possible interpretation of the data. Usually, however, before a
researcher can get to the scene of the
phenomenon, the parents of the deceased have been found and the
way has been left open for much
exaggeration.
In his present contribution, Stevenson reports three cases in Sri
Lanka where the recollections of the
supposedly reincarnated children have been written down in detail
and the family of the deceased has not
been located. Here is one of his cases:
"The Case of Iranga. The child was born in a village of Sri
Lanka near but not on the west coast, in 1981.
When she was about 3 years old she spoke about a previous life at
a place called Elpitiya. Among other
details, Iranga mentioned that her father sold bananas, there had
been two wells at her house, one well had
been destroyed by rain, her mother came from a place called
Matugama, she was a middle sister of her
family, and the house where the family lived had red walls and a
kitchen with a thatched roof. Her statements
led to the identification of a family in Elpitiya, one of whose
middle daughters had died, probably of a brain
tumor, in 1950. Among 43 statements that Iranga made about the
previous life, 38 were correct for this family,
the other 5 were wrong, unverifiable, or doubtful. Iranga's
village was 15 kilometers from Ilpitiya. Each family
had visited the other's community, but they had had no
acquantance with each other (or knowledge of each
other) before the case developed."
Stevenson's conclusion was that the three children had
information about deceased persons that could only
have been obtained paranormally.
(Stevenson, Ian, and Samararatne, Godwin; "Three New Cases
of the Reincarnation Type in Sri Lanka with
Written Records Made before Verification." Journal of
Nervous and Mental Disease, 176:741, 1988.)