>> I expect that reincarnation is true. After you leave your body on this existence, then you go into some other realm. And after some length of time has elapsed on this Earth plane, for some reason you choose to go back.
There is a conscious process in selecting the life that you're going to lead, and that you consider different alternatives, and then that you choose someone that I gather that you learned something from. >> Reincarnation is a concept that stretches deep into our history and is the central tenet for many pagan and Indian religions, including Buddhism and Hinduism. Billions of people around the world still believe in the idea of rebirth.
But is there any scientific evidence to support such claims? >> So what they've done is to collect thousands of case studies that support the idea that these kind of past life experiences are vividly remembered and are even correlated with some kind of physical birthmark. >> If reincarnation is real, then what might its purpose be?
Why do souls repeatedly incarnate? >> The soul is required to evolve. It's almost like as a soul, we're required to come into body, and we're required to learn.
And learning isn't easy. >> The implications of reincarnation are no less than profound and could answer some of the big questions humans have been asking since the dawn of time. Who are we and why are we here?
[MUSIC PLAYING] >> In the United States, there's this myth that ideas about reincarnation first came into the west through India back in the 19th century. But that's just simply not correct because reincarnation, it was present as an idea at the very beginning of western civilization. >> Scholars agree the concept of reincarnation is rooted in antiquity.
For example, the Neanderthal buried their dead along with their instruments and food for future lives. And the idea of rebirth continued into western civilization, and was famously taught by the man who coined the term philosophy, Pythagoras. >> Pythagoras, for example, who was the person who coined the term philosophy, was a reincarnationist.
And he claimed to remember eight of his past lives, and had some technique that he was able to get his students to have that experience as well. >> Past life regressions can be a contentious topic among practitioners of psychology. The evidence and accounts are overwhelming, but there's debate as to what they really are.
Dr Ian Stevenson was a well-respected psychologist and was the chair of the Department of Psychology at the University of Virginia. He was given a $1 million grant to fund research into paranormal psychology, also known as parapsychology, with the intention of disproving the concept of reincarnation. Stevenson went on to research thousands of cases on the uncanny memories of young children from their past lives.
While his intention was to disprove this phenomenon, in the end, he became one of its staunchest defenders and most dedicated researchers. Today, Dr Jim Tucker continues to conduct the work started by Stevenson. Unlike past life regressionists, Dr Stevenson and Dr Tucker do not study those put under hypnosis.
Instead, they look at cases of kids who start to spontaneously remember things and start speaking about their previous lives while fully cognizant. In one of Tucker's papers, he recounts a story of a boy from Thailand who, at the age of three, started complaining that he had been shot and killed in his past life while riding a bicycle to school. He even remembered that he was a local teacher, and he remembered his name, Bua Kai.
His grandmother took him to the village where he said he lived, and he led her to a house. He recognized the people living there, and they confirmed that five years earlier, their son, Bua Kai, had been shot and killed while riding a bike to work. He was shot in the back of the head, marked by a small entry wound, with a larger exit wound in the front of his head.
The little boy had been born with a small birthmark on the back of his head and a larger, oddly-shaped mark on his forehead. >> It happens a lot with children. And at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, they have documented thousands of these cases.
So you can say, you can't make this happen in a laboratory setting. But what you can do is create enough evidence that it becomes something meaningful from a scientific point of view. And that's what we have in terms of the evidence for reincarnation.
>> There are two primary ways people recall past lives. One is spontaneously, like in the case of so many children who suddenly remember memories in great detail. Number two is hypnotherapy, where a patient is put under hypnosis and then guided by a trained regression therapist into recalling previous lifetimes.
>> It surprises people how easy it is to access the first scene in a past life. And then it's the job of a trained regression therapist to know how to open it up, how to ask questions, how to deepen it. But also, it moves forward spontaneously.
I don't give the information to the client. They tell me the information. >> If reincarnation is real, then what is its purpose?
Dr Linda Backman, psychologist and regression therapist, has guided hundreds of patients into their past lives and may have the answer. >> The past lives explain something in current life because the past lives have a direct connection to life today. They explain something we're working on to change in life today, which is what we call karma.
They also can explain a relationship, a phobia, a physical symptom. The soul is required to evolve, and we're required to learn. So we gather karma and we also gather dharma, and that's what we're working on in our current life.
Karma is a free will decision we made in a past life that perhaps wasn't the best decision. It's not a permanent black mark on your soul. It's something you can balance in a subsequent life.
You have a life plan, life intentions. And then you basically come in with free will. >> Many humans experience profound suffering during their lifetime.
So why would a soul choose to come into body knowing it will be painful? >> It's perfectly plausible to me that from the framework outside of this one, we would choose to come into it knowing that we were going to be having a certain kind of suffering because we know from that framework that it's time limited, that you'll be out of it. But then once you get into this framework, see, that knowledge is blocked so that you're faced there with the raw suffering, without the insight, maybe, that you chose it in the first place, but also that it will be over.
>> One of the most fascinating parts of reincarnation is the idea of a soul group, or a group of souls that choose to incarnate together. >> I know this from client after client after client, where what they come upon at times in at the soul level of a regression is a group of souls with whom they incarnate repetitively. So simply put, I like to call it a soul pod.
A soul pod means most of us have about 10 to 20 souls with whom we incarnate most often. If you're the parent and there's a child, you made an agreement at the soul level to be parent and child. You came together for a reason.
>> Throughout many regression therapy sessions, patients not only recall previous human lives, but the lives of intelligent, off-planet alien species. >> I'm regressing a lot of clients in the last 10 to 12 years who discover their interplanetary souls, meaning they don't regularly come here. They come here on occasion, and they come to Earth, if I oversimplify the explanation, because they're highly evolved and they come from evolved, healthy locations.
They come to teach us how to progress as humanity. I have clients that begin-- I'm intending to guide a past life regression, and the first scene is literally in a spaceship. And some listeners might go, oh, well, the client was just making that up.
The level of detail, and the level of not only the detail of the ship. We get literal physical detail of what materials is it made from, and what do the controls look like? The chain of command on the ship as explained.
The interrelationships of the chain of command on the ship is explained. There's far too many details, in my opinion, to be made up. Matias de Stefano, host of "Initiation", claims to remember his past lives as different ETs.
Like other interplanetary souls, he is here on a mission to teach our intergalactic history and to help raise consciousness as humanity progresses into a new age. >> When I was 11, 12 years old, I started to remember my lives. And of course, I thought many times I was getting crazy until I started to find many others that also remembered.
Everything that I am doing in my life, it's aligned to my mission to go all around the world. And to connect all this nodes of energy, and to share and teach people about my memories is something I live in balance with. >> Reincarnation is a concept embedded in our history and culture with profound implications regarding our purpose and evolution as individuals and as a species.
While scientific evidence is hard to quantify, according to those who remember their past lives, our soul's evolution is akin to an epic science fiction narrative where the soul learns and grows over billions of years through multiple species throughout this universe and beyond. >> I gather that there must be ways that you can tap into these memories of past lives. However, I do respect the Tibetan tradition that says you probably better leave it alone.
And the reason is Plato said a similar thing. If at every moment in our waking life, we were flooded with all this information from past lives, it would make it more difficult to concentrate on this task at hand.
