Modern scientific research into the field of reincarnation first began in the 1960’s when Dr. Ian Stevenson, a psychiatrist and professor at the University of Virginia published a ground-breaking article in the Journal of American Psychical Research: « The Evidence for Survival from Claimed Memories of Former Incarnations”. The fallout from this first article, and his subsequent contribution to researching this phenomena is immense. In the Journal of Nervous and Mental Diseases, from September 1977, Dr. Harold Lief was quoted as saying the following about Stevenson: “Either he is making a colossal mistake or he will be known as the Galileo of the 20th century”. Over his forty year career, Dr. Stevenson published 10 books and countless peer reviewed articles, for a total of over 3000 cross-cultural case studies, suggestive of the survival of our individual consciousness, through the process of reincarnation. In his massive body of work, Ian Stevenson suggests 3 arguments to support the reincarnation thesis. Continue reading »

The topic of reincarnation, while very dominant in the collective imagination of Eastern traditions, remains marginalized in Western society. Recent scientific research on the topic, however, is reintroducing this age old belief into Western popular culture, with interesting therapeutic applications in the fields of psychology, psychiatry as well as alternative health. Psychiatrist Dr. Brian Weiss, through the use of past-life regression in his clinical practise and psychiatrist Dr. Ian Stevenson, through his ground-breaking cross-cultural reincarnation studies, are revolutionizing our modern understanding of the soul’s journey through time and space. What if we weren’t limited to a single life on earth? What if our soul had many lives to experience the physical world, before journeying back to a unified field of consciousness? My article in this section seeks to clarify some of these age old questions, by putting reincarnation back into its proper historical context. Continue reading »