Reincarnation, Part Three: Identifying Past Lives, with Walter Semkiw
Walter Semkiw, MD, is founder and president of the Institute for the Integration of Science, Intuition, and Spirit. He is author of Born Again, Return of the Revolutionaries: The Case for Reincarnation and Soul Groups Reunited, and Origin of the Soul and the Purpose of Reincarnation.
Here he describes his own journey from a skeptical medical student to a student and scholar of reincarnation cases. He came to accept that he had a past lifetime during the American Revolutionary War period. He also describes the development of an intuitive methodology employing the guidance of trance channel, Kevin Ryerson, and his spirit entity known as “Ahtun Re”. Using this approach, he believes he has been able to identify the past lives of hundreds of contemporary individuals. He describes some remarkable “hits” that strengthened his confidence in this non-scientific approach. He also maintains that people tend to reincarnate in “soul groups” that connect over multiple lifetimes. In this context, he describes how he came to believe that the interviewer, Jeffrey Mishlove, was the psychologist and philosopher, William James, in a previous lifetime.
New Thinking Allowed host, Jeffrey Mishlove, PhD, is author of The Roots of Consciousness, Psi Development Systems, and The PK Man. Between 1986 and 2002 he hosted and co-produced the original Thinking Allowed public television series. He is the recipient of the only doctoral diploma in "parapsychology" ever awarded by an accredited university (University of California, Berkeley, 1980). He serves as dean of transformational psychology at the University of Philosophical Research. He teaches parapsychology for ministers in training with the Centers for Spiritual Living through the Holmes Institute. He has served as vice-president of the Association for Humanistic Psychology, and is the recipient of its Pathfinder Award for outstanding contributions to the field of human consciousness. He is also past-president of the non-profit Intuition Network, an organization dedicated to creating a world in which all people are encouraged to cultivate and apply their inner, intuitive abilities.
(Recorded on November 22, 2015)
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Thinking Allowed
Conversations on the leading edge of knowledge and discovery with psychologist Jeffrey Mishlove
Hello and welcome, I'm Jeffrey Mishlove and this is part three of our four-part series with Dr. Walter Semkew on the subject of
reincarnation.
Dr. Semkew is a medical doctor. He is the founder and president of the
Institute for the Integration of Science, Intuition and Spirit. He is also the author of several books on
reincarnation, including
Return of the Revolutionaries, The Case for Reincarnation and the Reunification of Soul Groups,
Origin of the Soul and the Purpose of Reincarnation, and
Born Again.
Welcome again, Walter. Thank you, Jeff. Pleasure to be with you.
You've developed what has to be a unique approach to reincarnation. You've made a name for yourself
for identifying the past lives of, I suppose, hundreds of people and you use what I think
people in the scientific community would regard as an unorthodox approach
to that, but it's one that you feel
confident in. Yes, and
just to jump ahead a little bit, I feel confident in these principles of reincarnation because subsequently
by becoming a scholar of Ian Stevenson, all these principles that I first proposed in my first book in
2003, I find are supported by Stevenson's literature.
Mm-hmm. Well, let's talk about what drew you into the field. Well, my story is such
in
I've always had a scientific background and most people won't believe it, but I I'm a skeptic by nature
Mm-hmm, and I never believed in psychics or mediums. I thought that was all, you know
charlatan, you know, they were charlatans, and
it
was 1984 and I was in my residency in
occupational medicine and
in Chicago, and it was it was midwinter. There's nothing to do in Chicago
other than stay indoors, and this friend of mine said you have to go see this medium who is working out of a local
metaphysical bookstore, and
even though I didn't believe in psychics or mediums, I didn't have anything else to do but study.
I thought what the heck it might be entertaining.
Yeah.
And so this turned out to be a trance medium, and a trance medium is somebody who goes into a meditative state and
allows spirit beings to take over their body to communicate with human beings. Yeah. And
typically when the spirit takes over the person's body, they speak in a different accent, different voice,
different facial expressions, different mannerisms.
It's almost like there's a different person sitting in front of you, and that's what happened with this medium,
and there were two spirit guides that came through. The first one said he was the universal guardian
given to those who
came into
physical existence to make a statement, and
and that guide only stayed for a minute and a half or so. Then a second guide came through
who gave many more details about my past lives and so forth, and in particular the guide said that
I had a lifetime. The most prominent was during the American Revolution
where I had signed my name on parchment to help secure ideals for humanity.
The guide said also I had a lifetime in France during the era of Louis XIV,
and then the session went on, and
the guide did not give me specific names, and
then the guide said, do you have any questions? And I asked the usual questions. Am I going to find a girlfriend?
You know, should I meditate more? Kind of the general things. And then I thought, well
can you tell me who I was in the American Revolution? And they told me, and so a fairly well-known figure, and
and I
found it hard to believe. And
then the guide said, know that you are here to bring a new way of thinking, and
I thought that's strange. You know, like how am I going to bring a new way of thinking?
I don't understand life, you know, and at this point in time
I was sort of agnostic, and you know, who am I?
And after the
session, I pretty much dismissed it, you know, because I had heard that psychics tell you you're somebody famous,
because people want to hear that, and it brings in more customers. And so I
dismissed it all. I thought, oh, I probably just wasted my money. And then 12 years later, by this time
I was working as a medical director for an oil company,
Unocal 76, whose slogan is the spirit of 1776,
coincidentally. And I was in a Hawaiian business, and
I was going to go to lunch with some of the managers, and they said, let's meet in the parking lot in 10 minutes.
We'll go out to lunch. So it was broad daylight around noon.
I'm standing in a parking lot waiting for my colleagues, and we're out of nowhere, this booming voice,
like there was literally a megaphone in my head,
said, study the lifetime and mention this person from the American Revolution. And it like startled me,
you know, nothing like this ever happened to me
before, and nothing that dramatic has happened since.
But it made me start studying this person, and that era of the American Revolution.
And I realized that not only in some portraits did I look exactly like this person,
but I started to identify all these people in this person's life who seemed to be
reincarnated around me. The idea of a soul group. And that's where I started to formulate that people incarnate in groups.
And some were, you know, historical figures where portraits were easy to find,
but others, like one thing that really shook me up, and again, I still didn't believe this,
but I went back to Boston where this person lived, and I went to a local
historical society, and they had a lot of information, and
there was a shoebox with the name of this person's brother. And in history books,
they mentioned this brother, but this brother never did anything in the American Revolution,
so he's just mentioned brother of. And I had never seen a portrait of this brother.
Well, I take out the shoebox, and there's a portrait of the brother and his wife, and
the person is a dead ringer for my brother George, and
the woman is a dead ringer for my brother's wife. And I, it like goes, I could, it shocked me,
you know, and it was like, I was on a,
like a detective on a trail, where I kept finding more and more information that seemed to be supporting this theory.
Okay.
But at the same time, you know, I was a medical doctor, and you know, I
was afraid to talk to anybody, and in fact, when I did try to talk to my brothers about it,
they could not listen to it. They thought it was too weird. And, and I
remember during that time, I was, I felt like the loneliest person in the world, because I had no one to talk to.
And you know, this, this sort of thing sort of starts, you get obsessed with it, you know, and it's like such a big
idea, and if this is true, this could help us really understand how reincarnation works.
Mm-hmm.
And by the way,
now it's the total opposite, where, you know,
I know people all over the world, and people write to me about their own cases, and
what's sort of happened now, is I'm sort of becoming a mentor for people who are going through the same process that I went
through back in
1996, and ensuing years.
You're trying to integrate the
possibility that you could have been this person in a past lifetime.
Right, right. And, and just recently, a person contacted me, who
through a series of events, which I won't go through,
he is quite convinced that he's the reincarnation of a very famous musician, rock musician, and
he reminds me so much of me, because he's like saying, this is so amazing, and I have no one to talk to, and, and
you know, this, this guy's also a tough bodybuilder, and, and he's, you know, felt rejected by his whole family and everything,
because they're mainly Christians, and this idea of reincarnation just seems
unbelievable to people. Well, it was unbelievable to you when you started. Yes, yes, and, and in fact,
that's what led me to work with Kevin Ryerson, who's a good friend of yours. Yes. And, what happened was that
I had
hypothesized about 60 past life matches,
including who my wife was before, who my children from that lifetime were in this lifetime, about 60 matches,
and including a number of people in the
2000 presidential race, that, that
included Bill Clinton, Al Gore, and George W. Bush. All people who had had, you began to feel, had had past lives in
the American Revolutionary Period. Right, and I specifically identified who they were, and they matched in personality and
physical resemblance, but one of the people that I could not
locate in, in the American Revolution was Ralph Nader, and
since he was in this cycle, or this cohort of presidential
candidates in 2000, I figured he must have been in the
American Revolution, too, if people incarnate in soul groups, and I, you know, and I started to
meet with a whole series of psychics, trying to find out if any of them had the ability to make accurate past life matches.
First and foremost, to find out if this past lifetime for me was valid or not, you know,
and I didn't want to go running around saying I was this, you know, famous person,
you know, having people think that I'm crazy when I'm not. But now you've gone from a
position where you're very skeptical about any psychic, or any medium, to where you're seeking psychics for validation. Right, and
but in about the dozen psychics that I went to,
none of them seemed to have the ability to make accurate past life matches, and then I was introduced to Kevin Ryerson,
and Kevin channels a spirit guide named Atun Ray. Yes, who claims to be an ancient Egyptian
priest. Who last lived about 3,500 years ago, and
you know, I went through my proposed matches, and Atun Ray said that I was right in about
85% of the cases, and wrong in 15% of the cases.
So I went name by name, and he told me which ones were right, which ones were wrong.
He validated my past lifetime, but I still didn't know, how can I trust Atun Ray?
How do you know, how do I know he's accurate? And let me pause for a moment, because as a
parapsychologist in general, and as a friend of Kevin Ryerson,
I'm quite confident in his sincerity, in what he does, and not only that, in his talent.
But for me, I
view a great psychic like I might think of a great baseball player, like Babe Ruth.
He's one of the greatest baseball players of all times, but he did strike out more often than he hit a home run.
Right, and that's a valid point, that even good psychics have a hit rate.
Yeah, and some are more accurate than others.
Yeah, and if we have time, we can talk about the work of Gary Schwartz, who has done work to try to validate psychics.
He's a professor at the University of Arizona.
And of course, there's a hundred and fifty years of research in psychical research in
parapsychology. We have a vast body of data about this right now. So what I start to do is ask Atun Ray
you know, questions about what we would call blind cases. Okay. You know, it's one thing if you
hypothesize a past-life match. Yeah, you know, let's say that Bill Clinton, for instance,
I hypothesize was Peyton Randolph, who was the first president,
the president of the first Continental Congress.
Then Atun Ray just has to say yes or no.
But I start to ask about people where I had absolutely no idea who they were. And like Ralph Nader is a good example.
Right. And
Atun Ray said that Nader was part of the American Revolution,
he played a prominent role in the Continental Congress, and if you find his
portrait, you'll see the same angular facial features. And I said, what's the name? And he said, the name is Thompson.
Well, that's very specific information. Thompson, Continental Congress. I should be able to find him.
Well, by this time I had my own library on the American Revolution and I
looked through all the indices of all the books I had. I could not find a Thompson.
And I almost gave up on it.
But then I thought by this time I had a book contract and they had a deadline and so I thought I don't have time
to do this anymore,
but I thought I'd give it one more shot and I went to the San Francisco Public Library and
went through every book on the American Revolution that they had, just looking in the indices for a Thompson.
Finally, in a book that was published around
1935, it was a huge black volume,
in the index that says Thompson, Charles Thompson, portrait of Thompson.
I turned to the page and it's a dead ringer for Ralph Nader. And we can show that image. Yeah.
And then now that I, it turns out that he was the secretary of the Continental Congress
for the full 13 years of its existence.
And the reason he wasn't in most history books is they recorded who the elected representatives were.
And not many people focused on the secretary. But now that I had more information, I was able to
get more information on him and found that they had, they said the same thing.
So they were both advocates for the underdogs. They were both advocates for Native American rights.
And the history, you might ask if Thompson was a
revolutionary who served as the secretary of the Congress for 13 years,
why didn't he get elected as a representative himself?
And what the history books said was that he was too radical to be elected, just like Nader.
And then I start to ask about other
personalities.
For instance, I had read about another Philadelphia revolutionary named
David Rittenhouse.
And all I knew is that he helped edit the pamphlet Common Sense written by Thomas Paine.
But that's all I knew about him. And I asked Atun Ray, has this Rittenhouse reincarnated?
And he said, well, yeah, he was Carl Sagan. Sagan had died by this time.
Excuse me, but
at first thought, when Atun Ray told me that, my heart sank because I thought that can't be true.
Because by this time I had realized people pretty much do the same thing in things in life.
And, you know, politicians tend to come back as politicians. Artists come back as artists. Doctors come back as doctors.
And I thought, how could this little-known
revolutionary that I had never heard of
become the world's most famous astronomer?
And this was before the Internet. We're talking about 2001.
And the Internet was in its infancy. It was in its very early stages.
There were some very primitive search engines, but nobody used them. I think it's fair to say that Kevin Ryerson
probably didn't search the Internet. Right, right. And when I go to sessions, I don't tell Kevin ahead of time what I'm going to ask.
Yeah, so
then I got other books. And lo and behold, two months later,
I got a book that said that where I learned that Rittenhouse was America's first astronomer.
And he built the first telescope in America.
He built the first replica of the solar system that was accurate based on his observations.
And you didn't even know this when you first inquired. No, and I still didn't know what he looked like.
The book did not have a portrait.
Yeah. And the first time that I saw a portrait of Rittenhouse was actually when I went to visit Ian Stevenson in
2001. And
Stevenson was very gracious. He spent a whole day with me.
But while I was there, I did the tourist things and I went to James Madison's home.
And Madison had an extensive collection of portraits of people from the American Revolution.
And lo and behold, he has a portrait of Rittenhouse and he looks just like Carl Sagan.
And I like, you know, couldn't believe it.
And so here there was another case where there's no way in the world
Kevin could have known this through his own fund of knowledge when it took me so much work to find it.
And so that and now I've been working with Kevin and Artun Ray over a period of 15 years on a monthly basis.
I usually have two sessions or more per month and Artun Ray has been able to do this
reliably throughout this period of time. So what we have been doing is compiling a database of
famous personalities. One of my favorite recently is that
Elon Musk, the founder of
Tesla Motors and of SpaceX and of PayPal. He's been identified as the reincarnation of Thomas Edison.
And you know, Edison and Tesla had a great rivalry
about what type of electricity, AC or DC, was most practical for long-term transmission.
And Edison was direct current advocate and Tesla was AC.
Tesla won out.
Tesla won out and appropriately Edison called his car Tesla.
And physically the resemblance is stunning.
Okay, so
and people can
look you up on the web and they can find probably over a hundred of these matches. Probably closer to 500.
500 at this point. And if you just Google, you know, Elon Musk reincarnation will pop up.
I mean you can if you're interested in anybody just Google reincarnation in that person and
we have musicians and
politicians and scientists. So the criteria that you use in making these identifications include physical
resemblance,
personality
matches, career interests, talents, and soul groups. And the soul group plus the
confirmation by
Kevin Ryerson's trance
personality Atun Ray. Right. So and again, I've been doing this for so long and I've had websites up for such a long time.
People write to me all the time with proposed matches. And what I first do is I review them myself to see if they're plausible.
If they meet these criteria. And if they do then I'll ask about it in a session with Atun Ray.
And then if he affirms it then I'll put it on the website. Okay. Now, I think it's fair to
bring up that
you identified a match for me. In fact at this point, I think a couple.
Quite a few. Yeah. Well, well, you're almost your entire soul group in this lifetime.
In the William James life. And as I recall, here's how it happened. Many years ago
I had an internet radio program and I interviewed you because you had just written a book on astrology
at the time. And you mentioned in passing that you were doing these
identifications on the American Revolution. And I had a
website that
I owned the URL. I still do. WilliamJames.com. And you said to me, well, do you think you might have been the
reincarnation of William James, the founder of American psychology and one of the founders of
pragmatic philosophy and one of the first presidents of the Society for Psychical Research.
A person who has been identified, I think, as one of the hundred most influential Americans who ever lived. Oh, stop bragging.
Well, I said to you, of course not. I don't think I could have been William James for one thing. He was my hero.
Why would I have been a person who I regard as a hero? And you said to me, well people
reincarnate in soul groups.
So, what you might do is see if some of the people who are closest to you in this lifetime,
do they potentially
match in terms of these criteria that we've discussed, physical features and personality characteristics, etc.,
with people who were known to have been
associated with William James. And I figured I'll go through the exercise. I came up with a number of
possible, a dozen, of dozen possible matches,
hypothetical, and you took that information to a session with Kevin Ryerson and Atun Ray.
Right, and and just to kind of go back,
you're the one who actually connected me with these regression organizations through our
correspondence. And when I saw, there's also a category of reincarnation cases that I call affinity cases,
where someone is naturally attracted to their own past life. One example is Halle Berry has been
identified as the reincarnation of Dorothy Dandridge.
Dorothy Dandridge. And Halle went to great lengths to make a movie about Dorothy. Yes. Laurel and Hardy have been identified and
they, as children,
replicated the behavior of Laurel and Hardy
unconsciously. And
when I contacted them
to tell them they were Laurel and Hardy, they were kind of stunned, but they had to admit they've been
acting like Laurel and Hardy ever since they were children.
So there is this phenomenon of being attracted to your own past life persona.
And and so when I saw your website, I also looked up a picture of Henry James, of William James, and
you guys even have the same beard. You know, there's a strong physical resemblance. You used to have a beard.
Long ago. And now in your matches, like your wife Janelle physically matches William James' wife, and
again, you identified about a dozen people where the personalities and the facial features have matched.
Well, I have to tell you I've been
intrigued and also skeptical about this from the outset. It's been, I think, you know, close to 20 years since you first made that
identification, and it's it's something I find embarrassing and intriguing and
this interview is coming to an end now, but in our fourth session
I want to go into some detail with you about what it's like to to try and integrate that
possibility, that prospect.
So we can take a closer look at it coming up. I think that
the
issue for me when I expressed to you my skepticism, you said, well, William James would have been skeptical, too.
Exactly. Same personality trait.
So, you know,
it might be interesting to think, how would William James have
responded had somebody identified one of his past lives?
It's a very intriguing question. And I think for people who are familiar with my work,
some people can see, yeah, there is a connection with William James.
Well, aren't you the only person who got a degree in parapsychology from the University of California, Berkeley?
The only person in the world who has ever received an accredited doctoral diploma that says
parapsychology. And William James was the first president of what? Not the first president, but one of the early presidents. Anyhow, Walter Semke,
we're going to have a very intriguing interview coming up. Thank you so much for being with me. Thank you, William James.
And thank you for being with us. And be sure to check your listings for part four of our four-part series
with Dr. Walter Semke on
reincarnation.