Children’s Memories of Previous Lives, from Jim B Tucker | Insights At The Edge

There's a metaphor sometimes used in Buddhism where it's like there's a candle being lit and as it burns down lower, another candle takes that flame and then continues on. Jim will die at some point, but there may be this aspect of me that then continues on and in rare circumstances even continues on with some of the memories of his life. Welcome friends to our series Once More, exploring reincarnation and the gap between lives. In this episode, we're here with Dr. Jim B. Tucker, child psychiatrist and Professor Emeritus of Psychiatry and Neurobehavioral Sciences at the University of Virginia. For more than 10 years, Jim was the Director of the Division of Perceptual Studies at the University of Virginia, where he took over the work of Dr. Ian Stevenson, studying reports from children who claim to remember their past lives. Friends, stay with us. Jim, I'm so glad you're part of the series, that you're making time for this. Thank you so very much and welcome. Well, thank you. It's great to be here. To begin, for people who are hearing about the Division of Perceptual Studies for the very first time, set the table for us. What has this division been doing in the halls of the University of Virginia? That's right, in Mr. Jefferson's University. So, Ian Stevenson, who was initially the Chair of the Department of Psychiatry, became intrigued by work looking largely at the question of, is there a survival after death? And also sort of the interplay between mind and brain, challenging the idea that brain purely produces what we experience as mind. So anyway, he stepped down as Chair in the late 1960s to start this division that we now call the Division of Perceptual Studies. And we continue to look at those questions. And in particular, he focused largely, not completely, but largely on cases of young children from various parts of the world who said that they had memories of a previous life. And I then picked up on that work when I joined the university in the late 1990s. And what we do is learn about these cases and study them and see, can it be verified that what the child reports as memories, that they actually happened, that there was someone who had the life that the child says they remember? And do the details match? And can we be sure that the child did not learn about the past life through some sort of ordinary means? Mills I've heard the collection of data that you've collected. Unquestionably, the best evidence we have for the existence of reincarnation, strong statement. But when you say we gathered some stories, I mean, 2,500-plus case studies. So tell us a little bit about this collection, how the case studies were gathered. And if you were just to introduce me, top line, let me tell you what we've got in these 2,500 cases. Give me like a one-page summary, if you will. Sure. So yes, they are cases from all over, including increasingly cases from the U.S. of a young child, usually before school age, who says they have these memories. And what we have done over the decades is to determine exactly what the child has said, and then to determine, is there somebody who lived and died in the past whose life matches what the child says? And it involves getting as many witnesses as we can to either verify or not verify that the child's memories fit with somebody who lived before. So typically what we would do is meet with the child's family, talk with the child if they will talk with us. Sometimes they do, sometimes they don't. But find out from the parents as much as they can remember what the child has said. And of course, we document all that. And then there are some cases where the family has gone out and found that somebody's life fit with the child's details. And then there are other times where we do that kind of work. Or sometimes there have been journalists or whoever who have done the research. And again, there's the question of, could the child have learned about this through some sort of ordinary means? And sometimes, sometimes the children talk about being someone who lived and died nearby, or even a deceased relative. And in those cases, you can't be certain that the child didn't learn about the deceased person some sort of ordinary way. But then there are the ones where the child talks about a total stranger to everyone around them in some distant place. And then the task becomes going to that place and trying to find whether the details are accurate for somebody who lived. So it involves us approaching each case with completely an open mind when we're trying to find out, is there evidence here supporting the idea that this child's memories are legit? And so it involves documenting as much as possible and as carefully as possible and getting into the details and considering various possibilities and trying to determine, again, sort of the strength of the evidence for each case, what it adds up to. And then we can look at the proof as a whole, look at the database with our 2,500 cases, and also look at patterns in the cases. I want to hear more about the patterns. Before I do, I noticed that over the last few weeks, as I've talked to various people that I know about doing this interview with you and how interesting it is to study these cases, a lot of people immediately go to a sort of skeptical brush-off that this must be BS in one way or another. It just can't be true. And I've been asking myself, why is this response from certain people so immediate? It's like I'm offending them by sharing with them what's been happening for five-plus decades at the University of Virginia through a scientifically rigorous examination. So what do you think? Why is this so offensive to a certain group of people? They're like, no, it can't be factual. Well, I think for one thing, it really challenges people's worldview, and it also does it in a way that may seem fantastic. I mean, if you were talking with someone who says, I get visited by aliens every night, or I get the Angel Gabriel comes to me every night, or whatever, I mean, I think a lot of us, our initial reaction would be, that sounds kind of incredible. Unfortunately, there are a lot of people who dismiss the work without ever taking a look at it, which is frankly not a very scientific approach, right? So there are people who are open to considering the work, and people who aren't, and so be it. I mean, I'm not trying to convince somebody that they should spend their time delving into this, but if they're curious about it, and curious about the question of, can part of our consciousness continue on after the body dies, well, then I think it's worth taking a look. Okay, well, I'm deeply interested in this question. It's probably the central question throughout my life that's fueled a big part of my spiritual search. What happens when we die, and does consciousness continue, and what do we know about that consciousness that continues? And that's why this study, once more, of what or who reincarnates is so personally interesting to me. So, looking at it, you said there are certain patterns in the 2,500 cases that seem to come forward. And what I'd like to do, Jim, if it's okay, is talk about this from a sort of factual, here's the evidence, here's what we have, and then later we can talk about, well, how do we interpret this? But let's just sort of, right now, just look at this snapshot. Here's the patterns that we see. Yeah, okay. So, typically it starts with, like I said, very young children. The average age when a child starts talking about a purported past life is 35 months. So, it's usually a two- or three-year-old who starts coming out with these things. And then, of course, they can elaborate them as their language skills improve. But they do tend to have good language skills anyway. So, we've done psychological testing with some of them. And first of all, they're not psychotic or dissociating or whatever. The one thing that stands out from the testing is they tend to be quite intelligent and quite verbal. So, you've got these bright young kids who are reporting these things. And along with it can come other features like behavioral features. So, well, first of all, most of the children describe a life that ended in some sort of unnatural means, some sort of violent means, meaning murder, suicide, accident, combat, that sort of thing. So, three-quarters of the kids talk about how they died in the past life. And of those, 70% is by some sort of unnatural means. With those unnatural means cases, 35% of those kids will also show a phobia toward that mode of death. So, for instance, a girl who hated being in water basically from the time she was born. And when she was an infant, it would take three adults to hold her down to give her a bath. And then when she got old enough to talk, describe the life of a girl in another village who had drowned in an accident. And again, we see these intense fears related to what they say are their memories of things that they've experienced. A lot of them will also show a lot of emotions about this material. It's not someone just reading off a list of facts. And it's not just general knowledge, but more of things from one particular point of view, which they say was who they were before. And they may show great emotion talking about the previous family and talking about wanting to see the previous family, great emotion about the death. Some of them can have nightmares about what they describe as death in the past life. It's a completely involved picture and involves a lot of aspects of their personality. And again, in the cases that provide the strongest evidence, people have documented what the child said and then gone and looked and found that, in fact, somebody did have a life that matched what the child said. And then by the time the children get to be six or seven, typically, they stop talking about these things and they just kind of go on with their lives. We recently did a study, and my colleague Marietta Pelovanova was the primary author on this, but of talking with adults who we studied initially when they were kids reporting these things. And this work's been going on since the 1960s, so some of these have grown up. And what we found is, basically, they're doing well. Educationally, they hit probably above average as far as the number with either undergrad degrees or also postgraduate degrees. And occupationally, they were doing well. It just sort of ran the gamut. And emotionally, there was some depression and anxiety, but it didn't stand out any more than probably in the general population. Most of them were having happy, sort of normal adulthoods. How did your predecessor, Dr. Ian Stevenson, and then you, find these 2,500 cases? Well, so Ian started where he could find the cases, which typically is in cultures with a belief in reincarnation. So he would hear about, he published a paper where he just reviewed cases from the past that had been previously in journals or newspapers or whatever, and wrote them up. And following that, he started hearing about cases. So he got a small grant to go to India to study cases, and he'd heard about five of them by the time he went there. And then he was there for a month and found 25. And so he started developing colleagues in different places who would look for cases. And places back then, at least, in India, Thailand, various places, stories might be in the newspapers. But anyway, his associates would learn of cases. They'd contact him, and then after he'd heard about enough of them, then he would go there and study the cases. But in more modern times, since we set up our website, which has been over 25 years ago now, we don't really have to go looking for cases because the cases find us. So we're getting emails all the time now from mostly American parents who report that their child is talking about a past life. And they've been averaging now over 120 a year of contacts from families with their child talking about the past. In your book, Life Before Life, you write about another characteristic, another pattern, in these stories of young children that happens between 15 and 20 percent of the time. But I found this really extraordinary, that there are birth marks or some other physical sign, like a birth defect, that is some type of reflection of the painful death of the previous incarnation that the child's remembering. I wonder if you can give us some examples of that. It's pretty mind-bending. Right. And first of all, as far as how prevalent it is, the percentage is a little hard to judge because Ian Stemason, he was interested in psychosomatic medicine before he ever got into this. So the connection between mind and body. So these birthmark cases, he really sought out. And we have to select which cases do we study, and he would certainly study the birthmark cases. So anyway, it's hard to know what the actual percentage is. But in any event, I mean, he published a two-volume series with over 200 of these cases. And yeah, it's kids with birthmarks or even full birth defects that match wounds usually, not always, but usually the fatal wound that the previous person experienced. And so for instance, there was this little girl who remembered the life of a man who had gotten his fingers chopped off as he was being murdered. And she was born with very deformed fingers. There was a little boy who remembered the life of a boy from another village who had lost the fingers of his right hand in a water chopping machine. And that was not a fatal wound in his case, but it was obviously a traumatic one. And then the second little boy was born where his left hand was completely normal, but his right hand just had stubs for fingers. And then we've also—it's most obvious ones that you can see, but we have had, like, there's an American case of a heart defect that matched very closely the wounds of the previous person. He had been shot in a robbery, the wounds that he had suffered. So they can be internal as well. So the question that I and other people have asked is, how could that happen? I mean, even if you believe in reincarnation, how does a wound on a previous body show up on a child? And the way that I like to view it is that it's sort of a phenomenon of consciousness. It's not literally the injury on the body that gets transferred, but rather the consciousness is aware of that image of the injury and then takes it with it to the next developing fetus and then sort of imprints it on the developing fetus. And there are similar phenomena that are consistent with that idea. So there have been numerous cases published of hypnotizing someone who's particularly suggestible and then telling them, for instance, that they're being touched with a hot burner and just touching them with a pencil or a finger or something, and then they develop blisters like they were burned. Or sometimes cases of reliving traumatic memories, like one famous case, then developing rope marks on their arms after the person had been tied up in a traumatic event. So sometimes images can produce very specific effects on the body, on the skin or on the body, and that would be similar if you accept that consciousness has continued on. It would be a very similar phenomenon with the mark showing up on the developing fetus. You know, you're such a great emissary for this work, Jim, because you're professorial with your glasses and your serious and loving demeanor and presenting this all quite scientifically. I'm just so happy that you're the ambassador here for the Perceptual Studies Center. Well, thank you. The glasses are not for cosmetic effects, because I need them to see, but I think it's, I mean, what you say, professorial, I mean, it's accurate. I mean, we have never been sort of true believers who are out to convince people based on any kind of faith on us, but more of us trying to document what the evidence shows, and then let people make their own decisions about it. All right. Well, we said we'd start with laying out the database of facts from a very, very, very, very top-line view, and then talk some about how do we interpret this? How do we make sense of it? And in your books, you describe that there are the sort of, well, let's bang on this, is this fraud? And did people find out about this from someone in the village or something? And let's just, for a moment, put that aside and say, this has been scientifically, rigorously documented that these utterances and memories are coming out of young children without any contamination, including birthmarks in some percentage that match a previous death of a violent person. Okay, this is our evidence here. What do we make of it? And in your books, you describe three possible ways we could look at it, and there may be more, and one of them's reincarnation. Let's put that aside for a moment. Another is, could a young child be tapping in to some kind of collective unconscious, the psi field of knowing? And I'm wondering what you make of that possibility. Well, I think it's certainly worth considering. I mean, I think if there is this realm of consciousness that is intermingled with our physical reality but also separate from it, it's almost certainly too complex for us to understand and not necessarily linear the way we think of things. So we tend to talk in terms that are sort of black and white, but it may be very fuzzy gray. But I mean, certainly what the cases appear to be is not part of this overall large one consciousness that can be interpreted that way, but an individual consciousness that has continued on. And certainly from the child's perspective, it is not tapping into a knowledge base, but more it is recalling experiences. And again, it's not just knowing facts like psychic or whatever. It's the full picture and the emotional aspects of having experienced these things. I also think the birthmarks and birth defects, I mean, you can come up with an explanation how it could be reaching into a larger consciousness, but it gets a little complicated. The other part of this that weighs in on this discussion is that about 20% of the kids will talk about events happening between lives. So after they died in the last life that had things happen to them, and occasionally can give verifiable details either about the previous family and what they were doing or about their upcoming family, about their parents and things that were happening between the lives. So that would suggest that there is this element of consciousness that has carried through and is able to obtain new information and have new experiences. So that would certainly suggest an individual consciousness continuing on. Can you share a story with me about someone who knew what was happening between lives and a young child who was able to share that information? Sure. So there's one little boy in the US, a little boy named Ryan, who I've talked about, and they've been on TV some. But anyway, when he was little, he asked his mom about, he said that he saw her go to the doctor and find out that she was having a boy, and she got very angry and told the doctor that he was wrong, went out to dinner with her husband and cried through the whole meal because she was going to have a boy. Well, it turned out that Ryan's parents, his father had been married before and had children, so the deal was that they would only have one child for their life, and Ryan's mom very much wanted a little girl. So when she went for the ultrasound, she did get very upset when she learned that she was having a boy, and then, I think it was the father's birthday anyway, they went out to dinner and she did cry through the whole meal. And later, of course, she was very ashamed of the way that she had reacted, and she had certainly never told Ryan about it, and yet he told her about it. There is another American case, a very well-known one, James Leininger, who seemed to remember the life of a World War II pilot, but one time he said to his father that he was glad that he had chosen him to be his father, and his dad asked him what he meant, and James said that, yeah, he had seen his parents at a big pink hotel in Hawaii, and that they were eating dinner on the beach, and he had decided that he wanted to be born to them. Well, before he was born, his parents did take a trip to Hawaii, and they did stay at a big pink hotel, and they did have dinner on the beach their last night there, and it was during that trip that they started trying to conceive. They didn't actually get pregnant for a couple of months, but that was when the intention started, and James had seemingly reported to his dad just what his parents had done. Okay, I think I get a flavor of the stories, and correct me if I'm wrong, but it sounds like when you describe this not being just like reading a psychic field, you're saying, that explanation doesn't really work for me, because you're picturing some kind of individual consciousness of some kind that's observing versus like reading the thought fields of mom and dad or something like that. Right. Yeah, and other people have wondered whether there is this other consciousness from the past life that is, I'm blocking on the term, sort of overhanging on this child, so that the child thinks it's their memories, but actually, it was another one. And I would say you can't disprove that idea. It's certainly not the simplest way of explaining the phenomenon, but that doesn't mean it's not correct. And in this conversation, for me, I'm just wanting to pull on various things and look at it. I mean, it's not like this is some definitive answer. You've done so much research, though, and these stories tell us something. What they tell us, I think, is the subject of our exploration, investigation. So, it brings us to this other question, and as I've shared these stories of young children with people, several people that I know have said, oh, that's possession, Tammy. That's the spirit of the departed has hung around someplace because it didn't fully cross over, and now it's attaching itself to the young child. That's an explanation that's different than reincarnation. Sounds more logical to me. I wonder, I'm not sure about that, but what do you make of it? Well, if you're going to accept the birthmark cases, it would mean possession started while they were in utero. So, I'm not sure exactly how that's different from reincarnation, really, I mean, if it's inhabiting the body. And again, I mean, basically, these memories are exceptions, but typically, they start coming out as soon as the child can talk. So, I mean, it's very early on. So, again, the distinction between possession and reincarnation may not be as clear-cut as people might think, unless you're arguing that there are sort of two spirits there, that there's the child, and then there's this attached one that's providing memory. That is the argument that it's an attached entity of some kind. But not one that takes over the body, or takes over the whole person. It could merge with the person like a hitchhiker that's now informing and sort of melding with them. Yeah, and again, I mean, that's certainly worth considering, and I'm not sure why people would view that as any more likely than reincarnation, but we all have our views of what seems incredible versus something we can consider. I think the argument around that is that after a violent death, a soul could be confused about its dying, hang around, and then want to still, I mean, this is the argument that I've heard people pose, and, you know, want to stay attached to a nearby family or something like that. Well, right, which would be the same pattern as if it was reincarnation. But yeah, I mean, that this soul or spirit or whatever we want to call it, consciousness, is tied to this realm more so than others would be, and so they're looking for a family or looking for a body to start a new life with. Now, Jim, you've been immersed in this field and this study, and you've talked to a lot of really bright people about how we can look at this data, and I wonder if you could share with me what is pretty obvious we know. Like, if you look at this, here's what we know, and here's what I think is more in a realm of, hmm, we have theories, but we're not quite sure. How would you divide that? What do we know? Well, I mean, you're talking about knowing 100% certain, you know, I mean, that gets sort of questionable, but I think we can say we have good evidence that some young children have knowledge about a life from the past, and that's sort of stated as neutrally as possible. And then, like you say, then there's the question of, okay, well, how do we make it that? And I would say, at the least, that there is this element of consciousness that, in one form or another, seems to be present and seems to interact with the physical world and the physical body, but not necessarily be wholly dependent on it. Because however we frame it, there are these memories, or at least this knowledge, that has carried on after somebody died. And, you know, I don't think you can take these cases and just sort of map them on to materialistic understanding of reality. I mean, if you accept them, then I think we have to look at the idea that there is this consciousness that is, again, not wholly dependent on our brains or on this, even this physical world. So I have come to the conclusion, and other people who are brighter than I am, like Max Planck, the founder of quantum theory, come to the conclusion that consciousness is fundamental and that physical matter is derived from consciousness, but that ultimately, consciousness is what is at the core of things. Would you be willing to give me your working definition of consciousness? Well, right. That gets tricky. And some people have a different definition for mind versus consciousness. I just sort of lump it all together. But from my standpoint, it is thoughts, but not just thoughts, that they sort of coalesce into an entity. And it may be that there's this grand, large entity of consciousness, and that the physical world is all derived from it. But it may also be that there's this large consciousness realm, and that there are a lot of branches from it. And we each have a branch from the larger mothership, so to speak. And so we are all separate, but also all connected. So it's kind of like islands in the sea, where there are distinct individual islands, but underneath the surface, if you go far enough, they're all connected. And my feeling is that there's something like that, that there's this sea of consciousness. Well, I'm mixing metaphors here, but that there is consciousness that produces the physical world that we experience. And our brains serve as sort of vehicles to experience these things and to observe things. And it's probably a vehicle that ultimately all starts from the same place. After all of the investigation you've done, what's your own sense of dying for you? Like, oh, here's how I sort of feel into it now, when I imagine it. When I imagine it for myself, you mean? Yeah. Well, I've kind of decided that figuring out whether there's life after death or whatever is not as important as just experiencing the present that we have. And I certainly don't encourage people to do past life regression work or whatever, trying to sort out who they were before. I mean, look at who you are now and what you want to get out of the life that you're having. So, as far as my own death, I mean, I hope that on my deathbed, I can look back and feel like that I had the life sort of that I was meant to have. And we each find meaning in life in different ways. And for me, it's largely been sort of the love that I shared with my family, my wife, my kids, my grandkids, but also the work as an active child psychiatrist. I know that I helped a lot of families, and I also did this intriguing work. So, in any event, I think I can, you know, now that I've more or less retired, that puts me in the frame of mind of sort of looking ahead at kind of, you know, this is the later chapters of my life. And I think when I get to the end of it, I certainly hope that I continue on. I mean, the idea of personal non-existence, you know, doesn't hold a lot of charm for me. But regardless of whether I continue to exist or not, I hope that I can experience as much meaning between now and then as possible. This notion that the material world, the physical world, comes out of consciousness, grows out of consciousness, I think is the phrase you used. How does that play for you in the present moment? Like, how does that work inside of you when you're going about your life? You're like, oh, this insight, which is the insight you've taken from all of these different cases, how does that change you? Well, I mean, to be honest, from day to day, you know, ordinary life things, I'm not sure that it does. But I hope that that kind of concept can help me not get stuck on the small things so much and, you know, be able to sort of accept the irritations and imperfections of life and just appreciate more that this is an opportunity to have experiences and to, you know, it doesn't matter if the car ahead of me is going too slow or whatever, but more just take it all in, experience it, hopefully help grow as a person, as a consciousness. I mean, I've come to realize that our development, it never stops. It's not like we get 18 or 21 or whatever, we're fully formed. I mean, at 65, I feel like I'm still trying to develop as sort of a better person. And, you know, if we view this life, this lifetime as an opportunity to experience things and to grow, then, you know, hopefully we can take advantage of that. I realize I'm not exactly answering all of your questions precisely, but I think feeling like that this physical world is simply an outgrowth of consciousness or creation of consciousness allows us to look at trying to work on our consciousness and make it better. As a reincarnation researcher, if you will, what kind of research do you think could be done such that the case for reincarnation would be a lot stronger? Like, oh, if only we could do XYZ, then public respect would really increase, but we just haven't found a way to do it yet. Well, a couple of things. So two of my colleagues at the university, Marietta Pelovanova and Philip Cozzolino, they have gotten funding to do a study that is starting to look at what potential mechanisms could be for this phenomenon. And that has the potential down the road to, I think, really get people's attention. What are they doing? How are they trying to understand? There are different aspects of it, and some of it is trying to sort out, well, for instance, so there are a couple of hypotheses that are worth exploring. One is, is this a phenomenon of exceptional memory? So as you may know, there are some people who have essentially universal autobiographical memory. So if you say, what were you doing on April 2nd, 1978, they can tell you. And so they may perform on certain kinds of testing, like psychological testing or brain scans. They may show particular patterns, so then we can then look with these individuals and see, do you see the same patterns, where it would be a case of exceptional memory? The other possibility is, is this essentially a phenomenon like PTSD? Is it that the trauma that so many of the people experienced, does that cause the memories to stay even though you'd want to get rid of them, just like in PTSD? So again, you can look at kinds of tests to see how the brain deals with certain events and see, is that similar to how these individuals experience things? So then ultimately, can you get down to what is the brain doing and how are these brains different from other people's brains that allow them to do it, to access memories from previous life? A couple of other things that I think can make a difference. One is, yes, we have 2,500 cases. Some are stronger than others. Many of them are in other cultures. If we could get 50 American cases as strong as the ones I mentioned, Ryan and James, I think that would make it very hard to ignore this phenomenon. And then lastly, I'll say, not just this work, but parapsychology in general has always struggled with how to incorporate the findings with what we think we know about the world and reality. And I think if there's a way in to mesh these together, I think it will probably come through physics and in particular, quantum physics. And they explore some pretty wild ideas that quantum theorists do. And I think if ones come out that at least allow for these phenomenon and may even sort of require them, and if those theories can get more acceptance, then I think people would then look at this work and look at the evidence more carefully than many people do now. Can you be a little more specific what parapsychological theories you're talking about here? Well, with parapsychology, it's sort of the lack of theories that's the problem. You've got all this evidence of things like precognition or clairvoyance that are shown in very tightly controlled test situations, but then what do you make of it? Because it seems to conflict with how we think the world works. But quantum theory, again, can put consciousness at the forefront of reality. And I think many of the things that we find in our field can be incorporated into quantum theories and the idea of collapse of the wave function and that consciousness causes collapse, and various things that I know we don't want to get into. But I think certainly classical physics is the Newton's sort of mechanistic clockwork kind of universe, but we now know that that is a very incomplete picture of reality, and when we get at the quantum level, things get a whole lot more interesting. Okay, just to put you on the spot here, Jim, even more than I've already done, if I were to say, what do you make of the fact that so many of these memories are of violent deaths from the previous life? What do you make of that? I think that those memories, again, I think it's similar to PTSD, that those memories become hard to get rid of, and along with those can come other memories about life. I mean, if you remember being decapitated or whatever, then you're going to remember some of the circumstances. But I also think that it may be that it's an example of where the process gets short-circuited, that sort of the normal process is that we have this experience, and then we continue on in some form, but not necessarily coming back here. I mean, there may be all kinds of consciousness-created realities that we can explore, but with something like a traumatic death, that natural process is not able to occur, and instead, the consciousness gets kind of more tightly bound to this reality, so then reincarnation would happen. Okay, continuing with putting you on the spot, talking about the quantum world and consciousness creating the material plane, it gets pretty abstract. What I'd like to know is, from all the investigation you've done, do you think, well, look, when you die, you go through a journey and you come back as another being, you reincarnate. Sometimes you don't, maybe there's exceptional circumstances, maybe you reincarnate someplace else. But basically, yes, once more, that's what I think happens. Is that true, Jim, or how would you put it in your own words? Well, I don't think it would just be like beads on a string. You have one life, then you have the next, the next, the next. And I think there may be different aspects. We know that personality is affected by genetics, is affected by early experiences, so it's not like you're a complete clean slate as far as my point being, I wouldn't come back as me, but I think that there's a part of me that may be able to continue on. But then it goes into a new fetus with its genes and then its early experiences. So no, it's not that Jim will have a bunch of successive lives, but there may be sort of a larger self or sort of at a distance where that aspect of me continues on. So there's a metaphor sometimes used in Buddhism where it's like, there's a candle being lit, and as it burns down lower, another candle takes that flame and then continues on. So it's, Jim will die at some point in the future, but there may be this aspect of me that then continues on, and in rare circumstances even continues on with some of the memories of this life. As we conclude, Jim, you shared with me how in your work at the University of Virginia, you've looked at this through the lens of science, keeping an open mind. And if you were to make a final appeal to people who are listening to consider the research that has been done, that you've written about, terrific stories shared in your books, Life Before Life and Return to Life. Both volumes are now available in a two-volume edition called Before, Children's Memories of Previous Lives. How would you like us to look at these stories of children's memories? Well, I think they provide evidence, along with other kinds of work like near-death experiences that my colleague Bruce Grayson studies so carefully, evidence that there is a part of us that continues. And there are many people who accept that in general, people who are religious, people who are Christians believe that part of us continues. And this, along with faith, this work indicates that there can actually be evidence of that, that one can decide, can conclude that that is the most likely outcome for us, that a part of us continues. And I think if people are intrigued by that and intrigued by the idea of having evidence for it, then by all means, check out this work and decide for yourself. So, you know, there are a lot of people who are kind of put off by the idea of reincarnation because it really has not been a part of our culture or our religions. But if you look at the bigger picture, the idea that we continue on I think people can find the work to be useful to them. Dr. Jim Tucker, thank you so much for being part of our series, Once More, Exploring Reincarnation and the Gap Between Lives. Thank you. Of course. Thanks very much for having me. And if you'd like to watch Insights at the Edge on video and participate in the after-show Q&A session with our guests, come join us on Sounds True One, a new membership community featuring award-winning original shows, live classes, community learning, guided meditations, and more with the leading wisdom teachers of our time. Use promo code PODCAST to get your first month free. You can learn more at join.soundstrue.com. Sounds True, waking up the world. The Sounds True Podcast Network.