NDEs part 3: Reincarnation, Research, & Gnosis

Welcome back to Gnostic Insights. My name is Dr. Cyd Ropp, and I’m your host. I’m really glad that you’re with me and that we are exploring these topics together. Today I want to share with you an article that was first printed in the UNT Digital Library. That’s the university library system. It’s by Bruce Greyson, and it’s called Near Death Experiences and Claims of Past Life Memories. This was printed in autumn of 2021 and it is accessed through the University of North Texas Library system.

My brother looked this up for us because of our topic last week on near death experiences. And, you know my brother, Bill Puett, is a hypnotherapist. He is a retired philosophy professor. Nowadays he helps people through therapeutic hypnosis. Bill often has experiences with his clients of that in between place that one experiences between lives. Many times Bill asks a client to go back and remember when an upsetting trigger first occurred in their lives, and sometimes these people jump back into a previous life. That is how Bill has become so familiar with the idea and working with people’s past life experiences.

Bill had raised the question with me after last week’s episode, Well, what about the in between place? How do these near death experiences comport with the place that Bill and his clients are so familiar with—that being the in between place where they work on past life issues. And, the in between place is where a soul is prior to being reincarnated. At least that’s the therapeutic metaphor that seems to be going on in these situations. So let’s look at this article together, Near Death Experiences and Claims of Past Life Memories, and we’ll see if we can make sense of it in a gnostic way.

Let’s begin with reading the abstract. An abstract on an academic article is the overview, the summation, of what the article is going to be about. So let’s see what Dr. Greyson has to say.

“Some features of near death experiences suggest that consciousness may continue to function after death of the body. The life reviews of some NDEs [that’s near death experiences] include what seemed to be memories of a past lifetime, some of which involve verifiable details suggesting that the experiencer has lived more than one life and can recall events from successive lives. These apparent past life memories parallel the claims of young children who remember past lives. Furthermore, some children’s past life memories include scenes from the period between lives that parallel descriptions of the realm in which NDEs occur. Some children’s past life memories include anomalous features that contradict common beliefs about reincarnation. In addition, the idea that humans reincarnate into a new earthly body seems to contradict the common NDE feature of encountering deceased persons in a non-earthly realm. However, those apparent contradictions can be resolved by reconceptualization of prevailing ideas about time and about what aspects of human consciousness may survive bodily death.”

So, the article goes into what is a near death experience, and we don’t have to redescribe that because we covered it in depth in last week’s episode. And then the next section is called The Life Review, which also presents examples of that 360° life review that we covered in the last episode. Well, this is interesting. He cites an example from 1791,

“When British Rear Admiral Sir Francis Beaufort was only a 17 year old midshipman he fell off the boat into Portsmouth Harbour. Unfortunately, he had not yet learned to swim. After exhausting himself in his struggle to breathe, he lost consciousness and immediately experienced a feeling of calmness and noticed changes in his thinking. He later described it in this way. ‘From the moment that all exertions ceased, which I imagine was the immediate consequence of complete suffocation, thought rose above thought with the rapidity of succession. It is not only indescribable, but probably inconceivable by anyone who has not himself been in a similar situation. The course of those thoughts I can, even now in great measure, retrace the event which had just taken place. The awkwardness that had produced it were the first series of reflections that occurred.’”  He talks about remembering his childhood, another shipwreck… “’travelling backwards, every past incident of my life seemed to glance across my recollection in retrograde succession. Not, however, in mere outline as here stated, but the picture filled up with every minute and collateral feature. In short, the whole period of my existence seemed to be placed before me in a kind of panoramic review, and each act of it seemed to be accompanied by a consciousness of right or wrong, or by some reflection on its cause or its consequences. Indeed, many trifling events, which had been long forgotten then crowded into my imagination with the character of recent familiarity.’”

This was printed in Beaufort’s papers of 1858. The article then goes on to share many of the aspects of this near death experience that we talked about in last week’s episode.

“Such that many near death experiencers reported their life review not only helped them cope with losses, guilt and conflict, and find meaning in their lives, but also helped them make changes in their behavior based on what they had learned… 76% of those who reported re-experiencing their life events said they did so not only through their own eyes, but also from the perspective of others, feeling those other people’s emotions as well as their own. They reported this kind of empathic life review helped them understand the pain they may have caused others and the reasons for the pain they may have suffered at the hands of others.”

The article says that some life reviews additionally include mental impressions or images that did not seem to relate to the experiencer’s current lifetime. In these cases, experiencers reported apparent memories that they believed related to a previous earthly lifetime. Dr. Greyson then cites a case of a woman who believed she had had a previous life experience during her life review. But her recollections could not be proven as evidence because there was no way to compare it with the previous life. But then he goes on to quote another experiencer named David Moquin.

“When he was hospitalized with double pneumonia at age 48, he described visions of past lives during his near death experience as he was in and out of coma for several days. Quoting David Moquin’s NDE: ‘during that time I experienced at least two events that felt like past lifetimes. The one that has haunted me for the past 24 years was that of burning to death in an airplane crash. I kept seeing myself on fire and trying to reach a field just past a line of trees in a barbed wire type fence. I crashed, hit my head and tried to crawl out as I was engulfed in fire and couldn’t breathe. Many years later, a psychic told me that in my past lifetime I died landing a fighter plane on an odd single digit day in November 1944. I was born December 21st, 1940. My daughter, hearing the recording of the reading, googled and found that Captain Fryer was the only pilot that died on an odd single digit day that November, and that he died trying to land his burning P-51 Mustang. My favorite plane was always the P-51. The model sits on my desk. My daughter asked me questions and I seem to know the names of my Wing Commander, Squadron Commander, mother and father.’” That was recorded as personal communication in 2018. So, unlike the previous women’s apparent memories of a past life, Moquin’s NDE included verifiable details that were subsequently corroborated as true for a particular person who died a month before Moquin was born.

Dr. Nelson quotes a Pew Research Center finding that “one third of all Americans, even 1/3 of mainline Protestants and 1/3 of Roman Catholics whose contemporary religious orthodoxy excludes belief in reincarnation, believe that humans may at some point after death return to another life here on Earth.” That’s from (www.pewresearch.org /fact-tank/2018/10/01/new-age-beliefs- common-among-both-religious-and-nonreligious-americans/). The article is called New Age Beliefs Common Among Both Religious and Non-religious Americans.

Now, by the way, I don’t think that new age beliefs is a proper way to characterize belief in reincarnation. Reincarnation is a central idea in many Asian religions and it goes back thousands of years, at least as far back as our Christian and Jewish heritage. We’ve discussed reincarnation at depth in a couple of prior episodes here at Gnostic Insights, and I will include the link to those previous episodes in the transcript to this article so that you can go back and listen to them if you’d like.

“Researchers at the University of Virginia and at other universities around the globe have studied more than 2000 cases of very young children prior to school age who claim to recall details of the past life [I’ll include the citations at the end of the podcast article]. As well, in about 2/3 of those cases of young children, they’ve been able to identify the person the child claimed to have been in the past life based on the child’s memories, matching specific details of the claimed past life.”

Now, as an aside, my brother Bill and I have been discussing the veracity of reincarnation for decades literally by now. And I always resisted the notion because of my more Orthodox Christian beliefs. Bill has always thought that reincarnation was likely, and I generally have said that it was more likely to be a useful therapeutic metaphor; that when a person is apparently recalling a past life incident where this or that happened it was the way that their subconscious was accessing as an allegory their emotional troubles.

Or another way to write off memories of reincarnation would be that, for example, these young children or the man that died in the burning plane weren’t remembering their past life, but these were memories that were lodged in the transpersonal memory, or the transpersonal consciousness of the entire planet. Transpersonal is a Jungian term. It’s the meme bundle, in the way we’ve been talking about in the Simple Explanation. The meme bundle of everyone is clinging to our planet the way our personal meme bundle shrouds our self identity.

However, when I came to my realization of my theory of everything that’s called the Simple Explanation or the Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything, reincarnation was necessarily part of that philosophy. Because of the—and I don’t want to get into the weeds here, but—because of the toroidal nature of time, that time isn’t just linear, it wraps around, it keeps repeating over and over again.

And a torus—toroidal means based on a torus—is like a doughnut shape. So the way I conceive of time is that all potentiality comes down through the top funnel of that doughnut here and now is at the center of the doughnut and where the potentials collapse into one singularity here and now. And then what comes out to the bottom after the collapse is linear time because the potentials have collapsed and now it’s just time history of what happened during the previous string of collapse potential. I don’t want to confuse you with that.

Anyway, reincarnation and the repetition the cycles of time is part of the Simple Explanation. And, you know, I have taken the Simple Explanation theory of everything and applied it to the Gnostic Gospel, to the gnostic doctrines. And that’s my addition to what was written a couple of thousand years ago in the Tripartite Tractate that was part of the Nag Hammadi scriptures uncovered in 1945.

So, back to this article by Dr. Greyson. He says that the researcher who did most of the research in the beginning with the children, Ian Stevenson, beginning in the 1960s, limited his investigation to very young children between the ages of two and five before they had learned to read so that it would eliminate the claim that they had read something or that they have come across it, and that they were just reiterating what they had learned. “He also limited his studies to memories that came to the children spontaneously. The research avoided memories that were recovered in hypnotic past life regressions because of the increased suggestibility of people who are hypnotized.”

Now, of course, my own brother Bill’s experience with these types of stories is through hypnotic regression, so Bill’s clients would have been eliminated right off the bat.

The article says, “The issue is not that information acquired in hypnosis is never accurate, but rather that it is not reliable enough to be trusted as scientific evidence without additional verification. Greyson’s article says that the young children that Stephenson and other researchers have investigated not only have memories of past lives, but also often show behaviors such as phobias or preferences that are unusual within the context of their own families and are not explained by any current life events. However, these unexplained behaviors are usually consistent with the child’s statements about a previous life. For example, a young child who remembers a life that ended in drowning may show an unnatural fear of water or a young child in a Hindu family who remembers life as a devout Muslim may refuse to eat food not prepared according to Islamic law.” And so on.

And by the way, it’s these types of memory traumas or memes clinging to a persons soul, to their ego, that my brother Bill works with in his hypnotic therapy. A person comes to him with a complaint of a phobia, and they explore when that phobia occurred. Sometimes it’s a past life and they address it in the past life. And then when they come out of hypnosis, that phobia has been relieved because the meme was peeled off of them and discarded.

On the other hand, the article says that there are some cases in the University of Virginia collection that suggests that “their interpretation is not as straightforward as our common conceptions of reincarnation would suggest. For example, in some cases, researchers have investigated two or more children who recall the same past life.” [So that kind of throws a monkey wrench into our easy interpretation of this phenomenon, doesn’t it?]

Another troublesome finding is that a child can “remember the past lives of two different people who lived at the same time.” And there are a small number of such purported cases from the files at the University of Virginia. The University of Virginia files include 37 such cases, “which raised questions about how to interpret the children’s knowledge of someone else’s life.” Because of these inconsistencies, Stephenson, who initiated this line of research, never claimed that these cases were proof of reincarnation. “Instead, he referred to them as cases suggestive of reincarnation and cases of the reincarnation type.”

The article goes on to say both claimed memories of past lives and near death experiences have been controversial topics in academia because they challenge contemporary models of the mind brain relationship and may be open to multiple interpretations. He goes on to say, “several researchers have reported, anecdotally, that near death experiences became more open to the idea of reincarnation after their near death experiences.” As I said, I’m going to include these citations for this article at the end of this episode, so you can look all of this up yourself if you want to delve into it.

Dr. Greyson says that among more than 200 near death experiencers who have participated in his research, “1/3 said they believed that after death they will be recycled and reincarnated or reborn in the physical world. Another third reportedly believed that reincarnation is possible. Those are the same percentages of belief in reincarnation that the Pew Research Center found among the American population as a whole. However, some near death experiencers related their belief in reincarnation to specific events in their NDEs.

As a gnostic aside, here it is a funny thing: that it keeps being one third, one third, one third, isn’t it? You know, the Tripartite Tractate is called the three-part book, not only because the codex had three sections, but because it describes the three parts of humans—that being our spirit, our psychological, or what we might call soul, and our physical bodies. Another set of thirds. But it also has humans divided into three parts as well. The spiritual types which would be me, I hope to say, and you who are listening to this Gnostic podcast. And then there are the psychological types. They work out of their emotional centers, their psychological centers, rather than their spiritual centers. And then there are the physical types who only believe in the tangible, not even the psychological. Materialists. Most scientists are materialists. They only believe in what they can measure and weigh. So it’s very difficult to have a science of psychology, for example, because it all so subjective. You can’t measure it and weigh it, except by asking people subjective questions and then putting  that into various categories. But it’s subjective.

One problem that scientifically minded researchers have with the near death experiences and the past life memories is that the mind appears to be separate from the brain. They always want to equate our awareness and our consciousness with the brain and the brain’s activities—that consciousness is a byproduct of the brain. But we Gnostics realize that consciousness is not a byproduct of the brain. It’s more the other way around. The mind—consciousness—preexists the brain. It’s the foundation: consciousness. We begin with consciousness, and then we see how creation rolls out and builds up to become us with brains. That is not a scientific concept.

Now the article gets to what my brother Bill’s particular question was when he looked up this research. Let’s read it:

“In an apparent contradiction to the idea of reincarnation, many near death experiencers report having met deceased loved ones in some seemingly otherworldly environment in their NDEs. The question arises how it might be possible for deceased people to continue existing in some otherworldly realm after death if they have been reborn into a new earthly life.”

Greyson says, “The simplest resolution this apparent contradiction might be that deceased individuals might reside in some afterlife environment while awaiting reincarnation on Earth. Alternatively, one might speculate that different people may have different afterlife scenarios, some being reborn and others remaining in some other worldly realm. Or that one person might have several different afterlife scenarios, including both rebirth and continued existence in an otherworldly realm. This latter possibility is compatible with reported cases of mediumistic communication [that is, having a psychic reading], allegedly from deceased individuals who claim to have been already reincarnated but are able to leave their new bodies and present to the medium as discarnate spirits, and cases of apparitions of deceased individuals that appear after they have been born. Furthermore, given the claim of many near death experiences that the familiar concept of time as a linear progression doesn’t apply in the afterlife, it might be possible both to continue to exist in some other worldly realm and also simultaneously to be reborn on Earth.”

Now that is what my brother Bill and I have discussed: time. We know that the heavenly realm is eternal and that the Father itself is infinite. But we are eternal. In any case, we are not trapped in linear time. So, things that happen to us here in this material world happen one after another after another; they don’t all happen at once, at least not that we can tell. As I mentioned earlier in this episode, my idea of time has to do with potentiality wrapping around, coming down through the funnel, collapsing into here and now, and then coming out as history. That’s a cyclical version of time. Here in our earthly existence, we experience that collapse as always here, now. We’re always in the here and now. We aren’t in the future. We aren’t in the past. We’re here, now. But what happened in the past happened. That is the collapsed potentiality.

So, Bill and I have discussed that time in the other place. Time in the in between place and certainly time in the heavenly realm doesn’t present itself linearly. That’s the 360° life review that people experience. It can all happen at once, in an instant. We can sense it all, and we know that for the Father, time is completely nonlinear. The Father knows everything all at once. That’s what it means to be omniscient. It all happens at once. Omniscient, omnipresent, everywhere at once. All knowing at once. So time, once we are out of this material realm, is not the same as we experience it here.

Let’s see what Dr. Greyson has to say about this. “Many experiencers report that in their NDE’s they had not only an altered sense of time, but also a sense of complete timelessness.” And he cites a 36-year-old policeman who almost bled to death after surgery and what that man said was, “I knew what it was like to experience eternity, where there was no time. It’s the hardest thing to try to describe to someone. How do you describe a state of timelessness where there’s nothing progressing from one point to another, where it’s all there and you’re totally immersed in it?”

Greyson reports that among the 698 people who shared their NDEs with him, 59 percent, 415, said that they had a sense of timelessness in their NDEs. “Some of these experiencers said that time may still have existed on Earth, but that the realm of the NDE seemed to be outside of the flow of time. Everything in their NDE seemed to be happening at once, or they seemed to move forward and backward in time. Others said they realized in the NDE that time as humans know it was only ever an artificial construct of the brain and never really existed. That is, that the very concept of time had no independent reality.”

Here is how that was experienced by one of the people that he interviewed. She says that, “Before my NDE I used to think that the purpose of life was to evolve beyond the reincarnation cycle of birth and death. But after my NDE, I feel differently. This is primarily because the concept of reincarnation in its conventional form is a progression of lifetimes running sequentially, one after the other, and it wasn’t supported by my NDE. I realized that time doesn’t move in a linear fashion unless we’re using the filter of our bodies and minds. Once we’re no longer limited by our earthly senses, every moment exists simultaneously. I’ve come to think that the concept of reincarnation is really just an interpretation, a way for our intellect to make sense of all experiences happening at once.”

So Dr. Greyson’s article concludes, “NDEs that include apparent past-life memories in the life review suggest that humans can live on this Earthly plane more than once, and memories of past lives that include descriptions of the period between lives support the validity of NDEs. But little of that cross-validation between NDEs and apparent memories of past lives can be considered scientific evidence. At this point it appears that the question of reincarnation is a matter for which NDEs provide tantalizing directions for further research rather than definitive answers. “

He says, “ In particular, the temporal inconsistencies between encounters with deceased persons in NDEs and rebirth into subsequent Earthly lives, like so many ineffable features of NDEs, are challenging for scientists. These apparent contradictions and ineffability call for the identification of different methodologies or different means of expression to investigate them.”

Yeah. Well, I don’t think that’s going to happen. As I say, science is very materialistic. It really begins by looking very, very closely at material. When scientists study consciousness and the mind, they want to look at neuronal connections. They want to measure the speed of the synapse transmission of data. They want to measure the voltage of the electricity flowing through the synapses. This is the way science looks into these things that we look into from the other direction. Spiritual types and Gnostics start with consciousness and look how it manifests through material. We don’t look at material trying to find consciousness. I cannot imagine a scientific experiment that will ever prove reincarnation somehow arises from something that can be measured and weighed. The closest they can come to it is what they call anecdotal evidence. Anecdotes are stories. Anecdotal evidences of past lives is where someone remembers a past life or recognizes objects in their previous home and the people of their previous family.

We’ve had that kind of research and it still doesn’t count as “scientific” because it’s only, as they like to say, only anecdotal. So there is always going to be a schism, at least in our ordinary modalities, that this current age has. These are not going to be reconcilable through science. We can, from the gnostic point of view, we can reconcile science to us. We can reconcile science to the spiritual by showing that the material is a creation of the spiritual, and that is why Gnostic Insights continually restates that Gnostic cosmology of how consciousness flows from the Father through the Son, through the Fullness. From the Fullness, through the material existence of this plane.

But you’re never going to be able to look at the material existence of this plane of existence and see consciousness flowing back upwards unless you accept the fact that all of consciousness is carried in life—life and love and thought. Life, love, and logos is what exists. I mean, if scientists can’t even agree that life begins at conception, how are they ever going to get backward prior to conception?

OK, we’ve run out of time. Take a look at the transcript of this episode. You can find links within the transcript to previous episodes where this has all been discussed, and I will include the citations from Dr. Greyson’s article and the link to his article in the transcript at the end. Thanks so much for spending this time with me. God bless us all and onward and upward.

Greyson, Bruce. Near-Death Experiences and Claims of Past-Life Memories, article, Autumn 2021; Durham, North Carolina. (https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc2017035/: accessed January 20, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, UNT Digital Library, https://digital.library.unt.edu .

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