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USA, August 27, 2010 (By Lisa Miller,
the religion editor for Newsweek): According to data released last year by
the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, a quarter of Americans now
believe in reincarnation. (Women are more likely to believe than men;
Democrats more likely than Republicans.)
At Cannes in May, a Thai film about reincarnation, "Uncle Boonmee Who
Can Recall His Past Lives," won the highest prize. And Julia Roberts
recently told Elle magazine that though she was raised Christian, she had
become "very Hindu." Ms. Roberts believes that in her past life
she was a "peasant revolutionary," and said that when her
daughter sits in a certain way she knows "there's someone there I
didn't get the benefit of knowing ... It's an honor for me to continue to
shepherd that."
In religious terms, the human narrative -- birth, life, death and rebirth
-- has for millennia been relatively straightforward in the West. You were
born. You lived. You died. After a judgment you went to heaven (or hell)
forever and ever. Eternity was the end: no appeals allowed.
But nearly a billion Hindus and a half-billion Buddhists -- not to mention
the ancient Greeks, certain Jews and a few Christians -- have for thousands
of years believed something entirely different. Theirs is, as the
theologians say, a cyclical view. You are born. You live. You die. And
because nobody's perfect, your soul is born again -- not in another
location or sphere, and not in any metaphorical sense, but right here on
earth.
Gadadhara Pandit Dasa, Columbia University's first Hindu chaplain, called
it "a re-do," like a test you get to take over. After an
unspecified number of tries, the eternal soul finally achieves perfection.
Only then, in what Hindus call moksha (or release), does the soul go to
live with God.
Spiritually-minded Americans have had a love affair with Eastern religion
at least since the Beatles traveled to India in 1968, but for more than a
generation, reincarnation remained a fringe or even shameful belief.
"I can remember, 30 years ago, if a person wanted to learn about
reincarnation, they would go into a bookstore and go into a very back
corner, to a section called 'Occult,' " said Janet Cunningham,
president of the International Board for Regression Therapy, a professional
standards group for past-life therapists and researchers. "It felt
sneaky." Now the East is in our backyards, accessible on the Internet
and in every yoga studio.
At the same time, Western religion is failing to satisfy growing numbers of
people -- especially young adults. College students Mr. Dasa encounters,
most of them raised as Christians or Jews, "haven't given up on the
idea of spirituality or religion," he said. "They're tired of the
dogma they grew up with." According to the 2008 American Religious
Identification Survey, 15 percent of Americans express no affiliation with
any religious tradition, nearly double the number in 1990.
On the fringes of legitimate science, some researchers persist in studying
consciousness and its durability beyond the body. Dr. Jim Tucker, who
directs the Child and Family Psychiatry Clinic at the University of
Virginia, is committed to the scientific study of what can only be called
reincarnation.
He is carrying on the pioneering research of his mentor, Dr. Ian Stevenson,
who beginning in the 1960s collected more than 2,000 accounts of children
between the ages of 2 and 7 who seemed to remember previous lives vividly
without the help of hypnosis. Dr. Stevenson did most of his casework in
Asia, where belief in reincarnation is common.
Dr. Tucker studies American children and in one case found a young boy who
started to say, around the age of 18 months, that he was his own (deceased)
grandfather. "He eventually told details of his grandfather's life
that his parents felt certain he could not have learned through normal
means," Dr. Tucker wrote, "such as the fact that his
grandfather's sister had been murdered and that his grandmother had used a
food processor to make milkshakes for his grandfather every day at the end
of his life."
Dr. Tucker won't say such cases add up to proof of reincarnation, but he
likes to keep an open mind. "There can be something that survives
after the death of the brain and the death of the body that is somehow
connected to a new child," he said. "I have become convinced that
there is more to the world than the physical universe. There's the mind,
which is its own entity."
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