Return to Life by Jim B. Tucker M.D

Author:Jim B. Tucker, M.D.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Publishing Group

Chapter 6

FAMOUS NAMES FROM THE PAST

We occasionally get e-mails or letters from people who think they were famous in their past lives. This typically begins when they feel a connection to a historical figure. They then see things they have in common with that person, such as interests or abilities, or parallels in their lives such as both having absent fathers or attending boarding schools or traveling to other countries. At times, hypnotic regression or a “past-life reading” is involved in identifying the famous individual. Even though many of the people who write us do not claim to have specific memories from their famous past, they have become convinced nonetheless that they were significant historical figures.

Some of these people are leading quite accomplished lives and show no signs of being mentally ill or excessively fantasy prone. Even so, we view such reports with great skepticism. First, there is the matter of statistics. The number of people from the past who were famous is such a small proportion of the overall population that it is unlikely that any given living person was someone famous in the past. It is beyond unlikely that among our correspondents would be five people who were Mary Queen of Scots, five who were Thomas Jefferson, two who were Amelia Earhart, and so on. But as a correspondent once remarked to Ian, if we’ve all had past lives, some of us must have been famous before.

Apart from the statistics, there is the more critical issue of how to tell who someone might have been in a past life. Unless the person has actual memories that can be verified, trying to identify the past life of a present-day individual becomes little more than pure speculation. We have always focused on young children because they are the ones who spontaneously report specific memories of previous lives that can be checked for verification. For famous figures, the young age is important for another reason. The most impressive memories in our cases involve information the children could not have learned through normal means. It would be very difficult for an adult to recall details of a famous figure’s life that he or she could not have known before but that could nonetheless be verified as accurate.

The reports about famous past lives almost always come from adults, but there have been occasional exceptions. Ian and two colleagues wrote a paper about seven purported past-life cases that involved deception or self-deception. In one of them, a man in Turkey greatly admired John Kennedy. Just before his son was born in 1965, he had a dream in which President Kennedy came to his house and said he wanted to stay with him. The man then named his newborn son Kenedi, giving it a Turkish spelling. When Ian interviewed the man as his son was turning two years old, the father reported that the boy would say he was President Kennedy when he was asked his name.

Ian was amused by the case but thought no more of it until an associate happened upon it again when Kenedi was nineteen.

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