Section 2: Past Lives and Present Lives

The statement "Human beings have souls, and these souls can be reincarnated" may initially seem like a superstitious belief, but with concrete evidence of reincarnation, we can prove the existence of both "souls" and "reincarnation" simultaneously.

Fortunately, there are many credible examples of past lives that we can find in books and online resources related to "past lives". One example is when a young child speaks their mother tongue from a past life or recounts verifiable events from their previous existence.

Lifetime Entertainment Television produced a series in 2013 and 2014 called Ghost Inside My Child, which featured stories of children with memories of their past lives. Many of these children died in accidents, such as war, terrorist attacks, murder, traffic accidents, fires, and their deaths spanned from hundreds of years ago to recent times. These children were often reincarnated into distant and unfamiliar families, while some returned to their own relatives.

Jim B. Tucker, an associate professor of child psychiatry and behavioral neuroscience at the University of Virginia School of Medicine, has studied "past lives and reincarnation" for many years. In 2015, he published a book called Return to Life, which explored several cases of American children who remembered their past lives. Tucker interviewed these children and their parents and took them to the locations of their past lives, carefully verifying their accounts, eventually concluding that "these children indeed had memories of their past lives" with compelling evidence.

One of the more widely reported cases is that of little James, who had just turned two years old. In May 2001, James often cried out in his nightmares, "Airplane on fire! Can't get out!" He kicked and clawed as if trying to climb out of the cockpit. To understand his son's nightmares, James's parents began to investigate based on information he provided, such as Corsair fighter planes, the aircraft carrier Nakoma Bay, and the name of a combat buddy, Jack Larson. After much research and interviews, they identified James Huston Jr., a U.S. fighter pilot shot down by the Japanese during the Battle of Iwo Jima in 1945, as James Leininger's past life.

This story was written into a book called “Soul Survivor: The Reincarnation of a World War II Fighter Pilot “and was published in 2009. With such compelling evidence of past lives and reincarnation, it becomes increasingly difficult to dismiss these phenomena as mere superstition.

Many children who remember their past lives share commonalities. Typically, they begin to experience nightmares related to their past lives around the age of two and remember their death scene vividly but forget it gradually as they grow older. Studies have shown that some people's congenital disabilities or birthmarks are linked to their past life's tragic death experiences.

The average person may have some connection to their past lives, such as experiencing recurring dreams, having strong emotional reactions to certain people or objects, feeling drawn to unfamiliar places or customs, possessing unique talents, having an extreme fear of fire or water, having distinctive birthmarks, or speaking fluent foreign languages under hypnosis.

Hypnosis has long been used as a means of accessing past lives in mental therapy. Dr. Chen Sheng-Ying, a psychiatrist who graduated from the School of Medicine at National Taiwan University and has been practicing in the United States for many years, is one of the pioneers of past life regression therapy. In 1980, he encountered his first patient who spoke about their past life memories during hypnosis. Based on thousands of cases, he wrote two books about his hypnotherapy experiences: "Life is Eternal: Reports from a Psychiatrist's Past Life Regression Therapy" and "Transcending Past Lives and Present Lives: Reports from a Psychiatrist's Hypnotherapy Practice." In the preface of his books, he wrote, "No matter what a person's social status, position, or level of education is in this life, after exploring their subconscious, one can discover the profound wisdom in their soul is so extraordinary. It makes one think that perhaps the inner spiritual life within each person, which we may call the soul, is very ancient and full of wisdom."

In Buddhist culture, the soul, which bears its own karma, is reborn into different generations, and each life is regarded as equal, with no differentiation between a master and a follower. In Christian civilization, the soul only has one life, and there is no concept of reincarnation, so the idea of a reincarnated soul is seen as a "ghost in a child's body."

In the United States, Dr. Brian L. Weiss, who is two years younger than Dr. Chen and graduated from the School of Medicine at Yale University, has similar medical experiences and documented them in books such as "Many Lives, Many Masters" and "Only Love Is Real: A Story of Soulmates Reunited."

Dr. Michael Newton, an American who entered this field even earlier and achieved greater success, developed a unique hypnosis technique to explore memories of the reincarnation process from death to rebirth in the subconscious of hundreds of hypnotized individuals over decades. In 1994, he published "Journey of Souls," and in 2000, "Destiny of Souls," which provide in-depth descriptions and explorations of souls, the spiritual world, and the reincarnation process, offering a wealth of information about the spiritual world. Due to the similarity of many samples, it provides strong support for credibility.

The soul is immeasurable and intangible, and its concept currently lies outside the realm of science and may never be able to enter its gates. Although we don't know why a small number of children have memories of past lives, if there is one solidly proven case, it can demonstrate the existence of reincarnation and indirectly prove the existence of the soul. Even though the idea of "reincarnation of the soul" falls outside of the realm of empirical science, it is significant enough to serve as a crucial foundation of my belief system.