Dr. Ian Stevenson A MATTER OF DEATH AND LIFE (original) (raw)

Before I actually met Stevnson, the only insight I had into him personally came from a reprint of a lecture he had given at Southeastern Louisiana University in 1989, in which he explained how he progressed from analyzing rat livers in a medical lab to interviewing children who claimed to remember previous lives. His remarks read like something from the 19th century, a time when scientists could also be writers, historians and philosophers, when they weren't afraid to think aloud and puzzle over imponderable things in public. But I was also intrigued by a subtle underlying tone of bitterness, or at least hurt and puzzlement, apparent in the text. Stevenson clearly felt that his life's work had been scorned, or merely ignored, by those mainstream scientists he considered his peers.

He didn't even wait for the second paragraph to say, "For me, everything now believed by scientists is open to question, and I am always dismayed to find that many scientists accept current knowledge as forever fixed."

In his darker moments, Stevenson felt like an outcast, a heretic damned for his affronts to scientific orthodoxy. Once, in a particularly bleak frame of mind, he told me, "There's a saying, 'Science only changes one funeral at a time.' "

I first met Stevenson in January 1997, at his office on the University of Virginia campus. It was in an ancient two-story frame house sandwiched between an apartment building and a high-rise parking garage. A plaque on the exterior read "Division of Personality Studies."

When I was shown into Stevenson's office, we sat in facing armchairs. He spoke formally and thoughtfully. There was a sense of the past in the house, in his dress and manner and the way we were sitting there like gentlemen taking after-dinner brandy. In that conversation, and in subsequent ones, his seriousness of purpose was constant. He was reserved, but as I got to know him in the months that followed, I found him quite willing to consider any questions, even pointed ones about his motives and background.

Over dinner in a Beirut hotel, he explained what had diverted him from a successful career in conventional medical research: "What happened was that as I was a very extensive reader, I began to find in books here and there, and in newspapers and magazines, reports of what were usually individual cases of reincarnation memories. In the end I found 44 cases here and there.

"The thing that came out when you got them all together was that they predominantly featured young children, ages 2 to 5, who spoke of previous life memories for a brief time, until they were about 8. But you had to get them all together first before that was obvious. Many were little more than journalistic anecdotes, but some were considerably more serious . . .

"Numbers count in science, and these 44 cases, when you put them together, it just seemed inescapable to me that there must be something there. I couldn't see how they could all be faked, or they could all be a deception. My conclusion was that this might be a promising line of investigation if more cases could be found and studied earlier and more carefully. I don't think it occurred to me that I might be the one to carry out the investigations."

After Stevenson published a paper on his survey of the literature in 1960, he began to hear reports of similar claims in India, and received invitations to investigate.

"By the time I arrived, I had leads on five cases. To my surprise, in four weeks I had found 25 cases, and the same happened in Sri Lanka -- I had a lead to one or two there and I ended up with seven. I didn't pay much attention to the behavioral aspects of these cases. There was one where the child claimed that he was a Brahman and he was born in a low-caste family and he wouldn't eat his family's food. He said, 'You're all just a bunch of Jats, I'm a Brahman, I'm not going to eat your food.' " The boy persisted in his belief into an unhappy adulthood.

"I thought: Well this is interesting, but what really concerns me is how many of his statements can be verified, and what were the chances he could have learned this normally."

Over time, Stevenson concluded that in the strongest cases, no normal explanation comfortably fit the facts. And in aggregate, they all but demanded an explanation beyond the range of our current understanding.

He published his first collection of the cases in 1964.

When I asked what kind of response the book received, Stevenson said nothing for long enough that, though I had spoken plainly, I began to wonder if he hadn't heard the question.

Just when I was about to ask it again, he said, "The short answer is: none. It was just ignored. It was reviewed in the journals of psychical research, and that was about it. I was disappointed, but I couldn't say I was surprised. I was well aware of the isolation of my work."

Did he get any negative response from the university?

"Not precisely at this point, that I knew of. I think it was growing, though, because I learned later that the president of the university had received mail and telephone calls from alumni protesting what I was doing. And my wife was very distressed. She said, 'You're just ruining a promising career. Everything is going great for you. Why do you want to do this?'

"She was herself very materialistic and very oriented toward biochemistry as the answer to disease. So she didn't have sympathy for what I was doing [though they remained married for 25 years, until she died, in 1983]. But that wasn't the worst of her troubles. What was more distressing was that other people, instead of coming to me and saying, 'I'd like to see your data,' would make cracks to her at cocktail parties in my absence, tease her, and I thought that was shameful . . .

"But by that time, I was convinced that there was really something substantial in what I was seeing, something that should be pursued no matter what the cost. So I devoted more and more time to the cases."

Stevenson faced another crisis when his benefactor, Chester Carlson, dropped dead in a New York movie theater. Stevenson's grief combined with a sense of personal doom: "I thought, 'The bottom has dropped out of this. I'll have to go back to ordinary research.' And then his will was read, and it was found that he'd left the university a million dollars and a little more for my research."

Stevenson now had the backing to investigate full time, whether he got any mainstream respect or not. But he wasn't satisfied with operating in the comfortable margin.

"I thought that most parapsychologists were too isolated," he told me once. "They were just talking to themselves and not talking enough to other scientists, and far too inattentive to the fact that the rest of the world wasn't listening to them. They were too locked into a rather narrow laboratory program and they tended to be neglectful, if not contemptuous, of what happened in the field, of spontaneous experiences.

"Those interested me more. Modern psychologists imitated physicists by only being interested in what happened in a lab, not in things like love and death, and parapsychologists imitated psychologists. That is, you have tight control of conditions. But it seems to me that it's far better to be 90 percent certain of something important than 100 percent certain of something that is trivial."

Despite his craving for professional acceptance, Stevenson has shied away from publicity. He didn't trust journalists not to sensationalize his work, and many of his field trips were logistically complicated, arduous and even dangerous, not to mention expensive. He wasn't eager to have to look after a noncontributing member on these expeditions.

But after several years of correspondence, and no doubt because of his impending retirement, I persuaded Stevenson to take me along.

Even though he was on the eve of turning 80, his stamina was astounding. Ranging far outside the cities in both Lebanon and India, relentlessly logging 12-hour days seven days a week in often inhospitable environments, he rarely betrayed the slightest fatigue. It was all I could do to keep from begging him to take a break.

But I could understand his compulsion. The cases we encountered were every bit as difficult to explain away as he had advertised. As he readily acknowledges, no one of them could, on its own, rule out any normal alternative. But in many of them, the only way to account normally for what people were telling us was to hypothesize some massive, multi-sided conspiracy, either conscious fraud or some unconscious communal coordination among people from different families and communities with no obvious motive or clear means to cooperate in a deception.

It was also obvious that Stevenson wasn't ignoring contrary evidence or manufacturing support for his thesis. He was possibly even more energetic in pursuing a line of questioning that could puncture a claim than the contrary.

Ultimately, it was the accumulation of cases, across culture and circumstance, all with multiple, independent witnesses matter-of-factly testifying to things that were inconceivable, that began to take a toll on my skeptical bias.

But what about Stevenson's bias?

On one of those interminable return trips on rutted roads unlit even by starlight, the evening fires encasing the world in an acrid smog, I asked him directly: Doesn't his own passion threaten the objectivity of his findings?

"Show me a researcher who doesn't care one way or another about the results, and I'll show you bad research," he said.

The car lurched off the road to avoid a truck burdened like an ox with sacks of grain overhanging its frame, but Stevenson didn't seem to notice.

"It's like line calls in tennis," he went on. "I care very much about winning my weekly games in Charlottesville, so I pay very close attention to whether a ball is in or out. It is a matter of honor to be scrupulously honest, so I'm not going to lie. But I'm not going to miss a call, either."

Besides, he said, his fondest hope is that other line judges will be called down from the stands to inspect the smudges in the clay and either endorse or dispute his conclusions. What was unbearable was the possibility that nobody would even look.

As he spoke of it, his steady imperturbability finally deserted him, the dangers awaiting outside the tinny van on the mayhem of India's roads vanishing in the overwhelming glare of the world's indifference.

Because one thing was certain. In this life, Ian Stevenson was running out of time.

Tom Shroder is the editor of The Post's Sunday Style section. This article was adapted from Old Souls: The Scientific Evidence for Reincarnation, published this month by Simon & Schuster.