Erlendur Haraldsson
Department of Psychology, University of Iceland,
Reykjavik, Iceland
For more than a century certain phenomena have been considered relevant for the question if some part of our being survives bodily death (Myers, 1903). Prominent among them are some features of apparitions of the dead, mediumistic communications, and -- more recently -- alleged memories of a previous life. Well-known is Stevenson's paper "The contribution of apparitions for the question of survival" in which he lists and discusses various features of apparitions that are particularly relevant for the survival question (Stevenson, 1982). Similar lists of could be made for mediumistic communications and "Cases of the Reincarnation Type" (CORT).
Do we have from recent years any new findings that can be interpreted as further arguments for survival? There is the counter-argument that any phenomena that we come across can be interpreted as not being evidence for survival, particularly by the super-psi hypothesis but let us put it aside for a moment.
I have come across two new findings that -- in my opinion -- extend the list of pro-survival arguments. One is from the realm of apparitions of the dead, the other from studies of children who claim memories of a past life. For neither finding do I find an easy natural explanation, and hence argue for their paranormality and relevance for the survival question.
In Iceland, we have collected 450 detailed personal accounts of alleged contacts with the dead. Most of them are apparitional, and two-thirds with a visual component (Haraldsson, 1991, 2006). Among them 70,4% are of persons who had died naturally, and 29,6% violently (accident, murder or suicide). Only 7,86% of the population died violently in the relevant period compared to the 29,6% of the apparitional figures, which is almost fourfold. Similar findings have been observed before, but new is (as far as I know) that apparitions of a violent death were much more likely to appear to strangers than apparitions of persons who suffered a natural death, just as persons suffering violent death are more likely to appear in mediumistic communications, and are often found in as previous personalities in CORT.
Persons who suffer a violent death are two times more likely to appear to their relatives than persons who suffer a natural death. More interestingly, two-thirds of all apparitions of persons who suffer a violent death, appear to strangers, namely persons who did not know them when they were living. Thus, persons suffering violent death appear proportionally more often to their relatives than person who died naturally, but particularly often to strangers, who know nothing or near nothing about them and have no motivation to hallucinate them. These apparitional experiences have an invasional character.
Children who claim memories of a past life do sometimes reveal knowledge of events that took place before they were born. There can be little doubt of the paranormality revealed in such cases, but they may be open to the super-psi interpretation. However, the super-psi interpretation runs into difficulties concerning birthmarks that are found in some cases and correspond to wounds that were inflicted on a the child's statements fit the facts of the life events of that person.
In my psychological studies of children claiming past-life memories, a new finding has emerged. Psychological tests of Sri Lankan and Lebanese children reveal that as a group these children suffer from a post-traumatic stress disorder without ever having been in a life-threatening situation. Why? This can probably be best explained by the fact that 75-80% of the children describe how they died in the previous life through accidents, murder or other violent means. They repeatedly relive these images/memories. This is not an information transfer. It is a psychological, behavioural feature and thus of relevance for the survival question.