Time marches on, time stands still
Time on my hands, time to kill
Blood on my hands, and my hands in the till
Down at the 7-11 - Warren Zevon

Time Out of Mind

I've always been dismayed by the thought of reincarnation, so its unlikelihood has always been a comfort. Which is why it saddens me to consider that oblivion may have been as much wishful thinking as paradise.

But if the occult is on the table in these times then we need to talk about this, too, since reincarnation is the "great fundamental doctrine" of the Mystery Schools, as Dion Fortune writes in Sane Occultism. And more to the point, the emerging holographic model in which our minds are seen to both extend beyond our material bodies and to have emerged from a common consciousness provides the theoretical construct in which reincarnation becomes scientifically credible, if not inevitable.

Before we go much further, let's recall again the congruities of boundary experience, which are all manifested in part by higher frequencies of electro-magnetic vibration. Remote viewing may be regarded as a subset of astral projection, or out-of-body experience, while an OBE could be called a Near-Death Experience before its time. And the phenomenology of NDEs is remarkably similar to that of UFO encounters, as detailed in Dr Kenneth Ring's The Omega Project. And cords of each lead us to Fortune's fundamental doctrine.

Psychoactive research, too. In Rick Strassman's DMT: The Spirit Molecule he recalls the chill along his spine when he noted for the first time that it took 49 days from conception to the first signs of the human pineal gland, the same span recorded in the Tibetan Book of the Dead from death to reincarnation. (Forty-nine days is also the time of gender differentiation.) Strassman contends that endogenous DMT, produced in the pineal near death, may act as a "scout" for the non-corporeal realm.

Strassman writes:

As we die, if near-death experiences are any indication, there is a profound shift in consciousness away from identification with the body. Pineal DMT makes available those particular non-embodied contents of consciousness. All the factors previously described combine for one final burst of DMT production: catecholamine release; decreased breakdown and increased production of DMT; reduced anti-DMT; and decomposing pineal tissue. Therefore, it may be that the pineal is the most active organ in the body at the time of death....

The consequence of this flood of DMT upon our dying brain-based mind is a pulling back of the veils normally hiding what Tibetan Buddhists call the bardo, or intermediary states between this life and the next. DMT opens our senses to these betwixt states with their myriad visions, thoughts, sounds and feelings. As the body becomes totally inert, consciousness has completely left the body and now exists as a field among many fields of manifest things.

Bruce Moen - who received his training in altered-state projection at the Monroe Institute - describes in his book Voyages into the Unknown OBEs spent as a "first responder" guiding the shocked dead of Oklahoma City towards the souls' "reception centre." He notes he saw a Monroe associate, named Rebecca, doing the same, "her arms spread out in love...providing a portal," and that they acknowledged each other with smiles. Later, in this world, by telephone, they compared notes. ("Oh Bruce, the babies" were her first words.)

Reincarnation was the core tenent of Robert Monroe's philosophy, which he said he learned over decades of astral travel. Remember his "I/There"? Monroe taught that the self we know is merely the fragment of the "Total Self" which is currently living a physical life. The total self is a cluster of many beings who each live many lifetimes. (Since Monroe's death in 1995 Skip Atwater, former Operations and Training Officer of the US military's remote viewing program, has served as the institute's Director of Research.)

Where Life and Death are Memorized

Dr Joel Whitton is a Toronto psychologist who, in 1972, participated in the "Philip" experiment which allegedly created a fictional ghost by the power of a group's applied will (not unlike making a tulpa). In the decades since he has researched reincarnation, and his 13-year work with 30 individuals published in the book Life Between Life.

Of Whitton's subjects, Michael Talbot writes in The Holographic Universe that many "gave uncannily accurate historical details about the times in which they had lived":

Some even spoke languages unknown to them. While reliving an apparent past life as a Viking, one man, a 37-year old behavioral scientist, shouted words that linquistic authorities later identified as Old Norse. After being regressed to an ancient Persian lifetime, the same man began to write in a spidery, Arabic-style script that an expert in Near Eastern languages identified as an authentic representation of Sassanid Pahlavi, a long-extinct Mesopotamian tongue that flourished between A.D. 226 and 651.

Perhaps we should ask now, if we are confident that the subjects are not inventing a past life, can we assume that they are always recalling one? There are endless signals in the superhologram. Could it be that, when tuning in the higher vibrations, their brains-as-receivers instead pick up the cross-talk of disembodied consciousness? Rather than a transmigration of souls, this would mean a certain entanglement. Possibly. Entanglement could account for certain manifestations of mental and spiritual illness, including "possession." But the distinction may be chiefly rhetorical if we all partake of the same consciousness, and it fails to account for the alleged physical footprint of past lives upon the present.

Dr Ian Stevenson, head of the Department of Psychiatric Medicine at the University of Virginia School of Medicine, published an article in 1993 entitled "Birthmarks and Birth Defects Corresponding to Wounds on Deceased Persons." He found that 35% of children who claim to recall past lives bear a birthmark or defect they attribute to a wound suffered in an earlier incarnation.

Stevenson writes:

The cases of 210 such children have been investigated. The birthmarks were usually areas of hairless, puckered skin; some were areas of little or no pigmentation (hypopigmented macules); others were areas of increased pigmentation (hyperpigmented nevi). The birth defects were nearly always of rare types. In cases in which a deceased person was identified the details of whose life unmistakably matched the child's statements, a close correspondence was nearly always found between the birthmarks and/or birth defects on the child and the wounds on the deceased person. In 43 of 49 cases in which a medical document (usually a postmortem report) was obtained, it confirmed the correspondence between wounds: and birthmarks (or birth defects). There is little evidence that parents and other informants imposed a false identity on the child in order to explain the child's birthmark or birth defect. Some paranormal process seems required to account for at least some of the details of these cases, including the birthmarks and birth defects.

Talbot notes that Stevenson has escorted many children to the locales of their past lives, and observed them effortlessly navigate what should have been strange neighbourhoods as they "correctly identified their former house, belongings, and past-life relatives and friends."

Interestingly, and contrary to the presumptions of religion, Stevenson and most NDE researchers find no evidence of "retributive karma" or judgement of "sin" or uncharitable conduct.

Talbot writes that Stevenson has found that:

...although a person's material conditions can vary greatly from one life to the next, their moral conduct, interests, aptitudes, and attitudes remain the same. Individuals who were criminals in their previous existence tend to be drawn to criminal behavior again; people who were generous and kind continue to be generous and kind, and so on. From this Stevenson concludes that it is not the outward trappings of life that matter, but the inner ones, the joys, sorrows, and "inner growths" of the personality, that appear to be most important.