Old Souls: Compelling Evidence from Children Who Remember Past Lives

I personally found this book very interesting. It delves into personalities claiming memories of past lives, sometimes with uncanny accuracy and sometimes with vague memories. Throughout the world there are populaces that embrace reincarnation while others totally reject the idea as absurd. For years, Dr. Ian Stevenson has expended countless hours and energy in trying to establish a foothold in the mainstream scientific community. The author of this work accompanied him on several trips and independently sought answers to the existence or nonexistence o of reincarnation. The topic is interesting at the least and deserving of continuing exploration. For me, many questions remain unanswered and yet there is definitely some factor that causes me to feel uneasy about entirely dismissing the existence of reincarnation. As with much in life, the answer may never definitively reveal itself.

About 20% of the book is concerned with a very small number of actual cases, While 80% of the book is the author accompanying Ian Stevenson, who is perhaps most famous for his original book _20 Cases suggestive of Reincarnation_.The author has a propensity to often stop his narrative and describe in incidental detail what the various people are wearing ( ! )I think the greatest underlying theme that I've come away with from this book is that investigating these cases is astonishingly tedious and the idea that Stevenson has accumulated some 2000 of these in his files is beyond remarkable !The final resolution or proof for reincarnation, after all is said & done however, is not terribly strong, many of the cases and incidents are indeed very intriguing, but the sparsity leaves a great deal to be desired.Also; I find it very curious that he's traveling to all of these exotic places around the world to find these cases; whereas I would think that it would be much simpler to simply send out questionnaires to all of the local daycare centers, asking if the caretakers have overheard very young children in their care, talk about crazy things and that you could just follow up on that... ?

I bought 'Old Souls' because I have an interest in reincarnation, but wanted a book that approaches the subject from a more scientific point of view, which 'Old Souls' does. The book is based on journalist Tom Shroder's journeys with Dr. Ian Stevenson in Lebanon and India to seek out promisingly verifiable accounts of young children who appeared to remember past lives in some detail. Shroder's task as a journalist was to observe Stevenson and his interactions with the children and their families, to try to discern whether or not the children's stories truly could be believed, or were there to be debunked. (As it turned out, there were, with reservations, some of both.)The first half of the book was about Lebanon, and the second about India. During that first half, the question of reincarnation was uppermost in my mind, even in the face of Shroder's vivid descriptions of war-demolished and sometimes dangerous Beirut. When I started reading the second half of the book, however, the part about India, the issue of reincarnation faded far into the background for me when compared with the grip that Schroder's description of the living conditions in India had on me. It made me wonder why anyone would want to have even one life in those utterly miserable surroundings, much less more. Four words pretty much sum up what I garnered from Shroder's description of India: "raw sewage," "flies" and "malnutrition."Another question raised in my mind by the second half of 'Old Souls' was why on earth Dr. Ian Stevenson would keep going back to India to interview these children, knowing the horrendous conditions he would sometimes have to suffer right along with them. It's one thing to be highly interested in a subject; it's completely another to be willing to make repeated journeys into a veritable hell in order to conduct research you well know may never be given a fair look by mainstream scientists. Stevenson reminds me somewhat of people who try to climb Mount Everest; I greatly respect and admire them and think they are more than a little crazy. I'm so glad that Schroder wrote this book to chronicle Dr. Stevenson's story and that of the 'old souls' that he studied. The world truly does deserve to know.P.S. I do want to be sure to point out that Tom Shroder writes wonderfully well. He describes what he sees in vivid detail, and he also is generous in sharing his own emotional reactions and insights into what he sees. I ordered another book written by him simply because I so enjoyed his prose in 'Old Souls.'

I appreciate Shroder’s frank discussion of skepticism bashing against inexplicable observations of children recalling previous lives. Near the end [way too close to the end] he briefly dips into how quantum consciousness could be involved and the difficulties of 3-dimension beings [us] experiencing a 4-dimension reality, could contribute to understanding the phenomenon. These are not his field of expertise and complex subjects to both research and try to explain, so I can’t fault him for not dipping more deeply.It is an easy to read narrative. My only complaint was that I felt the color, while well written, was padding. I found myself scanning through those sections looking for “the meat.”

This book will make you a believer

Mejor de lo que esperaba!

Excellent book, very interesting for those that like learning about our spiritual side. Couldn’t recommend this more, one of my favorites

Had I known this book is an account by someone who accompanied Dr. Ian Stevenson on his last two research trips (to Lebanon and India), I would have bought it long ago. Shroder engagingly maintains a good balance between skepticism and qualified belief which should be valued by anyone who has ever considered whether 'souls' survive bodily death. Dr. Stevenson's heroic efforts to scientifically investigate the best evidence we have that reincarnation is real should be much more widely appreciated.

Excellent Book... everyone should read it atleast once in their life team

This book actually provides a good introduction to the work of Dr. Stevenson, who collected thousands of cases of children who spontaneously (without hypnosis) remember their own past lives. He methodically documents each child's statements of a previous life and identifies the deceased person the child remembers being.For Westerners the idea that some children (age three to five) not only remember a previous existence, but can identify loved ones from it, is quite bizarre. Those kinds of "memories" are not very detailed ones, it's more like memories from your early childhood - you remember only some fragments, mostly associated with some important/significant/unusual events at that time. And this is one of the points that make those kinds of memories (from past life), quite real.According to Stevenson, the orthodox theory (and it is just a theory) conceives human personality as the product of a person's genetic material inherited from his ancestors through his parents (influences of his prenatal and postnatal environment). But that theory cannot fully explain early childhood phobias, some of the abilities that seem to develop spontaneously, or even children convinced that they are the wrong sex. But if one accepts the possibility of reincarnation, one can entertain the idea that these children are demonstrating strong likes, dislikes, skills, and even genius that are the logical results of previous experiences. There again you will find cases of children acting as if they did not belong in their families (they treat parents and siblings with indifference, even hostility). This phenomenon is usually thought to have been caused by infantile trauma. In some cases, it could be so. But in other cases, it could be some kind of "left overs" from the "old life".Difficult to believe? For some, maybe. But I'm sure I'm not the only one who wonders about things like that. This book doesn't give you 100% answer, but it's a start in the right direction. Another point to consider is that almost nobody (in the "Western" world) is bold enough to talk to a small child about something like that (lack of time, lack of interest, fear of unknown, lack of belief - reason for that could be anything). And because of that, those memories are nearly always forgotten by adulthood (this can be attributed to lack of memory rehearsal; as very young children do not usually engage in rehearsal of remembered information, except very specific ones such as fire can cause pain and so on). Which gives another really good question: why would you want to remember? Sure, one reason could be that it is some kind of "proof" that "something" is there, on the other side - that the human soul lives on. But most of us seems to "knows" that (or subconsciously "feel" that) anyway.It seems like on one hand, the whole process of forgetting past life makes sense: all your friends from the other life are most likely gone, all the love ones too, your have new memories now, new life, new future - so why would you want to remember it (most likely it would drive you crazy after a while anyway)? There is not point in that - it's much better to "wipe the slate clean" (so to speak) and start over a new life again. From this point of view, this whole process seems to be a very naturalistic phenomenon.On the other, it doesn't in the way that, in the new life you are probably going to make the same mistakes again (or quite similar) as you did in the old one. Sure, you will also make some different choices too (after all it will be a different life), but mistakes will happen. You will have to learn similar basic things/feelings again: how to write, speak, how to hate, love and so on. I just don't see, how in this case, the so called "soul" can actually learn something - by repeating almost everything again, without remembering some "bad choices and mistakes" from the other "old life". The life will be new, but feelings (such as love, hate, pain, anger, wonder, or various emotions associated with mood, temperament, and personality), will be pretty much the same. But then again, maybe it's all about something different than just "learning".Anyway, for somebody who is interested in such subjects, this is a good book to start. It doesn't give you all the answers to the above, no book can do that, but it is close enough to put you on the right track. The other recommended books, 2 of them written by Stevenson himself, would be: "Twenty Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation", "Where Reincarnation and Biology Intersect" and "Yesterday's Children: The Search for My Family from the Past" by Jenny Cockell (or even go for something like "Lake of Memory Rising" - by William R. Fix).