When Ryan Hammons was about four years old, he began pleading with his mother to take him home—to Hollywood. His mother, a county clerk deputy who lived with her husband, a police officer, in Oklahoma, was surprised by the request. Surprise eventually turned to alarm when Ryan began waking from nightmares holding his chest and telling his parents that, when he was in Hollywood, his heart had exploded. He went on to describe what it was like to die, and said that everyone comes back, and that he’d known his mother before; he’d even picked her to be his mother. Eventually the family, with the help of child psychiatrist and reincarnation researcher Jim Tucker, was able to “solve” Ryan’s case, connecting his memories to that of a relatively obscure talent agent named Marty Martyn, who’d died forty years before Ryan was born. Ryan’s knowledge was extensive, providing a list of fifty-five verified details, ranging from the number of times Martyn was married to his having given his daughter a dog she didn’t like.
I had always found the idea of reincarnation easy to dismiss until I saw a video of Tucker talking to a documentarian about Ryan’s case, along with the cases of other children who shared surprisingly specific details about lives they claimed to have lived before. They weren’t saying they’d been someone famous like James Dean or Louis XIV; they were describing the lives of everyday people in the relatively recent past. Though skeptical, I couldn’t come up with an explanation for how they knew what they knew. I stayed up late into the night, trying to make sense of what I’d seen.
A professor of psychiatry and neurobehavioral sciences at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, Tucker has been studying the phenomenon of children reporting memories from past lives for more than twenty years. The start of his interest in reincarnation was similar to mine: he was dismissive until his wife opened him up to the subject. He soon read Children Who Remember Previous Lives, by Ian Stevenson, then the foremost name in the scientific study of past lives.
Tucker received a bachelor’s in psychology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1982 and earned his medical degree there four years later. He has published two books—Return to Life and Life Before Life, both of which have been collected with a new introduction in a single volume titled Before—and he has discussed his work on NPR’s Weekend Edition and CBS Sunday Morning. His research involves substantiating reports from parents who say their child is talking about a past life. Tucker and his colleagues interview all parties and, if they feel the case has merit, try to determine whose life the child might be describing. Once they’ve made such a determination, they refer to the case as “solved”—a designation they’ve applied to 70 percent of the 2,500 they’ve cataloged so far. They also collect data on each case so that larger trends can be observed. For example, the average time between death and rebirth is almost five years, and 80 percent of children who remember past lives specifically remember their death in the previous life.
I met with Tucker on a blisteringly hot summer day in Charlottesville, where I was glad to find refuge in his comfortable, nondescript, air-conditioned office. He proved to be not only a sober-minded doctor with a serious passion for his work but also a surprisingly easy person to talk to: unpretentious and collected, with a slight but noticeable accent from his upbringing in eastern North Carolina.
Jim Tucker
Askey: You’ve endeavored to maintain objectivity and accumulate data, but there’s no getting around the fact that your studies contradict a materialist worldview of consciousness as an emergent property of matter.
Tucker: I’m not trying to overturn materialism, only to show that it’s incomplete. The consciousness piece, I think, is at the core of reality. Max Planck, who is considered the father of quantum theory, viewed consciousness as fundamental and thought that physical things grow out of it. So I don’t think it’s crazy to consider that materialism—though it can be spectacularly successful in many ways—has its limits.
Askey: You and your predecessor, Ian Stevenson, have documented roughly 2,500 cases of children describing past-life memories—many having been substantiated through interviews and by uncovering information about the lives these children believe they lived before. At what point does anecdote become data?
Tucker: There’s a famous line: “The plural of anecdote is not data.” But [political scientist] Raymond Wolfinger’s original quote was actually “The plural of anecdote is data.” This is not controlled laboratory science. We are accumulating as many facts as we can and then seeing what we make of them. There’s this worldwide phenomenon of young children saying they remember a past life. We look at individual cases to see if they hold up, and at the phenomenon as a whole, to see what the patterns are and what we think it might add up to.
Askey: How do you compensate for the lack of experimental, laboratory data?
Tucker: We certainly don’t take anything on faith that we don’t have to. We start with what the parents tell us the child has said. In the strongest cases someone has written all that down before anyone tried to verify whether those details match a previous life. That’s important because our society relies on memory for a lot. At a trial, a witness’s memory can send someone to prison. But memory has its deficits. We try to verify what the child said and see how well it matches an individual’s life from the past. Then we ask, Could the child have had access to this information? Or could the parents have had access to this information and either intentionally or unintentionally credited the child with having it?
Askey: In 1989 Ian Stevenson said, “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.” Do you see your investigations as calling into question the accepted, current knowledge?
Tucker: I don’t remember that quote, but it’s a perfect distillation of what science should be, especially in medicine, because we’re always learning new things about the body, about treatments, about what works and doesn’t work, about new side effects. Scientists have to be open to changing their views.
There were eminent physicists in the nineteenth century who said that theoretical physics was nearing completion because everything had already been worked out. That was before relativity and quantum mechanics. Whenever people in the past have said we know all there is to know, they’ve been spectacularly wrong. Reincarnation is a big leap, certainly, but that doesn’t mean we should dismiss it out of hand.
Askey: What are you currently working on?
Tucker: One of our researchers here, Philip Cozzolino, is leading the research into parents’ initial reaction to their child’s story. What we found is that the father’s belief gets stronger over time and essentially correlates with the strength of the case. The father may start out more skeptical than the mother, but if it’s a strong case, the father will be persuaded. The mother may start out more supportive, but in the stronger cases, she actually becomes less so over time. Mothers don’t disbelieve it entirely, though. We think the idea of the child having had other parents can be discouraging to the mother. At times a child may say, “You’re not my real parents. My real parents are so-and-so.”
Askey: Ninety percent of the children you’ve studied describe a previous life in which they had the same gender. How do you account for this?
Tucker: You wouldn’t expect consciousness—or, if you want to use the term, spirit—to be gender specific. It seems to me that, when intact memories do come through, it’s typically from a life that’s fairly close to the previous one in multiple ways. Geographically it’s fairly close. Timewise it’s pretty close. Perhaps gender is part of the past-life “residue” that’s still with their consciousness as they continue to another life.
Whenever people in the past have said we know all there is to know, they’ve been spectacularly wrong. Reincarnation is a big leap, certainly, but that doesn’t mean we should dismiss it out of hand.
Askey: John Wheeler, who popularized the term “black hole,” also proposed the idea of a “participatory anthropic principle,” which says that observers are necessary to the existence of the universe. How does that inform your interpretation of past-life memories?
Tucker: Quantum physics, if nothing else, has shown that, at its core, reality is a lot less straightforward than we think. They say there are as many interpretations of quantum theory as there are quantum physicists. It’s sort of standard quantum theory that, until something is measured or observed, it doesn’t have a definite attribute. It’s only with observation that the attributes become definite. Wheeler essentially took this idea and ran with it. He speculated that it may well be that these observer events are what reality is actually made of. If you let that settle for a minute, it starts to get dizzying: reality’s not necessarily made of waves and particles—it might be made of observations and knowledge.
Wheeler wrote about what he called “delayed-choice experiments.” You might be familiar with the double-slit experiment: You send light through a barrier that has two slits in it. There’s film on the other side of the barrier, and the light creates an interference pattern on the film, indicating that it passed through the slits as light waves. It does that unless you use a device to observe the light as it passes through the slits. In that case, individual photons go through one slit or the other, and you no longer get the interference pattern on the film and instead get two fuzzy images corresponding to the two slits. By watching the photons go through the slits, you’ve essentially forced the light to behave as particles instead of a wave.
Wheeler suggested that instead of watching the photons go through one slit or the other, you have a setup in which you decide just after they’ve gone through the slits whether or not to observe their paths. If you do, you get the two images corresponding to the slits; if you don’t, you get an interference pattern. These experiments have been carried out, with modifications—they show that observation determines the kind of path the photons took through the slits in the past, before they were being observed. So it’s not just the attribute in the present that becomes definite when you use a measuring device; attributes in the past do, too. We think of the past being fixed, but it’s not.
This “measurement problem” is a huge issue in physics. Again, there are different interpretations, but it seems a reasonable hypothesis that the observations essentially make up reality. I mean, once you buy into delayed choice, then it could go all the way back to the Big Bang, right? Wheeler has a diagram in which the universe is shaped like a U, and you’ve got a giant eye looking at the beginning, if that makes sense.
So what’s primary here? Is it the universe, or is it the observer? Personally I don’t see how you can decide it’s the universe, because if the universe isn’t defined until it’s observed, then how could you not have the observer first? That’s a very long-winded way of saying that I do think consciousness is fundamental, as Max Planck said. And I think one day science may conclude that.
Our empirical studies of children with past-life memories are never going to be widely accepted without a theory that at least allows for it—and preferably one that requires it. I’m probably going to have to wait until my next lifetime for that to happen. [Laughs.] But I can see how it could happen. Perhaps then people will look back at work on reincarnation or near-death experiences and say, “Well, now that we understand that physical reality grows out of consciousness, these are examples of the fundamental consciousness showing through, independent of a functioning brain.”
Askey: What’s the most convincing case you might present to someone who is skeptical about the validity of past-life memories?
Tucker: Of the cases that I’ve studied, I think James Leininger’s is awfully hard to refute. Around his second birthday, James started having horrible nightmares about an airplane crash and a man who couldn’t get out of the plane. During the day he would slam his toy airplanes into the coffee table and repeatedly say, “Airplane crash on fire.” When his parents asked him about this, he said he had been a pilot who had been shot down by the Japanese and that he had been on a ship called “Natoma.” The Natoma Bay was an escort carrier stationed in the Pacific during World War II. Later, when James was just over two and a half, he saw a picture of Iwo Jima and said that’s where his plane had been shot down. As it turned out, the Natoma Bay had taken part in the Iwo Jima operation.
The family did an interview for an ABC News special that never aired, but because I was on the special, I got a copy of it. This interview was before the pilot James was describing had been identified, but it included details about how his plane had been shot in the engine, burst into flames, and crashed into the water, and how he wasn’t able to get out.
James’s parents had asked him who was there with him, and he’d said, “Jack Larson.” So his dad started looking for Jack Larsons. There were a number of them who took part in World War II. He started by looking among the war dead, but this Jack Larson had actually survived the war. James’s dad talked with him and found that not only was he on the Natoma Bay, but he’d served on it during the Iwo Jima operation. It turned out that only one pilot from the Natoma Bay had been killed during that operation: a guy named James Huston. James Leininger’s dad got the records, and they showed the flight plans for Huston’s final flight. Jack Larson was the pilot of the plane next to his.
In an ideal world, we would have been the ones investigating all this, rather than James’s dad, but fortunately we’ve got documentation of his correspondence and so forth. We can show that this written record was there before Huston was identified. And it all fits: the Natoma, Jack Larson, Iwo Jima—they all match this James Huston. That’s pretty darn hard to dismiss. And people have tried. In 2021 The Journal of Scientific Exploration published an essay by Michael Sudduth, who attempted to refute James Leininger’s case. He clearly spent scores of hours, if not more, trying to investigate it, but from my point of view he didn’t come up with anything to refute it. So I think that case stands up to scrutiny.
Our empirical studies of children with past-life memories are never going to be widely accepted without a theory that at least allows for it—and preferably one that requires it.
Askey: How do you typically respond to critics of your investigations?
Tucker: It depends. In that case, Sudduth made a serious effort, more or less. He put a lot of time in. If people are snarky or just dismiss it out of hand, I don’t pay attention. But if people have valid criticisms, they certainly need addressing.
Sudduth tried to attack the credibility of the parents and also to show that James could have had access to this material. By the time Huston was identified, when James was four, he did know about World War II and was fascinated by World War II planes. But he didn’t have any access to information about James Huston specifically, who was one pilot from this nondescript escort carrier who was killed where James said.
Askey: One of the interesting things about James’s case is those nightmares. What overlap have you observed between dreams and past-life memories?
Tucker: Even though that case and also the case of Ryan Hammons—which was another very impressive American account—both involve dreams, most don’t.
In general, dreams are the creations of our individual minds. Obviously, from Sigmund Freud on, people have put stock in dreams. Freud may have carried it a bit far, but I do think there are psychological meanings to dreams. My mind puts together the events of the day differently than yours would. Are dreams doorways to another realm of consciousness? Maybe sometimes. There are cases of people experiencing premonitions or precognition in dreams.
Askey: This is perhaps an ontological question, but do you think James Huston became James Leininger, or is there some other entity—some consciousness, some soul—that was once James Huston and is now James Leininger?
Tucker: The latter much more than the former, I think. We can only speculate, but to my mind there may well be this larger self that has different lifetimes. It’s a core that continues, though the people it inhabits are different. I use the analogy of actors in movies. When you see Jimmy Stewart in a movie, it’s undeniably Jimmy Stewart, and yet he can play very different characters.
Askey: Do you believe everyone has had a past life or lives and most of us simply don’t remember them?
Tucker: Not necessarily. Even if you accept these cases, we certainly can’t make the assumption that we all have multiple lives here in this reality. My feeling is that there is a part of us that survives, the consciousness part, but that doesn’t mean that we come back here. I would find it odd if we were limited to only this reality.
Askey: Do you think there is something like a collective consciousness? You and I are sharing this reality right now, but are we joined beyond this—to each other as well as to the other eight billion people on earth?
Tucker: I think if there is a consciousness realm, it’s almost certainly not linear or something that we can easily understand. But it would involve more of a connection than what we see here. So whether that means there’s one mind and we’re all pieces off of it, I don’t know. I recently used the analogy of a Venn diagram: perhaps there are overlaps, but there are also singular parts.
Askey: Do you believe all living creatures have a consciousness?
Tucker: That’s an interesting question. There may be a line below which it’s not a meaningful consciousness. But there are some animals that are clearly sentient. I mean, my dog has personality and character. It’s not a consciousness like we have—I don’t think so, anyway—but there’s a mind there operating. If I come back to another life, I hope he comes with me. I mean, I’m going to take my wife first. [Laughs.]
Now, does a fly have a consciousness? I don’t know. I’m not a believer in panpsychism—that everything in the world has consciousness. If this desk has consciousness, then we’re not using the word the way that I define it.
Askey: You’ve said before that you’re skeptical of past-life memories reported by adults, and that’s why your studies focus exclusively on children. Have you seen any compelling cases of past lives that are first reported after adolescence?
Tucker: There are occasionally exceptions or some persuasive evidence, but, for the most part, not so much. Sometimes people will claim a past-life connection even though they don’t have memories. We hear fairly often from adults who see similarities between their life and the life of a celebrated person in the past. But without actual memories, it’s just kind of guesswork, right? Adults have access to a lot more information than a three-year-old has. I don’t dismiss it out of hand, but I think the quality of the evidence has to be considered less, unless they have very obscure details that are hard for them to know.
Askey: You’re also skeptical of memories reported by adults who’ve undergone past-life regression with hypnosis. Why?
Tucker: Hypnosis is such an unreliable tool. Sometimes it’s amazingly accurate, but other times the mind just fills in the blanks. It’s very hard for someone to know, “Was that my mind doing that, or was that an actual memory?” And many claims of past lives coming from hypnotic regression are completely unverifiable. If you remember the life of a nondescript person in ancient Greece, it would be pretty hard to verify that. There are cases that contain absurd historical anachronisms, or cases where the person is rehypnotized and asked, “Where did you get that information?” and they say it was in a book they’d forgotten they’d read. There are a lot of reasons to be skeptical about it.
Askey: Since you mentioned ancient history: The bulk of the cases you’ve investigated involve lives that are far more recent. Why do you think that is?
Tucker: We try to verify, and it’s hard to verify a case if there’s not a written record somewhere, which leaves only more modern accounts. Also the vast majority of kids we study are talking about recent lives. Perhaps for intact memories to come through, if that’s what’s going on here, there needs to be a fairly strong connection between the two lives. It could be that if the consciousness is held to this realm, then comes back quickly with the intact memories, as opposed to if a person died two hundred years ago, then it’s gone on to somewhere else.
Askey: It seems that the children cease having these memories as they get older. Why is that?
Tucker: That’s not always true. We recently completed a study in which we interviewed adults we’d originally studied when they were kids. (I say “we,” but Ian Stevenson studied a lot of them.) None of them had super clear memories of the past life they’d reported as a child, but a substantial minority said they had at least some memory.
In any event, they certainly have fewer memories and typically stop talking about them. We all lose our memories of early childhood around the age of five, six, or seven. Take my grandkids: When they were three years old, they certainly knew who I was, and who my wife was. But if something had happened to us back then, by the time they were eight they probably would have had no memory of us. So it makes sense that the memories these kids seemingly brought with them into this life would also fade.
Askey: Pim van Lommel, a Dutch cardiologist who studies near-death experiences, suggests that our brains work like a television set tuned to a specific station. Could it be that, rather than being reincarnated, these children may just be tuning into information from someone else’s life, and as they develop a fuller sense of self, those signals fade?
Tucker: That goes all the way back to philosopher William James at least—this idea that our brains are like prisms, basically, where some of the light comes through, but the light or the consciousness originates elsewhere. People have used various analogies, depending on the era: Your brain is like a radio. If your radio breaks, you’re not able to hear the music anymore, but the radio station is still putting out a signal. I’m not sure such analogies are quite right, because, again, I think consciousness is really the core of reality. So it’s not that it’s elsewhere and uses a physical brain to reach this reality. I would instead favor a naturalistic explanation for why the past-life memories disappear in most cases. There are neurobiological explanations for why early childhood memories fade. The brain goes through a lot of changes, and some bits have to be pruned.
Askey: Are the children who report past lives neurologically distinct? In other words, do their brains look different?
Tucker: Not that we know of, but we are proposing to look at that in more depth. When we have done psychological testing with the children, we find they are more or less psychologically healthy. To be sure, they’re not psychotic or anything. They tend to be quite intelligent and verbal. So it may well be that the children we study are the ones who are able to give voice to the memories, and that doing so may cause the images to stay, such that the kids develop this sense of a past life. Whereas if a kid becomes verbal later, after the memories have faded, they just never become stored.
Askey: The cases Ian Stevenson studied were largely from countries in which a belief in reincarnation is more common, which is one reason you chose to focus on cases in the West. Has Western belief in reincarnation shifted since you’ve begun your studies?
Tucker: We certainly hear from a lot more families than we used to, but I think that’s because the word has gotten out more. Ian went to where he could find cases, which was in cultures with a belief in reincarnation. Here, people are often quite shy about the subject. In fact we have seen cases where the parents try to keep their child’s past-life stories from the grandparents. But these days if your child is talking about a past life, you google “past-life memories” or “children’s past lives,” and you quickly find us. So we’re hearing from more families, and also hearing from them earlier. Ian would often get a letter saying, “I wish I’d known about your work twenty years ago, when my son was young.”
If you look at recent surveys, probably 25 to 30 percent of Americans believe in reincarnation. One survey said even 20 percent of American Christians believe in reincarnation. James Leininger’s dad is a conservative Christian, and initially he hated the idea of past lives. He and his wife would argue about it. Eventually he was persuaded that James had lived a past life. It didn’t change his religious beliefs; he just incorporated those experiences into his existing beliefs.
We’re planning to do a survey to find out how often children talk about a past life. Because we don’t know if it’s happening more or less than it used to.
Probably 25 to 30 percent of Americans believe in reincarnation. One survey said even 20 percent of American Christians believe in reincarnation.
Askey: I’ve never had any memories of a past life, but I did have two imaginary friends when I was little—Pitzy and Conky. An article published in The Journal of Genetic Psychology suggests such friends were once seen as spirits connecting children with their past lives. Have you noted any overlap between children who report past lives and children with imaginary friends?
Tucker: An anthropologist colleague of ours once published a paper comparing imaginary friends to past-life memories. There are some substantial differences between the two phenomena.
I don’t think imaginary friends are paranormal in any way, but young kids sometimes don’t understand that they’re imaginary. There’s a piece of them that believes the friends exist. And we’ll get reports from parents whose young child will talk to a deceased grandparent or say they see an angel in the corner. Before the cognitive stage of concrete operations kicks in, kids certainly are more connected with the imagination. Maybe the imagination includes a doorway to parts of reality beyond what we experience?
Askey: Twenty-three percent of children you’ve documented with past-life memories describe the time in between lives, and how they describe it tends to be influenced by their culture. Children in the West might describe what sounds like a Christian conception of heaven, for instance. What do you know of that time between lives from what these children have said?
Tucker: As far as what I know, I would say nothing at all. [Laughs.] We wrote a paper on “intermission memories.” There are similarities among children’s stories, and there are differences. I don’t see any reason why each of us would have the same experience after we die. We could go to all kinds of different realities. And all of these reports are coming through the mouths of young children, which raises different kinds of issues. But there are cases where the children have given verified information—either things that happened to the previous person’s family after they died, or things that happened to their own parents before they were born—which would suggest that, between lives, the consciousness is capable of obtaining new information.
Some people have suggested that our memories continue to exist apart from the body after we die, and then somehow they get connected with a new brain, but there’s not this continuation of consciousness from life to life; it’s just some signal that was out there and got picked up. But if so, that would not explain the information obtained between lives.
Askey: Can you give an example of how a child might “remember” something about his or her parents before he or she was born?
Tucker: One is something Ryan Hammons remembered, much to his mother’s shame. Her husband had been married before, so when they got married, the deal was they would have only one child—and she desperately wanted to have a little girl. So one day Ryan told her he had observed her when the doctor did a test and said she was having a boy, and he’d seen how mad she got, and how she insisted she wasn’t having a boy. And then, Ryan said, he’d observed her going out with her husband to dinner and crying through the whole dinner. Well, in fact, after the ultrasound, she was told she was having a boy, and she did get really mad. And when they went out for dinner, she cried through the whole meal. She was extremely ashamed of the way she’d acted, so she certainly never told Ryan about it, and yet he knew.
Askey: There’s no such thing as a perfect example of a past-life memory, correct? Even for the solved cases, where many details match that of a real person’s life, there may be some false statements as well. Maybe the child says ten things, and nine of them match, but he says his previous house had a green door, when in fact it was blue. How do you make sense of the discrepancies?
Tucker: Well, what color was the door of your house when you were four years old? [Laughs.] But, yes, there’s no perfect case, just like there’s no perfect medical study. You can always find things to nitpick, and some of these cases have more holes than others. But if I’m asked to recall early childhood events, I don’t always get it right. Our minds do get things mixed up. So if you’re talking about memories across lifetimes, is it really that surprising that a child may give a different last name when all the other details are right? Now, if they have one image in their mind that is really strong, and that turns out to be wrong, that makes me wonder. There was a case where a child reported memories of dying in a fire, and they remembered jumping out a window and then being killed. Some people thought they had identified the previous life, but when I looked into it, that person had died in bed. That doesn’t make sense to me—if the one image you retained turned out to be false. There can also be fatal flaws in a case, like if the child had access to the information beforehand.
Askey: You pivoted from a traditional career in child psychiatry and moved toward this more unusual work in part because your wife, Chris, was open to the idea of psychics, spirits, and past lives. What was your belief system before you began to research this phenomenon?
Tucker: It’s not like she convinced me of a particular thing. But being with her opened me up to ways of thinking that I just hadn’t considered before. I was raised Southern Baptist, but I was nonpracticing as an adult. I would not have identified as a bona fide atheist, however, or even an agnostic. My beliefs were just sort of on simmer.
Chris has been a meditator. And I’m now a lapsed meditator. There are all kinds of things she’s opened me up to. We had been on different paths before we met, but then we more or less reached the same point when we got together, as family-first mental-health professionals who were looking for meaning in life. And now here we are thirty years later.
Askey: Where do you see this work going? Are 5,000 case studies going to convince more people than 2,500? Are fifty more cases as convincing as James Leininger’s or Ryan Hammons’s going to move the needle? Is widespread acceptance even your goal?
Tucker: Certainly if we had fifty—probably even twenty-five—American cases as strong as James Leininger’s or Ryan Hammons’s, I think people would have to pay attention to it more. I do think it’s important to continue to study strong cases, because people in the US will dismiss evidence from halfway around the world. So that work continues.
I’m going to be retiring before long, but there are people here who will carry on the work. And they’ll come at it from different perspectives. They’re looking at more process-oriented research: trying to sort out why some children report memories of past lives and other children don’t. It would be really interesting to find that their brains work differently, or there’s a genetic marker, or, for that matter, family dynamics like a history of major family disruption or adverse childhood experiences, the presence of a grieving parent, or the birth order. Firstborn children are more likely to experience imaginary friends than their siblings, whereas children who report past-life memories tend to be later in the birth order.
Askey: Why do you think research like yours is so rare in academia?
Tucker: It’s an area that doesn’t lend itself easily to scientific study. I mean, it’s pretty hard to nail consciousness down. It also goes against the reigning scientific paradigm of materialism. A lot of money goes to subjects that have clinical applications, whereas this is more about sorting out bigger issues. And our work doesn’t have widespread acceptance in the scientific community or among funding organizations. So that makes it a challenge.
We may be misguided, but we’re serious-minded. Aside from the facts or figures or whatever, what is the ultimate meaning of this work? Ultimately I hope that we can all find meaning, or create meaning, in our lives. I mean, we all want to be successful, but if we step back, we see it’s more about appreciating each experience. If there’s this part of us that exists outside of the physical world, maybe we don’t have to get so lost in the small details and can better appreciate the larger picture and the joy of connecting with each other and helping each other.
I don’t view it as my mission to convince people. My mission is to explore the subject, to learn as much as I can about it, and to put that information out there where people have access to it. If they’re convinced, good. If not, that’s OK, too. It’s up to you.
