Jim B. Tucker Quotes

“By the time they get to where they can really verbalize them, the images may have faded, whereas with these kids, they start talking about it, and it kind of firms it up in their minds and becomes a full case.”

“Consciousness is the core of reality that the physical world grows out of, not the other way around.”

“How could a two-year-old in Louisiana remember being a World War II pilot shot down over the Pacific? Or a boy in Oklahoma recall being a Hollywood extra?”

“I have become convinced that there is more than just the physical world.”

“The average age when a child starts talking about their past life is 35 months, so usually it's around their third birthday. Seventy-five percent of them will talk about how they died in their last life. In those cases, 70% of them are through some sort of unnatural means: murder, suicide, combat accidents.”

“The brain died physically, and the consciousness continued on.”

“The child has to be in the right frame of mind to talk about these things. It's usually during relaxed times, sometimes after a bath or during a car ride.”

“There's a well-known case where a child who remembered being a World War II pilot, which was 50-plus years ago. We can be pretty certain that child didn't hear about this random person, and yet they have a lot of memories.”

“We are not just physical beings trapped in a random universe for a few decades and then we're gone. This is a hopeful message for people.”

“What the child describes, does it match somebody who lived and died in the past? The child has to recall the right details that would allow tracing, typically names of either people or places; otherwise, it's extremely difficult.”

“A surprising number of Americans believe in reincarnation — between 20 and 27 percent, depending on the poll — and a similar percentage of Europeans do as well.”

“A toddler tried to strangle the man he said had killed him in his previous life.”

“Although some people find the idea of reincarnation to be ridiculous or offensive, others accept it on faith. The idea of reincarnation has appealed to many throughout history and into the present day, including Plato and the ancient Greeks, Hindus and Buddhists in Asia, various West Africans, many Native Americans in northwest North America, and even some groups of early Christians. Today, people in the world who believe in reincarnation may outnumber those who do not.”

“As much as we might wish to come back ourselves, we also wish that the people we love could do so.”

“Children all over the world have described memories of previous lives. For more than forty years, researchers have investigated their reports. More than 2,500 cases are registered in the files of the Division of Personality Studies at the University of Virginia. Some of the children have said they were deceased family members, and others described previous lives as strangers.”

“Even though it may seem hard to believe, evidence might exist that life after death is actually a reality. ”

“How did this little boy, living in a town 500 miles away, know so many things about a man who had died in Istanbul fifty years before he was born? He could not have heard about the man Dr. Keil had to work so hard to learn anything about. What possible explanation could there be? Kemal had a very simple answer: he said that he had been the man in a previous life.”

“In a typical case, a very young child begins to describe memories of another life. The child is persistent about this and often demands to be taken to his other family in another location. When the child has given names or enough details about the other location, the family often goes there to find that the child’s statements fit the life of a person who has died in the recent past.”

“Many of the subjects in our cases are born with birthmarks or birth defects that match wounds on the body of the previous personality, usually fatal wounds.”

“Reincarnation conflicts with the view of the majority of scientists that the material world is all that exists, and with many people’s religious beliefs.”

“Some people even say that researchers should not try to study the subject of life after death scientifically since it is so far removed from usual empirical areas of investigation.”

“Some young children say that they have been here before. They give various details about previous lives, often describing the way in which they died. Of course, young children say a lot of things, and we may simply think that they are fantasizing as children often do. But what if, in a number of instances, people listened to the children and then tried to find out if the events they described had actually happened? And what if, when those people went to the places the children had named, they found that what the children had said about the past events was indeed true? What then?”

“Sometimes, the case begins before the child, the subject of the case, is even born. One situation involves an elderly or dying individual, the previous personality, making a prediction about his or her next life. Such cases are rare, but they do occur with some frequency among two groups. One is the lamas of Tibet. Though their predictions can be vague or unclear, others use these predictions to“identify young children as the lamas reborn.”

“The concept of reincarnation is compelling because the idea of being able to come back to try again may appeal to a lot of people. We cannot change the mistakes we have made in the past, but being able to try to do better the next time would certainly be a comfort. If we get to live repeated lives, then perhaps we can make progress across lifetimes and become better people.”

“The idea that research could actually support the concept of reincarnation is surprising to many people in the West, since reincarnation may seem foreign or even absurd. People sometimes joke about their past lives or about their next one.”

“The lives that the children describe tend to be very recent ones, and in fact, the median time between the death of the previous personality and the birth of the subject is only fifteen to sixteen months.”

“There is no bigger question in the world than whether we can survive death.”

“These cases are not about 'proof', they are about evidence. Since this work has taken place in the messy real world rather than a tightly controlled laboratory, proof is not possible. This is often the case in science and medicine. For example, many medications are judged to be helpful, because evidence indicates that they work even though they have not been absolutely proven to do so.”

“Though many people in scientific fields hold views that can be just as dogmatic as those of an intensely religious person, judging from firmly held beliefs does not make for sound scientific inquiry.”

“I think it's very difficult to just map these cases onto a materialist understanding of reality. I mean, if physical matter, if the physical world is all there is, then I don't know how you can accept these cases and believe in them. But I think there are good reasons to think that consciousness can be considered a separate entity from physical reality.”