Prebirth memories
Adam said:
But still there can be no real evidence unless there are people who remember this realm. As an aside, are there people who claim to have memories of 'non-incarnation'?
Yes, there are. One of the websites that seriously deals with this issue is called
Spiritual Pre-existence, an initiative of Michael and Toni Maguire. I'm a contributor to this site, as I try to collect such accounts. One of my own subjects in a reincarnation case, a boy usually called Kees (pseudonym) was about 4 when he claimed to recall having been shot as a soldier. Later on, he also told his mother about his claimed memories of a spiritual pre-existence.
He clearly felt reluctant to talk about them. He told his mother that when you die, an angel comes to take you to God, who was pure “goodness”, the “Big Light” and “humour”. It was very difficult to describe the other world. It did not fit on any slide and could not be drawn with crayons.
He added that he had had his own spot near a beautiful blue waterfall, which streamed over and under a flower-bed, and there were wonderful fruits hanging from the trees nearby, which tasted better than all the mars bars and candy of the world taken together.
Kees had not felt like reincarnating and resisted the angels who tried to convince him it would be for his own good. They practically pushed him –though they did so lovingly- back to earth, as it was time for him to get to work again. The angels told him: “You know, when you go to earth, you will be accompanied by assistants”. He would be protected after he returned. The “Big Light” told him: “To make a good life is your own responsibility.”
I've included this case in a Dutch book about reincarnation research.
A more recent Dutch case is that of Mrs. H. van Sleeuwen. She claims that as a girl of about 7 she would have told her mother that she recalled how she dwelled in another world before she was born into this one. She was shown a young woman of about eighteen with a brown coat with large bottons, glasses and long hair. Something of a guide repeatedly asked Mrs. van Sleeuwen if she really wanted to go to this woman (presumably to be born with her).
Her mother would have told her (
afterwards!)that this was what she usually looked like before she got pregnant. Her mother would have been surprised by the description and thought that her daughter could not have known what she used to look like. Unfortunately, when I discovered the case, the mother had died several years before so that she could not confirm this story herself. By the way, there are no conscious memories of a previous life in this case.
In another case in the Netherlands I studied first hand, that of Christina (pseudonym), the girl in question told her mum (at age 3) that she had died in a fire. After she died she would have met a "woman dressed in white" who showed her several possible future parents. She chose a young lady with blond hair who was working as a typist. The woman or "angel" told her that in that case she would have to wait for some time before she could be reborn.
I managed to find a historical fire in Arnhem of 1973 which matched most of Christina's statements. Christina's mother told me that in the period in question she had indeed dyed her hair blond and had a job as a typist. Christina could not have known this when she told her mother about the dream, as she did not dye her hair anymore and worked as a housewife.
The strongest feature of this case is that the mother in question thought that her daughter's referred to a fire which took place in the sixties, when she herself would have been a young teenager. So in this scenario was no link between her age at the time of the fire and Christina's supposed vision of her in the afterlife. Christina would have seen her years after the fire. However, I found out that there was no fire with the features described by Christina in the sixties, and that the only fire which seemed to apply took place in 1973, which was a year in which her mother had dyed her hair and worked at the office of a wood company as a typist. This feature is important in two respects. Firstly, it lessens the probability that the story was really made up by Christina's mother (although there are also other reasons to think that she did not I won't mention here) and secondly, it suggests that Christina may really have seen her mother to be shortly or even immediately after the fire.
In his books, Ian Stevenson has included even stronger cases such as that of Veer Singh (in
Ten Cases in India ) in which some of his statements about his activities during his spiritual pre-existence were independently corroborated by members of the previous family. Maybe the best example is that Veer Singh claimed to have spiritually accompanied members of that family whenever they went out. This corresponded to a dream of his claimed previous mother in which her son told her that he had accompanied a brother when the latter went out. These are not the only cases suggestive of real, more or less verifiable prebirth memories.
If we accept the evidence for reincarnation as valid and sound enough, there is no special reason to be particularly skeptical about possible memories of an intermission period.
Best wishes,
Titus
That is of course ridiculous. We are just animals, and we are very similar to other mammals, so how could it possibly be justified that only human beings have souls? 
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