This week James Matlock is my guest. He is an expert on reincarnation and children that remember past lives.
I Saw a Light and Came Here: Children’s Experiences of Reincarnation, co-authored with Erlendur Haraldsson, is available from Amazon.com. The first two thirds of the book is by Erlendur. He describes cases of children who remember previous lives, mostly in Sri Lanka and Lebanon, and other survival phenomena, such as apparitions and mediumship, that he has investigated over the years. In the last third of the book, James brings in cross-cultural data, new cases and analysis, and thoughts on the meaning of it all.
James has worked at the American Society for Psychical Research in New York City and at the Rhine Research Center in Durham, North Carolina. He is presently a Research Fellow at the Parapsychology Foundation. His chief research interests are the history of parapsychology, anthropology of religion, and reincarnation. He teaches a 15-week online seminar course on reincarnation research and theory.
I Saw A Light And Came Here is the result of decades of scholarly research and investigations into past-life memories, primarily of children. Erlendur Haraldsson, a psychologist, has over two decades of experience behind him, having investigated some one hundred cases in the field. He worked closely with Ian Stevenson, M.D., of the University of Virginia, who began systematic studies of “cases of the reincarnation type,” but soon broke new ground with psychological studies of children who insist they remember episodes from past lives.
Haraldsson invited anthropologist James Matlock to join him because of his thorough familiarity with research around the globe. This book deals with various aspects of past-life memory and attempts to answer the questions that will inevitably come up in the minds of thoughtful readers.