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?
World War II pilot shot down over the Pacific?
Or a boy in Oklahoma recall being a Hollywood extra?
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For the last twenty years, Jim Tucker has traveled the country meeting families, hearing stories like these, and trying to determine if the children’s memories are valid. Continuing a fifty year research project at the University of Virginia involving children from all over the world, he decided to focus on cases in the United States, where parents would not expect their children to say such things.
A first-person account of his experiences with a number of extraordinary children, Return to Life follows Dr. Tucker on his investigations. Readers see him taking a young boy and his mother to a remote island the boy has talked about repeatedly, working to identify a man in a photograph whom a little boy says he used to be, and meeting a young golfing prodigy who has said he was the famous golfer, Bobby Jones. One little girl talks about a great fire; another recalls walking along a dusty road before being kidnapped by two men in a car. By the end of Return to Life, readers will conclude that Dr. Tucker has amassed persuasive evidence that some children do possess actual memories of previous lives. He then puts the cases in the context of current scientific understandings and concludes with his vision about what the cases say about the question of life after death for all of us. “In Return to Life, Jim Tucker painstakingly and meticulously documents the recycling of memories from beyond the barrier of physical death. He then rigorously offers a scientific theory to explain how our consciousness transcends space/time and is, hence, eternal. This book is an important milestone of an emerging scientific paradigm that suggests that consciousness conceives governs constructs and becomes the universe or perhaps multiple universes.” —DEEPAK CHOPRA, Co-Author of Super Brain
"Jim Tucker is a worthy successor to Dr. Ian Stevenson. He approaches these fascinating cases of children who appear to remember previous lives with an intelligent curiosity, sober judgment, and a real knack for telling a story, which is a good thing, because these are great stories." —TOM SHRODER, Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist and author of Old Souls: Compelling Evidence from Children Who Remember Past Lives "These incredible cases are not simply solid grounds for accepting some form of reincarnation into our Western worldview. These are heart-rending, poignant reminders that many of us do not quite ‘fit’ into the cultural and religious worlds into which we are born. Obviously, we are more than these worlds. Way, way more." —JEFFREY J. KRIPAL, author of Authors of the Impossible: The Sacred and the Paranormal “With Return to Life, Dr. Jim B. Tucker has driven a very large nail in the coffin of materialism. This is an important contribution to the growing body of evidence that consciousness survives the death of the brain and body. The fear of death and annihilation has caused more suffering in human history than all the physical diseases combined. This book is a powerful antidote to that dread.” —LARRY DOSSEY, MD, Author of One Mind: How Our Individual Mind Is Part of a Great Consciousness and Why It Matters “Jim Tucker's latest book, Return to Life, comes as a resounding wake-up call regarding human existence. For decades, materialists have insisted that consciousness is nothing more than a function or emergent property of the brain. But the fact is that scientifically, the origins and nature of consciousness and its role in nature remain a mystery. The greatest obstacle to illuminating these issues through scientific discovery is not ignorance, but the illusion that we already have the answers. The empirical evidence that Dr. Tucker presents in this book challenges the reductionistic, metaphysical beliefs of scientific materialism. If his research methods are flawed, the scientific community should bring this to his and the public's attention. If they are irreproachable, then the empirical facts he reveals compel us to reassess even our most fundamental assumptions about consciousness, human nature, and the universe at large.” —B. ALAN WALLACE, Ph.D., President of the Santa Barbara Institute for Consciousness Studies |
A NEW YORK TIMES
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A case from Return to Life was featured on the NBC Nightly News. The segment, along with an excerpt from the book, is available here. |
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