453—Reincarnation: New Methods of Collecting Evidence—From Children’s Memories of Past Lives to Interior Science Traditions: The Masters and their Healing Stories of Reincarnation
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(This piece is a lightly edited transcript of a live talk [June 15, 2025] given by Dr. Marc Gafni on the weekly broadcast One Mountain, Many Paths, founded by Gafni and his evolutionary partner Barbara Marx Hubbard. Thus, the style of the piece is spoken word and not a formal essay. Edited by Elena Maslova-Levin).
Artificial intelligence is an existential risk to our humanity
This week we are going to continue our journey into gilgul — this sense of the circle, of it coming around again, the reincarnation. We are looking at reincarnation from the perspective of becoming Homo amor in response to the meta-crisis.
We began this conversation when I first started the Center with my dear friend Ken Wilber in 2009. In 2011, after two years of intensive engagement, I came to this just very heartbreaking realization that just like we had faced, at the dawn of humanity, the realization of death of the human being — the first shock of existence, we were now facing the second shock — not the death of the human being, but the potential death of humanity.
The potential death of humanity had two dimensions to it. One is the actual physical extinction, risk to our physical existence, and the second dimension is risk to our existence in the existential sense—to our very human-ness—the death of not humanity, but of our humanity.
They are deeply entwined.
The second risk, the death of our humanity, is deeply related to reality becoming immersed inside of a planetary stack of digital structures, in which all human beings will become embedded, and there will be constant nudges, and prompts, and directional signals fed into us from the digital environment, which will be personalized and micro-targeted, in order to form our opinions, shape our direction without us even realizing it’s happening. As Alex Pentland, the head of the MIT Media Lab, said proudly: shape our desire. We will live inside an immersive digital environment; we might well call it a Skinner’s box. A box of the kind designed by B.F. Skinner, the social behaviorist engineer who reigned at Harvard for six decades. He built a Skinner’s box — he called it an operant conditioning chamber — in order to train rats and pigeons, to invisibly control them through schedules of variable reinforcement, that is, by putting rewards there at undetermined times, so that the pigeons and rats would always be acting in order to get those rewards.
Skinner envisioned the capacity to control humanity — human beings becoming the rats and the pigeons in a global Skinner’s box — not because he was evil in his intention. Skinner was a materialist. He thought the world was only made of things — only material. That the things had no ultimate purpose, that there was no ultimate value. But he naturally loved humanity, and he thought humanity would destroy itself. He was one of the earlier portenders of existential risk. He said the only way we can save humanity is to control this exploding population of human beings through turning the world into a Skinner’s box.
That’s the death of our humanity.
And then came the artificial intelligence explosion. The first wave of AI is Alex Pentland at the MIT Media Lab, using social media to create the first version of a Skinner’s box. The second wave of AI is the emergence of personalized artificial intelligence, chatbots, hijacking the conversational cosmos. Just like the first wave of AI hijacked attention, which is the first quality of our humanity, the second wave of AI — ChatGPT-4, Claude, Grok, Perplexity, all of the various chat bots — hijacked conversation. It’s just beginning to feel as though you’re having a personal conversation, when in fact you’re having nothing of the kind. The second quality of our humanity—intimate communion through conversation—is now hijacked. We head towards a world in which all children are socialized by artificial intelligence — personalized artificial intelligence that knows the child better than anyone, having constant conversation. An AI tutoring system which knows the children better than anyone and displaces education. My beautiful friend and colleague, Zak Stein, and I have called that the Personhood Conferral Problem, which challenges our very humanity.
The response to that, the response to the potential death of the humanity, or the death of our humanity, has to be a rebirth of humanity, or an evolution of humanity. We need to reclaim—or perhaps in some ways, claim for the first time—the deepest possible understanding of what it means to be human.
The emergence of the New Human in response to existential risk,
the new existence in response to the risk to existence,
the new existential sense of what it means to be a human being —
is what we call the fulfillment of Homo sapiens as Homo amor.
That’s where we are. That’s our intention. We are inside.
The identity of Homo amor extends beyond one lifetime
The very nature of our humanity is now challenged in an essential way. We need to step in, and we need to gather the deepest validated insights across all vectors of wisdom — from every period of history, from the traditional period, the pre-modern period, from the modern period, from the post-modern period. We need to weave them together into a new tapestry, a new set of wholes. All of these different parts, these different ideas themselves, are alive. Ideas are alive. Our love is alive. Ideas express Reality. The ideas come together and they form a new whole, a new intimacy — this new Story of Value.
We are now adding a dimension that we haven’t focused on so far.
To become Homo amor, to become the New Human, to become the New Humanity, I need to ask:
Who am I?
Where am I?
And what ought I do?
Those are the three great questions of CosmoErotic Humanism.
The response needs to expand and extend beyond one lifetime. We tend to myopically locate ourselves in one lifetime, and we ignore anything beyond.
Now, there is a way to get lost in an occult (or a superficial New Age) obsession with other lives and other galaxies. You have to be careful. Our primary focus is the fullness of this moment, and the moral, ethical, erotic imperative of this moment — the imperative of ErosValue, which demands our response, and demands our joy, and demands our engagement, and demands that we — as Homo amor, as the New Human, as God’s hands, as God’s dangling modifiers, as God’s sentences, as God’s verbs — participate together in the evolution of love. We literally become the New human. We become the New Humanity.
Nonetheless, at the same time—even though our full focus is right here—it’s also in the future of humanity. We are receiving the best validated wisdom from the past, integrating it into the depth of this present moment, and hearing the call of the future, and standing for the future. And we are standing for the trillions of unborn lives.
At the same time, we need to widen our perspective, and we need to drop more deeply into what William James called our wider self. That’s our conversation around reincarnation. That’s what we are talking about.
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Continuity of Unique Self
Reincarnation is the realization
that it’s not over when it’s over,
that there is a thread, a thread of essence;
there’s a plotline—and this is a big deal—that moves from lifetime to lifetime.
That’s the core of reincarnation:
There is a plotline that moves from lifetime to lifetime, and we need to understand and feel into that plotline.
That’s what we’re going to be talking about. Today, I want to feel into the sense of a plotline.
In part two, we looked at a couple of cases from Ian Stevenson, from his 1960 article, from the beginning of his career, when he began documenting stories of children who remember their last lifetime with great clarity. That is an insanely important piece of evidence. He collected many thousands of cases. There were two to three thousands that he documented clearly, in which we actually see that when the body dies, there is something essential, which is deeper than the body —
the unique will,
the unique quality of intimacy,
the unique storyline,
the unique set of challenges and invitations,
the unique transformations that need to happen,
the unique weaknesses,
the unique pathologies,
the unique wounds
— all of those are actually transmitted into the next lifetime.
That’s a very major realization that lived in many of the great traditions — although not all of them, but in many of the great masters. It’s very strong in the Solomon lineage. It’s central to the life vision, let’s say, of Isaac Luria, who is the major figure of Renaissance Kabbalah that defines the Renaissance. It’s this very deep realization of this continuity of Unique Self, this continuity of unique will, this continuity of unique wounding that actually takes place — so much so that it applies even to physical wounding. There is a story of a child who dies through a wound, right above the right side of the chest, and the new child is born with a huge birthmark in precisely that place. This new child remembers the name and an enormous amount of detail that they couldn’t possibly know about that child who’s died nine, or ten, or eleven months before the new child’s born. The new child remembers, and identifies themselves with, this previous child.
This has happened before in history, but the stories were anecdotal. You couldn’t verify them.
And again, what are we interested in here?
We’re adding a realization of the continuity of consciousness to the experience of Homo amor.
I think I’ve noted before a passage from Jung (the great psychoanalyst of the 20th century), where Jung basically says that in all of his patients over 35, the root issue of their neurosis, of their depression, of their anxiety, of their mental breakdown, of their impotence is always an incapacity to understand how their lives could possibly have meaning in the face of impending death. Jung says that without a sense of my own immortality of the soul — or what we would call continuity of consciousness — I cannot solve any mental breakdown. That’s shocking. Can’t be solved. Can’t be done. That’s correct.
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Memory of the future goes beyond one lifetime
One of the things we’ve talked about a lot together is that we try and do psychology by reorganizing the memories of our early childhood.
We go back to our early childhood, and we reorganize those memories. It’s quite important that I’m able to go back into the trauma, and heal some of the trauma by, let’s say, accessing my inner child, and having a conversation with my inner child, or finding my inner child at a moment where my inner child was abandoned, and being the powerful adult, and picking up my inner child and embracing my inner child. That’s enormously important. But it’s insufficient. It can’t get you home. I can’t recover myself and live a life of joy, of fullness, of fulfilling the actual purpose of my existence unless I am able to access, and deepen into, and be moved by not just a reorganized or re-lived set of old traumatic memories. You can’t heal just through the past. Nor can you heal by being in the depth of the present — meaning, I’m going to do the profound meditation which takes me into the bliss of eternity, and therefore, the trauma work, for example, is no longer necessary. That’s also a huge mistake.
The first is the dogma of classical modern psychology. It’s a false dogma. It’s true but partial (and therefore, false, because it claims absolute). It claims you can heal everything by doing attachment work. It can’t be done. That’s critical, but insufficient.
But I also can’t heal everything by being in the depth of the present and the eternity of it all, in which all memories fall away. That’s also necessary—to have this wider sense of my True Self, which is my field of awareness and allurements. That’s critical.
In the present, I’m in the fullness of my consciousness. But my consciousness also reaches to the future. And that breaks out in my Unique Self, because uniqueness, as we said last week, is the organ of perception of the future. I’ve got to access my memories of the future. My memories of the future are not only the future calling of my Unique Self—for me to give my unique gift in my unique circle of intimacy and influence.
It’s not just about me living my unique life in the future.
It’s not just about me giving my unique gift.
It’s not even just about me writing my unique poem and singing my unique song.
My memory of the future goes beyond the boundary of this lifetime.
There’s a larger trajectory to my soul, a larger trajectory to the vector of my irreducible uniqueness. My irreducible uniqueness is on a magical mystery tour from the past, through the present, and into the future.
I am called by the future.
It’s not true that if I die in time, existential risk is not going to affect me. No — I am going to reincarnate right into the next vortex. I am called by the future. And so, I begin to need to feel myself, to experience myself — in a very direct way, not in an abstract way — across generations. I’m covenanted with all the past, and all the presents, and all the future. We called it last week a covenant between generations. The realization of reincarnation means that I’m covenanted into the future. I’m called by my future. In this moment, in this lifetime, as Homo amor —
I am both madly in love with life.
I am madly in love with divinity as She appears in me, and divinity as She appears in She, and in thee, and in we.
And I am madly committed to gift into my unique circle of intimacy and influence.
And I’m called by the mad, wild, alive, wondrous call of the future that calls me to my emergence.
In the present, I am writing the script of the play of my future—both within this lifetime and in the next lifetime.
That’s our context. That’s a big context. I know that I’m spending quite a bit of time on context, but context matters. Otherwise, we’re just chatting. The context matters. We are filling in and expanding what it means to be Homo amor.
I’m going to read you a couple more cases from Stevenson, and then I’m going to go to a couple of the Solomon lineage masters so we can begin to hear how they talk about reincarnation. That’s week three, and then we’re going to go deeper next week.
The case of Shanti Devi
This is from Stevenson’s article.
Shanti Devi is born in 1926, and at the age of three she begins to recall and state details of her former life in the town of Mathura, which is about 80 miles away from where she is born. She says that her former name had been Lugdi, that she was originally born in 1902, and she was a Chaube by caste. She had married a cloth merchant named Kedar Nath Chaube, and she had given birth to a son. She gave birth to a son, and she died ten days later.
Shanti Devi is making these statements from about age three till about age nine. And finally, her family essentially can’t take it anymore. They write to the town that she’s describing—the town of Mathura, this town 80 miles away. They ask, “Did such a story ever really exist?” And in the rural countryside of India, of course, 80 miles away is a world away. And indeed, they find that this exact person, Kedar, exists. This person, Kedar, this cloth merchant, answers the letter, and he confirms everything that she says in her statements. Then he sends some relatives to the girl’s home, unannounced. She doesn’t know that anyone is coming. Two people come that are sent by Kedar, who are figures in her last life—and she immediately identifies both of these people that she’s never seen before.
They establish that the girl had never left Delhi — that’s where she was living now in this lifetime as Shanti Devi. India gets in an uproar over this, and they appoint a committee to do a deep investigation. They actually arrange a trip of Shanti Devi to Mathura, to the town in which she thought that she had lived in the previous life. And at Mathura, she immediately recognizes another relative of Kedar’s, who is in a huge crowd. She is then put in a carriage, and then the driver of the carriage is instructed to follow her directions. She gives them precise directions to the district and to the house of Kedar Nath Chaube, who she remembers as her husband in this previous lifetime. She recognizes the house, even though it’s been repainted in a different color.
Then, around the house, this old Brahmin appears, and she identifies this old Indian man, this Brahmin, as Kedar Nath Chaube’s father. She says, “Oh, that’s the father of my husband from the last lifetime.” Then when she enters the house that she ostensibly lived in during the previous lifetime. She answers correctly a whole series of questions that are put to her regarding the arrangement of the rooms and the closets. She has detailed memories of the arrangement of rooms and closets. Then she goes to the house of the people that she says she remembers to have been her own parents in a previous lifetime. She’s able to pick those parents out of a crowd of more than fifty people and to call each of them by name. Then Shanti Devi says that she had hidden some money in another house, which was the house of one of her husband’s relatives.
They get to that relative’s house. She points to a corner of one of the rooms where she says she had buried the money. They dig a hole. Witnesses come. But it’s empty. There’s no money there. Shanti Devi says, “No. I am a thousand billion percent sure that in this previous lifetime that I had left money there.” And then, listen to this. Eventually, Kedar Nath Chaube says that he had found the money and removed it after his wife’s death.
Shanti Devi used the same idioms of speech that were familiar in Mathura. She’s raised in Delhi—with, in essence, a Mathura dialect. There are about twenty four statements of her memories, which contain verified precise facts that were impossible for her to have known. And there is not even one instance, not even one, of an incorrect statement made by her.
It’s really a big deal to get this. These cases take place all around the world. They are not just Indian cases. They take place every place, everywhere, in different ways, around the world.
Continuity of personal plotlines
I’m going to read you just one more.
It’s a big deal just to get the depth of this.
Let’s go to Belgium now.
A six-year-old Belgian boy, Robert, insists that a portrait of his Uncle Albert, who has been killed in the First World War in 1915, is a portrait of him.
Of course, his parents think he’s crazy. Why does he think a portrait of Uncle Albert is a portrait of him? But he does.
Now, the boy is especially devoted to his paternal grandmother, and the rest of the grandchildren ignore her. And she is, of course, Albert’s mother. When he is with her, he is happy and healthy. And when he is with his own parents, he is sullen, disobedient, anxious. He is not happy anyplace else.
Albert, the boy’s uncle, had been the favorite of that grandmother — not Robert’s father. So, he is completely close with the paternal grandmother — and this grandmother loved Uncle Albert and ignored Robert’s dad.
Now, when Robert is three, he sees a swimming pool, he runs along the diving board, and he dives in. His Uncle Albert had been this great diver. This kid, little Robert, at three, sees a swimming pool, runs to the swimming pool, goes to the diving board, and dives in insanely — but his Uncle Albert had been a great diver.
Then a visitor points one of those early movie cameras at Robert and turns the handle with a clicking noise, and then Robert cries out and says, “Don’t! They killed me that way last time.” When he hears the clicking sound, he remembers his death, and Albert had been killed by machine gunfire while trying to destroy a German emplacement in World War II. His grandmother reports that Robert used to call her with nicknames that no one knew except for Albert, and that Robert knew her likes and dislikes that she had only shared with Albert.
Imagine, my friends, just imagine for a second that we have about just approximately 3,000 cases that have this kind of level of depth and detail. Does everyone get why that’s significant?
If you’re a rational human being today, we have a new reservoir of information that has opened up in this time of meta-crisis. That’s not an accident. That’s the nature of the Intimate Universe. As the universe careens towards the potential death of our humanity or the death of humanity itself, a new well of information opens up, the capacity to gather new forms of information and to validate those forms of information, to move from anecdotal stories to documenting the actual and utter reality of life beyond death, and of a continuity, a thread. That’s what’s important — not just life beyond death, but a continuity of the personal thread, of the personal plotline, of an individual life.
That’s unimaginably significant.
There are promises to be kept
Now I’m going to read you a different kind of story. I’m intentionally going to read this from the mystical literature, and I’m going to read it not in my language, but in the way that it’s recorded in what I would call the naive texts of the mystical literature.
This is a story that comes from the court of the Baal Shem Tov. The Baal Shem Tov is a major mystical master who founded the Hasidic movement in the Carpathian Mountains of Romania. He is one of the great lineage holders in the Solomon Lineage. I want to read you this text. It’s a little bit of a shocking text from the Baal Shem Tov. And the text reads as follows.
People seeking an audience with the great master usually came asking for guidance in their service, in their devotion, in their great practice of spirit. But this particular visitor who came to the Baal Shem Tov lost no time, came to the master and said, “Hey, I have no special needs. I have no particular problems. I have nothing that needs any attention. The truth is, the only real reason I am here is because a lucrative business deal brought me to a nearby town. Since it was so close, and I’ve heard so many wild stories about you, I was curious. I thought I’d come see you and hear what everybody was talking about.”
The Baal Shem Tov, the master, says to this businessman, “If you feel there is nothing I can help you with, then perhaps you could stay a while, and I could tell you a story.” He says, “Okay.” The Baal Shem Tov begins to tell this businessman a story.
Once, there were two childhood friends who were inseparable as they grew up together. However, when they became adults, their ways parted. One became wealthy and the other was very poor. In order to save his family from hunger, the poorer man sought out his childhood friend and asked him for help. The wealthy man said, ‘Of course, I’ll help you. When we were children, we promised each other we would remain friends forever, and we would share in everything we have. And you’re now in trouble, so I’m going to give you now half of my wealth.’
And so the person for whom the wheel of fortune had spun around and gone up gives his friend, for whom the wheel of fortune had gone down, half of his wealth.
And as often happens, the wheel turned again. The wheels of fortune reversed, and the one who had been wealthy was now very poor. The friend to whom he had earlier given half of his fortune had now become very wealthy. But what happens? He goes to his friend, who he had helped just a few years ago, and his friend, who is now wealthy, refuses to part with any of his fortune and turns him away.
That’s the second turning of the wheel.
And then there is a third turning of the wheel. The poor man became rich again, and the rich man again became poor. They each returned to their original situation. And again, the one who had now become poor, who had refused his friend, nonetheless goes to his friend and says, ‘Oh my God, I’m so sorry. Please forgive me. I’m so sorry I didn’t give you anything when you were down, but now I’m down. Would you help me?’ His friend agrees. He says, ‘Wow, yes, I’ll help you. I’ll help you. For sure. I’ll give you half. You’re forgiven.’
And then again, there is the passing of time, and there is a fourth turning of the wheel. But again, when the good man, who is now poor, goes to his friend, who’s now wealthy, his friend again refuses to honor the note that they had signed, and he finds himself homeless and penniless.
Years pass, the two men die. They come before the heavenly court to account for their lives, and, of course, the mean-spirited violation of all the oaths and all the promises of the man who refused to help his friend when he was down in those reversals of fortune witnessed against him. And so his friend was sent into the bliss of eternal paradise, and he is sent to a much more painful process of understanding.
But the friend who has been promised eternity says, ‘Stop. Even though he has betrayed me twice, I still can’t bear to see my friend suffer on my account. I won’t allow it.’
And the heavenly court was in an uproar. This was unusual. What were they going to do? They decided that the only way to solve the story was to have both men return to earth, and that the man who was locked in his ego, who had violated and betrayed, would have one last chance to become at one — to atone.
And so they both returned to earth, and the egoic man reincarnates as a wealthy merchant. And the good man, who wanted to help his friend in the heavenly tribunal, in the heavenly court, he agrees to reincarnate as a common street beggar. It came to pass one day that this righteous beggar, this good man, knocks on the door of the rich man begging for food. He hadn’t eaten for a very long time, and he was literally on the verge of starvation. But he was rudely and callously sent away, and died.
And at this point in the Baal Shem Tov story, the rich man has tears streaming down his face and he can barely speak. And he says, ‘Oh my God. Oh my God. Yesterday, I turned a beggar away from my door, and later I heard that a beggar was found dead in the street. Was he the beggar in your story?’
Of course, no answer was necessary, for it was clear. And the Baal Shem Tov says to this wealthy merchant that his former friend, the beggar, had a widow and children, and that if he would go to them and give three-quarters of his fortune to that family, he could perhaps become whole once again.
Do you understand, my friends?
Neither of them remembered the previous incarnation. But when we begin to realize that we haven’t just gone around once, we’ve gone around before, we’ve been here before, we become intimate. Every encounter is an encounter with someone that we have probably met before.
There are unpaid debts.
There are unfulfilled possibilities.
There are promises to be kept.
There are loves to be kindled and rekindled.
There are betrayals to be healed.
There are births to be birthed that were never birthed before.
That’s the story of our lives.
The duration of time
To become Homo amor is to become intimate with the entire fabric of the Intimate Universe and to become intimate with Reality is to actually break the myopic view of this local time and to step into what Bergson called the duration of time.
Time is a duration.
Time is a vast, expansive experience, which is not measurable, which is not merely clock time.
When I enter into time, at every moment in time, everything related to that quality of that moment in time is present.
When I encounter you and we find ourselves familiar, and we all of a sudden begin to move towards each other, and we begin to create together, or we feel friction, or we feel creative calling, it’s because we’ve done this before, and there are places to go together.
We were on a magical mystery tour together, and it was not completed —
and there are promises to be kept,
and there are potentials to be birthed,
and there are joys to be lived,
and there are celebrations to be celebrated,
and there are sometimes tears to be cried,
and there are healings and wholeness to be done.
That’s what it means to be Homo amor.
Homo amor knows that love and intimacy leak forwards and backwards in time. Homo amor steps underneath clock time, underneath chronos time, and enters into kairos time in which all past and present and future are actually available in every intimate encounter.
And even if I don’t know it—nor should I know it in my analytic mind—the lure of feeling, the lure, the invitation of that deepest, profound, unique allurement is what becomes the voice that I follow. That’s the experience of the clarified heart’s desire of Homo amor.
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