How Spiritualism Invaded the Sciences

Peering behind the veil between the seen and the unseen in this Great Controversy between God and His opponent---one can see lucifer laying the groundwork. From a woman speaking German while hypnotized to the dreams of a mother in Burma to a sickly wife and another's wife with premonitions---then ending in a Burmese LGBT Lifestyle Choice--step by step the building blocks were laid to open the door to SPIRITUALISM in Academic Circles today---known as Parapsychology.....For the living know that they shall die: but the dead know not any thing, neither have they any more a reward; for the memory of them is forgotten. Ecclesiastes 9:5

"Once ensconced at UVA, Stevenson began breaking the academic mold by publishing serious articles on parapsychology. His work

won a devoted fan and patron in Chester F. Carlson, the inventor of xerography, the photocopying technique perfected by the Xerox corporation. Carlson was convinced his wife, Dorris, had some psychic abilities, including premonitions and out-of-body experiences, and the inventor and entrepreneur donated to the University of Virginia to support Stevenson’s work, starting with a tape recorder. Carlson’s gifts grew, leading to the creation in 1964 of an endowed chair at the university. Stevenson later recalled what he thought when Carlson died: “The bottom has dropped out of this. I’ll have to go back to ordinary research.” But it turned out Carlson had bequeathed $1 million for Stevenson’s work.

With the endowment, Professor Ian Stevenson founded a new research division that conducted methodical experiments on campus, its work earning coverage in august publications such as the hundred-year-old The Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease. Stevenson stood up defiantly to detractors, writing: “Those who forget that science is fundamentally a method and not a collection of facts will righteously challenge new concepts which seem to question old facts.” He boldly proclaimed that the “data of parapsychology portend… a conceptual revolution which will make the Copernican revolution seem trivial in comparison.”

In such uncharted territory, he gave chances to people from a diverse range of backgrounds who wanted to join the team, including those from outside science. One was Champe Ransom, a young lawyer who became fascinated with parapsychology and jumped at the chance to leave the Alaska state legislature, where he served as counsel, to join Stevenson’s radical department in Virginia in 1970.

 In one systematic experiment, individuals were sequestered in rooms to look at emotion-inducing photographs clipped from magazines. In another room, individuals who claimed psychic abilities sat. The psychics, attempting to pick up signals from the other room, would record their observations, and Stevenson’s team would compare data. Results of such experiments were sometimes more promising than expected.

Octavia suffered from a severe case of diabetes, and a period of stability precipitated a downturn. Their only child had been stillborn, a trauma embedded in his memory. Stevenson would never have any children, a fact he always lamented. As he watched the person closest to him decline, he became even more obsessed with discovering whether a human soul could survive beyond the body. Even many hardline skeptics were impressed by the approach he took. “He’s an incredible methodologist, hard to fault,” Dr. Albert Stunkard of the University of Pennsylvania medical school commented to the New York Times. 

 On one of his swings through Southeast Asia in the fall of 1972, he got a message from U Win Maung, a trusted colleague. U Win tipped him off about a case of purported reincarnation he heard about from a town elder in Burma that Stevenson ought to check out for himself. From the time he laid eyes on Ma Tin, now 19, he was intrigued by how she presented herself, stoic and tough, and “overtly masculine.” In the only known published photo of her, she stands between a male and female sibling. She carries and presents herself in a way similar to her brother, which felt natural for her. 

He cataloged Ma Tin’s “memories” from what she claimed was her

former life and compared them with what he could discover from local experts about the Japanese occupation in World War Two. By speaking to family and friends of Ma Tin, he charted her earliest comments about Japan and the soldier from the time she was a child. Stevenson also conducted a Goodenough–Harris Draw-a-Person Test. The diagnostic tool was often used to measure intelligence in children, but Stevenson wanted to see what happened when, in the extended version of the test, she was given freedom to draw herself. She sketched two masculine figures. To a believer, this suggested her feeling of existing as two people, and supported her feelings that she was as much a man now as in her past life. Ma Tin wasn’t the only person in Burma in the 1970s who had professed to be reincarnated from Japanese soldiers. One such individual, only a child, was caught by villagers and burned alive.

 By the end of his visit, Ma Tin could breathe a sigh of relief. The expert may not have been able to prove her claims, but neither had he disproved them. 

Throughout the country, reincarnation wielded an unpredictable power that stretched from common villages to elite palaces. Its power was even felt in the upper echelons of the criminal world. Khun Sa, the drug lord, had not always been Khun Sa. A few years earlier when he was thrown into a high security prison, he was Chan Shee Fu. In prison, Fu, one of the country’s most prolific opium dealers before his arrest, pored over a smuggled copy of Romance of the Three Kingdoms, a massive 14th century Chinese novel interwoven with supernatural elements. Emboldened by that heroic story, he embraced an ambitious new narrative for his life: his opium trafficking was a means to revolution. And inspired by his discoveries about reincarnation while in prison, he announced a spiritual rebirth. He was now Khun Sa. His followers kidnapped two Russian doctors and successfully bartered for his release.

Stevenson, meanwhile, explored the anecdotes he had gathered that Ma Tin had spoken an unusual language as a child. He could refer to a case back in Virginia of a woman who spoke German — a language she didn’t know — when hypnotized, leading to intense speculation about whether she could have carried over the language from another life. But Ma Tin’s early language was another inconclusive lead in Stevenson’s search for undeniable proof. Ma Tin’s relatives did not know if the strange words she spoke in her youth had been Japanese, and the informant herself couldn’t recall them.

For Stevenson, the way to respect this young woman the most was to take her claims seriously. He urged her to give him a name. If Ma

Tin could tell him the name of the Japanese soldier from whom she claimed to be reincarnated, Stevenson could scour the world for records to verify his death and its circumstances. Stevenson often combed through such records, bribing bureaucrats when necessary by handing out sought-after American-made shirts. Ma Tin also could almost make out the plane that mowed down the soldier, but couldn’t tell if the plane was British or American. If Ma Tin managed to visualize its markings, Stevenson would be armed with more data to compare with the historical record.

What turned out to be surprisingly more specific was a series of dreams. These dreams belonged to Ma Tin’s mother, Daw Aye Tin. She experienced them 23 years earlier when she was pregnant with Ma Tin. Once a week, the expectant mother had a recurring dream about a Japanese soldier. The stocky Japanese man was shirtless, with short pants, and reminded her of an army cook that she’d met during Japan’s occupation of the region. In the dreams, the soldier said he would stay with them, but she ran from him. Stevenson previously had traced a belief existing in Eastern cultures that reincarnation was prefigured by “dreams in which a deceased person appears to the dreamer and announces his intention to be reborn as a child of the dreamer’s family.”

Into his old age, Stevenson continued following clues to paranormal experiences around the world in hundreds of cases, many of which centered around claims of rebirth, and applied the most rigorous scientific methods to supernatural questions in history, leading the San Francisco Chronicle to label him “a scholarly reincarnation detective.” When he passed away at age 88, Stevenson left behind a combination lock in one of his filing cabinets in Charlottesville, so that if he was reincarnated only he could open it. The still-locked cabinet, if ever opened, may well contain secrets of Ma Tin’s case and others never before revealed.

 In 1981, U Win Maung, Stevenson’s associate, returned to the village for a follow-up interview and reported back to his ivy-cloistered friend in Virginia. The news: Ma Tin Aung Myo was gone. Whether Stevenson’s investigation hastened the departure, or local developments such as the stranglehold of the “reborn” Khun Sa pushed Ma Tin away, their former informant had relocated. 

 

Reports indicated that Ma Tin — quite likely using the fully masculine name Maung Tin by this point — had short hair, wore men’s shirts, and that he — now gendered in the way she sought — lived with a girlfriend." 

 TrulyAdventurous/NickRipatrazone