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A conversation with Erlendur Haraldsson<\/a>: Professor Emeritus of Psychology, University of Iceland, Reykjavik.<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n Sitting round a table at the back of a dining hall with several others, Professor Erlendur Haraldsson is explaining his research into\u00a0 reincarnation and the world of the dead and dying.<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n At the hour of death, people who are about to die have visions, usually about someone whom they have known earlier and have died.<\/p>\n Professor Haraldsson is a psychologist and his theories seem to segue into the field of parapsychology.\u00a0 The appearance of someone at the hour of death acting as a guide into the world of the dying is an experience that is reported in various circumstances when someone is at the point of death.<\/em><\/p>\n As evidence of the his phenomenon, he tells of a cross-cultural study and evidence from American doctors and nurses in hospitals as well as in India:<\/em><\/p>\n We gathered a lot of cases in the United States from American doctors and nurses.\u00a0 Then we also wanted to do it in others countries with a different religion and a different culture. So it was also conducted in India.\u00a0 There we\u00a0 visited many university hospitals talked to a great number of offices and nurses\u00a0 who have witnessed many patients having visions of people who have passed away.<\/p>\n We collected a great number of these cases, I think over four hundred in each country and then we [with Karlis Osis<\/a>] wrote some papers on it\u00a0and at the end we wrote a book on it At the Hour of Death.\u00a0 This has been translated into several languages including Hindi, Tamil and Malayalam.<\/p>\n Why have you examined mostly children?<\/em><\/p>\n Children haven\u2019t seen much of the world; they haven\u2019t met very many people.\u00a0 Whereas grownups have read and seen and talked and so on.\u00a0 So what they may have thought is memories of past lives\u2026developed later in life.\u00a0 That might be mixed with different impressions they have heard about, read about, seen and so on.\u00a0 Whereas children, they have a much more limited scope of experiences.\u00a0 So with them you find that what they talk about is not mixed with impressions that grown up people have and that may come up after they are children.\u00a0 I made a study of children forgetting things as they grew older.\u00a0 Some of them forget completely; others may remember a bit vaguely.\u00a0 The general impression was that when they are grown up they may remember about 10% of what they talked about when they were children.<\/p>\n I have one paper about that.\u00a0 Not everyone has this ability when they are young.\u00a0 I think this is rather rare.\u00a0 I studied these cases in Sri Lanka.\u00a0 I started doing that because I was at the University of Virginia.\u00a0 There was a professor, Ian Stevenson<\/a>, and he had become interested about children who talk about past lives.\u00a0 First he learned about some cases in India that were widely publicised.\u00a0 He found them very strange.\u00a0 They would remember something from a past life.\u00a0 So he started to study them.<\/p>\n When he was doing that he learned that there were more cases and he gradually learned about more and more.\u00a0 But of course, India has a large population.\u00a0 And then, I happened to come to the University of Virginia where I met Ian Stevenson and he asked me if I would like to study some cases because he was the only one who had done that. He asked me if I would like to study some cases.\u00a0 I would find the same characteristics he had found in his studies.\u00a0 He was willing to come up with the funds for it.\u00a0 We decided to do that.\u00a0 Then we talked about which country we should look at.\u00a0 In some countries you find more, and in some countries fewer cases.<\/p>\n We decided on Sri Lanka.\u00a0 I was a bit familiar with Sri Lanka.\u00a0 I had been there and liked the country.<\/p>\n In the newspapers in Sri Lanka there were some reports of cases.\u00a0 So that was one source and you could be sure of finding at least something.\u00a0 I started by investigating these cases that had been published recently in the newspapers.<\/p>\n While I was doing that, I learned of new cases.\u00a0 In the end, after a few years I got 64 cases. Then I stopped.<\/p>\n I have here the main characteristics of the cases.\u00a0 Equally between girls and boys.\u00a0 The mean age when the child began to talk about the previous life was about two and a half years.\u00a0 Around that time they can talk properly.\u00a0 They tend to be quite talkative about this and talk a lot about it. They talk mostly about the same things.\u00a0 It\u2019s not that they remember everything from their past life, they remember some episodes and talk about them.\u00a0 We track down their account of the past life.\u00a0 It depends on statements.\u00a0 These statements were around 20 on average.\u00a0 I think for Sri Lanka it was 22.<\/p>\n The children speak frequently about how they died.\u00a0 Most of them have died violently.\u00a0 They have died in accidents, or they have been murdered.\u00a0 71% spoke of violent death.<\/p>\n When people die violently, they are thrown out of life.\u00a0 Not on purpose.\u00a0 They do not die naturally.\u00a0 So maybe they are keen to return.<\/p>\n Quite a number of the children who had died violently had phobias.\u00a0 These phobias are related to how they had died.\u00a0 If they have drowned, they may have fear of water and so on.<\/p>\n They often reject their family.\u00a0 They say, \u201cThis is not my family.\u00a0 I had another family.\u201d\u00a0 They speak about violent death.\u00a0 They have phobias related to that death.\u00a0 They have a specific psychological characteristic.\u00a0 They have post-traumatic stress disorders.\u00a0 They sometimes have birthmarks that are related to their memories<\/p>\n Some of them, they have some skills that are in line with their occupation in their previous life.\u00a0 There was one boy, and he said he had been searching for gems in Sri Lanka.\u00a0 They dig a pit, 2m by 2m and 3m deep and try to find gems.\u00a0 And then they put it on a bowl and sieve it to see\u2026they do it in a particular way and he knew how to do that.<\/p>\n They said, “That\u2019s exactly right.”<\/p>\n Some of the children are quite talkative about their past lives.\u00a0 They talk about their previous family, they reject their present family.\u00a0 Sometimes they have birthmarks that are related to their previous life and how they died.\u00a0 They had frequently died by accidents and there were scars that were related to that accident.\u00a0 In Sri Lanka, there were thirty-six accidents; nine had been killed in war; three had been murdered; one had committed suicide.\u00a0 In Lebanon, ten had died in war; three in accidents; seven were murdered; and one was suicide.<\/p>\n They had these phobias.\u00a0 They would fear certain places, certain situations, and animals.\u00a0 Then they had some psychological characteristics.\u00a0 I administered some tests to them.\u00a0 We used a questionnaire to interview the children about their behaviour.\u00a0 In Sri Lanka, these children are quite argumentative, they were a bit obsessed with some things \u2013 memories of their past lives.\u00a0 Also, they are bragging, boasting.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 They feel they have to be perfect.\u00a0 They are perfectionists.\u00a0 They dream frequently.\u00a0 They have outbursts of anger more than other children and they often refer to themselves in the third person.\u00a0 That\u2019s because they know about that previous person.<\/p>\n Many of the children are born near the place they died.\u00a0 The cases I studied in Sri Lanka and Lebanon, the previous person was always in that same country, usually in the same vicinity.\u00a0 One person was born in Lebanon and went to study in America.\u00a0 There he had some financial difficulties\u2026maybe he was just depressed and he committed suicide.\u00a0 There was a child who claimed to remember something of his life in Lebanon.<\/p>\n They have vivid memories of the events that lead to their death.\u00a0 They have phobias, they have fears and outbursts of anger and have more nightmares than other children.\u00a0 But the children in the present life have not been exposed to life-threatening situations so they shouldn\u2019t have these phobias or fears and so on.<\/p>\n I was open-minded concerning reincarnation and thought it was possible.\u00a0 I had read Stevenson\u2019s work and I was familiar with that.\u00a0 He published a number of papers in psychiatric journals and he wrote the books.\u00a0 So I was familiar with his work and I knew him myself.<\/p>\n There have been some fraud cases.\u00a0 \u00a0There have been some cultural influence between the child and parents.\u00a0 There is also the possibility that these children are fantasy prone.\u00a0 Can it be that these children are very psychic?\u00a0 For example could these children be able to somehow get an expression from someone who has died and incorporate that in their memories or do they remember what happened to them in the past?\u00a0 Then there is the possibility of over-shadowing.\u00a0 Could there be the possibility of some deceased person that they remember?\u00a0 Mixing the memories of the child and the memories of that deceased person.<\/p>\n Stevenson wrote about xenoglossy<\/a>.\u00a0 One case came through an Icelandic medium who I knew and worked with a long time ago.\u00a0 He had a man in one of his s\u00e9ances who lived in America.\u00a0 But he was a Dane and he had been brought up in Greenland and later became a professor of Eskimo languages at Boston University.\u00a0 During this s\u00e9ance there came a man through the medium and he spoke a language that nobody knew except that man from America.\u00a0 So they asked him what language he was speaking in. [laughs] He was speaking in Greenlandic.\u00a0 That was the best case I know of Xenoglossy.<\/p>\n There were some people present after the s\u00e9ance.\u00a0 Some of them I knew quite well.\u00a0 \u201cOh yes,\u201d they said. \u201cThat man spoke a language they couldn\u2019t understand.\u00a0 None of them understood it.\u00a0 A very interesting case.\u00a0 I gave a short review of it in a magazine.<\/p>\n I also found one case in Iceland.\u00a0 This man came from Reykjavik and he started to talk about life up in the country around the time when children started to talk about past lives.\u00a0 And he was always talking about life in the country.\u00a0 He was talking about a tractor accident.\u00a0 He didn\u2019t say that he had died but someone had died in a tractor accident. A half-brother had died in a tractor accident up in the country.<\/p>\n With my research, I was surprised at how many people felt they had been in contact with someone who had died.<\/p>\n I decided to do a survey in Iceland about this and not just asked them about whether or not they have had this experience but what was the nature of the experience?\u00a0 So we made this large survey about this and then we interviewed these people and asked them about the nature of their experience.\u00a0 They could be seeing someone; they could be finding a smell\u2026 an emanation; or hearing something.\u00a0 So it could be of different kinds.<\/p>\n The following are quotes from individuals:<\/p>\n I had the experience of the overshadowing of some great being which gave me intense joy.\u00a0 I felt like their came something over me.\u00a0 It was such a delight.\u00a0 It lasted a few minutes and then it went away.\u00a0 It was like it was another being \u2026 like a divine being or something.\u00a0 There was something also\u2026<\/em><\/p>\n At a young age I started to read the works of Buddhist \u2026 Milarepa and so on.\u00a0 I felt there was something familiar for me in this.<\/em><\/p>\n I interviewed children that Stevenson had studied quite a time ago and some of them remembered something.\u00a0 Some remembered a little bit.\u00a0 But my impression was that they remembered as grownups.\u00a0 Those who remembered at all, they remembered about 10% memories as children.<\/p>\n I became interested in this subject very early in my career as a psychologist and maybe there\u2019s a kind of over-shadowing that I experienced.\u00a0 Maybe I had been opened up a bit for it\u2026I\u2019m not sure.\u00a0 This experience I had was written about in William James\u2019 book\u2026<\/p>\n The cases I investigated:\u00a0 9 were Buddhist; 6 were Christian; 3 were Muslim; and 1 was Hindu.<\/p>\n There was one Muslim case that almost split the family.\u00a0 The father was so much against this because it didn\u2019t fit the religion that he almost lost his wife because the wife was closer to the child.<\/p>\n In Lebanon, all the cases were in the Druze community.\u00a0 They believe in reincarnation.\u00a0 But in Sri Lanka 90% were Buddhist but the bulk of the Sri Lankan population are Buddhist.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A conversation with Erlendur Haraldsson: Professor Emeritus of Psychology, University of Iceland, Reykjavik. Sitting round a table at the back of a dining hall with several others, Professor Erlendur Haraldsson is explaining his research into\u00a0 reincarnation and the world of the dead and dying. At the hour of death, people who are about to die […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":153,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"_uag_custom_page_level_css":"","_FSMCFIC_featured_image_caption":"","_FSMCFIC_featured_image_nocaption":"","_FSMCFIC_featured_image_hide":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[162,7],"tags":[476,475,474,477,478],"class_list":["post-6197","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-personal-stories","tag-ian-stevenson","tag-karlis-osis","tag-professor-erlendur-haraldsson","tag-reincarnation","tag-xenoglossy"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nTranscribed and edited by Albert Harris (Ed)<\/span><\/em><\/h5>\n
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Erlendur Haraldsson<\/b><\/a>\u00a0(born 1931) is a professor emeritus of\u00a0psychology<\/a>\u00a0on the faculty of\u00a0social science<\/a>\u00a0at the\u00a0University of Iceland<\/a>. He has published in various psychology and psychiatry journals. In addition, he has published\u00a0parapsychology<\/a>\u00a0books and authored a number of papers for parapsychology journals.<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n