First of all : This article is for people who believe in the survival of the soul/spirit after the physical death, then believe that reincarnation awaits them afterwards, and just hate this perspective. Stop despairing and read below!

Nowadays, there exist so many books on reincarnation (and believe me, I have read a lot of them), that among spiritually oriented people (except maybe Christians), reincarnation is accepted as a fact. However, when you recall that for a majority of people life is before all an awful bitch (ask any Palestinian), the prospect is rather distressing. I have even read websites that give you suggestions on how to escape reincarnation when you will be on the other side (such as avoiding “going into the light” at all costs). Yet, even though there is enough evidence to believe beyond any doubt that you will continue to exist after death, reincarnation has never been, and cannot be, either proved or disproved!

As such, I'm not going to try and prove that reincarnation doesn't exist, but that those who claim you're doomed to it, have no more proof of that than those (like Christians) who claim the opposite, i.e. that such a thing has never existed. In other words, there's no need to worry, because there's no proof that you'll have to repeat this journey of trouble, drudgery and suffering forever, in a world that only seems to know how to walk on its head.



So, there are various renown authors who wrote books about reincarnation. Among them: Brian Weiss, a psychiatrist who got some of his patients recall past lives memories through hypnosis; Chelsea Quinn Yarbro, a medium who channeled the Michael Teachings about a soul’s reincarnation cycles; Dolores Cannon, one of the very few authors whose hypnotized patients recounted memories of extra-terrestrial past lives; Helen Wambach, who hypnotized hundreds of people and made statistics from what they told, matching this data to what history tells us; Ian Stevenson, who investigated children who spontaneously recalled a past life; Michael Newton, a psychologist who learned from his hypnotized patients about the life occurring between two incarnations; and Robert Schwartz, who tells us that a soul plans its life to come before incarnating. All of this is worth reading, mind you, and who knows, maybe it’s true. Or maybe reincarnation is a wrong interpretation of what they found; lets see below:

Here are the most often mentioned aspects of reincarnation as told in new-age literature:

• Most humans are said to have already lived dozens, if not hundreds or even thousands of lives before their current one. Yet, the immense majority of people who remember past lives (whether under hypnosis or spontaneously), report human lives, and usually no earlier than ancient Egypt. However, if you consider the number of people alive today, and all humans who walked on earth during the last millenaries, the ratio is about 1 to 10-12. Plus in 4000 years of time, you would have a hard time living more than 100 (short!) lives in a row, meaning by the way, that you stole other souls’ opportunities to reincarnate. So from a purely mathematical perspective, I can’t see how an average human could have had more than 20 lives (some having had more human incarnations than others).


• Most people “remembered” their past lives through regression hypnosis. Note by the way that they usually remember only bits of these “past lives”, not their entirety and almost never with information such as their name back then, where they lived, etc. But who decides that what they get into their consciousness during regression hypnosis, actually was a past life of their own? Why could this not be a reading of someone else’s past life picked from the collective consciousness? Something similar to remote viewing. The feeling that it was real, doesn’t mean that it was yours. So reincarnation in this case, is just one interpretation among others as much as valid.


• Some people, among whom many children who could hardly have invented it, spontaneously “remember” the life of a deceased person. It is interpreted as a proof of reincarnation, as if what those people get into their mind could only be one of their past lives. However, you should know that earthbound spirits abound around us, and often aim at parasiting living humans if they can. Many psychotics who hear voices in their head actually are victims of such astral parasites. Note by the way that the children studied by Ian Stevenson typically recalled past lives of people who died recently and lived nearby, not from a variety of epochs and origins. Meanwhile, an earthbound spirit will typically stay in the vicinity of where he lived, and cannot remain for a very long time close to the material plane, but will sooner or later be drawn into the spirit world. Hence it adds credibility to the idea that such children are in fact overridden by an earthbound spirit, rather than remember a past life of their own.


• The prevalent and commonly accepted idea about the purpose of reincarnation, is that Earth is a school in which souls incarnate in order to learn, mature and evolve. The Michael Teachings have much developed and detailed this idea. They tell us that after many lives through different stages of maturation, a soul ceases to incarnate, but pursues evolution as a spirit in higher dimensions. But, when you read the spiritualist literature (which often ignores or denies reincarnation), it tells us that after its physical life a soul continues to evolve in the spirit world. No coming back into this world is deemed necessary. It also tells us that there is much more opportunity to evolve in the afterlife (provided you don’t find yourself in hell) than as a living human on Earth.


• Karma is the idea of coming back into this world to reap what you sowed during a past life. The problem is that it will be just difficult changing your ways and not repeating errors if you forget everything, every time you reincarnate. But there is worse: karma can be good or bad, but makes you return all the same. As such, you will have to come back to suffer bad consequences for the wrongs you did during a former life, but will also have to return to reap the rewards for the good deeds you instead performed. Thus, even if you manage to be a saint, you are doomed to come back down into this world of crap anyway. Yet, karma in itself doesn’t require reincarnation. Once dead, if you did evil you will go to Hell, and if you did good you will go to Heaven. No coming back is necessary to reap what you sowed.


• Marks and disabilities from past lives’ trauma. Some people have a physical or health issue, and then, during a regression hypnosis session, discover that the problem apparently stems from a past-life, and having realized it, are thereafter freed from it. This is pointed out as evidence of reincarnation. But there might be other explanations. For example: although you are a unique individual, your physical body borrows its DNA from your various ancestors through your genitors. You are distinct from them, but in some regards may have got some of their characteristics. If someone tells you that you have the same eyes as your father, you are nonetheless still you and not your father. As such, is it more farfetched than reincarnation, to imagine that you could have got unconscious memories from past humans’ lives at birth, that will help you shape your unique personality? These memories belong to you, but you are not the one who lived them in the first place.

(Past life memory or earthbound spirit parasite?)

The belief in reincarnation became particularly popular and the subject of many books during the last decades of the 20th century, although Alan Kardec, the French spiritualist, already mentioned it in the 19th century. However, most spiritualists of the 20th century didn’t endorse this idea. If you read the 35 books of the download section, only three of them (if I remember well) mention reincarnation: Astral City, Claude’s Book, and The Astral Plane. Then, only the James E. Padgett’s messages have specifically told that reincarnation doesn’t exist and is a wrong teaching. All others just ignored it, but from what they tell (about spirits having lived in the spiritual planes for ages), it is clear that no such thing is acknowledged to occur. Meanwhile, note that most of the literature dedicated to reincarnation seems to ignore what pertains to spirits and the spirit world. Michael Newton who told about the life between lives through his hypnotized patients, describes and reports things that were never corroborated by the abundant spiritualist literature. I will then conclude with my preferred exposé about this subject: In The Risen, by August Goforth, a spirit recounts that when alive he had learned and become convinced that after his death he would have to reincarnate. As such, once in the spirit world he sought to prepare his next incarnation as best as he could. Except he couldn’t find how to do this, and found nobody who knew or cared about reincarnation! He finally learned that there is no such thing as reincarnation; you live in the flesh only once. You can download this chapter here.

All of this should convince you that there is no consensus about reincarnation. It might be a reality, or might not exist at all, or it might be something incomprehensible as seen from our human condition. You just don’t need to believe that reincarnation is an inescapable fact of life so you would be doomed to return into this world of matter and ignominy for ages. As a last note, I will first add that the renown contemporary medium Matt Fraser explains that reincarnation does exist but is not an obligation, and (unless I misinterpret him) seems to suggest that it is even not common. You can read him here. And then, Geoff Cutler (A Spiritual Journey) has written a book just denying that reincarnation exists. You can download it here.