What's next after we are done with this life? Is reincarnation real?

 

What's next after we are done with this life? Is reincarnation real?

According to Sanatan Dharma, Jainism, Sikhism and Buddhism, this life is not our first, and death is not the end of the process of rebirth.

It was explicitly mentioned by Sri Krishna in Bhagavad Gita thousands of years ago.

As the embodied soul continuously passes, in this body, from boyhood to youth to old age, the soul similarly passes into another body at death. A sober person is not bewildered by such a change. Bg 2.13

As a person puts on new garments, giving up old ones, the soul similarly accepts new material bodies, giving up the old and useless ones. Bg 2.22

Don’t be tempted to think that we are created in this life and then go on to reincarnate. What happened after we were done with our last life, is - this life. In other words we have already reincarnated, and this life is the latest in an incalculably large number of reincarnations.

This is based on the understanding that a person is a jivatma or spirit soul and has always existed, never having been created and never destroyed. Our original identity as a jivatma is hidden behind our identity based on our body.

So reincarnation isn't a new idea that modern researchers have recently stumbled on. Sri Krishna was teaching it in the Bhagavad Gita thousands of years ago. But that doesn't settle the question for someone who doesn't accept the Gita as authoritative. So for them, modern researchers have independently investigated phenomena that appear to be consistent with the ancient idea.

Dr. Ian Stevenson studied thousands of cases of past life memories but because he was a scientist and scientists don’t like to use the word ‘proved’, he said that reincarnation was “the best explanation” for what he had observed and recorded.

Dr. Jim B. Tucker has continued and expanded Stevenson's research program at the University of Virginia for over two decades. Tucker has not only replicated Stevenson’s methodology but has also expanded it to include American cases, publishing peer-reviewed papers and books like Life Before Life and Return to Life. Independent researchers, such as Antonia Mills, Erlendur Haraldsson, and Jürgen Keil, have also conducted replication studies in different cultural contexts.

These studies consistently find similar patterns. Children speaking spontaneously about past lives, verifiable details, and corresponding birthmarks, yet they rarely penetrate mainstream scientific discourse.

Now why could that be? One might reasonably ask: if there is credible evidence for reincarnation, why isn't this common knowledge? Why haven't I heard about it before?

The answer is that scientific credibility and public awareness aren't the same thing. Research can exist for decades without becoming part of mainstream discourse, particularly when it concerns a subject that challenges established assumptions.

First, there is a publication problem. Much of the reincarnation literature exists in scholarly books rather than mainstream journals, and systematic reviews of the journal literature therefore capture only part of the available evidence. There is also evidence that controversial research can be evaluated differently depending on how it is labelled: identical findings have been judged less favourably when presented as parapsychology than when presented as neuroscience. Such biases can keep controversial research at the margins of academic discourse, where it receives less attention, fewer follow-up studies and consequently less exposure to the wider public.

I suspect there is something deeper involved as well. Reincarnation doesn't fit comfortably into either of the dominant Western paradigms. For materialism, convincing evidence would raise fundamental questions about whether consciousness is entirely produced by the brain. For Abrahamic religions that reject reincarnation, it would require reconsidering important theological assumptions about what happens after death. For once atheists, Christians, Muslims and Jews are united. Yay!

That’s all to say that the dominant scientific and religious establishments would rather it wasn’t true.

Despite that, belief in reincarnation in the Western world is no longer a fringe or ‘Eastern’ concept. A 2025 Pew Research Center survey covering 35 countries found that a median of 33% of adults believe in reincarnation. In the United States the figure was 31%, rising to 38% among Americans under 50 and 37% among the religiously unaffiliated. In Argentina, roughly half of those under 35 expressed belief in reincarnation.

Fundamental paradigms don’t change over night but whatever diehard materialists and Abrahamic religions believe there is a good possibility that reincarnation will become the majority view in the years ahead. If rigorous investigation eventually established that past-life memories cannot be adequately explained by fraud, coincidence, cryptomnesia, suggestion, genetic inheritance, or other mechanisms, the implications would be enormous. Billions of people would have some serious rethinking to do.

If the people and institutions in a position to make reincarnation a serious scientific question are themselves committed, consciously or unconsciously, to worldviews that would be profoundly disrupted by the answer, why would we expect the subject to receive the attention it deserves?

Reincarnation may not sound so dramatic, but if it were scientifically validated, its implications for the Western world would surpass those of Newton's, Galileo's and Einstein's discoveries.