Carol Bowman is a wonderful woman whose son had vivid past life memories and she wrote a great book about them. I met her at a talk once, and she is a very sincere delightful and very normal person.

I can't wait to read your book, but I think I have already read it, I think your publisher sent it to me, but when I get home I will look.

I have had several patients describe past life memories.

As readers of the newsletter will see, my take on this topic is very different. From Stevenson's work, I have learned that often children will have past life memories of people who are still alive, and also he has documented 2 people having the same past life memory.

I am of the opinion that memories are stored outside of the human brain, and that we simply access and interpret them with our right temporal lobes. I believe that past life memories represent the accessing of other people's lives, perhaps for a divine reason, or perhaps simply on accident, or both,.

I realize this is quite a jump for most people, and please all you skeptics, keep your responses fairminded, and without personal or dismissive comments. My new book, coming out in the spring, goes into this issue in great detail as well.

For now, I will only tempt you by saying that I have run this theory by many mainstream neuroscientists and they have been unable to refute it or see flaws in it. There is no currently accepted theory of memory being in the brain. Researchers like Fred Lashley, who devoted his life to studying memory, made the statement late in life to the effect that if it wasn't "impossible", he would think that memories weren't in the brain. The work of Rupert Sheldrake, a well respected biologist, also supports the concepts of memories being out of the brain.

If memories are outside the brain, and we access them with our right temporal lobes, it certainly would solve a lot of problems such as how cryptamnesia works, how false memory syndromes work, and how past life memories can occur from a biological standpoint.

At the very least, I am present a novel approach to this issue which again, transcends the current "I believe in reincarnation" or "past life memories are a bunch of hooey" debate that currently exists and is going no where.

Melvin Morse

Then it becomes clear, especially if we suppose there is a "reason" or meaning to why a person has a particular past life memory. The same forces which would cause a person to have a particular past life memory, acting at the level of DNA, would also create a matching birthmark.

This is not at all outlandish. Instead, it is the first attempt, to my knowledge, of attempting to explain how past life memories could function biologically at all.

If you are on the same page as me, you will realize that the same forces that caused the lottery number in Missouri to be 062 on the day Mark McGuire hit his 62d homerun, are the same forces that create birthmarks which match past life memories.

In fairness, I would like to point out that Ian Stevenson, when he heard my theory, rejected it out of hand!

I am not discouraged by this. Dr. Stevenson has spent his life collecting these stories, but knows little of recent advances in evolutionary biology.

Cutting edge biologists such as Colm Callahan are far more enthusiastic about my theories, and Colm recently told me that my theories directly led to his research on how morphic resonance and spiritual events act at the level of DNA.

Melvin Morse