In an otherwise nondescript office in downtown Charlottesville, Va., a small leather chest sits atop a filing cabinet. Within it lies a combination lock, unopened for more than 50 years. The man who set it is dead.
On its own, the lock is unremarkable — the kind you might use at the gym. The code, a mnemonic of a six-letter word converted into numbers, was known only to the psychiatrist Dr. Ian Stevenson, who set it long before he died, and years before he retired as director of the Division of Perceptual Studies, or DOPS, a parapsychology research unit he founded in 1967 within the University of Virginia’s school of medicine.
Dr. Stevenson called this experiment the Combination Lock Test for Survival. He reasoned that if he could transmit the code to someone from the grave, it might help answer the questions that had consumed him in life: Is communication from the “beyond” possible? Can the personality survive bodily death? Or, simply: Is reincarnation real?
This last conundrum — the survival of consciousness after death — continues to be at the forefront of the division’s research. The team has logged hundreds of cases of children who claim to remember past lives from all continents except Antarctica. “And that’s only because we haven’t looked for cases there,” said Dr. Jim Tucker, who has been investigating claims of past lives for more than two decades. He recently retired after having been the director of DOPS since 2015.
It was an unexpected career path to begin with.
“As far as reincarnation itself goes, I never had any particular interest in it,” said Dr. Tucker, who set out to solely become a child psychiatrist and was, at one point, the head of U.Va.’s Child and Family Psychiatry Clinic. “Even when I was training, it never occurred to me that I’d end up doing this work.”
Now, at 64 years old, after traveling the world to record cases of possible past life recollections, and with books and papers of his own on the subject of past lives, he has left the position.
