Evidence of the Soul

“The day science begins to study non-physical phenomena, it will make more progress in one decade than in all the previous centuries of its existence.” - Nikola Tesla 

Before I start this section I want you to know that I am not trying to change anyone’s religious views. I’m just trying to present some fascinating evidence that we are more than our minds. That we are spiritual beings. And the only reason I am presenting this information is because we know that a a spiritual connection is scientifically proven to improve our mental health. In fact, it may be the single most important factor in our overall wellbeing. But if you have strong views, are already convinced that you have a soul, and reading about things reincarnation are just going to piss you off, feel free to skip this section.

For many years I’ve been deeply curious about the question of the soul. Do we really have one? And if so, where do we go when we die? Do we reincarnate (some estimates show that 50% of the world believes in reincarnation), and if so, why? These aren’t just abstract ideas to me. They feel like some of the most important questions a human being can ask. My curiosity eventually turned into somewhat of an obsession: if the soul is real, I wanted to find the most legitimate evidence for it. That search led me to the top researchers in near-death experiences, past lives, and past-life regression.

When I first began this journey, I had no opinion on reincarnation. I just knew a large share of the world believed in it so I tried to remain open minded. I expected to find little more than speculation, but instead I was stunned to discover carefully collected data by serious scientists at respected institutions. The work of the University of Virginia’s Division of Perceptual Studies (DOPS) is especially remarkable. Over the past 60 years, Dr. Ian Stevenson and Dr. Jim Tucker have investigated thousands of children who recall past lives. In parallel, Dr. Bruce Greyson, also at UVA, has spent more than 40 years studying near-death experiences, publishing over 100 peer-reviewed papers. Here is a link to what all they do at DOPS. https://med.virginia.edu/perceptual-studies/ And beyond UVA, Dr. Michael Newton, a counseling psychologist, spent decades exploring “life between lives” through hypnosis.

Although I have read many books on these subjects, my recommended sources for this writing are below.  I highly recommend checking these out if you are curious.

• Life Before Life and Return to Life (Jim Tucker, M.D., UVA psychiatrist).

• After (Bruce Greyson, M.D., UVA psychiatrist).

• Journey of Souls (Michael Newton, Ph.D. in Counseling Psychology).

• Tim Ferriss’ 2024 podcast with Bruce Greyson.

Taken together, these works make an astonishing case: we are spiritual beings, consciousness survives death, and our souls evolve across lifetimes. I realize these are bold claims, but I urge you to keep an open mind. One thing I find helpful is to think of some of the things that seemed unbelievable to our ancestors but now seem so obvious. For example, just over 100 years ago we thought human flight was impossible, even years after it had been proven. The Wright Brothers achieved sustained flight in 1903, but by 1907 many in the world thought they were frauds because major newspapers continued to openly mock them. Everything changed in 1908 when the Wrights finally agreed to public flights so the world could see it with their own eyes. Two weeks ago I flew over 14 hours non-stop to Dubai from Dallas while having access to the internet. How things can change!

Paradigm shifts don’t happen overnight, and I believe we are in middle of one with consciousness. I feel quite confident that my grandkids will look back on this materialistic era with disbelief that such a large percentage of the population believed consciousness is solely created by the brain, despite the fact that this has never been proven and that there has long been evidence pointing beyond such a narrow view.

Reincarnation Evidence: UVA’s Solved Cases

UVA’s Division of Perceptual Studies maintains over 2,500 “solved cases” of children who insist they are someone else. These are typically 2- to 6-year-olds who suddenly begin speaking about another life. They give names, describe family members, identify where they lived, and how they died. Investigators (Stevenson and Tucker) then verify the data from the family and friends of the “previous personality.” A case is only marked “solved” when the details are verified, and thousands have been.

Key statistics:

• 2,500+ solved cases to date.

• Average age when speaking about a past life begins: 2–3 years old.

• 75% of children describe their death, most often traumatic (suggesting that sudden or violent deaths may make past-life memories more accessible).

• Median time between death and rebirth: 15–16 months.

• A third of Indian cases involve birthmarks or defects corresponding to fatal wounds; nearly 1 in 5 confirmed by medical records.

One of the most striking contributions of Dr. Ian Stevenson was his monumental two-volume, 2,200-page book Reincarnation and Biology, which documents 225 cases with photographs of birthmarks and birth defects that match the fatal wounds of previous personalities. In many cases autopsy or medical records confirmed the exact wound locations. This remains the most comprehensive published body of physical evidence for reincarnation in history.

Some Examples that defy coincidence:

• Boy with gunshot wounds. Born with two birthmarks, one small and round on his chest, the other large and irregular on his back. The “previous personality” had been shot in the chest, with the bullet exiting through his back exactly where the marks were.

• Boy with throat scar. Born with a long mark across his neck, he insisted he was murdered by having his throat slit. Records confirmed the prior personality died that way.

• James Leininger (U.S.). At age 2, he screamed of crashing in a plane. He gave the name “Natoma” (an aircraft carrier), “Jack Larsen” (a fellow pilot), and described being shot down. Navy records verified every detail matched pilot James Huston Jr., killed in WWII.

• The girl who named 25 relatives. One child correctly named 25 family members from a prior life with only one error. The odds of guessing are essentially zero.

• Patrick and Kevin (U.S.). Patrick was born blind in one eye and with a limp, identical to his deceased half-brother Kevin. At age 4, Patrick began talking about Kevin’s life.

One or two anecdotes can be brushed aside, but when 2,500 children across cultures and decades give verifiable details, anecdotes become evidence. The point here is not to convince you of reincarnation. The point is to present the evidence that we are more than our physical body.

Near-Death Experiences: What the Dying Tell Us

If reincarnation cases suggest that souls return, near-death experiences (NDEs) suggest where we go when we die. For over 40 years, Dr. Bruce Greyson at UVA has been the leading scientific investigator of NDEs, publishing more than 100 peer-reviewed papers and creating the Greyson NDE Scale, the world’s most widely used tool to study them.

NDEs are no longer rare. With advances in modern medicine and resuscitation technology, millions of people worldwide have now reported them. Studies estimate that 10–20% of patients who suffer cardiac arrest will describe an NDE. Given how many people each year experience clinical death and are revived, this translates into tens of millions of cases globally.

And what’s striking is how consistent these reports are. Across cultures, ages, genders, and religions, experiencers tell the same kinds of stories: leaving their body, encountering overwhelming love, seeing deceased loved ones, undergoing a life review, and being told it was “not their time.”

Patients with NDEs gave detailed, correct accounts of medical procedures that unconscious patients without NDEs consistently got wrong.

This was shown most clearly in a review of 93 out-of-body cases conducted by professor Jan Holden. She found that:

• 92% of the perceptions were completely accurate.

• 6% contained some error.

• Only 1% were completely wrong.

These patients were not only unconscious, they were in many cases clinically dead, with no heartbeat or measurable brain activity. Yet they described medical procedures, instruments, and even conversations in the operating room with uncanny accuracy.

Key statistics from decades of research:

• 80% leave their bodies, often observing their own resuscitation from above.

• 75% report encounters with deceased loved ones or beings of light. 

• 25% undergo a life review, reliving events from both their own and others’ perspectives. Experiencers often say they felt how their actions impacted others.

• 96% say their NDEs were “definitely real.” Most describe them as “more real than real.”

• Long-term effects: Nearly all report loss of fear of death, increased compassion, and a decreased focus on materialism.

Stories that stand out:

• The surgeon’s flapping arms: A patient described watching her doctor flap his arms like a bird during surgery. When Greyson asked, the surgeon admitted this was how he dried his hands before surgery.

• The shoe on the ledge: A patient insisted she saw a tennis shoe on a third-floor hospital ledge during her NDE during her out of body experience. A social worker checked and found the shoe exactly where she described, which was visible only from above.

• Loved ones waiting: Thousands of experiencers report seeing deceased relatives, but some cases are especially striking because the experiencer had no way of knowing the person had died. Stories like these are particularly compelling because they remove the possibility of the experiencer simply projecting their expectations. These encounters involved people whose deaths had not yet been communicated to the patient making coincidence an unlikely explanation.

• For example, one man described meeting his sister during his NDE. She told him it wasn’t his time yet. When he later recovered, he learned that his sister had passed away unexpectedly just hours before his cardiac arrest. He could not have known this at the time.

• Another experiencer, a young mother, reported being greeted by her grandmother in her NDE. She was shocked to discover later that her grandmother had died that very day, while she was still in the hospital.

What NDEs Mean

Dr. Greyson is cautious. He does not declare NDEs “proof” of life after death. Instead, he presents the evidence and leaves it up to the reader. But the consistency, prevalence, and accuracy of these accounts are impossible to ignore.

As Greyson has said, “Whatever NDEs are, they change people’s lives faster, more profoundly, and more permanently than psychotherapy or drugs.”

Taken together, NDEs suggest that consciousness does not simply end at death. Instead, our consciousness expands, encounters love, reviews its life, and often comes back transformed.

If you are curious to learn more, and especially to hear directly from people who have experienced profound near-death experiences, I recommend exploring the Coming Home Channel on YouTube. It features hundreds of first-person NDE accounts, many of which echo the same themes described in the scientific research: overwhelming love, encounters with loved ones, and the conviction that life continues beyond death. 

Journey of Souls: Life Between Lives

While UVA’s work focuses on verifiable external evidence, Dr. Michael Newton, Ph.D. in Counseling Psychology, contributed another perspective. Newton was a practicing therapist for 30 years, trained in hypnotherapy, and eventually became the founder of the Newton Institute for Life Between Lives.

Initially skeptical, Newton stumbled into cases where clients under hypnosis described not past lives but the spiritual world between lives. Over decades, he collected reports from more than 7,000 clients.

His clients consistently reported:

• Guides and loved ones greeting them after death.

• Healing stations of light to restore energy after difficult lives.

• Life reviews with wise beings or councils.

• We are a part of Soul groups, which are clusters of like-minded souls who reincarnate together as family or friends.

• The soul plans new lifetimes in order to revisit unresolved lessons or to accelerate spiritual growth.

The Hierarchy of Souls.
Newton’s research also uncovered a fascinating structure of spiritual development. Based on thousands of client sessions, he observed remarkable consistency in how people described their soul’s progress. From these reports he developed a framework of levels ranging from I to VI, which map the soul’s growth over many lifetimes:

• Level I–II: Beginner souls, often still struggling with fear, selfishness, and immaturity.

• Level III–IV: Intermediate souls, learning compassion, balance, and responsibility.

• Level V–VI: Advanced and master souls, often serving as guides for others.

Each level reflects greater wisdom, vibrational energy, and capacity to love. Souls advance not through perfection, but through persistent growth across many lifetimes.

Newton’s conclusion echoes what some spiritual masters like Gary Zukav have said: the purpose of reincarnation is evolution of the soul. Life is a school, and we return until we have mastered love.

Now let’s address the skepticism that came up for me. Could Michael Newton have made this up? In theory, yes, or perhaps 7,000 clients all unconsciously created similar stories under hypnosis. Critics of hypnosis sometimes raise this possibility. But Newton himself began as a skeptic, and he was surprised when clients started describing the same kinds of “between lives” experiences without prompting. Across decades of work, people from different cultures, religions, and backgrounds consistently reported remarkably similar themes: guides, soul groups, life reviews, and planning future incarnations. 

Importantly, there appear to be no credible claims of fraud against Newton. His credentials as a Ph.D. in Counseling Psychology, 30 years as a therapist, and his membership in professional associations lend further weight. While his findings cannot be “proven” in the same way UVA’s reincarnation cases can, but the consistency of his clients’ reports makes them very compelling: clients from different cultures, backgrounds, and belief systems independently described remarkably similar experiences. Once again, anecdotes converged into patterns.

This is really good news…

When we put these three streams of research together: Stevenson and Tucker’s 2,500 reincarnation cases, Greyson’s decades of NDE studies, and Newton’s 7,000 life-between-lives sessions, the conclusion is profound:

• We are spiritual beings.

• Consciousness appear to survive death.

• Our lives are part of a larger curriculum of growth and love.

This is profoundly good news. Life is not random and death does not appear to be the end. Moreover, unconditional, Divine love, which is the overwhelming force described by near-death experiencers and by souls in Newton’s sessions, appears to be a fundamental part of the fabric of reality. Saints and mystics have been saying this for thousands of years, and science is just catching up.

Pause for a moment and let the weight of this sink in. For me, the awareness that I am an eternal being and unconditionally loved by the Creator of All has completely reshaped my outlook on life. I now see myself as a participant in the “earth school,” here to grow, to face fears, and to evolve. 

I know all of this may sound a little far-fetched at first, but when I reflect on the vastness and mystery of our material universe, it actually feels quite reasonable. Think about it: the universe has existed for nearly 14 billion years, with potentially 2 trillion total galaxies, and even today physicists admit that dark energy, which makes up about 75% of the cosmos, is something we don’t really understand. If reality itself is filled with such scale and mystery, is it really such a leap to imagine a complex spiritual dimension? Whatever force or intelligence created this universe surely has the creativity to craft a beautiful spiritual realm as well. And just as the biological world evolves, it makes sense that our souls would evolve too. This reminds me of a quote I recently came across.

“The universe is not only stranger than we suppose, but stranger than we can suppose.”
— J. B. S. Haldane, British geneticist/biometrician/physiologist who is considered a founding figure in modern evolutionary biology.

But what if none of this is true? What if the lights simply go out, and there is no soul, no continuity, and no greater meaning to our lives? Even then, because of my spiritual worldview, I will have spent my life striving to be more loving, compassionate, and grateful. My relationships with family and friends will have been deeper with my days richer in joy. And that is the true upside of spirituality…more love, more gratitude, more joy, with nothing to lose. Contrast this with the alternative: living as if everything is random, meaningless, and rooted in fear. Which path creates a more beautiful life?

It is in this spirit that I return to Gary Zukav’s timeless reminder from Seat of the Soul, a book I will discuss at length later. “If you desire to know your soul, the first step is to recognize that you have a soul. The next step is to allow yourself to consider, ‘If I have a soul, what is my soul? What does my soul want? What is the relationship between my soul and me? How does my soul affect my life?’ When the energy of the soul is recognized, acknowledged, and valued, it begins to infuse with the personality.”

And here is a beautiful tribute to the soul’s enduring light and one of my favorite songs. Soul Sweet Song by Tedeschi Trucks Band.

Listen on Spotify