S3E5: The Mysterious Map to a Toddler’s Past Life| The Reincarnation Records

At just 18 months old, a boy named Esara began describing a terrifying death. He recalled drowning, named the friend who drowned alongside him, and spoke of another family, another home, and a life in a city nearly 200 miles away. His older sister began documenting his memories long before anyone identified the boy he appeared to be describing: a 14-year-old named Thilanga, who died exactly one year before Esara was born. When four-year-old Esara draws a map to the temple and home he claims to remember from his previous life, a reluctant search begins, unraveling an extraordinary mystery surrounding a teenager's untimely death, two families connected by seemingly impossible memories, and a child who appears to have inherited not just intimate details of a stranger's life, but his talents, skills, habits, and even the nicknames of those he loved. _______ Join The Telepathy Tapes Backstage Pass https://thetelepathytapes.supercast.com/ to get ad-free episodes, never-before-heard interviews, behind-the-scenes documentary footage, and access to our private Discord community. This is your invitation to come closer. To help shape what’s next. To be more than a listener… to be a co-creator of this paradigm shift. So if you’ve felt moved, if you’ve felt seen, if you’ve felt the call, subscribe today and join us: thetelepathytapes.com. https://thetelepathytapes.com/ _______ Thank you to our sponsors! Alloy http://myalloy.com/ - Try the original estrogen-powered M4 skincare from Alloy. Visit myalloy.com http://myalloy.com/ and use code TAPES for $20 off your first order! Butcher Box http://butcherbox.com/TAPES - Go to ButcherBox.com/TAPES http://butcherbox.com/TAPES to get $20 off your first box, plus chicken breast in everybox for life or filet or NY strips for a yea, with free shipping always! Ka'Chava http://kachava.com/ - Go to kachava.com http://kachava.com/ and use code TAPES for 15% off your first order. Lola Blankets http://lolablankets.com/ - Our listeners can get 40% OFF select Lola Blankets products with code TAPES at checkout, go to lolablankets.com http://lolablankets.com/. Luminara http://luminara.care/ - If you’re curious about experiencing energy healing for yourself, Luminara is offering 20% off your first session. Go to luminara.care http://luminara.care/ and use code TAPES20. Shopify http://shopify.com/tapes - Start your business today with the industry’s best business partner, Shopify. Sign up for your free trial at Shopify.com/tapes http://shopify.com/tapes. TruDiagnostics http://trudiagnostic.com/ - Go to TruDiagnostic.com http://trudiagnostic.com/ and use code tapes for 20% off your entire order. Quince http://quince.com/tapes - Find the fall pieces you’ll reach for most at Quince. Go to Quince.com/tapes http://quince.com/tapes for free shipping on your order and 365-day returns. Whatnot https://www.whatnot.com/?srsltid=AYCX9vKB0IN7Xfly6hvMMOUIImGW3GwV7XKJJ-7sr5tfiqItKgVASBEL - Download Whatnot in the app store today and get $20 off your first live purchase. Zenni http://zenni.com/podcast - That scratched up pair has done its job. Upgrade today with Zenni. Got to Zenni.com/podcast http://zenni.com/podcast and use code PODCAST15 for 15% off your first order + free shipping on all orders over $65! See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Ky Dickens?

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• 0:33Ky Dickens?

  This is Kai Dickens and you're listening to the Reincarnation Records from TTT Media. Welcome back to the Reincarnation Records. This is episode five. And quick disclaimer, this season builds on every episode that came before, so if you have not listened to the first four episodes, I highly encourage you to go back and do so now. For the last two episodes, we've been at the University of Virginia's Division of Perceptual Studies, learning about the work of Dr. Ian Stevenson and the thousands of children that he rigorously studied, who reported memories of previous lives. But for this episode, we wanted to go deep into one case, a case with many of the elements

• 1:15Ky Dickens?

  Stevenson looked for, spontaneous memories that begin very young, and a detailed record of what the child said before anyone went looking for the deceased person who might match. But almost more importantly, we wanted a case that could help us explore a question Carol Bowman raised earlier in this season. Could remembering and confronting past lives actually be healing? Because in the majority of the cases where children remember past lives, they remember a traumatic death. And if some children come into this life carrying fear, anger, grief, or resentment over how another life ended, is there a benefit to confronting those memories head-on, to talking about what happened, understanding it, and maybe even finding some kind of peace, forgiveness, and resolution? And that's really the question at the heart of the case we're about to tell you.

• 1:58Speaker 01

  And he apparently started to remember his past life when he was about 18 months. He started talking about his drowning. He started remembering his previous mother's name, father, where he went to school, his friends.

• 2:13Ky Dickens?

  That was Dr. Akila Weersekr, the Harvard neuroscientist who brought us the case that we'll be diving into today. And when we first met him, he wanted to make it very clear that studying reincarnation is not his job. Him becoming an expert on this case was definitely not on his bingo card.

• 2:28Speaker 01

  My name is Akila Weersekr. My main research involves neuroimaging and psychiatry at the moment. I got an appointment at Howard Medical School in 2019.

• 2:38Ky Dickens?

  And today, we're diving into a modern Sri Lankan case that consumed Dr. Weersekr's life for a few years because he entered an essay contest, supported by the Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies, which was founded by aerospace entrepreneur Robert Bigelow, to investigate one enormous question.

• 2:54Speaker 02

  Hundreds of people from around the world have been competing in a contest to show there is life after death.

• 3:02Speaker 03

  Las Vegas entrepreneur Robert Bigelow put up almost $2 million in prize money in maybe the biggest essay contest of all time, to solve the biggest question of all time.

• 3:13Ky Dickens?

  Applicants had to demonstrate serious experience investigating consciousness or expertise in their field. And if this sounds familiar from episode three, you're right. This is exactly how Dr. Ian Stevenson was swept into reincarnation research nearly 70 years ago.

• 3:27Speaker 01

  It was an essay competition. I thought maybe I could submit something with the collaborator. You can have any different types of models to explain what happened to consciousness after death. So I chose reincarnation.

• 3:40Ky Dickens?

  Dr. Weersekr grew up in Sri Lanka, a lush island nation just off the southern tip of India. About 70% of Sri Lanka is Buddhist, and the belief in rebirth is woven into everyday life. University of Virginia professor Dr. Ian Stevenson spent a lot of time there himself, and he postulated that the culture's openness to rebirth made families more likely to report extraordinary stories, allowing investigators like him to document children's statements before they could be influenced or forgotten. And many investigators are quick to point out that this doesn't mean reincarnation happens in Sri Lanka more often. It simply means that cases are easier to find and investigate. And Dr. Weersekr remembered hearing about a compelling reincarnation case there involving a boy named Isra.

• 4:23Speaker 01

  A newspaper article was written about the case. This was in early 2000s, and apparently Isra started to remember his past life when he was about 18 months. So I am back and I checked it, and then I was able to contact Isra.

• 4:38Ky Dickens?

  So Isra is the boy central to this case that started recalling epic details of a past life in the early 2000s.

• 4:45Speaker 01

  He was in his early 20s, and then he agreed to participate in the study. So that's how I got involved, because of the Bigelow competition.

• 4:53Ky Dickens?

  This case is one of the most layered and confounding that I've encountered in my research. It involves two boys separated by exactly one year. The first boy was named Tilanga Marhusan Ranasinghe, and most people called him by his initials, TMR, which is how we'll refer to him. He lived in the city of Kandy, the last royal capital of Sri Lanka, in the rolling hills near the Temple of Tooth, the country's most sacred Buddhist temple, which houses a relic believed to be the Buddha's tooth. And TMR was 14 years old when he went to a local river with friends and never came home.

• 5:27Speaker 01

  And he drowned in a river in Kandy, January 31, 2001.

• 5:33Ky Dickens?

  Exactly one year later, Isra was born, on January 31, 2002. He was welcomed into a family that has nothing to do with this boy, TMR. In fact, Isra's family lived nearly 200 miles to the south, where there's a different dialect and even different cultural traditions. And we were able to interview Isra for this story.

• 5:52Speaker 04

  Hello, everyone. It's me, Isra Bashteh, from Sri Lanka. Right now, I'm 24 years old.

• 5:58Ky Dickens?

  Isra's oldest sister, Banza, took care of him when he was a baby and toddler, which was common culturally. She was around 18 years old when he was born, but caregiving for this new baby brother was nothing she could have prepared for. In fact, one of the things she first noticed is that he was scream bloody murder when she tried to bathe him.

• 6:16Speaker 01

  His sister noticed that he has phobias. He doesn't want to shower, like he's scared of water.

• 6:23Ky Dickens?

  And when he was about a year and a half old, he started saying something terrifying that he remembered dying.

• 6:29Speaker 01

  Isra's sister told me that when he was quite young, one of the first things that he said, "I was drowning."

• 6:36Speaker 05

  Mama, what you did mean he did.

• 6:39Speaker 01

  And this uncle in a chariot came down and took me up to the sky. And then the sister was like, she didn't really understand what was happening.

• 6:49Ky Dickens?

  Isra's older sister, Banza, was the first person to meticulously start documenting this case, and we were able to interview her as well. So, Banza, do you feel comfortable speaking English?

• 6:59Speaker 06

  Not like my brother.

• 7:01Ky Dickens?

  That's okay. Maybe Akila, do you want to translate?

• 7:03Speaker 01

  I can translate. Hi, Banza. Kai, you can ask specific questions. She remembers more than Isra.

• 7:08Ky Dickens?

  Yeah.

• 7:09Speaker 01

  She documented everything.

• 7:10Ky Dickens?

  So I know early he said he drowned and he saw a chariot coming to take him to the sky. But Banza, did he say how it happened?

• 7:17Speaker 06

  Money can't get the enemy.

• 7:19Speaker 01

  So she's saying that he said he fell into the water and some type of a rock hit his chest, and then he couldn't breathe. And when he was born, he had this dent caved into the chest.

• 7:31Ky Dickens?

  And is it, he says it's still there? Are there any marks or any problems breathing?

• 7:35Speaker 04

  It is actually a butt defect, I would say, like a dent.

• 7:39Speaker 01

  This dent still is visible, and his mom told me that when he was born, it was very visible. The doctors were a bit concerned about it in the beginning.

• 7:48Ky Dickens?

  I have Dr. Weersekr's huge paper in front of me, and it has pictures and x-rays of Isra from when he was younger. And it is true that on the middle left side of his chest, there is a dent. And his doctors noted it's a congenital chest wall deformity that occurs in about 1 in 400 children, and no other family members have a similar birth defect.

• 8:08Speaker 01

  When he was younger, he said a specific name that another boy drowned with him, that my friend Duminda also died that day.

• 8:17Ky Dickens?

  This part really gets me, because a boy saying he drowned and hit his chest on a rock and couldn't breathe is one thing, stating a name of someone who he says died with him is something else entirely. And then he started to talk about a city where his family has no connections nearly 200 miles away.

• 8:32Speaker 01

  When Isra was about one year, nine months, he started to sail. He's from Kandy, in the southern province of Sri Lanka.

• 8:39Speaker 06

  This may are Kandy, Kandy, Kandy, Kandy.

• 8:42Speaker 01

  He started describing this place, Kandy. They've never been to Kandy before. It's like a six, seven hour drive from where he was born.

• 8:50Speaker 04

  I start to talk about, I want to go to Kandy to see my parents, to see my mother in Kandy.

• 8:56Ky Dickens?

  This is so hard to comprehend, and all I can think about is when my kids were really young, and you were so excited for not just their first words, but to look at you and say, "Mama." And I cannot imagine if either of my children, when they first started talking, told me they want to go see their mother, or, as he sometimes said, "my other mother."

• 9:15Speaker 01

  As time went by, he started remembering detailed information about the very famous Sri Lankan temple in Kandy. He was explaining how he used to go to the temple with his mother.

• 9:27Ky Dickens?

  And this is where the story moves beyond a toddler simply bringing up names. Isra starts displaying what researchers at the University of Virginia call "private knowledge," information a young child seemingly should have no way of knowing. And it wasn't just Kandy, a city where he's never been, or people's names that the family did not know. He started talking intimately and often about the Temple of Tooth. And yes, this temple is famous, but Isra nor his family had ever been there, and he wasn't just naming it. He started describing specific events from its past, including things that happened before he was born. And he shared these memories as if he'd lived through them.

• 10:04Speaker 01

  One specific that she remembers is that he started talking about the attack on the Temple of Tooth. There was a bomb attack and there was some destruction in the 90s, so the before Isra was born.

• 10:16Ky Dickens?

  Right. And had they talked about that at home, or would he have any way to know about that?

• 10:21Speaker 01

  It was not a recent event, and they didn't talk about it. So when he started talking about it, they started remembering.

• 10:28Ky Dickens?

  I looked up to see if there ever was a bombing at the Temple of the Tooth, and there was, in 1998. And I want to note that TMR, the boy that Isra says he was in his past life, would have been 11 years old when the bombing happened. And he died when he was only 14. So if Isra is somehow remembering TMR's life, this definitely was not a distant historical event. It would have happened during TMR's childhood, just years before he died, at a temple that he visited every day with his mother. So you'd imagine that would leave a mark on a kid. Here's Isra again.

• 10:58Speaker 04

  My elder sister, who is joining with me right now in this room, and she took a book and wrote every single thing I'm telling.

• 11:09Ky Dickens?

  His sister Banza instinctively did something researchers in this field have emphasized for decades. She wrote everything down before anyone went to look for who he might be describing. And that distinction is uber important because if you want to understand whether a child is describing a life that can be verified, you have to know what was said before anyone went looking for the person so it's not influenced. And one of the things she noted early on is just so odd. And when I first heard it, I thought it actually goes against the theory that Isra could have been TMR in a past life.

• 11:39Speaker 01

  She saw he's writing some letters. It was Japanese. And then he said that he wanted to use chopsticks to eat, which we don't do in Sri Lanka, but he wanted to eat with chopsticks.

• 11:52Ky Dickens?

  So now little Isra is writing Japanese characters and asking to use chopsticks, neither of which are common in Sri Lanka.

• 11:58Speaker 01

  And they have no exposure to Japanese, where they were born or where they lived at the time. He said that in his previous life, an older guy had taught him about this culture.

• 12:11Ky Dickens?

  So when asked about this, Isra said that he knew how to do these things because he had a caregiver in his previous life as TMR that was Japanese. So file that away because by the end of the episode, we'll see if that checks out. But at this point in the story, the most important thing is that Isra wasn't just talking about his past life. He started exhibiting behaviors, habits, and talents that weren't taught to him and that he did not pick up from the world around him.

• 12:34Speaker 01

  He remembered that he has played cricket sport, played in Sri Lanka.

• 12:40Ky Dickens?

  In Dr. Weer Sackra's paper, it was noted that Isra, as a little boy, actually told his sister that he was such a good cricket player that he represented Sri Lanka on a youth national team that took him to India. And at this point in the story, Isra's parents weren't necessarily leaning into these claims. They just wanted them to go away.

• 12:56Speaker 01

  They take him to the Southern Cricket Academy. And Isra, the first time, he hit the ball as a professional. And then the trainer asked his father, like, was he trained before? And it's not just like hitting a ball. There's a form to it. And he's like, no, he doesn't even play cricket.

• 13:13Ky Dickens?

  And from what I've researched, a cricket batting swing takes a lot of repetition to learn. You have to judge the ball's line and length. You have to move your feet accordingly and bring the bat through straight while generating power. And little Isra, who's preschool age, could do that flawlessly. And the skeptic in me thinks, well, it could have been luck or he could just have natural athletic ability. But then Isra demonstrated another talent that luck couldn't really explain away. It had to do with Candy and Dance, the classical dance tradition from the hill country around Candy. It has its own specific movements and rhythms and drumming and gestures, and it's learned through training. From a Western perspective, think of something like the Scottish Highland dancing. It has a very particular cultural tradition attached to it with its own technique.

• 13:55Ky Dickens?

  And remember that Isra lived almost 200 miles from Candy and had never been there. So one day, when Isra was still very little, around two, three years old, there was a parade.

• 14:04Speaker 01

  Within the procession, sometimes they drum these Candyan dancing beats. So when this little Isra hear this, he started dancing how the Candyan people danced, those dances.

• 14:18Speaker 04

  I was able to dance all the steps that they have practiced for months and months. We can just monkey play instead.

• 14:25Speaker 01

  He was not taught this dance. So when you hear this noise of the drumming, he started dancing as if somebody taught him that.

• 14:32Speaker 04

  And the steps are perfect.

• 14:34Ky Dickens?

  But, but, but Isra, how did you know how to do it? I mean, if you've never been taught it, right? Where, where do you think it came from?

• 14:40Speaker 04

  I don't know how it came. I felt like I've done this before, but I cannot explain how it happened. I love the feeling of traditional Candyan drumming. And I felt like all these things are already in my blood.

• 14:52Ky Dickens?

  He said, I felt like all of these things were already in my blood.

• 14:56Speaker 04

  I knew it. And I was able to, you know, dance as the same as they were.

• 15:01Ky Dickens?

  And then, as Isra got better at forming words, details became way more specific.

• 15:06Speaker 01

  He could remember that he had dogs, Jimmy and Chico, were friends.

• 15:11Ky Dickens?

  So he knew names of friends and, and the dog. And then came the thing that his family feared most. Isra said he wanted to go to Candy to see his old family. Here's Isra again.

• 15:21Speaker 04

  I start to talk about, I want to go to Candy to see my parents, to see my mother in Candy.

• 15:27Ky Dickens?

  And just to clarify, Isra was talking about visiting his mother, his family from his past life, the one he says he lived before in Candy. So just imagine if you were a parent and your child started asking that of you.

• 15:38Speaker 04

  So that point, they have realized their son, which means I, I'm not talking about to go on a trip. It's something beyond that.

• 15:45Ky Dickens?

  And when Isra talked about going to see his Candyan mother and father, something else caught his family's attention. He used a word for father used in the Candy region and not their region of the country.

• 15:56Speaker 01

  Candy dialect is a bit different than the rest of the country. There's very particular like names of father, Apache, like, we don't use that.

• 16:04Ky Dickens?

  Okay, so he said Apache for father. What do people say where Isra was from? Like, is it similar to that?

• 16:08Speaker 01

  We say Tata is more of the European descent words than Apache. It was not spoken in the down south. So that was specific to Candy.

• 16:18Ky Dickens?

  Okay, so then what happened next? And how did he convince them to go down there?

• 16:22Speaker 01

  He's between two and three years old. And he's telling his father that he wants a computer. And the father's mom bought a desktop computer. And then he started using it and using Paint, Microsoft Paint. He drew a map to his house, his older, his previous house. He started constantly talking about it at that point, like, he really wanted to go. And then he's telling Banza about, you know, that he really wants to see his mother.

• 16:48Ky Dickens?

  I want to stop for a second just to take stock of how wild this is. Isra has not even started school yet. His family has never been to Candy. They have no idea who TMR, the boy who drowned in the river, is, or whether this previous family that he's describing even exists. They're not using the internet like most people in Sri Lanka or even the world at the time. And even if there was an easy way to search or look up these people and places hundreds of miles away, they did not have much desire to go looking for them. And then Isra, who's not even three, gets on a computer and uses Microsoft Paint to draw a map to the house where he says he used to live.

• 17:22Speaker 01

  And then Banza, she got a little bit scared that what if his past life memories and present memories kind of get mixed up and he will be confused and it could kind of mentally damage him. There could be like a mental breakdown or something could happen.

• 17:37Ky Dickens?

  Or if Carol Bowman, who you met in the first two episodes, was correct in her hypothesis, it could be extremely healing, maybe even helping him overcome his phobia around water and bathing. And we will find out after we take a quick break. There's nothing quite like having pieces in your closet that you love and know you can count on for any occasion, except maybe giving someone else that same feeling. This holiday season, Quince is where I'm finding those pieces. Quince makes elevated everyday essentials using premium materials like Mongolian cashmere, organic cotton, and premium stretch denim. Quince also has gifts that keep giving all season long, like their high-quality down outerwear and cozy cashmere gloves and scarves. Everything at Quince is priced 50 to 80% less than similar brands.

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• 20:34Ky Dickens?

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• 20:40Ky Dickens?

  Welcome back. Where we left off, Isra, who's having detailed memories of a past life and is now two, maybe just barely three years old, draws a map to what he says is his old house using Microsoft Paint. And he also put other landmarks on the map.

• 20:54Speaker 01

  He drew where the temple was. I think that was like the reference point. And then he drew where the house was. And the sister also said that there's some of a body of water.

• 21:03Ky Dickens?

  So was the family on board?

• 21:04Speaker 01

  Nobody really wanted to go there. Right? They were afraid of what if he doesn't come back? What if they want to keep him? And then he drew the map. The main thing that he said was, I want to see my mother.

• 21:17Speaker 01

  After I see my mother, I'll stop talking about it. He pleaded to his sister because others don't want to deal with it much because, you know, they would be afraid. And so she explained that to her father. And then even though they didn't really want to do this, they agreed at the end.

• 21:32Ky Dickens?

  And when Isra was four years old, his family took him down to Kandy. They had no idea how to find or contact the family he seemed to remember outside of simply following the map that he had drawn. Less than 1% of Sri Lanka had access to the internet at this time. So they were really heading down there with nothing more than a map drawn by a toddler and his quote unquote memories.

• 21:53Speaker 01

  So in Kandy, they didn't know anybody. They have no relatives, friends, no one. They didn't know anybody in Kandy. But a city close to it, there were some of their family. So they took a train to that city called Mathalay. And then they hired a van, like a three wheeler, this thing that we have in Sri Lanka, like a taxi, to take them to Kandy from there. So they stayed overnight in Mathalay and then early morning they went to Kandy. He told them, before I go to see my mom, I want to go to the temple.

• 22:25Ky Dickens?

  And going to the Temple of the Tooth first made a lot of sense because little Isra had also drawn the temple on his map. And that's actually the landmark from which he drew how to get to what he remembers being his old house. And when they arrived at the temple, he showed them where the main door was.

• 22:40Speaker 01

  And he told them where to put the shoes, where to place them before we entered the temple, as if he's a regular visitor to the temple.

• 22:48Ky Dickens?

  Inside the temple, he actually convinced a monk of his past life due to his specific insider knowledge.

• 22:54Speaker 01

  He started telling about the history of the statue made of gems, like a previous king had made it for his mother, like the backstory of this statue. There was a Buddhist monk nearby and he heard this child talking about this. And he has asked, how do you know about this? He has said that I was here before and I know everything about this temple. And then the monk asked the dad, what is he talking about? And the dad said, he's talking about his previous life, you know, that's why we brought him to Kandy. So this Buddhist monk, initially a bit skeptical about it, and he has asked his father, is it okay if I ask him some questions about the temple?

• 23:35Ky Dickens?

  Okay. So can you give just a few examples?

• 23:37Speaker 01

  This Buddhist monk, he pointed to a place and asked, what's there? So it was actually a museum.

• 23:45Speaker 01

  Isara said, it's something that you go to after you pay some money, you go to see something. He didn't know how to say a museum. He said that.

• 23:55Ky Dickens?

  And just to put this in context, they were standing inside of a room where you can't necessarily see the museum. So you have to have some sort of situational awareness in this temple to even answer these questions correctly. And so Isra seemed to know that in the direction that the monk was pointing, there was a museum. And he described it as a place where you pay to see something. So not a slam dunk of evidence, but the monk wasn't done.

• 24:17Speaker 01

  And he pointed to a different direction and asked, what's there?

• 24:20Ky Dickens?

  Suggesting that beyond the wall or beyond where they could see, there's something important there.

• 24:25Speaker 01

  Then Isara said, there's an elephant, stuffed elephant, which is true.

• 24:30Ky Dickens?

  I looked this up myself and there was a real Tusker elephant who served at the Kandy Temple of Tooth. And after the elephant died in 1989, its body was preserved or taxidermied and put on display on the temple grounds.

• 24:43Speaker 01

  So he answered all these questions and then the monk was convinced that something is really going on.

• 24:48Ky Dickens?

  Before they left the temple that afternoon, Isra stopped in front of a row of framed photographs on the wall. He recognized them. And this ties back to the bombing of the temple that Isra started talking about very young, something that confounded the family because it's nothing that was ever brought up in his presence.

• 25:04Speaker 01

  Before they went to Kandy, Isara told his sister about one of his friends, he named the friend, that took photos of the destruction. After they went there to the temple, they found those photos inside the temple.

• 25:21Speaker 01

  And then he showed the photos and he's told, these are the three pictures that are the photos that I was talking about before.

• 25:27Ky Dickens?

  Wow. Okay. So now they leave the temple and it's time to go try to find his family. So what do they do next?

• 25:35Speaker 01

  So they came out of the temple. Now they wanted to go see the house, the previous home. So they followed his map. He drew exactly where to go.

• 25:45Ky Dickens?

  And along the way, he kept identifying landmarks like a tour guide.

• 25:48Speaker 01

  He talked about this tiny waterfall kind of thing in his map. And they passed that waterfall. They were traveling there. He showed, this is the waterfall that I was talking about. And he went to another road and then he pointed, this is where my house is. But apparently there was nothing there. It was just like torn apart, like they're going to build something else. That house was not there. And he started crying, profusely crying.

• 26:16Ky Dickens?

  It had taken months for Isra to convince his family to bring him to Kandy. And he'd been begging to go there for one reason. He wanted to see his mother, his old mother. And somehow, this little boy from nearly 200 miles away had drawn an accurate map from the Temple of Tooth to this exact spot where he believed he would find the mother that he'd been longing to see so badly. And when he got to the spot, nothing was there. The house was gone. So of course, he was in tears.

• 26:45Speaker 01

  When they asked, why are you crying? My, that home was demolished. And then he showed like another direction. He showed that you can see like a Buddhist statue like far away.

• 27:00Speaker 01

  And he said, I want to go there. I think that his friends were living there. So he wanted to go there next. The person who came to accompany them, he said, it's a bit far. You know, we might not be able to walk there.

• 27:12Ky Dickens?

  Remember, the family had hired a driver to get them around.

• 27:15Speaker 01

  But then Isara laughed and said, you know, we don't need to take a taxi. I know shortcuts. I know a way to go there much faster. So this guy had the knowledge how to go, how to walk from there instead of taking a taxi.

• 27:30Ky Dickens?

  So Isra takes his family on this extraordinary odyssey through Kandy, pointing out landmarks, roads, and shortcuts along the way. He correctly brings his family on foot to the Bahira Ova Kanda Buddha statue, which he had identified from a distance. And he took them to the statue because supposedly it was next to a home of a good friend that he had in his past life.

• 27:50Speaker 01

  He wanted to go to one of his friend's places. So when they went there, there's a restaurant there. That house was also non-existent at the time.

• 27:58Ky Dickens?

  Isra tried to explain to his family that he was not confused. This was his friend's house. And to prove it, he started talking about what was behind the restaurant.

• 28:05Speaker 01

  There's like a wooded area that, so you cannot see anything behind that. But he told them that there's a sort of a steps made out of rocks behind that, but they could not see it.

• 28:19Ky Dickens?

  The manager heard this four-year-old boy upset and passionate outside his restaurant, talked to the family, and was told that he was remembering his past life and led them there. And the manager decided to test little Isra, just like the monk did.

• 28:31Speaker 01

  And then the manager of the hotel or the restaurant came out and then he heard this, Isara is telling them about this. And then he has, he has told that there's no steps behind that wooded area like, but he's like, no, no, I'll show you. And then he took them there and he pulled those trees away, apart some of these bushes. And then he showed that. And then the manager says, yeah, I knew that. I just wanted to check if you, if you know what you're saying is true. That's why I was asking you.

• 28:59Ky Dickens?

  And in your research, Akila, did you find out if TMR really did have a friend who lived there?

• 29:03Speaker 01

  After Tilanga died in his previous life.

• 29:07Ky Dickens?

  When he says Tilanga, he's referring to TMR's first name.

• 29:10Speaker 01

  That friend and the family kind of moved out from that area because it was like shocked and they were sad about it and they couldn't live there. So that's why they left there.

• 29:21Ky Dickens?

  Wow. Okay. So at this point, they still hadn't contacted the family yet.

• 29:24Speaker 01

  So when they were there in, close to the restaurant, I think, you know, the word kind of got out that there's a small kid talking about his previous life and people around them heard about the, what he's talking about. And these taxi drivers kind of, they said, oh yeah, maybe he's talking about this particular family.

• 29:42Ky Dickens?

  And a taxi driver points them toward a local town official. This official listens to Isra's story and realizes he knows exactly which family they're talking about. In fact, he'd gone to school with TMR's sister. So this official calls her, tells her about the little boy who's come looking for the family, and a meeting was arranged at a restaurant.

• 30:01Speaker 01

  So Isara and his family will go to this restaurant and they will wait there. Isara is like playing and they were waiting for a while. Foreigners come and go, like a lot of people come to this restaurant. It's pretty, it's a hotel restaurant, I think. It's like a hotel. Suddenly he stopped playing and he looked at the door and he started screaming, saying, mom.

• 30:22Speaker 01

  That he rested his head on the one of the tables. That when that whoever the woman came in, like the previous mom.

• 30:30Ky Dickens?

  So again, I want to put this in context. Issa is a little boy. His current family has no idea what this other supposed family is going to look like when they walk through the door. And Issa sees a woman walk through the door, starts screaming, "Mom," and then starts crying. Issa, do you remember that?

• 30:45Speaker 04

  Not only that particular memory. I still remember every single fact that has happened as yesterday.

• 30:52Ky Dickens?

  He remembers as it were yesterday.

• 30:54Speaker 01

  That lady who came inside the hotel, she didn't come to them because she didn't know them. So she went to the hotel manager and explained like, "I'm here to meet this family whose son is talking about his previous life." And the manager then took her and told her, "Okay, that's the family." So at that time, Issa's family didn't know why he was crying. So the two sisters were going to take him outside to give him a toy to like make him stop crying.

• 31:20Ky Dickens?

  Issa, do you remember what was going through your head at the time?

• 31:22Speaker 04

  I still remember the particular exact moment. I still remember how I felt, but it's quite hard for me to convert it to a word. So.

• 31:31Speaker 01

  Were you happy or were you like?

• 31:34Speaker 04

  It's sort of a mixed feeling, I would say. Oh, happy, sad, emotional.

• 31:40Ky Dickens?

  Issa's sister, Banza, jumps in to talk more about what Issa told her about his emotions that day.

• 31:48Speaker 01

  The day that he died, he didn't tell his mom he was cutting school and going to swim. So he had this guilt. So that kind of transferred to Issa as well. I did a bad thing.

• 32:02Speaker 01

  He's going against my mom.

• 32:06Speaker 01

  That's where the mixed feeling comes from at the moment that they met for the first time.

• 32:14Ky Dickens?

  So the family of TMR is pointed toward the right table and they come and sit down. And I can't imagine being in a situation like this. I mean, how on earth would you break the ice? And Banza, Issa's big sister, who was responsible for getting them all down there, started to go through her notebook and tell TMR's mother all the things that little Issa had said about his past life to see if any of it checked out.

• 32:34Speaker 01

  Issa's sister, Banza, started telling that mother all the things that he's been telling her. And there was a particular one that he has said that, "I attended a wedding," this is before he died, "and that mom bought him a red color shirt." And the mom had said, "Oh, I still have that shirt in my house." She was like, "How does he know that he went to a wedding and that I bought him the shirt?" He talked about two dogs that he had before he went to Candy and he named them. They verified that he had dogs named Jimmy and Chico.

• 33:05Ky Dickens?

  Did they bring up the map on the first day? And what did she say about that location?

• 33:08Speaker 01

  She mentioned that, "Yeah, we used to live there." And then the government or the town took over that land and gave them some money to kind of move out. So she confirmed that.

• 33:17Ky Dickens?

  I cannot believe the map was correct. There's no way to explain that.

• 33:20Speaker 01

  Exactly. I don't know how to explain that.

• 33:22Ky Dickens?

  So Akila, can we just back up, you know, and give TMR just his moment? You know, like what did you discover about him? What was he interested in? What was he like? And how did he pass?

• 33:32Speaker 01

  TMR was 14 years old. Of course, as any other teenager, he had a lot of friends. He was quite popular because he was a cricketer and he was a good cricketer. He was chosen for the Sri Lankan, I think, under 19 national team. He went to India representing Sri Lanka.

• 33:48Ky Dickens?

  So what Issa told his sister, starting at around two and a half, that he was a good cricket player who had gone to India to compete, checked out. It was true.

• 33:56Speaker 01

  So he was pretty famous in his high school and a lot of people knew him in high school and out in the city.

• 34:02Ky Dickens?

  Okay. And then what else? Like what else convinced her, do you think?

• 34:06Speaker 01

  So in the previous life, the last thing that he asked his mom was a guitar. When Issa was pretty young, the first toy that he wanted was a guitar. Issa was asking the previous mother for his cricket bat and the ball.

• 34:22Ky Dickens?

  What did she say?

• 34:24Speaker 01

  She has given it to someone else.

• 34:26Ky Dickens?

  The mother also confirmed that he was an established Candy and dancer and that there was a man in his life that taught him some Japanese and how to use chopsticks. And the names that he remembered of friends and family members were correct. There was just a few things that Dr. Weir Saker was not able to verify. For instance, Issa said his family owned a red car, but they owned a green car. And he also talked about someone named Poti Ayah who fell in the bathroom and then later suffered a fever and died. So those remain a riddle, but almost everything else checked out.

• 34:54Speaker 01

  I think she was more convinced at the time about the whole situation. I think then kind of trusted what was happening was real.

• 35:01Ky Dickens?

  So if this were me, even with all of these unexplained synchronicities and the stack of evidence, I'd be really worried that grief was making me believe something I desperately wanted to be true. But there was something else, something absolutely jaw dropping that may explain why TMR's mother accepted the invitation to meet Issa so quickly. She had been praying for this exact moment for years.

• 35:27Speaker 01

  After he passed, this mother was doing good deeds like giving to the poor and all these things. What she was praying for is not nirvana, but she was praying that her son, the lost son, will be born somewhere else and come to her. The mom, she became a vegetarian because she's doing good deeds, going to the temple, and she's praying for that son to be born somewhere and come to her.

• 35:52Ky Dickens?

  So I want to summarize this here because it seems really important. After TMR died, his mother began praying daily for him to return. She did good deeds. She gave up meat, hoping somehow that all of this would bring him back. And then exactly one year to the day later, Issa was born. And from infancy, Issa could not tolerate meat.

• 36:13Speaker 01

  They tried to feed him meat, the fish, he would puke, almost like an allergic reaction. The smell from a restaurant also like he could not stand.

• 36:21Ky Dickens?

  TMR's mother believes her daily prayers and her good deeds like giving up meat somehow influenced Issa, the child who came next.

• 36:30Speaker 01

  Her belief is that because she became a vegetarian, that can influence Issa to be, you know, a vegetarian.

• 36:36Ky Dickens?

  Now, no one can prove that these are connected. Like we are absolutely in no man's land here. But there's something mind blowing about the possibility that TMR's mother's prayers for his return and the sacrifices she made while waiting for him somehow became tangled up in the consciousness of the child who came back.

• 36:54Speaker 01

  The science cannot really explain this at the moment, but maybe one day we might be able to explain this.

• 36:59Ky Dickens?

  So now, Akila, can you please take us back to the morning that TMR died? And, you know, what happened? And how does that compare to what Issa remembers?

• 37:08Speaker 01

  That day, he left home in the morning, but then he met these friends. And then they told him, "Let's not go to school in the morning. Let's go to the river, have a swim.

• 37:22Speaker 01

  Let's cut school and go there." So that's what they did that morning. And then his body was found around 5:00 PM that day by the police. He was a very good swimmer. So people couldn't understand, like he could not have drowned, you know, that this guy could swim.

• 37:36Ky Dickens?

  And I want to note here that a few boys went swimming and TMR was not the only boy to have drowned.

• 37:41Speaker 01

  Two people died that day. He was one of them.

• 37:44Ky Dickens?

  So just to interrupt really quick, I know that he said the name of the boy he died with when he was little. Was that correct?

• 37:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, exact name.

• 37:50Ky Dickens?

  And some boys who were there lived.

• 37:52Speaker 01

  There were also teenagers, I think 14, 15 years old kids. But what these boys are saying, they all went swimming and Issa and the other boy couldn't swim. They said they got into some current, water current. They got trapped and they died. And we somehow swam into the other side and we survived. So that was their version.

• 38:12Ky Dickens?

  Did the police expect foul play? Did they have any conclusions for how he died?

• 38:17Speaker 01

  No foul play was suspected. But when they found the body, they found that a wallet and all these bus passes and everything was with him. So if somebody is going swimming, you're not going with all these things. They're going to put them aside, clothes aside, and then you go swimming. So that kind of proves that they weren't really swimming.

• 38:35Ky Dickens?

  And then there's what Issa says he remembers from when he was still TMR.

• 38:39Speaker 04

  I suddenly fall and hit my chest on the rock.

• 38:43Speaker 01

  Previous mom told me that when I asked her like how he died and then they said he didn't really drown. When he went into the water, he plunged onto a rock and that kind of damaged his chest area.

• 38:55Ky Dickens?

  I just want to pause here really quick, Akila, because earlier we talked about Issa being born with a dent in his chest. And now it's confirmed that this last person died when a rock hit his chest. So I'm just wondering how you think this is possible?

• 39:09Speaker 01

  But I don't think that we can come to a conclusion at this time. There has to be some kind of a biological, a blueprint. In this blueprint, make this area like this, there's a dent. Why does it happen? Can we search off certain genes to make that happen?

• 39:23Ky Dickens?

  And Dr. Weir Saker made it very clear. He doesn't know. He has all sorts of things he wants to test and wants to look into further. He also talked about genetic testing, just like Dobbs did, like actually exhuming TMR's body and comparing genetic code between TMR and Issa to see if there's a link. There's so much to look into. And until that science is done, everyone is just hypothesizing and guessing.

• 39:43Speaker 01

  We break this down. This is karma. This is consciousness. This is mind. You know, I think maybe there are one thing.

• 39:50Ky Dickens?

  So Issa, going back to that day, you didn't take your wallet out. Like, do you think you were pushed? Is that what you think happened to you?

• 39:56Speaker 04

  I'll have to be neutral in this answer, like whether I've been pushed or not. I'm not disclosing much what I felt like and what I actually remember. I hope you get my point because bygones are bygones. I mean, I don't want any other person to make a discomfort to remember the same.

• 40:15Speaker 01

  We can keep it confidential.

• 40:17Ky Dickens?

  Issa was making a choice not to say publicly because to do so could bring shame onto someone. It could possibly implicate someone. Definitely not something he wants to do. But I can say that Issa would eventually come face to face with the people associated with this tragedy. So we'll pause there and take a quick break.

• 40:37Ky Dickens?

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• 42:00Ky Dickens?

  Welcome back to The Reincarnation Records. So after Isra's first trip to visit the family that he remembers from a past life, he did go back home.

• 42:07Speaker 01

  He got some issues resolved.

• 42:09Ky Dickens?

  Remember that from the time he was born, he had a terrible fear of water.

• 42:12Speaker 01

  After they met with the previous parents, the day he came home, he was able to go to the shower.

• 42:19Ky Dickens?

  In our first two episodes, you met Carol Bowman, who believes that when children talk about past life memories, they can recover from phobias and even heal physical ailments.

• 42:27Speaker 01

  I think he got some closure.

• 42:30Ky Dickens?

  But he didn't completely forget about his last family, the one grieving TMR. In fact, he started visiting them every chance he could get. And with each visit, more details emerged that were difficult to explain away.

• 42:39Speaker 01

  So after the first visit, I think maybe next school or vacation, Isra goes back to candy. And he meets up with one of his best friends who shook hands.

• 42:48Ky Dickens?

  And this is remarkable. This old friend of TMR's goes to shake Isra's hand, but instead of Isra simply giving him the polite, standard handshake, Isra, who's about six years old, launches into the secret handshake that TMR used to do with this friend, something that there's no way Isra could have known.

• 43:07Speaker 04

  It's like a unique handshake. You put two thumbs together and you turn the hand around and then it comes around and we hold the hand and like sort of a thing.

• 43:19Ky Dickens?

  So when you saw this old friend for the first time, you didn't have to be re-taught the handshake. You already knew it?

• 43:26Speaker 04

  Yeah, very naturally I did with him.

• 43:29Ky Dickens?

  And the handshake was just the beginning. Over the visits that followed, Isra kept running into people from TMR's life.

• 43:35Speaker 01

  He went to his previous school when he was about seven years old. And he remembered the teachers, the cricket coach and things like that.

• 43:43Ky Dickens?

  And one thing I often hear about in these incredibly convincing cases is a strong emotion. And an example of this happened to Isra. And it was actually Isra's old friend, with whom he shared the handshake, who thought it would be kind of cool and interesting to show Isra old photos of their friends and classmates to see how Isra would react and what he might remember.

• 44:00Speaker 01

  He started showing some photo albums. And in one of the albums, he sort of looked at the photos and kind of dropped them or punched it. He didn't want to see it. He was like six or seven years old.

• 44:13Ky Dickens?

  And just to note, Dr. Ware Sacra interviewed a ton of these people for his paper.

• 44:16Speaker 01

  And the guy was saying that those are the photos of these guys who took him swimming that day. He had some type of a reaction to seeing these guys. His sister said he just didn't want to look at the pictures of these kids.

• 44:28Ky Dickens?

  And as we touched on above, Isra seems to remember how he passed and who was there, and his strong emotions were tied to these memories.

• 44:35Speaker 01

  When Isra was nine years old, one of those friends who went swimming with him the day he died came to Isra's house with his wife.

• 44:45Ky Dickens?

  They came to visit because they could not get pregnant. They felt that the situation that was shared that day and the two lives lost may have had an effect on their ability to bring life into the world. And they met with Isra in hopes that confronting their shared trauma, clearing the air about what happened, might help all of them move on.

• 45:03Speaker 01

  After he met him, then now they have three children. So we don't know if there's any connection. The husband always says that the reason that I cannot get pregnant is because I was somehow involved in a situation that a mom lost his child.

• 45:18Ky Dickens?

  There was one more thing about this case that is inexplicable, something that I've been turning over in my brain for months. And here's this part of our interview. So Isra, is there anything else that you remember? And I'm not just talking about from TMR's life, but maybe like right after he died.

• 45:33Speaker 04

  I don't know whether how this can be scientific or this is

• 45:37Speaker 01

  It doesn't matter, yeah.

• 45:38Speaker 04

  This is a logical, debatable perspective.

• 45:41Ky Dickens?

  Isra was reticent to share because it couldn't be explained logically or scientifically.

• 45:46Speaker 01

  Logic breaks down right now, so I think we are beyond that. So you can just say what you think, you know?

• 45:50Ky Dickens?

  From my point of view, logic and science are already difficult to apply to this case. But I'd be remiss if I left out parts of the story just because they sounded strange. In fact, there's a long history in research around the unexplained, where people censor out the weirdest details because they're afraid that those details will make the whole story easier to dismiss. And I don't want to add to that history. And Dr. Ware Sacra shares that same instinct.

• 46:14Speaker 01

  I wanted to put out everything I got to know from these people, studying this case. Here you go, you can make up your mind. The day that he passed, there was the apparition.

• 46:25Ky Dickens?

  In case that was difficult to hear, he mentioned an apparition of TMR that happened the day he drowned.

• 46:30Speaker 01

  The day he drowned, one of his friends were going home after school. Let's say it's 2 o'clock, the school's done. So he was going and his home was near this river. And he swears that he met Kilanga, or TMR, wearing the uniform, going the opposite way. And he said hi to him.

• 46:49Ky Dickens?

  So a classmate of TMR's said he saw TMR on the road while he was walking home from school, and that was around 2:00 PM.

• 46:55Speaker 01

  And then this friend, he went home and 5 o'clock news says that TMR died, drowned like 9:00 or 10:00 in the morning. And he's like, no, that could not happen because I met him, I saw him.

• 47:08Ky Dickens?

  And as common in Sri Lanka at that time, TMR's body was brought around in a funeral procession to the homes and friends of loved ones.

• 47:15Speaker 01

  At the funeral, his body was taken to his house. And this friend, he collapsed. It's just like, this is unbelievable. How can you be dead because I met you? He did not believe that he was dead until he saw his body, actually.

• 47:31Ky Dickens?

  Well, and Isra, do you remember after you passed? Do you remember seeing him on the road or anything like that from when you were more in a spirit form?

• 47:39Speaker 04

  Yes, it was not normal, that I would say.

• 47:45Ky Dickens?

  Isra refers to TMR by his full name, Tilanga. And he starts by pointing to the trauma.

• 47:49Speaker 04

  Tilanga didn't knew that he was going to die or he is died. I believe since his chest has it on a rock, he might be unconscious and he was lurking in between.

• 48:07Speaker 01

  Isra didn't know that he was dead.

• 48:09Ky Dickens?

  So Isra, you're kind of saying that you, or Tilanga, I guess, or both of you, were in the in-between, like your consciousness just got up and went about your day?

• 48:18Speaker 04

  What I do believe, since Tilanga didn't know he had been passed away, he tries to act as usual as he is. So he had to go back to home.

• 48:31Ky Dickens?

  He was being motivated by the same fears that would have motivated him in life. And for many teenagers, that's your parents.

• 48:38Speaker 04

  Tilanga's father was a strict father who is putting rules and restrictions. So he knew he had to be back at home after school. So he kept that in his mind and walked to home as usual. Not knowingly, he might think, oh my God, I had to go back home. Now it's the time of millennia.

• 48:58Ky Dickens?

  So just remember that TMR's body is either in or near the river, and Isra is talking about his spirit or consciousness going about its day.

• 49:07Speaker 01

  Basically, yeah, unaware, right?

• 49:10Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 49:10Ky Dickens?

  Isra remembers being an apparition, like a ghost. So let that sink in. And his friend, who swore he saw Isra, wasn't crazy. Before ever even hearing this story himself, Isra had already told his sister Banza that he remembered being on the road, heading home that day, and seeing his friend. Here's Dr. Jim Matlock, an anthropologist who's come by scores of cases like Isra's.

• 49:31Speaker 07

  About 20% of these cases with the children with the past life memories, they'll have memories of the intermission. And oftentimes, these memories include what was done during the intermission. Sometimes they talk about the coming to the new parents, but oftentimes they would talk about being in certain places. In Asia, it's often in a realistic terrestrial setting. In the West, it's heaven. They talk about heaven and meeting Jesus, meeting God.

• 49:58Ky Dickens?

  Dr. Saieda Sadigi at University of Virginia's Department of Perceptual Studies looked at the intermission time across roughly 1,600 solved cases in their database. And in this field, "solved" means a child gave enough specific information that researchers were able to identify a deceased person whose life matched what the child had been saying. And when the team looked across the strongest cases, they found something surprising. The gap between death and rebirth doesn't appear to be random. It changes, depending on how expected or unexpected the death had been.

• 50:31Speaker 06

  There were five levels of unexpectedness, from like no expectation at all to they expected it a few days before, a month before. So we have five levels of unexpectedness.

• 50:42Ky Dickens?

  So like no expectation would be you're six years old, you're completely healthy, something awful happens and you die?

• 50:48Speaker 06

  Exactly, like a gunshot, something like that. So the most expected, which means the person was ill and the

• 50:56Speaker 05

  Unexpected to happen. The median intermission time is 21 months. For the most unexpected, like immediate deaths, the intermission time is 12 months.

• 51:07Ky Dickens?

  The most unexpected deaths correlate with an intermission period of 12 months, which is the exact amount of time between TMR's death and Isra's birth. And Isra himself uses the word unexpected when describing TMR's death. He said TMR didn't even realize he was dead because it happened so suddenly.

• 51:25Speaker 01

  There's some time missing. He might be somewhere else before he was born.

• 51:29Ky Dickens?

  And in the case of Isra, his memories from the intermission period aren't just the apparition thing that happened. His memories extend further into the period.

• 51:37Speaker 01

  Isra told me that he saw his mom, like today, like this life's mom. And then he followed her. He said, I chose this mom.

• 51:45Ky Dickens?

  And Jim Matlock has looked at enough cases to see that where a soul lands doesn't look random at all.

• 51:51Speaker 07

  What it implies is that there's not chance, right? What it implies is that the deceased are helping to determine where they are reborn. They're like that same thing.

• 52:05Ky Dickens?

  TMR's mother is at the Temple of Tooth grieving, begging for her son to come back. And down on the coast at the same time, Isra's mother is at her temple praying for a boy.

• 52:19Speaker 01

  Isra's mom, having two girls, wanted a boy, and she's praying she wants a boy. And the previous mom's praying this boy be born somewhere else and come back to me. So it's like really like amazing. Like I get goosebumps when I talk about this with people. Like, I mean, maybe it's nothing. Maybe it's a coincidence, but context, I don't feel it's a coincidence.

• 52:41Ky Dickens?

  And whatever you make of those two prayers, what happened next is part of what makes this case so moving. Because the thing that Isra's family was most afraid of, that they'd take him to Candy and somehow lose him to this other family, never happened. And his big sister, Bonza, is a huge reason that things worked out the way they did. She was the first person who really listened to what he was saying and thought to write it down before anyone knew whether there was another family out there to find. She advocated for him to be taken to Candy. And because of her persistence, Isra was able to find the family he'd been asking about since he could talk. And both of the women that he considers to be mom have become integral figures in this new extended family.

• 53:20Speaker 04

  My previous life mother, and this mother's connection is very strong. They are like the same family.

• 53:25Ky Dickens?

  He grew up going back to Candy on school holidays. They folded into one family. And when I asked him how he maintains that, two mothers, two lives, one of him, he made it sound really easy.

• 53:35Speaker 04

  Because that's like the same soul, same personality, just that they have shifted the body.

• 53:42Ky Dickens?

  He says he has the same soul, same personality, same love and loyalty to both mothers. He just has a different body.

• 53:49Speaker 04

  I'm widely connected to the entire network that my previous life person had.

• 53:54Ky Dickens?

  He said he's widely connected to the entire network of friends and family who were in his past life. And that brings me back to Carol Bowman and the question she posed at the very beginning of this season. If past life memories are real, can confronting them be healing? Because for Isra, it wasn't just about losing his fear of water. He went back and found the family he'd been longing for. He confronted people connected to that day and somehow made peace with a life that seemed to have ended in fear, guilt, and possibly even anger. And unlike some of the stories we heard last episode, where children seem driven by anger and revenge, Isra folded both of his lives into one. And then there was the boy who went swimming with TMR the day that he died, who was not able to have children when he got married until he went to visit nine-year-old Isra and talked through what happened. And pretty soon after that visit,

• 54:38Ky Dickens?

  went on to have children. And that could obviously be totally tied to luck or coincidence, or it's psychosomatic, or it might have nothing at all to do with Isra. But just for a thought exercise, let's say it does. And that makes me wonder if Carol Bowman's idea about healing might be even bigger than she postulated. What if confronting these memories doesn't just heal the child who has them? But what if forgiveness and reconciliation or closure creates ripples outward through families, relationships, maybe even across lives? And I have no idea how you would ever prove something like that. But in Isra's story, healing doesn't seem to belong to just one person. It seems to have spread. And as far as Dr. Weir Sacra's success in the essay contest that started this whole thing, he didn't win, but he was awarded an honorable mention. And along the way, this careful Harvard neuroscientist

• 55:22Ky Dickens?

  certainly inched over to belief in this case.

• 55:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm convinced, to tell you the truth, I'm convinced with Isra.

• 55:27Ky Dickens?

  There is so much about Isra's case that I'm still turning over in my head. From his memories and the map that he drew and the birth defect, the fear of water that disappeared after he went to Candy, the strange intermission period memories, and the fact that two mothers on different sides of Sri Lanka, each were praying for a boy. But there's another part of the story that opens an entirely different door. Because Isra didn't just seem to remember TMR's life. He seems to still have TMR's abilities and talents, be it cricket or candy and dancing or acting. In some ways, he seemed to pick up where TMR left off, even carrying forward some of the same goals and dreams for his life.

• 56:06Speaker 01

  In the previous life, Tilanga was an actor.

• 56:10Speaker 04

  Tilanga won different national awards in children's drama. In this life, I was fortunate to win jury awards from one of the prestigious awarding ceremonies for the traditional drama.

• 56:21Ky Dickens?

  They both won prestigious awards and national recognition for youth drama.

• 56:25Speaker 04

  The similarity of what I had in my last life, the capacity of acting, I think it has been converted to make myself even sharper in this life.

• 56:34Ky Dickens?

  So you're saying that you don't feel like you had to start from scratch with your acting skills? Like you already had a whole lifetime before to hone your talent?

• 56:42Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah.

• 56:43Ky Dickens?

  So that raises a question I hadn't really considered before this season. Most of us have heard stories of prodigies and savants who just arrive in the world knowing how to do something that they were never taught or exposed to. And actually, in our second season, The Consciousness Cassettes, we explored the possibility that some extraordinary abilities may come from somewhere beyond the brain, like they may be downloaded from an informational field. But what if, in some of these cases, talents and knowledge are coming from somewhere much more specific? What if they're being carried over from a past life? We never had to teach him how to swing the bat, how to catch the ball. He just did it.

• 57:18Speaker 03

  It is interesting when prodigies start at an early age saying, I was once someone else.

• 57:23Ky Dickens?

  And next week, we're exploring two remarkable cases that force us to ask that exact question. What happens when talents cross over? He started saying things like, I used to be tall. I was a tall baseball player. Is it possible that some prodigies might be remembering something from a previous life? When I showed him a picture of the 1927 Yankees, he said, that's me. That's what we're exploring next. Tune in next week as we explore prodigies and past lives.

• 57:54Ky Dickens?

  Thank you to the small team who made this season possible. Our amazing producer, Cooper Mall. Our audio mix and sound design was by Jeremy Cole. Music was by Mike Rbino. My right hand was Selena Kennedy. And I'm Ken Dickens, your executive producer, writer, editor, and host. And if you haven't listened to our last season of the podcast, The Consciousness Cassettes, I highly recommend you do so as it will give even more context to this season. And if you want to go in deeper, subscribe to our Backstage Pass by visiting our website. With it, you'll unlock access to bonus content, Ask Me Anything interviews with myself and guests. You'll be able to connect with other members on our Discord. You'll be able to enjoy the podcast ad-free and hear and see exclusive content from the Telepathy Tapes Vault. Visit our website at thetelepathytapes.com

• 58:38Ky Dickens?

  for more info on how to subscribe to our Backstage Pass. This is The Reincarnation Records from TTT Media.