The whole point of this NYT article seems to be point out a religious fad.
In that earlier incarnation, “I was going along, going along, going along, and I got eaten,” said Dr. [Paul] DeBell, who has a private practice on the Upper East Side where he specializes in hypnotizing those hoping to retrieve memories of past lives. Dr. DeBell likes to reflect on how previous lives can alter one’s sense of self. He, for example, is more than a psychiatrist in 21st-century Manhattan; he believes he is an eternal soul who also inhabited the body of a Tibetan monk and a conscientious German who refused to betray his Jewish neighbors in the Holocaust.
I gotta say, I love that that’s the quotation from him they decided to go with.
According to data released last year by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, a quarter of Americans now believe in reincarnation. (Women are more likely to believe than men; Democrats more likely than Republicans.) Julia Roberts recently told Elle magazine that though she was raised Christian, she had become “very Hindu.” Ms. Roberts believes that in her past life she was a “peasant revolutionary,” and said that when her daughter sits in a certain way she knows “there’s someone there I didn’t get the benefit of knowing … It’s an honor for me to continue to shepherd that.”
Well, if Julia Roberts told it to Elle magazine, that’s proof enough for me!
It’s a pretty credulous article, but all it purports to do is describe a trend, so I’m not sure how much I can fault it for that. They did find a psychology professor — Dr. Jim Tucker of the University of Virginia — to say a bit about how the notion of past lives is “scientifically dubious” about halfway into the three-page article, and near the end it says that the research being done on the topic is “on the fringes of legitimate science.” But of course, they go back to that same psychology professor at the end and it turns out that “he likes to keep an open mind.”
“There can be something that survives after the death of the brain and the death of the body that is somehow connected to a new child,” he said. “I have become convinced that there is more to the world than the physical universe. There’s the mind piece, which is its own entity.”
This trend doesn’t sound like a truthful epiphany to me. It just sounds like white Americans trying to appropriate some pieces of Asian culture in an attempt to feel more exotic, spiritual, and special. I’d love to sit down with Julia Roberts and see how much she actually knows about Hinduism. I suspect that she and the many others who claim to have “past lives” or believe in reincarnation don’t know much of anything about what it means to be Hindu, Buddhist, or any other religion they’re laying claim to. They just know it gets a lot of admiring coos from their yoga classmates.
TaiChi on 
