u/Clifford_Regnaut

This is a short compilation of some of the available research surrounding the topic of life after death. It’s not supposed to be comprehensive, but more like a short summary of what is available. Several of the links below lead to YouTube videos, which are a good way to have an introductory understanding of a certain topic. I suggest the mobile version of the Brave browser for consuming this kind of content, since not only will it automatically block ads, but its Background Play function allows you to use YouTube with the screen off. It's a nice way to make good use of those long commute hours.

This is not a static post and I'll probably change/add more relevant stuff if something interesting shows up.

Why is this post relevant and why should you care? Because it is based on the personal experiences of several different individuals instead of "divine revelations" or "sacred texts." In other words, I'm not just pulling things out of the ether.

Enjoy the journey!

1 - NDEs, which are, in my humble opinion, the best evidence so far.

Learnings from 1,000+ Near-Death Experiences — an interview with Dr. Bruce Greyson, University of Virginia (archive here)

• Bruce Greyson, MD, Professor Emeritus of Psychiatry & Neurobehavioral Sciences at the University of Virginia, is one of the world's leading experts on near-death experiences, and author of “After: A Doctor Explores What Near-Death Experiences Reveal About Life and Beyond.

Best Evidence for Life After Death: World's Largest NDE Study Revealed - an interview with Jeffrey Long (archive here)

• Jeffrey Long, M.D., is a physician practicing the specialty of radiation oncology (use of radiation to treat cancer) in Houma, Louisiana. Dr. Long has served on the Board of Directors of IANDS (International Association for Near-Death Studies), and is actively involved in NDE research.
• In August of 1998, the nonprofit Near Death Experience Research Foundation and coinciding website (nderf.org) was established by Dr. Long and his wife, Jody, to open up a forum for people from all over the world to share their personal experiences as well as a controlled environment in which to collect scientific data on this phenomenon. The website generates more than 400,000 unique pageviews each month and has generated the largest-known database of individual NDE experiences.
• He co-authored Evidence of the Afterlife: The Science of Near-Death Experiences with Paul Perry, and authored God and the Afterlife: The Groundbreaking New Evidence of Near-Death Experience

Rethinking Mortality: Exploring the Intersection of Life and Death - An inverview with Sam Parnia, in which he explains why NDE's are NOT hallucinations. (archive here)

>Dr Sam Parnia is one of the world's leading experts on the scientific study of cardiac arrest, death and near-death experiences. He is director of resuscitation research at the State University of New York in Stony Brook, USA and an honorary fellow at Southampton University Hospital in the UK where he received a PhD in cell biology. He is a former fellow in Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine at the Weill Cornell Medical Center in New York and Hammersmith Hospital in London. Dr Parnia directs a number of international studies focusing on the quality of brain resuscitation following cardiac arrest.

He authored three books:

• What Happens When We Die?: A Groundbreaking Study into the Nature of Life and Death
• Erasing Death: The Science That Is Rewriting the Boundaries Between Life & Death
• Lucid Dying: The New Science Revolutionizing How We Understand Life and Death

I also suggest you listen to people's accounts of their NDE's on YouTube instead of simply reading about them. Doing that made me realize these transformative and structured experiences are unlikely to be mere hallucinations generated by dying brains. Just be aware that some are using NDEs to promote specific religions, even though the elements in the experience do not actually warrant that. I’ve never seen any specific religion being pushed in these experiences, even though certain religious figures may appear in them. Converting to a certain religion is actually done after the fact as a product of the experiencer’s interpretation of the event. 

Recommended article: Near-Death and Out-of-Body Experiences in the Blind: A Study of Apparent Eyeless Vision

2 - Pre-birth / intermission memories. These are not to be confused with past-life memories, although they are related. While past-life memories deal with previous lives in the physical plane, Pre-birth / intermission memories deal with the discarnate existence of the individual.

This is a playlist of people's personal testimonies on YouTube (archive here).

A compilation of cases on OBERF.org / A study about these cases can be found here, on page 9 of the pdf.

Paranormal Aspects of Pre-Existence Memories in Young Children, a paper by philosopher Titus Rivas and others.

Intermission Memories, an article by James G Matlock

>James G Matlock received his Ph.D. in anthropology from Southern Illinois University at Carbondale. He has had a longstanding engagement in parapsychology and has written on the history of parapsychology, the anthropology of religion, postmortem survival, and reincarnation in both anthropology and parapsychology. He has worked at the American Society for Psychical Research and the Rhine Research Center and is currently Research Fellow with the Parapsychology Foundation. He teaches a course on reincarnation online through the Alvarado Zingrone Institute for Research and Education. He is the author of Signs of Reincarnation: Exploring Beliefs, Cases, and Theory (2019) and the co-author, with Erlendur Haraldsson, of I Saw a Light and Came Here: Children’s Experiences of Reincarnation (2016).

You can find an interview with James Matlock here. (archive here). He also co-authored two books: I Saw A Light And Came Here: Children's Experiences of Reincarnation and Signs of Reincarnation: Exploring Beliefs, Cases, and Theory.

Asian Versus Western Intermission Memories: Universal Features and Cultural Variations Another paper by Titus Rivas and Iris Giesler-Petersen.

This is a list of a few books on the subject of pre-birth memories. 

3 - Reports of Reincarnation / Past lives:

Journey of Souls & Destiny of Souls (audiobooks are available on YouTube) by Michael Newton. He was a hypnotherapist who used hypnotic regression to know more about what happens between lives. His works dispel the foolish notion that the spiritual world is a dreamy, nebulous place; instead, it shows that it is a much more vibrant and interesting environment. Interestingly, concepts like pre-life planning and councils, that sometimes appear in NDEs, also show up in his books.

An interview with Michael Newton can be found here (archive here) and another one here (archive here)

Helen Wambach's research on past lives through hypnotic regression.

>Helen Louise Wambach, PhD, nee Stewart (18 August 1925 Glen Ellen, Illinois – 18 August 1985 Larkspur, California).

>She graduated from University of Chicago during WW II and did graduate studies in psychology at Louisiana State University, working with shell-shocked veterans. She later taught psychology at John F. Kennedy University, California.

>In the 1980s Helen launched a group home for troubled teenage girls in New Jersey. Her interest in the paranormal overtook her professional life following the spate of American political assassinations and the death of her only brother. A déjà vu encounter in New Hope, PA finally set her on her path to research and writing on reincarnation.

>Her two books, Reliving Past Lives: The Evidence Under Hypnosis and Life Before Life document the results of her group hypnotherapy sessions into alleged past lives. She co-authored a third book, Dreams of the Future, with historian Chet Snow that was published shortly after her death.

You can find an interview with Helen here: Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3 (archives here, here and here)

Hypnotic regression is a controversial subject and there are doubts about its reliability; however, if a hypnotist manages to get similar info from different subjects without prompting them, that's worth taking into consideration. Regardless of that, apply salt as needed.

Ian Stevenson's / Jim Tucker's research, focused on children who naturally remember past lives. They did not use hypnotic regression.

>Ian Pretyman Stevenson (October 31, 1918 – February 8, 2007) was a Canadian-born U.S. psychiatrist. He worked for the University of Virginia School of Medicine for fifty years, as chair of the department of psychiatry from 1957 to 1967, Carlson Professor of Psychiatry from 1967 to 2001, and Research Professor of Psychiatry from 2002 until his death.

>As founder and director of the university's Division of Perceptual Studies, which investigates the paranormal, Stevenson became known internationally for his research into reincarnation, the idea that emotions, memories, and even physical injuries in the form of birthmarks, can be transferred from one life to another. He traveled extensively over a period of forty years, investigating three thousand cases of children around the world who claimed to remember past lives. His position was that certain phobias, philias, unusual abilities and illnesses could not be fully explained by heredity or the environment. He believed that reincarnation provided a third type of explanation.

Recommended lectures on YouTube:

Scientific Reincarnation Evidence by Dr Ian Stevenson (archive here)

Evidence For Life After Death: Part 1 (archive here) and Part 2 (archive here)

Children Who Claim to Remember Previous Lives with Ian Stevenson (archive here)

A list of Ian Stevenson's books can be found here.

>JIM B. TUCKER, M.D. is Bonner-Lowry Professor Emeritus of Psychiatry and Neurobehavioral Sciences at the University of Virginia. Up until his retirement, he was Director of the UVA Division of Perceptual Studies, where he continued the work of Dr. Ian Stevenson with children who report memories of previous lives. A board-certified child psychiatrist, Dr. Tucker worked with Dr. Stevenson for several years before taking over the research upon Dr. Stevenson’s retirement in 2002.

>Dr. Tucker was born and raised in North Carolina. He attended the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, where he graduated Phi Beta Kappa with a BA degree in psychology in 1982, followed by a Medical Degree four years later. He then received training in general psychiatry and child psychiatry at the University of Virginia. After he completed his training, he stayed in Charlottesville and began a successful private practice in psychiatry.

>Dr. Tucker, who was raised Southern Baptist, had never seriously considered the possibility of past lives before reading one of Dr. Stevenson’s book. After learning about the work, he became intrigued both by the children’s reports of past-life memories and by the prospect of studying them using an objective, scientific approach. He contacted the Division and in 1999 began working there half-time. A year later, he gave up his private practice completely to work at the university. He has now published two books and numerous papers in scientific journals.

He authored the book Before, which is composed of the works Life Before Life and Return to Life.

Interviews:

Dr. Jim Tucker on Children with Past-Life Memories: Is Reincarnation a Real Phenomenon? (archive here)

Famous Psychiatrist Reveals How You Live NOW Affects Your Afterlife (archive here)

4 - Mediumship research:

• Mediumship Research - An interview with Mark Boccuzzi (archive here)
• Mark Boccuzzi is a researcher at the Windbridge Institute, a research center that focuses on psi phenomena.
• Blinded, Peer Reviewed Scientific Studies on Psychic Mediums - A conversation with Dr. Julie Beischel of the Windbridge Institute. (Archive here)
• Mediumship accuracy: A quantitative and qualitative study with a triple-blind protocol.
• This life, Next life. A documentary by Keith Parsons.

5 - After-death communication

• Communication with discarnates after their parting. «An After-Death Communication (ADC) is a spiritual experience, which occurs when you are contacted directly and spontaneously by a deceased family member or friend, without the use of psychics, mediums, rituals, or devices of any kind. It's estimated that 60-120 million Americans - 20-40% of the population of the United States - have had one or more ADC experiences. Therefore, ADCs provide convincing new evidence for life after death.»
• Two of those responsible for making this field popular are Bill and Judy Guggenheim. Together they wrote Hello from Heaven: A New Field of Research-After-Death Communication Confirms That Life and Love Are Eternal and founded the «The ADC Project in May, 1988 to conduct the first in-depth research of After-Death Communications. In their initial research, they interviewed 2,000 people and collected more than 3,300 firsthand accounts from people who believe they have been contacted by a loved one who had died.»
• adcrf.org also compiles several cases of such cases. You can find them on https://www.adcrf.org/new_stories.html
• You can find several interviews with Bill Guggenheim on YouTube:
• Helping Parents Heal welcomed Bill Guggenheim, the co-author of 'Hello From Heaven', on August 3rd! (archive here).

For more resources on the topic of the afterlife, you can also check the pinned post.