I have never doubted that we live more than once. Call it forty years of sitting with people who are grieving, or forty years of glimpsing things during meditation and mediumship that simply don’t fit into one lifetime but somewhere along the way, the idea that the human spirit returns, again and again, in body after body, stopped being a belief for me and became something closer to a fact of my own experience. What I want to explore here is bigger than my own certainty, though. I want to look at why so many cultures, so far apart from one another, arrived at the same conclusion and then I want to be honest about the part of this picture I still wrestle with: karma.
A Thread Running Through Every Culture
What strikes me most is not that reincarnation exists as an idea, but how many unconnected civilisations arrived at it independently.
In Hinduism, the soul the atman is understood to move through countless bodies on its way back to union with the divine. In Buddhism, there is no fixed, permanent self at all, and yet a stream of consciousness, shaped by karma, continues from one life into the next. Jainism and Sikhism both carry versions of the same thread. Even the Dalai Lama, when asked whether reincarnation belongs to any one faith, was direct about it,
“Reincarnation is not an exclusively Hindu or Buddhist concept, but it is part of the history of human origin.”
Travel west, and the thread doesn’t disappear it just changes its clothes. Pythagoras taught the transmigration of souls in ancient Greece, and Plato wrote of the soul choosing its next life before drinking from the River Lethe and forgetting all that came before. The Druids of pre-Christian Britain and Gaul were recorded by Roman writers as believing firmly that the soul does not die but passes into a new body. Within Judaism, the mystical tradition of Kabbalah speaks of gilgul the soul’s cycle of return, sometimes to correct what was left unfinished. Even early Christianity had voices, like Origen of Alexandria, who entertained the pre-existence of the soul, before later councils closed that door.
Across Africa, many indigenous traditions hold that ancestors are reborn into their own family lines, particularly into children who arrive soon after an elder’s passing. Across the Americas, numerous Indigenous nations carry the same conviction in different words. None of these cultures were comparing notes. And yet they kept landing in the same place: that we are not a single, one-shot existence, but a spirit that returns to learn, and returns again.
To me, that convergence matters. When people who never met, who spoke different languages and worshipped in different ways, all arrive independently at the same deep intuition, I don’t think that’s coincidence. I think it’s something the soul itself already knows, surfacing again and again through whatever culture it finds itself born into.
Why We Return
If we accept that the spirit comes back, the next question is ‘why’. And nearly every tradition answers it the same way, to learn, to grow, to overcome, and to aspire toward something greater than we currently are.
I find this framing far more useful than picturing life as a single exam we either pass or fail. One lifetime is not enough to master patience, or courage, or forgiveness, or unconditional love not really. A soul that struggled with pride in one life might choose humility as its next classroom. A soul that never learned to receive love might be born into circumstances designed, gently, to teach exactly that. Nothing wasted, nothing final. Just the slow, patient unfolding of a much longer education than any single lifetime could hold.
And this isn’t only about us. I believe animal spirits share this same journey of growth and connection with us not as lesser beings passing through our lives by accident, but as fellow travellers on their own path of awareness and love, bound to us by real and often ancient ties.
Karma, Where I Start to Struggle
Now to the part I find harder and I think it’s worth being honest about that, rather than pretending it’s all settled in my mind.
Karma, in its traditional sense, is simply the law of cause and effect stretched out across lifetimes: what we do returns to us, not as punishment handed down by some cosmic judge, but as the natural echo of our own actions. It’s an elegant idea. It suggests a universe with moral coherence that kindness ripples outward and eventually back, that harm we cause eventually meets us again in some form, somewhere, until we learn from it.
But here is where it gets uncomfortable for me. I have sat with people going through the very worst of what life can bring devastating illness, the loss of a child, poverty, abuse and I have heard, more than once, someone else’s well-meaning voice suggesting that this suffering is somehow ‘deserved’. That it’s a debt being repaid. That somewhere, in some life we can’t remember or verify, we did something to earn this.
I think that reading of karma can be genuinely harmful. It can disempower exactly the people who most need strength and compassion in that moment. It can quietly blame the sick for their sickness, the grieving for their grief, the abused for their abuse and that, to me, has nothing to do with spiritual growth. It has the flavour of punishment dressed up in spiritual language, and I don’t believe punishment is what any loving universe is for.
Finding a Truer Version of the Teaching
So where does that leave the concept? I don’t think the answer is to throw karma out. I think the answer is to recover what it actually meant before it got flattened into a kind of cosmic scorekeeping.
The Dalai Lama, again, offers something closer to what I believe is the real teaching karma not as personal punishment, but as ‘shared’ responsibility, woven through all of us together:
“The universe that we inhabit and our shared perception of it are the results of a common karma.”
That reframes everything for me. Karma isn’t a ledger with your name alone on it, tallying up sins and debts to be individually repaid through suffering. It’s closer to an ocean we all swim in together the accumulated weight of every choice, every kindness and every cruelty, human and otherwise, shaping the conditions we’re all born into. Suffering, in that view, is not proof of a private crime. Much of it is simply the shared condition of being alive in an imperfect, interconnected world and what matters spiritually is not ‘why’ the suffering arrived, but what we do with it now, today, in this life we’re actually living.
Buddhism itself is far less fatalistic about this than popular culture gives it credit for. The teaching was never “you deserve this.” It was closer to: ‘your present choices matter more than your past ones’. Karma is not a life sentence it is a description of momentum, and momentum can always be redirected. A soul is never trapped by what came before; it is only ever standing, right now, at a fresh point of choice. That, to me, is the empowering version of karma not a chain around the ankle, but an invitation to change direction starting today.
I’d also gently push back on the idea that suffering always needs an explanation at all. Sometimes a difficult life is not repayment for anything it is simply the chosen curriculum of a brave soul, one that selected hardship deliberately, before birth, because it is often through our hardest chapters, not our easiest ones, that we grow the most. That is a very different thing from punishment. It is closer to courage.
The Evidence That Won’t Quite Go Away
For those who want more than philosophy, there is a genuinely fascinating body of research that deserves more attention than it gets.
Beginning in the 1960s, the psychiatrist Dr. Ian Stevenson, working out of the University of Virginia, began formally investigating children often as young as two or three who spoke, unprompted, about detailed memories of a previous life. His landmark 1966 study, ‘Twenty Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation’. was the beginning of what became a lifetime’s work: eventually documenting many hundreds of cases across dozens of countries, with real names, real dates, and real families independently verified.
One of his earliest and strongest cases involved a young Indian girl named Swarnlata Mishra, who at the age of three began singing unfamiliar songs and performing unfamiliar dances from a region of India she had never visited dances later confirmed to belong to a specific, real family more than a hundred miles from her own.
Stevenson’s work continues today under Dr. Jim Tucker at the University of Virginia’s Division of Perceptual Studies. One of the best documented modern cases is that of a young American boy, James Leininger, who from the age of two spoke of being a fighter pilot shot down during the Second World War. He gave the name of the aircraft carrier the ‘Natoma Bay’ and named a specific friend, Jack Larsen, details that were later verified to match the real, identified pilot the family eventually traced.
In roughly 30 percent of the cases researchers have studied, children were found to carry a birthmark or birth defect that corresponded to a fatal wound described in the previous life and in nearly fifty of these cases, an actual autopsy report was later obtained confirming the precise location of the wound matched the birthmark exactly.
None of this constitutes final proof and I don’t think it needs to, to be worth taking seriously. What it offers is something rarer: patient, careful, independently documented testimony that the boundary between one life and the next may be far thinner than modern Western culture assumes.
Where This Leaves Me
I return to where I began. I believe, without reservation, that we are not one life but many that the spirit travels on, gathering wisdom the way a traveller gathers stories, shaped by every land it has passed through. What I no longer accept is the version of karma that turns suffering into a sentence. I believe instead in a karma of connection rather than punishment one shared ocean, not individual courtrooms and in a soul, human or animal, that is never finished, never fixed, and never, ever alone on the path.
We do not return to be punished. We return to become.
By Tony Stockwell
