Children Recall Fascinating Past Lives, Heart Attack Doctor Shows Death Is Not The End, Man Exposes a Bike Theft Ring On His Own
Inspiring News Articles
October 20, 2024
Hey wonderful friends,
Welcome to our inspirational newsletter! At PEERS, we’ve documented countless stories and news articles that prove human creativity has already developed the tools necessary to transform society for the better. Here are the latest inspiring news articles we've summarized:
- stories of children who recall past lives in fascinating detail
- increasing scientific support for the idea that consciousness in some form exists beyond bodily life
- a brush with death that transformed a journalist's perspective
- a cyclist who created a website that exposed an international bike theft ring
- how Columbia is addressing violent crime with dignity and forgiveness
- South African scholar Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela's work exploring ways to nurture deep empathy between victims and perpetrators of conflict, and more!
Each inspiring excerpt is taken verbatim from the media website listed at the link provided. If any link fails, click here. The key sentences are highlighted in case you just want to skim. Please spread the inspiration and have a great one!
With faith in a transforming world,
Mark Bailey and Amber Yang for PEERS and WantToKnow.info
Special note: In a world facing significant challenges, our current stories about the world are falling short. Who are we? Why are we here? What are we truly capable of? Check out our latest Substack article on the incredible phenomena of near-death experiences, and how they reveal insights about who we are and what unites us across our differences.
The children who remember their past lives
May 2, 2024, Washington Post
https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2024/05/02/children-past-lives/
In Oklahoma in 2009, 5-year-old Ryan Hammons would lie awake at night and plead: “Can I go home? Can I see my mom?” or “What happened to my children?” He was lying beside [his mother] one night, Cyndi Hammons remembers, when he said that he needed to tell her something. “I think I used to be somebody else,” he whispered. Ryan was waking up sobbing at night and describing things his mother couldn’t fathom: that he remembered living in Hollywood in a big white house with a swimming pool. That he once had three sons and a younger sister. That he drove a green car, and his wife drove a black one. Not long after, Ryan saw a man he recognized in one of his library books, a peripheral figure in a photograph of six men: “That’s me!” he told his mother. With the help of a production crew from the A&E series “The Unexplained,” they were able to identify the man as Marty Martyn, a movie extra and talent agent who died in 1964. Cyndi and Ryan traveled to California to meet Martyn’s daughter, Marisa Martyn Rosenblatt, who was 8 when her father died. She ultimately confirmed many of Ryan’s statements about Marty Martyn. She didn’t know that her father had driven a green car, or that he had a younger sister, but it turned out both claims were accurate. Marty Martyn’s death certificate cited his age as 59, but Ryan insisted he had died at 61; census records and marriage listings ... confirmed this, as did Martyn’s daughter. Since the 1960s, more than 2,200 children from across the world have described apparent recollections from a previous life. Sometimes a child presents enough identifying information for relatives or researchers to pinpoint a deceased person, but ... about a third of the cases in the database do not include such a match. The most pronounced and convincing cases ... tend to occur in children between the ages of 2 and 6. They might suddenly describe places they have never been, people they have never met, sometimes using words or phrases that seem beyond their vocabulary. Their descriptions of past-life recollections often fade away entirely by the time the child turns 7 or 8.
Note: A 2006 University of Virginia study found that memories of past lives are not uncommon in kids. These fascinating recollections are all documented in a database maintained by the Division of Perceptual Studies at the University of Virginia School of Medicine. Explore more positive stories like this about the mysterious nature of reality.
Heart Attack Doctor: Science Shows Death Is Not the End
July 25, 2024, Evolution News
https://evolutionnews.org/2024/07/heart-attack-doctor-science-shows...
Sam Parnia’s medical specialty at the New York University Langone Health System is resuscitation. He also directs large clinical studies of heart attacks (cardiac arrest). That has brought him into contact with a lot of people who are on the brink. It has also strengthened his conviction that near-death experiences show that death is not the end of human consciousness. Hence his new book, Lucid Dying (Hachette 2024). From early on, he was puzzled by the relationship between the mind and the brain. He came to see that the message “from science” was not what he had been led to expect. "Although life and death remain a mystery, science is showing that contrary to what some philosophers, doctors, and scientists have argued for centuries, neither biological nor mental processes end in an absolute sense with death," [he said]. "There is much more to be discovered, but science does ... suggest that our consciousness and selfhood are not annihilated when we cross over into death and into the great unknown. In death, we may also come to discover that each of our actions, thoughts, and intentions in life, from the most minute, to the most extreme, do matter." Many believe that science proves — and must prove — that life beyond death is impossible. But it is difficult for science to refute, for example, veridical near-death experiences, where experiencers recount events that they could not have observed under natural circumstances.
Note: Dr. Parnia was the lead investigator of a study revealing that one in five people who survive CPR after cardiac arrest recall vivid near-death experiences, despite appearing unconscious and on the brink of death. Read about a boy named Eddie who, after recovering from a severe fever in the hospital, described seeing his deceased relatives in heaven, including his sister Teresa. His family later learned that she had died in a car accident the day before. Explore more positive stories like this about near-death experiences.
Sebastian Junger Is Reporting Live From the Brink of Death
May 21, 2024, New York Times
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/21/books/in-my-time-of-dying-sebastian...
Over the course of his reporting career, Sebastian Junger has had several close calls with death. In the introduction to his memoir, “In My Time of Dying” ... he describes his own near-drowning while surfing. On June 16, 2020, Junger found himself face-to-face with mortality in a way he’d never been. One minute he was enjoying quiet time with his wife at a remote cabin on Cape Cod in Massachusetts; the next, he was in excruciating pain from a ruptured aneurysm. “It never crossed my mind to start believing in God,” [said Junger]. “But what did happen was I was like, maybe we don’t understand the universe on a fundamental level. Maybe we just don’t understand that this world we experience is just one reality and that there’s some reality we can’t understand that’s engaged when we die. All this stuff happens — ghosts and telepathy and the dead appearing in the rooms of the dying — that’s consistent in every culture in the world. Maybe anything’s possible. If there’s ever an example of “anything can happen,” it’s the universe popping into existence from nothing. Two nights before I went to the hospital, I dreamed that I had died and was looking down on my grieving family. Because I had that experience, which I still can’t explain, it occurred to me that maybe I had died and ... was a ghost. I went into this very weird existential Escher drawing. Am I here, or not? At one point, I said to my wife, “How do I know I didn’t die?” She said, “You’re here, right in front of me. You survived.””
Note: Sebastian Junger is an American journalist, author and filmmaker focused on wartime issues. Explore more positive stories like this about near-death experiences.
After Police Didn’t Take it Seriously He Exposed an International Bike Theft Ring on His Own
August 30, 2024, Good News Network
https://www.goodnewsnetwork.org/after-police-didnt-take-it-seriously...
Mr. Brian Hance is urgently attempting to get the police to investigate what he says is an organized international bicycle smuggling ring depriving hundreds of Americans of their high-end bikes. The police in counties like Sonoma, Santa Clara, and Santa Cruz didn’t listen to him. “We’re not Interpol” they would say. Mr. Hance took up the charge himself, putting together dossiers of evidence on a one-man mission to prevent bike theft in America. Submitting them to various district attorneys, he watched as several key cogs in a giant machine of sophisticated bike theft and smuggling were dismantled. Hance runs Bike Index, a website where bike owners can register their bikes with serial numbers and photos to help ensure that if they’re ever stolen, there’s a community of people who may be able to help find it. There are 1.3 million bikes on the site. In the spring of 2020, scores of high-end bikes began appearing as missing on Bike Index, and Hance began seeing pictures on Facebook and Instagram of bikes for sale that matched the descriptions of those listed as stolen. Hance urged theft victims to report the crime in as detailed a way as possible to build a case file, and then ask the police to contact him so he could explain what he had stumbled upon. Finally, a major development occurred when the Attorney General’s office of Colorado indicted eight people on 227 counts of theft, including 29 bike shop burglaries. All eight pled guilty.
Note: Read about Iceland’s "bike whisperer," the man who finds stolen bicycles and helps thieves change. Explore more positive stories like this about repairing criminal justice.
Latin America has two models for eradicating violent crime. One is rooted in dignity and forgiveness.
April 29, 2024, Christian Science Monitor
https://www.csmonitor.com/Commentary/the-monitors-view/2024/0429...
Latin America is the world’s most dangerous region due to cartel and gang violence. It has 9% of the global population but one-third of the world’s homicides. Kidnapping and extortion are on the rise. The trend is driving a turn toward increasingly militarized solutions. El Salvador, for example, has incarcerated some 75,000 people – nearly 2% of its population – in recent years on suspicion of being involved in gangs. In Colombia, by contrast, exchanging the threat of arrest for dialogue is a key part of the government’s painstaking strategy of negotiating peace simultaneously with some 20 armed factions to end 60 years of conflict. That process, known as Paz Total (“total peace”) and launched less than two years ago by President Gustavo Petro, has been marked by reversals and unintended effects. But a key distinction lies in its emphasis on both empathy and the rule of law. The strategy’s first example of “restorative incarceration,” launched earlier this month, shows how. In exchange for admitting guilt for violent acts and seeking forgiveness from victims and the families, 48 military and former guerrilla leaders are now serving “sentences” by planting trees and helping heal the communities they once dominated through fear. “We’re going to sow life to try to make amends and build peace,” [said] Henry Torres, a former army general. As Colombia’s new attorney general put it, “our mission will be ... a mission for the dignity and well-being of our people.” Peace requires patience, said Juan Manuel Santos, a former president who negotiated a 2016 peace accord with Colombia’s main guerrilla faction that still serves as a template for Mr. Petro’s broader peace plan. “You need to convince, to persuade, to change people’s sentiments, to teach them how to forgive, how to reconcile,” he told The Harvard Gazette.
Note: A prison in Brazil with low recidivism rates uses a humane approach, where there are no armed guards and inmates have the keys to their own cells. Explore more positive stories like this about repairing criminal justice.
A prize for repairing riven societies
June 7, 2024, Christian Science Monitor
https://www.csmonitor.com/Commentary/the-monitors-view/2024/0607...
This year’s winner of the Templeton Prize, which highlights discoveries that yield "new insights about religion" ... was given to Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela, a South African scholar who has explored ways to nurture deep empathy between victims and perpetrators of conflict. Her particular focus is on the power of forgiveness to expunge hatred and historical harms. Such an approach is now widely acknowledged as essential because of wars – from Ukraine and Gaza to Myanmar and Sudan – that have resulted in extensive harm to innocent civilians. Serving on South Africa’s post-apartheid Truth and Reconciliation Commission in the 1990s, Dr. Gobodo-Madikizela gained insights into both the needs of those who suffered under decades of apartheid and the motivations of those who upheld racial separation through violence. Her life work, she said following the award announcement Tuesday, involves understanding “the conditions necessary to restore the values of what it means to be human.” “There’s no better time to shove away prejudices, pull up a chair with a supporter of that party you can’t stand, and talk with them about how we can work together for a brighter future,” wrote Ian Siebörger, a senior lecturer of linguistics at Rhodes University. Dr. Gobodo-Madikizela offers ways to avoid “the passing on of grievance and a sense of victimhood from one generation to the next.” The “reparative quest,” she told Time magazine this week, is “a constant journey to repair and to heal” through atonement and forgiveness. It is not a singular moment. Victims and perpetrators move each other beyond the boundaries of their own experiences.
Note: To explore more stories of forgiveness and healing in the face of atrocities, check out our powerful interview with Marina Cantacuzino, journalist and founder of The Forgiveness Project. Explore more positive stories like this about healing the war machine.
Iceland’s ‘bike whisperer’: the vigilante who finds stolen bicycles – and helps thieves change
December 25, 2023, The Guardian (One of the UK's Leading Newspapers)
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2023/dec/25/bicycle-jesus...
It all started in 2019, when Bjartmar Leósson started to see a rise in bike theft in Reykjavík. The bus driver and self-confessed “bike nerd” decided to start tracking them down and returning them to their rightful owners. Four years and, he estimates, hundreds of salvaged bikes later, the 44-year-old has developed a reputation in the Icelandic capital among cyclists and potential bike thieves. Known as the Reykjavík “bike whisperer”, people across his home city turn to him for help to find their missing bicycles, tools and even cars. Often, he says, bike thieves hand over bikes without being asked and some former bike thieves have started to help him. Now when somebody loses their bike it can take as little as 48 hours to track it down on his Facebook page, Hjóladót ofl. tapað fundið eða stolið (Bicycle stuff etc lost, found or stolen), updated every few hours with missing and found items and which has more than 14,500 members. “It’s not only me,” he says. “Many times someone sees a bike hidden in a bush, takes a picture and then someone else comments ‘hey that’s my bike’. So everyone’s looking out.” Now when people’s bikes get stolen, he says, the police direct them to his Facebook page. When there is a finder’s fee he gives it to people living in [a homeless] shelter. He he says he now sees the bike theft problem is often driven by addiction, aided by long rehab waiting lists and closures during the summer.
Note: Explore more positive stories like this in our comprehensive inspiring news articles archive focused on solutions and bridging divides.
Related Inspiring News From Years Past
Was a World War II pilot reincarnated in a body of a little boy?
December 22, 2009, CNN Larry King Live
https://web.archive.org/web/20101021224312/https://edition.cnn...
[Guest Host Jeff Probst]: Was a World War II fighter pilot reincarnated in a little boy's body? Bruce [and Andrea] Leininger say yes. They are authors of Soul Survivor: The Reincarnation of a World War II Fighter Pilot. Their book describes how their son James had memories of a WWII pilot who was killed in battle more than 60 years ago. James is now 11 years old. Andrea, when did you first realize that ... James was having ideas or stories that he wanted to share about this? Andrea Leininger: [It] started about two weeks after James' second birthday. He had a -- a night terror, which he had never had before. And this first nightmare began a series of nightmares that started occurring every other night, every night. And after several months of this, he was having a nightmare and ... I was able to finally determine what he was saying. And he was saying, "airplane crash on fire, little man can't get out." Probst: Bruce, even at three, he was -- James was drawing pictures of an airplane crashing. Bruce Leininger: By the time he started drawing those pictures, he'd been talking about this ... for several months. And he essentially gave us three items of information over about a three month period. One, he gave us the name of the ship, which I verified through research on the Internet. "Natoma Bay." He gave us a name Natoma. About a month later, he gave us [the] name of a guy he said he flew with. When we asked him if there was anyone else in his ... dream that he could remember. Jack -- Jack Larson.
Note: Jack Larson was confirmed to be a member of the crew of the Natoma Bay, who when contacted, remembered the incident of the crash described by this boy. Watch an excellent, intriguing four-minute Fox News clip on this fascinating case. Explore more positive stories like this in our comprehensive inspiring news articles archive focused on solutions and bridging divides.
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