When Children Remember Past Lives

The boy from Oklahoma who believed he was a Hollywood star from the 30s

This is a live presentation featuring Dr. Jim Tucker of The University of Virginia—one of the world’s foremost researchers in the phenomenon of children with past life memories. Also featured is one of Dr. Tucker’s subjects, Ryan Hammonds, and his mother Cyndi.

Video

Transcript

Adam Jacobs: So welcome to the very first Live and in-person recording of Beyond Belief (now Feed Your Head). My name is Adam Jacobs and I'm the senior editor of The Project of Beyond Belief, which also includes interviews such as the one we're about to have and it gives me enormous pleasure in this case to be speaking with Dr. Jim Tucker, who has joined us all the way from the University of Virginia where he works. He is the head of the Division of Perceptual Studies. And in order to frame, first of all, welcome, welcome, and thank you so much for being here. I have a series of questions that I'd like to ask you that I'm sure everybody is also interested in. And to frame it, I wanted to tell you a little bit about my science education when I was growing up, which I think is probably common.

At first, I learned from Copernicus that the earth is not particularly special as a place. I later learned from Darwin and with the caveat that what I was taught is not necessarily what these people actually said, that we were just fancy apes. Then Freud came along and said, most of what you think is pretty lowly and base, which isn't so inspiring. There was an experiment done by Miller and Urey in which they concluded that some lightning hit a pond millions of years ago and life began, and I believe that I accepted that totally because that's what I was taught in my 10th-grade biology class.

And finally, even in modern times, Richard Dawkins has basically taught us that all a human being is basically some genes that are trying to perpetuate themselves. So what we have is a pretty depressing picture of what humans are placed in the universe and what awaits us. Okay. Then later in life, I discovered your work, the work of your division and others like you, and for the first time was able to perceive that there are real scientists out there who were doing work that challenges some of this, what I would call radical physicalist paradigm of the way that the world is. I know there's a long and rich history of the department, but I wonder for the sake of the crowd and the virtual audience, can you give us just a few sentences about what you do and how it came about?

Jim Tucker: Sure. So at the University of Virginia, the chairman of the Department of Psychiatry, way back in the late 1950s became intrigued by a phenomenon of young children in various parts of the world who said they remembered a past life and he started investigating these cases and got more and more intrigued to eventually step down as chair of the department to focus on this work full time, not just with the children's past life memories, but other work as well, and the work has still been going. So he started this small research division in 1967, which we now call the Division of Perceptual Studies, and we've now studied over 2,500 cases of children who report memories of a past life were Ian Stevenson who started this work, typically went to places where you could find the cases, which was places with a belief in reincarnation like India, Thailand, and so forth.

These days, we don't have to find the cases because they find us. So with the internet, we hear from over a hundred American families a year telling us about their child reporting the memory of a past life. So our work becomes trying to assess what to make of this phenomenon. So is there evidence in this phenomenon that would suggest that these memories have carried over and that memories and mind can continue after the body dies?

So what we try to do is if a child talks a lot about a past life, we make a record of it and we try to see does that match somebody who actually lived in the past and in the strongest cases? And you're going to with our special guest star, hear about one in a few minutes. We see that there is strong evidence that a child does have memories that came from a past life. Our division also looks at other ways of approaching this question of can consciousness survive after the body dies? So Bruce Grayson is one of the world's leading experts on near-death experiences, and we also have a research lab that looks at people trying to do various psychic tasks, ESP tasks, trying to sort out what the brain is doing while the mind is trying to do these exceptional things. So that's some of what we do in our division,

Adam Jacobs: And I was fortunate enough to pay a visit a couple of months ago, so I got to see firsthand what you do, and it's extremely impressive. And I think that if people saw how serious it is in terms of its research, I think they would be taken aback and pleasantly surprised that there was another story out there. So in thinking about the skepticism that I know exists in the world about this, I went all the way back to Carl Sagan, who's extremely well-known. He wrote a book called The Demon Haunted World in 1996, and he said the following thing, he said: “At the time of this writing, there are three claims in the parapsychology field, which in my opinion deserve serious study with the third being that young people sometimes report details of a previous life, which upon checking turn out to be accurate and which they could not have known about in any other way than reincarnation.” So that's pretty wild that he would be open to that to begin with considering who he was.

Jim Tucker: Right. And the book, the Demon Haunted World was essentially an argument against anything sort of paranormal or spiritual and really was a physicalist kind of thing. But he had enough of an open mind to say, that sometimes things don't fit the way we think they do. It's worth exploring. And this was one of the items he mentioned.

Adam Jacobs: So the thing I wanted to ask you was what do you think he would say at this point, given it's been 30 years, do you think that the research would be convincing to him? Do you think he would've changed his mind about his perception of the universe?

Jim Tucker: Well, I can't say I could read his mind, but there are plenty of people where it does make them stop and think. So we hear from people in various scientific fields who are leading very mainstream careers but are also open to these things, and you never know who's going to be open to it, partly because of their own personal experiences, but also reading Ian Stevens' work or reading some of our more recent work and deciding, wow, this means something and it's worth looking into.

Adam Jacobs: Right. I think that my perception is that people are becoming more open to it. I could be wrong. I think as we've discussed actually in the past, I think it needs to reach a much broader audience, and I'm hoping to help with this and other means to bring that about. But taking a step back, could you explain this phenomenon in any other way besides…he says it has to be reincarnation. Is there any other phenomena that could explain this? Could it be ESP clairvoyance? Could these people be tapping into some…as it's called the Akashic field, that there's this field of consciousness out there? Or would you say that there is evidence that it specifically must be reincarnation?

Jim Tucker: Well, that's sort of a complicated question to explore. So first of all, there's the question, do you accept that these cases are valid and reasonable? People can differ on that? I think we can now say we have good evidence that some children do have memories from a past life. So then the question becomes, okay, how do we interpret that? And you're right, the most straightforward solution is that they have memories from a past life because they lived that past life. But there are other possibilities.

And I think if there is this realm of consciousness that is connected to the physical world, but also separate from it, it may well be too complex for us to fully understand. So yes, I mean, you mentioned ESP or Akashic record or whatever. I think, again, as you'll see in a few minutes, on an individual level, that explanation doesn't make sense because in these cases you see a child who is very emotionally attached to these memories, which are as strong as any memories that they have or will ever have.

I mean, they're extremely intense. They are not just repeating facts from a life, but the perspective of somebody who lived and died, which includes the attachments and love they had for other people. So it certainly seems to be that in one way or another, they lived that life in the past. Now, it doesn't mean it's the same personality. We all know that personality comes from our genes and our environment and various things, but there is also this larger piece that may experience being a personality in one life and then experience being a different personality in another life. But there is this continuation.

Adam Jacobs: And getting a little philosophical for a second to these children. Obviously, we should emphasize that it's very unlikely that a two or 3-year-old is going to start coming up with all these details of someone else's life in some other place. It just seems so counterintuitive. And that's part of the reason I assume that you study kids, it's so unbiased. But do they ever talk about what happens in between these two lives? And I'm also curious to know if they ever say what it means, why are they being reincarnated?

Jim Tucker: Well, about 20% of them do talk about events between lives, and it varies. Some of them will talk about staying near where the previous person died or where the previous family is. They may talk about remembering the funeral of themselves. Others talk about going to another room like heaven. Some of the American kids will use the word heaven. For others, it's not entirely pleasant what they go this other real, there may be various longings or hardships or so forth. And then some of them will talk about preparing to come back. And some say they had a choice of who to come back to, others say not. And then some will describe seeing their parents and choosing them and seeing things that they did that the parents then confirmed that in fact, they did do before the child was born.

Adam Jacobs: Which seems pretty hard to predict. It's hard to make that up. There is an interesting phenomenon, which seems again, so unlikely and so counterintuitive that there are birthmarks on kids that correspond to specific wounds that the deceased in their previous life had. And I know from your book that Dr. Stevenson quoted the Nobel Prize-winning physiologist, Charles Rees, I think is how you pronounce it, who said, “I never said that this was possible. I only said that it was true.” And then Dr. Stevenson went on to say he put the odds of two birthmarks randomly appearing in the same places on another person who was wounded there. And of course, who claims to have memories of being that person at one in 25,000.

Jim Tucker: Right. So yeah, Ian spent years studying these cases where the children didn't just report memories but also were born with birthmarks or defects that matched ones from the previous person, 18 cases where the children were born with two birthmarks, ones that matched the entrance wound and the exit wound on the body of a gunshot victim. And there are some pretty wild stories. And yes, it does seem counterintuitive. And initially, it was hard for me actually to accept this aspect of the phenomenon. So how I make sense of it, and more or less how Ian did, was that it's a phenomenon of consciousness, that it's not literally the wound on the previous body, but more the previous person's awareness of that wound sort of scarred their consciousness. And then it shows up when the consciousness then enters a new body that wound then manifests as a similar wound or defect on the body of the developing baby.

Adam Jacobs: And how do you feel about it now?

Jim Tucker: I think some of these cases are very hard to dismiss, even though it's a bit of a stretch to think that a hole in one body from a gun then shows up as a scar on the next one. But as Thomas Jefferson said, we try to follow the evidence wherever it leads, and that's where it leads sometimes.

Adam Jacobs: Okay. Yeah, I mean you've seen them with your own eyes.

Jim Tucker: Sure. Yeah.

Adam Jacobs: So a couple more questions, and then we have special guests coming right up of people who have actually gone through this experience and that you've worked with over many years. Would you say that this is a purely scientific area of research, or does it also veer into philosophy? In other words, is this the classical model of testable and falsifiable that people require for scientific standards, or is it more of an inference from observations that we make?

Jim Tucker: Well, it's certainly not controlled laboratory experiments. There are a lot of ways to try to find out the truth and a lot of scientific ways of doing it. And some of them involve exploring spontaneous phenomena that cannot be controlled. And this would be one of those. But we certainly use or try to use a scientific mindset as we approach these cases. It is not philosophical in the sense that we accept what people tell us and then make inferences about what it means for all of us when we're in the nitty gritty, trying to verify each statement that the child has made, making sure that the child said it, and then making sure it connects with the past life. And so it's, we think very serious-minded approach to this phenomenon.

Adam Jacobs: Yeah. So someone said to me online, that “there is no evidence for the supernatural. Why not admit it?” So is this evidence of the supernatural? Is this breaking into a new realm of scientific discovery? And one of your colleagues told me that he views Ian Stevenson as the next Darwin who's going to be discovered someday, and this will be considered as much of a breakthrough as any other major discovery that's ever taken place. It's just not there yet. Would you agree with that? Is that where it's going?

Jim Tucker: Well, as far as evidence of the supernatural, first of all, I would say this is not supernatural. It's natural. We just don't understand it. And there's plenty of evidence that mind can operate separately from the brain. So when someone says there's no evidence for something, it means they don't know of the evidence. But this person was incorrect.

Adam Jacobs: Okay, good. I want to let 'em know. Okay. We're going to take a second for a little transition. I'm going to ask Cindy and Ryan Hammonds to join us now. So we'll need another chair, and we need to get Ryan on Zoom, who is joining us from Oklahoma.

Adam Jacobs: Okay. So welcome Ryan and Cindy. It's great to have you guys here and obviously your perspectives on this whole thing. It's one thing for us to discuss this in this abstract way, but it's quite another to hear from people who actually lived it. And I have read your story several times, including last night. From my perspective, it is just remarkable and very hard to explain. And therefore it seemed like a great opportunity to showcase to everybody here and watching online exactly the meaning of what transpires when someone as a young child starts to report these memories. So I figured to start off, Cindy, can you tell us what happened? When did this start?

Cyndi Hammonds: Ryan was in pre-K, and he started having extreme nightmares. Every night. He would wake up screaming, saying his chest hurt. He was nine years old before he ever slept through an entire night. I couldn't figure out why he kept having these night terrors. I took him to the doctor. They couldn't really explain it. Sometimes it happens to children. And then one day he just opened up to me and he said, Mom, I have something I need to tell you. I think I used to be somebody else. So the first story he ever told was, I had three boys. They weren't my boys, but I gave them my name. And so it was very odd, and he wanted to know what happened to the boys. And he started talking about having lived in Hollywood with a house full of children and his swimming pool and working for the agency.

And so after he told me the first story, I started researching a little bit about reincarnation. And I had read that if you went and found books from the places the child talked about, then it would help kind of give them some closure. I never dreamed we would be able to ever pinpoint who the person was that he talked about, because Ryan's memories weren't like, my name's Joe Brown, it's more like I hated cats. Let me tell you why I hated cats. Or he would tell you a story about one of his wives, and he had four. So he would start talking about one of his wives, and it was just very intricate, he could tell like I drove a green car or part of my address had the word rock in it. So I kept it a secret from my husband for quite some time because he was the son of a church preacher.

This wasn't something that we were taught to believe in. And I knew that Kevin wasn't going to be exactly accepting of it, but how to figure out a way to get my child to sleep through the night. So I started researching and found that Dr. Tucker was very reputable in the field, and it said that if he agreed to speak with you, you had to be open to him visiting you in your home. And I knew there was no way I was going to pull that off and my husband not know that there was a renowned child psychiatrist in my home. So I had to tell Kevin my little secret. And so we started researching it together, and I wrote a letter to Dr. Tucker, wrote one letter and gave him all the details I had, but before I actually sent him the letter, I had started going to our public library and I would get books on everywhere Ryan talked about because it was so extensive, he would talk about dancing on the stages of Broadway.

He would talk about going to Paris with his wife on the big boats. He would talk about how his sister had been a favorite famous dancer. He just had all of these different places that he would talk about that he had never been to and he had never been exposed to. A child who's watching cartoons isn't going to know these details. There would be days that maybe there would be a certain type of music that would come on the TV, and he would do a complete tap dance in front of the TV. And I'd say, Ryan, where did you learn that? Well, I used to do it all the time with me and the guys.

And he would tell you just all kinds of, and they would be funny stories, some of them. But there were nights that it was like you were living with an elderly person that had Alzheimer's and he was grieving because he couldn't remember what were my children's names, what happened to my mother that had the curly hair? And one of the stories that he had told us was, that I had two sisters, one was three years older and one was three years younger. Whenever the census records came back, he was right. He was correct. One was three years younger and one was three years older. And Marty Martin's own daughter did not know about the other aunt because she had died at 21 of pneumonia.

Jim Tucker: Marty was the person he was

Cyndi Hammonds: Previously. Marty was the person he was previously. So Ryan's case, according to Dr. Tucker, is kind of unprecedented because we were flipping through a book about Hollywood one night, and I would have books sent in from other libraries when we exhausted what we had in our library. I had him send him from other places. So we had brought in this big book from the library and Ryan's flipping through it. And those were the nights he would sleep as if he could kind of look at the pictures and tell his stories. And all of a sudden he came across an old black and white photo, and it was from the movie called Night After Night, 1932. And so he grabbed it and he said, mama, mama, that's me. And that's George. And we'd done a picture together. And so of course there was nothing on there other than it had George’s name, but it didn't have the other gentleman's name.

And so I started immediately researching everything I could find out about that movie. And there wasn't hardly anything online about it. It's an old movie. Most of the actors in it were uncredited and the man never spoke a word. So it seemed really unlikely that an extra in a movie had had this grand life that he talked about, about running an agency and doing all of this travel. And he would get mad some days and he'd be like, I don't like being little. When I was big, I used to go down and see my boys at the bank and they gave me the money and I went where I wanted to go. Why can't we fly to have Chinese food in Chinatown? We would go into a department store for school clothes shopping. And there was one lady that she didn't like it that Ryan kept going over and touching the suits and the ties because he was little and she got onto him and he wanted agent clothes.

I mean, there were times we had to buy him suits and different things because he wanted to dress like when he had been Marty, and she got onto him and told him he couldn't touch the suits, and he turned around and looked at her and said, lady, do you know who I am? If you mess with me, you won't work in this town again. So you just never knew when it was going to pop up. It was like this whole other personality. He would go from being a five, six-year-old little boy to this Hollywood mogul that I just can't stand living with. Here we're our servants. Do you know how much easier life would be if we had a butler and we would just laugh and kind of go on with it, but he would be just really mad about it.

He just couldn't stand the fact that he had been a rich Jewish man who had been a Republican, and he came back to a middle-class family. Mom worked at the local county clerk's office. Dad was a police officer. I worked for an elected Democratic official, which was just horrible to him because he wanted to be a Republican and his grandfather was a church preacher. So his whole life was just turned upside down. So everything that we tried to teach him, he would fight you on it, especially when it came to religion. He would have questions and it was really difficult.

Adam Jacobs: Ryan, can you hear me?

Ryan Hammonds: Yes, sir, I can.

Adam Jacobs: So do you recall any of this that your mom is talking about at this point?

Ryan Hammonds: Well, if you really want to think about it like this. I mean, think about when you were three years old, you, I mean, you can't really remember any. No, I don't remember anything. I don't know if Dr. Tucker talked about this. I only heard some of the audio, but in these kinds of cases that I will just refer to as reincarnation, most of the children forget by the time they're about the age of nine, I believe. And so none of these incidences, I guess you could say, I don't remember whatsoever. A common question I get a lot when they ask about this is, do you remember anything? And I have to say, no, I really don't. I don't remember anything about this. A lot of times I say that this wasn't my story, it's more my mother's story. She tells it more than I can. She lived through it, of course, lived through everything, if that makes any sense.

Adam Jacobs: It makes perfect sense. But do you have any residual positive feelings about Hollywood or movies or Republicans?

Ryan Hammonds: Okay. I will say I don't want to be a Republican anymore, especially after watching the State of the Union address happen. I do have a fondness, I guess you can say for actors in Hollywood and that kind of realm of stuff, black and white movies, one of my favorite things to watch when I'm just getting bored or I'm bored or whatever. And just studying that side of old Hollywood and just studying history around that time, World War II, living in that era. I mean, there's a fondness to it, I guess you could say. And I believe that parts of my personality do come from that era. Well, not that era, but the other person, we'll just say right now, parts of my personality. And again, it's hard to explain…

Adam Jacobs: Yeah. Do you accept that it happened to you or do you think that there's some other explanation?

Ryan Hammonds: I don't. I try to think about it scientifically. A scientist doesn't just take an answer at its word. I accept that it happened. I accept that something happened. I won't say it's reincarnation. I won't say it's possession or something like that, or ESP or whatever that I won't say it's that to be, because I'm not sure. Just like everybody, just like even Dr. Tucker, we're not sure. So I mean, I accept that some event that we cannot explain happened to me. And that's all I can say.

Jim Tucker: Ryan, sorry if I can ask you a question, it's great to see you again.

Ryan Hammonds: Yeah, that's good. Well, I wish I could see you, but…

Jim Tucker: All right. Right. So I've talked with some adults who said that even though they didn't remember that they ever remembered a past life even, but just knowing about it, and hearing the stories, helped them have sort of more of a spiritual outlook on their life. Any of that with you? I mean, knowing everything that you and your parents went through, do you think it shapes the perspective that you have?

Ryan Hammonds: To me, I personally don't know. I am agnostic, so I don't have any type of religious viewpoint on anything in my life. It's possible that that could be shaped by my experience going through this because I feel like if I didn't go through this experience, I would probably go through a Christian upbringing, just like all my peers in a small-town Oklahoma setting. If I never met any of the people that got me to where I am today, my whole worldview would be completely different. So I believe that it made me more curious as to what could possibly be out there. What could this thing that happened to me be? And that's something that I don't think we will ever answer. I think it's, it will probably be an enigma just because we can't put, I mean, we can put a label on it as reincarnation, but truly to me, I believe that we don't have a word for what happened, if that makes sense. And we just use the word reincarnation, the easiest thing for our brain to understand.

Adam Jacobs: A couple more questions and then we're going to take some audience questions as well. So Cindy, how did this change you? Also, I'm curious, was it a positive or a negative experience when you were going through it, or both?

Cyndi Hammonds: It was very negative when I was going through it because we lived in the Bible Belt. People were very mean to me about it, especially after it had been on TV. People had a lot of questions. I worked in a public office. There were a lot of mean questions directed toward me. My husband, who is deceased now, he had a completely different experience with it. The people that he worked with would go buy books on the subject, and they were more open to it. So I just kind of think it depended on what kind of atmosphere you were in. I seemed to work in a more religious atmosphere. The people that I had worked with had been more of a Christian-based faith maybe. But we just had a very different flip side of the coin of how it affected me versus how it affected Kevin.

And I think we tried to shield Ryan quite a bit from it. It was something that we were very careful about. Any kind of talk show that we did, we didn't do anything. That was not something that went through Dr. Tucker first. If somebody approached us, our whole, we had no desire for 15 minutes of fame. That was nothing that we have not profited from this. That's the other question everybody wants to know. Well, did you profit from this? We didn't profit from this actually, almost every time we did anything, it was money out of our own pocket by the time they might pay for your plane ticket or whatever, but by the time the rest of it travel's expensive. And our thing was that at the end of the day, I know what I went through as a mother, and there wasn't a lot of resources out there.

I wouldn't have made it through it without Dr. Tucker because he was so good about when I had questions, he would answer 'em. But when you're going on no sleep, no understanding. And like I said, he had been brought up where his father had been raised in a Church of Christ. So it caused a lot of problems within our marriage and our family at the time. That was very hard because Kevin's outlook was on it. And I hate to say that because he's not here to speak for himself, but Kevin's outlook on it was Cindy, tell him to stop talking about it. Kevin worked at night. Kevin wasn't at home. Whenever I would be up dealing with it three or four hours at a time with Ryan screaming and crying, I always said it was kind of like we watched the same movie except that I read the book, first watched the movie, and Kevin kept getting up to go get popcorn.

And that's kind of how I always kind of explained it to people is that he got bits and pieces of it, but he never got the closeness that Ryan and I have from it because it was something that he and I basically had to go through together. It was every story he told. I would write the story down the next morning, I would email it to Dr. Tucker and we would save it. We knew that someday. And I knew without a doubt, I prayed every day, God let us find this picture. And on the back let it have the man's name and the movie night after night, and when they filmed for The Unexplained, and they hired a lady to go into the Paramount archives to actually research the movie. We didn't get to see The Unexplained before it aired. We watched it with everybody else in America.

So whenever she flipped the picture over of Marty Martin, she said, and there it was, and it had his name and the movie on it. And I gasped with everybody else. It was exactly how I prayed every day because I had to solve it, not only for me, but it had to be solved for him. And I still have broken pieces of it, like things that we never really, and it's been since, I mean, he's a freshman in college now, but there are still pieces that are still kind of missing that I wish we had answers to. And we'll probably never be able to know the answers to 'em because there were so many little details that he knew. And there was one that Dr. Tucker would not give me credit for. And it bothered me because Ryan, used to tell this story about his wives, and he said, the one that I love the most, she got married in a skirt and blouse.

And he would talk about her and he would talk about, he would always say, yeah, I went to get her. And I would say, I'm in if you're in. And it was his favorite story to tell. And so Dr. Tucker said, no, I can't give that to you because everybody got married in a dress. Everything they could find. But there was one that was missing. And when we filmed for Netflix, his niece brought the family pictures out that had the sisters that he had talked about, and the mom with the curly hair. And she pulled out one picture, the niece did, and it was a wedding photo, and she was in a skirt and blouse. And that had bothered me because I just knew that he was telling the truth, but he couldn't get credit for it because we didn't have proof from the photo. And when she laid that down, I knew that was another thing that he was going to get credit for because he had told that story so many times.

Adam Jacobs: Well, Cindy and Ryan, just from my perspective, just so you should know, my reaction to your story, having gone over it a few times, honestly, I would say the word that comes into my head is “rejoice.” To me. It is tremendously inspiring and Dr. Tucker's sort of mid-wifeing of the story and many other stories like it into the world to provide credible, well-researched scientific evidence over the course of decades. And I have stood in the archive room at the University of Virginia, this department, and I've seen case after case after case is nothing short of extraordinary to me.

And I think should give people an incredible sense of hope that the way that I was taught about the physical world is not necessarily all that is. And therefore, maybe we can be a lot happier that it's not going to end in the worst and the most negative way possible. But I wanted to give you the last word before taking questions. In your opinion, you've been doing this for decades, you worked for one of the top researchers in this field and had a close relationship with him. What do you conclude at this moment? Where are you holding with all of it?

Jim Tucker: Well, I guess I would say sort of where Ryan is in the sense that, yes, this happens and we can call it reincarnation. That's actually not a term I prefer because it has a lot of connotations that may not apply. But this is an example of how elements of consciousness, we have very good evidence that they have continued after somebody died and then have shown up in another person. And of course, that can be very hard to go through as a family. But it's great that Ryan and Cindy have been willing and Kevin when he was with us, that they've been willing to tell this story because it does make an impact. And initially, when we first talked about doing the first TV thing, Kevin and Cindy were very hesitant, but Ryan basically insisted on it because he said, if you won't do it, it shows you're embarrassed about it. Yeah, you're embarrassed by it. That's how the family came into the spotlight.

Cyndi Hammonds: We agreed to do it in shadow. And he threw a fit and said, that just means you're embarrassed of me. And the one thing someone had asked earlier about something that had been said about why you come back, Ryan, when he was little, he would tell you why he came back. At one time, Marty Martin owned the most expensive car in the world. It was a Rolls Royce, and we got to see it at the Peterson Car Museum, and it was even inscribed when you open the door, it says, specially made for Marty and Margaret Martin on the door. And they were so gracious to allow him to sit in the car, and it had a tortoiseshell umbrella in there, which we all laughed about because when he was little, he would cry for his tortoise, shell sunglasses. And apparently, they were a match set. So we found the umbrella, but nobody has the sunglasses.

But Ryan would always say he had to come back because of greed, that everybody has a certain lesson that they didn't learn. And then if you didn't learn it this time, then when you come back, you have to learn it. And that was always his lesson was greed to always make sure that you're generous and you help other people and that you don't want to get to heaven. He always said there was a scale of 1 to 10, and you don't want to get to heaven and find out you're just a five and you could have done better. So I think it has changed the way I look at the world around me. And I think a lot of times I think I had been a very judgmental person.

And when you go through something like this with a child and your deepest, darkest secret is on national television and you're on the Today Show or Dr. Oz, it really makes you realize that sometimes people go through things you can't explain. And just because you didn't have that experience doesn't mean that it doesn't make it true. So I think it made me have more compassion. It really changed me on the level of wanting to be more giving, wanting to be more compassionate. And if someone starts talking about something I don't believe in, I just listen to 'em, and then I just go on with my day because I don't know what they went through that put them to that point.

Adam Jacobs: I want to thank all three of you for being here. Thank you. And it was really remarkable. Your story's remarkable. Your work is remarkable. And I'd like to open it up now to the audience to ask some questions.