Reincarnation research has become my central interest and the subject of my books and major academic contributions, but I did not start off with it. From early in my life, I aspired to be a creative writer. I remember dictating stories to my mother before I could write them down myself. I held to the dream of writing fiction until after I graduated from Emory University with a B.A. in English in 1977.
I came close to graduating with a second B.A. in Psychology, but the Skinnerian operant conditioning to which I was introduced in my experimental psychology classes put me off. After I left Emory, I began to read in the New Age literature that was coming out in the 1970s. I found it harder than I had anticipated to make a living as a writer, though, and by the end of the 1970s, had given up on fiction and was thinking about trying nonfiction instead. I recall going to my local library in Arlington, VA, looking for a topic to write about. That is when I discovered reincarnation. Reincarnation in turn led (through the writings of Ian Stevenson) to learning about academic parapsychology, and I began to read intensively in that field.
I had become deeply interested in parapsychology when I decided I needed a change of direction and enrolled in library school at the University of Maryland in 1983. I found myself drawn to archives and for a term paper one semester did a survey of archival collections in parapsychology, a paper I later published (Matlock, 1987a), qualifying me for entrance into the professional Parapsychological Association.
I conducted my survey partly through correspondence and partly by visiting institutions with archival holdings in parapsychology. One place I visited was the American Society for Psychical Research (ASPR) in New York City, and after I received my M.L.S. in 1985, I was invited to join the staff as Librarian and Archivist. I was at the ASPR in 1987 and 1988, during which time I wrote articles on the history of parapsychology and on reincarnation for journals in the field (Matlock, 1987b, 1988, 1989). I also wrote a comprehensive review of reincarnation research for the series Advances in Parapsychological Research (Matlock, 1990b).
Another institution I visited in my survey of archival materials in parapsychology was Duke University, which housed materials related to the Parapsychology Laboratory of J. B. Rhine. This led to my being asked to arrange that collection and I moved to Durham, NC, for the purpose in 1989. I published my introduction to the finding aid I prepared for that collection in the Journal of Parapsychology (Matlock, 1991).
By this time, however, I had realized that a career as an archivist didn’t suit me and I decided to get a Ph.D. My experience with Skinnerian operant conditioning at Emory had turned me off to psychology. I considered history and philosophy, but settled on anthropology, and toward the end of my time at the ASPR enrolled in an M.A. program at Hunter College to see if I liked it. I did, and after completing my work at Duke, I returned to New York and to Hunter.
At Hunter, I quickly learned that reincarnation entered into the beliefs and social practices of tribal peoples all over the world and managed to make reincarnation the topic of every term paper I wrote there. I later published two of them (Matlock, 1990a, 1995). I also wrote my M.A. thesis on reincarnation beliefs and their relation to social practices in animistic cultures (Matlock, 1993).
From Hunter I went to Southern Illinois University at Carbondale for my Ph.D. I found it more difficult to work reincarnation into term papers and for the next few years moved away from parapsychology and reincarnation. After I received my Ph.D. in 2002, I was hired by the Rhine Research Center, and returned to Durham in 2004. Two years later I was out of a job again when they were forced to downsize and let go of all their staff.
I was not able to work on reincarnation while at the Rhine Center and that longstanding interest remained in abeyance until 2011, when Nancy Zingrone asked me to develop a course on reincarnation for an anticipated Master’s-level parapsychology program at Atlantic University. That program was cancelled before I had the course ready, but I continued to work on it and began to teach it online through the Alvarado-Zingrone Institute for Research and Education in 2014. My course lectures are the subject of 12 conversations with Jeffrey Mishlove I recorded in November, 2017, for his New Thinking Allowed video series on YouTube. My course lectures also form the basis of my book, Signs of Reincarnation: Exploring Beliefs, Cases, and Theory, to be published by Rowman and Littlefield in June, 2019.
In October, 2014, I formed a group called Signs of Reincarnation on Facebook in order to make reincarnation research better known to the public. I also have learned much about reincarnation experiences from that group. I presented some cases that came to my attention in a book field researcher Erlendur Haraldsson invited me to co-author with him. I Saw a Light and Came Here: Children’s Experiences of Reincarnation (Haraldsson & Matlock, 2016) was published by White Crow Books in the spring of 2017. I report on another case I learned about through Facebook, the case of Rylann O’Bannion, in Signs of Reincarnation: Exploring Beliefs, Cases, and Theory.
I am currently affiliated as a Research Fellow with the Parapsychology Foundation of New York City and Greenport, NY. Since 2017, I have been contributing articles on reincarnation to the Psi Encyclopedia.