I am sure,” Socrates declares, “that in reality the next life exists, that the living is torn away from the dead, and that the souls of the dead continue to live.” Ralph Waldo Emerson agrees. “The soul,” he writes, “enters the human body, as if into a temporary dwelling, from the outside and again leaves it... it moves to other abodes, since the soul is immortal.”

In the 20th century, the newspaper The San Francisco Examiner of August 26, 1928, printed the following statement: “I accepted the theory of reincarnation when I was 26 years old.” This astonishing statement made by Henry Ford placed him in the same ranks as a select few Americans of the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries, such as Thomas Edison, Benjamin Franklin, Tom Paine, Henry David Thoreau, and Walt Whitman. They all believed that the soul, that is, the energy that breathes life into the body, passes into a new body after its death. As we approach the new millennium, the number of people who accept reincarnation is increasing. In 1969, the Gallup Poll found that nearly 20% of Americans believed in life after death. A similar study in 1981 found that 23% of all Americans believe in reincarnation—almost a quarter of the population. Every year this percentage continues to grow. In 1989, analyst Walter Martin wrote that "the latest poll on reincarnation found that more than 58 percent of Americans surveyed either believed in it or thought it was possible."