Reincarnation and Past Life Regression

[Yuurei]

I don't even arrive at the question of past lives. It's just another form of living in the past.

Heh, I would say it is the ultimate for of living in the past.

 

[Galena]

My answer to this is that I think I was a bug last life. Possibly an ant; a spider if I’m feeling individualistic. This is part intuition and part rebellious.

 

[Chad of the OttomanEmpire]

The more I hear stories of people who believe, the more I disbelieve;= everyone was some sort of knight or royalty who in died honorably in battle.
No one ever tells a story of a miserable, nameless peasant who died a pitiful inquisition-ey death or an infected wound but that was the majority of human history.

I assume this rant (and everything that came after it) was in reference to the story I wrote here.

GUYS!!! The OP asked about experiences. I shared them!

I don't "like" knights--I've never remotely given two shits about this particular era in history, nor do I feel a sense of connection to it. I didn't claim to be particularly "high status". I didn't say I "died honourably". I didn't die in my vision at all. Where the hell did I say I was royalty?? I saw no glamour in this vision whatsoever. In fact, I also said I was a housewife, and political prisoner that got executed at an early age. So yes, actually, people DO get visions of being poor, unimportant, and dying indignant deaths.

I'm also a historian (of Middle Eastern history, not these eras) and I have very little sense of romance for peoples of the past. People are shitheads who do horrible fucking things to each other, race and era and other superficial stuff don't matter. Same shit different day. So no, I'm not "romanticising" my life by imagining myself to be a knight in the face of all my pathetic hardships LOOOOOL.

What's more, I never even said I "believed" it. I said, "I am open to these possibilities, here are my experiences with it". I specifically said there's way the hell more than one reason that can explain this stuff, so guys stop mocking me for being such a gullibly-minded dupe or acting like I'm a charlatan. I am a complete agnostic about literally everything and take all things--including my very awareness of my own existence--with a grain of salt, in ways that most people never will.

Yes, I'm AWARE the mind "can" construct this shit. My question is, why did it do that in that particular instance? Why doesn't it do this for me normally? How does this work? (This is called Ti--comparing the discrepancies to discover the underlying principle as to how something works.) Also, why are my dreams almost never this coherent, even when I start lucid dreaming? Assuming this IS all in my mind, could there be untapped therapeutic implications for harnessing the brain's capacity to do this? Etc.

It's like, if you're open to an orthodox possibility (I AM A GODDAMN ENTP--"TRY EVERYTHING"), suddenly you're a complete moron incapable of rational thought?? Idk. But feel free to continue to shit all over something I said in all sincerity to someone who asked, the internet definitely needs more disrespect.

 

[Yuurei]

I assume this rant (and everything that came after it) was in repference to the story I wrote here.

GUYS!!! The OP asked about experiences. I shared them!

I don't "like" knights--I've never remotely given two shits about this particular era in history, nor do I feel a sense of connection to it. I didn't claim to be particularly "high status". I didn't say I "died honourably". I didn't die in my vision at all. Where the hell did I say I was royalty?? I saw no glamour in this vision whatsoever. In fact, I also said I was a housewife, and political prisoner that got executed at an early age. So yes, actually, people DO get visions of being poor, unimportant, and dying indignant deaths.

I'm also a historian (of Middle Eastern history, not these eras) and I have very little sense of romance for peoples of the past. People are shitheads who do horrible fucking things to each other, race and era and other superficial stuff don't matter. Same shit different day. So no, I'm not "romanticising" my life by imagining myself to be a knight in the face of all my pathetic hardships LOOOOOL.

What's more, I never even said I "believed" it. I said, "I am open to these possibilities, here are my experiences with it". I specifically said there's way the hell more than one reason that can explain this stuff, so guys stop mocking me for being such a gullibly-minded dupe or acting like I'm a charlatan. I am a complete agnostic about literally everything and take all things--including my very awareness of my own existence--with a grain of salt, in ways that most people never will.

Yes, I'm AWARE the mind "can" construct this shit. My question is, why did it do that in that particular instance? Why doesn't it do this for me normally? How does this work? (This is called Ti--comparing the discrepancies to discover the underlying principle as to how something works.) Also, why are my dreams almost never this coherent, even when I start lucid dreaming? Assuming this IS all in my mind, could there be untapped therapeutic implications for harnessing the brain's capacity to do this? Etc.

It's like, if you're open to an orthodox possibility (I AM A GODDAMN ENTP--"TRY EVERYTHING"), suddenly you're a complete moron incapable of rational thought?? Idk. But feel free to continue to shit all over something I said in all sincerity to someone who asked, the internet definitely needs more disrespect.

Nope, it actually wasn’t. I have never heard a strory -from anyone IRL- that did not include them being a knight.

 

[Chad of the OttomanEmpire]

Nope, it actually wasn’t. I have never heard a strory -from anyone IRL- that did not include them being a knight.

Well all I can report is the inner truth of my own experiences (not saying objective truth). I've NEVER heard that from any other past life regression. They usually say something like, "I'm about six years old and I'm wearing Mary Janes. I think it's the 1930s. My mom wants me to go live with my uncle in the country side".

Are these people you reference people who've paid for sessions, or is it just who they "think" they were? Cause if you'd asked me I would have guessed at being a Prussian military officer under Kaiser Wilhelm II, in a division sent to East Africa and later died in WW1. Guess not.

 

[Kanra Jest]

If you ask me it could be simpler than it often is... If you're genuinely curious why not seek it out? Observe. Test it. Experiment. Experience it. If you don't know "Ghosts" exist, or if there's something to it that may not even be ghosts but "some other unexplained phenomenon" which is more likely to me honestly, then why not just go out to "haunted" domains and see for yourself? If you don't know if reincarnation exists then why not go out and seek a hypnotist? Do you not trust the hypnotist? Do you not trust multiple accounts of similar experiences and everyone lies or hallucinates the same things out of coincidence? Do you not trust your senses? I'm not sure how one comes to an absolute conclusion about what is and isn't without testing and experimenting anything out first hand tbh. If one has no interest it's no big deal, but If one is interested about it, I just think things could be clearer if more open ended experimentation was undergone.

But I suppose that's just a difference in thinking. Who knows

But at the same time if one views it as being stuck in the past, and I can see why, then the reason could easily be that knowledge of reincarnation has no practical use for this life anyway, whether true or not, so who the fuck cares? And I definitely 'get' that sort of thinking. What is useful is important than just knowing for the sake of it. But then again it's my nature to entertain all sorts of shit anyway so eh.

 

[cacaia]

There is definitely something to be said about it. At the University of Virginia, there is a whole department devoted to the scientific study of reincarnation. Dr. Ian Stevenson would use very harsh criteria and use the scientific method to test his subjects. Some of his subjects were children who were as young as 3 and could remember names, places, etc from other parts of the world and retell stories from another era that very few people would know. It's fascinating, really. Here's an article about it:
Searching For The Science Behind Reincarnation : NPR

 

[Firebird 8118]

There is definitely something to be said about it. At the University of Virginia, there is a whole department devoted to the scientific study of reincarnation. Dr. Ian Stevenson would use very harsh criteria and use the scientific method to test his subjects. Some of his subjects were children who were as young as 3 and could remember names, places, etc from other parts of the world and retell stories from another era that very few people would know. It's fascinating, really. Here's an article about it:
Searching For The Science Behind Reincarnation : NPR

God bless you for reviving this thread

I happen to not only believe strongly in reincarnation, but to also believe in the probability of our past lives affecting our current one. For instance, I found out through meditation one day that I most likely died by accident in my previous life, by falling from a great height... because of which I’m irrationally scared of heights. Also, that I was a spiritual healer or priest in some previous lifetime or another at least once...

 

[Kanra Jest]

God bless you for reviving this thread

I happen to not only believe strongly in reincarnation, but to also believe in the probability of our past lives affecting our current one. For instance, I found out through meditation one day that I most likely died by accident in my previous life, by falling from a great height... because of which I’m irrationally scared of heights. Also, that I was a spiritual healer or priest in some previous lifetime or another at least once...

I'm irrationally afraid of large bodies of water and I've had nightmares of drowning. So too have I a fear of heights. Hmm. I wonder..

Edit: Phobias, I believe they call it!

 

[Totenkindly]

I see a lot of supposed phenomena attributed to "quantum physics" when no explanation can be made. it's kind of the underlying "reason du jour" in this age. It doesn't mean it can't be involved but typically when no one has an explanation everyone jumps on the quantum bandwagon since no one quite understand how it works anyway, so it's an easy underlying potential driver.

We still don't really understand consciousness, and we don't know at all what happens after death either. We just know that people die and their body breaks down to its initial components. Many people believe in "souls" but we really don't know if such a thing exists either. If we understood some of that or at least the mechanisms for how it operated, then we could conjecture more coherently on a topic like reincarnation.

Academic research into claims of reincarnation
Psychiatrist Ian Stevenson, from the University of Virginia, having grown up with a mother who was a theosophist,[248] dedicated his later career to investigating claims of reincarnation. Other people who have undertaken similar pursuits include Jim B. Tucker, Antonia Mills,[249] Satwant Pasricha, Godwin Samararatne, and Erlendur Haraldsson, but Stevenson's publications remain the most well known.

Stevenson conducted more than 2,500 case studies of young children who claimed to remember past lives over a period of 40 years and published twelve books, including Twenty Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation, Reincarnation and Biology: A Contribution to the Etiology of Birthmarks and Birth Defects, a two-part monograph and Where Reincarnation and Biology Intersect. He documented the family's and child's statements along with correlates to a deceased person he believed matched the child's memory. Stevenson also claimed that some birthmarks and birth defects matched wounds and scars on the deceased, sometimes providing medical records like autopsy photographs to make his case.[250] Expecting controversy and skepticism, Stevenson also searched for disconfirming evidence and alternative explanations for the reports, but he argued (not without criticism) that his methods ruled out all possible "normal" explanations for the child’s memories.[251] Stevenson's work in this regard was impressive enough to Carl Sagan that he referred to what was apparently Stevenson's investigations in his book The Demon-Haunted World as an example of carefully collected empirical data, though he rejected reincarnation as a parsimonious explanation for the stories.[252] Sam Harris cited Stevenson's works in his book The End of Faith as part of a body of data that seems to attest to the reality of psychic phenomena.[253]

Critical reviews of these claims include work by Paul Edwards who criticized the accounts of reincarnation as being purely anecdotal and cherry-picked.[254] Instead, Edwards says such stories are attributable to selective thinking, suggestion, and false memories that can result from the family's or researcher's belief systems, and thus cannot be counted as empirical evidence.[255] The philosopher Keith Augustine wrote in critique that the fact that "the vast majority of Stevenson's cases come from countries where a religious belief in reincarnation is strong, and rarely elsewhere, seems to indicate that cultural conditioning (rather than reincarnation) generates claims of spontaneous past-life memories."[256] Further, Ian Wilson pointed out that a large number of Stevenson’s cases consisted of poor children remembering wealthy lives or belonging to a higher caste. In these societies, claims of reincarnation are sometimes used as schemes to obtain money from the richer families of alleged former incarnations.[257] Following these types of criticism, Stevenson published a book on European Cases of the Reincarnation Type in attempt to show the reports were cross-cultural. Even still, Robert Baker asserted that all the past-life experiences investigated by Stevenson and other parapsychologists are understandable in terms of known psychological factors including a mixture of cryptomnesia and confabulation.[258] Edwards also objected that reincarnation invokes assumptions that are inconsistent with modern science.[259] As the vast majority of people do not remember previous lives and there is no empirically documented mechanism known that allows personality to survive death and travel to another body, positing the existence of reincarnation is subject to the principle that "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence". Researchers such as Stevenson acknowledged these limitations.[260]

Stevenson also claimed there were a handful of cases that suggested evidence of xenoglossy, including two where a subject under hypnosis allegedly conversed with people speaking the foreign language, instead of merely being able to recite foreign words. Sarah Thomason, a linguist (and skeptical researcher) at the University of Michigan, reanalyzed these cases, concluding that "the linguistic evidence is too weak to provide support for the claims of xenoglossy."[261]

Reincarnation - Wikipedia

 

[Mole]

It's a religious belief not based in evidence or reason like the belief in demons.

Innocent of evidence and reason Jesus "cast out demons" because he wrongly believed that demons caused physical and mental illness.

And if Jesus was wrong about demons, he was wrong about other things as well.

The sleep of reason brings forth monsters, and in this case, demons.

 

[cacaia]

I am sure I starved to death at some point- I have a weird relationship with food in this life.

 

[Yuurei]

Yesterday a friend called me "Rachael" by mistake. We do not know any "Rachel" so it isn't a case of habit or mistaken identity.

This also isn't the first time it's happened. It's happened hundreds of times from random teachers through all 18 years of school to acquaintances and random strangers. All of them years apart and having never met.

Every time I ask them "Why/" the just say confidently " Something just told me 'That's Rachael."

It kind of bugs me because I hate that name, though not much more than my actual name.

There might be something to this, but if not it's a pretty bizarre coincidence.

I remain fairly skeptical but it would explain several things.

 

[cacaia]

Yesterday a friend called me "Rachael" by mistake. We do not know any "Rachel" so it isn't a case of habit or mistaken identity.

This also isn't the first time it's happened. It's happened hundreds of times from random teachers through all 18 years of school to acquaintances and random strangers. All of them years apart and having never met.

Every time I ask them "Why/" the just say confidently " Something just told me 'That's Rachael."

It kind of bugs me because I hate that name, though not much more than my actual name.

There might be something to this, but if not it's a pretty bizarre coincidence.

I remain fairly skeptical but it would explain several things.

MMMMMmmmm...If it's happened more than three times, I would keep tabs on it

 

[Yuurei]

MMMMMmmmm...If it's happened more than three times, I would keep tabs on it

I was not exaggerating rating when I said “ hundreds” of times.

Odd though, when we tgink of past lives it’s always so long ago. But “ Raechal” is a fairly midern name, I think.

 

[True]

I am sure I starved to death at some point- I have a weird relationship with food in this life.

Same in the way that I am with food, most of the time we're not friends. I am bullied by my own food.

 

[Snow as White]

i would hate to think that my soul was foolish enough to choose the red pill more than once in her lifetime. :/

 

[Firebird 8118]

i would hate to think that my soul was foolish enough to choose the red pill more than once in her lifetime. :/

Well, think of it this way: reincarnation is basically just you taking another chance at making better choices... except that you have little to no memory of what you did before, and you’re wearing a completely different body with a completely different personality. And the scars of your last death manifest as either birthmarks or phobias in your current lifetime.

... Sorry, I think I freaked myself out trying to show you how I see reincarnation as a Hindu.

 

[Yuurei]

Heh, I wonder if this is why I am so claustrophobic. I am not afraid of anything else at all.

Maybe it's more of an emotional thing. I die in my dreams all the time. I'm never upset at dying but devastated by a strong desire to see someone one last time.

Dreams are curious things. I once told a psych professor that I find it fascinating how I know things in my dreams that I don't IRL. She dismissed it s silly nonsense. I mean, I'm a bit skeptical myself but it is simple fact that my subconscious knows things my waking self does not. To dismiss that is boring to say the least.

 

[Kanra Jest]

Heh, I wonder if this is why I am so claustrophobic. I am not afraid of anything else at all.

Maybe it's more of an emotional thing. I die in my dreams all the time. I'm never upset at dying but devastated by a strong desire to see someone one last time.

Dreams are curious things. I once told a psych professor that I find it fascinating how I know things in my dreams that I don't IRL. She dismissed it s silly nonsense. I mean, I'm a bit skeptical myself but it is simple fact that my subconscious knows things my waking self does not. To dismiss that is boring to say the least.

I've had that same feeling about the subconscious knowing more than the conscious. Sometimes my dreams feel too real too. I know things, remember, like I have some sort of realization but then upon waking I don't remember it. But it lingers as some nagging feeling, you know something is there but you cannot access it.