Evidence of reincarnation? I think not.

[IndigoChild5559]

In any case, I don't tend to interpret experiences like this as past lives, per se, myself. They represent connections with something, but the nature of that connection is up to the individual to discover meaning in for themselves. What the connection "really is" tends to be less relevant than the meaning found and told, whether that impacts one's practices, etc. There was a time I believed certain things I experienced pointed at "past lives" but I'm just not attached to that narrative - it's enough to know there's a connection there that I can value.

I have entertained the notion that some events in history simply leave an imprint upon time, like a stone thrown into a pond creates waves that ripple out. And that perhaps some people seem to be gifted with the sort of inner radar to receive and interpret those waves, similar to a radio or TV.

Note, I think its a POSSIBILITY. It is not something I know to be true or something I claim to believe.

 

[IndigoChild5559]

How about memories from your current past? Do you accept that these are all actual events from your current life? S

Are they valid experiences? I tend to assume they are. But I'm certainly more than familiar with the notion of false memories and how they are created. There are too many other explanations for why I have had those experiences.

My earliest memory is of my family visiting the model homes of the neighborhood we moved to when I was two. I remember how my brother and I played on some kind of triangular wood formation in a field where construction was still going on. This memory is clearly skewed. It is highly doubtful that my older sister would let us play in a construction area, given the obvious danger. Also, if I was two, that would make my brother an infant. The memory probably has some sort basis in a real event, but simply has been altered over time.

 

[IndigoChild5559]

Human trafficking occurs to kids in a way that can be alarmingly higher than what everyone thinks.

True, but although human trafficking is done by evil people, they are not members of satanic covens.

 

[ajay0]

Not quite. Close. But not quite. There's better examples.

Here is what I have read on the subject....

What Judaism Says About Reincarnation | My Jewish Learning

Jewish Reincarnation. Jewish Life After Death. Jewish Afterlife and Eschatology. Jewish View on Next Life. Jewish Ideas and Beliefs

www.myjewishlearning.com

In the Western imagination, reincarnation has long been associated with the religious traditions of the East. Transmigration — the journey of an individual soul through many incarnations — is something that religious seekers in the West often think of as samsara, the cycle of death and rebirth which is a core aspect of the great Dharmic religions: Buddhism, Hinduism, Sikhism, and Jainism. Sometimes overlooked, both by Jews and by students of Jewish tradition, is gilgul, a concept that is described in great detail throughout the Kaballah . Very much in line with samsara, which is often depicted as a wheel in Buddhist art, the word gilgul comes from the Hebrew root meaning “to spin.” The soul, in the kabbalistic view, spins onward through a great many bodies, striving after a higher form of perfection.

While it occasionally happens that new souls may be created, most of us have been here before and will be here again. This particular life comprises but one stage on our path towards a perfected state when the small divine spark of our own soul will become reintegrated into the fires of the divine. This perfected state — i.e. the culmination of gilgul — can be understood as a cognate to the Buddhist notion of nirvana. However, where nirvana means literally “to blow out” — that is, to extinguish the flames of desire and greed — the kabbalists describe ultimate goal of transmigration as a kind of compounded flame, in which the soul’s spark is subsumed by the boundless light of God.

 

[sayak83]

What the researchers have done is DESCRIBE the commonalities among the accounts given by children, my the same way as Kate Atkinson in Life After Life explores the commonalities among Near Death Experiences. These sort of commonalities do not necessarily mean that they are due to actual reincarnation or the soul surviving death. The researchers you are referring to do not conclude that reincarnation is real.

That they haven't pinned down a perfectly natural explanation for the phenomena doesn't mean that such a natural explanation doesn't exist. There is the saying, "Absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence."

They conclude that quite a number of children have memories of past lives that are verifiable as events that actually happened in the deceased person's life. They have also been able to pin down under what conditions (related to deceased person's death) that reliably leads to formation of these past life memories. They have been able to rule out and information transfer through usual social means between the children and those in the orbit of the deceased person.

Science, since it follows methodological naturalism, will never say, for any non-naturalistic phenomena, what is causing such phenomenon as it's beyond its purview. It will only help in doing systematic documentation of it and will neither accept or deny any non-naturalistic explanation for the same, as it's not it's job. So expecting science to certify a phenomena is non-naturalistic is absurd. It will simply have an agnostic stance.
However rebirth theories do exist from a non-naturalistic philosophy and they do predict the existence of such memories. So, finding that such memories do occur verifiably is evidence for these rebirth theories.

 

[GoodAttention]

Once upon a time, a woman friend of mine was on my massage table and she said she was getting an imagine of a woman, and asked her toa sk thye woman if she was an ally, and my friend said she heard the woman say, “Yet,” and I asked my friend if she wanted to ask the woman if she had anything she wanted to say, and m friend said she wasn’t sure, and I wait and she said, okay, and she asked the woman if she had anything to say, and my friend then started crying and shaking, and I asked her what that was about? She said the woman had told her, “You abandoned your children in 1863.”


That was in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

I moved to Boulder, Colorado, but sometimes drove back to Santa Fe to see friends there, including her. During one visit, she introduced me to a Hawiian man she had met and was dating. It got serious. Then, they were engaged, and he was back in on the Big Island, Hawaii, waiting on her to come be with him.

One day she called me in Boulder, all out of sorts. Her hair was falling out, she was losing wight, she had pimples on her face, and what seemed most distressing to her was she said she no longer could manifest what she wanted to happen. I asked her if she was trying to get out of marrying him. She admitted she was. I said, well, look at what that caused. She groaned. She called him and made a date to come join him. Her symptoms left.

Unrelated, if you believe in such, my lady at the time and I flew to the Big Island for a vacation, I called my friends boyfriend and we drove the rental car to where he worked and had a short visit, then we left. My wife flew back to Boulder nd I stayed behind for rew days. He He allied andnvited me to drive up for dinner, and I did that. While he was cooking dinner, his bride to be, my friend, called him and I could tell by how the conversation was going that she was trying to back out, and he was being very easy with her but not saying okay. Finally, I asked him to hand me the telephone, and when I did, I said, “Hi, Linda, it’s me.” And she said, “What are you doing there?” And I said, You are trying to get out of it again, and you forgot what happened when you did that before? Come on out here and marry him, and if doesn’t work out, you can get a divorce.” She said, “Okay,” and that’s what she did, and they got married, and eventually they had a child.

The understanding and respect between you and your wife could make kings enviable.

 

[IndigoChild5559]

They conclude that quite a number of children have memories of past lives that are verifiable as events that actually happened in the deceased person's life. They have also been able to pin down under what conditions (related to deceased person's death) that reliably leads to formation of these past life memories. They have been able to rule out and information transfer through usual social means between the children and those in the orbit of the deceased person.

Science, since it follows methodological naturalism, will never say, for any non-naturalistic phenomena, what is causing such phenomenon as it's beyond its purview. It will only help in doing systematic documentation of it and will neither accept or deny any non-naturalistic explanation for the same, as it's not it's job. So expecting science to certify a phenomena is non-naturalistic is absurd. It will simply have an agnostic stance.
However rebirth theories do exist from a non-naturalistic philosophy and they do predict the existence of such memories. So, finding that such memories do occur verifiably is evidence for these rebirth theories.

No, they certainly have NOT reached those conclusions. Please reread my answer to this in my previous post. The studies are descriptive. They do not reach your conclusion. There are other explanations for these accounts, so a conclusion is not possible at this time, since those other explanations have not been ruled out.

It could very well be that some time in the future, scientists might find enough evidence to establish a working theory. But that is certainly not the case at this time. The evidence we have so far is simply insufficient.

 

[Fool]

I quite often hear from people who believe in reincarnation that they have "memories" of past lives, sometimes in dreams, or in vivid visions in their heads, or revealed through regressive hypnosis.

I take no stand on whether reincarnation actually exists. Maybe it does and maybe it doesn't.

But this I will say for certain: those evidences prove absolutely nothing. How do I know? Because I have those experiences, and they cannot possibly all be true, because the time periods overlap. Let me give just a couple of examples:

1. I once had a series of recurring dreams that I was a Jewish man in an upstairs room, wearing spectacles and reading. The first thing I heard was dogs barking. The sound of glass shattering. Boots, boots on the stairs. Pounding on my door. The door explodes inward with a deafening crash that I can still hear today. A lot of very painful things happened next that I prefer not to share. It is one of the most terrifying dreams I ever had. I would wake up, go back to sleep, and find myself back in the same dream. This went on for days. It was only years later that it clicked for me that this was a dream about Kristallnacht.

2. I also have had many dreams, both sleeping and awake, of being a thin man, an author, at a table outside a Paris cafe. The tweed suit, turtleneck sweater, and beret I'm wearing indicate the 1930's. I compulsively smoke cigarettes and drink gin or whisky. I think about the meaninglessness of my existence. My mentality is defined by disillusionment. I cannot tell you how disturbing this was when I would wake up, or how dark it felt. I'm quite certain these images were inspired by Sartre, whose novels I read as a young adult.

Since both dreams happen in the thirties, they cannot possibly both be memories of past lives. it doesn't matter than in both cases it is extremely vivid, that I can even smell the humidity or the food, or feel the breeze on my face. It's simply impossible that these are past lives.

Moving to my next point. Using hypnosis for regression, either into past events of this life or into so-called past lives, is absolutely notorious for creating false memories. The individual tends to see whatever they think the therapist wants to hear, and then they assume that these visions are actual memories.

We had a big Satanic scare in the 90s, where everyone thought Satanic covens were kidnapping children, molesting them, and sacrificing them. All sorts of people were saying they had seen these things. But when the FBI investigated extensively, they found there was no truth at all to it. Some had false memories either due to hypnosis or due to leading interrogations by police and others. Others were lying for attention or due to mental problems. A few were outright hallucinating. So we had 100s of eyewitnesses to something that never happened at all.

Next point. Stop and consider for a moment how many people "remember" they are Julius Caesar or Joan of Arc. They cannot all have been the same people in the past. And isn't it curious that these "memories" are always of very famous people in history. At least most of my dreams of the past are of insignificant people, like a black slave girl running through the field, or an ordinary woman in a Puritan village picking out cloth for a dress. I think my Sartre dream is the only one with a recognizable person from history.

So no. For all the above reasons, vividly "remembering" past lives is not evidence of reincarnation.

3-yr-old recalls past life murder, identifies killer and locates his body

A three-year-old boy not only remembers his murder in the past life, but also recognises his killer

www.deccanchronicle.com