IndigoChild5559
Loving God and my neighbor as myself.
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.
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.
