• We have updated the guidelines regarding posting political content: please see the stickied thread on Website Issues.

Reincarnation (The Phenomenon; The Process; Theories)

Re: Proof of reincarnation?

Originally posted by Marianina
You could look up my birth certificate, my mother's birth certificate, and then my grandmother's dates - siblings, parents - 1901 census.

The only way to get independent evidence (not proof) would be for there to be family records or remembrances of events which would be difficult for an outsider to get. Why did Grandma wear old clothes at my mother's wedding ? (Answer - my mother had her clothes coupons stolen, so both grandmas gave theirs for her wedding outfit). Unregistered stillborn children, and information held on censuses not yet in the public domain would also be relevant. What do you think ?
Click to expand...

If the census information wasn't used, then the personal information would have to be verified using a skeptical third party. Both "reincarnee" (I like that word! :D) and prior life associates might have prejudices for or against the claims that grandma lives again. It would be too easy to pass answers unknowningly as we do in a cold reading or even to agree out of sympathy. I do like the idea about personal information except using still born children. Before better health care, how many women didn't have a child that didn't survive?

There is also the difficulty that so many claims are "in" instead of "out" of family. I know a woman who's toddler keeps saying things like "When you were little, you did this." "When I was your mom, we did things this way." It's very strange for her because her mom did die before her daughter was born. In this case, the lost clothes coupons would be family lore. The daughter could remember the tale being told over dinner when parent's thought she was too young to understand or care.
 
There are more souls that choose not to incarnate in a physical body than there are people....also since a soul is really the awareness of god, actually there is only one soul, that all of humanity shares... hence enlightment is the realization that we are all one..the dropping of maya, the illusion that we are seperate...like a drop of water,which can be considered to be a part of all the worlds oceans, though we are seperate we are all essentially the same and can merge with the Ocean, which just as the river seeks the sea, so to does the soul seek to merge with god, the primal desire....when all desires are burned away, the soul realizes that all other desires create unrest and pain for the soul, and are a distraction...
 
Reincarnation is when your soul goes on to learn its next lesson, or if not achieved in his/her former life experience, a repeated lesson, or may need to answer for a karmic act.

We belong to soul groups these souls are reincarnated repeatedly with the same ones but in different relationships, ethnicities, cultures, abilities, disabilities etc etc in order to learn what we need to learn. that is why we feel we have been somewhere or experienced something before, or we meet someone and feel that we have known them all of our lives.

Furhter reading on this is books on or by Edgar Cayce.


all ancient cultures and beleif systems believe in these same basic principles.

it is more detailed but this is it in a nutshell so to speak.
 
An alternative view to the one soul=many bodies is also well ensconced in some folklores - at least the celtic and viking ones. When you name a child you often give him or her more than one name which is traditional in your family. Family names like John, Michael, Sarah, Isobel, recur over 400 years of my family on both sides. Names which are repeatedly unlucky are ditched.

Also Catholic lore says that you choose a saint's name for your baby, which then goes on to give the child a special link to the qualities of the saint or angel after which he/she is named. Is this a reflection of an earlier cult of reincarnation, or is it a recognition that soul speaks to soul in a way that we do not yet understand ?
 
"Is this a reflection of an earlier cult of reincarnation, or is it a recognition that soul speaks to soul in a way that we do not yet understand ?"


I'd assumed it was apotropaic and a fairly standard method of defining group membership - and hence non-members.

No reason for something to be single purpose of course. :)

Kath
 
As a Buddhist I'm obviously interested in this topic, but it has to be said that real objective proof is probably impossible to come by. There have been many, many recorded incidences of the likes of a child remembering a family they were related to before they were born, and eventually meeting up with them and apparently knowing things they should not have been able to.

But there's a problem - it's not possible to get evidence that's free from all possible 'contamination'. When an investigator's called, the families have usually met, and there's also no concrete way of showing that there's been no possibly subconscious picking up of supposedly 'unknowable' information such as language etc.

So although there's tonnes of anecdotal evidence out there, it's never going to be of a high enough quality to be completely convincing to a sceptical person. What is impressive, though is that there are cases that although the above flaws cannot be ruled out, they seem highly unlikely to have occurred.
 
Investigable

One important matter about reincarnation is that it's one of a couple of "afterlife" theories you can investigate scientifically. That is, not just by studying people who claim to be reincarnated but by looking in the records. If a 10 year old kid says he was Joe Blow, an insurance salesman in Omaha who died in 1939, then you can go to Omaha and look for insurance agents named Joe Blow in the phone books, city directories, newspapers and other records. Of course, if the kid lives in Ulan Bator and doesn't know any English, so much the better.
(Another investigable afterlife is ghosts. Actually, I'd kind of like to hang around and scare people. Might be more fun that having to go through more lives.):cool:
 
If you get stuck as a ghost. . .

It's hard for me to reconcile (some) ghosts and reincarnation. The ghosts of those who died and still haunt a house, area or person seem to be in a very boring situation. Hardly anyone can see you, hardly anyone can hear you, and communication is only possible to those few who can see and hear you, but don't have a clue to who you are. (usually). Most people just glance sideways at you, and then tell themselves that they just saw a shadow out of the corner of their eye.

Mediums who do connect to the dead ghosts, usually are frustrated at the odd messages they get. "What do you mean 'tomato juice'? What does it mean???"

The way I reconcile ghosts to reincarnation is that ghosts are "stuck" and "need to move on". (okay, sounds cliche, but it works) It's so cliche that it's probably not correct. I am sure there is more going on than the living can really know.

Of course, and easier explanation is that a soul is timeless, and the same soul can be in everyone at once, and still haunt people at the same time. My mind sure dislikes that paradox, but again, this could be the true explanation.

Why do I feel like I've lived several lifetimes? I don't even remember living other lives. (They tell me that I'm an "old soul")

:) Ain't the worst thing I've been called.
 
When you see animals doing human like things could this show reincarnation in ways saying that there doing what they learnt when they were Human?
 
More to do with the evolution of humans from animals or the animal copying what it sees in its current life. Parrots don't talk because they're reincarnated people.
 
If we accept that homo sapiens are animals, then it easy to posit certain behaviours that so-called higher animals may have in common. Thus these behaviours are not human-like, just (as my learned colleague above suggests) mimicry or misinterpretation.
 
If Karma exists (and the notion of re-birth in a new body), then there has to be a beaurocracy running it because someone's got to make the judgement regarding what form you will take in the next life - So, why oh why would your last life interfere with this one? Hmmm...actually, if it is a civil service type arrangment, then the answer becomes obvious (incompetence). Overall, I don't believe in this idea (though I would be interested if any evidence actually turned up) - Thus I assert that our cute fuzzy friends are probably smarter and more emotive than science currently allows (as analysis of the current cognitive quota's is - in my opinion - still grounded in the notion of human superiority ... however, this aside, their behaviour patterns doesn't make them previously human.
 
Last edited by a moderator:
Gadaffi_Duck said:
Thus I assert that our cute fuzzy friends are probably smarter and more emotive than science currently allows (as analysis of the current cognitive quota's is - in my opinion - still grounded in the notion of human superiority ... however, this aside, their behaviour patterns doesn't make them previously human.
Click to expand...

Your most likely right that Science underestimates animal intellect.

What about dreams though that people have too or fears that people have when they've never been near like if they fear swimming in water for example?
 
Children, children, stop squabbling and get back to the point. Just because the early church fathers removed all mention of reincarnation from the Bible at the Second Council of Constantinople, there is no reason to disbelieve this fact. As truth cannot be beat down and stifled, reincarnation will come up again and again and challenge you to disprove it- even if the bishops scream out till they are hoarse in the voice that there is no such thing as reincarnation. Wake up people!
 
Don Mills~ said:
tinfoilpants said:
If reincarnation takes plave then shouldn't the world population be fairly constant? Or is there a mechanism to cover this?
Click to expand...

Reminds me of an SF story I read years ago. Medical authorities are worried by the soaring rate of "idiot child" births -- children who are fully functional at the physical level, but are growing up showing no signs of a cogitating mind. You're prob'ly ahead of me with the explanation: There's only so many minds to go round (and round, and round), and with the ever-rising birth rate ...
Click to expand...

I read a different story called "Population Implosion" in which the result of a constant population of souls and an increasing population of bodies was earlier and earlier deaths. Perfectly healthy people would just stop living. The maximum age one could live to became common knowledge.
 
I would consider reincarnation to be philisophy rather than a reality, which allows the human brain to accomodate notions of the consciousness/immortality into the empirical evidence of life/death/rebirth found in nature.
 
Intellectually, I like the idea of reincarnation.

Emotionally, I'm not so sure.

As I'm well past half-way to my three-score years and ten, I have to consider the fact of my mortality more and more each day. Another life might seem appealing if you're enjoying this one, but, frankly, I'm not. My life, apart from a few bright spots, has been mostly unsatisfactory, if not downright depressing. And I don't want more of that.

If a reincarnation was always an improvement on the previous life, then yes, it would be something to aspire to. But on the basis of such evidence as we have, a future incarnation is as likely to be worse than this life. (That might be like a Christian expecting heaven, and getting hell.)

Millions of suicides a year expect at least nothingness, if not a better world. But could they be disappointed?

We really need better information!
 
I didn't get a chance to read the entire thread, but has anyone read Allen Kardec?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allan_Kardec

I don't really gel with the Christian slant, but a lot of what he described really resonates with me. I can't recall very much of the details, but I think he claimed to converse with higher spirits via a medium.

Some of the concepts struck me as quite fascinating, many even 'before their time', so to speak.

Worth a look, if you can bear wading through the spiritism stuff to get to the gems. I think the actual conversations with spirits are online somewhere, I read them back in 2006.......
 
Kardec's Spiritism struck a chord with many people, especially in Latin America, though it seems only to be fully acredited as a religion in Canada:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spiritism

The prolific Chico Xavier seems to have been responsible for the spread of Spiritism in Brazil.

"Wading through the Spiritism stuff," might be time-consuming - Xavier wrote some 450 books - but as these were supposedly dictated by the spirits, I don't see how you can really skip them! :)
 
I am interested in reincarnation and think it's extremely possible. It would make sense of the age old question of why we are here. We are here to learn through this life before moving on to the next one. But do we ever reach the end? Maybe we do and become one with the higher intelligence/spirit/God who knows.

I think the evidence from children is the most compelling, when they say things they couldn't possibly have know. As adults I think we've absorbed too much to make any evidence tainted. I always feel drawn to the 1890s but I don't know if that's a past life or early influences. I was heavily into The Phantom of the Opera and Sherlock Holmes when I was young. Did I like them because of the Victorian element or did I like the Victorian element because of them?

What happens in you add in parallel universes too? What if they exist? Do we cross them? What if that's why some information is slightly wrong when investigated?
 
Last edited by a moderator:
MorningAngel said:
I am interested in reincarnation and think it's extremely possible.
Click to expand...

If it is possible, by what mechanism is it being made possible? How would that work?
I'm thinking, if our souls (our 'essence') floats around looking for a new body, what is maintaining the souls while out of the body?

MorningAngel said:
It would make sense of the age old question of why we are here. We are here to learn through this life before moving on to the next one. But do we ever reach the end? Maybe we do and become one with the higher intelligence/spirit/God who knows.
Click to expand...

Would it answer all the questions? I think it would raise many new questions about why we are here.
 
The trouble is, as has been mentioned before, there are more people on Earth than ever before, so where do all the new souls come from? You can't be reincarnated from a state of nothing, can you? Or can you, it might explain a lot if there's spontaneous soul creation, though would that be because supply has to keep up with demand, like some kind of profitable business model?

I've heard of folks being described as an "old soul", but have you ever met someone who's a "new soul"?
 
Someone I knew once (who was a committed believer in reincarnation) told me the answer to that question.
He said that some souls can be split, meaning that they occupy several bodies at the same time.

I didn't buy it.
 
It could be more like some people's lives were so vivid for them that their experiences and memories hang about in the atmosphere to be picked up by impressionable minds like radio signals, but nobody is reincarnated at all.
 
I think my mums a new soul more trusting than my old soul trust no-one attitude lol.

If I am reincarnated I hope I don't get regressed back to this life I'd want my money back.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top