Do you believe we have past lives??

[RevolvingPivot]

Inspired by my other thread....

Places you have visited with a strange vibe http://www.mumsnet.com/Talk/amiibeingunreasonable/4260839-places-you-have-visited-with-a-strange-vibe

Yes. I have a mild form of epilepsy and sometimes before a seizure I feel and very momentarily sort of peripherally visualise sequences which I'm increasingly convinced are related to past (life) experiences.

I know that doesn't really make sense and sounds odd but it's the only way I can explain it.

Why would it be related to past lives? It's just seizure activity. It does the weirdest things to your brain.

I do. I realise this will sound cuckoo to a lot of people but when I was little I knew this wasn’t my first time here, and that I was back. I knew my way around places I’d never been before, get feelings of deja vu often, and we had a sundial in the garden which I could tell the time from when I was still very young, no one had explained how sundials work and they’re not that straightforward.

Then when I was around 10 my gran, who lived nearby, had a clearout of her loft. She found an old leather bible from the 1800s, and inside was an inscription. It was my name (first and surname - my first name has a fairly unusual spelling and this was the same), and a date, which was my date of birth 😱😱. I definitely wasn’t named after her as none of my living relatives knew who she was. But at the moment it all made sense to me, I knew I had come back as myself.

@Ijustknowitstimetogo

Yes, we're 'unconscious' when sleeping but often oddly aware of unconscious content, which can sometimes become conscious upon awakening. Science has evidenced the experience of dream content even in subjects who claim never to dream, shown in patterns of neural activity while they're sleeping. Consciousness and the unconscious are two sides of the same coin, since one state is known to influence the other. An example of this is when familiar figures or locations from waking life appear in dreams, and when dream content affects waking mood.

@Elphame

Yes - but they may not be in the past given that time is non linear.

Yep

The sceptics seems woefully ignorant. If you read around the subject and try to be open minded you might be surprised. If you really believe science has all the answers to every question, you are being very narrow minded.

@BreakingtheIce

The sceptics seems woefully ignorant. If you read around the subject and try to be open minded you might be surprised. If you really believe science has all the answers to every question, you are being very narrow minded.

It’s like someone saying they will turn in to a cat tomorrow and using the fact that we can’t see in to the future, therefore we can’t say for certain that they are wrong and that they won’t turn in to a cat tomorrow. (Or a log or a stone and anything at all)

They could say you’re being ignorant and not opening your mind to the possibilities of them turning in to a cat?

What evidence has shown us however, is that it’s highly highly unlikely to happen and I know where I’d place my billion dollars bet!

I think our brains are nowhere near full capacity on the earth plain. I think we get a choice if we want to come back, in order to reach a higher level. Once we get born again we forget our past lives and we just learn new experiences.

When we die we go home, from where we came from.

As if everything is just this.

@PandemicAtTheDisco

Or the tower reminded him of a tower he remembered from a past life and he got confused!

Yep, that’s how science works. The very fact that the kid got it wrong could mean he’s right.

Science is full of paradigm shifts after all!

As if everything is just this.

It's interesting isn't it - some people appear to feel threatened either way. Hostile to ideas and beliefs about other lives, or so desperate for past lives to be true that they will believe just about anything! I'm all for a middle path. And did someone upthread scream that Buddhism was made up rubbish, or words to that effect? Buddhism is an intricate philosophy, many of its tenets pre-date Western answers to philosophical questions. The story of Buddha is an illustrative allegory, a kind of Eastern Plato

@PandemicAtTheDisco

Science is full of paradigm shifts after all!

And any scientist with integrity would be the first to say so! 😉

How many scientists have integrity is another topic altogether!

It's interesting isn't it - some people appear to feel threatened either way.

I don't wholeheartedly believe in reincarnation (or anything else 'woo' like ghosts and spirits and psychics etc) but I do get into debates with people who rubbish it with science. Or worse, scientific 'facts'. Which is different from them just believing something else (I have no problem with that).

Mostly because it's something we currently do not have the ability to perceive.

What evidence has shown us however, is that it’s highly highly unlikely to happen and I know where I’d place my billion dollars bet!

The strength of an analogy is in the similarities though.

What you mean by evidence is that we've agreed upon an accepted reality that humans don't spontaneously turn into cats. That's because we have eyes (to see) or cameras (to record) human behaviour over thousands of years and have never observed a human turn into a cat or the effects of a human turning into a cat. Or any other animal from which we could draw conclusions.

Nobody and nothing has ever been able to observe the state of death or the effects of death (in terns of a spirit / soul / consciousness). You can't use the same no observation over thousands of years acceptance of reality because a method for observation doesn't exist.

So the analogy is flawed. A slightly less flawed analogy would work better if the human claimed he could only turn into a cat when nobody or nothing was around to observe him. Did he?

But now that's a philosophical question similar to the tree falling in the deserted forest making a sound. Science can attempt to answer it but... it's still a philosophical question.

And I don't necessarily think this is a bad thing. I remember reading something once about physics along the lines of some things thought to be accepted will turn out to be wrong, but if we're really lucky then most of it will be wrong. Because isn't that the joy in it? The unknown.

PhD = Doctor of Philosophy in this country.

It's not often called a Doctor of Science for some reason although this term is used in other parts of the world.

There's a brilliant documentary on Netflix called "Surviving Death". There are several episodes and one is specifically about reincarnation and former lives.

I second this. The two episodes about the Medium are a bit pants but the near death experience one and the reincarnation one are truly brilliant.

My head says no, but I know of two young children who’ve come out with very spooky things. One was a niece of only 3 - she started talking about her daddy being very angry! and the house being on fire, and my dd who was with her, was startled, since BiL is the most chilled person alive. So she said she was sure her daddy would never be angry like that.
‘Oh, not that daddy,’ said the child, quite matter of fact. ‘I mean my other daddy, before.’

The other was the preschool grandson of a friend. While on holiday the whole family had gone to visit a site of Graeco/Roman ruins where none of them had ever been before. As soon as they arrived, the little boy said, ‘I used to live here!’ and went on to very happily point out the remains of his house, and of his friend’s house - he even gave a slightly garbled but appropriate name for him. Then he pointed out a cave where they used to hide and the remains of the pool (bath) where they would swim.

Needless to say, all the rest of the family were seriously spooked!

When they finally left, he said, ‘Thank you for bringing me home.’

As I said,, he was still pre school so couldn’t possibly have read anything about it.
In both cases, as they grew older they completely forgot these ‘memories’, if that’s what they were.

Again, people never "remember" living in bog standard semis, terraced houses, labourers' cottages or whatever.

Possibly because you'd be unlikely to visit a random house you'd lived in 'before'. The poster mentioned Skipton Castle - a tourist attraction, somewhere you'd visit. Remembering Skipton Castle doesn't mean you have to have lived in it - you might just have lived in Skipton itself in a past life.

Again, people never "remember" living in bog standard semis, terraced houses, labourers' cottages or whatever

Actually, some of the most compelling stories Ive heard are about children who do recall fairly humdrum in experiences.

One of my earliest memories is of leaning on the back of a sofa and looking out of a window. Across the road was a tall office block mostly windowed and seeing the setting sun reflecting in the windows. This wasn't a one off this was something I remember doing regularly late afternoon. My parents say we didn't live anywhere near anything of that description - nor did we go visit anywhere this could have been. I'm not saying it's a previous life, but the memory is strong and it's bugging me!

@SecondCityShark

Again, people never "remember" living in bog standard semis, terraced houses, labourers' cottages or whatever

Actually, some of the most compelling stories Ive heard are about children who do recall fairly humdrum in experiences.

Yes me too.

@Zzelda, the only TV documentary I can recall on this topic, featured a child who became panicky, saying she couldn’t breathe, whenever they passed a row of small terraced houses alongside a railway line, near her home.

I forget the details, but other things she said led the research to a child who’d lived in one of those houses a hundred or so years previously, and had died of diphtheria - which results in a membrane growing across the windpipe, i.e. inability to breathe.
So certainly an ‘obscure nobody’.

I've read a lot of books on reincarnation and it's the only spiritual belief that has ever made sense to me. I think ghosts/hauntings are just residual energy. The idea of having one life and then just going to the spirit world always seemed pointless and odd to me. I think we come to earth to learn lessons and advance spiritually and in the end we will all return to Source/the spirit world. Although with the way most humans behave I think we have got a while to go...

Of course there is the sceptic in me which sometimes thinks meh there is probably just nothing when we die.

If anyone is interested I recommend the book 'Journey of Souls: Case Studies of Life Between Lives' by Michael Newton.

Again, people never "remember" living in bog standard semis, terraced houses, labourers' cottages or whatever

The only ones I've ever read about are people that did live in bog standard houses, terraces etc.