To ask if you believe in past lives?

[Sayhellolikethis]

Name changed, as I’ve told MIL and DSis about this already…

Putting my little boy (just turned 4) to bed and he told me “I built 60 bridges during the war and I also built a bomb”. I asked him why he built a bomb and he said “I put 2 bombs on each of my bridges to protect them”. He also said “the factories were covered in camouflage”.

He then added “and a fighter jet plane falled to the ground”.

It was such a ramble of words and then he just wanted to snuggle down and go to sleep.

Has anyone else had a similar experience with their little ones? He won’t talk about it any further. Puzzled!!

Just because people believe in past life's doesn't mean it's true.

It is clearly utter rubbish and the people who do believe are what is nicest way gullible.

Nope you are wrong provide evidence it exists oh no you can't it's all anecdotes.

Nope you are wrong provide evidence it exists oh no you can't it's all anecdote.

Im not interested in wasting precious time trying to convince you. Do your own research. Theres plenty of documented cases out there courtesy of Google.

Ah the old Google it, I can find numerous articles saying it's bollocks bet you will tell me to go to YouTube next.

There were 2 American doctors (psychiatrists), from University of Arizona I believe. They had pretty much devoted their careers to this kind of research into past lives, flying all over the world to talk to children who seemed to have past life memories.

I've also seen some videos on youtube with parents being interviewed/telling their children's stories and it's fascinating. One in particular I remember (sorry no link but you can try googling), A little boy who'd said he used to fly a plane during WWII. He'd given his parents so much information over time that they'd looked into all kinds of records, eventually leading to a person with the exact name, title/profession etc all details matching. The family went as far as finding this man's sister (an old lady then). After hearing them out, she herself believed the little boy was her reincarnated brother.

There's a best seller called "Yesterday's Children". Written by a woman with such vivid recollections of a past life that she too, ended up finding her family from that life (after some very extensive efforts).

My DS has vivid memories of a past life - living in london, he can describe the buildings clearly - it is so believable when you speak to him - and he is not the imaginative type. - read so many cases of similar - fascinating OP

By what mechanism would that work? We know quite a lot about how human memory works - when your hippocampus dies or is damaged, your memory stops working. So is it your belief that there is some sort of soul which also works as a memory bank, but not in living people who suffer brain injury, which then floats about and falls into a foetus? But only some souls and some foetuses?

Everything is anecdotal until somebody proves it.

What about countries that never saw snow until people who had, came in and told them about it.
I wonder how many said 'it's not real because no one has done an official study with conclusive results yet'. Or 'where is this snow then?' Expecting it to be replicated right then and there as proof in completely unsuitable conditions.

We still don't even know what's deep in our own oceans for the most part. Or out there in the billions of other planets.

Studying what a bunch of 4 year old who happen to possibly remember some sort of past life? Not an easy task. But as pp mentioned before, there have been cases where people have traced stories back to real individuals. A large, comprehensive study outwith TV shows would be good but how they'd go about it I don't know.

I don't know if there's enough word of mouth evidence of it imo. But there's plenty for many things we can't explain. Even if it's just 'there's plenty of things we can't explain'.

We are living on modern world we shouldn't be believing this woowoo, so yes it is anecdotal.

Just because there is things we can't explain doesn't mean we make shit up to explain it.

Maybe the soul carries memories but when in a body, the brain writes over them. Like plugging a memory stick into a computer and deleting the files on it to make space for new stuff.

A childs mind wouldn't be able to make sense of a lot of things so it would just let them go. Some memories might be retained long enough to be thought on further once the child can express them. If they can put them into words or act on them at last.

It's only woowoo because we have a fixed narrative of how the world is supposed to be. Do we have to believe in the easter bunny? No. But if all the anecdotal evidence suggests your kid remembers a past life...why couldn't that be possible? Hell, we can fly in the air like birds on planes these days. If that's possible, who is to say what other things may or may not be. Or what we may or may not know 100 years from now.

Oh dear oh dear we fly because of scientists and engineers.

Past life's are complete bollocks there is zero evidence, you are comparing feats of engineering to someone saying I think this happened

I don't believe in it due to there being zero evidence, much like I don't believe the world is flat or the loch ness monster exists.

Some years ago I met someone at a social gathering, a large group, many of whom hadn't met except online. This person and I had never met in person before, only vaguely online. Never seen pictures of each other. Yet we both recognised each other at once as if we'd known each other before. But there was never an occasions where our lives could possibly have overlapped. In general I don't believe in any afterlife or reincarnation, but this still makes us wonder years later. We remain good friends.

But we know why planes fly - it’s a combination of lift and thrust overcoming mass and drag. Y’know - science and engineering.

also, your in response to my previous post the word “perhaps” is doing a lot of heavy lifting. (Ie: making stuff up in the face of all knowledge about how the brain works)

Just because some people don’t believe in past lives, doesn’t mean it’s not true.

It's not the fact that some people don't believe in it that makes it not true. It's the fact that there's absolutely zero evidence for it (or for ghosts, clairvoyants, psychics or any other woo nonsense).

Absolutely!
And it is so fascinating.It's quite rare for adults to remember but young children recall events ,people and facts in incredible details.
Read some books,there are plenty that do a collection of stories from many people whose children have recalled their previous lives.
There are some new souls on the earth plane but the huge majority of us have had several lives.
You can go to a trained therapist to be taken back to a previous life to heal something causing you issues in this life but it must be someone qualified.

To be fair, @Pinkbonbon isn’t suggesting that planes are powered by fairy dust or flown by ghosts. She is saying that if you’d told people from the 1400s that humans would be flying in planes, they would’ve thought it impossible.

Thats because they didn’t have the understanding at that time to believe it was possible.

likewise, there could be some, as yet unknown, set of circumstances that mean children can recount the memories of long dead individuals. It might even be (shock horror) non- woo.

its Fine to disagree that it is someone’s past life memories, but it’s nonsense to just say ‘that didn’t happen’. I think many of these people are talking honestly about their experiences.

I'd hope the trained therapists don't encourage this behavior.

Nope these people are talking about delusions it might feel honest to them but it doesn't make it true.

No. I suspect you believe in woo, so this is something you’re making a thing of.

my son used to say ‘when I was a boy before…’ but I put it down to his developmental imagination. To think he lived before is utterly ludicrous and we both laugh about it now.

@teabycandlelight i believe they are sincere but mistaken as are people who think they’ve had an accurate psychic reading or religious experience. The point is that what is being claimed doesn’t just require knowledge we don’t have now (people from the Middle Ages seeing an aeroplane) but it is in direct contradiction to all our knowledge of how brains and memory works - it requires a supernatural explanation that works completely differently to everything we know but only sometimes. I do not have to be open minded about that any more than I have to be open minded about the existence of magic, fairies or Thor.

I too have had the experience of my DC recounting experience of a previous life.
No real other other explanation for it when a child of 30 months tells you that she was the mother of an adult son who fought with his father? Virtually no exposure toTV and talked about things outside of a young child’s experience.
Ceased talking about these things a few month later and later had no recollection.

The naysayers fascinate me. You’re living on a planet in space travelling at 1000 mph. That’s mind blowing, yet you probably take it for granted. Whose to say past lives aren’t real?

To the doubters: absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
As a scientifically minded person you should know that.

If the hypothesis explains the facts (i.e. explains the things children say), then don't discount the hypothesis because you don't like it.

I think many people have an emotional investment in 'not believing woo stuff.' Perhaps it comes from fear.