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AIBU?

Share your dilemmas and get honest opinions from other Mumsnetters.

Original poster

To ask if you believe in past lives?

396 replies

Sayhellolikethis · 28/05/2023 15:06

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!!

OP posts:
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continentallentil · 28/05/2023 23:23

Rollonannualeave · 28/05/2023 17:02

CurlewKate · Today 16:57
"I haven't had this , but there's quite a lot written about it."
And not a single case that doesn't, on investigation, turn out to have a simple, perfectly rational explanation.

Respectfully. You are wrong.

Well she isn’t.

There is no solid scientific evidence that past lives, ghosts, god, or any similarly supernatural action exists.

You can of course choose to believe it does or it might, but there is no clear evidence for it.

continentallentil · 28/05/2023 23:23

Rollonannualeave · 28/05/2023 17:10

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.

😱

continentallentil · 28/05/2023 23:33

Pinkbonbon · 28/05/2023 18:14

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.

Show quote history

I think the point is that a good scientific principle is to assume the simplest explanation unless it is proven to be wrong.

The simplest explanation for small kids talking about other families and worlds is that they have picked up bits of info around them and turned it into a story. Small kids are like info sponges, they like stories, and they have a limited grip on reality.

You are right that we can’t know for sure that past lives don’t exist, any more than we we can know for sure that ghosts or god don’t exist. But there are simpler explanations for all the activities attributed to these things.

Dodger101 · 28/05/2023 23:33

Ha ha, past lives, no.

Peverellshire · 28/05/2023 23:37

Rollonannualeave · 28/05/2023 21:39

The skeptics on this thread strike me as lazy thinkers that want everyone else to bend over backwards trying to prove things to their very closed and made up minds.

All the examples on the thread are re: dramatic deaths and lives, the odds are for the most part, the lives and deaths would be pretty banal.

Peverellshire · 28/05/2023 23:39

JaneyGee · 28/05/2023 22:28

I doubt we have an immortal soul that re-inhabits another body at death. Other things could explain this stuff. Jung believed that we inherit a collective unconscious, which he described as a ‘million year old man’. For him, it was a kind of collective memory. When a child dreams about ‘monsters’, for example, maybe he’s seeing the reptiles and snakes that hunted our mammalian ancestors. Even Freud thought there was some truth to this.

I’ve got a hunch that we inherit the memories of out ancestors - especially the traumatic ones. People who experiment with LSD, for example (I mean those who do it carefully and seriously, under laboratory conditions) claim they have travelled into their DNA and ‘seen’ incidents from their ancestral past. Then there is epigenetics, which may cast some light on it. All this is way beyond me, but I have a hunch that is what we’re really seeing in past life regression. I’m convinced we somehow inherit memories and traumas, not just of our great grandparents, but of our species, and even our genus.

Yes, that makes sense. About belonging to a 'whole' a 'collective'.

rogueone · 28/05/2023 23:42

My youngest son consistently told me from the time he could speak that I was his new mummy: his real mummy and family were killed by the soldiers. They lived in the woods and he had a sister and brother. He doesn’t remember ever saying that now and stopped when he was around 5!

Peverellshire · 28/05/2023 23:46

rogueone · 28/05/2023 23:42

My youngest son consistently told me from the time he could speak that I was his new mummy: his real mummy and family were killed by the soldiers. They lived in the woods and he had a sister and brother. He doesn’t remember ever saying that now and stopped when he was around 5!

Interesting, but inevitably most, if this was true re: past lives, would have had incredibly dull lives. Or is it that you only recall the traumatic? Why not I died of old age in my bungalow and had 5 clever sisters?

50450750q · 28/05/2023 23:47

Stillcountingbeans · 28/05/2023 20:58

Don't you think that if there was any evidence for reincarnation it would change absolutely everything about our lives?

No I don't think it would change anything at all, except that possibly some people would try to be a bit nicer, in case they incurred 'bad karma' and had a worse life next time.
What do you think it would change?

Or some people would look down on those born with disabilities for having done something bad in a past life. Which is a thing some people already believe.

CurlewKate · 29/05/2023 06:20

@Pinkbonbon "Because how arrogant do you need to be to think you know all the secrets of the universe! " I don't think I know all the secrets of the Universe. But I do know some of them. And if I apply the scientific method to any that I don't and I don't come up with an explanation, I know that I am missing some facts, not that the method does not apply. And I am prepared to wait for the facts to emerge eventually. Which they will.

barmycatmum · 29/05/2023 06:38

Yes, I do.
the people quacking on about being “scientifically minded” and then proceeding to behave in a very unscientific manner in this thread are hilarious.

science is not about knowing, you jackasses. It’s about curiosity and testing. Many theories held for a time and then were disproven. Many theories are still holding - none of it is fucking certain.

god , sometimes I completely despair of the human race.

CurlewKate · 29/05/2023 06:55

@barmycatmum "the people quacking on about being “scientifically minded” and then proceeding to behave in a very unscientific manner in this thread are hilarious."
Can you say some more about this?

Fairislefandango · 29/05/2023 07:00

science is not about knowing, you jackasses. It’s about curiosity and testing

I don't think anyone is suggesting we have scientific proof of the non-existence of past lives. In any case, it's by definition pretty hard to get proof of the non-existence of things. That's why the burden of proof is on the person claiming that something does exist.

In the absence of a single scrap of evidence of any of these supernatural phenomena (including deities) throughout the whole of human existence, I don't think it's unreasonable to be extremely sceptical. Small children saying weird stuff isn't evidence of anything. Pretending is what they do. My dd spent about 6 months mostly claiming to be a baby jaguar.

musixa · 29/05/2023 07:04

Jifmicroliquid · 28/05/2023 20:16

I have a theory for this. I genuinely think that a past life memory is a memory that someone has from being a baby/too young to remember things. So something might have been on the TV and they have seen the images, although too young to understand what it is or understand the words to go with it. For some reason they store that memory, or multiple memories, that jumble together and then when they are a bit older and have an understanding of language and can decipher that memory, they think it’s something they actually done because it’s happened at a time that they shouldn’t really be able to remember anything. If that makes sense. So it’s sort of a glitch memory that feels real because they were too young to essentially recognise it as anything else.
I think it explains why not everyone seems to have a past life, and why so many children come out with these things, because they are simply recounting that memory.

This is a very plausible theory.

Tourmalines · 29/05/2023 07:14

It’s a load of rubbish .

SinnerBoy · 29/05/2023 07:23

Stillcountingbeans · Yesterday 21:07

No thank you. I don't feel the need to do your research for you.

Sorry, but that's just a cop out; you have claimed confidently that there is a lot of evidence, you need to support your claim, or it will, properly, be dismissed.

CurlewKate · 29/05/2023 07:24

@Jifmicroliquid Yes-and that actually has been shown to be true in several well known cases of "past life" experiences.

Rollonannualeave · 29/05/2023 07:25

‘Do your own research’ is utter nonsense. Nobody on here is equipped to do a proper scientific study with all the safeguards. Nobody has even attempted the first step of a literature review. ‘Research’ is not the same as using google. This is where all the daft anti vax and covid denial stuff came from

Calm down dear. No one is asking you to do a randomised controlled medical trial. Just a bit of searching on the web for famous past lives cases. Surely you're equipped to do that. We're not interested in literature here. But some empirical studies. Go on, have a quick search online. Or are you afraid it may mess with your existing world view?

CurlewKate · 29/05/2023 07:36

I have happily searched for this sort of thing before. It's always worth checking to see if a certain Ian Stephenson of the University of Virginia is involved in the case at any level.

Flittingaboutagain · 29/05/2023 08:01

But there's stuff out there we'll never understand... and if you don't believe in it, be grateful you still have that luxury (for now ;)

^ I am very grateful!

I think there's a possibility of some kind of inherited memory. Also like PP I wonder if a baby without language exposed to adult themed TV eg whilst mum is breastfeeding picks up imagery etc and then puts their own spin on it when they have language as a child. That could explain why the themes of their past life memories are often quite dramatic?

Orders76 · 29/05/2023 08:16

I had years of recurring dreams of drowning in what I thought was thames after skating on ice, probably to age 6 or 7 and rarely but sometimes as a adult.
I looked it and another occurance in a park up recently and it was only men and boys. Not sure what to think tbh.

motherofcatsandbears · 29/05/2023 08:18

Watch “Ghost inside my child” and read up on it. I believe in past lives and had past life regression.

Pancakeorcrepe · 29/05/2023 08:19

I believe in them 100% and have resolved health issues I had with past lives therapy. Is it all placebo? I don’t care, because the health issues are gone.

IWantToVote · 29/05/2023 08:24

Of course not!

What a ridiculous thought.

Jifmicroliquid · 29/05/2023 08:41

CurlewKate · 29/05/2023 07:24

@Jifmicroliquid Yes-and that actually has been shown to be true in several well known cases of "past life" experiences.

I think it’s a bit like the memory that a lot of people have of flying down the stairs when they were very young, which they think is a memory of the sensation of being carried down the stairs. People can misremember things when memories occur so young.

So say if a toddler goes to GP house and Grandad had a war documentary on in the background. The images of war planes might imprint on the toddlers mind, despite the fact they aren’t actually watching or paying attention. A year or two later, now perhaps with awareness of what war planes look like and subconsciously making a connection, something triggers that memory and child recalls to bemused parents that they used to fly old war planes, because they recall a memory of seeing them fly, but they don’t realise it’s a memory of something they watched as they were so young.