anyone else's toddler ever spoken about 'past life' experiences??????

[noonar]

now, am not saying (necessarily) that i believe in reincarnation, but i've just had a rather spooky conversation with my 3 yo dd. (just 3)

the gist of it was that she's bored with being 3 and wants to be a teenager again. when i asked her where i was whilst she was busy being a teenager, she said that she had a different mummy then.

the conversation went on, and then she said that she got sick and she died.

as i said earlier, i'm not saying i believe any of this, but it certainly sent a shiver down my spine.

awesome debating skills rockin...you've literally blown me away

I'm not debating anything, theres no point, you won't listen & I have no desire to engage you, you are more than welcome to your opinion, I have mine & I don't really care - that's your prerogative but it might be nice if you weren't so holier than though God complex bombastic with it though & give others a chance to speak - or is that the scientific way - you say your view more than everyone else, over & over again - count up the posts in favour of anti-woo & whey hey - "woo" loses

I can read the thread title though - bye bye :)

I agree with rockinhippy and refuse to engage you any more.

I'm willing to embrace possibilities and you aren't. That's okay. But please STOP telling me your point of view....If you want to start your own thread that's fine, but please leave this thread for people who want to discuss actual experiences

There is a perpetual problem with trying to prove this kind of evidence is true. If a child says something that cannot be verified then you can argue it is made up. If it can be verified then there is always the possibility that it can have been known previously by the child albeit unwittingly, maybe deliberately.

There is also the problem that even if you could verify that the child did not have access to the information that it could be something else at play that we don't really know about rather than reincarnation. So, however compelling the stories and however rigorous the research, it is unlikely to ever be enough to say that reincarnation can be proven by past life recall in children. Unless we can find new techniques to validate these sort of stories (and prove the existence of the soul) then it will remain a matter of belief.

Maybe he'll tell you a bit more inclusionist. Keep us posted! :)

Here's a link to an interview with Dr Stevenson about his research and views. Interview is followed by one of his case studies if anyone is interested.

reluctant-messenger.com/reincarnation-proof.htm

"Ooh I haven't read the entire thread (and see seeker has done her bunfight thing)."

? At least I haven't been gratuitously offensive......

Just in case anyone's interested, here is a sceptical but measured and sympathetic article about Ian Stevenson. I think that he should be given huge credit for obviously wanting to believe so very much, but not letting that desire get in the way of his true scientific curiosity and desire for real evidence. He ended up where he had started- with no proof, despite examining thousands of cases. He also should be given credit for debunking many supposed cases of past life memory/regression, particularly under hypnosis, that convinced many others.

Link doesn't work seeker.

Sorry. Try this

Anyone who knows me on these boards knows that i am not a woo type at all. I have read a few books on pas life's and none of them really confirmed there was any evidence.
However did have a very odd experience with my Dd 15 when she was 3.
We were on a train we get regularly but normally sit on the othetdside. Looking out the window we could see a cemetery in the distance. Dd suddenly announced that where they put dead people. She then started telling me that when she was here before she had been in a cemetery because and talked about being married then killed by a policemen with a knife.
She does have a really good imagination but not in that sort of way. The way She talked was not her normal language. She mentioned being here before one other time a few weeks later and there was another odd comment about her grandad calling her gingetnut which wasn't his vocabulary as he was Greek.

We had not had anyone close die and she had never been to cemetery either.

She has no memory of it now
It was a very strange experience and still to this day don't know what to think of it. Its not yhevsort of thing should have seen on tv at that age.

That's a bit freaky bruffin. I know DS (4) really has no concept of what death is or what a graveyard is. when children start talking about those things it just seems so strange.

Seeker: Interesting article here about scientific 'proof'. I liked this quote:

"Real scientists never use the words ?scientific proofs,? because they know no such thing exists. Anyone who uses the words ?proof,? ?prove? and ?proven? in their discussion of science is not a real scientist."

Have you come arose the expression "beyond reasonable doubt"?

well thats okay then...the only person on this thread who claims to have conclusive proof was someone saying that some people have proof of reincarnation....so we can discard what they said quite happily.

Every time I used it, it was in conjunctions with 'cannot' as in 'cannot prove' or 'prove beyond reasonable doubt' which still allows unreasonable doubt and absolute proof as the remit of mathematics alone....

Does no one care that I verified my DD's missing yellow bear story?

seeker I liked the bit in the article that points out that the methodology of going around showing that a story can be matched with a real event can never either produce evidence for or against reincarnation.

It can't provide evidence for reincarnation because there is always a different way for the information to have arrived in the candidate's brain. Either rumour, memory, dream, or just spontaneous neuronal activity.

Fundamentally thinking something is not evidence of where that thought originated.

It can't provide evidence against reincarnation because when a story turns out not to match you just say that person was wrong or not reincarnated or doesn't remember or whatever.

Fundamentally the fact I remember no past lives does not mean I am not reincarnated.

When I was little, I used to talk about my 'other mummy'.

It's obviously impossible to prove that reincarnation doesn't happen. It's just that there are more likely and logical explanations for the examples people give.

I think Ian Stevenson was quite impressive in his commitment to the scientific method. Apart from the bit where he said that birth defects could mean that a person had been injured in a past life- that somebody who had had fingers cut off as a punishment in a past life might be born with finger deformities in their next life.

Guys, isn't it obvious that ICEBINEG is just trolling. Don't feed it and it will go away ;)

My own DD's have never mentioned anything strange like this, however I used to look after a little boy of four who one day, quite randomly out of nowhere told me that he used to live in China and that he'd been stabbed in the belly with a sword and died. It made my blood run cold.

So any sort of disagreement is trolling now? Wow.

There's disagreement and then there's doing it for a reaction and that's what she's doing IMO.

My dd until she was about four used to talk about "who I used to be" She had her other mummy and a brother Peter and sister Edith. She said she died when she had an accident in a factory when she was only a little girl and they were often hungry as her other Daddy had died.
She used to tell me all sorts of things about her life before me and said she was glad she came to me as I was kinder than her other Mummy who used to hit her

Where are the stories of past lives of people who lived long and mundane lives eventually popping their clogs sitting in a piss stained chair in an old people's home in Slough?

"There's disagreement and then there's doing it for a reaction and that's what she's doing IMO."

I suspect the reaction she is hoping for is that people might stop and think for a moment- open their minds to rationality, if you like.

Where are the stories of past lives of people who lived long and mundane lives eventually popping their clogs sitting in a piss stained chair in an old people's home in Slough?

According to Stevenson (sorry to keep going on about him but he's pretty much the only person who's done any serious research on this):

'Violent death is a factor in our cases. In more than seven hundred cases in six different cultures, sixty-one percent remembered having died violently. But are these cases actually representative? Those involving accidents, murders, and suicides are bound to get more attention than others in which the child remembers a quiet life. Children also tend to remember the final years or a previous life. Almost seventy five percent of our children appear to recall the way they died, and if death was violent, they remember it in vivid detail.'

Alternatively the parents are more likely to remember things the children's ramblings that are emotionally charged. Another thing I notice is the frequency with which the stories involve the child dying as a child. When children write stories they tend to have plenty of children in the story, usually themselves. Coming back to my original point, why is no one researching the phenomenom of monsters under the bed? How do we know that isn't real? If our main criteria of proof is that 'someone said it so it must be true' then following that logic we have to believe in a lot of stuff.

Well I think a young child talking in detail about death would draw attention if they didn't really save any experience/knowledge of it. Many of the children's stories involve them dying in adulthood, not as children.

Setting up a camera under the bed/in the wardrobe should help with the monster theory :)