Reincarnation
- Thread starter mchang
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I am sharing this as my personal interpretation and research question, not as a demand that others accept it.
I do not personally remember any past lives. My own view is that reincarnation is deeply connected to the fear of death. I think it may be one of the ways human beings try to answer the terrifying question of what happens when the body dies. In that sense, I see it as similar to why some people talk to dead loved ones, feel that the dead are still present, or believe communication with the dead is possible. It may be a way of keeping identity, love, memory, and meaning alive after death.
What interests me is not just whether reincarnation is true or false, but why humans create sacred meaning around death, belonging, and continuity. In my own life, one core text I am studying is from my 1983 baptism certificate: “God has made you a member of the holy Christian church.” I am not trying to make archaeology prove Lutheran doctrine. I am trying to understand how God-language, ritual, belonging, symbolic meaning, and family history fit together across time.
From a science-first point of view, I am especially interested in how early human symbolic behavior, burial, myth, the Lion Man, and later traditions show the human capacity to create sacred meaning. So my response to the question is that I do not have a past-life memory to share, but I do think reincarnation may be one of humanity’s oldest kinds of answers to death, grief, and the desire for life to continue in some form.
I do not personally remember any past lives. My own view is that reincarnation is deeply connected to the fear of death. I think it may be one of the ways human beings try to answer the terrifying question of what happens when the body dies. In that sense, I see it as similar to why some people talk to dead loved ones, feel that the dead are still present, or believe communication with the dead is possible. It may be a way of keeping identity, love, memory, and meaning alive after death.
What interests me is not just whether reincarnation is true or false, but why humans create sacred meaning around death, belonging, and continuity. In my own life, one core text I am studying is from my 1983 baptism certificate: “God has made you a member of the holy Christian church.” I am not trying to make archaeology prove Lutheran doctrine. I am trying to understand how God-language, ritual, belonging, symbolic meaning, and family history fit together across time.
From a science-first point of view, I am especially interested in how early human symbolic behavior, burial, myth, the Lion Man, and later traditions show the human capacity to create sacred meaning. So my response to the question is that I do not have a past-life memory to share, but I do think reincarnation may be one of humanity’s oldest kinds of answers to death, grief, and the desire for life to continue in some form.
My first experience with past lives was in 1997. It's happened many times since then. This is one of the things I came here to do, uncover these experiences and heal them.
In a meditation I had a visual of someone laying prone with a man standing over them. The prone person was waist high. He had on peacock armbands and a head dress. There was a priestess there and I had the feeling I was being held spread eagle. This was in color which is rare for me.
My wife is a gifted medium. A few days after this we were sitting in our dining room finishing up a reading for ourselves. When she was done it popped into my head to ask her about this visual. As soon as I had the thought I felt this inrush of emotion that took my breath away and I uttered an unintelligible sound. I looked at her and I couldn't speak.
What happened was I was being sacrificed. In that lifetime I didn't understand what & why was going on. The priest was my cousin from this lifetime and the priestess was my wife from this lifetime. The inrush of emotion I felt that took my breath away was terror. It was the emotion of terror I felt when it happened that I couldn't understand.
This experience and this emotion had been in the energetic ether waiting for me to ask about it to let it come back to me so I could accept what happened. I forgave my cousin and wife and this cleared this past life experience from my energy.
This has happened with other past lives many times over the years. What I was taught what I learned was we carry with us from lifetime to lifetime those unresolved emotional experiences we don't or are unable to process. They become a part of our energy. When we find them and face them we can heal them and in doing so we let them go. As we let them go our connection with the Source grows clearer and stronger.
Brian
In a meditation I had a visual of someone laying prone with a man standing over them. The prone person was waist high. He had on peacock armbands and a head dress. There was a priestess there and I had the feeling I was being held spread eagle. This was in color which is rare for me.
My wife is a gifted medium. A few days after this we were sitting in our dining room finishing up a reading for ourselves. When she was done it popped into my head to ask her about this visual. As soon as I had the thought I felt this inrush of emotion that took my breath away and I uttered an unintelligible sound. I looked at her and I couldn't speak.
What happened was I was being sacrificed. In that lifetime I didn't understand what & why was going on. The priest was my cousin from this lifetime and the priestess was my wife from this lifetime. The inrush of emotion I felt that took my breath away was terror. It was the emotion of terror I felt when it happened that I couldn't understand.
This experience and this emotion had been in the energetic ether waiting for me to ask about it to let it come back to me so I could accept what happened. I forgave my cousin and wife and this cleared this past life experience from my energy.
This has happened with other past lives many times over the years. What I was taught what I learned was we carry with us from lifetime to lifetime those unresolved emotional experiences we don't or are unable to process. They become a part of our energy. When we find them and face them we can heal them and in doing so we let them go. As we let them go our connection with the Source grows clearer and stronger.
Brian
Something else to consider is the concept of the Akashic Records from Theosophy, but much older. In short, we may sometimes have the ability to tap into the larger shared experiences from people through time. With that in mind, past life experiences may not necessarily be from our own life's but also from other people's. Just a thought. 
I believe what will happen has been written (Akashic) what path we choose to get there is our freewill. Disagree with you on your comment regarding past life experiences being possibly someone else's. Our experiences travel with our energy. Thanks brianSomething else to consider is the concept of the Akashic Records from Theosophy, but much older. In short, we may sometimes have the ability to tap into the larger shared experiences from people through time. With that in mind, past life experiences may not necessarily be from our own life's but also from other people's. Just a thought.
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When I was young I used to assume that reincarnation was the most likely theory because my mom said it was. The reading material she kept around seemed to support that and it was more or less what I believed. I used to think it was likely also because when I would read novels or history or watch movies or tv shows I would find history "familiar" in a personal way.
My grandfather believed quite dogmatically in conditional immortality so that was always in the background.
(mainstream religion was not our forte)
Apparently, though, I found out years later, both theories exist non-dogmatically in Judaism.
My grandfather believed quite dogmatically in conditional immortality so that was always in the background.
(mainstream religion was not our forte)
Apparently, though, I found out years later, both theories exist non-dogmatically in Judaism.
It's fine to disagree - I just put it out there as something to consider as part of the wider discussion.
This is especially as sometimes what might be perceived as past life experiences can overlap in time, suggesting either misunderstanding as to what those experiences are - or something less direct in play.
For me, it comes from personal experience with past lives. Thanks brian
My understanding comes from healing things from my past lives as they were brought to me this lifetime. BrianIt's fine to disagree - I just put it out there as something to consider as part of the wider discussion.
This is especially as sometimes what might be perceived as past life experiences can overlap in time, suggesting either misunderstanding as to what those experiences are - or something less direct in play.
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I've heard theories that time is not necessarily linear, or of different timelines, or of souls having subdivisions, or of souls in matrices that share with one another, that may account for those things. However it's reasonable to theorize that people who have memories from before their own time could have them from all sorts of sources, up to and including a former life.It's fine to disagree - I just put it out there as something to consider as part of the wider discussion.
This is especially as sometimes what might be perceived as past life experiences can overlap in time, suggesting either misunderstanding as to what those experiences are - or something less direct in play.
Time could be multi dimensional happening all at the same time on different levels. No way for us in this human being to deny or confirm. brian
René Guénon, in "The Multiple States of the Being" offers:
"... consciousness in the individual human state, like this state itself, is nonetheless capable of indefinite extension; and even in the ordinary man, that is, one who has not especially developed his extra-corporeal modalities, it in fact extends much further than is commonly supposed.
"... but if the psychologists readily recognize the existence of a 'subconscious' ... they always forget to envisage correlatively a 'superconscious' ...
"... in reality both the 'subconscious' and the 'superconscious' are simple prolongations of consciousness itself and can never take us out of its integral domain, and consequently cannot in any way be compared to the 'unconscious', that is, to what is outside of consciousness, but on the contrary must be included in the complete notion of the individual consciousness.
"Considered in this way, the individual consciousness suffices to account for everything that takes place mentally in the domain of individuality, without need for recourse to the bizarre hypothesis of a 'plurality of consciousnesses', which some people have even understood in the sense of a literal 'polypsychism'. It is true that the 'unity of the self', as ordinarily envisaged, is equally illusory, but if this is so, it is precisely because plurality and complexity exist in the very heart of the consciousness, which prolongs itself in modalities some of which may be very distant and obscure, such as those that constitute what might be called 'organic consciousness', as well as most of those manifested in the dream state.
"From another point of view the indefinite extension of consciousness renders completely useless certain strange theories that have surfaced in our time, of which the metaphysical impossibility suffices to refute completely. Here we do not intend to speak only of the more or less 'reincarnationist' hypotheses, and others comparable to them, as implying a similar limitation of Universal Possibility ..."
(The Multiple States of Being, Chapter 7: "The Possibilities of Individual Consciousness", Sophia Perennis, New York, 2004, p.43-44)
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Guénon was somewhat adamant that rebirth as a human being was a one-time event, as the idea of someone (and who, or rather what, is never adequately defined) coming back time and again, in Guénon's metaphysic, was a no-no. Furthermore, Guénon argued the popular theory of reincarnation was a largely western idea and not taught in the authentic traditions.
Marco Pallis offered, to the contrary, that:
"... he (Guénon) wished rather to emphasize the principial simultaneity of that which, from the standpoint of ordinary experience, appears as successive: the "guénonian" presentation of the Multiple States of the Being is a static version of the same truth which samsara traditionally expresses in dynamic mode... whence his statement that, among Hindus, their frequent references to rebirth in human form are consciously intended to be read in a symbolical sense only, and that it is Western misunderstanding, notably on the part of Theosophists, that is exclusively responsible for current reincarnationist phraseology. Having had much to do with both Brahmins and Lamas in their own countries I can only say that as a statement of fact the above mentioned view does not hold water.
While I feel sure that all are agreed in rejecting the possibility of repetition in the arising and existence of beings, as spelling metaphysical nonsense, the possibility of another (but different) human birth is not formally ruled out by the Orientals; for them, this possibility goes in with the rest of samsara and they neither try to limit it in positive or negative terms. One can perhaps best express the traditional view by saying that human birth is a rare and correspondingly precious opportunity, determined like everything else in an indefinite Round of Existence by antecedent karma. Popular simplifications apart, this is the doctrine one meets in Asia."
(Letter entitled 'Reincarnation' in Studies in Comparative Religion, Vol.1, No.1)
It is, because according to samsara, one cannot rule such a thing out.
That said, an axiom is that human life is a rare thing indeed – the Blind Turtle analogy is a Buddhist parable illustrating the extreme rarity of obtaining a human rebirth and encountering the Dharma.
A blind turtle lives in a vast ocean that covers the world. It surfaces only once every 100 to 100,000 years, and on the surface is a 'golden yoke' (or log with a hole) driven by random winds and currents. The likelihood of the turtle's head passing through the yoke’s hole is compared to the improbability of a being being reborn as a human.
That successive rebirths are not impossible, but extremely unlikely, the remembrance of such is essentially useless, as all it tells is one is still subject to samsara.
I'm not sure, but I think the idea that each rebirth is a successive step 'forward', as somehow marking progress, is entirely fictitious, an error that the rules of "Snakes and Ladders" make clear.
More likely, in my book, is some kind of resonance phenomena.
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Is that correct however? What does he base that on?