Past Lives, Are they real?

Well i believe in them, What are your opinions?

I believe it is possible

I heard several books of the bible refered to reincarnation but were taken out (By people hundreds/thousands of years later)

Jesus was also suppost to have said about reincarnation on many occasions (Or so i have heard)

Yes it has been said that Pope Clement excised reincarnation from the Bible. He felt that keeping it in the Bible would encourage people to sin if they knew they were going to have numerous lives to correct their mistakes.

However, getting more into the actual subject of reincarnation. I am a firm believer in reincarnation. I have numerous theories on the topic which I would gladly share if anybody would be interested.

The most recent incident in our (my husband and I) life is when my husband was studying for a psych exam and one of the psychiatrist's in his textbook had led an almost parallel life to the one my husband had. The psychologist (a rather famous one) had absolutely so much in common that it was totally uncanny. We went looking online for a picture of the psychologist and although he bore no marked resemblance to my husband, the woman next to him, his wife looked like the split image of what I would probably look like in about 20 years time.

Now I am aware that whenever people speak about past lives they were always Cleopatra, or Caesar, or someone equally famous. We have no such delusions and it was a rather sobering thought to have to consider that this had been us in a previous life. Other lives we had lived were in Belgium as farmers, in India etc.

Ever hear the truth? It always sounds just right? Well this just did.

Without wanting to sound like some-thing out of the Lion King there is this whole circle of life thing. Practically ever-thing on earth gets recycled so why not souls too??

My mum told me that when I was about 4 I apparantly told her that I used to be a miner and that I died because of gas in the mine. I described how I remember seeing lots of other miners lying all around me dying. It all sounds pretty horrible but I have no memories of my past life now nor do I even remember telling my mum so don't know if its true or just childish imagination. Doesn't sound like the normal kind of story a child would make up though.

Funny thing is though, I have allways loved exploring tunnels, caves and underground places.

[edit on 10-6-2004 by lambchops]

well i believe in reincarnation, so therefore past lives are real.

do a search on "reincarnation" "past lives"

you'll find lots of opinions and quite a few recollections of previous lives.

How come so many people were Cleopatra or Beethoven in their past lives?
No one seems to be Joe of Muddy Ditch or some mundane nobody.
I do definately believe in reencarnation though. I also believe that souls tend to cluster together from lifetime to lifetime so you'd tend to keep meeting the same souls lifetime after lifetime.

Well, I have read quite a few books on this and I havent encountered a single case in which a person claimed to have been somebody famous in their past life.
This famous person thingy seems to be an urban legend of some kind, it is NOT in any of the serious books on reincarnation.
On the contrary, people talk about lives as slaves in egypt, farmers during the Dark Ages, simple soldiers in some war, etc, etc.

There are in my opinion quite a few problems with past lives. Memories and the mind are at least in part a product of your brain and it's cells. This is obvious in patients with certain types of brain damage that can no longer form new memories or lose their short- or longterm memory. A damaged prefontal lobe damages your longterm memory. Just think about Alzheimer's disease. Patients that have had temporal lobe brain surgery can also suffer from memory loss.

This makes me believe that memory are linked to the brain and the cells. Without damaged cells the memories no longer exist. After death, all your cells are totally gone. This makes memories of past lives very hard to believe. Why do the memories stay when your entire body dies, but don't they stay when a certain part of your brain dies or is damaged?

Then there's also the problem of the impossibility to measure the memories leaving the body. Another problem has to do with how the memories can form in the infant brain. At young age the memory, especially the longterm, still has to develop. You remember very little from your childhood, because your memory was not fully functional yet. Past life memories couldn't have existed in a baby's memory.

Those are my reasons to treat past life memories with a lot of skepticism. However, if it were real, I hope I was one of the great polymathematicians of the 18th or 19th century, like Riemann or Gauss.

[edit on 10-6-2004 by amantine]

Um.......... It was a Joke.


Well the first part was, not the second part.
I was at a past life regression where a woman went back to a life where she was burned at the stake for being a witch. We had to bring her back, because she was freaking out so bad when they put the torch to her.
odd thing was it appeared that she recognized everyone in the room (eccept for me) as being there when this occured. She said she was wrongly accused of it and those in the room knew who the real witch was but were to scared to tell.

personaly i am unsure of past live.
i have spoken at lenght to other like minded people as me, and a few of them swear there own spirit guide is the old them. the person they were once. but that confuses me. because if the soul lives on, and lives again, how can that soul be a differant energy to cummunicate ?

u see my point there ?

rant over

ill get my coat

I went through a regression session once...it was VERY interesting.
YES...I believe in reincarnation.
I think this planet is a school for souls...and we repeat when we flunk.
Or we repaet because we are having so much fun being PHYSICALL we choose to DO IT again.....I think we CAN choose to repeat or to go on.....
yup yup yup I am a BELIEVER!

PS Giselbertus??? dude? in my regression I was a Joe Flub from Muddy Gultch ....seriously

[edit on 10-6-2004 by theRiverGoddess]

River Goddess: I agree with your vision of life being a school. I believe that before each life we choose to learn particular lessons that will lead us to "enlightenment"/preparation for the next level/density. I believe that we frequently get bogged down by the ego trap. The ego ties us tightly to the earth and its delights. The ego is also the hungriest of all earthbound beings. The more you feed it the more ravenous it becomes. In the end once we learn unconditional love, humility and to live in truth we are ready to move to the next level. I think the books by Roger Woolger are very helpful in understanding the reincarnation process.

Namaste my friends

I read a book by Thomas Shroder called OLD SOULS : Compelling Evidence from Children Who Remember Past Lives.
It's about the work of Dr. Ian Stevenson, who studied what I believe is called 'xenoglossy', in young children. Xenoglossy is the ability to write or speak in a language that has not been learned. The idea being that they (the children) carried the fluency over from their past life(or lives).

A good book. And I'd never heard of xenoglossy before reading it, so it was pretty interesting.