I tend strongly to believe that every human being is an individual, preciously distinct, one in a myriad billion through the history of our strange race but sometimes I wonder…
I wonder why the disciples asked Jesus “Who sinned? This man or his parents that he was born blind?” if they didn’t have some kind of belief in an earthly existence (or at least one where ‘sin’ was possible) before the present personality’s birth. Jesus’ response? “Neither this man nor his parents sinned…”
I wonder if our ideas of identity are too limited. I wonder if we might resonate with others who have existed in different times the same way one wine glass resonates with another of similar structure and composition or a radio reciever is tuned into a particular wavelength.
If we accept these stories of family members knowing when a loved one dies, or is hurt, etc. and that they do so without a physically measurable means of information transference then the means of communication must be either not currently measurable or occurring through a medium that is separate in some way from the physical.
In the same way that time, space, energy and mass make up what we call the physical realm, there may be another realm of soulish reality. This could be other-dimensional or simply a part of reality we don’t normally see, analogous to those colours of the spectrum invisible to our eyes. It’s possible that information transference in that realm would not require any of the normal mediums of transfer of the physical world and may even be unrestricted by time.
I wonder if our sense of identification with our personality is a means of delusion. What if we actually are bigger than who we think we are now? This is from C.S. Lewis’s “The Great Divorce”:
“And suddenly all was changed. I saw a great assembly of gigantic forms all motionless, all in deepest silence, standing forever about a little silver table and looking upon it. And on the table were little figures like chessmen moving to and fro and doing this and that. And I knew that each chessman was the idolum or puppet representative of some of the great presences that stood by. And the acts and motions of each chessman were a moving portrait, a mimicry or pantomime, which delineated the inmost nature of his giant master. And these chessmen are men and women as they appear in this world. And the silver table is Time. And those who stand and watch are the immortal souls of those same men and women.”
Sometimes I wonder if, though we see the past as past and future as future as we exist in these bodies, we are living in many different lives at once, our deepest nature playing out multiple lives, seemingly disconnected from each other by time and space but actually branches from the same root.
And sometimes I wonder about the deepest reality. There is a strange verse in the New Testament which says “Whoever is joined to God is one spirit”. Many translations add “with Him” but it’s not in the original.
I think the concept behind reincarnation is perhaps more complex than the Hindu or Buddhist idea but to me, it is a far more logical premise than assuming that our very short lives are nearly enough to achieve the kind of slow spiritual evolution that might take place.It surely makes sense that Nature and her own sophisticated recycling and beautifully economic equilibrium extends to and reflects the same with consciousnes.
There is an enormous body of evidence around the world for the existence of former lives and the process of conscious planning between lives or as the Tibetan buddhists state in the “bardo” or interlife. For me at least, it is as natural as the sun and moon.
Memories reincarnated are easily mistaken for a spirit being reincarnated. Having memories doesn’t automatically mean they were your memories. People “remember” things that haven’t even happened yet.
The dominant rational materialist worldview arose from intelligent people’s frustration with religious tyranny arising out of easily falsified tales of spirit worlds and the hereafter.
Thus, they would work to refute any attempt to present evidence that would indicate the presence or reality of such phenomena.
However, even the people at the forefront of such a movement steered clear of mentioning certain individuals, like Daniel Dunglas Home, because they could not disprove his powers like they could with outright charlatans.
If you look around, you’ll find stories that are difficult to refute, some of which, arise from a child of 5-6 who has the exact personality, knowledge, and memories of an adult they never met, who lived far, and who died before they were born.
Then again, groups and individuals who wish to advance a spiritualist worldview are just as capable of engineering psy-ops as their rationalist materialist counterparts.
In Colin Wilson’s “The Occult,” he tells an anecdote of medieval monks exploiting the sincere visions of another monk. The monk had visions that told him certain things, but then he had different visions that contradicted his initial visions, or maybe they looked too “real,” in any case, he discovered other monks were sneaking into his room in various guises, pretending to be materialized spirits. People who claim spiritual visions have always been ripe for manipulation.
To me, at least, this story (if it is legitimate) says more about the nature of mind and consciousness than reincarnation. If Jung was right and there is some sort of collective unconscious, perhaps there is some way this kid could have been ‘tuned in’ to the impact this particular WWII soldier left on it. Given the physical nature of life and death, the idea of an individual ‘soul’ still strikes me as ridiculous.
It seems there was definitely some kind of transference but not all of the details match what they are able to find out later. (I recommend having a look at some of the other stories in the ‘Extraordinary People’ series.)
All the near death experience research, and there is a lot- reflects the same occurrences, despite cultural background, spanning ages from children to adults around the world. Everyone reports more or less the same events…
Light/tunnel= etheric beings= then a holographic instant life review movie plays in front of you and you watch and see the hurt and love you generated, it is all felt…then there is discussion and then you get sent right back because of course it’s too early in the cases of near death…
Anyway this whole universal sequence of events to me points to many lives as a learning process. That and about a million other things support reincarnation imo.
Matter of time before the slowpokes in mainstream academia get it.
Could a human being function without a mind? Of course not. That being the case, how is it that the laws of nature have conduced to the development of intelligent beings that require minds to function? To me that unquestionably reveals that the body is designed to be operated by a mind, and both body and mind are therefore an intended plan of more than a mere Mind.
Of course, I’m a Christian and a creationist and therefore I don’t believe in reincarnation. I do believe in fallen angelic beings who have access to detailed information on the dead and who may thus be able to simulate familiarity with the deceased’s experiences. By the same token, I believe they may represent a (forbidden) source of information about secret or future events they have been made aware of and can pass that information to humans in much the same way they tempt us, or through dreams, etc. That said, there is always something in it for them, albeit to the spiritual hurt of those whom they communicate with. For instance, false doctrine about the next life, or ideas about reincarnation.
As a Christian, I tend to interpret everything through Scripture. Therefore, if someone says they are the reincarnation of someone else, no amount of evidence could avail to persuade me that their claim is true.
There was something read at a eulogy of a famous scientist several years ago (don’t remember who died or who read the eulogy), but the gist of it was that energy does not die.
If the human body and the cells within it are comprised of energy – well then. I took this eulogy to mean that my beloved sisters and father who have passed on before me, while they may not be recognizable in human form beyond the grave, still do exist in some way form, or fashion.
To save Kevin some of his bandwith – with another of my long winded comments – check out the Akashic record. http://www.edgarcayce.org/about_edgarcayce/akashic_records/akashic_records.asp
Defense.gov News Photo 110426-A-7597S-183: U.S. Special Operations service members with Special Operations Task Force South board two UH-60 Black Hawk helicopters following a clearing operation in Panjwa'i district in Kandahar province, Afghanistan, on April 25, 2011. Source: Wikimedia.
I tend strongly to believe that every human being is an individual, preciously distinct, one in a myriad billion through the history of our strange race but sometimes I wonder…
I wonder why the disciples asked Jesus “Who sinned? This man or his parents that he was born blind?” if they didn’t have some kind of belief in an earthly existence (or at least one where ‘sin’ was possible) before the present personality’s birth. Jesus’ response? “Neither this man nor his parents sinned…”
I wonder if our ideas of identity are too limited. I wonder if we might resonate with others who have existed in different times the same way one wine glass resonates with another of similar structure and composition or a radio reciever is tuned into a particular wavelength.
If we accept these stories of family members knowing when a loved one dies, or is hurt, etc. and that they do so without a physically measurable means of information transference then the means of communication must be either not currently measurable or occurring through a medium that is separate in some way from the physical.
In the same way that time, space, energy and mass make up what we call the physical realm, there may be another realm of soulish reality. This could be other-dimensional or simply a part of reality we don’t normally see, analogous to those colours of the spectrum invisible to our eyes. It’s possible that information transference in that realm would not require any of the normal mediums of transfer of the physical world and may even be unrestricted by time.
I wonder if our sense of identification with our personality is a means of delusion. What if we actually are bigger than who we think we are now? This is from C.S. Lewis’s “The Great Divorce”:
“And suddenly all was changed. I saw a great assembly of gigantic forms all motionless, all in deepest silence, standing forever about a little silver table and looking upon it. And on the table were little figures like chessmen moving to and fro and doing this and that. And I knew that each chessman was the idolum or puppet representative of some of the great presences that stood by. And the acts and motions of each chessman were a moving portrait, a mimicry or pantomime, which delineated the inmost nature of his giant master. And these chessmen are men and women as they appear in this world. And the silver table is Time. And those who stand and watch are the immortal souls of those same men and women.”
Sometimes I wonder if, though we see the past as past and future as future as we exist in these bodies, we are living in many different lives at once, our deepest nature playing out multiple lives, seemingly disconnected from each other by time and space but actually branches from the same root.
And sometimes I wonder about the deepest reality. There is a strange verse in the New Testament which says “Whoever is joined to God is one spirit”. Many translations add “with Him” but it’s not in the original.
What a wonderful world.
Indeed.
I think the concept behind reincarnation is perhaps more complex than the Hindu or Buddhist idea but to me, it is a far more logical premise than assuming that our very short lives are nearly enough to achieve the kind of slow spiritual evolution that might take place.It surely makes sense that Nature and her own sophisticated recycling and beautifully economic equilibrium extends to and reflects the same with consciousnes.
There is an enormous body of evidence around the world for the existence of former lives and the process of conscious planning between lives or as the Tibetan buddhists state in the “bardo” or interlife. For me at least, it is as natural as the sun and moon.
Memories reincarnated are easily mistaken for a spirit being reincarnated. Having memories doesn’t automatically mean they were your memories. People “remember” things that haven’t even happened yet.
The dominant rational materialist worldview arose from intelligent people’s frustration with religious tyranny arising out of easily falsified tales of spirit worlds and the hereafter.
Thus, they would work to refute any attempt to present evidence that would indicate the presence or reality of such phenomena.
However, even the people at the forefront of such a movement steered clear of mentioning certain individuals, like Daniel Dunglas Home, because they could not disprove his powers like they could with outright charlatans.
If you look around, you’ll find stories that are difficult to refute, some of which, arise from a child of 5-6 who has the exact personality, knowledge, and memories of an adult they never met, who lived far, and who died before they were born.
Then again, groups and individuals who wish to advance a spiritualist worldview are just as capable of engineering psy-ops as their rationalist materialist counterparts.
In Colin Wilson’s “The Occult,” he tells an anecdote of medieval monks exploiting the sincere visions of another monk. The monk had visions that told him certain things, but then he had different visions that contradicted his initial visions, or maybe they looked too “real,” in any case, he discovered other monks were sneaking into his room in various guises, pretending to be materialized spirits. People who claim spiritual visions have always been ripe for manipulation.
To me, at least, this story (if it is legitimate) says more about the nature of mind and consciousness than reincarnation. If Jung was right and there is some sort of collective unconscious, perhaps there is some way this kid could have been ‘tuned in’ to the impact this particular WWII soldier left on it. Given the physical nature of life and death, the idea of an individual ‘soul’ still strikes me as ridiculous.
Man, talk about off-topic!
There’s a related story on youtube. See ‘Extraordinary people – The boy who lived before Pt1’ at
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1RRs7fXjs_w
It seems there was definitely some kind of transference but not all of the details match what they are able to find out later. (I recommend having a look at some of the other stories in the ‘Extraordinary People’ series.)
All the near death experience research, and there is a lot- reflects the same occurrences, despite cultural background, spanning ages from children to adults around the world. Everyone reports more or less the same events…
Light/tunnel= etheric beings= then a holographic instant life review movie plays in front of you and you watch and see the hurt and love you generated, it is all felt…then there is discussion and then you get sent right back because of course it’s too early in the cases of near death…
Anyway this whole universal sequence of events to me points to many lives as a learning process. That and about a million other things support reincarnation imo.
Matter of time before the slowpokes in mainstream academia get it.
Could a human being function without a mind? Of course not. That being the case, how is it that the laws of nature have conduced to the development of intelligent beings that require minds to function? To me that unquestionably reveals that the body is designed to be operated by a mind, and both body and mind are therefore an intended plan of more than a mere Mind.
Of course, I’m a Christian and a creationist and therefore I don’t believe in reincarnation. I do believe in fallen angelic beings who have access to detailed information on the dead and who may thus be able to simulate familiarity with the deceased’s experiences. By the same token, I believe they may represent a (forbidden) source of information about secret or future events they have been made aware of and can pass that information to humans in much the same way they tempt us, or through dreams, etc. That said, there is always something in it for them, albeit to the spiritual hurt of those whom they communicate with. For instance, false doctrine about the next life, or ideas about reincarnation.
As a Christian, I tend to interpret everything through Scripture. Therefore, if someone says they are the reincarnation of someone else, no amount of evidence could avail to persuade me that their claim is true.
There was something read at a eulogy of a famous scientist several years ago (don’t remember who died or who read the eulogy), but the gist of it was that energy does not die.
If the human body and the cells within it are comprised of energy – well then. I took this eulogy to mean that my beloved sisters and father who have passed on before me, while they may not be recognizable in human form beyond the grave, still do exist in some way form, or fashion.
To save Kevin some of his bandwith – with another of my long winded comments – check out the Akashic record.
http://www.edgarcayce.org/about_edgarcayce/akashic_records/akashic_records.asp
@ Eileen & Cryingfreeman,
I just left a post at https://cryptogon.com/?p=9202
which is not directly relevant to this topic but pertinent to your posts.