Do you believe in past life regression?

Where I have a big problem with it is that people who say they are in touch with their previous lives are all precious snowflakes that have been chosen, and the rest of us are just unfortunate slobs.

I used to be a werewolf but i’m alright nowwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww!!

No. I am 99% sure it’s all made up, either deliberately or by our subconscious brains. Show me the evidence.

Yes. Yes. I regress myself. I have infinite continues.

Yep, the trouble is everyone’s past lives seem to be famous/important/interesting people. The math doesn’t add up. Speaking of math not adding up, If the human population was much smaller in ancient times then there can’t be a 1:1 ratio of past lives to present lives. IMO it’s all made up to allow “entertainers” to get your money.

How many tragic medieval princesses could there possibly have been?

No. It’s all, to use a highly technical term, bullshit.

It’s a wacky made-up excuse for not being a better person.

Believe would be far too strong a word for how I regard the subject. Unfortunately it is an area rife with potential for quacks and charlatans to make money from the gullible and easily led.

That being said, there is one aspect of it that I find fascinating and that is the numerous spontaneous accounts by children re-living memories of past lives.

I’m referring to kids who have NOT been hypnotically regressed or influenced by their parents. In fact most of their parents are totally puzzled by their kid’s various accounts and extremely reluctant to believe it’s past lives.

I’ve done a bit of reading on the Forum board at www.carolbowman.com and found it fascinating. It used to be titled the child past lives board.

She is the author of a fairly well known book which has done extensive investigation into child past lives (by that same title.)

There is an innocence and purity about children that I find more compelling than adults attempts to manipulate. Kids don’t have a profit motive here.

So, I allow for the possibility in my mind. But believe wouldn’t be an accurate description of my attitude at this point. It’s more like heightened interest and willingness to consider the possibility. I just can’t be totally cynical and dismissive about it.

But without further evidence or personal experience I’m not prepared to vigorously defend the concept.

It is in the same drawer as contacting the dead in the netherrealm and alien abduction accounts.
I can guarantee you, our mind wipe technology is very thorough.

I could swear I answered this question before when I was an Egyptian scribe.

I have experienced spontaneous past-life regressions. I have also been regressed and was able to come up with dates that later proved verifiable. I don’t spend much time thinking about it, though. I still have to live this life now.

I do not know how reincarnation works. I believe in some kind of god, but I do not have any clue what it is or how it exists or even whether or not it is interested in me personally. I don’t care either. I have to live my life.

I had a friend whose toddler would refer to “her other parents” who were elderly and Chinese and not very loving. As she grew older the memories seemed to fade.

@Buttonstc

Yeah, I use to “relive” “memories” of past lives too, but then I had the good sense to realize it was simply the product of a vivid imagination.

Not “believe”, but there is definitely something going on with actual hypnotic past-life regression, that is not just people making stuff up or being confused, though those things of course also do happen.

I’ve read and heard accounts from sane intelligent people, including a doctor with a solid mainstream reputation on the line, people I know and respect, and patients who do not welcome the information and have no background in their current lifetimes which would have them know anything about what comes up in hypnosis, who relate very detailed and historical information while under hypnosis. The process seems to often be very psychologically useful to the patient, too.

There’s no reason for many of these doctors and patients to be inventing these things, and the nature of their reports are congruent in ways that don’t seem at all compatible with a “they made it up” theory. The skeptics become the unscientific ones, to my mind, as the general arguments against seem to mainly add up to expressions of faith that such things can’t possibly be true because of an unscientific mindset that nothing anything like a “psychic” nature can be real.

Egypt must have been pretty crowded in ancient times!

This coming from an Egyptian princess, Babylonian queen, Aztec warrior, and drowning French aristocrat!

In actuality you were all ancient aliens that were murdered by the evil alien overlord Xenu by being thrown into volcanoes and blown up with hydrogen bombs.
(this is what scientologists actually believe)

@Zaku

Few people consciously make up this sort of stuff, and I think most earnestly believe it. But earnest belief isn’t exactly empirical evidence.

Also you make the mistake of believing that we think such things “can’t possibly be true”. The issue is that there’s no observable evidence for such claims and no way to empirically test or verify such claims. If anyone ever develops a scientific test that can prove, to the exclusion of any other possible explanation, such phenomena consistently to any observer who follows the proper steps, then I and other scientifically minded folk will accept it and acknowledge it.

While it cannot be proven that past life regression does not exist the fact of the matter is there’s no empirical proof or evidence for it. Until there is I will, frankly, continue to regard such things as bullshit, especially since it is so often the domain of bullshit artists.

I love when they say “And the person said things they couldn’t possibly know!”

Oh, really? Because if enough is known about it that those things are at all verifiable as true, then they most certainly could know about it.

I’m sure if I wanted to I could give a fairly convincing past-life story of an middle-caste Irish woman from the eighth century. I might even “accidentally” slip in the four old Gaelic words I know, just to add to the theatricality. And it would have an assload more verifiable detail than most if not all “past life regressions” I’ve ever heard.

It’s rather suspicious that we never hear about a former Hitler, Stalin or Genghis Khan. I, however, was once Casanova. I kinda exaggerated my memoirs, though. I was broke and slaving away in my dotage in a nasty old baron’s private library and needed the money really, really bad. My old trick of selling the recipe for making gold had fallen victim to the age of enlightenment. I still can’t go back to Venice. The Duke may be long dead, but his descendants still hold a bounty out on me. Evidently my adventures there have fairly shook that family’s tree. And nobody would play whist with me anymore. Not even the baron. They’d all caught on to me. And I’m afraid all my old lovers were either dead or contented grandmothers by this time. So, I lied a bit and suddenly had a best seller on my hands.

Funny how nobody was Hitler in a past life.
EDIT: Dammit, beat me to it.

Impossible, never happened, and never will.

@ARE_you_kidding_me Sorry.

Maybe we haven’t heard of a reborn Hitler & Co. because, well, if you were Hitler, would you admit it? There’s always that.

*cough… Trump

My avatar shows me in my past life form. I miss the jungle and having a beak that can crush Brazil nuts. I also miss being able to do loop de loops on tree branches. I am hoping my next carnation will be as a turtle in some amazing, sunny pond.

sunny pond soup

Funny, I saw a turtle by the side of a sunny pond today… except it was the remains of said turtle, after he had been hit by a car. Poor turtle.

Maybe all the Dr. Mengeles and Elizabeth Báthory’s are here. Imagine slowly realizing what was wrong with you—the reason you always felt different and out of step with the people around you—was that you had spent your past life conducting brutal, sadistic “medical” experiments on children, or having virgins brought to your castle only to be horribly vivisected above you in your bath so you could bathe in their blood and preserve your youth. And now, through a sane filter, you understand the evil you had done. That would surely send you to a rubber room. It would make a good short story. Like Charlotte Perkins Stetson’s Yellow Wallpaper. You’re in this ugly yellow room slowly going crazy, because what started out as an afternoon of troubled introspection becomes a descent into madness as you slowly realize what the problem has been all your life. It’s all coming back now… Cue freaky music.

Maybe all the returned bad guys are who doctors today term incurable schizophrenics, suited only for institutionalization. Cue freaky music again.

I have a strong past-life memory of being a tiktaalik.

You know the best thing about turtles?
They come with their own wok.

Lol…well this turtle will stay away from roads and turtle soup poachers. I will be a turtle of above average intelligence.

No. I think these kind of ideas—afterlife, reincarnation, etc—mask our innate fear that the life we each live is the only life we have.

Welcome to the site.
They sometimes go off a little overboard on some subjects.
Save yourself time. Blow off any nasty. Just smile and nod.
Good question.
I am not set on my thoughts about this subject.
One set of beliefs has me questioning the validity of such thoughts.
I have inadvertently met those who not only believe in it, they actively seek like-minded.
A recent article article has me reading a book about children who have spoken of such memories and experiences. My verdict is still out.
Interestingly enough, out of the gazillions of people who have walked on this planet, picking one or two people to use as a basis for judgement, is, well, to be expected.
At one point, the sun revolved around the earth… Sooo as far as questioning the accepted, I believe in doing so. Every day. Those who remain stalwart in their iron-clad outlook, must need to do so, for some reason or another.
Believe and persue as you wish.
Close your mind towards questioning and the wonder of ‘what if’s’ and you become an ‘expert’ of nothing.

No. And I suspect if I did have a past life, I would have been a housemaid or something equally unappealing. We can’t all be Queens etc.

Conceptually, I don’t see why some form of reincarnation isn’t possible—the way I see it, it depends on how particular consciousness forms (not consciousness in the abstract, but the individual), and whether that particularity is repeatable or not. If it’s repeatable, then sure, reincarnated; if not, then I guess we’re just once.

Assuming reincarnation, I have a hard time imagining how memories would transfer from one form to another… but then, I understand memories as physical entities, a function of an organ devoted to information processing and storage. I’m not sure why I separate memories so decisively from consciousness, where I leave one uncertain and the other tangible, I just do. It feels more intuitive to me.

Sometimes I have conflicting beliefs about what is possible to know. I was raised skeptical, and I feel more comfortable with empirical information than other forms. Still I find myself more willing to jump to conclusions based on pieces of evidence than perhaps a good skeptic would—an eagerness I work to temper. I’ve also grown up with a mom who knows more than she should… so many stories (especially pre-cellphone), where she felt that someone in her family was hurt or otherwise needed help, called around to find them, and was correct. Nothing to do with past lives, but a little spooky.

So I guess I don’t know, but I would still say no, I don’t believe in past life regression.

@msh “At one point, the sun revolved around the earth… Sooo as far as questioning the accepted, I believe in doing so. Every day. Those who remain stalwart in their iron-clad outlook, must need to do so, for some reason or another.
Believe and persue as you wish.
Close your mind towards questioning and the wonder of ‘what if’s’ and you become an ‘expert’ of nothing.”

Yes, at one point the Sun did revolve around the Earth. And it was thanks to science and empirical observation that we learned otherwise, despite the objections of those who put their stock in the supernatural.

If a turtle loses its shell is it homeless or naked?

All science was thought supernatural at some point. Mathematics was considered mystical, and only special people would attempt to make use of numbers.

@rojo , both.

@Darth_Algae

To have the imagination to wonder- came in to play first.
As per the norm.
What follows is what follows.
A bunch of old white men decided what was.
They were wrong.
Now being done without some identifiers, they are still going to have to change…
being wrong again and all.
Isn’t it fascinating when that happens more and more often?
Without the ’what if’s’ – you have Nothing.
Absolutely Nothing. The mundane.
As is still today.
I’m saddened if anyone has lost the ability to imagine.
Tell me, is it a prettier vision in colorless black and white?
Not even a hint of grey for some. How…sad?

Ooohhhh! I Know!!!!
Let’s go on one of the new jellies questions and show off some of our pithiest work!
Dismissive. Condescending. Some even polished their pedestals of clay for the occasion.
Thank heavens for some that have the ability to balance and/or question. To ponder the What If?
Redeeming qualities.
Oh! Damn! Did I actually thank -heaven?
Tsk. Forgive me!
Oops! Controversial non-black and white imagination again!
Holy cow! Tsk! Can’t seem to stop…
Hell and damnation! Whaaaat?

If you rely wholly on what you can physically see or touch, or only print upon a page-
You have missed a huge life lesson.
How sad.

Guess those people will have to come back and do it all over. And over.
Good luck with that.~~~~~~~~~~~~~

@msh

I’m sure you intended to make some point there, but it’s hard to pick out from the inane rambling.

Soooooo, back to the topic at hand.
Perhaps due to some native American ancestry, or perhaps due to a tumor or aneurism, I can’t be sure, but I have had a number of visions. I do not lose knowledge of who or where I am. I do not lose track of time or reality.
These visions began when I was rather young. There have not been many, and they do not occur with any sort of regularity.
Usually they involved a young, adult native woman. I hear nothing; voices, or any other sounds.
When it happens, I feel emotions, the sort associated with memories of special events. I have wondered sometimes about past life, and whether this woman could be me, or some past associate.
Now, to the naysayers; I neither believe, nor disbelieve reincarnation being a thing. I wonder, and I suppose.
Let’s suppose together, just because developing a thought is more fun than arguing one.
Suppose we have a spirit of some sort; not composed in Heaven by a god, but simply some form of energy which makes the difference between a person, and clay and water and minerals. If energy cannot be destroyed, then when we die, this loose cannonball of energy has to go somewhere. If we spend a lifetime eating, learning, nurturing, growing, experiencing; then this spirit would be much larger and more powerful than when it started. It would have to split apart to begin life anew, so as not to overpower the new vessel for its existence. Hence, maybe fifty different people had sometime been the same one Egyptian queen.
I’m not preaching, I’m just saying.

@msh

The book to which you referred in your post, is it the same one by Carol Bowman about children’s past lives that I mentioned or is it a different one?

If different, could you please share the title and author (or PM me the details) Thanks.

@Darth_Algar “Few people consciously make up this sort of stuff, and I think most earnestly believe it. But earnest belief isn’t exactly empirical evidence.”

Of course belief isn’t evidence. Neither is disbelief. Nor is the existence of frauds and annoying TV shows hyping psychic stuff but providing nothing.

“Also you make the mistake of believing that we think such things “can’t possibly be true”. The issue is that there’s no observable evidence for such claims and no way to empirically test or verify such claims. If anyone ever develops a scientific test that can prove, to the exclusion of any other possible explanation, such phenomena consistently to any observer who follows the proper steps, then I and other scientifically minded folk will accept it and acknowledge it.”

And until then, people who are dogmatic non-scientific disbelievers will continue to ignore what people tell them, and act like they’re being all scientific about it.

“While it cannot be proven that past life regression does not exist the fact of the matter is there’s no empirical proof or evidence for it. Until there is I will, frankly, continue to regard such things as bullshit, especially since it is so often the domain of bullshit artists.”

Right, so clearly you have a world model you believe in that requires you to declare anything bullshit that doesn’t agree with it, and that doesn’t look like empirical evidence to you. I’m not particularly interested in trying to penetrate that belief system, but I hope you or others aren’t fooled that that’s a rational scientific way to think.

As I think I already wrote, I’ve read several books and talked to several people, with various perspectives and experiences. Hypnotic past-life regression is clearly documented by multiple independent doctors, psychiatrists and hypnotists, to be something that frequently happens. Now, if you are phobic of the idea of anything that you can’t explain by identified mechanical physical understood causation, then you’re free to do whatever mental gymnastics and tantrums you need to reconcile the massive numbers of accounts of people doing this with what could possibly be causing it in your world view, and you could even be right.

I’m not saying that the source of the content is necessarily an accurate past-life memory, but what people say seems rather like that (much more like that than any other theory or rationalization I’ve heard), as they describe in detail skills they don’t have, historical settings and cultures they’ve never studied, etc., just because someone hypnotized them and asked them to drift their mind back earlier and earlier in time.

Whatever the explanation is, it definitely does happen. What’s happening exactly we don’t know.

Hypnotic “recovery” of memories of alien abductions is also a thing.
Hypnosis puts you into a state of extreme suggestibility, so any “memories” derived from them are absolutely worthless.

Furthermore, the plural of anecdote is not data.

And you think about bear’s balls.
Soooo
To each their own.

@Espiritus_Corvus def not Hitler

@Zaku

Lots of people believe it, so it must be true…

Also, hypnotism? That’s where you’re putting your stock, really? People under hypnosis are extremely vulnerable to suggestion. In a few minutes time a skilled hypnotist could probably have you confessing to the murder of John F. Kennedy.

@Darth_Algar Do you really know that little about what past-life regression is, that you would write a one-liner objecting to hypnotism? And yet you act like you know what you’re talking about, and try to criticize others for not thinking straight, or not using proper evidence?

I’m nowhere near someone who would think, “ooh hypnotism”, but when a very successful psychiatrist who had no predilections for psychic anything, and who’s professional career and reputation stood to lose a lot by even reporting on what he observed, publishes accounts of what happens, and all sorts of other independent sources have also published accounts along similar lines, even before the phenomenon was known (i.e. it was independently recorded in various places by different people), there’s little room for conspiracy theories that all these doctors and writers and so on suddenly got bored with their careers and independently invented the same kinds of stories to make up.

In particular, there is no room for doubt that it happens. And again, whether it’s real channeling of something, or some sort of dream eruption based on subconsciously collected stuff, combined with amazing coincidences, isn’t entirely clear, but the more accounts I read, the harder it is to explain them as just subconscious regurgitations.

And again your argument goes back to an appeal to popularity. Lots of people believe it/think it/claim it, therefore it must be true. You’d be amazed at what the human mind is capable of experiencing when we really want to believe something.

And just because a doctor has a good reputation does not make him incapable of mistaking an illusion for real phenomena. We are all human and all capable of being deceived, even by (especially by) our own brains. I’ve seen shit I would have absolutely thought was real at the moment, however I know that I could not rule out other factors (tiredness, nerves, levels of particular chemicals in the brain, etc, etc, etc). No matter how smart you are, no matter how well educated you are, no matter how objective you are, you can be deceived.

There have been plenty of scientists who have believed in things such as telekinesis, spoonbending, and so on, and who have ran tests that have, through no conscious manipulation of their own, seemed to confirm such things, but their conclusions never hold up under repeated controlled tests by objective observers.

You can’t necessarily trust what you see. You can’t necessarily trust what you think, or even what you remember. Our memories are always skewed towards our own views and beliefs. Take five people who were all present at the same event and each one will remember it differently (especially and time passes and the people get further removed from that event).

This is why it is so important to be able to empirically test and observe a phenomena, and so important the same results to be reproducible time and time and time again by anyone following the same protocol.

I’m also among the last people to believe anything because of popularity.

I’m talking about transcribing tape recordings of hypnosis sessions. Patient with no knowledge of hypnosis or past lives or foreign culture or history comes in to psychiatrist who has no prior ideas about past-life regression, but knows hypnosis helps patients remember and process traumatic events from the past that they otherwise have blocks to remembering. Resists suggestion of hypnotherapy at first. Doctor regresses patient through childhood, then while at age two says, “Go back to the time from which your symptoms arise.” Not even suggesting a past life – the idea wasn’t intended and wasn’t mentioned. Patient describes a scene where she’s 18 and it’s 1863 B.C. She vividly describes details of the scene, clothing, names, and takes on a foreign persona. Patient goes on to describe many other detailed scenes from other lives and parts of the world. Material seems to have nothing to do with the patient’s knowledge or interests, and is consistent between sessions. Other patients, other doctors, etc., all have done this sort of thing, without being fans of the paranormal or anything. In fact, many of them are put off by the experience, and skepticism and debunking attempts are applied, accounts are presented without bias, etc.

So, recordings of such sessions are proof that they happen. You can try to construct elaborate theories about how people with no knowledge that past-life regression is a thing or is interesting somehow all have themselves or their patients do the same sort of thing. Or you can insist that it’s just some human quirk of the mind in a dream-like state that somehow pulls these things together and behaves this way, but it doesn’t mean anything is really from a past life connected to that person in any other way that subconscious imagination. I’m not trying to say those aren’t possible, and the last one I think may even be likely.

But it is just simple recorded events that would just be silly to deny, that people do do this without being goaded into it.

“Patient with no knowledge of hypnosis or past lives or foreign culture or history”

How is this verified? Was the patient born and raised under a rock on a desert island, by deaf-mutes?

” she’s 18 and it’s 1863 B.C”
Um… If you can’t figure out what’s wrong with that claim, this conversation is pointless.

Here is a video of two girls being hypnotised and being convinced that they are chicken

@Seek No one is claiming that the date 1863 BC was necessarily accurate. The fact is, a doctor and a patient with no interest in past life regression, using hypnosis for childhood (not past-life) regression, had the patient describing a prior life vision (and later, many others) in great detail. All I’m saying is that there are many, many documented cases of people under hypnosis having vivid regressions of past settings. I’m not saying the necessary explanation is that these are accurate visions, or even that these are necessarily experiences that were really had by the same consciousness in the past, even though that’s what they present as. I’m just saying that it’s reliably documented that this has happened many documented times without any scheme of the patient or hypnotist. And that to me, having read several books on the subject and talked to people who’ve done and conducted it, I’m sure it happens and I personally tend to think there must be something very interesting going on, as the accounts really don’t seem consistent with just a confused brain under hypnosis.

The patient you questioned was from the 1970s in the mid-west USA. As the doctor describes the patient:
“Her religion was simple and unquestioned. She was raised to believe in traditional Catholic ideology and practices, and she had never really doubted the truthfulness and validity of her faith. She believed that if you were a good Catholic and lived properly by observing the faith and its rituals, you would be rewarded by going to heaven; if not, you would experience a purgatory or hell. A patriarchal God and his Son made these final decisions. I later learned that Catherine did not believe in reincarnation; in fact, she knew very little about the concept, although she had read sparingly about the Hindus. Reincarnation was an idea contrary to her upbringing and understanding. She had never read any metaphysical or occult literature, having no interest in it. She was secure in her beliefs.”

In other words, no one in the situation had any interest in making up stories about past-life regression.

The doctor was a very respected psychiatrist with extensive experience with psychiatric patients who:

“reflected the entire spectrum of emotional disorders. I had directed inpatient units at four major medical schools. I had spent years in psychiatric emergency rooms, outpatient clinics, and various other settings, evaluating and treating outpatients. I knew all about the auditory and visual hallucinations and delusions of schizophrenia. I had treated many patients with borderline syndromes and historical character disorders, including split or multiple personalities. I had been a career teacher in drug and alcohol abuse, funded by the national Institute of drug abuse, and I was very familiar with the gamut of drug effects on the brain.

Catherine had none of these symptoms or syndromes. What had occurred was not a manifestation of psychiatric illness. She was not psychotic, not out of touch with reality, and she had never suffered from hallucinations or delusions.

She did not use drugs, and she had no sociopathic traits. She did not have a hysterical personality, and she did not have dissociative tendencies. That is, she was generally aware of what she was doing and thinking, did not function on “automatic pilot,” and had never had any split or multiple personalities. The material she produced was often beyond her conscious capabilities in both style and content. ... She had knowledge that she had never had access to, or accumulated, in her present life. All this knowledge, as well as the whole experience, was alien to her culture and upbringing and contrary to many of her beliefs.

Catherine is a relatively simple and honest person. She is not a scholar, and she could not have invented the facts, details, historical events, descriptions, and poetry that came through her. As a psychiatrist, a scientist, I was certain that the material originated from some portion of her unconscious mind. It was real, beyond any doubt. Even if Catherine were a skilled actress, she could not have re-created these happenings. The knowledge was too accurate and too specific, lying beyond her capacity.”

Again, having read books by very intelligent and experienced doctors and others have had direct experiences with this, as well as with many other forms of human behavior, and give unedited accounts of exactly what was said, I mostly find their conclusions to be very reasonable, and certainly not worthy of the dismissive mockery in several of the replies here.

Catholic? So she was raised in a household that at least nominally studied the Old Testament? Perhaps the span of time roughly around 1800 BCE?

And unless the psychologist were also an expert in bronze age anthropology, I don’t think they are qualified to make value judgments on the accuracy of her stories.

@Seek Possibly, though this one patient had visions of three different periods just on that first day (1863 BC Egypt(?), 1756 AD Spain, and 1568 BC Greece), and I don’t expect Sunday School gives people very accurate details of clothing and architecture and stuff, nor of techniques for preparing bodies for the afterlife as described in the Egyptian Book Of the Dead, which the waking patient had never heard of. However as a waking adult the patient did find once herself drawn to an Egyptology exhibit, and freaked herself out when she found herself correcting a tour guide on points of accuracy, and she had no idea how she knew to say the things she was saying, or why she was certain she was right, but she was.

The most materialistic explanation I myself have for these accounts is that there would need to be a subconscious part of the brain which latches onto information about several settings in the past, and obsessively stores information about those settings whenever it can, and constructs an elaborate story about one past life in each setting, and shares none of it with the conscious mind, somehow. However they do impact the conscious experience, as patients tend to have reactions to their conscious life based on people and events from these unconscious stories.

Seems to me if it were a memory and not an invention, the dates given would be in the relevant reckoning of the time, not the modern calendar. That’s to say nothing of language.

What does an ancient Greek know of the “BC / AD” split?

That’s an interesting point that’s occurred to me too. Also that converting to older dates even as a modern historian can be a non-trivial thing, and have a variety of possible answers. One might expect them to start speaking whatever language were appropriate to the place and time, too, and not be able to understand modern English…

I don’t remember reading about any accounts of using anything but the modern language or dates, and although they make vivid reports of objects and can even describe the process of complex skills which the waking person has no knowledge of, the language they use to do so is that of the modern person, and sometimes struggles to find words to explain things.

It’s interesting to me how that differs from detailed vivid dreams, which in my experience also usually use my own vocabulary and symbols (though sometimes not), but even when I dream so that I’m convinced I’m in a place, it’s never anything historical and rarely even plausible for the modern world – it’s always some weird mix, like a real city except it’s a mix of several cities and has really cool architecture or something, but there’s no way it ever existed in this world, and I pretty much never have detailed skills I don’t have (except athletics or magic) which could be described and used in the real world, let alone be historically accurate.

But the context of hypnosis is there’s a conversation between the hypnotist and the subject which always has a modern context, which seems to be a separate context from the experience the subject is relating (and explaining in modern words).

What I get from the use of something like “it’s 1863 B.C.” is the subject is trying to relate a situation however it occurs to them in the moment. But I think that could be consistent with several theories about what could be causing it, such as:

* They have some elaborate sub-conscious stories about past lives which they pieced together from things their subconscious heard about history, which is very detailed and consistent in astounding ways for something that was learned without the conscious mind knowing the same things. If this is true, I start to wonder – did the woman who had these historical regressions in the 1970’s then in the 1950s-60s sleep-walk to go read up on these subjects, or was she a type of split personality that the expert psychiatrist couldn’t detect, who did research on details of several different occupations in different periods in different parts of the world, and then somehow suppress that knowledge from her conscious mind? Seems like if we want to believe it’s all subconscious, then we have to think through all the implications of that, and in this case, they start to get at least as far-fetched as the other explanations.

* They could be relating experiences of spirits that aren’t her own experiences, or even the experiences of her own spirit. Of course, that means you need to believe in spirits, possession, and/or mediumship and so on, which given how hard it was to even get some people to believe people even relate these stories, is probably not going to fly in this thread with the people still having objections to regressions. But, I’d say this is a middle-ground explanation, which makes a good amount of sense.

* They could actually be past-life experiences which were had by the spirit/consciousness in question that currently hangs out with the current living person. This requires accepting that the spirit might be separate from the body, and move from body to body after death. This is the most consistent with the reports, which often end up saying exactly this.

* One might also conjecture that spirits don’t map one-to-one to bodies, or that spirit and consciousness are two different things, which are also different from the body. I find this a likely explanation if we accept what regressed people say, because also they often seem to relate people they used to know to people they currently know. It might not just be psychological transfer, and it might also not just be single spirits staying together. That is, it might be that consciousness is attention focused on an experience, but whatever is having that consciousness might not be tied only to one experience at a time.

No one knows, of course. And I don’t expect any of the skeptics to be interested in such ideas, except maybe the first one. I think though that it has to be pretty interesting that there are so many common experiences all pointing to the same kinds of weird things coming from different people who are not woo woo conspirators at all. You can make funny faces and try to say why some of it seems ridiculous, but I don’t know of any more plausible explanations for what’s been recorded except for these three. Even the most materialistic skeptic is going to have to come up with something that sounds pretty wacky to explain how all these people can be coming up with so much of the same wild content.

I have a theory that it is not actual reincarnation that is experienced but information that is encoded in our DNA somehow and passed down through the generations. Now, why some people can access the information and the vast majority of people can’t I don’t have a clue to.

I have thought of that too.

@rojo @Here2_4 ever seen Lucy?

OK… When I hear hoofbeats, I think horses, not unicorns. Occam’s Razor says if it sounds like a made up story, it’s far more likely to be a made up story than the entire known universe was rewritten to make your pet theory of reincarnation true.

@seek, https://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=live+unicorns&view=detail&mid=AD76668CB21075E5D205AD76668CB21075E5D205&FORM=VIRE1
..
@DancingMind , I don’t understand the reference.

@Here2_4 aha sorry I was a bit cryptic: unless I’m remembering the movie wrong, it riffs on an idea of genetics-carrying-experiential-information… thought it connected to @rojo‘s thought