Were you Reincarnated, or do you have a bad memory

www.livescience.com...

Apparrently, scientists are saying that instead of you thinking that you had a past life and you can remember things from that life, you instead have a bad memory and associate memories from this life as a past life.

I'm neither a proponent of either claim, but I wanted to know what you guys think about this.


Edit: quoted part of the source -

People who believe they have lived past lives as, say, Indian princesses or battlefield commanders are more likely to make certain types of memory errors, according to a new study. The propensity to make these mistakes could, in part, explain why people cling to implausible reincarnation claims in the first place. Researchers recruited people who, after undergoing hypnotic therapy, had come to believe that they had past lives. Subjects were asked to read aloud a list of 40 non-famous names, and then, after a two-hour wait, told that they were going to see a list consisting of three types of names: non-famous names they had already seen (from the earlier list), famous names, and names of non-famous people that they had not previously seen. Their task was to identify which names were famous. The researchers found that, compared to control subjects who dismissed the idea of reincarnation, past-life believers were almost twice as likely to misidentify names. In particular, their tendency was to wrongly identify as famous the non-famous names they had seen in the first task. This kind of error, called a source-monitoring error, indicates that a person has difficulty recognizing where a memory came from.

[edit on 3-3-2009 by mahtoosacks]

Without going into details of my one past life memory, I'll have to say that those memories don't relate to my early childhood or lifetime in any significant way. Though, I do recall being fed peas in a highchair, they tasted horrible! I never fed my kids bland baby food. And pounding the piano keys alongside my talented aunt when I was around 10 months old, really thought I was contributing in a delightful manner! Crawling on the freshly mowed, damp and prickly lawn after my cast was removed at 11 months. All of my childhood except perhaps the most boring moments.

I too can slightly remember things from a young age.

I was born in alaska and on the move to alabama, I remember riding in the campershell that was on my dads truck.

aside from that, the next memory isnt till preschool or right before. i remember getting chicken pox at age 4, and splitting open my chin while playing and needing stitches. all of those memories are in complete realism. like it happened yesterday, but nothing of before.

I have often thought that I should be able to remember though. People say that when they talk to me they feel that I am an old soul, but I dont know much about such things.

Originally posted by mahtoosacks
Apparrently, scientists are saying that instead of you thinking that you had a past life and you can remember things from that life, you instead have a bad memory and associate memories from this life as a past life.

The human mind / brain is a fully equipt apparatus that can lead you on about yourself, with THAT I agree. Example: People with severe (war / abuse) trauma's, do change their memories just to get on living.

But simply saying people with reincarnation memories have bad memories make me laugh. Till 2005 I had a superduber memory, due to 3 operations in a very short period of time, I found myself having trouble to concentrate and having trouble with my short-term memory.
It's speculation but it can very well be that the 2nd op didn't went the way it should have been and although I have all the hospital docs at home, there's nothing to find in there. They do clean out dossiers before they go OUT to clients and such.

Anyway I have memories of prior lives on medication, when I was in a coma for 10 weeks and memories via dreams / meditations or just like 'normal'(?) memories.

For me it's ok and I know how to deal with it, for others it can be weird or scary, not in the least for some Doctors ... well suppose I lived 200 yrs ago with this in my mind they would have locked me up.

Oh and if there's any doc out there who wants to test me, just use the U2U



[edit on 3/3/2009 by Melyanna Tengwesta]

I believe in reincarnation, but don't remember anything (yet?).

I believe it's possible that consciousness itself can be expressed as a "quantity," just like electricity or heat, but we haven't figured out how to measure it yet. So say we die and our consciousness disperses, only to be re-absorbed by other living beings, not unlike the atoms of our decomposing bodies are re-absorbed into our natural environments and eventually become other life forms, or the heat is lost from our bodies and absorbed into the surrounding atmosphere.

That would be pretty natural and fitting with the way all our known forms of body energy behave when we die, wouldn't it?

the best reaserch on the subject you will find in the book "life before life" by Jim Tucker. they interviewed the huge number of KIDS to get from them the data about their memories from past lifes.

the kids do not lie and they do not have a knowledge or'and the imagination to speak about the past lifes with such a details taht you can find the relatives from the real persons they were before.

later, as adults they are mostly loosing the memories and start to live the new lifes. but the article you quated is a crap imo.

read that book

cheers

reply to post by mahtoosacks


that explanation does not sit well with me. The study only had to do with remembering names. "Past life" memories are some times very detailed and vivid.

[edit on 3/3/2009 by JPhish]

From my memory, we have soul bodies, soul families, even line up for lessons with groups, say on certain planets. We dont disperse, we're actually a lot more than we seem to think we are.

reply to post by mahtoosacks


scientists have got to be the most closed minded individuals there are. If they can't prove it, it does not exist. this is sooo small minded it makes me crazy. there are things that exist that they do not have equipment or the consciousness to detect, plain and simple. Back before microscopes no one would have believed that bacteria exists b/c one could not see/prove it. ridiculous....... that in and of itself proves that just b/c "we" have not discovered it does NOT mean it does not exist.

reply to post by azurite


i too feel as you do. i get frustrated with articles that are supposed to provide answers, only to wash it off as just some normal everyday culprit to blame.

the entire article about the "Top 10 Conspiracies of All Time" on the site really made me mad. Princess D was #2. ALTHOUGH, 9/11 was #1

While I'm not sure one way or another with past life regression, I think human memory is very speculative in the sense it will often fill in the gaps on a subconscious level.

Take stage hypnotism for example; if you hypnotise a man, tell him he is female, then regress him to childhood, and then ask about his toys he'll tell you about girls toys from his childhood. More often than not he will recall a time when he was playing with them.

The person isn't lying as such; the brain is just doing its job. As much as we like to thing ourselves as precise and logical, the human brain seems to reason by a series of concurrent approximations with some approximations carrying more weight than others.

Pitfalls of regression are well known with leading questions for example, however take this example.

Q1) where are you?
A) outside a store looking at hats.

Q2) are you male or female?

Now, my brain will reason that hats = female. Nothing sexist, just my environment.
If I were from cattle country, my brain may reason hats = male.

A) female.

Now in my case looking at the hat may be a past life memory, but what is the second?

Past Life research and factual unknowable memories, facts , dates, names, abound in earth's culture.

The early Christian's taught reincarnation, until Emperor "Justinus" got in on the act and repressed changed the teachings and book. If you know your bible you will see Jesus discussing himself as "Isiah" and "Elijah" in a previous life.

Many modern "Tulkus" and such like in Tibetan Buddhism when very young pick out objects from many others that were there's in a previous life, relate to people dressed for trickery as servants or cooks as "Master" "Teacher" (insert name here) when 3 or 4, that person had been their previous reincarnations teacher or master.

In the Indian Subcontinent it is not even questioned thousands upon thousands of children have taken parents to previous homes, telling them where they lived, the family members, secrets, and where things are buried and hidden, that only the previous life could know about.

In modern western science many Psychiatrists and such like are finding absolutely stunning results from past Life healing and such like.

A very good source is as follows

A graduate of Columbia University and Yale Medical School, Brian L. Weiss M.D. is Chairman Emeritus of Psychiatry at the Mount Sinai Medical Center in Miami.

Here

He was a total sceptic for many years but the medical, clinical evidence and healing obtained through fixing traumas from past lives was too much for his scientific brain to ignore.

Here is a good opening statement and information for sceptics here from a STILL chairman of Emeritus of Psychiatry



Wake up because when you go to sleep in this life finally it all starts again , oh but how you did to others.

Elf that is so incredibly interesting because I was literally reading about these very things 10minutes ago in "WITH MYSTICS AND MAGICIANS IN TIBET" (in regards to the Tulkus) which I had picked up from you in the media section!

And yes, that article is quite ridiculous for reasons quite obvious. Westerners have very strange ways of going about creating domains of knowing and understanding, always very inaccurate and misleading.

I am working heavily on my dreams and meditations nowadays so hopefully I can ascertain more knowledge on some of my past lives, which I know I have had many.

[edit on 9-3-2009 by Asmus]

reply to post by mahtoosacks


Hey there matoosacks (interesting name BTW)

Very interesting report too ... very clinical ... very logical. And I can see how such results could come about in a trial such as this. The human mind is an amazing piece of natural machinary that can perform all kinds of feats that we are only beginning to scratch the surface of (scientifically speaking).

And this is why I personally DO NOT use hypnosis on my clients when I regress them. As a result their recalled memories are a lot sharper with far less chance of false memory occurring.

Kind of nice to see the scientific world confirming something I've suspected for a long, long time and backing-up a principle that I've believed and worked with for the last 15yrs.

Woody

Psychology grad here... that test sounds like crap. How are famous names significant to memory? I can't even remember my family and relatives names at a reunion. Or in the grocery store, I have to dart down a different aisle because I can't remember a high school students name.

seems like people with a fixation on past lives would be more interested in famous people because they might be "one of them". Or an interest in history.

I call BS. Hypnosis and famous names.. bleh.

hey! maybe people who have bad memories just have more room in their brains to create some kind of fantasy.....

high five Woodwytch.

clinical and logical it is not...(Yoda voice)

reply to post by mahtoosacks


This is something that I am passionate about, as I remember existing before this life.

It is not some bad memory, although there are bad memories of dying for sure, but the memories are not some introductory fantasy that just came about my life at some undetermined period of time.

I have always remembered existing before this life, they are my earliest life memories, and precede my childhood memories with far more intensity.

When I was two years old, I was coping with the memories of dying in a war, and the feelings of dying, the awareness that I had died and was living again was overwhelming for me at that age.

Throughout my life, I have held on to these memories as being the absolute testimony of what life is, and how we live it as an experience.

There is no question, at least for me, based on these memories of a past life, as well as the afterlife memories that came with the journey between lifetimes that we do indeed reincarnate.

The memories certainly are fragmented and faded over the years. I don't believe we incarnate, I know we do. I also am aware that we are also subjective to forgetting the previous life as part of a control.

How I bypassed that control can only seem to relate to my absolute refusal to reincarnate into this lifetime, during the after-life session. Emotionally, I was very charged up and angry, and that intense emotion seems to have created the gravity that overcome the forgetfulness within the control.

People who deny reincarnation in my opinion are just locked into this life focus with no memory of any previous life, so I can't blame them. I would be the same had it not been for the memories I have.

Good luck in remembering.

I have no memory of a past life. But I sense it. I believe you. It is just something I know. I have interests that lead me to believe that I may have had certain types of lives, and there are things I "know" that I really don't know why I know, and people that are in color and most are in B&W, but that is as far as it goes for me. I have no intention of trying to find out what they were.

Hey there seagrass,

er hum ! It sounds like you have made the same assumption about me that many others have made before you.

When people see the name 'woodwytch' and/or know that I am a Pagan ... and/or that I work in a field that is classified as 'alternative', they automatically imagine that I must be a dizzy new-age type who has no concept of reality and resides in a world where faeries dwell at the bottom of the garden.

No harm done ... it's an easy mistake to make !

However, it might surprise you to know that I too have studied (and hold MSc degrees), in both Psychology and Natural Earth Sciences (which included amongst other subjects - biology / chemistry / physics etc) ... so not really a dizzy new-age type, in spite of appearences to the contrary.

Even so, I personally believe there is no substitute for solid firsthand experience and research (to authenticate the firsthand experience) ... as opposed to drawing the 'psychology grad here', card as if it were a weapon.

But as a 'psychology grad' yourself, I would have thought that you'd have known that a bad memory is basically down to the conscious mind being a little over protective by acting as a slightly over efficient filter that restricts access to the memories of 'everything' that are stored in the vaults of our subconscious and unconscious minds.


>>> I do agree with you that hypnosis / famous names are BS.

>>> But the comment you made about ... "people with bad memories have more room to create fantasy"

Are you saying that people with bad memories are 'empty headed' ? (see above).

>>> And your comment to me directly ... "clinical and logical it is not ... (Yoda voice)"

As a Star Wars fan you're obviously not totally adverse to a bit of fantasy yourself methinks. which would seem to emphasize that the individual perseption of 'clinical' and 'logical' are relative surely ?

But even more interesting (to me as a Pastlife Regression Therapist), is the content of your last post ... very interesting and very telling.

Woody

[edit on 10-3-2009 by woodwytch]

[edit on 10-3-2009 by woodwytch]