Reincarnation - An interesting Interview

[RichLB]

Research? What kind of research? I'm picturing a career day at school. "My dad is a lawyer." "My dad is a fire fighter." "My dad is a doctor." "My dad finds people who say dead guys come back to life."

Crackpots researching crackpots . . .

One might ask what credentials you present to discredit scientists who do not accept what you do. It's easy to name call, but far more difficult to denounce results which use accepted research methodology. You might find the following of interest and an answer to your question. The source can be found at:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reincarnat ... n_research

Psychiatrist Ian Stevenson, from the University of Virginia, investigated many reports of young children who claimed to remember a past life. He conducted more than 2,500 case studies over a period of 40 years and published twelve books, including Twenty Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation and Where Reincarnation and Biology Intersect. Stevenson methodically documented each child's statements and then identified the deceased person the child identified with, and verified the facts of the deceased person's life that matched the child's memory. He also matched birthmarks and birth defects to wounds and scars on the deceased, verified by medical records such as autopsy photographs, in Reincarnation and Biology.[69]

Stevenson searched for disconfirming evidence and alternative explanations for the reports, and believed that his strict methods ruled out all possible "normal" explanations for the child’s memories.[70] However, a significant majority of Stevenson's reported cases of reincarnation originated in Eastern societies, where dominant religions often permit the concept of reincarnation. Following this type of criticism, Stevenson published a book on European Cases of the Reincarnation Type. Other people who have undertaken reincarnation research include Jim B. Tucker, Satwant Pasricha, Godwin Samararatne, and Erlendur Haraldsson.

Skeptics such as Paul Edwards have analyzed many of these accounts, and called them anecdotal,[71] while also suggesting that claims of evidence for reincarnation originate from selective thinking and from the false memories that often result from one's own belief system and basic fears, and thus cannot be counted as empirical evidence. Carl Sagan referred to examples apparently from Stevenson's investigations in his book The Demon-Haunted World as an example of carefully collected empirical data, though he rejected reincarnation as a parsimonious explanation for the stories.[72]

Objections to claims of reincarnation include the facts that the vast majority of people do not remember previous lives and there is no mechanism known to modern science that would enable a personality to survive death and travel to another body, barring the idea of biocentrism. Researchers such as Stevenson have acknowledged these limitations.[73]

[RichLB]

You might also find this lengthy article from Omni interesting.
http://reluctant-messenger.com/reincarnation-proof.htm

[Gaybutton]

One might ask what credentials you present to discredit scientists who do not accept what you do.

As soon as mainstream science accepts reincarnation as fact, so will I. Until then - crackpot.

I'll be glad to accept the credentials of mainstream science. But me? I ain't got no credentials. We don't need no credentials:

[Rogie]

Objections to claims of reincarnation include the facts that the vast majority of people do not remember previous lives and there is no mechanism known to modern science that would enable a personality to survive death and travel to another body, barring the idea of biocentrism.

Biocentrism? Not come across that before. I'll have to check that one out. My reason for repeating the quote about most people not remembering (or more likely never having had any) previous lives is that I was mulling that conundrum over last night and wondering why that might be so. You may laugh, he'd a few too many perhaps, but I do take it seriously - the possibility of reincarnation. Why not? It's a real challenge to try and explain these documented occurrences. It's dead easy to adopt the water off a duck's back attitude, far harder to open one's mind and go out on a limb. It's hard enough discussing a topic like this on a message board, just imagine how serious reincarnation researchers must feel after documenting their cases. That's why in my earlier post I quoted from Stevenson's comment regarding what one might refer to I suppose as the 'establishment'.

So, why might young children in which reincarnation is supposed to have occurred be so rare? The best I could come up with was it is something akin to spiritualism. The spirit or spirits are summoned forth, do their thing and go back to wherever they came from. In many cases a spirit guide is needed as intermediary between the spirit and those indulging in the seance or whatever. I'd like to suggest that if a reincarnation equivalent to these spirit guides could be found, he/she might be able to tap into everybody, perhaps younger children better than adults, and attempt to establish whether the person had any previous lives. Maybe we've all had them!

However, from what little I know (I'm no expert!), reincarnation induces disagreement in spiritualist circles. Some mediums - or rather, the spirits that speak through them - accept reincarnation, while others deny it. There's also the Karma debate. If that's true, one might suppose reincarnation would be universal. That it appears not to be the case, would suggest reincarnation is a matter of choice for the individual spirit.

[Bob]

.....While I'm one of those loons who think....

Now pay attention, I wasn't the one who said that! I suppose, though, that confession is good for the soul (which, I think was first said by Mahatma Ghandi who in present life is Shirley MacLaine).

[RichLB]

.....While I'm one of those loons who think....

Far better to be "one of those loons who think" than one of those loons who doesn't think.

[Gaybutton]

Far better to be "one of those loons who think" than one of those loons who doesn't think.

Many more people claim to experience deja vu than claim to have lived past lives. I don't know anyone who says he never experienced deja vu. Most people have experienced it multiple times. For many, including me, often it seems so real you just know you've done this before. Does the fact that so many people have experienced deja vu make it true that it happened before?

I don't think you need me to tell you that science has only scratched the surface of understanding how the human brain works. Reincarnation? Is it limited to humans? Do you get any choices? Can a flea come back as a goldfish? My neighbor's cat got run over the other day. Can my neighbor's cat come back as my neighbor's child? And who says you even have to come back as an animal? Doesn't anyone want to come back as an azalea? For those who like to travel, maybe you can come back as a tumbleweed. Some might want to come back as a bacterium in a moose turd.

What happens if human cloning becomes a reality? After they both die, do the original and the clone both have to come back as the same thing? If not, maybe one could come back as a farang and the other could come back as a go-go boy. That would sure give new meaning to "fuck yourself."

Does reincarnation occur immediately after death? If not, how long does it take before you get reincarnated? Could it be immediate? Could it take tens of thousands of years? Do you get a choice when to come back or what to come back as? I hope so. In my next life I'd like to come back as a shepherd a few miles outside of Bucharest. Maybe you don't even have to come back to the planet Earth. Maybe those UFOs consist of people who died ages ago and have been on the planet Blatzenplooft ever since.

[Rogie]

Maybe you don't even have to come back to the planet Earth. Maybe those UFOs consist of people who died ages ago and have been on the planet Blatzenplooft ever since.

However absurd a notion one comes up with you can be sure someone's come up with it already.

An American psychic by the name of Jack Schwarz was told that he was the reincarnation of a traveller from Pluto. Apparently he was also to be found from time to time (on the astral plane) on Venus. Who told him this? None other than somebody he met, who delighted in the code name XB-15. This man was from a tribe of people who crash-landed in a rocket ship on earth thousands of years ago.

I'd be the first to say he sounds like a real nut, but Schwarz was far from your average person.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Schwarz

"Man is coming out of his state of ignorance, the ignorance which made man perceive only from his physical environment and create concepts about this environment, ignoring his relationship with the cosmos, thereby shunning everything which would give him awareness, and thus causing the interfering capacity of the Universal Laws which are not psychological or physiological, but metapsychophysio-logical - not a defiance of our physical laws, but an expansion of these laws."

And here's a nice little sound bite . . .

"All of your body is in your mind,
but not all of your mind is in your body."

http://www.holisticu.org/jack/

[bao-bao]

None of us truly know what happens, but I'd like to THINK we get another chance at a "do-over". A friend says "that's ridiculous... where would you put everyone who's come back?", but in this vast universe there must be someplace else different species could exist. Again, nobody knows. The idea that it's our way of making the finality of death more palatable seems more probable, but...

A line that almost always makes me laugh is the exclamation the woman in the background makes immediately after the welcome in this clip:

[windwalker]

Psychiatrist Ian Stevenson, from the University of Virginia, ....

Another crackpot.