Although I often read this message board for a diversion, I never felt compelled to post until coming across this thread. I suppose it is because I usually find that both sides of a given debate are adequately developed and I don’t think that I have much to offer beyond what has already been said. On this topic, however, I do not think that this is the case, as nobody has really provided a strong, reasoned argument in favor of the validity of past lives.
I would encourage anyone who is interested in the topic to look at the work of Ian Stevenson. A good starting point, aside from viewing his Wikipedia page, is his book, Twenty Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation.
As for a little background on the man; already an accomplished psychiatrist in the conventional sense (he was the chair of the department of psychiatry at the University of Virginia School of Medicine from 1957-1967), he had an intense interest in past life research. With regard to the OP’s direct question about fire, he theorized that phobias, child prodigies, and even intense life interests that begin at a very young age and continue throughout life, can all be tied to our experiences in previous lives.
He was able to pursue his own research in this area when $1,000,000 was donated to the university specifically for this purpose. Stevenson subsequently spent decades traveling the globe in search of case studies, specifically children, who had vivid memories of previous lives. He would attempt to “confirm” these cases by validating details that the child could not possibly have learned in his or her current incarnation.
As critics point out, his methodology was flawed – he could not impose any sort of controls to his case studies. How could he? But what he may have lacked in terms of controlling variables and influencing factors (say, from parents), he made up for in terms of volume. He amassed about 3,000 case studies over his career, and “confirmed” a great many of these.
Some of the more spectacular examples involve xenoglossy, which is the spontaneous ability to speak fluently languages that the child has not had significant exposure to in this incarnation.
There are countless examples where a child would speak of his or her former family and be able to provide precise details of their former hometown’s topography, as well as about the family itself. When Stevenson would contact these families, they would confirm what the child reported remembering, such as the names of family members and their personality characteristics. There are cases of children looking at family photographs provided by these families, and easily identifying family members.
And, contrary to what people have posted several times above, it is about as rare as one would expect that the person’s former incarnation was of someone famous or in any way remarkable. The vast majority of these lives are mundane.
With case studies like these, I do think it is unfortunate that people entirely dismiss the possibility out of hand. At the very least, it is worth consideration.
I personally believe in this, not because of this research, but because of past life regressions that I have performed on other people. This began as a bit of a fun game, to see what would happen, after reading about such regression therapy. However, I soon discovered that the friends I did this hypnosis on, were coming up with fascinating life stories – again, not fascinating because they were famous people or performed extraordinary acts – but because the lives were so ordinary, but rich in detail, with certain running themes that carried significance in the current life.
For instance, there was a friend of mine who did not believe in past lives whatsoever, but she was willing to undergo this silly charade out of curiosity. She happened to be an extremely visual thinker, so the process was natural for her (there is a definite correlation there, in my limited experience). Anyway, we went through two separate lives, basically from start to finish, stopping at moments of particular significance. An important fact, in her current life, is that she has always had a severe distaste for her mother’s wedding dress. Whenever she would see it, there was something about it that really bothered her – something about the fabric, but the complaint was inarticulable. If she was really pressed on the matter, she could say nothing except that she simply did not like it.
In both previous lives, the same sort of fabric and patterned design came up in significant ways. In the first life, in the Victorian period, she was part of a wealthy, well-to-do family. She recalled an incident as a teenager where she was unable to pursue a love interest due to a disparity in family prominence and wealth. She recalled ripping a fine tablecloth off a table in a fit of anger, and this cloth reminded her of the wedding dress in her current incarnation.
In the second life, she was a young African American boy in the recently desegregated south. I remember how puzzled she seemed as she was describing herself, as she looked “himself” in the mirror – how odd it was to feel as though she was this young man, who appeared so different from her in her current life – an attractive, white, blond woman. She recalled hating her hair in that life, how it didn’t look like the other kids’, and overhearing a fight between her parents in the living room about not being able to afford new shoes for the kids. This is just the sort of mundane detail that I referred to earlier.
Anyway, she recalled going to a school dance where she, again, could not pursue a love interest; this time due to the racial divide. At the dance, where the punch was being served, was another table cloth that reminded her of the wedding dress in her current incarnation. Again, it represented an obstacle to accessing a potential loving relationship. The balance is interesting, as in the first life, she was on one side of the barrier, but in the second life, she was on the other, in terms of societal prestige.
It is also interesting that her parents, in this incarnation, were divorced, and so, this wedding dress, where the cloth should represent a loving relationship, instead it represents a failed attempt in that regard.
Of course, we did not go into these past life regressions with the mission to figure out why she hated her mother’s wedding dress. It just so happened that, in the Victorian life, she saw the tablecloth, and that was immediately what came to mind. We did not go into these lives with any other intent than curiosity, and had no predetermined expectations.
So, is it possible – even probable – that what these friends of mine reported was nothing more than contemporaneous imaginings, invented as we spoke, like someone narrating a dream? Yes, yes it is, and I concede that wholeheartedly. The brain is remarkable at confabulating reasonable explanations for biases, beliefs, and interests, post hoc. However, I’ve performed this experiment with others, and have read the work of people who regularly engage in this sort of past life regression therapy (Brian Weiss, for example), and, to me, it is convincing.
What is particularly interesting about all this though, even assuming that these visions are completely fabricated by the mind, in the moment, is that going to the “root” of these problems, or at least convincing somebody that they have done so, is an effective therapy in and of itself. Brian Weiss writes a lot about this; in particular, his first patient had an irrational fear of choking among other anxieties(if I remember correctly) that was not explained in her current incarnation, but once he brought her back to a previous life where she died in this manner, the fear was completely ameliorated. She understood (or believed she understood) the cause of the problem, and so this somehow made the problem go away. I do not know of any broad studies of this phenomena, under controlled settings, but it would be interesting to see such a study carried out. It would not necessarily prove or disprove past lives, but it would show that this therapy works, which is fascinating on its own.
If I had the means, I would love to be able to research this topic on a larger scale, and attempt to confirm cases as Ian Stevenson did. As it stands, it is just a hobby of mine to explore when the topic comes up with a close friend. The results have always been worth the effort.
As an aside, I have never undergone a regression myself. I have tried, but I cannot visualize, and so I cannot follow the induction technique. This is a subject for another thread entirely, but, as I alluded to earlier, those who can visualize vividly have a predisposition to be able to jump back to past lives quickly and easily.