Reincarnation, the Sequel!

Great Debates
1

PolyCarp asked me to open up a thread on reincarnation with a few of my own beliefs re-iterated. Go here for the original thread.

So, when talking about the afterlife, I said:

The only way I’ve been able to make some sense of this life is that it is not just ONE life, but a whole series of lives. Yes, I feel re-incarnation is true. But let me continue.

Each life is suppose to teach us something. What that lesson is suppose to be is up to the individual to find. I’ve found it helpful to look around and find what’s been repeating itself at you. That’s usually the first clue.

Here’s where it gets corny. Remember a movie a few years back, starring Albert Brooks and Meryl Streep, Judging your Life? After you die, you go to this Other Place where you aren’t judged, but you review your life and figure out what you did wrong, what you did right and how to improve it.

Believe it or not, that’s pretty much how I feelthe Afterlife is. And, after resting and organizing your notes, you’re sent back to THIS world to give it another go.

Despite how closely this movie mirrors my own belief, I don’t think there’s any JUDGING that goes on in this Other Place. Oh, the God(s) help you sort out your life, figure where you went wrong, what you did right. There’s no punishment or reward, there is, however, UNDERSTANDING, which I feel is the most important thing. Understanding what you did, why you did it and how it effects the world around you.

And this continues 'til… well, that’s a good question. The best I’ve been able to figure out is that after a certain point, you’ve gained enough experience that your willpower is able to sustain your soul or spirit without the aid of a physical body. You essentially graduate to the next level, that of a non-corporal being.

After that? Damned if I know. Having spoken with other Pagans, I know this belief is shared by others. Maybe not exactly in the same way, but it follows the same pattern.

One more thing. I have not a bit of evidence to back this up. Only personal experience and personal revelation that has been shared with me and others have told me. I just know in my heart it’s right.

2

1st let me say i try to NOT BELIEVE ANYTHING. we’re stuck with the problem of evaluating information from many sources and this information is often contradictory. like george harrison said, it’s like “searching for the truth among the liars.”

i lump all religion/occult/mysticism/paranormal/etc. together and presume most of it is BULLSH!T. some people are talking trash to scam others and some people believe what is obvious nonsense. but we are supposed to “respect” everyone’s beliefs. yeah right. depending on the circumstances the most i can give is polite indifference.

at this point i SUSPECT the universe runs on reincarnation, people reborn as people only. it appears that gender remains constant with rebirths. the book with the best collected evidence i’ve seen is: OLD SOULS by Tom Shroder (c)1999. i don’t even remember the names of most of the books i’ve read on the occult in the last 20 years. this trek was started by THE ULTIMATE FRONTIER by Eklal Keushana which someone loaned me in 1974. it is the only book i’ve seen with a reasonably complete paradigm of what is going on.

my main problem with the HELL concept is that i see NO POINT in eternal suffering. any GOD worth his salt would HAVE TO come up with a better system than that. then relatively recently i find that HELL in the old testament is actually translated from SHEOL. my cruden’s concordance, encyclopedia britannica and random house dictionary agree it means “place of the dead” or “dwelling place of spirits.” it looks to me like the heaven-hell paradigm comes from roman paganism. the underground fire and brimstone idea sounds like it could be created by people who live near volcanoes. there are volcanoes in italy but where are they in the middle east?

lots more to cover, but it can wait for later posts.

                                              Dal Timgar
3

Thanks, Freyr and Dal. In particular, Dal, I had become confused reading of posts because it seemed you were arguing for reincarnation in some and against “belief” in others. Your comments clarified my understanding of what you’ve been saying, and I do appreciate it.

My comments: I agree in general terms with Freyr’s concept that any reasonable metaphysic sees life as a means for learning and growing, not a “guess wrong and you’re in the flames” video game. I suspect, on moderate evidence, that reincarnation is one means God uses for accomplishing the end of producing spiritually mature humans. Sort of a “Nice try, but not good enough. Now go back and do it again, and try to get it right this time.”

Why? Because there are numerous accounts of persons who recall previous lives, often small children with good circumstantial evidence that cannot be explained away by stories they’ve heard, visits they’ve made, etc.

In particular, I knew a woman about 30 years ago (1969) who “recalled” having lived in a house in Akhetaten, Egypt, during the Amarna Revolution. She drew me a sketch plan of the house and its location in the city. Ten years later, an account of that house’s excavation, after her account to me, was published. The location and floor plan matched the sketch, which I still possessed. I would love to produce that as evidence, but unfortunately it was destroyed or accidentally discarded in one of the numerous moves I made between then and now.

The Skeptic’s Dictionary has this to say about reincarnation: http://www.skepdic.com/reincarn.html
and about the Bridey Murphy story: http://www.skepdic.com/bridey.html

Supposedly, past life regression under hypnosis is quite feasible. Again, the skeptics have comments: http://www.skepdic.com/pastlife.html

I can allow for confabulation, the concept that, having told a story, one comes to believe it oneself. I do know people who have done this with incidents I know to be false. (And my memories of the Akhetaten house incident are of course suspect on the same grounds – one reason I wish I still had that sketch.) But I think that there is “adequate smoke” here to suspect that there is at least “something smoldering in the underbrush.”

Comments?

4

I personally regard the issue of reincarnation with some distaste, as I do the philosophies that posit rejoining or joining with some Uberspirit after death. Both require something that I would resist if at all possible, the loss of one’s identity.

I have read your other post Freyr, where you claim that the soul is the real identity, but I would counter that it is not “me” in any way that I would consider meaningful. If I must start all over again, with no recall of my prior existence, learning everything from potty training to long division over again, coping with some other set of parents, or none at all perhaps, searching for love all over again, along with everything else, I’ll pass.

The worst philosophy regarding reincarnation I have ever read was in a book called “One,” by Richard Bach. His idea was that we were all the same person. In other words, there was only one individual human being, unbounded by time, reborn into each and every person in turn. (This was years ago that I read this, so some of the details are a little foggy.) Uh, no thanks again. While I might not mind being born as Hugh Hefner, I have no desire to be each and every Jew killed in the holocaust, and even less desire to live out the lives of the Marquis de Sade, Hitler, Stalin, or many of the other less savory individuals in the past and to come. I can’t decide if this would be the ultimate in masochism or the ultimate in sadism. I suppose it would be both, by definition.

The only reincarnation scenario that appeals to me at all even remotely would be one in which I remain me, with all my earthly memories and learning, but am born into a vastly different existence. Say a Snerf on planet Exo 9, the place where the earthly souls go when they’ve passed onward.

5

I haven’t given reincarnation any thought, but it seems interesting to me. For anyone that wants to field this question…

It seems that most past lives that I’ve seen/heard people discuss are from centuries ago. Does anyone know of a past life claim that is only decades old?

For (hypothetical) example, I was a hardware store owner, named George Perkins, in Hometown, USA, in the 1930s. The obvious caveat to this type of claim would be that it’s very easy to do research on Mr. P, then make the claim.

6

Poly said:

Numerous accounts? Where are the verified accounts? I’m sure a lot of people think Bridey Murphy was one such account, but as you know from reading the Skeptic’s Dictionary entry on it, it is no such thing.

One could similarly say there are numerous accounts of people being cured by faith healers, or psychics finding murderers, or people being abducted by aliens. The problem is always the same – verification. Reincarnation is in the same group.

Just because it looks like there’s smoke doesn’t always mean there’s fire. Sometimes it’s just fog. :slight_smile:

7

Freyr, even though you are a Teutonic deity, the Celtic Druids were big reincarnation proponents. Given the existence of the soul, (an idea that strains the credulity or brain power of David B), why would people think their current persona has any right to equal billing. Your current persona would have the same relationship to your soul that the clothes you wear today has to your persona. Some clothes fit well, some made you look bad, some you remember for a long time because they were associated with momentous occasions but they are not you (well maybe for some of the extremely shallow, first time around people their clothes are a large part of them).

I believe when I shuck this mortal mipsman coil, mipsman will have left (I hope) an imprint on my soul, with memories to be triggered by the next persona that my soul inhabits.

I agree with Dal that main stream religion Hell is a stupid, inefficient device for an omnipotent, omniscient Deity. I believe that there are many lives that could be lead that will fit the bill for Hell. The Deity, with his omniscient accounting system and programming/allocation system, can make sure that everybody gets what he deserves, thus being just and loving.

As to previous lives recollections, at the Tank Museum at Fort Knox, I could smell the hot oil and knew what the gritty dirt covered armor of the Panzers felt like; at Shiloh,TN, (even the name of which gave me the creeps), I walked from the Sunken Road up to the river landing with the hair raised on my neck; crossing over the bridge at the Straits of Mackinac, “I” was in a birch bark canoe, knowing that “I” was about to have problems at the rendezvous (I am pretty sure I was half Indian); walking through York, England, I felt a sword in my hand but it was my left hand; exploring pueblos in Chaco Canyon, I “remembered” the dark and dusty inner chambers where “I” slept; “we” would have walked through Hell (as currently defined) for Julius Ceasar after one of his harangues; bits and pieces: the ship breaking up at night in the storm, the beauty of Sicily (never been there) tempered by the pain of crucifixion by the Romans during one of the slave revolts, the miry muddy farming existence of a medieval European farmer, sailing past southern Greece on a Venetian trading ship…

These were not mipsman. They were somebody else but they had the soul that I am associated with and left their imprint, as I hope will I. I can not see what lessons I should be learning, probably just some karmic retribution and rewards going on. Maybe we are in the early rounds of the competion.

If there is a karmic reward system, I ask that I be making a “transition” at the same time as David B. so I can ask him if doesn’t feel like an idiot now.

8

mipsman, is it possible to discern when another person is near the end of their “karmic journey”, so to speak? I mean, is there a noticeable aura or presence about them that makes it clear (to someone that knows what to look for).

Do mundane existences not make an impression on the soul?

9

I saw this on ‘sightings’, so take it or leave it as you wish. they had a story about a woman in england who had dreams since childhood about a being a mother of something like 8 children, sketched the house, streetmaps of the town, etc… her flashback were between the turn of the century and 1920’s/30’s, and she was being interviewed probably early 90’s. well, on a trip to a town in ireland (she was english) all this stuff started matching her memories… she found the field where the cottage was (since crumbled). she learned more through old timers, the chuch, and found out who lived there and where they were. apparently she (in her past life) died during childbirth, her family was split up, but some of her (supposed) children were still alive. she eventually met with them and apparently knew enough about their early childhoods to make them believe her. of course they were all in their late 60’s/early 70’s. like i said, it was from ‘sightings’, so take it with a grain of salt.

10

Reincarnation sounds like a good idea. It would be nice if it were true. I would even really really like it to be true.

Unfortunately there is not the slightest reason to suspect that it is.

11

**Dal_Tigmar:

my main problem with the HELL concept is that i see NO POINT in eternal suffering. any GOD worth his salt would HAVE TO come up with a better system than that. then relatively recently i find that HELL in the old testament is actually translated from SHEOL. my cruden’s concordance, encyclopedia britannica and random house dictionary agree it means “place of the dead” or “dwelling place of spirits.” it looks to me like the heaven-hell paradigm comes from roman paganism. the underground fire and brimstone idea sounds like it could be created by people who live near volcanoes. there are volcanoes in italy but where are they in the middle east?

RIGHT ON** One of the main reasons for leaving the Xian Church is this “hell-fire and damnation” stuff. The idea that an all loving god would torture people for not understand or not following instructions seems ludicrous. I noticed the similarity between the concept of Xian Hell and old Greco-Roman mythology in 6th grade. After that, it ceased to be a threat to me.

**Polycarp wrote:

Why? Because there are numerous accounts of persons who recall previous lives, often small children with good circumstantial evidence that cannot be explained away by stories they’ve heard, visits they’ve made, etc.**

While I’ve not recalled previous lives (I’m a bit leery of the “recall” stuff) my own person experience that I have a soul and therefore past lives is this:

Back in '88, I was at the World SF&F Con in New Orleans. I met my first boyfriend there. He lived in Isreal at the time.

Thru phone calls and email, we arranged to meet in Isreal in May of '89. A couple months before I went, I had a dream where I visited his apartment building. I always chalked it up to wishful thinking, UNTIL I actually went there.

In the dream I saw the elevator and the foyer of his apartment building, the lighting and the paneling on the walls. When we got to his place, the memories of the dream suddenly flooded back, the elevator, the walls and their paneling, the lighting, etc. EXACTLY as I had seen in the dream. He had never described his place for me, never sent me any pictures, etc. His apartment building is 6000 miles away, yet I knew it perfectly. It was so eerie it was frightening. THAT convinced me of my own soul’s existence.

**Pthalis wrote:

The only reincarnation scenario that appeals to me at all even remotely would be one in which I remain me, with all my earthly memories and learning, but am born into a vastly different existence. Say a Snerf on planet Exo 9, the
place where the earthly souls go when they’ve passed onward.**

How are the Snerfs on Exo 9? :smiley: So, what happens after you die on Exo 9? Your soul travels to another planet of even more inconceivable existence? I’m trying to mock you here, just figuring out what you believe.

**mipsman wrote:

I believe when I shuck this mortal mipsman coil, mipsman will have left (I hope) an imprint on my soul, with memories
to be triggered by the next persona that my soul inhabits.**

This is pretty much my thought too. You do retain something, or learn something each time you incarnate, but exactly how it stays with your soul, I dunno. Anyone want to take a guess at the mechanics of it all?

**Scylla wrote:

Reincarnation sounds like a good idea. It would be nice if it were true. I would even really really like it to be true.

Unfortunately there is not the slightest reason to suspect that it is.**

Sorta like trying to describe sex to a virgin? Until you’ve experienced it, it’s impossible to describe? :smiley:

12

mipsman:

Huh. With that attitude, I think we can rest assured that you’re coming back for another couple of go-rounds.

Anyhow. Until someone can come up with a workable model of just what a “soul” is, where in the body it is located, by what mechanism it is transported from body to body, and, most importantly, how it manages to retain memories and personality vestiges which we know for a fact to be a result of the physical structure and electrochemical activity of the human brain, I don’t see any reason to grant the idea of reincarnation any more credence than fire-and-brimstone fundamentalist Christianity.

13

I’m going to assume there’s a “not” accidentally left out of that last sentence unintentionally :slight_smile:

Well, what I believe is basically that death equals the end. Lights out. Finito. While it would be nice if there were some way I could conitinue on afterward, nothing seems convincing to me. The snerfs thing is just a way of saying that I might find reincarnation of a certain type, where my identity, memories, etc. are preserved, to be something I would not necessarily find as depressing and unappealing as the standard one where we live human lives over and over again until we get it right. I like me, and I don’t want to be someone else. (Except Hugh Hefner of course.)

14

**Ptahlis wrote:

I’m going to assume there’s a “not” accidentally left out of that last sentence unintentionally**

Whoops! You’re right! Mea culpa, mea culpa!

15

David, I would love to see some of those stories as well. I’m going on the basis of authors in whom I have some confidence who have said that such stories are more common than one would think. If somebody has links to such stories, particularly if investigated by objective scholars, I’d appreciate their posting the same.

Phil, one quick comment: While it would be ideal to have a mechanism, simple evidence that it does happen that is incontrovertible without straining one’s incredulity all out of shape would be acceptable. Something like a four-year-old child in Lancashire who gives detailed an circumstantial descriptions of life in Abu Dhabi when neither he nor anyone he has encountered has been there, seen a travelogue about it, etc. If I were to see several accounts of this sort, I’d give provisional acceptance to the idea that some such phenomenon is indeed valid, even without a proposed mechanism accounting for them. After all, genes were only a hypothesis to account for hereditary inheritance of traits for several decades after they were proposed. Albeit the two ideas are not on all fours, since it is obvious how the genes were transmitted, if not what they were, while the idea of the continuance of some sort of identity across lifetimes has no mechanism whatsoever in the absence of the idea of a soul under some nomenclature or other. How would you react to that sort of evidence?

16

And one more point – I’ve got to do something about this bad case of premature posting I’ve developed… :wink:

You note the need to have “…a workable model of just what a “soul” is, where in the body it is located, by what mechanism it is transported from body to body, and, most importantly, how it manages to retain memories and personality vestiges which we know for a fact to be a result of the physical structure and electrochemical activity of the human brain…”

Some thoughts:

  1. Suggesting that a “soul” is made up of “spirit” which is neither matter nor energy but a substance other than them and not presently detectable is a start towards this. And, while I don’t insist on the equation, consider that the hypothetical tachyons “fit” today’s physical model and are not presently detectable. A “confined tachyon” model of the soul works – and, as I’ve noted before, many of the characteristics that the Lorenz equations ascribe to tachyons fit the classic theological definition of God, supposedly composed of the same “spirit” stuff.

  2. The mechanism for interbody transfer is implicit in the hypothetical composition.

  3. Perhaps the most telling point in your questions is your semi-equivalence of soul and memory. From what we know of memory, it is stored “holographically,” with no one point in the brain the site for any one memory. This suggests to me the idea that any attempt to pin down “mind” or “soul” is doomed to failure for not asking the right questions – that they are not objects but patterns.

  4. The final question, of how the soul survives death when its data and programs are built to run under the brain’s OS, so to speak, might better be looked at from the alternative of what is a soul for? If you conceive of it as the person’s backup disk, functioning to save data and programming during a (literally) fatal crash, you have your answer implicit in the question.

All this is intended to be purely speculative, to merely suggest that there are potential answers that do not depend on some FoGgy revealed theology but fit into the material cosmos we (sort of) understand. I would be very surprised if anything I’ve said above is precisely true. I would be equally surprised if it were totally in error, with no real-world referent whatsoever.

17

Poly:

I haven’t the slightest idea how I would react to such evidence, to be honest, but I have a strong suspicion I’m never going to have to worry about it.

Just out of curiousity, is that Blackburn, Lancashire? :smiley:

I would know a Lorenz equation if I was choking on one. Could you dumb it down a bit for me? OK, could you dumb it down a lot? Like all good materialists, I have Hawking’s books, but it isn’t like I understand them. :slight_smile:

I do know what a tachyon is, though–so how would they be contained? Don’t they travel faster than light?

I guess. When I understand it, I’ll disagree with you.

Well of course. And things like memory, language, etc. move around in the brain sometimes if damage occurs. But that doesn’t change the fact that they are a function of the brain, and not separate from it. Kill the brain, kill the memories?

I’m not a big fan of circularity. Can an FTL particle with no energy, matter or mass carry information, and if so, how?

18

As long as we’re trying to work out what a soul is, I’ll add my question to the idea of a soul as a “back-up device” of sorts. It’s pretty clear that there is some sort of relationship between my mind and my brain. If I receive an injury to my brain, I can lose some memories. How is it that my soul can contain these memories and make them available to me at some life in the future, but can’t make them available to me a week after my injury?

19

muppetsoup said:

Grain? How about a whole salt lick! :wink:

mipsman said:

Oh, look, a new version of a fundie. “I can’t wait to see your face when you’re sent to hell!”

Tell ya what, you worry about things like that. I’ll live in reality. Deal?

20

Incidentally, I almost hate to do this because I suspect it will take the thread in a whole different direction, but I think it’s important.

Those who believe in reincarnation use these nice little stories about kids and adults who “know” things they shouldn’t be able to know. As I’ve already mentioned to Polycarp, the problem is that none of these stories have been backed up by hard evidence. But let’s put that aside for a second. Let’s imagine that one of them was – we found a real kid who had real evidence that he had real knowledge of something he couldn’t know from the past.

Why do we assume it’s reincarnation?

I have talked to a “parapsychologist” who believes that such things have occurred, but she does not believe it is evidence of reincarnation. She believes it is evidence of psychic vibrations (or something like that) that get embedded into objects and areas. The kids are just picking up those vibrations somehow.

See, everybody who believes has been assuming it’s reincarnation. But this is one of those things where they have not looked at all the possibilities. It reminds me of creationists who think that if they somehow disprove evolution, that means creationism is true. It’s not. There may be other possibilities. In this topic, even if you find a verifiable case, you have not proven reincarnation.

Personally, as you might have guessed, I believe in neither and am still waiting for decent evidence (evidence that I strongly suspect I will never see). But if such evidence should come along, people need to be careful not to simply assume that it is their particular belief that is being supported. There may be other reasons.