Reincarnation

[nivek]

Proof of Past Lives? Dr Jim Tucker discusses his research into reincarnation memories

When Dr Ian Stevenson passed away in 2007, one could be forgiven for thinking any chance of further serious scientific research into ‘reincarnation memories’ had died with him. Stevenson had spent four decades rigorously cataloguing instances from all around the world of children reporting memories of past lives, which appeared to show that, at the very least, there was something going on that couldn’t be explained by fraud or delusion.

Enter Dr Jim Tucker, a colleague of Stevenson’s at the University of Virginia’s Division of Perceptual Studies, who took over his work and continued to build on it – with his team now having some 2500 cases on their books.

In a fascinating recent interview with Dhru Purohit (embedded below), Dr Tucker explains that Stevenson “became intrigued by these reports from different parts of the world of young children who said they remembered a past life. And he decided to go and investigate. And what he found was this phenomenon, first of all, was a lot more common than people in the West had any idea, and secondly that it produced some very intriguing cases.”

(More on the link)

 

[nivek]

Uttar Pradesh: Boy says he 'died' 8 years ago, goes to old home, claims he had a rebirth

The 13-year-old boy who died from drowning in a canal eight years back, has now returned to his village in Uttar Pradesh's Mainpuri district. His stories of reincarnation have become a subject of discussion.

A 13-year-old boy, who 'died' from drowning in a canal eight years ago, has returned to his village in Uttar Pradesh's Mainpuri district. And, he has stories to tell. His stories of reincarnation have enthralled villagers.

Rohit Kumar, the thirteen-year-old son of Pramod Kumar from Nagla Salehi village in Uttar Pradesh's Mainpuri district, had died on May 4, 2013, from drowning in a canal near Kanpur while taking a bath.

On August 19, Chandraveer alias Chotu, son of Ramnaresh Shankhwar, a resident of the nearby village, Nagla Amar Singh, came to Pramod Kumar and said he was his son Rohit in previous birth.

He claimed he had a rebirth and identified Pramod and Usha Devi as his parents. On meeting his 'previous' family, Chandraveer, started narrating stories from his previous birth. He also identified his sister. Enthralled by his reincarnation stories, villagers soon gathered at Pramod's place to listen to Chandraveer's tales.

Meanwhile, when Subhash Chandra Yadav, the headmaster of the village's former secondary school, stopped by, Chandraveer immediately identified him and touched his feet and said, "This is Subhash, sir," reports AajTak. Villagers took Chandraveer to the same school where Rohit studied earlier. Teachers asked him questions that Rohit could have answered.

Surprisingly, Chandraveer answered them correctly, according to the report.

Chandraveer's father Shankhwar said his son would always talk about reincarnation since childhood and insisted on coming to Nagla Salehi. They feared losing him and avoided bringing him to the village. Eventually, he said he felt helpless before the child's insistence and took him to Pramod's house.

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[nivek]

The Strange Case of the Reincarnation of Anne Frank

We have long been enamored with the thought of what happens to us after we die. It is a conundrum that has consumed scientists, philosophers, and great thinkers since time unremembered and perhaps always will. We have no more of an answer to this fundamental existential question now than we did since the very first flickers of consciousness bubbled up into the brains of our long forgotten ancestors, but there have been many ideas. One of these is the idea that we are some how reborn and recycled into a new body after death, and the cases of reincarnation are varied and at times very bizarre. A very intriguing case revolves around a woman who from childhood would insist that she was the reincarnation of the famous Anne Frank, in a case that has never been satisfactorily explained.

Many readers will immediately know the name of Annelies Marie Frank, or more popularly known as Anne Frank. Born in 1929 in Frankfurt, Germany, she had the bad fortune of being born Jewish in a place that was not welcoming to them at all at the time. Her family moved to Amsterdam, Netherlands, in 1934 when Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party gained control over Germany, when she was at the age of four and a half, but this did little to protect them. When the Germans occupied the Netherlands in 1940, they began persecuting the Jewish population there as much as anywhere else, and as it intensified, Anne and her family went into hiding to live in cramped hidden rooms behind a bookcase in the place of work of Anne’s father, Otto Frank. There they stayed hidden in the shadows and Anne would write a diary every day of the horrors of war and their predicament, all the way up until they were discovered and arrested by the Gestapo in August 1944 and sent off to concentration camps. Anne would die around 15th April 1945 at the notorious Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. The only survivor of the family during the war would be Otto Frank, who would later find that his daughter’s diary had been saved by his secretary, and it would later be published in 1947 as The Diary of a Young Girl, later known as The Diary of Anne Frank, perhaps one of the most well-known memoirs there is, and the second biggest selling book after the Bible. It is all a very tragic tale, and although Anne Frank lives on in her book and the hearts of millions, it seems that she may have lived on in other ways as well.

Anne Frank

In 1954, a girl named Barbro Karlen was born to Christian parents in the country of Sweden, and from an early age was plagued by nightmares that caused her to wake screaming in the middle if the night. When she was just 3 years old, she surprised her parents when she calmly said that her name was not Barbro, but rather Anne. At first this seemed like just a whim, but it soon became obvious that the girl was serious, insisting on being called Anne and later even claiming that her parents were not her real parents and that her full name was in fact “Anne Frank.” Throughout all of this she had recurring nightmares of men in uniform kicking down her door, and at the time Barbro’s parents did not understand the meaning of all of this because they had never heard of Anne Frank and of course their young daughter wouldn’t have heard of her either, as the book had only been translated into a few languages and not Swedish at that point. To them their daughter was just going through some fantasy, but things would get stranger.

Her parents would bring her to see a psychiatrist, but she would not open up about these experiences to him, and so he told them that she was just a normal little girl going through some troubles. He told them that she would grow out of it, and so life went on. By the age of 12, Barbro had gone on to become quite the literary prodigy, penning a book of poetry called Man on Earth, which far from just a child’s scribbled ramblings would go onto become one of the most popular books in her native Sweden, and she would write nine more volumes in the series. During this time, she kept mostly quiet with the talk of Anne Frank, and was even herself starting to think she might be losing her mind. Even when she learned who Anne Frank was, she was so shocked and so tired of being treated like an over imaginative child that she kept it all to herself.

Things got a bit eerie when her parents took her to Amsterdam on a vacation to visit as part of a European tour, and as soon as they were there, they decided to visit the Anne Frank house. Although Barbro had never been to Amsterdam and had no instructions, she immediately knew how to get to the Anne Frank house, taking them unerringly through a walk through the twisting streets of the city to arrive at their destination. Once they were there, she was able to find her way around the house, making comments about how the place had used to look and what pictures had been in her room, and her parents were finally starting to see what all of this talk of being Anne Frank was, even beginning to believe she might be the girl reincarnated. In his book Born Again, Walter Semkiw, MD would write of this strange visit:

“That’s strange,” Barbro said, when they stood in front of the steps up to the house. “It didn’t look like this before.” She looked wonderingly and her parents didn’t know what to say. They entered the house and went up the long narrow staircase. Barbro, who had been so carefree when showing them the way, suddenly went white in the face. She broke out in a cold sweat and reached for her mother’s hand. Her mother was horrified when she felt Barbro’s hand, which was as cold as ice.

When they entered the hiding place, the same terrors overcame Barbro that she had experienced so many times in her dreams. She found it hard to breathe and panic spread through her body. When they went into one of the smaller rooms, she suddenly stood still and brightened up a little. Barbro looked at the wall in front of her and exclaimed, “Look, the pictures of the film stars are still there!” The pictures of the movie stars that Anne had clipped and affixed to the wall, which Barbro saw at that moment, made her feel happy, almost as if she had come home.

Her mother stared at the blank wall and couldn’t understand this at all. “What pictures? The wall is bare?” Barbro looked again and she saw that this was true. The wall was bare! Her mother was so confounded that she felt driven to ask one of the guides whether there had been pictures on the wall at one time. “Oh yes,” the guide replied, “they had only been taken down temporarily to be mounted under glass so that they wouldn’t be destroyed or stolen.” Barbro’s mother didn’t know what to say. “How in the world could you find your way here first of all, then insist that the steps outside were different and then see the pictures on the wall when they weren’t there?”

The Anne Frank house today

In her adolescent years these past life memories would begin to fade away and she took up a semblance of a normal life, working with the Swedish Police Service, but this would change when she was in her forties and had an aversion to one of the police officers she worked with. She did not know why at first, until she came to the conclusion that he was a reincarnated Nazi guard, after which all of her past life memories came flooding back. It was with this resurgence of memories that she decided to write a book on her experiences titled And the Wolves Howled.

In addition to all of this inexplicable knowledge, Barbro also demonstrated many strange similarities to Anne Frank throughout her life. For instance, from a young age she had been terrified of men in uniform, and also had an aversion to eating beans, something Frank had mostly subsisted on during her time in hiding. She also would not take showers, only baths, and she also mostly loathed having her hair cut, something that was shaved off when arriving at a concentration camp. She was also a child writing prodigy, like Frank, and was even noticed to have similar facial features to Frank. Coincidence or not? Perhaps strangest of all is that in later years Barbro would meet Frank’s last living relative, her cousin, Buddy Elias, who after talking in depth with her was convinced that she was indeed the reincarnation of Anne Frank. In the end we are left with a case of the reincarnation of a very famous individual that has all of the hallmarks of such cases, including access to knowledge one should not known, phobias from a past life, and other similarities to the deceased person in question. Is Barbro Karlen really the reincarnation of Anne Frank, or is there some other explanation? Whatever the case may be, it has gone on to become one of the more remarkable cases on past lives.

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[pigfarmer]

Seems like a common framework for these things, very similar to James Leininger and Ryan Hammonds

THEN AND NOW: The boy who proved he was reincarnated

 

[pigfarmer]

Just finished reading Dr. Jim Tucker's second book on this topic. Super easy read but the last part of the book gets into speculation and quantum physics and although dumbed down to my level still makes my head hurt. That said, it's about the best explanation of some very difficult to comprehend topics that may (or may not) relate that I've yet seen. Double slit, Schrodinger's cat, collapse of wave function, random number generators, synchronicity, all sorts of things we've heard about in one convenient pile. I enjoyed it.

This book describes the two cases I've mentioned that are very, very hard to dispute. Tucker is going about this in an apparently logical fashion and has created a coherent database with some surprising results. Zero woo-woo. No talk of 'frequencies' or 'energy' 'or vibrational prominence' or any of that. Very clinical but also very laid back. I was left with the impression that if you get a couple of drinks into him and make him say what he really thinks this is it. Aren't there a few you'd like to do that to?

Typically, I backed into this and will now read the first book.

Whatever happens, we don't just wink out.

 

[pigfarmer]

I guess it's just because I am focused on all this right now but it isn't hard to see why people who have studied various Fortean topics all seem to come back to consciousness studies.

 

[pigfarmer]

Just read this - and if I had been paying attention properly I would've see that the Kindle version contains both of Tucker's books.

This is dry stuff with tantalizing bits mixed in. The vast majority of the cases are from Asia; they have been collected by numerous researchers over more than 40 years. His second book, which I read first fo some reason, is basically the same as this one except it focuses on two extraordinary and fairly recent US cases which I've mentioned before.

Bottom line is, the information collection was done methodically and a database created. He addresses human memory, cultural belief, hoaxes and unintentional coaching, psychic abilities, hypnosis and all sorts of stuff to hold up and compare against the case files to see what fits as the best possible explanation. None of those mentioned really do. Interestingly - and this is the kicker that really has my attention - he's not saying 'reincarnation is real and we come back after we die'. Rather, it's 'the evidence leads us to suggest that some memories - that can be verified - survive the physical death of one person and may resurface in another some time later'. May not seem like much of a distinction, but I think it is important for a clinical study.

When looking at the statistical likelihood in the database he has created - probably in excess of 3000 cases by now - says that an untimely or violent death is the most likely to be associated with children talking about past lives. Some never speak of 'in between' while some speak of a Heaven like realm and in some cases acquired very specific details that it would be hard to find an explanation for.

Tucker gets into quantum physics as a way to understand human consciousness, or more accurately the nature of Reality and Time. That gets a bit too deep for me for sure and it lost my interest. I understand the general concepts though and he does a good job of explaining them to the layman.

Overall it reinforced my belief that we don't just wink out and that's that. Some sort of much larger probably natural process at work that we only very dimly understand. Like I said in another thread, maybe that's the real dividing line between isolation and First Contact.

 

[nivek]

Five-Year-Old Boy and Indian Twins Claim They Are Reincarnated​

Time travel stories – Tik Tok video warnings from people from the future, photos and paintings from the past of people seeming to be using cell phone and ear buds from the present – are all the rage these days. In a sense, reincarnation is also a form of time travel – a person dies and then comes back in the future in the body of another person, bringing with them their memories. This kind of Quantum Leap variation popped up in the news twice recently with stories twin brothers in India who claim they were once other twin brothers who were murdered in a property dispute, and of a five-year-old boy in Ohio claiming to have once been a woman who died in a fire. All claim to have evidence which proves their stories.

Could reincarnation be the one true form of time travel? Must one die to move to the future?

“The children also showed behavior unusual in their families and that, in those cases in which the claims were verified, matched the behavior of the deceased persons the children claimed to have been. My first journey to Asia therefore showed the need for more journeys.”

The first reincarnation tale comes from the Daily Star and the late Dr. Ian Stevenson, a noted Canadian-born American psychiatrist and the founder and director of the Division of Perceptual Studies at the University of Virginia School of Medicine. Stevenson was the rare medical professional who investigated the paranormal and his primary area of focus was the subject of reincarnation – could emotions, memories, and even physical bodily features can be passed on from one incarnation to another? As he investigated various alleged cases of reincarnation, he came upon Ram and Shesh Narain Diwediamoo, two brothers born in India in 1964. Or were they?

As Stevenson relates the story, the Diwediamoo twins very early in their children began to talk of being farmers named named Bhimsen and Bhism Pitmah. Things got scary when they said they had been by a man named Jagnath over some land. As described in the LAD Bible, they said this Jagnnath invited them to his house under the pretense of settling their dispute. Once they were inside, he instead attacked and killed both brothers and hid their bodies in a well. Being concerned and probably hoping this was just the strange but fertile imaginations of Ram and Shesh, their family followed up on the names … and were shocked to discover that Bhimsen and Bhism Pitamah were real brothers … who had disappeared in April of 1964, just four months before Ram and Shesh were born.

As word spread about the strange connection between Ram and Shesh and Bhimsen and Bhism, the Diwediamoo family was contacted by the Pitmah family and friends of the brothers. They were shocked at the accurate details the young boys had of their missing relatives. This then reached Dr. Stevenson, who interviewed them in person. He coaxed more information from the then 11-year-old boys – they ‘remembered’ rings and watches they had worn, how many acres of land they had owned, that the older farmers had another brother named Chandra, that they had both been married and both had sons, and they had unusual behavior quirks of the older men that only their family would know of. Then came the most eerie revelations.

Ram and Shesh told Stevenson about their ‘murderer’. Jagannath was an important man from the neighboring village of Kurri and he had two accomplices. That information was forwarded to the police, who verified it. Then they showed him their strange marks they were born with. Unlike normal birthmarks, these stretched horizontally across their abdomens. Stevenson believed these would match the fatal wounds on the bodies of both brothers. Unfortunately, Stevenson died in 2007 and no follow-ups with Ram and Shesh seem to have been made, nor was there any confirmation of the murder of the Diwediamoos by Jagnath. Stevenson was both respected as a knowledgeable medical researcher applying science to the paranormal subject of reincarnation, and as a quack by skeptics.

The New York Post brings up another case of alleged reincarnation to compare and contrast to that of the Diwediamoos. The parents of Luke Ruehlman of Cincinnati, Ohio, claim that has soon as he could talk, Luke babbled on about a woman named Pam. Since many kids have imaginary friends, they either ignored Luke or played along with him … until the day he said that HE was Pam and that she had died.

“He turned to me and said, ‘Well, I was, well, I used to be, but I died and I went up to heaven. I saw God and then eventually, God pushed me back down and I was a baby and you named me Luke.’ “

What does one say to a two-year-old who comes up with that kind of story? As Luke talked more, he claimed that as Pam he had traveled on a train to Chicago – a city neither he nor his family have ever visited. When he told his mother that he had black and wore earrings “when I was a girl,” she decided to see if she could find ‘Pam’. Like the family of Ram and Shesh, she got an unexpected shock – in 1993, a woman named Pam Robinson was one of 19 people killed in a fire at Chicago’s Paxton Hotel. In an appearance on the television show, “The Ghost Inside My Child.” Luke was show photographs of black women and he immediately picked out Pam Robinson. That led his family to contact Pam’s family, whose members noted that Pam liked the music of Stevie Wonder and playing the keyboard – two interests shared by Luke.

Unfortunately, that seems to be the end of the investigation into the alleged reincarnation of Pam Robinson in Luke Ruehlman. Are these two cases strong enough to prove reincarnation? Not really. Dr. Stevenson conducted hundreds of investigations and interviews of possible reincarnations around the world with memories as detailed as these and yet could not provide the scientific proof that reincarnation exists.

It would help if other scientists or medical professionals would follow up on Luke Ruehlman and the Diwediamoo twins to see if they themselves still believe they lived and died in past lives. That would require them to expose themselves to the ridicule investigators like Stevenson received. It is one thing to be skeptical or critical based on evidence. It is another to merely mock or slander. What will we do when there are no more scientists willing to do these investigations?

Is reincarnation, if it exists, the closest thing we have to real trime travel?

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[Standingstones]

No one comes back as a lower form of life. That would be contradictory to the very purpose of reincarnation. One could momentarily possess the body of a lower life form.


IMHO

At one time I was taking meditation classes at a Buddhist temple. The nun teaching the class brought up reincarnating as a lower form of animal. So I brought up subject of coming back as a cockroach. She didn’t blink an eye and stated it was quite possible to come back as an insect. I stopped taking that class immediately. Sorry, I couldn’t buy into being an insect in my next life.

 

[pigfarmer]

At one time I was taking meditation classes at a Buddhist temple. The nun teaching the class brought up reincarnating as a lower form of animal. So I brought up subject of coming back as a cockroach. She didn’t blink an eye and stated it was quite possible to come back as an insect. I stopped taking that class immediately. Sorry, I couldn’t buy into being an insect in my next life.

There are reports of people remembering lives as snakes and such - I think that came from Ian Stevenson. Not to be overly philosophical but what exactly is a 'lower form of life' anyway ? Life is Life and we should be glad for it. My achin' feet aren't overly glad about anything right now, but you get the idea.

BTW - how does that nun know that ? She got the rule book somewhere ?

 

[Standingstones]

There are reports of people remembering lives as snakes and such - I think that came from Ian Stevenson. Not to be overly philosophical but what exactly is a 'lower form of life' anyway ? Life is Life and we should be glad for it. My achin' feet aren't overly glad about anything right now, but you get the idea.

BTW - how does that nun know that ? She got the rule book somewhere ?

I won’t state what branch of Buddhism she belonged to but one time they rented out a school bus to go and protest the Dalai Lama who was visiting the US. There was some pissing contest between the two branches. It must have been about cockroach reincarnations !!

 

[Standingstones]

There are reports of people remembering lives as snakes and such - I think that came from Ian Stevenson. Not to be overly philosophical but what exactly is a 'lower form of life' anyway ? Life is Life and we should be glad for it. My achin' feet aren't overly glad about anything right now, but you get the idea.

BTW - how does that nun know that ? She got the rule book somewhere ?

One good thing about coming back as a snake, no more aching feet!

 

[spacecase0]

At one time I was taking meditation classes at a Buddhist temple. The nun teaching the class brought up reincarnating as a lower form of animal. So I brought up subject of coming back as a cockroach. She didn’t blink an eye and stated it was quite possible to come back as an insect. I stopped taking that class immediately. Sorry, I couldn’t buy into being an insect in my next life.

I am pretty sure that once you evolve enough you just will not "fit" into a way less advanced animal.

 

[pigfarmer]

What if there was something you needed to learn? Something specific. I tend to thing the meaning of life is to live

 

[SOUL-DRIFTER]

I am pretty sure that once you evolve enough you just will not "fit" into a way less advanced animal.

My feeling is 'fit' is not the word. The soul or life essence can fit into any body, but the craving to learn and experience more cannot be realized effectively in a lower life form.
IMHO

 

[matr96]

Nobody can avoid it.
Before coming back to this world or another, some people spend a long time in the spirit world. In a short period of time, others return.
It varies from person to person how many lives it takes to learn the necessary lessons.

Less lives are required to ascend up the ladder for those who are spiritually and intellectually advanced.
However, some people will encounter obstacles and will need to overcome them.

 

[pigfarmer]

Nobody can avoid it

not even Betty White, although she tried

 

[Rick Hunter]

Nobody can avoid it.
Before coming back to this world or another, some people spend a long time in the spirit world. In a short period of time, others return.
It varies from person to person how many lives it takes to learn the necessary lessons.

Less lives are required to ascend up the ladder for those who are spiritually and intellectually advanced.
However, some people will encounter obstacles and will need to overcome them.

Welcome to AE, Matr! Please elaborate, this is a very important topic.

 

[nivek]

The astral

The astral plane extends around each and every planet, formed of matter which is too fine for absorption by the planet but too coarse to escape from the attraction of the planet's mass, so existing between the dense matter of earth and the etherical matter of the spirit world...

...

 

[pigfarmer]

matter which is too fine for absorption filtration by the planet but too coarse to escape

non sequitur ... actually, I think that's what was wrong with the Saab clogged fuel injector, particulate matter trapped in the rail ...............