Autism and Reincarnation

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Here is an interesting article regarding reincarnation:

•Omni Magazine's Interview with Dr. Ian Stevenson


Probably the best known, if not most respected, collection of scientific data that appears to provide scientific proof that reincarnation is real, is the life's work of Dr. Ian Stevenson. Instead of relying on hypnosis to verify that an individual has had a previous life, he instead chose to collect thousands of cases of children who spontaneously (without hypnosis) remember a past life. Dr. Ian Stevenson uses this approach because spontaneous past life memories in a child can be investigated using strict scientific protocols. Hypnosis, while useful in researching into past lives, is less reliable from a purely scientific perspective. In order to collect his data, Dr. Stevenson methodically documents the child's statements of a previous life. Then he identifies the deceased person the child remembers being, and verifies the facts of the deceased person's life that match the child's memory. He even matches birthmarks and birth defects to wounds and scars on the deceased, verified by medical records. His strict methods systematically rule out all possible "normal" explanations for the child’s memories.

Dr. Stevenson has devoted the last forty years to the scientific documentation of past life memories of children from all over the world. He has over 3000 cases in his files. Many people, including skeptics and scholars, agree that these cases offer the best evidence yet for reincarnation.

Dr. Stevenson's credentials are impeccable. He is a medical doctor and had many scholarly papers to his credit before he began paranormal research. He is the former head of the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Virginia, and now is Director of the Division of Personality Studies at the University of Virginia.

read remainder of article:

remainder of interview

I'm still in a state of shock.

I and all my real-world autistic friends are all atheists and skeptics etc.... as such I thought all autistics were because of brain function. I was wrong. I'm still in a state of shock.

Next time I'm reincarnated I'm signing up for a different planet.

I would have said something like that, but as a matter of consciousness sharing.
I'm sure there is no causal relationship here, but I could see it possibly being categorized as an effect of Jung's synchronicity.
The idea being that "information/memory" is not a material thing and so not limited by space or time displacement.
Science really does not have a handle on what comes from our subconscious.
I find it an interesting idea.

kewl perspective

Sojourner;

To share a little bit about myself I was raised Roman Catholic, had my bouts in my early 20's of looking at things like Buddhism and Christian Gnosticism, had a hard slip into agnosticism and atheism (mostly brought on my seeing the a lot of base animalism in how society functions socially), when things turned back around and I felt like I'd found evidence for consciousness beyond the physical body I went forward to do all kinds of research.

Where I ended up - Rosicrucian, Martinist, and other western mystery philosophies (currently a member of both AMORC and BOTA).

For as much as the idea of reincarnation makes sense to me - ie. energy neither created nor destroyed, why would information or consciousness arbitrarily be different? It also seems like while we're all equal in the eyes of the law we start and finish in very different spots, with very different strengths and weaknesses, the body of knowledge leading to wisdom seems to be the same across the board but the problems that stand between us and that tend to be as different as our instances of birth.

For right now at least I tend to be quite wary of any direct claims citing that autism is the reincarnational result of a), b) or c). I remember hearing something about Edgar Cayce mentioning the nukes of over Japan in WWII and a lot of former Japanese vaporized in that event pulled back from birth and consequently came back only partially settled in their bodies.

My problem with that is it doesn't seem to fit the motif of cruelty in history unless we had significant waves of autism right after the Mongols ripped through China, the Urals, and eventually Europe. We should have also experienced this after any round of major genocide. Nations at war, particularly when there's a lot of bad blood from past events (example Bosnia, Armenia, etc. in the early 90's) where stuff of our worst nightmares or of the worst hack n' slash horror actually comes to life at the hands of soldiers and mercenaries. We should be able to see evidence of autism after any mass act of cruelty.

If however we can't trace it then we have to consider the likelihood that autistic incarnation is much more complex, that a Holy Guardian Angel or Higher Self might decide to touch down in an autistic body for any reason from that to attitude adjustment (being a self-righteous jag in a past life) to simply not having experienced anything like it and wanting to give it a try to fill out it's experiential resume.

The trouble I find is that everyone says something a little bit different when they peer around the psychic realms. Some people have given profoundly detailed narratives, good example being Rudolph Steiner, and when you hold certain elements of the story up to other things it start to unravel. Partly it seems like we have our own filters we pass these things through, Edgar Cayce wasn't that different from Steiner, Blavatski, Levi, Yves D'Alveydre, or Fabre d'Olivet in that regard.

One of these days it may come to pass that we'll have a clearer reach into the unconscious; right now it seems like that realm is best described as a non-linear gradient where the territories seem to be coagulated by likeness of ideas rather than chronological history or origin of the ideas itself. It doesn't seem to come with an index or routing guide for people who want to make rhyme or reason of certain kinds of causal dynamics as we see them. I hope that one day enough research will unmuddy that area of consciousness but we've got a while to go on that.

If you don't go with the static time, parallel lives idea above, but instead think about linear time and reincarnation, you will soon recognize a math problem.



Given the changing rate of population growth, there aren't enough souls from the past to populate the present. Either only some souls reincarnate and other lives are de novo existences, or the whole thing is not quite right.

Learned Buddhists have assured me there is no personal reincarnation, but a kind of karmic seed that passes into the new person from the bardo. When I asked the question "what is it that gets reincarnated?" they said it was a difficult question, but that it would be wrong to think of the ego and person of the deceased as that which gets reincarnated. This makes the "Kundun" and personal recollection sort of story hard to understand.

Given the absence of convincing evidence and the variety of interpretations of what reincarnation might mean, I am thinking this is probably more wish projection and anxiety about death than anything else.

I was in upper primary school but met the girl on numerous occasions and even played with her. She became a regular visitor to my neighbors house. She herself told me that she was this other person (the neighbor's dead daughter) in a previous life, but I'll be honest and didn't really investigate her story thoroughly as we were both just children. My parents relayed the story in more detail when I was older and it struck me as remarkable.

After a few months the girl stopped coming to the house. My parents nor I never asked the neighbor what happened?

Is it true that there are more people alive today than have died in all of human history?

I had heard this stated any number of times - I recall some years ago it being scientifically refuted. I was just curious what the accepted scientific opinion about this matter was.

Fact or Fiction?: Living People Outnumber the Dead

Booming population growth among the living, according to one rumor, outpaces the dead

The human population has swelled so much that people alive today outnumber all those who have ever lived, says a factoid whose roots stretch back to the 1970s. Some versions of this widely circulating rumor claim that 75 percent of all people ever born are currently alive. Yet, despite a quadrupling of the population in the past century, the number of people alive today is still dwarfed by the number of people who have ever lived.

In 2002 Carl Haub, a demographer at the Population Reference Bureau, a nongovernmental organization in Washington, D.C., updated his earlier estimate of the number of people that have ever existed. To calculate this, he studied the available population data to determine the human population growth rates during different historical periods, and used them to determine the number of people who have ever been born.

To calculate how many people have ever lived, Haub followed a minimalist approach, beginning with two people in 50000 B.C.—his Adam and Eve. Then, using his historical growth rates and population benchmarks, he estimated that slightly over 106 billion people had ever been born. Of those, people alive today comprise only 6 percent, nowhere near 75 percent. "[It is] almost surely true people alive today are some small fraction of [all] people," says Joel Cohen, a professor of populations at the Rockefeller and Columbia Universities in New York City.

For this myth ever to be valid there would have to be more than 100 billion people living on Earth. "How cozy," Cohen says. "It just doesn't seem plausible," he adds.

Today there are more than 6.5 billion people walking on Earth, according to United Nations estimates.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/artic ... mber-dead/

You are right. The number of folks alive today is less than seven billion. And the total number who have ever lived is estimated to be between 60 and 100 billion, or even more.

So when you do what the Victorians called "join the great majority"(ie "die") you are in fact joining the majority of humans.

Though some categories of humans are of lopsided number now. There maybe more living people over 100 years old today than have ever lived before. My guess is that the majority of people officially diagnosed with aspergers who have ever lived are alive today (not the majority who have ever had the condition, just the majority officially diagnosed).

And population growth has no bearing on the issue of whether or not reincarnation is real, or not.

I think that some people believe that new souls (entities) are coming from the center of our galaxy, possibly being routed or relayed through the Sun.
That would explain the increase.

Perhaps it is possible that there is some sort of consciousness "splitting", perhaps due to entropy, - increasing complexity.

There are many more ways to form theories than we presently have to prove or disprove them.

Last edited by olympiadis on 26 Mar 2015, 2:21 pm, edited 1 time in total.

How about some FACTS?

All this speculation is tedious and frustrating.

Speculation is a critical part of the scientific process.

Imagine a time when test methods/equipment was not available for use in the exploration of a field of study, any field.
The mind had to use what it thought it knew, combined with unknown possibilities in order to form mental models.
That's just how it is.
When new test equipment becomes available we gain more knowledge, but unfortunately this also allows a lot of arrogance as well as unfounded reliance on the test equipment to be both infallible and the source of complete knowledge.

I love test equipment, but every field of science and/or wonder stretches out into an infinity of undiscovered information that we do not yet have the ability to detect, let alone measure with our current technology.

I believe that scientific methods are sound, but their purpose is not to support any sort of arrogance, or the suppression of ideas.

Hello Fnord,
I prefaced my post with the disclaimer that reincarnation is a belief system, like Christianity, UFO's, etc., and there are many faces to that belief system. For every theory of Reincarnation that would refute this theory of mine, there is a theory that would support it.

Look at your location that you've got on your profile marker: STENDEC. STENDEC itself has several theories, yet you probably gravitate to the theory that feels the most comfortable to you, your life experiences, your principles, etc. The same thing with the concept of Reincarnation--those of us who chose this belief system will gravitate to the theory that best resonates with our personalities. To demand facts about someone else's belief system is similar to demanding the facts about what came first: the chicken or the egg? The answer belongs to that individual alone.

Skepticism is very healthy to any theoretical proposition, I think, but only to the extent that it can strengthen or weaken the theory, not challenge its existence. It is.

Speculation is only ONE step in the Scientific Method. The steps of the Scientific Method are:

1. Ask a Question ("What if ... ?" or "Why ... ?")
2. Do Background Research (something more than just visiting a few Internet websites)
3. Construct a Hypothesis (i.e., Speculation)
4. Test Your Hypothesis by Doing an Experiment (One experiment, many times)
5. Analyze Your Data
6. Draw a Conclusion ("Was I right?" If not, then go back to step 1)
7. Communicate Your Results

Those who have speculated on the topic seem to have skipped over steps 4, 5 and 6, and gone straight to step 7.

That is not at all scientific.

Brilliant! I just love a well thought out "What-If?".

Here is one:

What if the ability to lie to ourselves is the most attractive feature that Life on Earth has to offer.
Without it, is Divine Honesty, the hard, stone cold, Godlike honesty that we here cannot yet bear.
We are using this ability to lie to our "selves", within this "reality"(The Big Lie), to claw our way out of our personal hells.
We relive the same lives over and over until we are strong enough to grow up.

Or,
what if Autism is no more than a human classification error?