Autism and Reincarnation

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The evidence presented is currently interpreted through limited human sensory perception. This has limitations. In the future new technology may be able to interpret what goes on in the human mind. In addition to allegations of reincarnation there is the ever present anecdotes of life after death.


Belief is a form of bias, you should know that! currently (and I am using your own model steps 1-8 which is not bad) a curious scientist should be at step 1 and asking questions objectively why?. In relation to your alleged evidence points 1-3 the evidence presented is going to fall into (2) that its currently scientifically non-significant. That does not mean a relationship cannot be derived, merely we dont know how to interpret the data properly. It would be foolish to simply lump all these allegations into (3) without examining all the evidence with the tools we have available.

Assuming - for the sake of argument alone - that reincarnation actually occurs, how does one find out the identities they allegedly had in allegedly previous lives without falling under the influences of scammers and other exploitive people?

Bigger problem still - if all this universal memory is in a reservoir of sorts and not sorted or categorized to our chronological or historical likings it means that you can pull in very vivid memories of someone who did very much exist and, while edifying the existence of such a centralized archetypal memory bank, it's still no proof that you were ever them. With that in mind I'd have to consider that the esoteric Buddhists, Hindus, and western mystics had to entertain and tease out this particular question until they were confident that there were certain particular signs that what you were experiencing was a personality in your own soul's makeup vs. something you were just pulling in off the network so to speak.

I know that to a least some Theravada and Vajrayana Buddhists, there is no such confidence. Given the basic understanding of samsara, the question might not be that meaningful, or might be translated as "just how confused am I?"

I think this question is an explanation for the very weird idea that physical characteristics of the new host are somehow determined by random events in the life of the previous host. For example, he has a big birthmark on his right cheek because that was where he was injured in the car crash in the previous life.
[edited because that might be a bit opaque] I think the people making these weird physical claims are trying to cope with an insecurity about the question you raise.

One fictional treatment of these ideas that I quite enjoyed was the film "Dead Again" with Kenneth Branagh, Emily Thompson and Andy Garcia with a nice little performances by Derek Jacobi and Robin Williams.

Sickness really exist - how do we avoid the influences of scammers and other exploitive people?

I'll be first to agree that I have come across some utter nonsense pedaled under the banner of reincarnation. There are numbers of people who can only imagine that they were either someone historic or at least connected to famous historic events. Well, how many historic people have any of us known in this life and how many historic events have any of us been central players? Just how many people could have been an ancient Egyptian priest or priestess?

If I have lived in the past - I can only assume that in all probability I was a farmer or simple worker or at an earlier time a hunter/gatherer. That is was the vast majority of humanity has always been.

Taking the premise the question becomes what kind of reincarnational schema are people engaging. I've heard of psychics reading for someone and telling them that the place they just got a tattoo on their back or the place they have a birthmark is the place where they had a previous sword or bullet wound in a previous life. At the same time - as far as I understand it - Buddhism and Hinduism have more in common with Neoplatonism, Hermeticism, and the Judao-Christian stuff like Rosicrucianism, Martinism, Masonry, and Golden Dawn than what might appear at first glance. They all seem to suggest reincarnation as the evolution of consciousness, the Great Work in the west suggests internal alchemy to be the ongoing qualitative improvements of character, integrity, and general ethic doing things at the etheric level (working with the same 'secret fire'/kundalini in the east either knowingly or otherwise) to bring a person to having the 'solar body' or the golden wedding garment of the Book of Revelations - ie. humanity 2.0. It's suggestive of the very slow but persistent process of the observer effect on matter and energy altering a person over time which is pretty much the best modern definition one can offer for alchemy. From there it seems like even Buddhism doesn't suggest that it ends in annihilation of self-awareness but rather that the cycles go higher and higher, our incarnations on this Earth are just a small sliver in that process, and that if Nirvana gets likened to annihilation it's because it's a state beyond the horizon line - so many steps out ahead that even if someone could pen a description of it into words there'd be nothing we could use in analogy to make any grasp of it accessible.

That's where I don't fully understand the idea of death-traumas showing up in the next life. If someone happened to be in Hiroshima Japan in 1945, was a good practicing Buddhist or Shinto and got evaporated by the bomb - it had no impact on their moral character at the time of their death, it wasn't a karmic event like - say - getting shot while holding up a bank might be. It could be one of those etheric kind of things but I'd think if it were happening to anyone who died in war, foul play or by gory accident it would be a consistent pattern rather than simply being some people. Also with a schema as complex as what gets described in places like AP Sinnet's Esoteric Buddhism - it wouldn't surprise me if our whole concept of individualities weaving in and out of incarnation like sine waves could be an oversimplification.

Your answer to my question is evasive. Please answer the question asked and detail the steps necessary to determine the history of one's (alleged) past lives.

Funny thing is it was neither an answer nor an evasion. I said that there's more complications to the issue - that a person could dive off into the collective, come up with crisp details of someone's life, match it to a person who lived in whatever time period along with name, DOB, etc. and it still wouldn't be proof that they were ever that person. You may want to try someone in this thread who claims competency in past-life regression.

Any response to a question that does not answer the question is an evasion. I learned this during my time as a storefront 'psychic', and in the years since as a debunker of woo.

Does anyone else have a direct and valid answer to the question, "How does one find out the identities they allegedly had in allegedly previous lives without falling under the influences of scammers and other exploitative people?"

Please answer the question as asked and detail the steps necessary to determine the history of one's (alleged) past lives.

Fair enough, but come to think of it I might have some slightly friendlier evasion that I might have to try passing off as advice.

Why the sudden interest?

The problem actually trying this endeavor, if you're serious about it, if you find a credible 'Explore past lives in 30 minutes or less' - the best case scenario is nothing happens, you lose a half hour of your life that you can't get back, and you know what you already knew; that it's all bunk. The worse possibility is you might have a vivid hallucination, see all kinds of things that you would swear you never saw either on the internet, TV, news, you start researching and see that what you saw is verifiable - you come to believe that you had some kind of experience unexplainable by reductive materialism and guess what? There's absolutely not one single shred of proof that it ever happened or that you didn't make the whole thing up. Even the veracity of whether or not you actually had a hallucination to base your claims on is up for jabs.

To me it just sounds like a lose/lose - you're probably much better off just not trying it, assuming your right, and continuing to pound the thread.

To me it seems that there is no valid answer to my question; because if there was a procedure to accurately determine alleged past lives, people would know about it, use it, and find out exactly who they allegedly were.

So, since there is no such procedure, then there is no way to determine if reincarnation is real or not.

There is no valid empirical evidence to support any claim in favor of reincarnation.

It's a fantasy - wishful thinking, at best.

Only this, and nothing more.

I don't know of any exact method to determine who any given individual was in their past life. I would not pretend to know who or what I might have been.

The closest we can come to it are the reports of young children recalling events or previous lives. One can certainly find reasons to doubt those reports - but out of thousands of documented cases - there certainly are some eerie examples.

Dr. Tucker, in a follow-up to his book Life Before Life, explores American cases of young children who report memories of previous lives.

A first-person account of Jim Tucker's experiences with a number of extraordinary children with memories of past lives, Return to Life focuses mostly on American cases, presenting each family's story and describing his investigation. His goal is to determine what happened--what the child has said, how the parents have reacted, whether the child's statements match the life of a particular deceased person, and whether the child could have learned such information through normal means. Tucker has found cases that provide persuasive evidence that some children do, in fact, possess memories of previous lives.

Among others, readers will meet a boy who describes a previous life on a small island. When Tucker takes him to that island, he finds that some details eerily match the boy's statements and some do not. Another boy points to a photograph from the 1930s and says he used to be one of the men in it. Once the laborious efforts to identify that man are successful, many of the child's numerous memories are found to match the details of his life. Soon after his second birthday, a third boy begins expressing memories of being a World War II pilot who is eventually identified.

Thought-provoking and captivating, Return to Life urges its readers to think about life after death and reincarnation, and reflect about their own consciousness and spirituality.
http://www.amazon.com/Return-Life-Extraordinary-Children-Remember/dp/1250063485

Jim Tucker is the medical director of the Child and Family Psychiatry Clinic, and Associate Professor of Psychiatry and Neurobehavioral Sciences at the University of Virginia School of Medicine

Last edited by r2d2 on 28 Mar 2015, 5:10 pm, edited 1 time in total.

It depends on your concept of reincarnation.

1) The more generally understood concept, and that which seems to be being discussed here, is when a dying person's consciousness is believed to pass onto a new being during conception or birth.

2) Or it can be conceptualised that the energy contained within the body/mind transforms upon death and becomes something new and/or is absorbed by other life.

The second is a much more plausible explanation in my opinion.
It is believed by Buddhist communities that only those who are 'Great' practitioners (ie. Those who've attained enlightenment) have the ability to make this transition without losing all trace memory of the previous life.

The Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines 'Reincarnation' as:

The plural of 'anecdote' (personal account) is not 'data' (facts); thus, an entire book full of non-validated personal accounts may as well be placed in the "Fantasy/Fiction" section of a used-book store.

As for the 'energy' concept, there is no evidence for that, either.

As a Jain, I'm supposed to believe and endorse reincarnation because it is one of the abilities attributed to mankind and all living things alike. It's difficult for me to reconcile, though, because I have no direct proof. Because I like Jainism very much I'd like to believe in reincarnation but my logical mind doesn't buy it.

Recently, I've been thinking about "third" eye which animals used to possess way back in the day. That "eye", often located below the skin between the visible eyes, was responsible for a sense which alerted the animals to danger but was made superfluous by the development of the other senses. As such, that "third eye" is vestigial and remnants of it still exists in animals. To wit: some dogs and cats will see or detect someone new and keep their distance. Those same animals can see someone new then "decide" that, eh, this person is not a danger to me. That's happened to me quite often. I liken this "essence" which animals sense as being the indefinable soul that people have discussed for centuries. I'm willing to admit that, in fact, there may be a soul, and if it dies exist then the possibility that it can be reincarnated is plausible, albeit farfetched.

I was a cat in my most recent life. And autism existed long before the holocaust. Michelangelo is thought by some to have been an autistic savant.