Reincarnation.

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Given enough time alone in a silent and darkened room, and a death-row inmate could convince himself that he is the Messiah.


Because reincarnation is a doctrine that stands by itself, yet people believe in it more than the doctrines taught in the "real" religions - this I learned at the Seminary.

I also took courses in psychology, and spent 18 months apprenticed to my cousin the witch. At no time was anything other than subjective testimony given as "evidence" for a reincarnative experience.


Jerry Seinfeld has said a lot of other funny things that also mean nothing when taken out of their original context. It seems that you are wasting your time paying attention to the words of has-been actors when you could have been getting a real education.

The only "amazing" thing about reincarnation is that those who believe in it all use the same arguments that are used by people who believe that: (1) UFOs are extra-terrestrial in origin; (2) they can predict the next song on the radio; (3) they can see auras; (4) God speaks directly to them about the End Of The World; (4) extraterrestrial aliens built the pyramids at Giza; and (5) the Virgin Mary has nothing better to do than impress her image on tortillas, water stains, and the retinas of people who stare too long at the sun.

I don't know about reincarnation and I really wouldn't debate one way or another for it. However, there is a situation being debated about the threshold of near-death experiences when the patient is seeing their immediate environment or other things beyond but still in our physical world. I personally don't trust what happens afterward for any reliability but the debate that the whole experience happens during the brain turning back on seems to have refutation by very succinct events that the person is able to describe, either during the time they were 'out' or even during the thick of the psychedelia and seeing flashes of 'real world' that time-stamp the observation as being when their neocortex was out and even their brain stem was barely functioning. Those time-stamp events and observations to be worth anything have to be cleared as being unique/novel enough to mean something and that's the indication of what they're finding. Of course the problem with breaking the anecdote barrier here is that creating these circumstances isn't exactly a matter of mixing a few chemicals in a test-tube; it takes a person being in a bad way at the right time with the right quantitative instruments and follow-up.

The challenge with what's being engaged is just how much of a tangled mess it is, ie. even if a person seems to be able to tell us uncannily accurate things about what they saw when their brain shut down, what comes after with the NDE content seems incredibly asymmetric in contextual content, perhaps more consistent in structural indicators such as dark tunnels, light beings, or whatever have you, but the rest seems to melt into a sort of pulp-fiction soup almost like people are wading around in scraps and ideas that have been projected out into the environment by others as well as themselves. Some of that would at least indicate a very abstract and perhaps in-and-of-itself non-sentient (at least sentience as we'd understand it) global consciousness. Then again one could I suppose just as easily say that if we think of ourselves looking out as being face-down that this reality could start to resemble (at least intuitively) what people would call subsequently higher planes of connection that we exist in at the same time as being here every moment.

The last of that of course was purely speculative/interpretive. Regardless, I have a feeling that between that first phase of NDE's and also what people call terminal lucidity that some clues will come out, similar to what Bruce Greyson argued at the UN, that 99.9% of the time brain and consciousness are in such unison that the distinction is meaningless, but regardless we're forced to look at the other .01% as the situation the way we look at Quantum Mechanics undergirding a perfectly well-working Newtonian mechanics for macro events.

I would agree though - people who are taking this out past the basics should be careful to get their hopes up too high, as in yes - the possibility of consciousness not being completely local at least makes both the universe and us a significant bit more interesting but we're still far from having clarity on what it means.

The condition is called "Anoxia", and is produced when the brain is not receiving enough oxygen to maintain higher-brain functions, yet just enough oxygen to keep recording memories. High-altitude pilots report similar experiences when their oxygen fails. Miners have reported similar hallucinations when the air starts to run out. Divers experience "Rapture of the Deep" when excess nitrogen displaces the oxygen in their blood.

Of course, this being the scientific explanation, it is not likely to be believed by those who would rather hold out desperately for any shred of belief that would promise them life-after-death instead of oblivion.

That completely bypasses the main subject though. Otherwise you'd be making a claim similar to that putting my head in a plastic bag and hyperventilating can give me the ability to see what my friend is doing seven miles away in his house.

Anoxia confers no such ability - it induces hallucinations instead.

Then I was right on my first claim - ie. that completely bypassed the topic I was addressing.

1- You clearly have no experience with good retreats, otherwise you wouldn't pronounce such foolish generalisations

2- If you think that drawing circles on the floor and playing with swords in white clothes is the same as meditation, then you realy are coming from a ridiculous point of view. Why is research into meditation a rapidly growing field with so many promises and wicca isn't? Do you have a clue?

3- So in your opinion people can either watch sitcoms all day or get an education without even looking at the TV? That's a funny point of view! What are you doing on the forum discussing rebirth, then?

Returning to the second part of your 2nd point, you here reveal that either you are not thinking logicaly or that you're trolling. How would you expect an objective proof of reincarnation? And I'll ask you again, since you dodged it last time: why did you ask for testemonials and then criticize them for being testemonials?

Spot on the money Modus.
"You can starve to death while reading the menu."

I believe your intentions were good. I just think what you said could be taken wrongly (like how I took it).

I've yet to experience a meditative retreat that did not have some religious or pseudo-religious agenda.


That is not how I think, so please do not accuse me of it. As I've stated, I took psychology courses. Some of them taught various forms of meditation, none of which involve any of that ritualistic crap you described.


Do you have any evidence to back up your claim? Even if it were true, the reasoning could be that people may be disappointed with mainstream religions and medical treatments, and are desperate for anything that promises even a shred of relief. Besides, just because "everybody believes" something, that fact alone does not make it true.


Non Sequitur.


I ask for first-hand accounts in the hope that there might be something in them that will reveal a source of objective evidence; seeing none, I criticize them for being nothing more than subjective testimonials, which are inherently worthless.

I can see also that you are attacking me personally with lies and false claims. This is not logical.

Trolling? No, I'm simply presenting a viewpoint that opposes the idea that reincarnation has any validity in the real world.

But if all you want is a thread full of posts that agree with whatever you say, then just say so.

Last edited by Fnord on 26 Jan 2013, 6:45 pm, edited 1 time in total.

For the record, I've been to Seminary; I've been apprenticed to a New Age practitioner (who also claimed to be a psychic, a witch, and a reincarnation of Mary Magdalene); I've taken psychology courses; and I've investigated dozens of claims alleging past life experiences.

I've meditated; I've experience sensory deprivation; I've been both a test subject and a researcher in paranormal studies; and I've even tried hypnotic regression (it didn't work, since I can't be hypnotized).

So far, none of this has provided any valid insight into reincarnation, life-after-death, near-death experiences, or any other alleged paranormal phenomena.

It takes more than a few people expressing their beliefs and attacking those who don't believe as they do to convince me that their beliefs have any merit.

So... before any more of you pretend that you know anything about me, I suggest that you first go back over the more than 15,000 posts I've made on this website and actually read them.

I think people inteligent enough can make their own conclusions about what you're trying to do here. My wrok is done as I had nothing to prove regarding rebirth.

Been there done that. I was able to have visions of supposed past lives.

But now I am a super skeptic about anything supernatural. Tons of reasons made me rethink just about everything, including the results of my meditations.

Self-Suggestion is the road to damnation. There's an alternative explanation that is also simpler than "past lives exist and through meditations I witnessed them". And it is that through meditation I entered a dream state, and when my sub-conscious saw the extreme need I had for answers, it fabricated a good story, like it tends to do all the time. That sub-conscious is a Jerk.

Once I woke up and smell the reality, I figured, my past life was full of cliches about a past culture that didn't turn out to be true, but that I assimilated through mass media...

Well done, sir!

Well done!

This much I'd fully agree with, but then again I don't think its quite this simple in total.

Attention and focus can be powerful in terms of rearranging how you focus on reality and how you interpret events but there are still plenty of hiccups in this that quite often are too unambiguous to fit that model. I don't mean that last part in regard to reincarnation but rather materialism. There's really no belief system out there at present that doesn't have Procrustean aspects to how it tries to filter or discard incoming data.

Last edited by techstepgenr8tion on 27 Jan 2013, 12:01 am, edited 2 times in total.

Please describe the meditations. What exactly were the mental factors present at the time of these visions?