Table of Contents
Reincarnation. The philosophy of living over and over again in many lifetimes. Is it true? Many religions believe in some kind of reincarnation.
In this Reincarnation article, we will cover…
- A Brief Overview of Reincarnation
- Various Philosophies of Reincarnation
- Books That Discuss Reincarnation
- Techniques That Access Past Lives
- One of My Own Past Life Memories
- A Past Life Dream
- Checking Details
- Are Past Lives Real?
Reincarnation Living Again… Is it Possible?
Many religions have believed in some form of reincarnation for about as long as anyone can remember.
Even some of the religions that speak against it now. Let’s take a look and see what we think.
A Brief Overview of Reincarnation
This is going to be a very brief overview of reincarnation because its history is so long and so broad.
Almost literally, there are references to it going back to before written history.
The Wikipedia article describes these in much more detail and here is a link. to it so that you can peruse it.
Rather than try to get into a history of reincarnation, let’s just look at some of the different ideas pertaining to it.
The basic idea of reincarnation is that when a person dies, the soul goes into another body. This is also called transmigration. So, the person lives a whole other life.
Some beliefs, such as some of the eastern religions, believe that the soul can become any of several types of beings.
If the person had a fairly devotional life, he/she will be reincarnated as a human at a higher level of life than the one they just ended.
If he/she wasn’t quite so devoted, they will become a person of lesser status.
Or even be incarnated as an animal, bird, insect, plant, mineral (such as a rock), or a being in another type of dimension, like an elemental, and lastly, as a demon.
Other beliefs reject the concept that a person can be incarnated as nonhuman and say each type of soul reincarnates as the same type.
A dog will always be a dog, an ant will always be an ant, a cucumber will always be cucumber and a human will always be a human.
The Bible originally taught about reincarnation but in the second council of Constantinople, it was removed.
All references to reincarnation in the Bible were taken out and anyone who still believed in it was declared to be cursed.
Various Philosophies of Reincarnation
Many groups believe that we are reincarnated in circumstances that match what we were involved with when we died.
We are supposed to go from there and try to live better lives.
So that we’re born into a better one after that.
The goal of many of these is to actually become so advanced spiritually, that we get off the cycle of reincarnation and reabsorb into the divine.
Other people believe in karma, the idea that what goes around, comes around.
If you hurt someone in this life, you will be hurt in the same way in the next life.
If you do good in this life, you will have a happier life in the next one.
Still, others think that you have several lifetimes in order to learn lessons.
When you’ve learned all that you’re supposed to, then you stop coming back.
Then there are the people who feel that some of those who are born into bad circumstances, say in a family that is abusive, are more advanced souls.
They are there to change that dynamic and heal the generational problems.
Or those who die in violent circumstances, like a terrorist attack, volunteered to live that life and die that way.
It would bring attention to that problem and encourage finding a solution or being more loving to each other.
It would be the same situation for those born into minority groups that are being rejected and harmed.
They are there to encourage equality.
So, there are many theories of why we may come back, but no one knows definitively. Or even if we do.
Reincarnation Today
Since these early times, the teachings of reincarnation have changed just a little.
Most believe that transmigration is kept within species, so that your good old dog, Shep, won’t be reincarnated as your grandchild. Or vice versa.
The Theosophical Society was one of the first organizations in the West to talk about reincarnation and introduce the concept to people who wouldn’t normally have heard of it.
Books That Discuss Reincarnation
For me, the topic of reincarnation came up when I saw a book called “The Search for Bridey Murphy” by Morey Bernstein. You can find it here . Is currently available on Kindle, Paperback, and hardcover.
I read this book over 40 years ago so I may not have the details right anymore and having trouble finding a synopsis that shows how it started.
But, if I remember right, a woman, Virginia Tighe, went to Morey Bernstein for a hypnosis session.
Possibly to find the cause of a problem she had.
He hypnotized her back, either to the point where the problem started or just to see if he could go back further than her birth in a regression.
She began discussing, in a child’s voice that it was “terrible, jus’ terrible”.
On being asked what was terrible, she said she’d been sent to her room and was so angry about it, she began to peel the paint off of her metal bedstead. So, now it looked flaky and patchy.
Bernstein was surprised to discover that her name wasn’t the one that she had now, but something else.
Also, the child she was regressed to didn’t pronounce it very well.
Later sessions came up with Bridey Murphy, living in Ireland in the previous century.
She described watching herself being “ditched”, which meant buried.
There has been a lot of discussion about this book since its publication and whether the person really existed.
I don’t think they were ever able to verify her story, but the discussion was on.
Ian Stevenson was a psychiatrist that began to research the claims of children who said that they had lived other lives.
Most of these cases were in the East. His writings have been used and referenced by researchers ever since.
Many of these kids knew where they had lived and who they had been and when going to visit their previous homes, recognized family members of the previous person.
They knew how that person had died and sometimes had birthmarks that matched wounds on the previous person.
Another book was “Across Time and Death: A Mother’s Search for Her Past Life Children” by Jenny Cockell you can find it here .
This is a person who lived in Ireland in a past life, like Virginia Tighe.
But, in this case, Jenny knew at a young age that she had had eight children that she felt she’d abandoned when she died.
She eventually found them and wrote about the experience. She remembered it without hypnosis.
Techniques to Access Past Lives
There are several ways that you can access past life memories.
The one you’ve probably heard the most about is hypnosis.
Quite a few accounts are out there by various authors who said that they were treating someone for a phobia or something using hypnosis and asked them to go to the first instance of experiencing the fear.
Often, the person, instead of going to a childhood memory in this life, would go back to something that happened in another life.
They were afraid of water and it turned out that they drowned in a previous existence.
And usually, the hypnotist hadn’t believed in reincarnation before this happened.
Now there are people who research possible past lives and hypnotism is considered the least valid means of verifying or discovering earlier lives.
Part of the problem is that a hypnotist can subtly lead someone towards a particular type of life.
“You are in your previous life. Look at yourself in a mirror or reflective surface. What are you wearing? A dress? Breeches? How about shoes? Sandals?”
And the person may pick from those suggestions.
The hypnotist may not be trying to get them to say a certain thing, they may only be giving examples, but it could subconsciously lead the person on.
The other complaint is that people could access things they read about or saw in movies. It’s hard to prove if they did or didn’t.
Most often, the most verifiable memories are those that are spontaneous.
Especially ones where a name is remembered and it isn’t one that could have been found in the news, online, or through another source.
In other words, a person who wasn’t famous or well known or part of a news piece.
A plumber who died 20 years ago of natural causes in Poughkeepsie, maybe. Only his immediate family and friends knew of him.
A memory like that could come because you saw or heard something that was significant to that person.
Here’s an example of one of my past life regression experiences. Once, I was walking down a street and passed a fence that went around a large yard that contained a lot of trees making it very dark inside that area.
The fence was wrought iron and had the curlycues on the tops of the metal posts linked by metal bars.
In an instant, I could see myself as a woman in a graveyard at night, visiting my husband’s grave.
The fence around the graveyard was similar.
I was wearing an old-fashioned long skirt and blouse and had a shawl around my shoulders.
Many of the headstones had celtic crosses on them and other Celtic symbols, so it may have been Ireland. It was only a few seconds but seemed like a memory. It’s unverifiable, though, as there’s no name, place, or date.
The most likely way that you’ll get a past life memory and you can’t make it happen, by the way, is through dreams.
You’ll have a dream that isn’t disjointed or strange, like they usually are, but will be linear and often be of another time or person. I’ve had a few of those.
One of My Own Past Life Memories
When I was working at a local government job, I had past life memories of the spontaneous and the dream type. https://skullgal.com/past-life-regression-experiences-that-fueled-my-interest/
It was the situation I was living with that triggered them.
The dept. that I worked in was overwhelmingly staffed by Christians of the evangelical, Christian nation variety.
I used to go to a church like that for eighteen years and got out as it was one of the most abusive places I’ve ever been.
There were only two of us, the lead person and myself, who weren’t of that religion.
She was Catholic and I’m just kind of seeking.
She had been made lead person before the rest of them all converted.
So the office manager, the supervisor, and everyone else was in this church.
And they wanted only people of their religion working with them.
At some point, the lead person became interested in paganism and thought I was a pagan.
I had pagan friends but wasn’t one myself.
I brought her a beginner book to look at and she was leafing through it as we were alone in the room, when she thought she heard someone coming in the back door.
She panicked and began looking for a place to hide the book saying, “We’ve got to get rid of this! Where can we hide it? You don’t know what they’ll do if they find this.”
She pulled a drawer out and quickly dropped the book into it, shutting it firmly away. No one came in. It was a false alarm.
But, while she was doing that, I saw in my mind the two of us in a cottage or small house in a wood.
Dressed in old-fashioned clothing, long coarse skirts, blousy shirts with a kirtle overall, we were practicing the old religion.
A blanket or tablecloth was covering an old trunk and laid out upon it were a candle and various paraphernalia of our craft.
Horses hooves could be heard not far away and we immediately blew out the candle and hid all the tools in the trunk, looking about us to see whether we had overlooked anything.
I felt that it was 1600’s Germany for some reason.
It was finished before she’d found a hiding place for the book, only a few seconds.
But one of the girls had felt like she was me and the other seemed to have been her. We were sisters.
A Past Life Dream
A few days later, I dreamed of these girls.
There was a meeting of the local town in a clearing.
I was walking and bumped into a burly man who was getting ready to join some musicians.
He gruffly told me to watch what I was doing and I moved away from him.
I saw my sister, the lead person in this life, looking worried.
Taking my place at the end of a group of people seated on the ground in a row waiting for the meeting to start, I noticed a boy dressed in ragged clothes next to me.
At some point, I realized it wasn’t a boy, but my other sister, twin to the lead person, who had been hidden at birth and raised by someone else far away so that the twins would be safe.
Local religion thought one of the twins would be the devil’s child and would kill it.
She had come in disguise, I guess to be part of her original family, even if she had to hide it. That was why my lead person was nervous.
That wasn’t the worst, though, as for some reason the twin decided to get up and casually go to the food table and sneak a fish.
Just as she was hiding it under her tunic, the burly man grabbed her hand and yanked it back out.
That was enough to discover that she wasn’t a boy at all.
Looking more closely, he could then tell that she looked like the other sister and declared that he’d known she was too big for one, supposedly referring to our mother when carrying them.
I impulsively grabbed the sister’s other hand and began to run into the woods.
The next scene in the dream was the only part that didn’t seem linear.
We found ourselves in the town that I grew up in, in this life but everything was white.
Or at least it was a town I thought I knew. At the point where I told her I knew where we were and we started to go to a certain destination, I woke up.
Checking Details
Looking up 1600’s Germany, I was unable to find if twins were killed because they were twins, although there were different rulers for different provinces and each was run by the religious laws of those rulers.
There was also a war that raged for several years between the various versions of Christianity, particularly the Calvinists and Catholics.
Another thing I didn’t know, was that the Inquisition wasn’t just in England, Spain, or Italy, where most of us think of it as being.
It was also in Germany and more people were killed as heretics there than anywhere else. And the 1600s were some of the worst.
The burly man felt like he was one of the girls in our dept. She was always talking about gory or violent things.
Just like I felt that the first sister was my lead person, so I felt that the man was this coworker.
I was later let go for not being a Christian. The lead person kept her job but was moved to another dept.
Her family had a history with the city politically and they couldn’t get rid of her.
Other Posts
We Hope You Liked This Reincarnation Post
So, do we live many lives, maybe advancing in spiritual growth as we go? I don’t know.
We don’t have a lot of real evidence one way or the other, but there are researchers who are looking into finding proof and learning more about it.
I’m told that the inclusion of historical information in my dream could be considered veridical proof.
That’s only if you wouldn’t have known it otherwise, and you first learned of it in the dream.
There are all kinds of groups on FB, videos, books, and websites devoted to reincarnation.
The stories are fascinating. To me, anyway.
If you’ve had a possible past life memory, feel free to put it in the comments.
And keep exploring. That’s how we’ll keep learning more.
Check out our other posts…
- Past Life Regression Experiences That Fueled My Interest
- Timeslips Phenomenon: The Less Known Dimension
- Recognizing After-Death Communication From A Loved One
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