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Posted: 22-07-2005 13:30 Post subject:

Children, children, stop squabbling and get back to the point. Just because the early church fathers removed all mention of reincarnation from the Bible at the Second Council of Constantinople, there is no reason to disbelieve this fact. As truth cannot be beat down and stifled, reincarnation will come up again and again and challenge you to disprove it- even if the bishops scream out till they are hoarse in the voice that there is no such thing as reincarnation. Wake up people!

Posted: 23-09-2007 16:49 Post subject:

Posted: 26-04-2008 11:56 Post subject:

'I died in Jerusalem in 1276', says doctor who underwent hypnosis to reveal a former life
By DANNY PENMAN Last updated at 22:33pm on 25th April 2008

The last time I 'died' was in Jerusalem in 1276. Pope Gregory X's Crusade against Islam had collapsed and the city's Christians would soon be abandoned to their fate.

My final hours were filled with fear. I was besieged in a beautiful vaulted church along with 100 knights. Smoky candlelight glinted off their armour. Some knights were praying, others resting.

As dawn broke, they readied themselves for the final conflict with an implacable foe. Even the most devout were terrified. All knew that only a handful would survive the coming day.

I watched their preparations for battle. The sharpening of swords and lances. The reinforcing of shields and armour.

But most of all, I prepared for my own death. As a monk in a city of Muslims, my chances of surviving the coming assault were slim. Soon after the knights left the church, I retreated to a small side-chapel to pray. I was desperate for forgiveness.

I had travelled from a monastery in Kent to the Holy Land so that I could kill Muslims.

Although I still hated Islam, I found it hard to love my own side. The decadence and corruption of the Crusaders had sickened me. I wanted to be left alone to live in peace, but it was too late.

With no knights left to protect me, the rampaging enemy had set fire to the chapel. I watched as the flames roared up the sides of the building.

Soon I too was on fire and burning like a Roman candle. I didn't feel any pain - I knew I was going to die and that my Lord would make it swift.

Out of the blackness I could see a burning white light. A calm voice asked me what I had learned from my life and whether there was any knowledge I wished to carry to the next.

It was the voice of David Wells - a past-life regression therapist who had put me in a trance and guided me to my 'past incarnation'.

To many, the idea of reincarnation will seem like bunkum. But strange as it may seem, it is garnering a surprising degree of respectable scientific support.

Today, London hosts an international conference on the subject in memory of the late Dr Ian Stevenson, an American scientist who spent decades studying the phenomenon.

Dr Stevenson amassed an astonishing amount of evidence for reincarnation. He tracked down more than 3,000 children who claimed to have experienced a 'previous life'.

Many were able to give precise details, such as their former names and the manner of their deaths. They could even recall the names of friends and family, many of whom Dr Stevenson was able to track down through birth records. Others knew intimate details known only to the deceased's family.

Such findings have led respected academics to startling conclusions. 'Reincarnation is the most likely explanation for the strongest cases,' says Dr Jim Tucker, medical director of the Child and Family Psychiatric Clinic at the University of Virginia in the U.S.

'The evidence points to a "carry over" of memories and emotions from one life to another. That could be termed reincarnation.'

Reincarnation is highly controversial - not just among scientists, but between different religions too. Broadly speaking, Christians, Muslims and Jews do not believe in it, while Hindus and Buddhists do.

To most in the West, it is still seen as little more than the product of a far-fetched imagination. But given the growing interest of the scientific community, I decided to investigate whether there could be more to it.

I volunteered to undergo what's known as 'past-life regression therapy'. Practitioners of this discipline claim we have all lived before and that we can be taught to remember our former incarnations.

It sounded utterly preposterous. Yet I must admit to a certain uneasiness, also. What if I were to remember that I had been a murderer or a rapist in a former life? Or, Heaven forbid, one of Hitler or Stalin's henchmen?

Whatever the truth behind it, past-life regression is not without risks. The psychological shock of 'recovering a memory' from a former life can overwhelm some. Others feel guilty about misdeeds 'they' perpetrated.

I took comfort from the fact that David Wells, one of Britain's most experienced practitioners and author of Past, Present And Future: What Your Past Lives Tell You About Yourself, had agreed to be my guide.

I was led into a darkened room and coaxed into relaxing on a big, soft chair surrounded by burning incense and scented candles.

David asked me to imagine myself floating above my house. I mentally drifted off into space and turned back to face our beautiful planet.

Slowly the Earth appeared to stop turning and began to reverse direction. This symbolised flying backwards through time.

In my hypnotic state, I pictured myself returning to Earth at the time of my former life - just in time to re-live my death in that church in 13th-century Jerusalem.

My regression experience was perplexing, to say the least. I felt as if I were living in two worlds at once. I was aware of my current life, but the world of Jerusalem in 1276 was equally real.

I could feel the clothes I was wearing and the sandals on my feet. I saw my surroundings in vivid detail, right down to the moonlight streaming through church windows and the fear etched on the knights' faces.

It felt more powerful and spontaneous than a memory, more realistic than a dream, but not as solid as the waking world.

As I stayed in my trance, David started asking me questions about my past life, and things became even stranger. It felt as if someone else was replying.

The answers I gave were so spontaneous and specific that it certainly didn't feel like I was dreaming them up on the spot, or trawling through memories of films set during the Crusades.

Was I merely describing scenes from my imagination or from facts I had gleaned during my real life?

Professor Chris French, a psychologist at Goldsmiths, University of London, thinks it was a combination of the two. He is deeply sceptical about past-life encounters, and says: 'Often people who undergo hypnotic regression conjure up false memories. It's not a magical key for unlocking hidden memories.

'There's mountains of experimental data which shows that people produce a story for themselves based on their own beliefs and expectations. People come out with a Hollywood version of historical events, such as life in Roman Britain or medieval Europe.'

Even so, the evidence for reincarnation remains tantalising. Dr Stevenson's team at the University of Virginia documented possible cases of reincarnation involving children over a 40-year period.

They focused on children because they thought their stories were less likely to have been contaminated with false memories.

Most of the team's evidence was gathered in the Middle East and Asia, where a belief in reincarnation is generally accepted.

[continues...]

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/news.html?in_article_id=562154&in_page_id=1770

Posted: 29-08-2009 10:38 Post subject:

Reincarnated! Our son is a World War II pilot come back to life
By Zoe Brennan
Last updated at 1:29 AM on 29th August 2009

It sounds totally beyond belief. But read the tantalising evidence from this boy's family and you may start to wonder...The agonised screams pierced the air. 'Plane on fire! Airplane crash.' In the dark, a two-year-old boy was just visible, writhing on his bed in the grip of horror. 'He was lying there on his back, kicking and clawing at the covers like he was trying to kick his way out of a coffin,' remembers the boy's father.
'I thought, this looks like The Exorcist. I half expected his head to spin around like that little girl in the movie. But then I heard what James was saying.'
Over and over again, the tiny child screamed: 'Plane on fire! Little man can't get out.'

For his shocked parents, these nightly scenes were traumatic.
For experts, they were baffling.
As the nightmares became more terrifying, the child started screaming the name of the 'little man' who couldn't get out of the plane. It was James - like his own name. He also talked in his dreams of 'Jack Larsen', 'Natoma' and 'Corsair'.

James Leininger's father, Bruce, was flummoxed. In a desperate attempt to find an answer to his son's troubled nights, he embarked on an obsessive three-year research project, armed only with the outbursts and names his son had been shouting in his disturbed sleep.
What he discovered astonished and perplexed him, and drove him to an extraordinary conclusion.
A lifelong Christian, it was not the answer he had sought for his son's behaviour. But he came to believe James was the reincarnation of a World War II fighter pilot; a man who had been shot down in his plane and struggled to escape as it caught fire; a hero.

The idea seems so preposterous as to be unbelievable. Yet in their new book, Soul Survivor: The Reincarnation Of A World War II Fighter Pilot, Bruce and his wife, Andrea, lay out some compelling evidence.

It all began on May 1, 2000. James, just three weeks past his second birthday, was a happy, playful toddler living in an idyllic home in southern Louisiana. That night, his mother was woken by his screams. She held him in her arms as he thrashed around.
Soon, however, James was having five nightmares a week. Andrea was worried. Her little boy began to talk during his bad dreams, screaming about an airplane crash and writhing as if he were trapped in a burning aircraft.

At a toy shop, they admired some model planes. 'Look,' said Andrea. 'There's a bomb on the bottom.'
'That's not a bomb, Mummy,' he replied. 'That's a drop tank.' Just a toddler, he was talking like a military historian. How had he known about the gas tank used by aircraft to extend their range?
As the nightmares continued, she asked him: 'Who is the little man?'
'Me,' he answered. His father asked: 'What happened to your plane?'
James replied: 'It crashed on fire.'

'Why did your plane crash?'

'It got shot,' he said.

'Who shot your plane?'

James made a disgusted face. 'The Japanese!' he said, with indignation.
He said he knew it was the Japanese, because of 'the big red sun'. Was he describing the Japanese symbol of the rising sun, painted on their warplanes, called 'meatballs' by American pilots?

Tentatively, Andrea began to suggest reincarnation; perhaps James had lived a past life? Bruce reacted angrily. There must be a rational explanation for all this.
He questioned his son further. 'Do you remember what kind of plane the little man flew?'
'A Corsair,' replied the two-year-old without hesitation - repeating the word he shouted in his dreams.
Bruce knew this was a World War II fighter plane.
'Do you remember where your airplane took off from?' he asked.
'A boat,' said James. How did he know that these planes were launched from aircraft carriers? He asked the name of the boat.
His son replied with certainty: 'The Natoma.'

After James was in bed, Bruce researched what he had heard. A naturally sceptical man, he was amazed to find the Natoma Bay was a World War II aircraft carrier.

etc...

Next, little James unnerved his father by telling him: 'I knew you would be a good daddy, that's why I picked you.'
'Where did you find us?' asked a shaken Bruce.
'In Hawaii, at the pink hotel, on the beach,' he replied. Eerily, he described his parents' fifth wedding anniversary - five weeks before Andrea got pregnant - saying it was when he 'chose' them to bring him back into the world. Shocked

...

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-1209795/Reincarnated-Our-son-World-War-II-pilot-come-life.html#ixzz0PYzvGRNb

Posted: 25-09-2009 18:54 Post subject:

This is a very good book of its kind and I recommend looking for it. If you can't get it in UK libraries, and actively collect reincarnation data, order through U.S. amazon.

The "drop tank" identification happened when he was two, and he actually said "dwop tank." At four he could describe the mechanical peculiarities of a Corsair aircraft. His father, obsessively searching for evidence to show that all this information his son was spouting was merely random, kept turning up evidence that it wasn't. He held on for a long time to the fact that James said he'd flown a Corsair and the aircraft carrier he named didn't have any; but then he turned out to have been a Corsair test pilot prior to the carrier. And on and on. If you believe in Reincarnation, this will look like irrefutable proof to you, and if you don't, you've got a nice chewy intellectual exercise ahead of you here. If not reincarnation, it's something equally odd and unlikely.

I don't have an opinion on the subject, and don't think it matters. What matters is that, in the process of doing all this research, Mr. Leininger established a connection to the crew of the Natoma Bay and began to feel an obligation to them, so he became a kind of liasion for the dead. The details of wartime deaths are often withheld from family for security reasons during the war, and then it's nobody's job, afterward, to go back and release information to families - and many of them have no idea how to go about learning what they want. The endless cross-referencing of segregated documents and personal interviews enabled him to bring people together who needed to meet, get information to the individuals who wanted it, and connect dots that needed connecting.

Posted: 30-01-2011 16:48 Post subject:

I would consider reincarnation to be philisophy rather than a reality, which allows the human brain to accomodate notions of the consciousness/immortality into the empirical evidence of life/death/rebirth found in nature.

Posted: 14-03-2011 20:36 Post subject:

Has anyone ever read The Children That Time Forgot by Peter Harrison? It was collected stories of English kids recalling past lives, originally published in the 80s I believe.

I *think* I read it way back in the early 90s but can't remember anything about it. I'm hoping to interview Peter soon, and wondered if anyone else had read it?

Posted: 14-03-2011 22:01 Post subject:

Intellectually, I like the idea of reincarnation.

Emotionally, I'm not so sure.

As I'm well past half-way to my three-score years and ten, I have to consider the fact of my mortality more and more each day. Another life might seem appealing if you're enjoying this one, but, frankly, I'm not. My life, apart from a few bright spots, has been mostly unsatisfactory, if not downright depressing. And I don't want more of that.

If a reincarnation was always an improvement on the previous life, then yes, it would be something to aspire to. But on the basis of such evidence as we have, a future incarnation is as likely to be worse than this life. (That might be like a Christian expecting heaven, and getting hell.)

Millions of suicides a year expect at least nothingness, if not a better world. But could they be disappointed?

We really need better information!

Posted: 18-06-2011 17:44 Post subject:

Jerusalem rabbis 'condemn dog to death by stoning'

A Jewish rabbinical court condemned to death by stoning a stray dog it feared was the reincarnation of a lawyer who insulted its judges, reports say.
The dog entered the Jerusalem financial court several weeks ago and would not leave, reports Israeli website Ynet.
It reminded a judge of a curse passed on a now deceased secular lawyer about 20 years ago, when judges bid his spirit to enter the body of a dog.

The animal is said to have escaped before the sentence was carried out.

One of the judges at the court in the city's ultra-Orthodox Mea Shearim neighbourhood had reportedly asked local children to carry out the sentence.
An animal welfare organisation filed a complaint with the police against a court official, who denied reports that judges had ordered the dog's stoning, according to Ynet.

But a court manager told Israeli daily Yediot Aharonot the stoning had been ordered as "as an appropriate way to 'get back at' the spirit which entered the poor dog", according to Ynet.
Dogs are considered impure animals in traditional Judaism.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-13819764

Posted: 21-06-2011 12:21 Post subject:

Posted: 30-09-2011 10:29 Post subject:

Another less-tha-serious article about old photos...

First Nicolas Cage, now John Travolta: Is this a photo of the Grease star in 1860? (Scientologists do believe in reincarnation)
By John Stevens and Mark Duell
Last updated at 5:40 PM on 29th September 2011

He is a member of the Church of Scientology, which believes in reincarnation and asks some members to sign one billion year contracts of service.
And one photograph collector in Ontario, Canada, claims he has found a picture of John Travolta from a previous incarnation in 1860.
The 150-year-old photo of a man who looks remarkably like Travolta has been put up for sale on eBay.

'I've had this interesting photograph for years and I've been unable to part with it,' the seller said on the auction site.
'When you look at it and into the eyes of the sitter you will see what I mean!
'I believe this is the photograph of a very young John Travolta taken around 1860... This is a ruby glass ambrotype photograph and it is one of a kind.
'It hasn't been changed, tampered with or altered in anyway. It is clear and is as nice as the day it was taken roughly 151 years ago.

The photo is listed at $50,000 or nearest offer, and while it has a large price tag comes with free shipping and gift wrapping.

...

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2043257/Nicolas-Cage-John-Travoltas-1860-doppelganger-photo-eBay.html#ixzz1ZQUHJ6uY

Posted: 30-09-2011 12:58 Post subject:

All that's needed to settle this important question is a direct line to the Ascended Masters. I knew that subscription would come in handy . . .

They say that the gentleman is half right but that the creature in the photograph is actually the love-child of Travolta and George Formby*.

It's a connection that may cause some excitement in genealogical circles. Well, something needs to.

*The horse-faced, ukelele-playing star, whose middle name was Hoy**, announces that he is available for engagements of a come-back nature. Shocked

**The Hoys usually inherited a walrus-face but due to genetic mutation or an infection caught from the Rabbit Woman of Godalming . . .

Why not subscribe today and trace your own Fortean ancestors!

Posted: 30-09-2011 16:32 Post subject:

There's been that many people on Earth down the millennia that's it not so much of a shock that some of them would look the same, even the unrelated by blood ones.

Posted: 30-09-2011 21:09 Post subject:

I think there's a certain range of facial types, so it's small wonder that some people look alike.

Posted: 29-05-2012 09:00 Post subject:

Reincarnation? Surely we’ve been here before Wink

At least Joanna Lumley doesn’t indulge in celebrity memoirs from a past life with royalty.
By Christopher Howse
8:39PM BST 28 May 2012

Usually it’s with Aztecs, or possibly ancient Egyptians. If not, then in some royal court. That’s where reincarnated people remember living before. The unusual thing about the past life that Joanna Lumley suspects she had is its modesty. “I think I might have been a boy in the First World War,” she says.

The actress felt immense calm, she said this week, when she visited Ypres, where presumably her past self fell. This sort of feeling – having been here before and recognising something that means a lot – compels some people to think reincarnation must be true. I wonder.

There is, to be sure, respectable reincarnation, of the Tibetan Buddhist school. Then there is wacky reincarnation, of what may be called the Shirley MacLaine school.

In 1938 a three-year-old boy on the bare Tibetan plateau of Amdo was shown some objects by a party of visitors. “Mine, mine,” he said of some. They became convinced he was the reincarnation of the 13th Dalai Lama, who had died a year before. He even remembered where his predecessor had left his false teeth. And so Lhamo Thondup became recognised as the 14th Dalai Lama.

His is a poignant story. He was taken from the windy fields of buckwheat to a vast monastery where he found companionship in the mice that ran over his bed. More troublesome later were Mao Tse-tung and his successors, who drove him into exile.

The Chinese now try to beat the Tibetan Buddhists at their own reincarnation game. When the Dalai Lama dies they will no doubt pick some promising boy and have his past-life credentials certified by stooges. To head off the divisions this would cause, the present Dalai Lama has announced that he might be the last, being regarded as an enlightened one with the choice of how he might be reincarnated. “Naturally my next life is entirely up to me,” he said a few months ago.

The Tibetan Buddhist school of reincarnation’s respectability need not make it true. The Dalai Lama has just been awarded the Templeton prize, the first winner of which, 40 years ago, was Mother Teresa. They strike the world as obviously good people. But it is impossible to see how they can both be right in their beliefs.

Tibetan Buddhism is a far-away religion of which we know little. Compassion and reincarnation sound comforting. The fearsome, fang-baring, three-eyed, orange-flame-spouting Dorje Shugden or Dolgyal does not. His crown is of five skulls and his necklace of freshly severed heads. This deity, or protector of dharma, depending on how you look at it, should not be propitiated, the Dalai Lama insists, for that would be spirit-worship. Others strongly disagree, which is why you often hear protesters shouting at the Dalai Lama.

The Dorje Shugden controversy suggests how much about Tibetan Buddhism is unfamiliar. You can’t just pick the reincarnation on the menu and skip the wrathful deities. In the West, an awful lot of Buddhism-fanciers are the toe-in-the-water kind. They don’t get up at 4am to meditate. I walked past a nightclub called Buddha the other day. No nightclubs are called Mohammed. We’re not taking Buddhism seriously.

“I was in the court of Charlemagne,” wrote Shirley MacLaine in her masterpiece The Camino, about walking to Santiago. Its subtitle is A Pilgrimage of Courage. The true courage must have come in publishing it.
Miss MacLaine not only discovered her close friendship with the Carolingian emperor, but tracked down his own future life. He turned up as Olaf Palme, “the Swedish prime minister with whom I had a love affair and whom I had written about in Out on a Limb and disguised as a British politician from the Labour Party”. Many politicians from the Labour Party must have breathed easier after reading that.

I can’t remember whether Miss MacLaine visited Aztec Mexico, but she had a memorable time in Lemuria, a civilisation of which Atlantis was part until everything got a bit too watery. “Did I have a child in this Lemuria?” she asks a spirit-guide in The Camino. “You simply impregnated yourself with your own androgynous desire,” came the reply. Easy as pie, when you know how.

Reincarnation is the in thing now, as spiritualism was after the First World War. It meets a longing for a life beyond the mundane. Spiritualism was not discredited by exposure of table-turning tricksters with Red Indian friends on the other side and false ectoplasm on this side. It just grew unfashionable, like the aspidistra.

Now it’s the “spiritual” without the -ism. This takes in crystals, angels, standing stones, Gaia, a diet of fruit and nuts and, in a weakened sense, the euro. Reincarnation, coherent or not, hardly deserves to be thrown into the same bran tub. Christians, though, believe, according to their creed, in almost the opposite, declaring that they look forward to the resurrection of the body. But that’s another story.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/religion/9295172/Reincarnation-Surely-weve-been-here-before.html