Death and Reincarnation

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. . . asks you LEADING questions.

Been there, done that, designed the tee-shirt.

^ no, he didn't though.
There were no leading questions at all.
Which means I have a very poor imagination.

I interpreted the thread as a bit of fun. I don't necessarily believe in reincarnation, I haven't even thought about the topic in any great detail.

I simply posted from my existing, perceived understanding of reincarnation, I wasn't intentionally trying to annoy anyone. I am sorry if you were displeased with my post.

Maybe it exist. Maybe it doesn't.
Reincarnation, heaven, hell, ghosts, the soul, may all exist. I choose not to give it any more thought than I have in the past (referring to this life), and I have gone through periods of my life where I've given it a lot of thought, and each time it adjusts as I get older and collect more stuff in my head.

I am comfortable with the idea that when I die, the universe around me will have much relevance as it did before I was born. I am as important as that ant someone in the world just dowsed in bug spray. Or as the person someplace who was just blown up by a drone attack, or stray (or purposeful) gunfire.
Why do humans think they are so special?

I spent three hours mulling over and typing about reincarnation, heaven, hell, ghosts, and the soul. Then I thought "What if extraterrestrial species are like a better version of humans? What if their souls immigrated to Earth?" That's either a step up or step down depending on where one lands. Regardless, what are some people going to do when they learn about extraterrestrial souls immigrating to our planet? We can barely deal with the chaos we create here ourselves!

Seriously, I deleted my fledgling treatise when I realized I started crossing the boundary of other's personal beliefs. It does not matter what I belief, as long as you're confident about yours. Don't mess with others religious. So I'm not saying reincarnation does not exist. I'm saying I don't find evidence that it affects me. The same is true with ghosts. Others swear by heaven, hell, ghosts, the soul, reincarnation, and aliens. I'm open to the idea of all of it. I just don't think about it anymore, unless something new presents itself.

when i was young my handwriting was identical to that of my paternal grandmother's handwriting. i've long had a feeling that i useta be her, she passed 5 years before i was born.

I'm largely inconclusive about whether or not reincarnation actually happens - yet I slightly lean towards reincarnation as a good possibility.

Anybody investigate 'Past Life Forum' content? This forum has many well thought-out insights.

Reincarnation assumes not just the concept of a soul. It also assumes the persistence of consciousness after death. The latter is much harder to scientifically validate since consciousness is inextricably linked to sensory perception in the current life. Transferring memories is analogous to removing a microchip from a phone and inserting it another device. It may be possible to transfer memories/data but not the person's identity since the new body = new hardware.

Story: 'The Quantum Theory of Reincarnation' - by Roger Ebert (the late movie critic):

Story: https://www.rogerebert.com/roger-ebert/ ... ncarnation

i wonder if his partner gene siskel agreed with him?

I don't think reincarnation happens. But I do have a strange suspicion that it might. People exist and I'm one of them, but I don't understand why I'm ToughDiamond and not somebody else, or nobody. Quite why that suggests I will be born as somebody else after TD dies, I can't seem to put into words, and naturally until I can, it doesn't hold water as a good argument.

We are a species who can anticipate our own deaths, which is a very nasty side effect of intelligence, and I suspect that's why many of us find ourselves believing that we have immortal souls. As Kryten said in Red Dwarf, "There's no human heaven, it's just something they made up to stop us all going mad."

i'd rather not go mad.

Me neither, I'd love to feel convinced that there's a brand new meat suit waiting for me when this one has passed its use-before date. But I lack the ability to believe a thing on the mere grounds of wanting to believe it, at least as far as conscious decisions go, and my unconscious mind clearly hasn't been any help at all. I guess if there's any hope, it'll be in the form of strong, non-anecdotal evidence.

Still, at least I don't have to worry about coming back as an individual whose lot in life turns out to be worse than that of my current earthly form. Nonexistence would be far preferable to that. It won't be any fun of course, but it won't hurt a bit.

Interesting how some reincarnationists say reincarnation metes out poetic justice to villains ("next time you'll be the victim you shafted in this life"). Kind of similar to Christianity where you're said to get what you deserve after you die, though the punishments don't seem to fit the crimes quite so neatly.

It probably would. Intrigued, I searched the Web for "messy afterlife" and found nothing relevant. There may be a market for a new religion though, unless there's a rule that soul-based religions must point to a tidy experience after death. But I suspect the belief in a messy experience would fail to catch on. Bang goes another get-rich-quick scheme.

In my strongest vision, I was probably a nobody. I had to vacate my home during the Civil War, and I had just come home to find my land and my crops completely destroyed, dead horses rotting. My child's mother (in this current life) was sitting next to me, and I saw her as my wife in the vision, and we were crying and mourning all of this, along with the loss of our son (it wasn't clear to me how he had died).

But of course, this means there's no way to find out who I actually was. Too many people involved in that war, too many battles, too little documentation. I had a few leads, but they all lead to dead ends.

Most stories I've read, they were not famous people. Actually, a lot of them end up being "my son was my brother/uncle/grandfather in their previous life", things like that. Stories where the whole family are skeptical until the child starts revealing details they should have no way of knowing.

I think the child stories are the most interesting, because they don't need hypnosis or anything like that, they just -remember- everything, until they reach a certain age and start to forget. Some of them even remember the afterlife, inbetween lives.


The one I've done online was nothing like that. He says things like "Look around you, where are you? What do you see?" and then asks you to look down at your feet (to see what kind of clothes you're wearing, etc.).
It's been a while, I think shortly after that he says "let's now move on to a very important time in your life, where are you and what is happening?"
And then the last phase is to see your own death (if you're comfortable with it, otherwise you can leave at any time).

I've always had trouble with past life regressions though, because I can never get comfortable enough to concentrate. I've had a lot more stable visions that just came out of nowhere, like the one above.


Maybe!

I've been told by a couple of different scam artists that I have a "very old soul" and have been through my incarnations. That I could find out more about for a fee. I've always wondered why they try to convince you that you were someone famous or important. Surly with 7 billion souls or more surviving multiple incarnations we can't all be famous or important. I guess my soul is in fact very old indeed - too old to fall for that trick.

There seems to be an awful number of royalty and fallen civil war soldiers getting recycled through.