Reincarnation? Or die and burn forever in hell if you aren't a Christian?

    Sometimes it's fun take a break from the hard rock pile and yank a few chains.

    From religion.com yesterday:

Indigo/Child5550 

Evidence of reincarnation? I think not.  

I quite often hear from people who believe in reincarnation that they have "memories" of past lives, sometimes in dreams, or in vivid visions in their heads, or revealed through regressive hypnosis.

I take no stand on whether reincarnation actually exists. Maybe it does and maybe it doesn't.

But this I will say for certain: those evidences prove absolutely nothing. How do I know? Because I have those experiences, and they cannot possibly all be true, because the time periods overlap. Let me give just a couple of examples:

1. I once had a series of recurring dreams that I was a Jewish man in an upstairs room, wearing spectacles and reading. The first thing I heard was dogs barking. The sound of glass shattering. Boots, boots on the stairs. Pounding on my door. The door explodes inward with a deafening crash that I can still hear today. A lot of very painful things happened next that I prefer not to share. It is one of the most terrifying dreams I ever had. I would wake up, go back to sleep, and find myself back in the same dream. This went on for days. It was only years later that it clicked for me that this was a dream about Kristallnacht.

2. I also have had many dreams, both sleeping and awake, of being a thin man, an author, at a table outside a Paris cafe. The tweed suit, turtleneck sweater, and beret I'm wearing indicate the 1930's. I compulsively smoke cigarettes and drink gin or whisky. I think about the meaninglessness of my existence. My mentality is defined by disillusionment. I cannot tell you how disturbing this was when I would wake up, or how dark it felt. I'm quite certain these images were inspired by Sartre, whose novels I read as a young adult.

Since both dreams happen in the thirties, they cannot possibly both be memories of past lives. it doesn't matter than in both cases it is extremely vivid, that I can even smell the humidity or the food, or feel the breeze on my face. It's simply impossible that these are past lives.

Moving to my next point. Using hypnosis for regression, either into past events of this life or into so-called past lives, is absolutely notorious for creating false memories. The individual tends to see whatever they think the therapist wants to hear, and then they assume that these visions are actual memories.

We had a big Satanic scare in the 90s, where everyone thought Satanic covens were kidnapping children, molesting them, and sacrificing them. All sorts of people were saying they had seen these things. But when the FBI investigated extensively, they found there was no truth at all to it. Some had false memories either due to hypnosis or due to leading interrogations by police and others. Others were lying for attention or due to mental problems. A few were outright hallucinating. So we had 100s of eyewitnesses to something that never happened at all.

Next point. Stop and consider for a moment how many people "remember" they are Julius Caesar or Joan of Arc. They cannot all have been the same people in the past. And isn't it curious that these "memories" are always of very famous people in history. At least most of my dreams of the past are of insignificant people, like a black slave girl running through the field, or an ordinary woman in a Puritan village picking out cloth for a dress. I think my Sartre dream is the only one with a recognizable person from history.

So no. For all the above reasons, vividly "remembering" past lives is not evidence of reincarnation.

Redneck Mystic
Consider in the Gospels, Jesus gave sight to a man who was born blind, and then:

John 9:1-5 His disciples asked Him, “Rabbi (Teacher), who sinned, this man or his parents, that he would be born blind?” Jesus answered, “Neither this man nor his parents sinned, but it was so that the works of God might be displayed and illustrated in him.

Jesus did not tell his disciples their question was wrong, bu that there was a different reason. How could the man have sinned before he was born, if not in a previous life?

Consider also hidden in plain view in the Gospels:

Matthew 17:

10 The disciples asked him, “Why then do the teachers of the law say that Elijah must come first?”

11 Jesus replied, “To be sure, Elijah comes and will restore all things. 12 But I tell you, Elijah has already come, and they did not recognize him, but have done to him everything they wished. In the same way the Son of Man is going to suffer at their hands.” 13 Then the disciples understood that he was talking to them about John the Baptist.

Redneck Mystic
Once upon a time, a woman friend of mine was on my massage table and she said she was getting an imagine of a woman, and asked her to ask the woman if she was an ally, and my friend said she heard the woman say, “Yes,” and I asked my friend if she wanted to ask the woman if she had anything she wanted to say, and my friend said she wasn’t sure, and I waited and she said, okay, and she asked the woman if she had anything to say, and my friend then started crying and shaking, and I asked her what that was about? She said the woman had told her, “You abandoned your children in 1863.”

That was in Santa Fe, New Mexico. 

I moved to Boulder, Colorado, but sometimes drove back to Santa Fe to see friends there, including her. During one visit, she introduced me to a Hawiian man she had met and was dating. It got serious. Then, they were engaged, and he was back on the Big Island, Hawaii, waiting for her to join him. 

One day she called me in Boulder, all out of sorts. Her hair was falling out, she was losing wight, she had pimples on her face, and what seemed most distressing to her was she said she no longer could manifest what she wanted to happen. I asked her if she was trying to get out of marrying him? She admitted she was. I said, well, look at what that caused. She groaned. She called him and made a date to come join him. Her symptoms left. 

Unrelated, if you believe in such, my lady at the time and I flew to the Big Island for a vacation. I called my friend's boyfriend and we drove the rental car to where he worked and had a short visit, then we left. My wife flew back to Boulder and I stayed behind for few days. He called and invited me to drive up for dinner, and I did that. While he was cooking dinner, his bride to be, my friend, called him and I could tell by how the conversation was going that she was trying to back out, and he was being very easy with her but not saying okay. Finally, I asked him to hand me the telephone, and when I did, I said, “Hi, Linda, it’s me.” And she said, “What are you doing there?” And I said, you are trying to get out of it again, and you forgot what happened when you did that before? Come on out here and marry him, and if doesn’t work out, you can get a divorce.” She said, “Okay,” and that’s what she did, and they got married, and eventually they had a child.

Redneck Mystic

Discovery as Dalai Lama https://www.dalailama.com/the-dalai-lama/biography-and-daily-life/birth-to-exile

When Lhamo Thondup was two years old, a search party that had been sent out by the Tibetan government to find the new incarnation of the Dalai Lama arrived at Kumbum monastery. It had been led there by a number of signs. One of these concerned the embalmed body of his predecessor, Thupten Gyatso, the Thirteenth Dalai Lama, who had died aged fifty-seven in 1933. During the mummification process, the head was discovered to have turned from facing south to the northeast. Shortly after that the Regent, himself a senior lama, had a vision. Looking into the waters of the sacred lake, Lhamoi Lhatso, in southern Tibet, he clearly saw the Tibetan letters Ah, Ka and Ma float into view. These were followed by the image of a three-storied monastery with a turquoise and gold roof and a path running from it to a hill. Finally, he saw a small house with strangely shaped guttering. He was sure that the letter Ah referred to Amdo, the northeastern province, so it was there that the search party was sent.

His His Holiness the Dalai Lama at the age of four at Kumbum Monastery in Amdo, Eastern Tibet.

By the time they reached Kumbum, the members of the search party felt that they were on the right track. It seemed likely that if the letter Ah referred to Amdo, then Ka must indicate the monastery at Kumbum, which was indeed three-storied and turquoise-roofed. They now only needed to locate a hill and a house with peculiar guttering. So they began to search the neighbouring villages. When they saw the gnarled branches of juniper wood on the roof of the His Holiness’s parent’s house, they were certain that the new Dalai Lama would not be far away. Nevertheless, rather than reveal the purpose of their visit, the group asked only to stay the night. The leader of the party, Kewtsang Rinpoche, then disguised himself as a servant and spent much of the evening observing and playing with the youngest child in the house.

The child recognized him and called out “Sera lama, Sera lama”. Sera was Kewtsang Rinpoche's monastery. The next day they left, only to return a few days later as a formal deputation. This time they brought with them a number of possessions that had belonged to the Thirteenth Dalai Lama, together with several similar items that did not belong to the Thirteenth Dalai Lama. In every case, the infant correctly identified those belonging to the Thirteenth Dalai Lama saying, “It's mine. It's mine”. This more or less convinced the search party that they had found the new incarnation. It was not long before the boy from Taktser was recognized to be the new Dalai Lama.

The boy, Lhamo Thondup, was first taken to Kumbum monastery. “There now began a somewhat unhappy period of my life”, His Holiness was to write later, reflecting on his separation from his parents and the unfamiliar surroundings. However, there were two consolations to life at the monastery. First, His Holiness’s immediate elder brother Lobsang Samden was already there. The second consolation was the fact that his teacher was a very kind old monk, who often seated his young disciple inside his gown.

Lhamo Thondup was eventually to be reunited with his parents and together they were to journey to Lhasa. This did not come about for some eighteen months, however, because Ma Bufeng, the local Chinese Muslim warlord, refused to let the boy-incarnate be taken to Lhasa without payment of a large ransom. It was not until the summer of 1939 that he left for the capital, Lhasa, in a large party consisting of his parents, his brother Lobsang Samden, members of the search party, and other pilgrims.

Redneck Mystic

Or perhaps reincarnation doubters prefer Christianity’s view, you only get one chance when you die, you go to heaven or hell, and that’s it, forever, and if you aren’t a Christian, you don’t get heaven.

Consider this poem that fell out of me as fast as I could write in the spring of 1995: 

 

Earth-
the sacred prism
through which souls are refracted
into their elemental parts,
purified in Holy Fire,
then one-forged
and sent on their way
to not even God knows where,
simply because they are all
unique emanations of God,
Evolving… 

 

ajay0

Reincarnation was part of original Christianity as taught by Christ. The heavy persecution of Christians by the romans in the early centuries and tampering of Christian scriptures as per their sensibilities and conditioning in the councils of Nicea meant that reincarnation became a non-Christian teaching later on.

Christmas was actually a roman pagan festival in the beginning. There is no conclusive date on when Christ was born.

Redneck Mystic
You are correct on both counts. The early church moved Jesus’s death from Pices to December to make Christianity more attractive to the Pagans. The early church didn’t want people to think they had more than one chance, because that would weaken the church’s hold on them and their coin purses. Likewise, the early church wanted people to think it was simple as pie to be saved by Jesus, just believe what the Church told them about how easy it was, he was the son of God, he was crucified, and he died for their sins, he descended into hell, he rose again from the dead, according to the Scriptures, and ascended into heaven, to sit on the right hand of God, which he very well probably did, but he did not teach that was how to follow him there, rather, he taught them how to live entirely differently and in that way follow him there.

sloanbashinsky@yahoo.com