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Are My Past Lives Important?
Past lives reincarnation theorizes that the soul goes through other lives and other births; Hinduism is one such philosophy focuses on past lives reincarnation, dictated by athma, the soul, and karma, or deeds. Hindu religious scriptures state that the soul cannot be destroyed, and therefore lives on, changing form from one body to the next just as we might shed old clothes for new once the old ones have worn out.
This is very different from Christianity's view of reincarnation, which focuses on Christ's resurrection. The Hindus state that the soul can inhabit any form, man, woman or animal. The deeds or karma of a human being in one life dictate what's going to be his or her life in the next.
Several Hindu scriptures talk very much about past lives reincarnation. Most notable among these is the Bhrigu Sanhita. This scripture apparently had a complete accounting of the future and past births of all souls living; it's unfortunate, then, that the scripture has been lost to the ages.
Dr. Ian Stevenson has the most compelling modern day account of rebirth, as represented in the data he collected. Modern science still pooh-poohs rebirth as a legitimate claim, so it can't be stated that this is the most noted source of scientific information on past lives reincarnation as a theory. However, it's the most famous and is extremely well documented because Dr. Stevenson was a psychiatrist and had a degree in medicine.
Today, most therapists who use past life regression induce trances in subjects or use hypnosis to get them to recall past lives. Dr. Stevenson did not do that, however. He simply talked to children who could spontaneously recall events from their own past lives.
Among the most confusing and well known of these involved a young boy who was just six years old at the time. From a tiny village in Punjab, the boy said that he had been a man named Satnam Singh, from the village of Chakkchela, in a past life. He had never been to the man's village, but said the man had lived there and could also recall details from there with amazing clarity.
The family tried to dissuade the boy from telling people about this, but he continued to claim that he was Satnam; he also gave the name of this man's father. He also said that he had been killed in his past life as he was coming home from school in a motorcycle accident. The boy's claims were investigated and were indeed found to be true, insofar that a man by that name had indeed been killed in a motorcycle accident on the way home from school. The boy was also able to give intimate family details, and these, too, proved to be accurate. What was most notable, though, was that when the man's and the boy's handwriting samples were compared, they were found to be identical.
Stevenson also interviewed a young girl named Swarnalata, another of his famous cases. This young girl was just three years old, but she remembered her past life as a young woman named Biya Pathak. The little girl could describe the house that she lived in, and even took her father there one day when they were coming back from the railway station in their town. She further said that she and her father could get a better cup of tea in Biya Pathak's house than they could on the road. Again, the final proof turned out to be when the child recognized the young woman's brother, and addressed him by a pet name the young woman had had for him, among a group of nine people.
Stevenson lists dozens of these cases in his data, and also states that in some cases, when there has been a physical trauma in the last life, it can manifest in the form of a birthmark in the next life. A man from Thailand seemed to illustrate this; he recollected that he was his own deceased maternal uncle, reincarnated. And indeed, this man had a scar on his head that was located in the exact same place as a knife wound his uncle had died from.
Another young boy claimed to remember a past life as a man named MahaRam. This man had been killed by close contact gunfire to the chest, and the boy had several birthmarks on his chest that looked like gunshot wound scars.
Dr. Brian Weiss is considered to be the father of modern past life regression, and he and several other eminent authorities in the field of psychiatry and psychology consider that the concept of rebirth is in fact a plausible one. Nonetheless, science itself remains very skeptical about it. It's also worth noting here, however, that when people do undergo past life regression therapy, they often suddenly dispense with lifelong fears and phobias.
Emotional Problems Are A Thing Of The Past
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