WHO WERE YOU IN PAST LIFE?
If you’ve ever wondered why a new place you visit feels strangely familiar – or a person you’ve just met, you sort of know – it’s a feeling of familiarity which can’t be explained. It could well be you’re touching on one of your past lives.
WHAT IS REINCARNATION
Reincarnation is a belief in resurrection of one’s soul, in other words, when people die, their bodies decompose but their souls are reborn into other bodies. It is said that human subconscious always keeps some dim memories of previous life. However, only very few people can bring back those memories. Reincarnation is the religious or philosophical concept that the soul or spirit, after biological death, begins a new life in a new body depending on the moral quality of the previous life’s actions.
KARMA: THE CAUSE OF REINCARNATION
According to the Hindu religious and philosophical concepts, man is composed of two fundamental principles opposed to each other per nature: one spiritual, the soul (atman), and the other material, the body (sarira). The atman is eternal, immutable, not born, not created, indestructible; instead, the body is temporal, created, mutable and destructible. The union between atman and body is not essential, but is accidental. It is a type of imprisonment or a penalty which the atman has to undergo due to avidya and karma.
Avidya signifies ignorance, ignorance of the true nature of atman or of the distorted vision in which the atman identifies itself or confounds itself with the psycho-physical organism. Due to avidya, the atman which is eternal and non-temporal, is caught up in time; gets joined to physical body. Birth is the union of the eternal and spiritual atman with the material and earthly body
PAST LIFE IN EARLY HINDUISM, JAINISM AND BUDDHISM
In Rigveda, numerous references are made to transmigration, re-birth (punar janma), and re-death (punar mroityu). It is believed that the origin of the concept of the cycle of birth and death, the concept of samsara, and the concept of liberation in the Indian tradition, were in part the creation of the non-Vedic Shramana tradition.
In Jainism, the soul and matter are considered eternal, uncreated and perpetual. There is a constant interplay between the two, resulting in bewildering cosmic manifestations in material, psychic and emotional spheres around us. This led to the theories of transmigration and rebirth. The life, after death therefore moves on to another form of life based on the merits and demerits it accumulated in its current life. The path to becoming a supreme soul is to practice non-violence and be truthful.
PAST LIFE JOURNEYS, ARE THEY REAL?
For a growing number of people, they are. By delving into a past life many have uncovered what has been in the way of patterns or experiences which bring insight into the present, and profoundly affect their future. It is believed that past life regressions can help resolve today’s life challenges through the release of pain – mental or physical, illness, stress, allergies or fears. Discovering the past can manifest a clearer life flow in the here and now.
PAST LIFE REGRESSION
Also know as past life therapy or regression therapy, it is a technique that uses hypnosis to recover what practitioners believe are memories of past lives or incarnations. Past life regression is typically undertaken either in pursuit of a spiritual experience, or in a psycho-therapeutic setting. Most advocates loosely adhere to beliefs about reincarnation, though religious traditions that incorporate reincarnation generally do not include the idea of repressed memories of past lives.
The source of the memories is a collage of experiences, knowledge, imagination and suggestion or guidance from the hypnotist than recall of a previous existence. Once created, the memories are indistinguishable from memories based on events that occurred during the subject’s life. Experiments with subjects undergoing past life regression indicate that a belief in reincarnation and suggestions by the hypnotist are the two most important factors regarding the contents of memories reported.
PAST LIFE REGRESSION IN HINDU MYTHOLOGY
In ancient Indian literature, the Upanishads mention past-life regression, but the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali discuss the concept in greater detail. Writing during the 2nd century BC, the Hindu scholar Patanjali discussed the idea of the soul becoming burdened with an accumulation of impressions as part of the karma from previous lives. Patañjali called the process of past-life regression prati-prasav (literally “reverse birthing”), and saw it as addressing current problems through memories of past lives. Some types of yoga continue to use prati-prasav as a practice.
PAST LIFE REGRESSION AND CHINESE MYTHOLOGY
In the religious mythology of China the deity Meng Po, also known as the “Lady of Forgetfullness”, prevents souls from remembering their past lives: she gives them a bittersweet drink that erases all memories before they climb the wheel of reincarnation.
PAST LIFE REGRESSION IN MODERN ERA
Past life regression therapy has been developed since the 1950s by psychologists, psychiatrists and mediums. The belief gained credibility because some of the advocates possess legitimate credentials, though these credentials were in areas unrelated to religion, psychotherapy or other domains dealing with past lives and mental health. Interest in the phenomenon started due to American housewife Virginia Tighe reporting and recounting the alleged memories of a 19th-century Irish woman named Bridey Murphy
IS IT POSSIBLE TO REMEMBER ALL OF OUR PAST LIVES?
Buddha is the only one who, it is said, remembered all of his past lives when he fully ‘Awakened’. It is known that as one progresses on the spiritual path, he or she can attain siddhas or powers that can take the form of telepathy, psychic powers, materialization of objects. It is possible that one of these siddhas would be to see past lives. All great saints and sages have advised not to pay attention to them.
THE DANGER OF KNOWING OUR PAST LIVES
Isn’t it irresponsible to tell people about their past lives? Whether the therapist is incorrect, people will still create thought forms around that incorrect image of themselves. If the therapist is correct, the people involved become subject to the karma for which they may not yet be prepared. The whole subject is fraught with danger and complexity. When our past lives enter spontaneously into our consciousness, they will do so under law.
WATCH YOUR KARMA
There is a little-known law that when we become truly aware of our past life we enter into the karma of that time. Most of us have a heavy enough load of karma to deal with in this life without an unnecessary load from some previous one, which happily we are not yet called upon to resolve. So the more important thing is to know that every moment we are making karma, we are creating our next life right now.
SIGNS OF PAST LIFE
Those who believe in past lives suggest that there might be clues to what our past lives were in the various complex aspects that make up our current physical, emotional, intellectual, and psychological personalities. Here are some of them…
SIGN OF PAST LIFE: DEJA VU
Most of us have experienced the eerie feeling of deja vu – the sudden, surprising feeling that an event we are going through at the moment has happened exactly this way before. Psychologist Arthur Funkhouser has broken down this phenomenon into sub-categories: deja vecu – an event already experienced or lived through; deja senti – already felt, perhaps triggered by a voice or music; and deja visite – a place so familiar we feel we’ve been there before.
While scientists and psychiatrists insist there are neurological explanations for these phenomena, others wonder if these strange feelings could be vague, fleeting memories of past lives. You enter a house or building, for example, in a town you’ve never visited before. Yet every detail of that place is familiar. You know what’s in the next room and up the stairs. You have the overwhelming feeling that you’ve been there before
SIGN OF PAST LIFE: WEIRD MEMORIES
Some kids have “memories” of childhood events that never really happened. Are they just remembering a child’s fantasy, misunderstanding, or even a dream that they interprets as reality? Or are they remembering something that happened to them before they were born into this lifetime? Human memory is a fraught with error and incongruities, and many of us have memories of things that family and friends can attest never occurred. So the question is: Is it faulty memory or a remembrance of lives past?
SIGN OF PAST LIFE: DREAMS AND NIGHTMARES
Recurring dreams and nightmares also have been suggested as being memories or at least clues of past lives. For example, you have dreams that are not memories of places or events that have happened in this life, yet they recur in your dreams often. Are they memories of something important that happened in a past life? Likewise, can nightmares be reflections of past life traumas that have clung to our spirits and haunt our sleep.
SIGN OF PAST LIFE: FEARS AND PHOBIAS
Where do your fears and phobias come from? Fear of such things as spiders, snakes, and heights seem to be built into the human psyche as part of our evolved survival instinct. Many people suffer from phobias that are completely irrational, however. Fear of water, of birds, of numbers, of mirrors, of plants, of specific colors… the list goes on and on. People suffer from all kinds of bizarre phobias.
While several years on a psychologist’s couch might get to the root of those odd fears, those who believe in past lives wonder if they are carried over from a previous lifetime. Does a fear of water indicate a previous death by drowning? Could a fear of the color red suggest, for example, that a person was struck or killed by a red streetcar?
SIGN OF PAST LIFE: AFFINITY FOR FOREIGN CULTURE
You probably know a person who was born and raised in India but obsessed with British culture. You might also know someone who can think of nothing else then getting dressed up for a war reenactment. There are “philes” for virtually every culture on the planet, both modern and ancient, affecting people who seem to have no rationale for their obsessions. Why? Are they merely trying to find familiarity in a culture in which they lived 1000 years ago?
SIGN OF PAST LIFE: PASSIONS
Here is a related subject. It’s good to have things that we are passionate about, as long as they do not become obsessive and debilitating. But from where do passions arise for books, art, antiques, fashion, gardening, theatre, cars, trains, aircraft, the paranormal – or any number of other subjects? Intense interest in a specific subject might be totally natural, of course, but might there be a past life connection in some cases?
SIGN OF PAST LIFE: UNCONTROLLED HABITS
The dark sides of passions are those uncontrolled habits and obsessions that take over people’s lives and can even marginalize them in society. Obsessive-compulsives and hoarders fit into this category. A man who has to turn the light switch off and on ten times before he leaves a room; a woman who collects newspapers into six-foot-high stacks throughout her house because she cannot bear to get rid of them.
Each of us has at least one bad habit, from fingernail biting to gossiping to procrastination. The extreme forms include addictions to everything from television to Facebook to drugs. Again, psychological explanations can be found for these uncontrolled habits, yet those who believe in reincarnation say they might have roots in past lives.
SIGN OF PAST LIFE: INEXPLICABLE PAINS
Do you have aches and pains that the doctors cannot quite pinpoint or find a medical explanation for? You might be labeled a hypochondriac – a person who imagines his or her ailments. Or, as past life proponents suggest, those mysterious pains, sores, cramps, and more could be reflections of suffering you endured in a previous existence.
SIGN OF PAST LIFE: BIRTHMARKS
Birthmarks have been touted as evidence for reincarnation. In one fascinating case, an Indian boy claimed to remember the life of a man named Maha Ram, who was killed with a shotgun fired at close range. This boy had an array of birthmarks in the center of his chest. So the story was checked out. Indeed, there was a man named Maha Ram who was killed by a shotgun blast to the chest. In a similar way, various other physical traits – even deformities – have been suggested as having their precedent in a person’s former life.
CHILDREN WHO REMEMBER PAST LIVES
There have been many cases of children from the age when they can first talk saying that they can remember another life. They talk about another house, other parents and families and about how they died. Sometimes they become so unhappy that their parents arrange for them to go to the place where they say they lived before. In many cases they are able to identify their previous relatives. Here are some such famous cases…
THE SHANTI DEVI CASE
At the age of four in 1930 in Delhi, India, Shanti Devi began to mention certain details about clothes, food, people, incidents, places which surprised her parents. She mentioned the following which were later verified to be true. She said she was Lugdi who used to live in Mathura, 128 kilometers away. She spoke some words in the dialect of that area and claimed to have given birth to a son and died ten days later, events which it was later found did happen to Lugdi. When taken to Mathura, she recognized her husband of her former life, Kedar Nath, and spoke of many things they did together. She was able to identify with accuracy a number of landmarks where she used in live in the previous life. She also knew that in her former life, she had hidden 150 rupees in an underground corner of a room for safe keeping in the house. A committee of well respected people from the town was organized to investigate her claim.
The case became internationally known and attracted the attention of many, many sociologists and writers. For example, in the 1950s a Swedish writer, Sture Lonnerstrand, traveled to India to meet Shanti Devi and to continue to investigate for himself the documented facts. He too came to the conclusion that the Shanti Devi case is a foolproof case for reincarnation.
THE JAMES LINEGAR CASE
A young American boy remembers his past life as an American fighter pilot fighting the Japanese during World War II. Dr Ian Stevenson, spent many years investigating the claims by checking the documents, letters, autopsy records, birth and death certificates, hospital records, photographs, newspaper reports etc. He established that this was a clraer case of re-birth.
THE CASE OF IMAD ELAWAR
In Lebanon, Dr Ian Stevenson went unannounced into a Druse village and asked the villagers if they knew of any cases where children talked of past lives. He was referred to the home of five-year-old Imad Elawar. Since the age of one Imad had been talking all the time about a former life in a village twenty-five miles away. At age one his first words had been the names ‘Jamileh’ and ‘Mahmoud’.
Stevenson interviewed the child and the parents and recorded over fifty-seven separate claims about his former life. When Stevenson went with the boy and his father to the other village to investigate the boy’s claims he found that Imad had made thirteen correct statements and identifications about his former life including photographs of himself and his brother.
Imad recognized photographs of his former uncle, Mahmoud, and his former mistress, Jamileh. He was able to point out details of where he had kept his rifle, a secret known only to his mother, and of how his bed had been arranged during his last illness. He stopped a stranger and had a long talk with him about their experiences together in their army service. In all Stevenson calculates that of the fifty-seven claims Imad had made about his former life, fifty-one could be verified.
THE CASE OF MARTA LORENZ
Another very convincing case investigated by Dr Stevenson was the Brazilian case of Marta Lorenz, who at the age of one year recognized a friend of her parents with the words ‘Hello, Papa.’ At around two she began talking about details of a previous life as her mother’s best friend, the daughter of the family friend she had recognized. Many of these details were not known to the child’s mother but were later confirmed by several different people.
She remembered one hundred and twenty separate and unrelated details about her previous life as Maria de Olivero, including details of what Maria had told her best friend (Marta’s mother) immediately before she died – that she would try to be reborn as her best friend’s daughter and that as soon as she was old enough would relate many details of her former life.
CONCLUSION: CAN WE STOP THE CYCLE OF BIRTH?
There are many different paths to end the idea of the ego’s separation; the three main paths are: surrender or devotion, also called bhakti yoga; the path of knowledge, called jnana yoga; and the path of service or work called karma yoga. In the end all of these paths arrive at the same place, which is union with God. But until we merge in God Consciousness, we come back to Earth in another reincarnation to continually work on perfecting our path.
Source: https://agarwaltv.wordpress.com/2015/12/18/reincarnation-who-were-you-in-past-life/
