The other day I got into a discussion with a friend of mine about reincarnation. Actually it wasn’t specifically reincarnation per se, but more along the lines of past lives. My friend was adamant that it is a complete hallucination and that all stories of past lives are made up either consciously for attention, or unconsciously to be able to deal with past experiences in this life that are too painful to face.
While I”m not a full fledged card carrying member of any official past lives network (If they indeed exist), I do believe their is something valuable at least in the concept of past lives. There is just too much about the mind and the whole concept of reality that we all share to be really sure of anything.
Of course, if you are a religious person, you can take solace in your beliefs, whatever they may be. Personally, I used to be a deep believer in the Catholic Church. There was even a time when I went to daily mass. But the more I read different texts on different subjects from different cultures, the more I realized that there has got to be a more inclusive explanation for everything. But I digress.
My friend was telling me about different case studies where they’ve hypnotized people and have done what they call “pass life regressions.” Under hypnosis, they slowly take the person back through several lives and the person describes things as they are being regressed. Supposedly a researcher in this field has done with thousands of people and has come to some startling conclusions. Certain people who claimed to have lived before in ancient China, for example, all accurately described the clothing that was worn at the time. This is either a strange coincidence, a extremely well planned hoax, or something else entirely.
My friend claims that this study only shows that the hypnotist is only cleverly using hypnotic techniques to plant memories into people. If that were the case, then of course you would expect most people to come up with the same answers about people living in ancient China.
I’m not so sure. Perhaps we do go through this life several times. Perhaps these people weren’t regressing to previous lives at all, perhaps they were merely tapping into the superconscious. The giant storehouse of all information ever known or to be known by all sentient entities that have lived or ever will live. Or maybe it is just gigantic shared hallucination.
In the end, my friend and I agreed to disagree. He thinks everything is explainable by current biological science. While I agree that ultimately science must explain everything, that doesn’t mean that there isn’t a whole lot of science that we have discovered yet, or are even capable of understanding. The general belief among cultural anthropologists is that any yet to be discovered technology, when shown to a more primitive society, will be treated by them as magic. Perhaps all of this is some kind of magic, on some level.