Past Lives | Ep. 115
This week, we discuss past lives. Have you ever found yourself personally connecting to a different time period?
Or, have you heard stories about children remembering specific details about people they never met and places they’ve never traveled…only to be completely accurate?
We explore many theories and ideas behind past lives, including Reincarnation and Deja Vu, and discuss a few experiences. Listen now!
Are Past Lives Real?
Are souls bound to only have one form?
Can a person remember a traumatic event that didn’t even happen to themselves?
Is a birthmark really an indication of a Wound from another time?
What’s up Bizarros!? This week we dive into the believability of past lives.
What Is A Past Life?
A past life is a life from the past. Obviously.
Those that have a strong belief in past lives state that basically, your past lives are part of what makes you up. Like if you have a particular fear like heights or sharks or elephants or fire. Perhaps it’s because you have died in a past life because of that said thing.
These are a few signs that you have a past life according to professor Brian Weiss MD
He wrote a book on the topic
Deja Vu
If you experience this phenomenon it is because you have had the experience before. You have been to that place before you have met this person in their past life.
Vivid Dreams
So if you have a dream that is of you in a time or place that is much different than where you live and it’s reoccurring, it could be memories from your past lives. They can also be symbolic of your past life too.
Knowing History Without Trying
You may be interested in certain areas of history or locations and be able to find yourself in that culture’s history easily and enjoy it without any effort but others seem to be a lot harder like Clare loves the civil war era. I love medieval England and Ancient Greek.
The last sign according to Weiss is that you have a group of people that you are connected to.
He says that they are a soul company or a soul family. They are a group of souls that stay connected through different lives.
According to Dr. Jim Tucker of the University of Virginia, even personality quirks like phobias and preferences not common in families can be attributed to past lives.
Children who remember previous lives typically occur between 2 and 5 and are often reported making statements regarding past lives. These remarks when fact-checked are very commonly correct when referring to specifics.
Where Does The Idea of Past Lives Come From?
Essentially it comes from Hinduism, Jainism, Buddhism
However, it’s a little more complicated.
Reincarnation actually translates to taking the flesh again. It comes from the aforementioned eastern religions that draw more on universal metaphysical beloved whereas western religions or Abraham of religion at least are more analytical.
In Hinduism broken down simply, it is believed that when something dies it begins again in a new body. This does not mean human to human only. Basically, after you die your fate is governed by karma.
Jainism is similar to Hinduism but more complicated. The biggest difference I could understand is that gods don’t play a part in your karmic path but in Hinduism they do.
So in Jainism, if you do bad things you are reborn in hell, if you are neutral you become a plant or animal, and if you do good you become a human.
I think Buddhism reincarnation or punarbhava in Sanskrit literally means to “become again” is the closest to our modern understanding of reincarnation. It teaches that there is no individual soul but every life we live is a flow of consciousness that stacks and learns from its past. But every life is not the same as the last, (not the same person) but not entirely different either. Life evolves, grows, and learns from the past.
What Percentage Of People Believe In Past Lives?
According to surveys, 38% of people believe in reincarnation. While some people find the stories of remembering past life memories interesting, not many find it strong enough to believe in it.
Why Is The Concept Of Past Lives Or Reincarnation So Popular?
I think the popularity of reincarnation comes from two things.
It comes from it being a unique and foreign topic, that the majority of Americans don’t or can’t believe In because it does not follow Christian religious teachings, so it becomes almost taboo and therefore very interesting.
Also, the media has helped this thought too. There is even a newish anime called jobless reincarnation, about a person reincarnating.
I also think it comes from that very human fear of the unknown and the fear of death. So if you believe in reincarnation that’s two birds one stone. You know the place you will come back to at least somewhat. It will be earth, not some heaven or hell. And you will have another chance to live again.
One of the creepier aspects of past lives is how children talk about their past lives.
Children Who Remember Previous Lives
According to Tucker again children from about 2-5 often remember these events. About 70% of the cases observed were recounted because they were traumatic events like murder, suicide, killed in combat, or dying in an accident.
So they talk about these things without really understanding what they are saying. It’s just a feeling.
These memories of past lives typically start to fade after age 6 or 7. Then they are gone along with the trauma unless it’s an unreadable fear or something for no reason.
Encounters or experiences of children telling their past lives
This First Past Life Experience Is From BuzzFeed
About a love for a dog that travels through time
“My at-the-time 5-year-old son (now 31) woke up one day and asked me, ‘Where is Banjo? When are we going to look for him?’ I was shocked. Banjo was the name of our family dog, a bull terrier, that we had on the farm when I was still a pre-teen.”
“One day, there was a flash flood in our area (Upington, South Africa) and my little brother was stuck in the middle of the raging Orange River on a rock. Banjo jumped in the water (he loved swimming) to rescue my brother, but he got swept away by the powerful current and we never saw him again. My brother had to stay on that rock for a full 19 hours before the water was safe enough for a boat to cross to get to him. My brother was distraught about our dog having been presumably killed by the flood. Only two years after that incident, my brother was killed while cycling when a speeding vehicle hit him from behind.
I have never told my son about Banjo. There’s no way he could have known that name. My son has been acting in ways that remind me of my deceased brother. They have the same favorite color, they like the same food, they both like to sing. … I can’t help but think that the soul of my brother migrated into my son somehow.”
Past Life Memories
“I don’t believe in the paranormal. I’m a pretty reasonable guy. I have degrees in science and healthcare and I’m pretty grounded.
But since I was a child, I had a memory of me stumbling out the backdoor of a club, I couldn’t hold myself (either really drunk or on drugs) and I slipped down a staircase, hit my head in the alley, and died. I was about 19, I was thin, had long blonde hair, and I was wearing a brown-red leather jacket. I remember the neon signs, the staircase, the door I walked out of, and even the interior. I can paint the picture perfectly if I had any talent in art.ANYWAYS!
So 2 years ago, I took a leisure trip to Budapest, and while exploring the ruined pubs with my wife. I FOUND THE FU*KING ALLEY!
It was funny because I remarked to my wife earlier when we arrived, that I felt something about Budapest that felt like ‘home’ and familiar and I felt oddly too comfortable there like I could have never left. I think about this quite often.’
I find it hard to believe that one’s about themselves. I find them much more credible when they are parents talking about their children.
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More Past Life Memories
“When my daughter was 3, she saw a large ship while we were on vacation at the beach and said, “That’s like the one my parents had before you died.” I said, “You had other parents before us?” She calmly went on to explain that I shouldn’t worry, they were her parents a long time before my husband and I were, but the ship they were on broke apart and they are still at the bottom of the ocean. She then said when her “before” parents died, she and her sister “Brinella” had to be separated because no one could take them both. She said her sister went to live in Australia, but she stayed in Ireland. We live in the U.S.”
This is a comment to the post that gives the post even more credit.
“The detail about her being separated from her sister is really interesting because it sounds like the Home Children child migration scheme that was practiced starting in the 1870s through the 1930s. Poor and orphaned kids from the UK were sent to Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and South Africa. If by “Ireland” she means “Northern Ireland” it makes sense.
It seems like children came to Australia from similar programs out of Ireland and Malta as well so it didn’t have to be Northern Ireland.
It seems like there are decent records (compared to other problematic moments involving the treatment of children in history at least) so if you feel so inclined to find “Brinella” you might be able to. At the very least it could make a good history project in school for your kiddo when she’s older.”
A Nanny’s Kid Talks About A Memory From A Previous Life
Not a mum but I was a nanny for many years.
This is going to be long and I apologize in advance.
One of my little ones, 2 yrs old & incredibly smart child, way ahead developmentally in almost every way. He used to like to tell me things while we got him ready for bed. It was almost always these weird stories which would always start with “When I was an old lady…” and they were always very specific little “day in the life of” type things which I quickly realized went beyond the life experience & typical vocabulary of a 2 yr old.
Over a few months, he kept adding very consistently to this story. He would also sometimes play as this old lady, with a cloth over his head and walking slowly as if his back pained him. Grocery shopping or playing with his sister’s dolls as if they were his grandchildren was his favorite when he did this.
He added some specific details like:
How many children she had, (4 daughters and a son)and how many grandchildren.
Her husband had died in his 50s (the same age as one of his uncles) from a lung disease.
One of her daughters had died in their 30s in a car accident leaving 2 children who she took in with the help of another daughter.
She had a bad back and pain in her feet. One of her daughters would rub her feet to help with the pain.
All but one of her children was married, the unmarried daughter lived with her and she worried she would never marry.
She remembered dying. She had been crossing a street and was hit by a car. She described how people stood around her, where it hurt, and how someone eventually lifted her into a car (no ambulances) and took her to the hospital where she died.
I was not his only nanny, and he was consistent with these stories. Us nannies would get together and swap stories and I would write them down because I had been fascinated with phenomena like past lives before this and wanted to see where it all went.
He also described the house & neighborhood they lived in. This is especially interesting as this kid came from a SUPER wealthy family and had never even seen the kind of housing or poverty he was describing. He also talked about living by the seaside.
Months into this unfolding, we visited a seaside city on the other side of the country. One day a family member was having a birthday party so we piled in the van to drive over, and our driver got lost (this is pre google maps & smartphone times). We ended up driving through this extremely poor neighborhood and suddenly my little boy started shouting and screaming and insisted we turn down a couple of specific streets.
He started pointing out the window and telling us things he was recognizing “from when I was an old lady”. It matched what he’d previously described in general and we were all so interested we let him direct us where to go as we were already going to be late for the party anyway.
He accurately described what we would see around the next turn several times but got extremely confused and upset when he got to where “her” house was because it was now a store. The driver leaned out the window and asked a nearby old person what had been there before the store and was told “houses”.
We never went back there or were able to get any additional verification. Totally understandably his parents were concerned about this storytelling and how vivid and strange it was, so after this dramatic incident, we made an active effort to redirect him to other stories and play types.
As he approached three he started telling less & less of these stories, and they got less & less specific. By about 3 1/2 he couldn’t even remember telling us stories about being an old lady. He thought we were joking with him.
To this day, over 25 yrs later, I can’t really explain it.
I wish I still had the notebook I was writing things down in so I could give more specific details. It’s a long time ago so I only remember the bigger highlights of it. I should mention that this did not happen in a Western country and he was a SUPER protected and privileged kid. He didn’t even meet a child outside of his direct family till he was 3 (when he started a VERY exclusive kindergarten after I spent several months begging his parents).
He rarely watched TV and when he did it was highly curated – pretty much just Barney. Not even Disney movies. So there wasn’t really a lot of exposure to background media he could have picked this stuff up from. And us nannies didn’t talk about most of the stuff he would come out with and none of us were originally from that country either.
So the super-specific cultural details he would come out with would baffle us (one of them was when he would play, he’d put a cloth over his head and dance in an extremely specific way, his auntie was visiting one day and saw him do it and fell about laughing.
She said he was dancing like an old woman at a wedding…. like, specifically a cultural dance traditionally done by mothers & grandmothers at weddings). There were more specific odd little validations that happened as well.
Also, we were specifically instructed NOT to encourage this “play”, in that culture any nonconforming behavior is not well received so there was fear this was an indication of him being other than “normal” (I say that in quotes because I believe there is no fixed “normal” – everyone is valid just the way they are). So we were not leading him on and playing into this scenario he was telling us about. We would try and redirect him away from it.
Painting Memories Of A Past Life
“Not me but a friend’s little sister. The whole family was out for dinner at a restaurant in a skiing village where they recently bought a cottage near. My friend’s little sister as soon as they walked in said “I know this place. My mother and I used to paint here.”
To which her mother replied “We’ve never been here before, what do you mean?” she replied with “No. My mother from before. We used to paint here all the time.”
The family was obviously a little freaked out but didn’t think much of it as she was pretty young and they figured just messing around. Later on though, when talking to the waitress, the little girl again adamantly mentioned how she used to paint there and the waitress revealed that it in fact was an art studio for many years in the 1900s but had been converted sometime in the early 2000s into a restaurant.
Needless to say the entire table, waitress included, got goosebumps and were at a loss for words.”
Do Birthmarks Point To Evidence Of A Past Life?
“I have exactly the same entry and exit wound, on the left side of my forehead, and a massive raspberry mark on the base of my skull. When I was 6 I described the battle I died in. It turns out it was Rorkes drift as in the movie Zulu. When I was older I saw the movie and was in shock. I didn’t think anything of the birthmarks until someone told me today about this theory, looks like I’m not alone.”
From the psi encyclopedia
“An example is the case of Purnima Ekanayake in Sri Lanka, which was investigated by Erlendur Haraldsson.6 Purnima was born with a group of light-colored birthmarks over the left side of her chest and lower ribs. When she was four years old, she saw a television program about the Kelaniya temple some 145 miles away and said she recognized it.
When she later visited the temple with her parents and a school group, she said she had lived on the other side of the river that flowed beside it. She eventually made twenty statements about a past life, claiming to have been a male incense maker who was selling incense sticks on his bicycle when he was hit by a large vehicle and killed.
She named two incense brands she said she sold, ones her parents did not know. An associate of her father who spent weekends in Kelaniya investigated and found that there were three small family incense businesses across the river by the temple.
One of them sold the brands Purnima had named. A member of the family had been hit by a bus and killed as he took his incense sticks to the market, two years before Purnima was born.
Do You Have Memories Of Past Lives?
What do you think Bizarros? Are past lives real?
Have you ever had a feeling or a connection to something that you couldn’t explain?
Do you believe we have all experienced a past life?