I begin by exploring the legitimacy of past life regression.  I only ask that posters confine their comments to this practice until I shift the focus of this thread to other flaws in alleged past life recall.
Two of the poster boys for alleged reincarnation evidence are Michael Newton’s hypnotic regression technique and Dr. Ian Stevenson’s research on the past life recall of young children.  Future posts will discuss fatal flaws in Stevenson’s own research .  But even he dismisses past life regression of the sort performed by Newton.  Newton admits his patients have some sort of psychological disorder.  His claims do not follow the pattern established by other researchers on NDEs and past life recall, not even reincarnationist Joel Whitton’s “Life Between Life.” Nor have his findings been replicated in controlled studies.  Nor has Newton has not published his findings in any scientific journal subjected to peer review by experts in clinical hypnosis. 
More importantly, as a psychiatrist, even Dr. Stevenson is well aware that it is illegitimate to use hypnotic regression techniques in support of reincarnation: “In my experience, nearly all so-called previous personalities evoked through hypnotism are entirely imaginary and a result of the patient’s eagerness to obey the hypnotist’s suggestions.  It is no secret that we are all highly suggestible under hypnosis.  This kind of suggestion can actually be dangerous.  Some people have been terribly frightened by their supposed memories, and in other cases the previous personality evoked has refused to go away for a long time (Omni Magazine” (1988).”  Thus, it comes as no surprise that even Sigmund Freud abandoned hypnosis as a treatment method when he discovered so many cases of false memories. 
In fact, scientific research at Harvard and elsewhere has repeatedly demonstrated that “people with memories of false lives are less able to discriminate between imagined and real events both inside and outside the laboratory.”  Thus, respected organizations like the American Medical Association, the American Psychiatric Association, and the Australian Psychiatric Association express dismay that hypnotic regression is misused to recover adult memories of childhood sexual abuse!
Yale psychology professor, Dr. John Kilstrom, summaries the consensus of the experts surveyed in Fromm and Nash, “Contemporary Hypnosis Research:” and Barnhardt and Kihlstrom’s review in Wegner and Pennebaker’s “Handbook of Mental Heath.”   “Everything we know about hypnosis tells us that hypnosis is first and foremost and experience of the imagination.  The analogy is to hypnotic age regression where we suggest to adults that they are children once again….If regression to age 5 doesn’t produce the real thing, why should anyone expect more of past life regression?
Many New Agers lamely claim that their regression “helped” them. Of course, any cultist can claim that experiences that support their dogmas “helped” them.  But as Dr. Kihlstrom observes,  “There is not even a single clinical study with anything like an acceptable design—showing the past life regression has positive therapeutic effects.”
Less important but more amusing is a report I read of a study of 500 subjects who experienced mass hypnotic regression to past lives.  There were several Napoleons and other famous dead worthies.  At least New Ager Helen Wambach’s parallel study offered avoided this comedic expose.
I also read a study on several past life readers.  These readers were confronted with the inconsistencies among the readers.  They dismissed this objection on the grounds that each reader might have tuned in to a different life.  So researchers shifted the study to immediate  past lives.  This approach exposed their delusions.  Each reader imagined a different past life for each subject!

Don

Don,if I were you I would not ask god if you had a past life.I think if you do you will regrett it.

Me thinks THOU DOST protest too much.

Beau wrote on Mar 8^th, 2010 at 11:04am:


Thank you, Beau...

george stone wrote on Mar 8^th, 2010 at 1:10am:


Hi George. Of all the answers, yours was the best! ...Don! That intellectual religious guy, will never acknowledge reincarnation. His whole christian belief system will collapse upon this physical and spiritual truth and reality! And that's not counting on his present delicate mental-emotional state if it were confirmed to him from supernatural sources within himself, this truth, which he will dismiss as false revelations as usual. Regards. Carl.

I am not seeing it George, but you did say you were having some interesting things going on with your PC. Or it could be that your picking up on a vibration. I prefer to believe that if that is the case it is because you see me as one with All, and not that my comments are two faced. Take care George.

I'm not seeing it, but I tend to only see things that are dumped into my head...

Quote:

It depends on the width of your browser window. If you want us to see what you're seeing, tell us how wide your window is (or something like maximized at 1280x800 screen resolution)

take care,
Vagabound

Well, you're saying the spaces between the words make the pictures.
These pictures will disappear if you resize the window, because the words will be at a different spot.
That's why we can only see the picture you're describing if our browser windows have the same width as yours.

I remember an interesting story of someone who recalled an attack from an airplane in WWII back when he was a boy. It had been a single fighter shooting at him with a machine gun, and he hid in a ditch beside the street. Many years later he went to a cinema to watch an old movie. How baffled he was when he saw this very scene in that movie! He figured then, he had seen this movie earlier, not long after WWII and this scene of the movie melted together with a real attack. So, hidden memories, and even false memories are a factor.

However, when we furthermore consider the possibility that so-called past-life memories could be actually picked-up memories of someone else, then a proof of reincarnation is impossible, as I can't see how one discerns an own memory and a memory of someone else which appears as an own memory.

Spooky

With the frequent dogmatic allusions to "the Jesus Disk,' this seems a good time to revisit the discussion of my critique of past life recall as evidence for reincarnation.

recoverer wrote on Jan 30^th, 2015 at 2:42pm:

Please read my last post rather than the one before. The edit feature isn't working correctly.