My friend reflected on the circularity of time, and how in certain moments of life things repeat themselves again, the past comes back to you. It may be the same situation, but now you see things in a different way. And, linking it with reincarnation, she compared it with that instant in which you remember who you really are, which is more than your present self. We always talk of past lives, and especially at the beginning we tend to separate our past selves from our current self. People around doesn’t help either, because they don’t understand what reincarnation consists of, and least of all know what remembering past lives entails. The first thing anyone will tell you is: “But that happened in the past, forget it, now everything is different”. Even my boyfriend, not too long ago, when I was telling him how I felt for having died in a naval battle in 18th century, said to me: “Bah, but that was a long time ago, it can’t affect you”. I could only smile and keep quiet, as I know that he won’t understand, no matter how much I explain it to him. Our past lives are not really past. We say “past” to situate them in a more or less remote time, prior to the current one. That doesn’t mean they are forgotten, nor dead, nor overcome in many cases... and, of course, we haven’t become different persons, nor do we have a “new life”. This is so for everyone, not only for the ones who remember past lives. We think death is some kind of separation between one life and the next, a full point, next paragraph, when in reality it is only a full point. It is having a shower and changing your clothes. When you go out to the streets, it is the world the one that has changed (a little), but you keep being the same.
Yesterday I got up and the first thing I read online was a post from a friend in my forum that made me reflect. I confess that, were it not for moments like this, I would have left the reincarnation world, in which people in general only want quick answers. This may end up in two ways: getting disappointed because in my book Pandora’s Box they don’t find “general information” (??) or believing any lie someone told them that makes no sense, for instance that your disincarnated twin soul can be affected by someone watching a film about his past personality and this will manifest in the form of pain in your heart area (real example, seeing is believing). To the rest of people that are tired of hearing so many old wives’ tales, I recommend reading my blog Soy reencarnacionista or joining Foro Reencarnación. We are few, but at least, sometimes, you get up in the morning and you congratulate there are people who think by themselves and, besides, fill you with inspiration to keep advancing.
My friend reflected on the circularity of time, and how in certain moments of life things repeat themselves again, the past comes back to you. It may be the same situation, but now you see things in a different way. And, linking it with reincarnation, she compared it with that instant in which you remember who you really are, which is more than your present self. We always talk of past lives, and especially at the beginning we tend to separate our past selves from our current self. People around doesn’t help either, because they don’t understand what reincarnation consists of, and least of all know what remembering past lives entails. The first thing anyone will tell you is: “But that happened in the past, forget it, now everything is different”. Even my boyfriend, not too long ago, when I was telling him how I felt for having died in a naval battle in 18th century, said to me: “Bah, but that was a long time ago, it can’t affect you”. I could only smile and keep quiet, as I know that he won’t understand, no matter how much I explain it to him. Our past lives are not really past. We say “past” to situate them in a more or less remote time, prior to the current one. That doesn’t mean they are forgotten, nor dead, nor overcome in many cases... and, of course, we haven’t become different persons, nor do we have a “new life”. This is so for everyone, not only for the ones who remember past lives. We think death is some kind of separation between one life and the next, a full point, next paragraph, when in reality it is only a full point. It is having a shower and changing your clothes. When you go out to the streets, it is the world the one that has changed (a little), but you keep being the same.
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The case of Sandika Tharanga. Sandika was born in 1979 from Catholic parents. When he was three years old, he started to speak about a past life as a monk in a monastery he didn’t identify. He frequently spoke of the chief-monk in that monastery. One day he was going to attend a ceremony, where monks are invited for a meal by lay-people and offerings are interchanged (called almsgiving), when he heard a big noise, a shot or explosion, and this is the last thing he remembers.
Sandika showed a great fear of crackers and sudden noises. When he heard them he instinctively placed his hands on the left side of his chest. His parents explained this because of a gunshot he had received in his chest in his previous life which had caused his death. Besides, Sandika had a birthmark on his chest, small and dark, situated slightly to the left of the midline. It had been more prominent in his early years. In Sri Lanka there had been periods of political turmoil, particularly the Insurgence of 1971, in which a number of monks were killed. Haraldsson met Sandika in 1988, when he was eight years old, and his memories were already fading, as usually happens in these cases. His main interests were visiting temples and attending school. He was always very religious and tried to convert his parents to Buddhism, but they didn’t comply. He was eager to find the monastery where he had lived, and his father took him to six-seven temples when he was three-four years old, but he didn’t recognize any of them. Like many other children who remember past lives, Sandika told his mother she wasn’t his real mother, and asked to be taken to his monastery and to his previous mother’s place. Another behavioral signs included picking flowers and placing them on a bed or chair before the worship, as there was no altar in his house. He also chanted stanzas and worshipped as Buddhists do, though his parents didn’t remember which stanzas were as they didn’t pay much attention or understood the words. From the age of three he would worship two to three times a day, at six he still offered flowers to a picture of Buddha which was put up in the house, and later he was given a statue of the Buddha. In 1996 there was one image of Buddha displayed in a prominent place in the house, and Sandika had recently placed another one elsewhere. Also, he would ask his family to give alms to monks; he didn’t eat meat; he got especially high school marks in Buddhism and asked his parents not to cut his hair (because his hair was always cut in his previous life and now he didn’t want that). Sandika never expressed the wish to become a monk again. In 1996 he was still interested in Buddhism and frequently visited temples, but he had no intention of becoming one. There are a lot of things I can’t understand in the reincarnation world. One of them is the fact that many people think only children can remember past lives, and besides, their accounts are more reliable than adults’. This, from my point of view, is totally false, especially when in the majority of cases researchers collect their testimonies years after the events took place. About the alleged reliability of children’s claims, I already talked in my other blog Soy reencarnacionista, so today I will focus on other issues. Generalizations abound. They abound too much. These generalizations use to have their origin in the scarce scientific studies that exist about children who supposedly remember past lives. I don’t know if the fault lies on the researchers themselves, who forget to explain things properly, or on the readers that are not familiar with the research work and don’t know the results of the study can’t be extrapolated to all the reincarnation cases in the world. The conclusions of a study are circumscribed to that study. In the best of cases, if we are speaking of all the studies published up until this moment, they are circumscribed to that group of studies. The conclusions reached are not definitive, nor immutable, nor applicable to all humanity since the beginning of times. Science evolves. Science can be wrong. Researchers can interpret the data poorly. Is this clear? If the answer is yes, let us go a bit farther. Next I am going to focus on the topic that concerns me today, a very interesting article by Erlendur Haraldsson, entitled “Children Who Speak of Memories of a Previous Life as a Buddhist Monk: Three New Cases”, and published in 1999 in the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research. If someone wants to read it completely, they can find it clicking on the title.
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AuthorMy virtual name is Eowyn. I have been researching and experiencing reincarnation since 2011. This blog is only a tiny fraction of the result. Categories
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