The lecture has seemed to me very interesting, so much so that I think it is worth having its transcription and, for those who need it, its translation (if this is the case, go to the Spanish version of the site). They are very long documents, slightly over thirty pages, so in this blog entry I shall limit myself to sum up briefly each case Carol Bowman presents to us and make some comment of my own. Like I did in this entry, I have divided the document in several parts to ease the reading.
A few weeks ago I posted in my social networks and my forum a recent lecture by Carol Bowman, past life therapist who specialized on children who remember past lives. Thanks to her Reincarnation Forum (previously Child Past Lives, that is the reason I keep using the initials CPL in order to refer to it in abbreviated form), I could understand what was occurring to me almost seven years ago, and I could start researching my own memories. Although the forum was much better moderated at the beginning and with time I ended up finding other places where I felt more comfortable, I will always say CPL was crucial in my path and for that I will be forever grateful to Carol Bowman. If someone doesn’t know them, I strongly recommend her books: Children’s Past Lives and Return From Heaven. Regrettably only the first one is translated into Spanish but I think the edition is hard to find. You can also find some references to them in my own book Children Who Remember Past Lives: Evidence of Reincarnation?
The lecture has seemed to me very interesting, so much so that I think it is worth having its transcription and, for those who need it, its translation (if this is the case, go to the Spanish version of the site). They are very long documents, slightly over thirty pages, so in this blog entry I shall limit myself to sum up briefly each case Carol Bowman presents to us and make some comment of my own. Like I did in this entry, I have divided the document in several parts to ease the reading.
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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.
When I started to remember past lives, one of the most repeated tips in forums like therapist Carol Bowman’s (currently Reincarnation Forum), was to search for possible clues of what I had been in other lives in childhood plays. Years later, I recommend the same to people who want to remember, but that doesn’t mean that at the beginning I wasn’t as skeptical as now might be a reader who reads these lines for the first time and doesn’t know much about reincarnation. It is obvious that not everything we do as kids is directly related to our past lives, but at this point I have no doubt that many of these behaviors we have in childhood, more or less odd, pathological or not, had their origin in a past life. It is not necessary to remember a past live to have these behaviors. As I always say, we are the result of our experiences, and this includes childhood, of course. The famous concept of tabula rasa has gone obsolete a long time ago... or at least that is what should have already occurred. At the speed science progresses, it is very possible many scientists still believe in it.
Despite my skepticism, I followed those tips and wrote everything that I could not explain from this life experiences and could be related to my past lives. Only months, even years later, I could see it was true: many of my fears, attitudes, personality traits, some thoughts... had clearly originated in events of the remote past. And it wasn’t until I began researching in deep the bibliography on reincarnation, when I found that this relation between childhood play and past lives was not something someone had made up or a simple observation of people who remember past lives and/or research reincarnation at a personal level. On the contrary, there was even a published scientific article about it. Dr. Ian Stevenson had studied hundreds of children who claimed to remember their past lives, and he had realized that many times their childhood plays had a direct relation with the experiences in those lives. For many people, the best evidence of reincarnation are children who remember past lives. In the scientific reincarnation literature cases of these type have been compiled since the 1960's. If it is the first time you approach this phenomenon, here you will find readable descriptions of the most significant and striking cases, including the most recent ones aired by the media and several new accounts found by the author.
When I began to remember past lives, I also set off to investigate everything related to reincarnation, and I read all I could get my hands on, from all viewpoints. In Spain it is very easy to find books on regression therapy, and recently some other books on children who remember past lives have been published in Spanish, as Life Before Life, by Dr. Jim B. Tucker. However, it is much more difficult to access scientific papers and the most academic works by Dr. Ian Stevenson, most of which are not even translated into Spanish. The general public usually learns about these cases from some reference in the internet, but it is not really aware of the enormous amount of information there is in regards to children who apparently remember past lives, from the most thorough and scientific perspective. |
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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