Reincarnation

[Wendae]

I've always thought I was a lesbian in a past life. I was not happy with the thing between my legs at an early age and did things we won't get into to remedy the problem. I just always knew things most men don't and had an adversion to being touched or hugged by men. The naked male body has always disgusted me. It made things rough taking showers in school and the military. My love making was almost always oral although to satisfy my partner it was necessary to perform as a male. Anyway there are a lot of other factors that lead me to believe I was a female in a past life. DejaVu is a major player.

[Paulette]

We all have experienced things we cannot explain, that contradict our beliefs of what can be true or real.

I've never seen a ghost and don't "believe" in them but I've experienced several presences that could be described as ghosts. I've never had visions of places I have never been or even experienced, or deja vu (presque vu? - almost seen or recalled, like the word we "know" but can't remember; jamais vu? - never seen before but recognized), but my wife has had several visions of places she'd never been to or events that hadn't happened yet, and then was present at those foreseen events and unexperienced places. There's even one she saw long before she met me, where in that vision we had been married for many years and were in an auto accident and she saw me die. There are too many impossibilities in that vision for either of us to explain or even to explain away. So we don't try.

This all falls into Lewis Carol's exercise of believing three impossible things before breakfast. We don't believe them yet we don't deny our experiences. We can't explain them. We simply don't know. Fortunately, neither of us are troubled or worried about her visions coming true -- they exist outside our experience, both physically and emotionally, yet we have meta-emotions about it. We'll just have to see how it - our lives - play out.

This reminds me of a wonderful short story by Ted Chiang, "The Story of Your Life." I recommend it very highly.

[Amanda M]

For me, the jury is still out. As part of my professional practice, I do offer past life regression. Now, I do not control what my client sees, or wants to see. It is a non-directive process. I have worked with several people, who were quite convincing about their 'past life' experience - one in particular, who described a row of cottages beside the sea (in early Victorian times) and a church at one end of the row of the cottages.

There is no evidence of the church now, but historical research confirmed that it had existed.

The client in question was very convincing about her day-to-day living - describing family relationships, diet, clothing, house construction and so on.

However, was she a student of early Victorian social systems and lifestyles? I don't know.

There have been others, of course - and I think the majority - who seemed not quite convincing. After all, how many Roman centurions can you expect?

No - wait a minute, that's one of mine.
In the end it really is down to the individual.

[April Rose]

Everyone seems to have been a queen or a princess or a warrior in their past lives. Not many pig farmers, street cleaners or serfs in the mix even though they would have been the majority of the population at the time. It leaves me skeptical.

[Wendae]

Everyone seems to have been a queen or a princess or a warrior in their past lives. Not many pig farmers, street cleaners or serfs in the mix even though they would have been the majority of the population at the time. It leaves me skeptical.

I guess I could have been a lesbian pig farmer.