Reincarnationist, author, and prominent psychiatrist Dr. Weiss was censured by the medical establishment in 1988 after he published “Many Lives, Many Masters” which details his work with a patient he calls Catherine, who remembered multiple past lives.

Now, according to this very interesting piece, below, from The New York Times, Dr. Weiss says: “Doctors are e-mailing me. They’re not so concerned with their reputations and careers. We can talk about this openly. And it’s not just psychiatrists, but surgeons and architects.”

Is reincarnation finally being accepted within the scientific community? An exciting thought indeed…

Remembrances of Lives Past

 

Dustin Leader for The New York Times

Peter Bostock and his wife, Jo-Anne, of Winnipeg, Manitoba. He believes they loved each other in past lives working on an estate in 1880s Derbyshire, England. (By LISA MILLER)

In one of his past lives, Dr. Paul DeBell believes, he was a caveman. The gray-haired Cornell-trained psychiatrist has a gentle, serious manner, and his appearance, together with the generic shrink décor of his office — leather couch, granite-topped coffee table — makes this pronouncement seem particularly jarring.

In that earlier incarnation, “I was going along, going along, going along, and I got eaten,” said Dr. DeBell, who has a private practice on the Upper East Side where he specializes in hypnotizing those hoping to retrieve memories of past lives. Dr. DeBell likes to reflect on how previous lives can alter one’s sense of self…

 

For the complete article please click here.

 

Sometimes children are imbued with such talent that it seems as if there is no other explanation other than that they are accessing skills and knowledge left over from past lives…

Enjoy -

Are human spiritual beliefs just an byproduct of evolution or a product of our psychological readiness to accept vivid, memorable tales about the world around us? And for that matter, is the soul “nothing more than an emanation of our neuronal machinery”?

The think-tank website Big Questions Online, offers an article that discusses these questions in a way that you may find interesting:

Why We See Spirits and Souls
Understanding the neurobiology of religious belief is a far cry from explaining it away.
By Michael Graziano

Scientific anti-theism began, arguably, with Thomas Huxley, the 19th-century champion of the theory of evolution who styled himself “Darwin’s bulldog.” Huxley advocated improving the Bible by removing “statements to which men of science absolutely and entirely demure.” Since then, the view that science should correct people’s mistaken religious beliefs, and even more so that science is fundamentally antithetical to religion, has grown in popularity. It is now championed by influential public figures like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens.

A primary basis for scientific anti-theism is that much of religion can potentially be explained by science…

For the complete article, click here.

There is a growing movement to think about and discuss ideas about morality that are free from the “God Hypothesis” – as reincarnationists, is there any way that we can conceive of reincarnation free from a guiding hand of some kind? This concept seems like fuel for a lot of wonderful deep thinking! If you have any thoughts on this matter, we hope that you decide to share them in Comments.

On this note, please enjoy psychologist Jonathan Haidt’s recent presentation at the Edge conference. Haidt, a prominent social psychologist and researcher spoke on “The New Science of Morality” – Click here and then scroll down until you see the video window for Haidt’s talk. You won’t be sorry you did!

What is the “singularity”? What is Time Wave Zero? What on earth is the Zero Point? Terrence McKenna, via the use of hallucinogenics, conceived of these concepts and wrote about them in the book The Invisible Landscape. According to McKenna, the Singularity, an event that has its possible arrival scheduled for 2012, marks the culmination of infinite technological progress and a single point in time when anything and everything imaginable will occur simultaneously!

I am on the edge of my seat! What could it all mean?

Learn more about the Singularity and Time Wave Zero via the video, below.

A reader of our blog asked us to present some information on a trance channeler and author named April Crawford. He promised that Ms. Crawford would be of great interest to reincarnationists, and I must say that I agree!

April Crawford consults with highly evolved nonphysical entities somewhat in the tradition of Edgar Cayce and Jane Roberts (as opposed to contacting the recently “dead”).  However, she is also one of the most talented direct mediums in the world and the author of “Parting Notes”: A Connection With The Afterlife.

Best selling author April Crawford writes a free “Spiritual News Letter” called Inner Whispers which is written via Open Deep Trance – an  entity called Veronica speaks through her (one of several entities). This entity (Veronica) provides information similar to that in the book “Many Lives, Many Masters” by reincarnationist Brian L. Weiss, M.D., in that Veronica presents information in an  accessible manner (plus, it’s free to everyone on a weekly basis.) This is quite a resource for those who are interested in such things!

Please enjoy this video of April Crawford as she describes her own experience as a channeler:

Welcome back to the Reincarnationist QA! Thank you to author Marie-Nicole Ryan for answering our questions. Marie-Nicole is the author of a paranormal romance dealing with reincarnation, SEE YOU IN MY DREAMS. She also the author of several other wonderful books that appeal to our audience. Please visit her at her website, here.

THE QUESTIONS:

What is your most marked characteristic that you believe could be a hold over from a past life?

Hunger. In this life I have a problem with overeating. In one of my dreams, I experienced dying of starvation in a concentration camp. I believe whatever “world” one’s life condition is in at the time of death is the dominant influence of the next life. While one may be born into one of the lower “Ten Worlds”, it is possible to elevate one’s basic life condition. But hunger relates to more than a hunger for food. There’s the hunger for love, material items. I have a great love for antiques which may be a holdover from an earlier life.

What is your principle defect that you believe may be inherited from a previous incarnation?

Insecurity and a large dose of impatience. At least, these are the defects that plague me now and presents my greatest opportunity for growth.

Which of your favorite heroes do you think you could have been and why?

I’m so wedded to the female persona, and thus to my heroines, I’m not sure I can conceive of myself as male. But if I were to pick one of my fictional heroes, it would be Sheriff Cordero Tate, in SEDUCING THE SHERIFF. I relate more to his solid character than to the outrageous heroine of the story.  As for real life heroes, anyone involved in animal rescue is a hero to me.

What three people from history would you like to have over to dinner for a discussion about reincarnation?

Anya Seton, author of THE GREEN DARKNESS, Marie Antoinette (talk about some bad karma), and Gautama Buddha

What do you think happens when we die?

As a follower of Nichiren Daishonin Buddhism, I believe our consciousness (true self) goes into ku (a sort of cosmic consciousness) until time to be reborn. I believe in this state we are aware of all our past lives and have the ability to choose our next set of circumstances and the opportunities for additional growth as human beings.

When you come back next time, who (or what!) would you like to be?

I want to come back again as a creative person. Whatever form that creativity takes is fine, as long as it’s legal. In addition, and however shallow it sounds, being tall, thin, beautiful and brilliant would be okay, too.

Marie-Nicole Ryan’s links:

http://marienicoleryan.com
http://twitter.com/marienicoleryan
http://facebook.com/MarieNicoleRyan.author
http://sgi-usa.org

Buy Marie-Nicole’s new release, Love Me If You Can, here.

I love it when science discovers via technology and study that something incredibly mysterious is going on and are then forced to speculate how those findings could possibly be so mind-bending, and how or why the actual mechanics of the discovery remain largely unknown!

Here’s an example of science weighing in on some discoveries made about the deep connections that sometimes occur between people – and how these discoveries have actually made the phenomenon more mysterious!:

Wired Science News for Your Neurons

Good Connection Really Does Lead to Mind Meld

By Brandon Keim

When two people experience a deep connection, they’re informally described as being on the same wavelength. There may be neurological truth to that.

Brain scans of a speaker and listener showed their neural activity synchronizing during storytelling. The stronger their reported connection, the closer the coupling.

The experiment was the first to use fMRI, which measures blood flow changes in the brain, on two people as they talked. Different brain regions have been linked to both speaking and listening, but “the ongoing interaction between the two systems during everyday communication remains largely unknown,” wrote Princeton University neuroscientists Greg Stephens and Uri Hasson in the July 27 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

They found that speaking and listening used common rather than separate neural subsystems inside each brain. Even more striking was an overlap between the brains of speaker and listener. When post-scan interviews found that stories had resonated, scans showed a complex interplay of neural call and response, as if language were a wire between test subjects’ brains…

Read More at Wired, here.

Thank you Jenny Gardiner, author of Slim to None; Winging It: A Memoir of Caring for a Vengeful Parrot Who’s Determined to Kill Me; and Sleeping with Ward Cleaver – for answering one of our last Reincarnationist Q&As (at least for a while!)

THE QUESTIONS:

What is your most marked characteristic that you believe could be a hold over from a past life?

I definitely was born to the water in a past life. It is the place where I feel almost eerily at peace and like I belong.

What is your principle defect that you believe may be inherited from a previous incarnation?

Eating – LOL!

Which of your favorite heroes do you think you could have been and why?

I think I would have been a woman who defied expectations to be seen and not heard. I have too much outrage over injustice and I know I’d have strained in the tethers of a society that suppressed women. I guess throughout history there are so many women who did this, who were able to stand up and speak and defend themselves that it’s hard to pick just one.

What three people from history would you like to have over to dinner for a discussion about reincarnation?

I’m a little curious about Thomas Jefferson since I live in TJ country and everyone gushes on him so much (having grown elsewhere we didn’t get a huge dose of his history in school like they have here). But I’d like to ask him about the types of double standards that were acceptable to people like him. To keep slaves yet be proponent of individual liberties. That sort of thing. I’d love to know if those famed patriots from around here are still lurking…
I’d love to talk with women who were persecuted in the Salem witch trials. It would be interesting to find out what happened with their souls/spirits and if reincarnated, how so?
I also think I’d love to talk with my grandmother, who I wish was around to talk about all sorts of things sometimes…Find out where she went after she passed away, and if she’s now been reincarnated into something/someone else…

What do you think happens when we die?

I do believe the soul or spirit remains somehow. And perhaps if there are major unresolved problems, they remain in an unsettled way. I also think there are bad spirits that remain. When I was in college I lived in the attic of a house for a semester and I was so convinced it was haunted by bad spirits that I moved out. I live in the South and many people have stories of hauntings in homes and properties here–relics from the Civil war and from slavery.

When you come back next time, who (or what!) would you like to be?

Someone who helps better the world.

Learn more about Jenny and her work at her various online locations:
www.jennygardiner.net
www.jennygardiner.net/blog/
www.facebook.com/jennygardinerbooks
twitter.com/jennygardiner

Our many lives are fleeting, like clouds in the sky.

Enjoy a magnificent visual metaphor for this idea, a time-lapse piece by artist ken Murphy called A History of the Sky… (“Long Shorts” are short films that exemplify long-term thinking.  You can find more of them on the Long Now Blog.)

“Art project in progress A History of the Sky features lots and lots of time-lapse videos of the sky that are synchronized so that they’re all showing the same time of day.  Ken Murphy is the artist that created it and he hopes to one day manifest all the data he’s collecting as a video installation that’s always displaying the skies of the last 365 days.  The project was recently featured at the Exploratorium, but it’s still in a need of a home for the installation.”

Click here to watch A History of the Sky