POLL: Do you believe in reincarnation?

I think it would still work for Buddhists.

Another possibility: not all potential people are necessarily alive at once. Maybe there are several billion potential people, and they just cycle through existence. There's no reason that a person would have to be reborn immediately after dying, there could be a delay of years, decades, even millions of years. So perhaps the fact that there are more people currently on Earth than there have ever been merely means that for some of those people it's the first time around. Each chain of people has to start somewhere.

Now that's the best argument I've hears in a while to support my views

Except that the idea of "life energy" is completely unsubstantiated. See my post above.

Unless that's what dark energy is.

That was exactly my view for most of my life. However, based on my experiences with deja vu and other weird experiences, I'm lead to believe reincarnation might be a possibility.

It is true that there are more people living on earth than say 2000 years ago. This doesn't contradict the idea of reincarnation at all because the life energy in the universe stay the same.

Here is my belief (stuff I made up in my mind a few years ago):

When you die, your life energy gets scatter out into the universal. How and when this life energy get combined into another life form is based on karma (the cause and effect). You might die and not reincarnate until the next cycle of the universe. Base on what most scientist believe, the universe is constantly expanding until a point where it stops expanding. This is the point when the universe will start collapsing on itself. Once the universe collapses, a whole new cycle of the universe begins. As long as energy and life energy stays the same, there is no contradiction.

I guess based on my concept, it's even possible to reincarnate as aliens on other planets. However, I haven't heard anyone mention past life as an alien.

All the way through college and gradual school I never gave half a thought to reincarnation.

Then I happened upon an amazing survey by professors Joseph Head and Sylvia Cranston called "Reincarnation: The Phoenix Fire Mystery: An East-West Dialogue on Death and Rebirth from the Worlds of Religion, Science, Psychology, Philosophy".

Whew! Amazing information on everything from how the Church only started condemning reincarnation in the 6th Century to... Dr. Ian Stevenson's cross-cultural research into cases of spontaneous recall of past lives to... issues seldom considered by those who reflexly reject the idea.

I've never met anyone who was willing to check out Head/Cranston's survey and continued to call reincarnation absurd. As someone once said, "Is it any more miraculous to consider being born several times than it is to consider that we have been born once? Check out Amazon:

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/t.../qid=1073095477

So there can't be new souls added to the mix? Who says it'd have to be a fixed number?

But, yeah, from what I've heard and experienced, other planets are in on a foreign exchange program.

wolfen

i maybe believe in reincarnation for one silly reason.

you know when people have near death experiences and they say they see a light at the end of the tunnel?

imagine being born and travelling down the birth canal...

ooh. spooooky.

You're kidding, right?

I guess the people that live to tell the tale account for miscarriages!

Honestly, though, I think it's just random synapses firing with those near-death experiences�which you can induce to rather trippy effects if you work at it, I read an article on a book about it once, something about out-of-body experiences and how-to-do-them.

That's fine...except many of them involve viewing the operating room from the perspective of the ceiling. My aunt had this experience. She had died on the operating table and while she was clinically dead she was looking down on the surgeons. One of them yelled "Too much anesthesia!"

They finally revived her. She told them she wasn't going to press charges and the surgeon acted like he didn't know what she was talking about until she detailed just about everything that happened during the 2 minute timeframe in which she was dead.

She also said she also saw a light above her, and many people she knew were there. They told her it wasn't her time, yet.

Lots of weird stuff like that in my family. We're all freaks.


wolfen

Out-of-body experiences are strange things, indeed. You CAN induce them with practice, but I'm not sure just what causes them and the explanation for what they exactly are (if there is one yet).

And it couldn't possibly be that she actually heard them yell that through her ears and just imagined the rest... Bright light? Yes, there tend to be bright lights in operating rooms. You want the surgeon to be able to see. Even if her heart had stopped, her brain was still alive, and therefore capable of accepting input.

They are very illuminating, whatever is happening. There seems to be enough evidence to suggest that it's beyond the dream-state.

Here's one of the best places that discusses the subject, check out the forum, really good.

http://www.astralpulse.com/

http://www.astralpulse.com/forums/

People will believe in anything that comforts them instead of realizing that once you die, you simply rot and dissipate.

From the perspective of the ceiling! Yeah, I'm sure it COULD possibly be that they strapped her to the ceiling during the operation and operated on her upside down.

Wow, how embarrassed I am for not thinking of a more plausible explanation like that. *blush*

Secondarily, your argument hinges on the idea that she was not, in fact, dead. So now you know more than medical science? Here's the hypocrisy...those who don't believe in life after death will argue that when someone died they didn't really die.

Anything to avoid the truth, as you all say.

wolfen

And that's the rub and quite possibly the explanation.

I wonder what happens when I get cloned after I died. Would that be considered reincarnaton?

What if someone made of a clone of me while I'm still alive. I wonder how my concept of "life energy" gets duplicated.

Have a date set?

I'd heard there was one group that put a human woman as one of the lowest things you could be reincarnated as? However I don't quite trust the person that said this... anyone know how valid this statement is?

That said I don't believe in reincarnation, it doesn't make sense in light of the other aspects of what I believe