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I have been curious about the relative validity of regression claims. I have done personal research, but have not found a satisfying result. Very valid claims have been made by both camps. Skeptics claim that accounts are the results of false memories. Advocates point to children that give chillingly accurate accounts of their past lives. I will remain neutral in this topic, as I have not made up my own mind yet. This is bound to be an interesting discussion.
You will get one response when you post your inquiry here and a different one if you post in "Unexplained Mysteries." Some psychologists perceive themselves as "scientific," though there is little science at all to psychology (which has been an ongoing criticism).
Past life regression is a subject that you are either attracted to because of belief or experience . . . or that you become attracted to. If you approach it from a scientific perspective, there is no way to "prove" it, definitively, although people who have been regressed have given accounts of lives in times that CAN be substantiated by facts (and which they could never have known - especially if the person is young) - but there will always be ways to discount, or dispute - IF that is what you are looking for.
The subject of past lives is a spiritual question . . .not a "scientific" question - scientists are objectivists - they "believe" there is only one "reality," which they think can be observed (and in fact, this thought alone is questioned in Quantum Physics where it is understood that the observer interacts and changes the result just by being an entity in the "system").
You will get one response when you post your inquiry here and a different one if you post in "Unexplained Mysteries." Some psychologists perceive themselves as "scientific," though there is little science at all to psychology (which has been an ongoing criticism).
Past life regression is a subject that you are either attracted to because of belief or experience . . . or that you become attracted to. If you approach it from a scientific perspective, there is no way to "prove" it, definitively, although people who have been regressed have given accounts of lives in times that CAN be substantiated by facts (and which they could never have known - especially if the person is young) - but there will always be ways to discount, or dispute - IF that is what you are looking for.
The subject of past lives is a spiritual question . . .not a "scientific" question - scientists are objectivists - they "believe" there is only one "reality," which they think can be observed (and in fact, this thought alone is questioned in Quantum Physics where it is understood that the observer interacts and changes the result just by being an entity in the "system").
Exactly. If you don't believe there is more than one life for religious reasons or philosophical or scientific ones, why should you think you can send one into a state to remember the non-existant? And if you do believe, then it becomes a valid question if you can be prompted to remember, if it is free will not to and so on. But that will not be 'scientific'.
I do believe and do believe my last life ended very young, not just from a regression in which I was no longer there at ten, but other things I've come to 'sense' about it. But if this is 'scientific' is not really important to me since its not about science.
Some psychdocs use it not as believers but as the patient probably does or will reveal things about real life which got them where they are now.
I am an empiricist and also find the very idea of reincarnation horrifying, for multiple reasons. So my position is predictable. I can't explain some of the claims about past life regressions, always assuming they are totally authentic (a big assumption) but I have learned to say "I don't know" when I don't know.
I have a stepson who has an inexplicable attraction to ghost hunts and have done on two or three with him and his mother. It's all the more odd because he's an ardent atheist. Even he can't explain where his fascination comes from. At any rate, I had an experience on one of these hunts that I can't explain or debunk, but the conclusion I had to come to ultimately is, all forms of supernaturalism require that you accept the supernatural on the basis that you can't disprove it. It's fundamentally the same claim made by religion. The burden of proof is not on me to disprove someone's extraordinary and naturalistically unsupportable claims; it's on them to prove it. If I claim that there are invisible and undetectable pink elephants in the sky it's up to me to prove it, not up to you to disprove it. Further, even if I have an inexplicable experience, it's not on me to make up an explanation, it's up to me to say "I don't know how to explain that" until I have data and evidence that truly justifies me saying something more than that.
Another way to look at it is that most people do not actually deal effectively with the fact of their own mortality. They think they do, they claim they do, but they really haven't. As a result, they have a very strong vested interest in seeing what they want to see and reaching conclusions they want to reach, that tend to support the notion that this life is not all there is. Not only does it hand-wave away their mortality, but it rationalizes the growing realization that they are not going to accomplish and experience all they would prefer to in this life. Also, most belief systems involving pre or after lives, flatter us with the notion that we are so significant and important that God Almighty, Ruler of Heaven and Earth (or the Universal Consciousness, or whatever) actually has bent over backwards to arrange it for us. Thus part of dealing with your mortality is dealing with your basic unimportance. This is a heavy blow to the ego.
Given all this psychological freight everyone insists on carrying around like a ton of bricks, and the tendency of the human mind to be tricked by things like agency inference, it should not surprise us that people have very real-seeming experiences, even life-changing experiences, involving past life regressions, ghosts, near death experiences, sweeping feelings of nonduality and/or a sense of loving or malevolent unseen presences. Conveniently all of this requires a certain mindset, a certain environment, darkness, etc., to experience at all and even then it tends to be only seen from the corner of your eye or within the digital artifacts of a noisy video or audio recording. While this is the situation, we have no basis to think it's anything but people who really want to believe something is true, opening themselves up uncritically to personal subjective experiences that help them in that belief.
I have been curious about the relative validity of regression claims. I have done personal research, but have not found a satisfying result. Very valid claims have been made by both camps. Skeptics claim that accounts are the results of false memories. Advocates point to children that give chillingly accurate accounts of their past lives. I will remain neutral in this topic, as I have not made up my own mind yet. This is bound to be an interesting discussion.
There's a book out by a psychiatrist or hypnotherapist who writes about his experience working with a client. He did not believe in past life regression and had no interest in doing that type of work. But the client one day spontaneously regressed in a session. The therapist wasn't sure what was going on, but allowed the process to continue in subsequent sessions. He says it turned him into a believer, to his astonishment. Stubborn symptoms began to resolve. He documents this in his book. If you look the topic up on Amazon, that book will come up. It's pretty interesting.
There's a book out by a psychiatrist or hypnotherapist who writes about his experience working with a client. He did not believe in past life regression and had no interest in doing that type of work. But the client one day spontaneously regressed in a session. The therapist wasn't sure what was going on, but allowed the process to continue in subsequent sessions. He says it turned him into a believer, to his astonishment. Stubborn symptoms began to resolve. He documents this in his book. If you look the topic up on Amazon, that book will come up. It's pretty interesting.
I've tried it and it did nothing for me...btw have you ever noticed it's hardly men and mostly women who are into that stuff?...
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