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Have you ever doubted a friend's past life memories?

Alexnovo

Senior Registered
I have a question that I sort of feel bad about asking, but have any of you ever doubted a friend's past life memories? I ask this because I was recently discussing my regressions with one of the few friends that I have that I knew would be receptive to reincarnation. In the course of the conversation he told me of two past lives of his that he recalls. In one he is an Indian Raj (or King) dressed all in white and wearing a golden crown. He tells of a period in the Raj's youth when he was imprisoned by a rival to the throne, but of his ultimate triumph and his life of luxury. In the second life he recounts being a famous star of the 19th Century Italian Opera Circuit. I will not repeat all of the details, but the life is filled with great adoration.

I listened to his accounts and asked questions but never in any way expressed any doubt; but I must say that his accounts struck me as not being quite right. Maybe this is my own personal prejudice that I need to overcome. Perhaps I am just jealous as I have not been a star of the stage or a king (at least as far as I know :)). I believe that all people can be and are reincarnated and therefore accept that as Rajs, Kings, Opera stars have lived, they also are reincarnated. However, I have noticed in myself, a skepticism when it comes to people claiming that they were royalty or stars.

I guess my question is, have any of you had a close friend that had memories of such extraordinary lives and if so, did you subject them to more scrutiny than you would more ordinary lives. The alternative question, is ‘am I crazy to question a friend’s accounts?’
 
Alexnovo,


I would be supportive of your freind.. As I too had a freind once who did not question my famous memory. It meant alot to me at that time as she was the only one who I could talk about my belief to. She was even nice and said that she could see my as this famous person which helped with my self esteem alot .


I would just keep on talking reincarnation stories and make sure he does continue to do regression work to make sure his memories are really true for his own sake ... as in my case my famous memory had an interesting reason behind it and upon A second regression I was found to be mistaken.


soulfreindly
 
Alex,


In my experience, intuition is one of the most important gifts that human beings have. It tells us what we need to know at any given moment, often times when someone is being truthful or untruthful



My only suggestion is to listen to your gut-- it doesn't lie.
:)
 
I have, but the situation was a bit different. My friend told me that she believes she was Queen Elizabeth I of England in a past life. She didn't give any evidence, and I'm pretty sure this was just an idea of hers rather than something she discovered in a regression or something. I didn't say anything to her, and won't, about it, but I don't believe it.
 
Hi,


I have doubted other people's PL memories at times too, but most likely, the other person really believes them, or they wouldn't share them. I think, even in our current lives, time can distort memories, so when you consider the time between lives, I would imagine our memories of past lives aren't always accurate either, but it's not really a matter of being dishonest, but more of a difference in perception.
 
Yes sometimes, and of course it's difficult, because you really have no way of knowing for sure, and even if you did, would it make any difference? I don't have friends who make the kind of faulty famous/royalty claims, but for example sometimes you might be sure you recognise them from a past life, and they claim it couldn't have been them. It's not a real conflict, but you just wonder who has the real answer and how can you tell? :) I'd usually go with the person themselves knowing better than someone else.


There have been many discussions about people claiming famous past lives on this forum. I personally believe we all get to experience that, too, but if someone in solely remembering past lives of wealth and stardom, you're bound to get a little skeptical. :D


Karoliina
 
Lady of Shalott said:
I have, but the situation was a bit different. My friend told me that she believes she was Queen Elizabeth I of England in a past life. She didn't give any evidence, and I'm pretty sure this was just an idea of hers rather than something she discovered in a regression or something. I didn't say anything to her, and won't, about it, but I don't believe it.
Perhaps the memories that your friend has are of living as a lady in the Elizabethan period, not necessarily being Elizabeth. If she can recall being grandly dressed in clothing of the period or a similar memory, she may have been the wife of a nobleman without necessarily being the Queen. I think we must respect our friend's feelings and memories - if we don't wish to have our own dismissed. Even in this life, I find my memories are not always accurate; a memory from another life hundreds of years ago may not be 100% on the mark, either! I might tend to view a friend claiming to be someone famous with a doubtful eye myself, and blame it on current life ego issues, but nevertheless if it's real to them I'd let them keep their beliefs, if it makes them happy. If they can provide any actual evidence, like knowledge of things not commonly known about the famous person, that's different!
 
I want to thank everyone for their responses. I will say that I in no way think my friend is lying (in other words I think he believes what he says). He recovered these memories as a result of a psychic reading. What I have done, is while being supportive, suggested that he explore these, and other past lives, by using regression. I agree completely with the posts that suggest that we should be supportive of a friend´s recollections, if we wish ours to be taken seriously.


I will also say that speaking for myself, I know that there are certain historical figures that I am very drawn to. As much as might like to recall being those individuals, I suspect that it is more likely that I had a past life connection to that person. Thus for example I have for as long as I can remember been fascinated by the Emperor Hadrian. I doubt I was Hadrian, but rather think I was a person who perhaps knew him (served under his command or something) or just a Roman citizen who admired him from afar.


For me, when it comes to questions like this, it would seem that a balance needs to be found, in which one accepts the validity of one´s memories but also questions them.
 
Equestrienne7 said:
Perhaps the memories that your friend has are of living as a lady in the Elizabethan period, not necessarily being Elizabeth. If she can recall being grandly dressed in clothing of the period or a similar memory, she may have been the wife of a nobleman without necessarily being the Queen. I think we must respect our friend's feelings and memories - if we don't wish to have our own dismissed. Even in this life, I find my memories are not always accurate; a memory from another life hundreds of years ago may not be 100% on the mark, either! I might tend to view a friend claiming to be someone famous with a doubtful eye myself, and blame it on current life ego issues, but nevertheless if it's real to them I'd let them keep their beliefs, if it makes them happy. If they can provide any actual evidence, like knowledge of things not commonly known about the famous person, that's different!
She did not give me all the details, but I am fairly certain that she believes it not because of a memory, but because she has a strong interest in Elizabeth, and has discovered things they had in common while reading about her. I do think it is likely that she lived during that time, especially considering her interest in Queen Elizabeth. Of course, I never plan to tell her she wasn't Queen Elizabeth, because how should I know anyways? And if it makes her happy to believe it, I'll let her.
 
Alexnovo said:
I agree completely with the posts that suggest that we should be supportive of a friend´s recollections, if we wish ours to be taken seriously.
Yes, I agree. I do feel that it's a give and take thing.


I must say I don't have that many friends that have PL memories - unfortunately! :D :D Most of my "remembering friends" are here at the Forum, and I have never really thought to question them - their conviction is as valid and certainly as strong as mine!


One thing I know - it's good to question things. But it's also good to take them as they come and not think about it too much. Even truth is not carved in stone. ;) I get the feeling that sooner or later the importance of all things will present itself. :cool
 
Sorry for bumping up this thread but i thought it was a good one.


I think there is a lot of taboo between reincarnationists when it comes to doubt somebody else' s memories. I also know that a lot of people will just be supportive even if they don' t believe the person because "Well, only THEY can learn from their experience and we are in no position to judge".


Personally though, i think it' s good and healthy to express the doubt for their memories if there is any. Maybe they' re confused and they need you to raise up the doubt so they can find their true selves. Maybe they' re not and by "proving to you" that they' re right ,they gain more confidence in their memories and with that, more confidence to trust others as well. If find very hard though to be supportive if i don' t believe them.


When i started to be more open with my story a few years ago people' s reactions were different:


_ One person didn' t believe me because, as she said "She doesn' t believe anyone" and because i didn' t remember her, and she thought that if that person ever reincarnated he will remember her. I was annoyed at the time when she told me, of course. I don' t think her reasons to not believe me were valid though, people can' t choose what to remember.


How was this experience useful? well, it made me more cautions when coming out with a PL and it also made me take a more scientific approach to the whole thing (not that i wasn' t interested in a scientific approach back then but i don't think i was thinking of the mechanics of reincarnation and the soul as much)


_ Another person felt that i might have been right in my PL identification because as she said later "I had the same vibe" (she remembered me from back then), however, she is skeptic by nature so she decided to put me on trial and ask me "trap questions" to see if i would fall. I guess i answered what i was supposed to answer because she believed me after that.


How was this experience useful? I gained more confidence in myself and in my recollections.


Nowadays i think i have enough confidence, memories and stuff to just not care if people believe me or not. Are there doubts? there always will be doubts but as i might mention in other occasion, i think sometimes to have doubts it' s to be in some sort of mild denial.


In conclusion, if you don' t believe somebody (and you care about the person) I think the best is to tell them, it might sound and feel rude at first but in the end it will be for the best, whether they' re right in their claim or not.


Also, and people might not agree on this, i think that false, confused or misguided claims are harmful for the whole community of people who believe in reincarnation. Outsiders will label us as "Oh, they all think they were William the conqueror" and new people considering the idea of reincarnation might walk away because if everything is accepted, then nothing is accepted and you end up not knowing what' s true and what' s not.
 
I think though, if the belief comes from a need to satisfy the ego, it's not a battle worth fighting. Rather than direct confrontation, perhaps an approach of working through their experience and evidence would be better :thumbsup:


My wife is one of the few people outside of the forum I've even discussed past lives with and I can't even get to the point of discussing my evidence with her. She just has these "you're not special" sort of blinders on which I think stems mainly from her fears of abandonment and I don't know what she fears is going to happen..


Anyway, I think the most convincing cases come from normal people with no prior interest in past lives or flights of fancy. For me, I always tend to doubt people when they're clearly more focused on the past life than they are their methods.
 
Totoro said:
Anyway, I think the most convincing cases come from normal people with no prior interest in past lives or flights of fancy. For me, I always tend to doubt people when they're clearly more focused on the past life than they are their methods.
I agree.
 
When I was in 5th grade, a friend of mine believed she was royalty or nobility... in every life. She was a little social climber, however, and I took her claims with a grain of salt.


I never believed my family's claims that I was my dad's grandmother. It just never sounded right, and they were pretty much of the belief that you always reincarnate into your own family, a notion I didn't buy.
 
I discussed reincarnation with a friend one time and said that I had a hunch that I might have been a certain famous person, to which he laughed and said I wasn't. Afterwards, he told me not only did he believe he was the reincarnation of George Washington, but Abraham Lincoln too. No, I didn't believe him, but I was at least nice about it and didn't say so.
 
Totoro said:
I think the most convincing cases come from normal people with no prior interest in past lives or flights of fancy.
Well said, I absolutely agree.


For me personally, I have not really spoken outside of this forum & to 2 family members about my past lives...Let alone talked to another friend about their past lives, so I can't really comment on the original question very well. :laugh:
 
The very few people I know who’ve mentioned past lives sounded credible enough, they were very ordinary, drab lives and didn’t raise any red flags. But it’s an insignificantly small number compared to the many books and online accounts which is where all the doubts come in. Too many incarnations of the same tired old queens, which not incidentally happen to be the same ones Hollywood loves, too many wealthy beautiful drowning women who were first class passengers on the Titanic (try again - no women from first class died), too many fictional characters, lots of over-wrought emotional sturm und drang.


My hope is that someday I’ll be convinced of reincarnation, to that end I’m always disappointed if someone just sees it as an opportunity for role-playing or flights of fancy, and I wouldn't be supportive of them for the sake of their ego.


I don’t know, the more realistic ones may also just be a psychological tic, but I have to apply common sense as best as I can.
 
I don't disagree with you sister grey, skepticism is a good tool to use to know that we're being honest with ourselves.


I'm always skeptical and am always looking to disprove my findings and yet every time, some coincidence, synchronicity or alignment of facts just pops up yet again.


I think, to be totally honest, since reincarnation is nothing we can really publicly or scientifically prove beyond a doubt, all we really have is ourselves. I feel that issue of reincarnation is highly personal, since many of us have issues that need resolving (if we have strong memories and indications that is) and that if we're honest with ourselves and use an open mind along with sound standards and research methods, we only need prove anything to ourselves.


I think because of that and in general, people that "go public" seem to be more wrapped up in the fantasy of it and are more inclined to drop names and other things all over the place.


For me, I'm more into the research of it. I want to know more about my family, who they are as people and they issues they face.
 
I kept it to myself, but I doubted my brother's claims that he was a) a pilot on a B-17 who was in love with a British school teacher, b) a crewman onboard the Hornet, and c) legendary Big Band leader Glenn Miller... all at once.


I know some of you believe that we can live multiple lives at once, but I don't. I've tried to keep an open mind about it, and it will remain open, but it doesn't sit right with me. I know he also didn't believe it until it became convenient, and his story changed with his mood. It also clashed with my family's long standing belief that you always reincarnate into your own family.


So, how did he explain it? He stroked his ego. He wanted to somehow stand out, be special, and get attention. Therefore, he cropped up this idea that sure, you always reincarnate into your own family, but some souls are special. They're outsiders, rebels, renegades, and any other "cool" title he could come up with. These souls were also so stacked with spiritual energy that they couldn't be contained in one body and so were given a sort of special pass to occupy more than one body. The more energy you had, the more bodies you got to occupy. He claimed there were probably 8 or 9 more than he just hadn't remembered yet. ALSO... these souls were somehow singled out for some special destiny. The rest of us were apparently just run-of-the-mill souls infesting physical bodies until that grand day when we could advance as far as he had. (His "special destiny" was apprently washing dishes in a small Nebraska town, but who knows what the future may bring?)


Anybody wonder why I didn't believe him? :rolleyes: (Remember, this is the same guy who genuinely believed he had always incarnated as a male and always on this piece of land we call the United States, even before anybody ever got here.)
 
That almost sounds like the mania associated with bi polar disorder. :eek:


I think reincarnation is a bell curve, like most things in life. Most people are average, some are more known than others (for various reasons, many of them not being for fame at all). Most reincarnate with their families (or familiar people), some don't. I think there's exceptions to every rule.


And while I believe in simultaneous lives, I think they tend to occur in short overlaps of time on average rather than in the multiplicity version most people seem to associate them with.
 
When I was a child of eight, my friends and I encountered a man who lived in a corner apartment and claimed to have been reincarnated from a parrot on a pirate ship. Of course, we didn't believe him and didn't ridicule him to his face, since he was a friendly and harmless fellow. So, one can't accuse us of child-like credulity. However, it never occurred to us that he could also have been pulling our legs. So, one could say that our incredulity only went so far, and that our critical awareness was not yet fully developed.


In our present frame of reference, open-mindedness and naive credulity are often seen as describing the same thing, which seems to be at odds with scientific reality; and the stories we hear are often disregarded by skeptics as the mere ravings of "childlike" morons and mystics. Whereas, we the believers often view skeptics as nothing more than closed-minded cynics who fear any departure from dogma.


The truth always seems to lie somewhere in between these two widely divergent points of view. Sometimes the source of a claim may be based on some aspect of true experience, while the interpretation of that experience may be filtered by ego, emotion or even an impish desire to inject a bit of fun or fear into the story. For every story, there is some element of human filtering; and it is impossible—in my opinion—to know how much of any story is entirely true. Thus, I never believe any single story; but rather find evidence in common elements found among numerous stories.


However, I have realized that even those common elements can be influenced by common human expectations born of whatever seems popular or culturally conditioned. In other words, stories of meeting Jesus Christ on the other side may be only a reflection of one's cultural expectations, even when the experiencer is not even Christian. And, even if I were to experience meeting my own deceased mother tomorrow, I would not completely believe my own senses.


So, one might ask, why do I consider myself a believer in life after death, let alone reincarnation? Well, first of all, I don't completely believe; but rather I lean strongly toward it. The reason is that I examine all aspects of life and read everything available, from Alchemy to Zoology, that will test existing commonly held beliefs; and I don't throw anything out. It is said that we should believe nothing that we hear and only half of what we see. Yet, by following such a meme we would never accomplish anything; for we depend so fully upon our senses. So, I would rather put forward that we should ask ourselves to dream of things that never were, and ask ourselves, Why not?. (Credit to Robert F. Kennedy's quote)
 
I believe that it's not my place to judge whether someone's memories of being a famous person in a prior life is true or not. So, even if I don't agree with the person's claims, I don't say anything out of respect. However, I'm glad this subject was brought up because I have a question that I've been wanting to ask for a very long time. If a person was really the reincarnation of someone famous, how do you explain that the spirit of that famous person has been seen or has even communicated to the living? I know of one case where the spirit of a celebrity had interacted with a man and a woman - spoken with them, walked with them, the spirit was about as normal as a living human. It was only after the couple went to enquire about this person they had been chatting with and was shown a picture of the celebrity, that they realised that they had been happily chatting with a spirit.
 
Some might suggest that a ghost is merely an imprint of energy and not the actual soul itself, but it is a good question, and one I have entertained myself with no satisfactory answer.
 
Midnight.Sapphires said:
If a person was really the reincarnation of someone famous, how do you explain that the spirit of that famous person has been seen or has even communicated to the living?
This question has been asked a number of times here on the Forum, and the answers seem to indicate that our spirits don't exist exclusively within the confines of our physical bodies. In fact there are documented cases of spirits appearing in life-saving cases where the personality behind the spirit was not even deceased; nor was the living personality of the spirit even aware that their intelligent image appeared as was reported. I wish that I could refer you to the cases, but they were experienced by extremely credible people. In cases involving deceased spirits communicating while possibly also being reincarnated, we have only the testimony of certain mediums who all consistently give the same explanation: that our souls remain complete on the other side, where time has no meaning, while simultaneously experiencing life as we know it in this limited dimension.
 
Midnight.Sapphires said:
If a person was really the reincarnation of someone famous, how do you explain that the spirit of that famous person has been seen or has even communicated to the living? I know of one case where the spirit of a celebrity had interacted with a man and a woman - spoken with them, walked with them, the spirit was about as normal as a living human. It was only after the couple went to enquire about this person they had been chatting with and was shown a picture of the celebrity, that they realised that they had been happily chatting with a spirit.
The explanations the other gave you are valid, however, my opinion is "I just don't explain it", or I explain it the same way I will explain how there are so many Romanov family members or 5 Heydrichs, some of them are misinterpreting the facts. We have to select what information to retain and which one to disregard because otherwise we will take as true contradictory facts. Personally i haven't seen any convincing proof that mediumship and talking with the spirits is something real, so I prefer to dismiss the whole subject. If it happens to me and I see the spirit of someone famous the first thing I'll ask myself is "How can I know it's really that person and I'm not just giving that shape to the spirit i'm seeing?" The spirit will have to give me evidence that only that person can know and I have to be able to verify it later, kinda like with a past life memory. Only then I might be able to maybe say it was the spirit of that person.
 
Owl,


I do have to agree that I did not believe people could talk to spirits ... until my father died and it happened to me. Belief in the unknown is a difficult road to travel.


I hope one day you are fortunate to experience the sheer joy of speaking to a loved one that has passed. It is amazing.
 
I'm more prone to believe that people can talk to deceased relative spirits than to some celebrity that has nothing to do with them. But yeah, hopefully it'll happen.
 
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