KM Wehrstein
Active Member
Hi everyone -- Forum owners, mods, super mods, staff members, senior members and members generally:
I’ve created a new account here under my real name so as to share my thoughts on the collaboration ideas being discussed here, as well as other comments on this thread, on behalf of ICRR, of which I'm president, and from my knowledge of the Facebook group Signs of Reincarnation (SoR), where I am a long-time admin and one of two “group experts” (in FB terminology), the other being Jim Matlock.
But before I get to that: Congratulations to this forum for staying alive! I am very glad this decision has been made. I was here a lot in years past (under a different handle) especially when having past-life memories was new to me and this was the only place to talk about them. I made a lot of fond friends among fellow travellers here, too. It would have been a great shame if the opportunity for such benefits that this forum offered then and still does now were to disappear.
Now my thoughts:
1) Everyone's points about Facebook on this thread are well-taken. I have to say also the number of people who have said they don't use FB made me realize how much good reincarnation recounting and information is being missed by those who restrict their reincarnation conversations to FB.
The worst problem with FB, imo, is the disposable nature of the conversations, especially in large groups, due to FB format. Because of this, people are not inclined to put much time or thought into their comments, so they tend to be short, shallow, generally uninteresting and sometimes rude in ways you don’t see in places where conversations are better preserved. This discourages people who do want to put time and thought into what they write from posting, leeching quality out of the posts. It is difficult to have conversations in which bonds are formed unless you form them (possibly inappropriately) fast, because relationship-building requires making yourself heard through all the noise. Because of all this, I have seen many people who were active on SoR in its early days when it was small leave it as it grew. The best purpose for large FB groups, I think, is promotion, because you have a large audience and can seize its whole attention at least for a short time -- not discussion.
2) Because of this, ICRR has plans for its own forum in the same multi-section/subsection/thread format as is used here, restricted to ICRR members only… though we are not wed to that restriction, and might create a public one with a members-only section.
3) Re Ocean’s proposal, viz:
Speaking for ICRR only, I see a few problems with this.
a) I would argue that those who are not interested in verifying their PL memories should be urged to do so nonetheless, because it is the best way to gain confidence that it's genuine past lives they are dealing with. Thus I think that these people are the ones who most need recommendation to visit ICRR! The serious research is relevant to everyone who thinks or even knows they had a past life, because past lives are serious business – they can have tremendous effects on people. But perhaps even more importantly, it can be a tremendous relief and encouragement as well to learn, as you do from acquainting yourself sufficiently with the research findings, that having and remembering a past life is normal.
To explain further what I mean by this, until I got into the serious research, I didn’t learn that:
Learning things like these along with reading umpteen formal case reports made me much more accepting of my own experiences, and has for many other people too, which is invaluable -- a balm to the soul wrestling between self-trust and self-doubt. Too many reincarnationists consider science an enemy due to the anti-reincarnationist attitudes of many scientists. But those scientists' attitude is, frankly, unscientific, and therefore to be ignored and not to be taken as truly representative of science. Science in the true sense of the word inquires about everything without preconceived notions.
...cont...
I’ve created a new account here under my real name so as to share my thoughts on the collaboration ideas being discussed here, as well as other comments on this thread, on behalf of ICRR, of which I'm president, and from my knowledge of the Facebook group Signs of Reincarnation (SoR), where I am a long-time admin and one of two “group experts” (in FB terminology), the other being Jim Matlock.
But before I get to that: Congratulations to this forum for staying alive! I am very glad this decision has been made. I was here a lot in years past (under a different handle) especially when having past-life memories was new to me and this was the only place to talk about them. I made a lot of fond friends among fellow travellers here, too. It would have been a great shame if the opportunity for such benefits that this forum offered then and still does now were to disappear.
Now my thoughts:
1) Everyone's points about Facebook on this thread are well-taken. I have to say also the number of people who have said they don't use FB made me realize how much good reincarnation recounting and information is being missed by those who restrict their reincarnation conversations to FB.
The worst problem with FB, imo, is the disposable nature of the conversations, especially in large groups, due to FB format. Because of this, people are not inclined to put much time or thought into their comments, so they tend to be short, shallow, generally uninteresting and sometimes rude in ways you don’t see in places where conversations are better preserved. This discourages people who do want to put time and thought into what they write from posting, leeching quality out of the posts. It is difficult to have conversations in which bonds are formed unless you form them (possibly inappropriately) fast, because relationship-building requires making yourself heard through all the noise. Because of all this, I have seen many people who were active on SoR in its early days when it was small leave it as it grew. The best purpose for large FB groups, I think, is promotion, because you have a large audience and can seize its whole attention at least for a short time -- not discussion.
2) Because of this, ICRR has plans for its own forum in the same multi-section/subsection/thread format as is used here, restricted to ICRR members only… though we are not wed to that restriction, and might create a public one with a members-only section.
3) Re Ocean’s proposal, viz:
Speaking for ICRR only, I see a few problems with this.
a) I would argue that those who are not interested in verifying their PL memories should be urged to do so nonetheless, because it is the best way to gain confidence that it's genuine past lives they are dealing with. Thus I think that these people are the ones who most need recommendation to visit ICRR! The serious research is relevant to everyone who thinks or even knows they had a past life, because past lives are serious business – they can have tremendous effects on people. But perhaps even more importantly, it can be a tremendous relief and encouragement as well to learn, as you do from acquainting yourself sufficiently with the research findings, that having and remembering a past life is normal.
To explain further what I mean by this, until I got into the serious research, I didn’t learn that:
- All the Abrahamic religions have, or once had, reincarnationist sects
- All the other major world religions are reincarnationist
- 33% of Americans believed in reincarnation as of 2018, up from 24% (including 22% of Christians) in 2009
- Tribal cultures in every corner of the globe believe in reincarnation, which in anthropological practice would be taken as strong evidence that reincarnation belief is very old, likely dating back to prehistory
- People in these cultures look for the same signs of reincarnation that researchers do in 2022
- Kids with past-life memories generally test out as normal psychologically, tending to brightness as measured by age of first words and school performance
- Ian Stevenson and the handful of other researchers he trained investigated and recorded not a handful, or scores, or hundreds, but 2,500 cases, from all over the world
- About 30% of the subjects in these cases have physical signs related to their past lives, such as birthmarks corresponding to past-life injuries
- As many as 6% of American households with children aged 3-10 say they have a child currently talking about a past life (tentative finding; further work is planned)
Learning things like these along with reading umpteen formal case reports made me much more accepting of my own experiences, and has for many other people too, which is invaluable -- a balm to the soul wrestling between self-trust and self-doubt. Too many reincarnationists consider science an enemy due to the anti-reincarnationist attitudes of many scientists. But those scientists' attitude is, frankly, unscientific, and therefore to be ignored and not to be taken as truly representative of science. Science in the true sense of the word inquires about everything without preconceived notions.
...cont...
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