Summary:
• Reincarnation is the belief that after your body dies, your soul enters a new body and lives another lifetime. This is a central belief in many religions, including Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, and Sikhism, although some major religions like Christianity and Islam have historically not emphasized it.
• Many people who have had near-death experiences (NDEs) say that reincarnation is real, including some who did not believe in reincarnation before their NDE. According to science, there is no indisputable proof that reincarnation exists, although there are some intriguing stories.
• You are not required to believe in reincarnation. Many people do not and still grow spiritually.
• Reincarnation is not a punishment but a choice, according to NDE testimonies and mystics. For spiritual learning and growth, your soul voluntarily decides to live another lifetime. Souls typically plan each lifetime in advance, choosing families, situations, and challenges to learn from. You will not be reborn as an animal or plant unless your soul wants that experience.
• Between lifetimes, souls are said to return to a loving, non-physical realm that many NDE experiencers call simply “Home”—a realm Christians call Heaven and Muslims call Paradise.
• Karma is a moral accountability system tied to reincarnation because your actions have effects. But karma is not a cosmic “bank account” of moral credits and debts.
• In the life review described in NDEs, you will feel the emotions you felt during the situations you lived through, and you will feel the emotions of everyone you helped or hurt during those situations. For this reason, arrogance and revenge are very dangerous behaviors because eventually, in your own life review, you will feel the pain you caused others. You will also feel the happiness you caused. That is karma.
• The number of lifetimes your soul may have lived is less important than how you live this lifetime. Your current lifetime is your most important one because it isn’t over yet.
• Strong interests in a historical period or place, or having particular personal talents, might hint at a past life, but biology, family, and hard work also matter considerably.
• Dreams or hypnosis may seem to reveal past lives. Beware, however, because those possible memories might be only symbolic, incomplete, or false.
• Some children describe apparent memories of past lives, including names, places, and traumatic deaths—and a few of those details may match real records. Parents of such children should listen calmly to their children, avoid leading questions, and reassure the children that they are now safe in their current family and life. Children should never be put through past-life regression hypnosis.
• Beware of imagining that reincarnation somehow explains everything. Chance and effort still play major roles in life.
• Beware of glorifying the idea of past lives. Most lifetimes are quite ordinary and include considerable suffering. If reincarnation exists, its purpose is to help the soul learn, not to boost the ego.
Most religions distinguish between the body and the soul. A body can contain a soul, but a soul can leave a body. Someday a body will die, but a soul never dies. When a soul enters a body, such as into the body of a baby in preparation for birth, that event is called incarnation. The English word incarnation comes from the Latin word incarnatus, meaning “into flesh” or “to make flesh.” After the soul has lived a lifetime and then enters a new body to live another lifetime, that is called reincarnation.
Reincarnation is a common belief in Hinduism, Buddhism, Daoism, Sikhism, Jainism, and various other religions, including many tribal religions. But because religious scriptures can be interpreted in multiple ways, their information about reincarnation may seem contradictory. Many people today are skeptical of supernatural claims, as they should be, and reincarnation is a supernatural claim. Many do not believe in reincarnation at all. If their own religion teaches reincarnation, they may prefer to emphasize their religion’s moral guidance and rituals.
In centuries past, many Jewish, Christian, and Islamic theologians either ignored the idea of reincarnation or argued against it, although there were exceptions. In early Christianity, many Christians known as Gnostic Christians believed in reincarnation. Today, reincarnation is a common belief in Hasidic Judaism and in some faiths derived from Christianity or Islam.
The following is not intended to persuade you that reincarnation exists. Reincarnation may not exist. (An afterlife may not exist. God may not exist.) However, many people who had a near-death experience (NDE) have reported that reincarnation does exist, including people who did not believe in reincarnation before their NDE. Not all NDEs reveal any information about reincarnation, but many do. The system of reincarnation described in those NDEs is compassionate, morally accountable, and focused on the soul’s spiritual learning. That system is described here.
Skeptics of reincarnation may prefer to believe in traditional religious doctrines, or to believe in scientific materialism without any supernatural possibilities. And skeptics have the right to criticize what is asserted here. Perhaps their criticisms are accurate. You should decide for yourself.
· Reincarnation has multiple names. Centuries ago in Europe, the idea of reincarnation was called transmigration of the soul—meaning that after the body dies, the soul migrates (transitions) into a new body. Before the spread of Orthodox Christianity and Roman Catholic Christianity, transmigration of the soul was a common religious belief in ancient Greece and elsewhere in Europe.
Some Eastern religions prefer to use the word rebirth instead of reincarnation because the latter word may imply that the soul never changes. Buddhism teaches that the soul does change. Buddhism uses the analogy of a lit candle lighting another candle: as the first candle lights the second, both candles share the same flame, but the flame on the second candle is also new. Likewise, Buddhism teaches that the soul’s rebirth means that the soul is both new and old. Every lifetime is different, and the soul changes during those lifetimes.
Using the word rebirth in this way should not be confused with the Christian term of being “born again.” To be “born again” in Christianity means that the person has had a profound religious experience that radically changes how that person interprets the world, causing the person to follow the teachings of Jesus Christ in the Christian Bible. But to be “born again” does not mean the Christian believer gets a new body. The body remains the same; instead, the soul changes its priorities—in this lifetime.
· You chose to reincarnate and you planned your life before you were born. How a soul plans to have a lifetime in a physical body can be very complicated; nevertheless, the soul has considerable freedom to decide which spiritual lessons it wants to experience and learn. (See the answer to the question, “How does a soul plan to live a human lifetime?”)
· Reincarnation is a privilege, not a punishment. Reincarnation is not a supernatural penalty for bad deeds done in a past life. Living a lifetime can be difficult, sometimes very difficult, sometimes so difficult that you may feel nobody should suffer that. Still, life is precious—an opportunity to love and to learn everything about love that a soul can experience on Earth. According to most NDE experiencers, that focus is the purpose of life. Living a lifetime that is focused on love may sound simple, but it is not. It can be painful. Not all learning is achieved with ease. To thoroughly learn the many lessons of love, including when love is absent or distorted, requires multiple lifetimes. Life is precious because love is precious. Living multiple lifetimes to learn about love is why reincarnation is a privilege.
· You will not reincarnate immediately unless you choose to. Two misconceptions about reincarnation are that the soul exists only in a physical body on Earth, and that the soul reincarnates immediately, always, without ever going to the realm of infinite love that Christians call Heaven and Muslims call Paradise. According to many NDEs, and the truth about reincarnation is very different.
The afterlife is more than reincarnation. According to NDE testimonies, a non-material realm of infinite love does exist. Not only do our souls go there, we came from there—and we return to that place, repeatedly, as many times as we reincarnate. Religious scriptures call that place Heaven or Paradise, but many NDE experiencers call it Home. Reincarnation is only a temporary journey away from Home so that your soul can learn. While at Home, if you choose to reincarnate so that you can have a human experience (or some other physical experience), that is your choice. When to reincarnate is also your choice. You can choose to reincarnate immediately, or you can choose to reincarnate after some years, or decades, or centuries. The choice is entirely your own, because you have free will.
· You will not reincarnate as another species unless you want to. Some beliefs about reincarnation include the idea that souls can incarnate, or reincarnate, as physical beings other than as humans, for example as plants or animals. This idea can be frightening if you are afraid of reincarnating as something non-human. But remember this: your soul has free will—and that means you will not reincarnate unless you choose to. NDE testimonies report this. If you want to reincarnate as a human again, you will choose that. The reason to reincarnate as something other than a human being is to have a non-human experience. (And in your past lifetimes, you may already have had those experiences. Whatever the choice is, the choice is yours, made by your soul.
· Karma is simple, but people make it complicated. One religious argument against reincarnation is that if a person believes he will be reincarnated repeatedly, he might behave immorally without fear of Divine punishment. Why strive for moral perfection within a single lifetime if you are going to be reincarnated anyway? Without reincarnation, however, fear of God’s judgment and eternal punishment becomes a Divine incentive to be morally good within the only lifetime you may have.
Whatever the merits of this argument, it ignores the role of karma. Most religions that teach reincarnation include the principle of karma, which is a form of moral accountability. The word karma—written in Sanskrit as कर्म —originally meant doing a deed, and it includes the person’s intent. Does the deed help anybody? Does the deed harm anybody? Helping is good, harming is bad. A common belief is that reincarnation is influenced by karma because a lifetime of good deeds might be rewarded in the next life, but a lifetime of bad deeds might be punished in the next life.
That is the basic idea of karma, although religions disagree on how karma works. Not all deeds are equal, and most lifetimes consist of a mix of good deeds and bad deeds. Imagine a person has saved many lives—but is also a murderer. Is that person morally neutral? Do good deeds compensate for bad deeds? In attempting to answer such questions, religions have developed some very complicated ideas about karma, too vast to summarize here.
In trying to explain karma, some people imagine that each person has a sort of supernatural ledger, upon which good deeds create so-called “good karma” while bad deeds create so-called “bad karma.” Having plenty of “bad karma” is like having plenty of debts that must be repaid. But Buddhist masters and other religious sages dislike explaining karma this way. They emphasize that karma is a principle, not a supernatural bank account. They say there is only karma, not so-called “good karma” or “bad karma.”
Ideas similar to karma can be found in religions not usually associated with reincarnation. In Judaism, for example, is the idea of middah k’neged middah— מידה כנגד מידה —usually translated as “measure for measure.” In Jewish scriptures, this often refers to how God may punish someone for a severe sin; for example, a soldier should never abuse widows, or else God may punish him with death in battle, making his own wife a widow. In Christianity, Jesus warned, “All who draw the sword will die by the sword.” (Holy Bible, Matthew 26:52.) His apostle Paul said, “A man reaps what he sows.” (Holy Bible, Galatians 6:7.) These warnings have become common sayings among Christians. Both Christianity and Islam have taught that God remembers all of your deeds, good and bad, and will hold you accountable on the Day of Judgment.
Some people believe karma operates in this lifetime, including the results. They believe that if someone performs good deeds in this lifetime, then in this lifetime that person will attract kindness and good luck; but if someone performs bad deeds, then in this lifetime the results are bad luck. Such results do happen sometimes. Nevertheless, there are many people who perform bad deeds but are not punished, and many others who perform good deeds but, in response, suffer unfairness.
So, how does karma work? Does karma exist? Many NDEs that include a life review describe a form of karma that is both simple and profound. In the life review, the entire lifetime of the person is presented. Every emotional experience felt during that lifetime is felt again. Additionally, in every situation the person lived through, the person will feel the emotions of everyone that person interacted with. Additionally, the person will feel the emotional results of every deed that person did.
So, for every good deed you did, you will feel the emotions of everyone involved at that moment and the emotions of everyone your deed ever benefited. A small deed of kindness can have extraordinary results. It can transform a person’s life. It can have a ripple effect by affecting people who affect other people who affect other people, many of whom you never met, but your small deed of kindness began the ripple.
However, a cruel deed has painful consequences, emotionally and physically, although you may not have fully understood how painful your deed was. If you deliberately harmed someone, then in your life review you will feel the pain felt by that person and also the pain of everyone else affected by the consequences of that harm.
Imagine the life review of somebody who was extremely abusive, such as a violent criminal or a harsh dictator. A human body cannot physically withstand all of the suffering caused by, for example, a mass murderer—but a soul can withstand that horrific experience. And learn from it. Is that punishment? If so, then it is the most proportional punishment possible, exactly equal to the amount of suffering the deed caused. Such incredibly exact, proportional punishment is possible only in a supernatural realm. No legal system on Earth could physically achieve that.
Yet, throughout the life review, throughout the shameful times of your life, God does not judge you. You judge yourself, probably very harshly after feeling all of the suffering you caused. But during that life review, you are surrounded by God’s unconditional love and comforting. People who have experienced an NDE life review report testify to this: that God did not judge them; instead, they received Divine loving support.
The life review reveals all of the benefits and consequences of your deeds so that you can learn. What lessons did you learn from that lifetime? How could you apply those lessons in another lifetime? What would you want to learn in another lifetime?
That is what karma really is. No NDE explicitly states that the life review is karma, but the parallels are striking, and this interpretation avoids the punitive distortions that some religious traditions later developed. Notably, NDEs do not describe souls being forced to reincarnate to “pay off” karmic debts; instead, they describe learning, growth, and voluntary choices.
Karma is not a form of supernatural slavery. Karma is not an eternal cycle of lifetimes designed to punish you. Karma is not an attempt to balance good deeds against bad deeds. Karma does not demand that you live another lifetime to settle any debts from a past lifetime. Karma does not create any debts; it creates lessons about love and kindness revealed by a life review. If the next lifetime of a soul is very different from its previous lifetime, that is because the soul wants a very different experience—perhaps to feel being a victim because in the previous lifetime the soul was a victimizer. But that is the choice of the soul, not a requirement from karma, because any sins or debts from the previous lifetime were already paid for during the life review.
Karma does not control you. Your soul learns from your many lifetimes and chooses to continue to grow spiritually. That process of learning is called “karma.”
Karma is simple. But because karma is supernatural, we have long imagined that karma is complicated. Karma is not complicated. But karma is profound.
· Reincarnation is a warning against arrogance and revenge. Arrogance can mean that you treat people as inferior to yourself, not as your equals, not respecting them, not caring much about their feelings. Revenge can mean harmful retaliation. It can mean inflicting suffering upon others because you believe they made you suffer.
Most of the evils recorded in human history are the consequences of arrogance and revenge.
Most people do not want to be considered arrogant. But all of us do make mistakes—and sometimes our words or actions inflict suffering upon others. Some words or actions can be especially cruel. An atheist might assume that after inflicting suffering upon others, there will be no supernatural consequences. A Christian or a Muslim might assume that after inflicting suffering upon others but then asking God for forgiveness, there will be no supernatural consequences.
According to every NDE life review, however, there are supernatural consequences. God forgives, but there are still consequences for inflicting suffering. A person undergoing an NDE life review feels the suffering of everyone that person hurt during that lifetime. The purpose of a life review is to learn from the experience—but it still hurts.
Instead of assuming a lack of supernatural consequences, reincarnation suggests a different perspective, and you do not need to believe in reincarnation to understand that perspective. Treat others as you wish to be treated. The power you possess might be as simple as having some money or food needed by another person. Whatever power you possess is a gift from God, but how you use that gift is a test of your moral wisdom. People with little hope, having little or no protection, perhaps desperate—they could be vulnerable to the power you possess. If you were in their situation, suffering their troubles, their traumas, their fears, then what treatment would you wish for? Having empathy, what should you do?
Christianity teaches the importance of forgiveness, and Islam teaches the importance of mercy. If you want forgiveness, be forgiving. If you want mercy, be merciful. Feeling empathy for other people does not require any belief in reincarnation, but having an awareness of reincarnation can encourage a greater willingness to forgive and be merciful. If your situation is better than what other people are experiencing, then you are fortunate—but never assume that your situation will never change, whether in this lifetime or in another.
In this lifetime, arrogance and revenge are destructive—and they may reappear in another lifetime when you become the weak person, the vulnerable one, one of those people wishing for forgiveness and mercy. So, forgive and be merciful.
Reincarnation is not an escape from morality. Reincarnation does not allow somebody to inflict suffering without any consequences, again and again, in multiple lifetimes. There is karma, there is accountability.
· Reincarnation can resolve some theological contradictions. A religious doctrine is a set of religious ideas that fit together, or at least they should fit together. Each religious idea may, by itself, make moral sense, but some combinations of religious ideas do not make moral sense or logical sense. That problem is called a theological contradiction—and it can weaken the moral authority of that religious doctrine and, consequently, harm the willingness of many people to believe in that religion. Yet a theological contradiction can be extremely difficult to resolve when believers are reluctant to change the doctrine, especially it that doctrine has achieved the status of a tradition.
In Christianity and Islam, their traditional doctrines have difficulty resolving a theological contradiction called predestination. Imagine a wicked person who never asks for any forgiveness from God before he dies. According to traditional Christian and Islamic doctrines, that person deserves to be punished in Hell for all eternity. Predestination asserts that because God knows everything, then God knew before that wicked person was born that he would live a wicked life and harm innocent people—that he was always destined for Hell, already predestined in the mind of God. But if God already knows the future before that person was born, why create that person? Why allow that wicked person to be born? If that person never existed, his victims would be better off. If he never existed, he would never spend eternity in the torment of Hell.
This theological contradiction is very difficult to resolve, and so most Christians and Muslims prefer not to think about predestination. Another problem they prefer to not think about is how long the dead must wait until God resurrects them to life. Many Christians and Muslims like to believe that their dead loved ones are currently in Christian Heaven or Islamic Paradise—but traditional interpretations of Christian and Muslim scriptures suggest that the dead are not there, at least not yet. In the traditional doctrines, you live only one human lifetime and then, after death, your soul and your dead body both must wait without any awareness (because you are dead) until the Day of Judgment.
How long that wait lasts is a question answered differently by different denominations. Some say God will not resurrect the dead until the end of the world, which may not happen for thousands of years. Indeed, thousands of years have already passed since their scriptures were written.
The traditional doctrines of Christianity and Islam teach that God on the Day of Judgment will judge every person’s deeds and beliefs, to be either punished or rewarded. To be punished means eternal torment in Hell—a punishment infinitely longer than any human lifetime. To be rewarded means eternal bliss in Christian Heaven or Islamic Paradise. (Interestingly, all souls get eternal life, but the punished souls get imprisoned in Hell.) The traditional doctrines say a lifetime of sins can be forgiven through religious repentance just before death, but that a lifetime of loving and caring for others will not prevent eternal punishment in Hell if the person dies as an atheist, or at least not as a believing Christian or Muslim. This implies that the safest lifetime is to die as an innocent baby before committing any sins. But a lengthy lifetime of good deeds could be ruined by one terrible sin.
Roman Catholic Christianity teaches the existence of Purgatory, a temporary place for souls judged to be good enough to avoid permanent torment in Hell but not yet ready for Heaven. Most other Christian denominations do not believe in Purgatory, and its existence does not bring the Day of Judgment any closer.
So, in one theological contradiction, each person lives a unique lifetime with a variety of troubles, opportunities, and lengths of time, but everybody seems to share the same Day of Judgment, resulting in either eternal torment or eternal bliss. In another theological contradiction, every believer is offered eternal life after physical death—but the dead believer must wait for perhaps thousands of years, dead without any awareness, until resurrection and the Day of Judgment. Hopefully, after that long wait, the believer does not get sentenced to Hell.
Reincarnation, including karma, is a very different system. It does not have any contradictions caused by predestination. It does not choose between either infinite torment or infinite bliss after a finite lifetime. It is not ignore the dead for hundreds or thousands of years because it does not treat the Day of Judgment, a life review, as the same date for everybody. Instead, reincarnation treats you as an individual, with your own life review occurring soon after your death. It does not punish souls for all eternity. (How is a soul supposed to learn from an eternity of torment?) Instead, it offers opportunities to learn and apply moral lessons in new lifetimes. It is a system that encourages the spiritual progress of every soul.
· You are not required to believe in reincarnation. There is no supernatural punishment for not believing in reincarnation. In past centuries, the traditional doctrines of Christianity and Islam did not teach reincarnation except to deny its existence—and millions of Christians and Muslims lived their lives and progressed spiritually without believing in reincarnation. Occasionally some Christians and Muslims did ask some questions about the unfairness of eternal torment in Hell or about the theological contradictions of predestination, but most practiced the religion they were taught, with or without any doubts.
In more recent times, many Christians and Muslims have had NDEs, during which some discovered they had lived multiple past lives, despite not believing in reincarnation. In many other NDEs, reincarnation is never mentioned. If a person did not believe in reincarnation before having an NDE, that person might not believe in reincarnation afterwards. What matters is your spiritual growth in this lifetime.
· The number of lifetimes you have already lived may surprise you. If reincarnation does not exist, then you have one lifetime and you are living it now. But if reincarnation does exist, then you have one lifetime and you are living it now—because your soul never dies.
However, when most people talk about lifetimes and reincarnation, they usually mean a lifetime lived in a physical, biological body. Most religions define a lifetime in this way, but they disagree on how many human lifetimes a soul may live. The possible numbers range from one (because everyone must begin with one lifetime) to less than ten, to several tens, hundreds, thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions, or possibly more.
Likewise, among NDEs that have conveyed any information about reincarnation, there is no agreement on the number of lifetimes a soul may live. Some people during their NDE were told that they had lived multiple lives. In some NDEs, scenes from some past lives were shown. Sometimes a vague number of past lives was mentioned, such as “hundreds” or “thousands.” But exact numbers of past lives are rarely mentioned during an NDE. The focus is on this present lifetime.
When people are put under hypnosis and asked to remember any memories from a past life, visions may emerge in the mind. If those visions are memories of a past life (or several), nevertheless those people may not be remembering every past life they have ever lived, including a total number. And there is always the possibility that their memories of past lives are distorted by time, incomplete, or that the mind is inventing those visions.
If humans do live multiple lifetimes, the duration of human history offers some clues about how many past lives you may have had. Scientists estimate that the human species may have existed for approximately 300,000 years. If your soul incarnated as a person 300,000 years ago and immediately reincarnated repeatedly until the present day, and if your average lifetime was 50 years, then by today you would have lived 6,000 past lives. That estimate is extreme and very rough, but still intriguing. If you lived only ten percent of that number, that means 600 past lives.
You might wonder why any soul would want to reincarnate hundreds or thousands of times as a human. There are numerous possible reasons. Throughout the life you are living now, how many people have you ever met? Every person is different and has experiences unique to that person. If you were to ask every person to tell their life stories, including what lessons about life that person discovered, imagine the vast variety of stories you would hear. Every lifetime teaches different lessons and may include difficult challenges that the soul did not accomplish in a past life but now wants to. Some souls reincarnate as humans to help others. There is also the sad fact that, historically, most human lives were relatively short, including many deaths of infants and other young children. When a human lifetime is short, your soul might want to become a human again in order to learn more.
There is also a possibility that a soul may incarnate as more than one person at the same time, perhaps as two people or more. This idea of a “higher” soul having the ability to inhabit multiple bodies at the same time is not mentioned in any ancient religious scripture. (It is also different from the romantic idea of a “soul mate.”) Nevertheless, it is at least possible because we humans, living in a material Universe, do not know enough about the supernatural to know with certainty what is possible and what is not. Historically, scientists studying materialism believed that only one Universe exists, but today there are reputable theories in physics suggesting that multiple Universes may exist. This scientific analogy is not evidence for reincarnation, but it illustrates that reality may be far more complex than our current understanding. If our scientific theories can accommodate the possibility of multiple universes, then our theories about the supernatural can accommodate the possibility of one soul incarnating as multiple people at the same time.
(Interestingly, the scientific theory of multiple Universes also includes the possibility of other versions of you existing in other universes, living alternate versions of your life. And this theory does not include any role for reincarnation.)
Whatever the number, knowing how many past lives you had might be interesting for your ego, but it is not very important for your soul. If your spiritual growth somehow needed to know that number, then you would be informed of it somehow. And remember: because the soul never dies, the truth is that you have only one lifetime—an eternal lifetime.
· Your past lifetimes probably included pain and suffering. That is why you lived them. You might like to imagine that your past lives were glamourous or glorious. And maybe some glamorous or glorious things did happen, but such experiences are unusual. Most past lives are ordinary and focused on personal relationships. Most lifetimes today are ordinary and should be focused on personal relationships. Some lifetimes are happier than others, but nearly every lifetime includes experiences of trauma, tragedy, challenges, and some failures. That is because a lifetime without any troubles does not encourage personal growth or improvement of the soul.
A past life may overlap with a famous event in history, such as a war or a plague, and also the aftermath of that event. Sometimes that event or events are among the reasons a soul chooses that particular lifetime—to live that terrible experience. Yet an ordinary lifetime can also experience horrific troubles that historical records never record. But the experiences still feel real, both the joys and the sorrows, the celebrations and the suffering.
History is important, including your history, but beware of imagining that your past lives were always wonderful and happy. Most past lives involved struggle and were quite painful, sometimes very painful, including betrayals and tragedies, illnesses and injuries, and also physically difficult, sometimes violent. Many lifetimes today are like that.
· Possible memories when you are dreaming or under hypnosis. Dreams have been called windows into the subconscious mind. Sometimes a dream presents a short story created out of words or ideas that you heard only minutes or hours before you fell asleep. The story may consist of a combination of symbols that may not make much sense unless you discover what those symbols mean. A dream may have a message, or it may not. In a typical dream, when you see a scene, whatever surrounds that scene may look very blurry, like in a thick fog. Most dreams are soon forgotten.
A dream that feels like the memory of a past life is not typical. It is very vivid, and you might remember it for years. The story looks and feels realistic, perhaps ordinary or perhaps scary, but not full of symbols combined in an unrealistic way. You are in the story but as a different person, not the person you are today. The dream may end with you—the person in the dream—dying, perhaps violently. You may experience this same dream multiple times. Its details never change.
Adolescents and children can have such dreams, not only adults. There is probably an important reason why you are experiencing it, especially multiple times. Perhaps something happened in a past life which now, in your current life, you need to consider and resolve. It might include a traumatic event, such as dying, but even that memory can reassure you that death is not the end—because you are living again, now. Is there another lesson you can learn? Consider the story carefully to identify what that lesson might be. It could be the reason why you are dreaming about it.
Are dreams about past lives entirely imaginary? If reincarnation does not exist, then dreams about past lives are definitely imaginary—but such dreams can still be meaningful because they are messages from your subconscious. Using a dream, one part of your mind is communicating with another part of your mind, trying to make you more aware of the message. If reincarnation does exist and you are supposed to remember something from a past life, then a dream might be a memory. Whether or not the memory is pure and actually happened might be difficult to prove, but because the dream is your own, its message is meant for you. What others say about it is not so important.
In your current life, you might have difficulty remembering any event that your mind did not treat as very important when the event occurred. (Perhaps the event was very ordinary.) But a mental record of that event still exists deep within your mind. There are also memories that the mind might deliberately try to forget, especially if the event involved sexual abuse or other emotional trauma—and so the mind pretends that the event never happened. That memory is called a repressed memory, hidden from conscious awareness but still in the subconscious.
Hypnosis is a technique that in many cases can help a person recall a memory that is seemingly forgotten. The human mind has several levels of awareness, called states of consciousness, ranging from fully awake to drowsy to fully asleep, with various levels in between. One of those states is called a trance. Entering a trance can happen naturally, such as when you are in prayer or meditation, or reading a very interesting book, or doing a creative activity. Hypnosis deliberately encourages a state of deep relaxation, a state of consciousness resembling a trance or being asleep—but the person under hypnosis is actually awake and intensely focused on particular thoughts, feelings, mental images, or sensations. That intense focus allows the person under hypnosis to ignore ordinary distractions.
The person under hypnosis is guided by someone called the hypnotist, who verbally suggests to the person how to relax more deeply. Once the person is under hypnosis, the hypnotist calmly interviews the person, asking questions about what the person is visualizing within the mind. The person under hypnosis still has free will, which means the person is always in control and will not do anything the person does not want to do.
Many people who undergo hypnosis have mentally accessed what seem to be memories of a past life. The details can be very personal, including references to past names, places, friends, family members, how the past person lived, and how the past person died. What the mind experiences can feel real, and so the person under hypnosis may mentally re-live portions of that past life, perhaps using words or phrases from the historical era of that lifetime. Some memories can be traumatic, terrifying, or horrific, such as being raped, beaten, imprisoned, tortured, attacked by animals, burning to death, dying in a crashing vehicle or a collapsing building. Sometimes the person remembers participating in a major historical event, such as being a soldier in a war, perhaps using swords, firearms, or other military equipment.
Information obtained during hypnosis is not entirely reliable. The mind can imagine what seems to be a memory but which, in reality, never happened. It may feel like a genuine memory but is possibly a false memory. Sometimes the hypnotist may, by mistake, ask questions that are not neutral because they are overly specific. These are called leading questions and can cause the person under hypnosis to imagine a specific answer, a false memory, and both people may not realize this transition from real memory into pure imagination. Also, the nature of hypnosis and how it affects the subconscious mind is controversial, including for ethical reasons. When hypnosis is used to access memories of a past life (real or imagined), the experience can be incredibly emotional. In your lifetime today, how would you feel if you suddenly remembered some of the most painful memories you ever experienced? Remembering emotional experiences from a past life can be like that.
Nevertheless, what can be learned from dreams or under hypnosis can be intriguing. Some details revealed during hypnosis have been confirmed by historical records or by individuals whom the past person knew and are still alive. Those confirmations are not definitive proof that the person lived a past life, however. Not every detail is confirmed. Sometimes no details are confirmed. But there are cases in which at least some details are confirmed.
· Some of your personal skills or interests might be clues to a past life. A common assumption about reincarnation is that skills mastered in a past life may re-emerge in the next. For instance, an excellent writer in this life may have been an excellent writer in a past life. The person today might not remember that past life, but the soul remembers, and so a past skill can become a present skill, perhaps very quickly. This theory would help explain how some children become prodigies (called “gifted” children) because at a very young age they develop extraordinary abilities in areas like music, art, literature, philosophy, mathematics, or the physical sciences.
This theory has some problems, however. First, scientists cannot easily test this theory because it is supernatural. Second, a person who is very smart usually has one or two parents who were very smart, and some ancestors who were very smart. The basic abilities of a person are inherited through biology and genes. Third, although the children we call “gifted” do perform some remarkable feats, they also had some help—a mentor, a great teacher, or sometimes several teachers.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was born in Austria in the eighteenth century. Mozart at a young age became one of the greatest composers of Western concert music, but his incredible skill did not develop in isolation. Mozart’s father was already a respected composer and music theorist. Mozart’s mother was very loving and supportive. Mozart’s sister, Nanneri, was also a musical prodigy, and both she and Wolfgang performed together when they were children, playing musical instruments for important audiences that included royal families. Mozart’s wife, Constanze, was also a musician. Mozart was a musical prodigy, but he also had a musical family. If Mozart had been born into a very different family, perhaps in rural poverty, he might never have received the education he needed to develop his talent. His magnificent music would never exist.
Another problem with this theory is that if reincarnation exists, then many, many people have had multiple lifetimes. Consider the implications of that. Throughout human history, most women and many men have prepared food, including cooking food for their families. Most girls and women were taught to cook, and many of them practiced cooking daily. Every soul who has lived multiple human lifetimes was probably a woman at least once. If every soul has cooking skills developed across hundreds or thousands of years of practice, then logically everyone today ought to have the skill of a master chef. But the reality is that excellent cooking is a skill that many people do not possess.
Another common assumption about reincarnation involves unexplained interests and fascinations. A person might be fascinated by a particular place, culture, or time in history, but without any direct connection to it. The person feels some vague connection to it, emotionally drawn to it, but without knowing why. Reincarnation suggests having lived a past life in that place, culture, or historical time.
One problem with this theory is similar to the reality that not everyone is a master chef. If the average person today has lived many human lifetimes, then many places on Earth ought to feel deeply familiar, along with many cultures. And almost everybody ought to be fascinated by most of human history. But the reality is that most people today are not fascinated by so many places, or cultures, or historical times. Instead, only a relatively small number of places, cultures, or past times may feel personally fascinating.
Yet, if reincarnation does exist, then perhaps there is some truth in the idea that a particular skill, or a fascination with a particular place, culture, or historical time, represents a clue to a past life.
Every person has free will. Every lifetime may involve a mission to perform and some lessons to learn. To encourage a person to discover what that mission is and to learn those lessons, the soul may arrange to be born (incarnate) as a person within a particular family, in a particular place, at a particular time, with particular circumstances (such as poor, or rich, or very rich), to have a particular upbringing and education, and will meet particular people throughout that lifetime. In addition, the soul may allow the person to remember particular memories from one or more past lives while prohibiting all other past life memories. Remembering only some memories may encourage the person to discover the intended mission, to develop the interests and skills needed to perform that mission, and to live the lifetime that person is meant to live.
So, if you are not a prodigy in this lifetime, then reincarnation suggests that you might have been a prodigy in a past lifetime, or you might become a prodigy in a future lifetime. Whatever the answer, your focus should be on this lifetime, the life you are living today. Any clues to a past life are still clues, but only clues, not certainties.
· Your most important lifetime is your present lifetime. If you suspect that you possess memories of a past life, then you might wonder if that past person had more wealth, or power, or beauty, or social status, or fame, or more adventures than you have today. Or perhaps that past life involved more suffering, more poverty, more violence or oppression than you experience today. Perhaps you had a different gender, religion, nationality, or race or ethnicity. If you enjoy learning about history, then the idea of having had a past life can be fascinating. So, when thinking about your past life or lives, perhaps you feel proud of yourself. Or perhaps you feel distressed that your life today seems to be inferior by comparison.
Actually, your most important lifetime is this current lifetime, and there are several reasons why. Your memories of a past life might be false—that is a strong possibility. Reincarnation may not exist, and so perhaps your mind invented what you suspect are memories of a past life.
Or, if reincarnation does exist, those memories could be available to many souls, not only to your soul, because those memories offer spiritual lessons that many souls can learn from. So, perhaps a soul did live that past life, but that soul was not your soul. Instead, perhaps your soul accessed those memories to benefit from those experiences.
This possibility explains why multiple people can recall living the life of the same historical person, such as a famous king or queen. Those memories are being shared among multiple souls.
Or perhaps you did live that past life, but your memories of it could be faulty. Some people have an incredibly good memory, but most people do not. And nobody has a perfect memory. In this lifetime today, memories can be faulty because they can change over time, across years and decades, and so your memories of this lifetime may not be an entirely accurate record of what happened. For similar reasons, memories of a past life can be vulnerable to being altered by the mind, especially by a very imaginative and creative mind.
Or perhaps your memories of a past life are entirely accurate and you did live it. But that past life is over. Every past life you have ever lived is over. But the lifetime you are living today is not over: you have not finished living it. And there are reasons why you are living it now: to experience some things and do some things that did not happen during your previous lives. You cannot change what happened in your previous lives; they are over. But you can choose your actions in this life. In this life your soul is still learning and growing.
The point is that a past life, any past life, is not something to brag about. It is not something to feel proud of, especially if those feelings are attempts to compensate for feeling disappointment or depression in your current life. If other people are genuinely interested in your past life or past lives, then that can be a topic of discussion—if you want to. But if you treat a past life as more important than this current lifetime, then you are not living this lifetime properly because you are not learning what you should be learning from it. The spiritual lessons that a lifetime teaches can be different for each person because every person is unique. Whatever those lessons are, you are less likely to learn them if you are busy trying to escape the troubles of your present life by glorifying a past life. (And you cannot be certain that the past life you remember was really yours.)
Remember: the purpose of reincarnation is to teach the soul, not to feed the ego.
· Whatever harm you inflicted in a past lifetime is not the person you are today. If you have lived many past lives on Earth, then at least once you may have been someone who was abusive and perhaps cruel. This possibility may disturb you; perhaps it terrifies you. Please remember these five points:
First, you might not remember every important detail about that past person, such as why that person developed an abusive personality. No personality is simple. Your personality today is not simple. The personality of that past person was not simple.
Second, if that past person did exist, that person is now dead. And maybe you were never that person. If you were that person, you are not that person today.
Third, this lifetime today is a wonderful opportunity. So, in comparison to that past person, be a better person. You are probably already a better person. Help other people, do not abuse them. Strive to be kinder than you were in the past, whether in a past life or in your current life.
Fourth, if your life today distresses you, choose to improve it. Help others. Learn to love more. Love unconditionally. Be brave and do it. You can afford to be brave because your soul cannot die.
Fifth, God has already forgiven you. If God had not forgiven you, you would not be living this lifetime today.
· Trauma in a past lifetime can affect this lifetime, especially in children. When a person suffers a traumatic experience, the damage can include emotional trauma along with physical trauma. The emotional trauma can last longer. Memories of the experience can be intense, terrifying, perhaps frequent. For example, a child who almost drowns in water may grow up into an adult deeply afraid of being near a swimming pool or a lake, or traveling on a boat.
If a person dies in a traumatic way—perhaps by drowning, or dying in a fire, or from a great fall, or in a violent way—you might assume that no emotional trauma would exist because the person is dead. Reincarnation reveals that assumption is false. The person did die, but the soul still lives and the soul remembers.
Perhaps the soul could disregard those traumatic memories and leave them in the past. If so, then reincarnation means only another incarnation with no obvious connection between lifetimes. Or, instead, the soul may choose to use those traumatic memories to influence a future lifetime. Reincarnation then becomes a sort of bridge directly connecting one lifetime with another lifetime. Memories from the earlier lifetime influence the later one.
Most children do not have traumatic memories of a past life, but some children do. When the child is between the ages of three and seven years old, those memories may emerge in the form of vivid dreams. (Older children and adults may also have such dreams, although less so.) The dreams can be nightmares, including images of how the past person died. Such dreams can be especially surprising when the child knows facts (apparently remembering facts) about a time in history the young child is not supposed to know. The child may tell stories of where and how the past person lived, where the person was born and grew up, personal habits of the person, perhaps the names of personal friends and family relatives, and how the person died. And the stories the child tells sound consistent.
Many of these cases have been investigated scientifically. While the findings are not definitive proof that reincarnation exists, they can be very intriguing. Details revealed by the child—names, dates, places, other facts—are sometimes confirmed in historical records. The child may remember a location the child has never visited, such as a house where the dead person lived. If that building still stands and the child visits it, the child may reveal historical details about it that are sometimes confirmed in historical records, details most people would not know nor guess. There are cases in which friends or relatives of the dead person are still alive. If the child is introduced to them—without the child being told who they are—the child may recognize their faces, call them by their names (which the child was never told), and recall memories of the dead person that only those people would know.
Some critics have accused such children of inventing stories and accused the parents of seeking media publicity and any money which that publicity might bring. Those accusations are often unfair. It is true that some cases receiving media publicity do get sensationalized. (Not all cases are sensationalized, but some are.) But in most cases the parents do not want media publicity. Their primary concern is the child’s mental health, suffering vivid dreams that are often nightmares. If the past life ended violently, the young child may talk about it, describing acts of violence so horrific that most adults feel uncomfortable hearing it. Some parents are receptive to the idea of reincarnation, but others are not, especially if they believe in traditional Christianity or traditional Islam or are atheists. Still, the child talks about supposed memories which the parents either do not believe or are afraid to believe. They do not want their child treated as “weird” or worse.
If a soul wants its human reincarnation to realize that it did live a past life, then the child may be born with physical features similar to the past person. Their faces, for example, may look noticeably similar. If the past person died violently, such as due to a knife wound or a gunshot, then the child might have a birthmark on the exact same location on the body where the past person suffered the deadly attack. That birthmark might not look identical to a knife wound or a gunshot, but it can look noticeably similar. Such physical similarities are not proof of reincarnation, but, like clues that could be meaningful, the physical similarities can be intriguing.
In some cases, the religion of the past person becomes a legacy which the reincarnated person feels an attraction to. This occurs not for spiritual reasons (because one religion is not better than another) but due to a limited number of human hosts. For example, in the early 1940s, approximately six million Jews were mass murdered in a horrific event we now call the Holocaust. The victims included approximately one million Jewish children. In the decades since then, many souls who were Jewish children murdered during the Holocaust later reincarnated into Christian families. Not all of them did—some reincarnated into Jewish families—but there were not enough Jewish families alive for every Jewish victim of the Holocaust to reincarnate into. Later, many of those Christian-raised children experienced nightmares of being persecuted and murdered, sometimes seeing in their dreams some clues or symbols indicating the Holocaust. And many of them felt drawn to Judaism and sought historical information about the Holocaust. That was a double burden for the reincarnated child: experiencing nightmares about the Holocaust, and facing disbelief and criticism that a Christian claims to have been, in a past life, a Jewish victim of the Holocaust.
(When hypnosis is used to access past life memories, not all memories of the Holocaust are of Jewish victims. Some people recall being Communists murdered by the Nazis. Other people recall being members of the Nazi Party or of other Nazi organizations such as the paramilitary SS, the Schutzstaffel. There are a wide variety of memories.)
Since the Holocaust, other events on Earth include the mass murder of other religious groups. Therefore, we may see more reincarnations of people born into one religion but mysteriously attracted to another religion. And they may have nightmares of being persecuted. Such reincarnations may also involve racial or ethnic groups that have suffered persecution.
You may wonder why only some children have memories of a past life, instead of everyone. One reason could be that not all deaths involve emotional trauma. Another reason could be that not all souls feel a need to bring the trauma from one lifetime into another lifetime. Souls plan their lifetimes, including how the person’s religious and spiritual beliefs will develop. Traumatic memories from a past life can reveal to the person the existence of reincarnation, but those traumatic memories are also an emotional burden, especially for a child. (You can live a satisfying lifetime without having any proof of reincarnation.) Furthermore, that knowledge of reincarnation is personal, influencing only that person and maybe others familiar with the person. That knowledge influences only the people it is meant to influence. Not enough proof is provided to persuade the entire world.
If you are a parent and wonder if your child might be remembering a past life, the following are some suggestions for general guidance. A medical or psychological professional can provide more individual assistance and may offer somewhat different advice or counseling.
First, listen carefully to what the child is describing—and respect what the child says and believes. You may not agree with the beliefs but respect them. (For example, the past person may have had a different parent than the child has today. Respect that possibility.) Your goal is to learn as much as possible about the child’s beliefs but without upsetting the child. If you criticize the child’s beliefs, the child may stop trusting you because criticism can feel like disrespect.
Avoid asking questions about very specific details. Such questions can cause the child to make up some answers. Instead, ask general questions such as, “Do you remember anything else?” Show your interest and your empathy. If the child describes being killed, say something like, “That must have been scary.”
Record any statements the child makes about a past life. This is especially important when the child provides enough information to identify a particular deceased person.
Use language that is kind, simple, and clear. Reincarnation is complicated; the child may need some time to fully understand it. Avoid using words or terms that the child may not understand, such as karma. Explain that many people believe that reincarnation is a way for souls to learn and grow by having new experiences in each lifetime and learning new lessons. Those lessons help us to become better people and better souls. Admit to the child that you do not know everything about reincarnation. (Nobody knows everything about reincarnation, not even very wise people. That is why they disagree.) Encourage the child to ask questions. Explain that the child should decide whether or not to believe in reincarnation. There is no right or wrong answer.
Sometimes the child may claim to have a different name than what parents named the child, and the child may demand to be called by that different name. The child may also say things like, “You are not my real Mommy,” or “You are not my real Daddy.” Hearing those remarks can be upsetting. Those statements alone do not indicate a mental illness, however. Many children who claim to remember another set of parents, another home, or a previous death, only rarely show actual mental health problems. Furthermore, as children grow older, they tend to lose their memories of early childhood; likewise, this often happens to children with memories of a past life. During the years when the child becomes involved in elementary school, the child may no longer remember ever talking about a past life. Only rarely will the child’s memories of a past life persist into adulthood.
Despite talk of past lives, never forget that this current lifetime is the most important one. Lovingly remind the child of this fact. Reassure the child that, in this lifetime, the child is now safe. Explain that although the child had another family in a previous life, the child’s current family is the child’s family for this lifetime. Explain with gentle kindness that the past lifetime occurred in the past.
Children should never undergo past-life regression hypnosis.
· Beware of interpreting everything in this lifetime as somehow connected to reincarnation. Some people treat the idea of reincarnation as if it were a key to interpreting human behavior and human events. For example, when they meet a new person, they may imagine that their new relationship is the result of reincarnation. When they see somebody demonstrating excellent skills, such as creating music or art, they may imagine those excellent skills are the result of reincarnation. Almost anything that occurs in this lifetime, they may imagine as somehow connected to reincarnation. The idea provides them with a feeling of having hidden knowledge or special insight.
Perhaps such imaginings are accurate—or perhaps not. Reincarnation does not explain everything and it is not supposed to. Reincarnation may not exist. When two people meet for the first time without expecting to, that event could be genuinely accidental. Excellent skills are achieved through practice; some people may not need as much practice as other people, but having excellent skills is not always the result of reincarnation. If reincarnation does not exist, then excellent skills are never the result of reincarnation.
The point is that reincarnation is not a moral virtue. Reincarnation is not love. Reincarnation is a supernatural process that occurs between lifetimes, but in your relationships and daily decisions you do not need to assume any role for reincarnation. The decisions you make should be based upon the situations you face, how you analyze each situation, how you feel about it, and what you believe that you ought to do. If you add into that situation some beliefs about reincarnation, then you might not interpret that situation as accurately as you could. It might appear even more confusing, not less. Choose to do what is right because it is morally right, not because of how it might relate to reincarnation.