Monstrous

Ghosts, Poltergeists & Apparitions => Ghostly Encounters => Topic started by: Iris on December 25, 2008, 01:30:08 PM

Title: Past Life Regression
Post by: Iris on December 25, 2008, 01:30:08 PM
I'm starting this thread in the Paranormal section because well, I think it sort of is paranormal and no other sections in the forums seemed to coincide with this.

If you don't know what a past life regression is let me give you a definition. Past life regression is a technique that uses hypnosis to recover what most practitioners believe are memories of past lives or incarnations. Past life regression is typically undertaken either in pursuit of a spiritual experience, or in a therapeutic setting. The memories can be explained scientifically without reference to past lives or reincarnation through a combination of confabulation, true memories, imagination and suggestion from the hypnotist.[1] Therapists using past life regression claim that a lack of proof for the validity of past lives does not prevent the technique having therapeutic value and helping patients.

Most advocates loosely adhere to beliefs about reincarnation, though religious traditions that incorporate reincarnation into their beliefs generally do not include the idea of repressed memories of past lives.

Now, after reading that definition a past life can easily distract one from conquering their current demons in their life. For example, those afraid of drowning may have drowned in their past life, a person afraid of commitment (who have had decent upbringing) may have  been forced into a marriage in a former life...the list goes on. I have had a past life regression about a year ago from a friend...which was astounding when I learned what I had told her and what I had seen. I was a wealthy woman married to a man that had a job...something like a banker ....it was in the late 1800's and my favorite thing was sitting by this harbor watching the boats...also, I used to shop for beautiful hats and dresses. I loved hats. My husband didn't love me much and I didn't love him...we had a gigantic house and it seemed we both settled. Now, in this lifetime...I fear being with someone to settle because I fear loneliness...a loneliness that is more empty than actually not being with a person. Being with someone to settle is putting yourself in a cage and taking you from the person you're meant to be with.

I've had other things that have happened to me in my life that I've had sense to stay as far away from as I am. I recently started meditating again and I drifted so far off I couldn't hear when my Mom came into the room. I started seeing visions of a beautiful girl with blond hair, a blue dress, and some kind of hat on her head. I started feeling as if I was her and I began watching the rocks, twigs, and leaves roll faster beneath my feet. I was apparently in some kind of forest-where I don't know.  I was running full speed away from somewhere  or someone and I began crying because I realized I was being chased. I looked behind me to see a man in his twenties, in a white Victorian shirt, and brown trousers. He was rather handsome but as soon I looked at him I knew why he was there. He twisted his lips in an evil smirk and stared at me and began moving. That's when I awoke from meditation...he was going to rape her. or me. I don't know. I snapped out of it in tears...I sobbed for a long while...
This may have been something purely from my subconscious but I don't think so. I think it's something that happened. I've had horrible personal experiences that happened to me regarding the cruelties inflicted on women...I'll stop saying what I need to there. It feels somewhat good to write this...because I'm sort of anonymous with anyone who reads this. Anyhow, this all made sense to me and is making me want to explore what could have happened to me. It turned to be almost a sign to let me know...that this time I got away.


If anyone has any past life experiences, please...I'd love to hear them! 
Title: Re: Past Life Regression
Post by: Devious Viper on December 25, 2008, 01:48:02 PM
Of course, just as there is no - and can be no - empirical, scientific disproof of the claims made for regression techniques, there can be no proof of their claims either. However, they have been found to be unreliable as far as a court of law is concerned - it was such regression techniques that caused "false memory syndrome" which led to the (later disproved) allegations against parents of ritual satanic abuse and child molestation etc.

The Cult Information Awareness center says: "RMT [Recovered Memory Therapy] exploits the tendency within each of us to blame others for our problems, and to latch onto simple answers for life's complicated problems.  RMT therapists suggest that aside from entirely ruining childhoods, childhood sexual abuse can explain anything and everything that goes wrong during adulthood.  RMT becomes the ultimate crybaby therapy... Memories can be deliberately distorted in adults by presenting a display of visual information, and later exposing subjects to verbal disinformation about what they saw.  This disinformation often becomes incorporated into memory, contaminating the ultimate memories that are recalled... Many RMT therapists have studied neither basic sciences related to memory, nor the diagnosis of actual diseases of memory.  Their knowledge is often based on a single weekend seminar, as opposed to years of formal training in any graduate program they attended to get their licenses... Some individuals come to believe that they lived "past lives" as a result of having undergone "past life therapy."  This phenomenon generally develops in participants who are grounded in the New Age zeitgeist and already open to "discovering" their past lives.  They enroll in seminars which can run up to an entire weekend and will involve some measure of group hypnotic induction and guided meditations.  This sort of FMS [False Memory Syndrome]  also involves continuing group reinforcement.  In contrast to horrific images of sexual abuse, recollections of "past lives" are generally pleasant and interesting.  Few participants will recall spending prior lives in lunatic asylums or dungeons.  The whole experience is assumed to be therapeutic by helping participants better understand the situation of their present lives. A small number of individuals develop "recovered memories" of, for example,  being abducted by aliens from outer space.  Almost always these individuals had some curiosity about this area and were hardly skeptics before they fell into an alien abduction FMS. In contrast to women who are plagued with concerns that they were sexually abused, these varieties of FMS are of a much more benign nature and do not disrupt personal functioning or family life.  While some of these individuals suffer the ignominy of being perceived as "kooks," they may receive compensating group support from those who share their beliefs."

Of course, many of the real workings of the brain are undiscovered territory, so who can say for sure?
Title: Re: Past Life Regression
Post by: Nina on January 03, 2009, 08:01:11 PM
I had never been to a past life regression, although I cant say I wasnt planing to. Why? Well, simply cause I had those memories that couldnt be from this, present life. Even now when I think of it, Im 100% sure it was in the Empire of Otoman.... middle east somewhere, I can even remember what was the structure of my dress like. Also, I can remember bits of drama, and when I meditate on this, I see there was a fight, and I may be killed there, but Im not sure, I just keep seeing this sword covered with blood that is drowning in this beautiful blue water, and as it falls, slowly, I remember this thin cloth of blood coming off the sword. So, could it be a false memory? Maybe, but last year Ive met two people whome I knew I know from that time. Strange thing is that the three of us started to act and communicate with each other like we are back then, and we just got acquainted. The problem is, we almost did the same mistake we did back then, and I decided to brake that magical time-space circle. Good thing I did, cause I would most probably be dead now, killed by the same hand.... this time I fought back, as Iris said  :wink:
Title: Re: Past Life Regression
Post by: Iris on January 19, 2009, 12:19:00 PM
Nina--your visions regarding your past life are quite impressive in description. Usually that's what happens--you meet people from your past life or run into an experience that is similar to a past life experience. It seems almost like a test from the lesson you learned in your last lifetime. Even though you can't recall every detail from a past life--you come away with feelings of what happens and a recollection once you walk into a similar situation. When I meditate I fall deep into visions. After writing that I went into meditation and saw the same girl as I was her again...and she was in a chamber embracing a man outside of his quarters--and then a big wedding had occurred. I had seen in the balcony a young man staring with contempt in his eyes...I couldn't see his face clearly but I could feel his anger. I am wondering if it was the same man. I don't know. Nina, kudos for fighting back this time...that's so wonderful to hear :)
Title: Re: Past Life Regression
Post by: nightwolf on March 03, 2009, 11:50:33 AM
My past lives?  They involve fighting, blood, death, and fire.  Lots and lots of fire.  There are too many to recount or remember, and most are too fantastic to be believed anyway...  But the memories are there, along with the fighting, the blood, the screaming, the torture, and the death.   

Mostly, I just remember how I died. Like the most recent.  1952, drunk driving accident.  I was 19, behind the wheel with my girlfriend, drag racing on a  highway.   I went to fast, the car swerved, flipped, and rolled.  She was killed on impact, and I remained alive for six more hours while they tried to save me on an operating table.  Then I died.   

I was a boy then, now I'm a girl.  Funny how that works out isn't it?
Title: Re: Past Life Regression
Post by: nightwolf on March 03, 2009, 09:33:12 PM
If you say so.  But I'm not actually having gender identity issues.  Remembering being a guy, and actually thinking I am a guy are two entirely different things. 

As for the blood and death?  It's in a lot of peoples pasts.  So, I suppose it all comes down to whether or not you believe in reincarnation.   :roll:  Also, I never said the blood or the death was mine.
Title: Re: Past Life Regression
Post by: nightwolf on March 03, 2009, 10:21:37 PM
Sure.  :-D   But honestly, I expect you to call me on it Kreepy.  I never expected you to believe me in the first place, which is why I said it.  Whether or not it's true.  If I could, I'd let you wander around in my mind and then maybe you'd get an idea of where I'm coming from.  I'm only beginning to explore most of this myself, and a lot of it's new.  Which is why I'm here. 

But really, for me, searching through my past lives is a very painful process and mostly I just get flashes of the usual cliche bull crap.  If I could be more specific, I would.  After all, I'm still trying to get a handle on the long dead necromantic language that keeps floating through my brain.  (How do I know this works?  Because I accidentally wrote a summoning ritual on my arm and nearly turned it into the living dead.  Luckily I caught it when my arm started to deaden, turn icy cold, clammy, and lose feeling)  So I tend to be flippant about it.  I'm sorry if that offends you.
Title: Re: Past Life Regression
Post by: oldbill4823 on March 04, 2009, 03:17:38 AM
How do you know that what appears in your awareness when you are exploring past lives is actually genuine past life experience?
Have you ever really questioned that what you are experiencing might be moulded to fit into a pre existing belief that you have that you have lived before?
If you have how critical was the questioning?
Title: Re: Past Life Regression
Post by: nightwolf on March 04, 2009, 12:42:22 PM
Those are excellent questions.    :-D

My awareness of my past life experiences is very different from my standard memories.  There's a subtle differentiation between the things that are fabricated and what is real.  It's like a difference in taste or flavor, the images are harder and more solid than anything that normally comes out of my regular everyday imagination.  My emotions are generally always linked to them, and oftentimes if I do want to look at or experience who I was in the past it becomes incredibly painful.  That's a usual thing when you're dealing with your own death though, when exploring a specific past life (different from the random flashes) the first thing you generally experience is how you died.  Remembering the sensation of a dull iron sword ripping through your internal organs isn't exactly something I want to dream about, much less think about.  You have to get past your own death if you want to experience more about your previous lives.  But it is not and never has been an accurate science.  You have to know what it is your looking for, what the past looks like, and when you find it you know. 

The brain has an incredibly need for logic, and my brain constantly tries to associate the things I'm trying to remember with the things that I've seen on television or read about.  So I have a bad habit of getting things wrong the first time I cycle through, which means I have to experience it again.  All over again.  The same memory can be experienced several times, and the fact of the matter is that these days it's a mixed bag.  You'll find some people who are on their second or third lifetime about as often as you'll find a soul that's been newly born into this world.  The quickest turn around time for a soul is about eight to ten years between lives.  The average soul is double that, if not higher, which is why many babies being born today are the souls of the men and women who died in the jungles of Vietnam.  You might be someone who died during WWII.   The last human war I participated in was WWI, and I remember dying in a spray of machine gun fire somewhere in France. 

The amount of times a soul has lived or died can be gauged by simply looking at them.  Of course that requires that you know how to "look".  The species  is a little tougher, mostly because it gets jumbled with the body.  However telling whether someone is human or not human is simple.    The thing most people forget about past lives is that gender is fluid.  I have been both male and female in my past lives, however wearing the genitalia of another sex in a past life does not make me any less able to adjust to being a certain gender.  Sometimes, depending on how young a soul is, you can tell if a woman has been male or if a man has been female previously by noticing their gestures.  This isn't always the case however. 

Also, there are skills I have (like the cited Necromancy example) that get me into trouble, things that I essentially know how to use without ever having studied them before.  You could call it innate or inborn knowledge this would make sense if more people knew how.  But I don't know, is it natural to remember a language that does not exist here, and be capable of using it to raise the dead?  Because that's what I was doing to my arm.  I essentially cast a spell on myself, using my own magical power without ever realizing what I was doing.  I recognize some of the symbols now, but I don't know all of them.  It was a spell of six symbols written on the inside of my arm (if you know anything about necromancy, you'll realize that that's where you cast for the best effect because it's close to a major vein.) the first was an invocation to a death god, offering up my arm as a sacrifice.  The second was the symbol that specified rebirth through death.  The rest were specifications on the type of rebirth my arm would experience, I still don't know what they mean, mostly because these are things that the english language has no words for.  Even the symbols I understand are only vague meanings, and I can know that I'm not crazy because my boyfriend is an actual practiced necromancer and he was able to read what I wrote.  (No, he never gave me lessons or imparted that kind of knowledge to me.)  According to him this was a very complicated spell, one that I should not have been able to make work unless I was practiced in it. 

What happened to my arm was that over the course of four hours after I inscribed the symbols on the inside of my arm (in inked pen), my hand and forearm steadily grew increasingly numb, cold, until there was a visible difference between the skin coloration on my left arm and the normal tan coloring on my right.   My veins became visible to the point where I could literally see my pulse beating in my wrist.  My boyfriend specifically said that it didn't feel like my arm anymore.  I washed the symbols off and in a few days it had reverted back to normal, but I can still feel the symbol for the invocation in my wrist.  Since that happened, I started to literally see ghosts, and until I learned how to tune them out so I would hear them all the time. 

I have never studied demonology, but I know the basic ritual of how to summon a demon.  What to do, how to do it, and what constitutes a summoning ritual.  The difference here is not thinking I know, it's just knowing.  There's no doubt other than disbelief, the feeling that this can't possibly be happening.  But that's the brain saying it not the gut.  That's on top of the necromantic symbols and the other weird glyphs that float through my mind on a fairly regular basis.

As for my reasoning behind rebirth, these things are only the tip of the iceberg.  I have a basic knowledge of how reincarnation works, how the universe works, how magic works.  And I know that I'm right because I can make it work.  Scientific testing and gathering of empirical data to support the conclusion that I've already come to innately.  That's the how, the why, and the end result.  Inborn knowledge that could have only come from an outside source or memory other than my own.  I didn't bargain for my abilities gentlemen (and gentlewomen), I just have them.  And because of that, I search for where they might have come from and the results are disturbing to say the least.
Title: Re: Past Life Regression
Post by: nightwolf on March 04, 2009, 01:36:01 PM
Sure.  Like I said, you don't have to believe me, and I didn't expect you to.  But because the truth is often crazy that also leaves room for this to be the truth.  The possibilities are endless.

And yeah, it's arrogant, it's crazy, and it's out there.  So what. And if you say it's a delusion then it's your loss, not mine.  People experience the paranormal daily, and you're going to tell me that you've never thought really hard about the nature of reality? In the book Mort by Terry Pratchett, the character Death said something along the lines of "People are very good at not seeing what they don't wish to see" when he was explaining why the folk of Discworld don't notice his presence.

Thinking about how weak and fragile they are makes people uncomfortable.  But that doesn't change the fact that human beings are weak and fragile.  Things are happening all around us, all the time, and we simply don't notice.  Sometimes in a theatre, a person will watch an event in a movie or see something on the street that may fill them with that they will find unnerving for reasons they can't quite comprehend.  It might be a car crash, or 'Apocalypse Now'.  Most often it'll be in relation to how they died.  But deja vu or not, it does happen.  Just not all the time, and not to everybody. 

But then again, truth is subjective.  It's all about what you witness and what you believe.  Views of reality are shaped by the knowledge we gather whether it's empirical, innate, intuitive, or authoritative.  Often a combination of all four.  We decide what it means for us and to us, then discard what doesn't fit with our personal worldview.  It depends on the kind of knowledge you deem most important.  So, believe what you want.

Cliche, not cliche, arrogant, not arrogant.  Delusion, not delusion.  Truth, not truth.  Tomato, tomato.   
Title: Re: Past Life Regression
Post by: Iris on March 11, 2009, 10:47:09 AM
This thread became rather interesting.