Are Past Lives Real? For Seekers & Skeptics Alike

Hello,

My name is Keith Parker with Field Dynamics Energy Healing.

This is a talk on looking at the phenomena of past lives.

In a sense,

What I'm hoping to do is ask this open-ended question of,

Are past lives real?

What to make of those?

Whether you're a seeker or a skeptic,

This is going to be very informative and a very reasonable grounded understanding of the phenomena of past lives.

Now,

This can be referred to as reincarnation,

Rebirth,

Transmigration,

Transpersonal domains of experience,

But everybody is,

I'm sure,

Landing with this idea of what are past lives.

We all have a sense of that,

Believing in it or not.

And what I'm going to do,

My big goal for this talk is to try and explain what it could mean.

To try and give you a map of the possibilities of what this is from the literal all the way to the abstract or non-literal.

Because one thing that's really important is that the phenomenology of past lives is very,

Very real.

Past life memory,

Transpersonal memory,

Is very,

Very real.

Now,

Most people haven't had these kinds of memories,

But there is a reason why many of the world's traditions hold belief in reincarnation in a particular way.

It's not random.

It's not misinformed.

It's not primitive.

It's based on people's experience,

Real,

Reliable,

Expectant phenomena that people actually have.

And you might not be aware of just how common this is.

Now,

I'm going to explain possible mechanisms for the phenomena,

From the literal to the abstract as mentioned,

But I want to impress upon you that this stuff is very,

Very real.

It's so interesting when you open yourself up to the fact that this stuff is real.

Now,

I've personally had a lot of transpersonal memory,

And not because I was looking for it or because I had a belief system that fit into the idea of a literal or abstract reincarnation,

Transmigration existence,

But rather that because of doing deep meditation work and healing work,

There came a point where certain kinds of memory started to come into my experience.

And it was very confusing and very strange and very exotic,

But I've had these kinds of experiences.

So I'm,

For instance,

Living proof.

But if I'm not here to convince you,

Then take it from all of these different doctors,

Dr.

Edith Fiori,

Dr.

Samuel Sagan,

Dr.

Brian Rice,

Dr.

Roger Wolger,

Dr.

William Baldwin.

Many of these are regression therapists or people who became known as regression therapists because these people in their personal life and in their medical practices came upon case after case after case and built up tens of thousands of cases of people recalling these transpersonal domains of memory.

So we wonder what is going on here because the phenomena is real.

The phenomena is irrefutable.

It's just a matter of the mechanism.

And I think that looking at the possible mechanisms is extremely intriguing.

Now one person who took this very far,

Probably the most well-known Western researcher into the phenomena of past life memory is Dr.

Ian Stevenson from the University of Virginia,

Who founded or headed the Division of Perceptual Studies there for about 40 years.

And he's very,

Very well known around past life memory.

He looked at thousands of cases in particular of children who had recall of past lives in various ways.

So there would be children who would have information,

Who would have memory,

Who would have stories to tell,

Who knew songs that they couldn't have been introduced to in the life that they were currently living.

And so he used things like their birthmarks,

Their phobias,

Different kinds of unusual abilities,

Illnesses,

Anything that couldn't be explained fully by hereditary means or the environment.

And he tried to make a map of explaining the mechanism of reincarnation.

And for him,

He was interested in seeing is there something coming into a person's life that is beyond genetic inheritance and that reincarnation might possibly prove as a third contributing factor.

Now,

I'm not suggesting that his research is definitive in any way whatsoever,

But he's a very interesting person to look at because he's working for 40 years,

Thousands of cases,

A major research university and heading up a Division of Perceptual Studies.

So that's great.

Those are a number of different great references,

But let's get into the different mechanisms of the phenomena of past lives.

So as an overview,

This is something that is from both the Eastern and the Western and the indigenous traditions of the world.

The idea of reincarnation is there in every single different area of the world's traditions.

And that's important to know.

It's not every single tradition that exists,

But from spanning the globe,

You'll see that there are beliefs in reincarnation from the West and the East and the indigenous traditions of the world.

So it's not isolated anywhere in particular.

Now let's look at the literal version of this,

The literal version of it.

What is being said if,

Simply if,

This were to be the case.

The literal version of transmigration or reincarnation is that we are born and die in a particular physical body,

And then we actually reincarnate into another physical body and have another lifetime and that there's actually a holding on or a maintaining of,

A recording of the previous lifetime as one moves into the next one.

And so actually the idea would be that the physical body is only a transient or temporary vehicle for something like we might call the soul's evolution.

And this word,

The soul,

Is often referred to as the thing that would be the transmigrational unit,

Something that is beyond the personality,

Is beyond the physical body,

And that is moving from lifetime to lifetime.

Now the idea here is that the reason for this process is because the soul is learning.

The soul is going through an evolutionary process that is utilizing biological evolution,

But not based necessarily in biological evolution,

And it is using these lifetimes in order to learn something.

And this is tied into,

I'm going to use Eastern traditions because they articulate it very,

Very well,

This literal rendition of past lives.

The idea is that one learns enough lessons in order to be liberated from the cycle of death and rebirth,

And sometimes this is called moksha.

It also certainly ties into traditional notions of awakening and enlightenment.

The idea that the enlightened being is one who no longer will go through the rounds of death and rebirth.

Now what is the lesson or what are the lessons being learned?

What needs to be worked through?

And this word tends to be the word karma,

That we accrue karma,

We accrue,

Let's say,

Energetic inertia as we move through life in any way that is unskillful.

And in those unskillful situations,

We accrue a kind of debt,

A karmic debt that we need to resolve or atone or neutralize in order to be fully liberated from that karma.

And that kind of is the situation with the soul here,

Is that the soul needs to be free enough from its karmic debt in order to be fully liberated from this cycle of death and rebirth.

So this is an interesting perspective and it certainly is above and beyond the physicalist,

Reductionist,

Materialist perspective of modern science.

And it's the idea,

Of course,

That we are more than simply our physical bodies and that there is this element called the soul and that that soul actually transmigrates or reincarnates from lifetime to lifetime for the purpose of,

Let's say,

Soul evolution.

Now is that true?

Who knows,

Right?

But these past life memories are keys into the possibility of giving individuals a direct experience of tasting something or of knowing something that may very well point beyond the lifetime that they're familiar with now.

But we're going to look at different mechanisms.

Before we move on to this little rendition,

I want to look specifically into the Tibetan tradition's relationship to this because there's a very interesting thing going on there.

Now the Buddhist tradition,

Particularly in the Tibetan one,

Has a thing called the Bodhisattva.

And the idea of the Bodhisattva is that as an individual awakens and frees themselves up from this karma and frees themselves up from the cycle of death and rebirth,

The idea is that the Bodhisattva vow is one in which even the awakened being chooses and vows not to leave the cycle of rebirth until everyone on the planet has been fully liberated.

And that's quite the dedication you could imagine.

So this is the idea of the Bodhisattva and it is exemplified in how it is that the Dalai Lama in part is chosen from lifetime to lifetime.

So this is quite interesting for those of you who are unaware of how the next Dalai Lama is chosen.

Basically a Dalai Lama will pass away and what they say is that when their body is being cremated that there will be smoke that comes up into the air and that that smoke will actually be guided,

It will be directed towards the village or the area where the Dalai Lama is going to reincarnate or reinhabitate its next body in a baby.

And so the people at the funeral are watching the smoke and they use that as a signal to go to inspect the nearby villages or the direction in order to find out where the Dalai Lama has reincarnated.

Now think about this for a moment.

What is the structure?

What is the vehicle that somebody could pass away in if the physical body were to die?

How would there be a vehicle for there to be a directing of the smoke,

For there to be a conscious awareness in to then choose the next body of incarnation?

You wonder what is that?

And the clear candidate would be the electromagnetic field or the human aura.

The idea here being that what it is that's reincarnating is actually contained,

Is actually housed within an electromagnetic field rather than a physical one.

And I specialize in energy work and I can tell you that the human energy field is vastly different in its operation than the physical body.

So it's a very interesting candidate and it certainly is the suggested format for somebody passing away,

Being conscious and awake as they're dying.

So this is why so many intense meditation traditions focus on being able to be present,

Intensely at the transition of death.

Because the idea is you die consciously,

Awake and aware and the body disintegrates or the body falls away and what is left is a conscious awareness within the energy field that the electromagnetic field maintains or becomes the distilled aspect of the person's consciousness and awareness and they then can navigate or move in that energy field alone as the physical body is left behind.

So that's the idea here in the Tibetan tradition with the Dalai Lama and it certainly is a fascinating one.

Okay,

Moving on.

Here is the next step.

Now this maintains a literal explanation of transmigration and reincarnation and past lives.

It maintains a literal one but it's very different.

This has to do with the idea of a shared mind or a collective mind.

A collective human mind.

Imagine we all have access to a singular mind that is shared by humanity,

Maybe even to the extent of the planet itself.

But instead of thinking ourselves as only individuals and locked within individuality itself,

Maybe there is a way in which we're hooked into a collective mind of all humans.

Kind of like a collective data bank,

If you will,

Of memory and experience and even identity.

So imagine it like this.

This metaphor may help.

Imagine if the collective mind is a tree and each of us experiences itself as an individual as a leaf on the tree.

So as we actually move into the psyche,

As we move into the mind through meditation,

Through healing work,

Through other means potentially,

But as we start to look inward and develop ability to access the subtleties of the mind,

You might say moving from the conscious into the subconscious,

We might move from the leaves on the tree into the branch,

Into the trunk,

And then into the roots.

And there will be different kinds of information at these different levels of the structuring of the collective consciousness.

And so the idea here is that as people are moving deep into their psyche,

They're actually approaching the collective conscious.

And in some ways,

Maybe Carl Jung spoke of this in what he called the collective unconscious.

But in this case,

What we're saying is that all human experience can be accessible by each and every individual.

And it happens as a consequence of going deep into the psyche.

Now keep in mind that people generally,

In terms of past life phenomena and transpersonal memory,

Part of the reason why it is accentuated in spiritual traditions is because if you look into the process of doing very deep and advanced meditation work,

It tends to be that pretty reliably,

Pretty much as an expected experience,

People in deep states of meditation will start having these kinds of memories,

And that certainly is how it came about for me.

So why is that?

And we can understand this collective unconscious model in which what it has to do with is a person goes very,

Very deeply into the mind.

They start to come into contact with the collective mind.

Now why would there be certain memories there is a good question.

Why some memories versus others?

Well,

There are two kinds of ways of getting at it,

And the words are resonance and resolution.

So maybe there is a memory in the collective unconscious that you resonate with,

Meaning that you vibrate with,

That there's relationship there.

And so as you go deep from your individuated self into the collective,

You actually bump into people's memories who are similar to you in terms of its resonance,

In terms of its relationship to your individuated psyche.

Another way of thinking about this is that you're actually part of the resolution process for that unresolved memory.

Most transpersonal memories,

This is valuable to understand,

Most past life memories are of a traumatic nature.

They tend to be about unresolved dying or traumas or things that are quite arresting to re-experience.

And so maybe part of what's happening in this collective unconscious model has to do with as the individual goes into the collective,

They bump into unresolved past lives that aren't them literally,

But that are related to them enough that in re-experiencing them gives the opportunity to take a dissonant experience into a greater harmonious consonant resolved state.

So there are a couple of different mechanisms in the collective unconscious model here that might be the case.

Now one is going with the energetic means via the energy field as was mentioned in the Tibetan Dalai Lama example.

So it may very well be that the collective mind is like a broadcast,

If you will,

A large frequency band like all of the television stations,

All of the lives that have ever been experienced on the planet and they're being held in the planetary sphere and that our energy field is kind of linked into the larger energy field of the planet and the collective and that we can actually navigate and access all of these different channels,

All these different lifetimes that people have had and that adds up to the collective.

So that version is energetic,

Vibratory,

Frequency-based,

Electromagnetic fields.

Now another mechanism is the potential for it being simply genetic memory and this certainly would satisfy the physicalist and modern science.

It is very possible that genetics hold memory.

Genes are in their absolute infancy regarding our understanding,

You know,

DNA,

Genetic code,

Understanding what that stuff does is very,

Very not well understood yet and one thing is for sure is that the amount of information that can fit in DNA coding is absolutely massive.

For instance,

All of the world's data,

All of it,

Can fit on a DNA hard drive the size of a teaspoon.

Everything that has ever happened in human history regarding the information we've collected,

Can all fit on a DNA hard drive the size of a teaspoon.

So imagine being handed a USB stick and that said,

Yeah,

This is all the information that there has ever been ever in humankind.

Now your whole body is full of DNA,

Right?

Your whole body.

So what if genetic code is a recording mechanism,

Right?

What if genetic code records information in a way that has not yet been detected or understood and there certainly is the space for that.

It certainly has the storage capacity for extremely dense data.

So that is a literal explanation that would satisfy the physicalist and modern science that is literal and physicalist.

Quite interesting there.

Okay,

Let's move on to the third and final version as to what might be the mechanism of this past life memories.

Now the third is,

This is a very straightforward one in which we all have direct experience and that is called personal myth.

And this is the realm of symbolism and dreams.

Everyone has dreams.

Everyone is aware of having dreams.

And in our dreams,

We're not necessarily ourselves.

We're not necessarily in environments that make rational sense.

And in a sense,

Dreams can fill out the maxim of the imagination.

It can be anything.

They can be highly,

Highly creative,

Suggestive,

Symbolic,

Et cetera,

Et cetera.

And we don't fully understand dreams.

That is not something that anybody claims to know in an absolute sense what is happening with dream life.

There are tons of theories.

But nonetheless,

Dreams are certainly a way that we can know that our mind creates circumstances to have an interaction that is very exotic and abstract.

Now maybe these past life memories are actually types of dreams.

Now there's a reason why they're categorized as past life memories and transpersonal memories and why tens of thousands of cases are recorded and they're not confused by people as being dreams.

And I'll also suggest from my own experience that the memories related to these past life memories do not come across and do not seem like dreams.

But that does not mean necessarily that they aren't.

It might simply be that it's a particular way in which a person has an experience that is separate enough from the familiarity of dream space,

Yet it is still emanating from a similar source.

So dreams are a reasonable explanation as to what these past life memories are and why might it be happening in that particular way?

One answer is that possibly the person needs to see something,

The psyche,

The subconscious needs to reveal something to a person and it does so in such a manner as to switch out the person's individual identity and switch in somebody else's identity.

That is very possible.

And so maybe there's some kind of natural negotiation happening here in the recesses of the mind as a person is investigating the subconscious that the representation and the experience a person needs to have to penetrate deeper into their mind becomes this odd replacement where the person sees themselves as somebody else in a different experience they don't contextualize in their current life.

And so there is really in a sense the third and final way in which symbolism or dreams might be the explanation for these past life memories.

So I hope that this has been really informative.

We've taken a subject that is quite hard to tackle and is one that many people simply put aside right at the beginning simply because of belief systems or presuppositions around what is even meant.

And the thing is I hope that I have conveyed to you enough information to show you that the phenomenology of past lives is very real and they're very,

Very interesting.

They're very,

Very therapeutically effective when engaged within that context.

Healing work regarding the resolution of past lives can be very,

Very significant for people.

And as I mentioned,

For me,

Like many people who are doing deep meditation work,

They come upon these kinds of memories at pivotal moments in their personal development.

So there's something significant about these things and it would be a big shame to simply put them aside and ignore their relevance.

So I'd ask you to consider what do we do with the phenomenology,

Whether these be literally true or symbolically true,

There is real value in taking these past life experiences more seriously and honoring the phenomena inherent in investigating the deep recesses of the human mind.

So I thank you so much for taking your time to listen to me today around this topic.

My name is Keith Parker with Field Dynamics Energy Healing and I hope to see you again soon.

Thank you.