Interesting comments by Bruce Greyson

Surprised how inactive this area of the forum is, but nonetheless I hope someone still is paying attention to it! Anyways, I think this was discussed way back but here's a quote direct from an interview with Bruce Greyson where he was asked about western medicine and his opinion on reincarnation cases. Quite confused myself of what to think of it all: 

Chris Impey (Moderator): A postscript question on this from the panel: What is your personal view on rebirth?

Bruce Greyson: What is my personal view of rebirth? Many of the cases that we have are unexplainable in terms of Western medicine, but they are also unexplainable in terms of the reincarnation hypothesis. Sometimes we’ll see two children who seem to remember the same past life; Sometimes We'll see a child remembering a past life
of someone who died when the child was six months old, so the two lives over lapped. It does not fit into a clear model that we can follow. 

http://www.scienceformonks.org/Scie.../R...oduced.pdf

Read a book recently, that discussed how reincarnation may be nonlinear. One way that this could be interpreted: when someone dies, they essentially become information that can be used in a future carnation. By this theory, someone could be 10% cleopatra, 20% thomas Edison, etc. It could also explain why multiple people claim to have been famous people in a previous life. Perhaps that 'thread' could be used more.

This seems to me to be assuming that there is only one explanation for memories from a previous diffferent life. Perhaps, in reality, there are several reasons for it, rebirth being only one of them.

I've just been through the PDF and as I thought because I've seen it before, (unless I'm mistaken) there's no mention of two children remembering the same past life. Does anyone know where this case was reported from ?

If one can believe in precognition, is there necessarily any difficulty in believing that the same consciousness could be incarnate in two bodies at once?

If one can believe in precognition, is there necessarily any difficulty in believing that the same consciousness could be incarnate in two bodies at once?

Or “overshadowing” by a discarnate entity....

I prefer the gestalt soul idea. Each personality has individual validity within a greater entity - a gestalt of all those once incarnated personalities. No reason, then, that the gestalt (higher self or soul) could not incarnate two personalities in contemporaneous earth time. In the bigger picture, however, (and in ways I can't grasp intellectually) all these lives are simultaneous if earth time is an illusion.

Where am I? I thought I posted a response. lol

Oh, wait...Here.

http://www.angelfire.com/ok/SilverBirch/lights.html

"There are also what I call facets of the one diamond. This is the over-soul, the greater individuality, and the facets are aspects of it which incarnate into your world for experiences that will add lustre to the diamond when they return to it.

...

Also there are people who, although separate persons, are aspects of the one individuality. For instance, my medium, his wife and myself are parts of one individual. So you can have facets of the one guide. You can call these extensions if you like, but it comes to the same thing. Only an infinitesimal part of the whole individuality can be manifested in physical form on earth."

"Beyond Human Personality"  was written by the spirit of F. W. H. Myers through the medium Geraldine Cummins.

IV Reincarnation
I Am quite clear that those human beings who live almost wholly in the physical sense while on earth, must be reborn in order that they may experience an intellectual and higher form of emotional life. In other words, those human beings I have described as "Animal-man" almost invariably reincarnate.

Some of the individuals I have designated by the term, "Soul-man," also choose to live again on earth. But metempsychosis does not involve a machine-like regularity of return. I have not noted any evidence of a continual progression of births and deaths for any one particular soul. I do not for a moment believe that the individual returns a hundred times or more to the earth. This is indeed, a wrong assumption. There may, of course, be certain exceptions which you are more likely to meet with among those primitive beings who seem incapable of aspiration - of desire to rise above their physical nature. But the majority of people only reincarnate two, three or four times. Though if they have some human purpose or plan to achieve they may return as many as eight or nine times. No arbitrary figure can be named. We are only fairly safe in concluding that, in the human form, they are not doomed to wander over the space of fifty, a hundred and more lives.

...

However, it is well to be agreed that, even if we run, the race of life on earth six times, we touch but on the fringe of human experience. We have obtained only a certain discipline. We have not plumbed the depths or scaled the heights of being; we have not covered all the space of human consciousness, of human feeling. Yet I can assure you that until we have harvested many times the fruits of lives spent on earth we shall not, save in exceptional cases, live on the higher planes beyond death.

It is not necessary for us to return to earth to gather into our granary this manifold variety of life and knowledge. We can reap, bind and bring much of it home by participating in the life of our group-soul. Many belong to it and these may spread themselves in their journeys over past, present and future. Indeed in the Group, we speak of the life of a man as a "journey." Very well. I have not, at any time, been a member of the yellow races, but there are souls in my Group who have known and lived that eastern life, and I may, and do, enter into every act and emotion in their past chronicles.

...

You will recognize how greatly power of will, mind and perception can be increased through your entry into the larger self. You continue to preserve your identity and your fundamental individuality. But you develop immensely in character and in spiritual force. You gather the wisdom of the ages, not through the continual "Sturm und Drang" of hundreds of years passed in the confinement of the crude physical body, you gather it through love which has a gravitational pull and draws you within the memories of those who are akin to your soul, however alien their bodies may have been when they were on earth.

...

A soul that, for the first time, enters a material body is, usually, related spiritually to some member of its Group and, so close is its relationship, it may take on the karma of the older soul. The latter has, perhaps, experienced four or five incarnations on earth. It is not yet wholly purified, has not gained all the terrestrial experience necessary to its spiritual evolution. It acquires it, however, in two ways: (1) through its entry into the group-memory, the conditions of which I have described: (2) through its psychic connection with a young soul which takes up the karma, takes on the pattern created by its previous earthly life or lives.