Reincarnation Cases

[Ninshub]

Changing their viewpoint, maybe - but eliminating their agony?

I guess it would depend on the person, and whether they're still in agony and kind, severity. I don't know.

Right at this moment I'm thinking of the NDE of that woman who got hid by an explosive device in Irak. During her NDE, she was with the souls who helped her perpetrate and plan this event, and they were laughing about it, and saying "What would happen if we did this to her instead?", etc. going through the possibilities, etc. It was play, like children almost. And coming back she has both perspectives. She has the perspective that it was play. But still has physical injuries (or had), and has PTSD that sometimes comes up where, like anybody else, she has a panic attack, and in that moment it's not fun at all. (Natalie Sudman's the name, she's got interviews up on Bob Olson's AfterlifeTV.)

[Ninshub]

You could also listen to or read Robert Schwartz, who interviewed mediums and channels who got into contact with the souls of sitters, or people in the spirit world they've lost, or spirit guides,with sitters who had gone through all the various kinds of challenges/tragedies of life (physical illness, blindness/deafness, addiction, death of a loved on, accidents, miscarriage, having to become a caregiver, abusive relationships, incest, adoption, poverty, suicide, rape - the second half of these, potentially tougher for us to understand would be "planned" uncruelly, is in his second book.)

[Laird]

Thanks for the refs, Ian. To be honest, "playing" with the potential injuries and suffering of a victim of an explosive device is something that seems abhorrent to me. You can choose whatever perspective you like, but suffering is suffering; pain is pain; and these hurt at the time and for as long as they are experienced. I can't "get" a perspective that reduces suffering and pain to "play". You know that I am a vegan - are the collaborating souls of the animals being mercilessly butchered in slaughterhouses all over the world "playing" with the different ways that their deaths might occur? "Hey, how about if we leave you partially conscious while you're butchered?" "Hahaha, yeah, let's do that to you, that'd be a lot of fun!" Seriously? It seems utterly lacking in compassion.

Re the video, I am at around 21 minutes in. I am skeptical (in the sense of doubting), but trying to listen with an open mind and answer any objections I might have for myself. I might or might not finish watching it, and might or might not respond afterwards, but please know that regardless, I appreciate you sharing it with me.

[Ninshub]

To be honest, "playing" with the potential injuries and suffering of a victim of an explosive device is something that seems abhorrent to me. You can choose whatever perspective you like, but suffering is suffering; pain is pain; and these hurt at the time and for as long as they are experienced.

Fair enough, Laird. Just to make sure I was clear, the NDEr herself was part of the planning. In her NDE, she could see herself and the other souls involved participating in the "play" (the word I used). Here's a quote from her I used before on Skeptiko:

From this environment it’s like I can see the whole scene of the blown up truck and everything going on down there and my body in that truck. I can see the injuries that I left this body with. So what we’re doing is we’re changing those.

This really good friend of mine with me here, we’re actually fooling around a lot. We’re like, okay, let’s lop off her right arm, and then we’d immediately see this whole lifetime of me with all the details; I’m trying to do everything with my left hand, and we thought that was hilarious. We’re falling down laughing. Or okay, let’s fix her head but let’s leave her with some brain damage so she can’t talk, and that’s funny to us in that environment. It’s not funny here, but it was hilarious from there.

We were choosing different possibilities and immediately seeing where those would lead, what kinds of experiences those injuries would offer, and how fun. It was very revealing and still continues to be revealing to me that I can go to that place and I can perceive my troubles and my difficulties through the healing process with a sense of humor. I mean it’s all hilarious. It’s all nothing to my whole self awareness.

http://www.afterlifetv.com/2013/08/09/ex...erience-2/

Do you think that knowing that such a perspective might exist would be of much comfort to a human in a human perspective imprisoned and tortured for decades as a sex slave? These things happen.

Laird:
Warning: This is going to get woo-woo, sorry.

But consider the possibility that this person who is a sex slave, "owned" a sex slave in some other incarnation. If, and I just say IF, this was true, is it possible that this person might benefit from seeing this experience from the opposite perspective? And consider the possibility that the owner of the sex slave that you just referred to, is very very very close to the person who is the sex slave in their "real life" (LBL), and is doing this, not out of some horrible motivation, but to help their very close friend (family really) learn something they strongly desire to learn.

I say this NOT to convince you this viewpoint is true, (that might not even be possible based on your own world view) but to show you that there is a consistent and logical thought process here, that is based on actual non-religious/non-dogmatic writings from actual people who claim that they have had the actual experience of LBL and remember it. Essentially those who have seen these things up close.

IF you could imagine for a few minutes that these channeled and other materials were true, you might imagine how this process of playing out scenarios might be intentional, and might be purposeful, and might be instructional, and therefore positive.

Again: this is less about convincing you, but more about explaining why reasonable people, people of good will, can and do believe that this is actually how things work. You may already know all this and if so, perhaps at least others who read it may be exposed to an alternative perspective...

I now give you back control of your non woo-woo tv set... (hopefully you are old enough to get the 60 's TV joke) 

Yeah, ppl chose the continue to overplay the importance of life in physical reality, only the experiences have value and, apparently, your spirit self, the True You, selects these experiences for reasons unknown to me and, frankly, none of my business.

I don't believe in any separate "true self". There are lots of CORTs in which the previous personality chose the parents of his next incarnation, or the subject remembers how he (not spirit self or true self etc.) chose his parents or was drawn to them.

I don't believe in any separate "true self". There are lots of CORTs in which the previous personality chose the parents of his next incarnation, or the subject remembers how he (not spirit self or true self etc.) chose his parents or was drawn to them.

snip- he subject remembers how he (not spirit self or true self etc.) chose his parents

I don't get what you mean. 

Why are you saying that the person remembers how "he (not spirit self or true self etc.) chose... " I don't understand how you are making this distinction.

Lets look at this- 
You say that "he" remembers how he chose his parents.  We can assume this was done during some non-physical period of existence right? I mean he did it before he was born right? 
 
So if this person said they remember making a choice like this, it would be during a non-physical period of existence right?

And being non-physical, the person would be therefore a "spirit" or "true" self. Right? 

So what are you saying here? How can a "person" existing in the non-physical be anything OTHER than a "spirit"?

snip- he subject remembers how he (not spirit self or true self etc.) chose his parents

I don't get what you mean. 

Why are you saying that the person remembers how "he (not spirit self or true self etc.) chose... " I don't understand how you are making this distinction.

Lets look at this- 
You say that "he" remembers how he chose his parents.  We can assume this was done during some non-physical period of existence right? I mean he did it before he was born right? 
 
So if this person said they remember making a choice like this, it would be during a non-physical period of existence right?

And being non-physical, the person would be therefore a "spirit" or "true" self. Right? 

So what are you saying here? How can a "person" existing in the non-physical be anything OTHER than a "spirit"?

It is always the same individual, same being, whether he is incarnate or discarnate. E.g. in this life I can decide, whether I'm going to visit my friends A and B in my hometown, or my friends C and D in another city. After my death I can decide whether I want to have couple AB or DC as my parents. It is always the same I that makes the decisions. There isn't any "true self" that decides something against my wishes. We are not some puppets whose strings are pulled by some mystical "true self" or "higher self".

A large body of evidence says there is an afterlife and there is reincarnation - these seem to be facts of existence. But the New Age belief system about LBL choices made by the self does not seem credible, at least if it is suggested that this "self" is something closely related to the human self. The reason for this is of course that humans would never wish to experience the horrendous things that regularly afflict humanity. One possibility is that the channellings and hypnotic state memories of life-between-lives choices (such as obtained by Michael Newton and others) are really mostly creative confabulations of the suggestible subconscious mind in response to conscious intention and to the therapist. Many if not most apparent past life memories elicited during hypnosis are probably from this sort of mechanism, which is the main reason Ian Stevenson didn't trust this sort of information in his research. The actual process leading to the very difficult human condition may not be discoverable, by intention of the powers that be.

It is always the same individual, same being, whether he is incarnate or discarnate. E.g. in this life I can decide, whether I'm going to visit my friends A and B in my hometown, or my friends C and D in another city. After my death I can decide whether I want to have couple AB or DC as my parents. It is always the same I that makes the decisions. There isn't any "true self" that decides something against my wishes. We are not some puppets whose strings are pulled by some mystical "true self" or "higher self".

Raimo:
Thought about it and I guess my root questions to get to the bottom of this are: 

Do you think you go to an afterlife when you die?
Do you think you stay there forever or do you live again?
If you live again, what happened to the old version of you?
And finally what happens the second time you die? Who are you in the afterlife? The first you or the second you?

The answers to these questions lead to the whole issue of: spirit-you vs real-you vs whatever-you...

Note- I'm not asking these questions to beat you up. I really think they contain the answer to the larger question.