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How did you first find out about the idea of reincarnation,..........................

VikingGirlTBird

VikingGirlTBird

A True Viking/Medieval Person at my very heart!
How did you first find out about the idea of reincarnation, what really attracted you to the idea of reincarnation, and made you accept or really want to believe in the idea of reincarnation?

I first found out about the idea of reincarnation about when I was thirteen years old from a book I was reading about the spirits and ghosts of Virginia. What really attracted me to the idea of reincarnation is my really deep love of history and that the idea of reincarnation provides me of a way that I can actually live and experience daily life all through out history first hand (With out timemachines because there are not any timemachines unfortunately yet.), including daily life through out all of my favorite historical times first hand (Prehistory to Sixteenth Century but, especially the Viking Age and the Middle Ages.) in history. Even though the idea of reincarnation remains really controversial to me...I still really really want to believe in the idea of reincarnation because I really love history, the idea of living and experiencing history first hand all throughout my past lives, that reincarnation really explains why I really love certain historical times in history, and etc. Go reincarnation!!! :) ;)
 
I don't think I knew anything about reincarnation until I was 19. There was a story in the newspaper about a woman in Pennsylvania who was hypnotized by a friend for some problem she had. While she was hypnotized she spoke German, which she didn't know when awake. The friend recorded the session and then had a high school German teacher listen to it. The teacher said it was a little girl who was lost and looking for her mother. At the end of the story the article said it was like the "Bridey Murphy" case from the 1950's. I had never heard of Bridey Murphy but found a copy at a used book sale. That was the first of many, many books on reincarnation that I have read. But looking back I think there were a few things I knew at age 4 that a 4 year old wouldn't know.
 
The most I ever knew about reincarnation was misinformation until early 2014. What I did hear about it led me to believe that reincarnation insisted that one would come back as a bug or animal as retribution for mistakes. It was all very muddled.


Over 2012 and 2013 I spent a lot of time challenging the beliefs with which I was raised. I had been studying scientific research of the paranormal for years, which eventually led to Carol Bowman's articles as well as the other reincarnation research that has been going on. Once I read the case studies and realized that this is an ongoing world-wide phenomena, I had to test it for myself.


In January I meditated with an open mind to experiencing something past life related and over the following weeks had several very detailed, emotional, and convincing regressions, including one that was mirrored in all its primary details by my best friend. After that, I considered reincarnation to be the most probable explanation for my experience, though I am still open to alternate explanations. coffee
 
Hello VikingirlTbird... Welcome to the forum.


What a great question. I first learned of reincarnation as a teenager (I think) when a movie came out entitled "The Reincarnation of Peter Proud." It was somewhat controversial, at least in my world of conservative Christians. It was heresy. So, guess what... I HAD to see it! Those were my rebellious hippie years. Well, any way it made perfect sense to me. Thirty years later I'd lost the idea and its meaning. But a series of events in my own life led me to the only possible conclusion: that I was my great grandfather's soul. That is too long a story for here, but you can read about it in this thread. At that same time I was given a book by Dr. Brian Weiss, and from then on I was on a mad mission to learn every thing and anything I could. That's what brought me to this forum back in the old days:rolleyes:.


So for a recap: Learned about it from a movie plot, discovered my own past lives by tragic and powerful life circumstances, went to a past life regression doctor, and then read and devoured everything I could on the subject.


Blessing to you!


Tman
 
I was about six years old when I saw a commercial about a guy reincarnating into different animals/people. Poor guy kept on dying when all he wanted was a beer! LOL
 
Oddly, I had my plastic horses' world arranged on an essentially Eastern plan when I was quite small: if one horse got broken or lost, its 'soul' would enter the next horse that I obtained. Yet more surprisingly, in retrospect, there was one horse -- a wood-grain colored Clydesdale mare if memory serves -- who I thought had forgotten that her personality actually came from me. I thought that she was sadly misguided and separated from Truth, but that she would someday realize her mistake and return to the fold with me and my other more enlightened plastic horses. ;)


Thus, when my best friend's mother introduced me to "Autobiography of a Yogi" by Paramahansa Yogananda when I was in about 6th grade, it all felt quite familiar and fitting!
 
I am not sure. When I was a little child, I played a game with my cousins, where we would live for a while, then die, and then born again etc. When we died we went under the blanket, closed our eyes and layed still for a few seconds.


When I was about 10, I heard that my parents where talking about reincarnation. They didn't believe in it, but they had read about some celebrity who told about it. (Or perhaps they had seen a program, where somebody spoke of it, I'm not sure about that detail). Anyway, they only briefly mentioned it, but I thought that it made sense.
 
Good discussion! Really interesting responses on it here. Funny, we all start out in different places.

spacecase0 said:
I was raised with the idea that it was just part of reality
Click to expand...
Likewise. Well I guess we don't all start out so different LOL


My folks are spiritual and raised me thus, but as I grew it was up to me to find my own truth. I looked around through a few religions in my teenage years and kept on with my subscription to the concept of soul and reincarnation as a natural process. I was just a 'believer' for a while until I had enough experiences to really make it real for me, but even before those it seemed quite rational and I did look forward to finding out for myself. Good thing I was patient, after some time it did finally click and I haven't looked back since.
 
I was raised as a protestant believing in Heaven and Hell and Jesus being a g-d then I have met my Yoga teacher and my world has changed. He was teaching ab obscure form of mental Yoga called Agni Yoga, in which he managed to open our eyes about reincarnation and karma. He told us that Jesus was g-d just like any of us, can be. Told us about the meaning of Namaste, that g-d lives in each and every one of us and the purpose of all this is to learn and progress to become the best we can be, whereas each incarnation is a lesson and we better make the grade or we must repeat the class ;)
 
I was maybe about 10 or so and I was playing with a neighbor and he, out of the blue, asked me if I believed in reincarnation and who I thought I may have been in a past life.


At the time, I said I didn't know, but I would assume it'd be someone you knew a lot about. I guess that wasn't far off the mark. :D While specifically, I hadn't know who I was, I knew plenty about when and where they came from. Like most of us, I was obsessed with the time / place, which is a pretty strong indicator of a past life.
 
I had past life memories from a very young age, but I didn't know what it was and I thought everyone was the same. By the time I got to school I'd worked out that it wasn't normal and was a bit 'weird'. I was told it was my imagination and I accepted that.


Then I saw a movie with Barbara Streisand - On a clear day. It's about a woman who has past life memories. She goes to a psychiatrist to quit smoking, but when she's hypnotised, she remembers a past life. I got very excited about this, but had nobody to talk to about it. It came out in 1970, so I'd have been about 10 years old. I was secretly very pleased that maybe it wasn't just my imagination at all!


'>


Later, when I was in my teens I came across a book 'Life after life' by Raymond Moody. That's when I really began to understand that all this 'stuff' that kept popping into my head was not my imagination, but past life memories and I wasn't the only one and there was nothing wrong with me.
 
I was taking a Comparative Religions class in high school and on the chapter about Buddhism, Hindu where reincarnation is a mainstream belief.. Like something clicked all those years ago like...I was thinking back then (2009) that Maybe there is Something to this Reincarnation...


Fast Foreward to Early May 2014..and for some reason I overwhelmed my mind that day without really trying (I'm introverted and it happens sometimes). And that night...the dreams I had...well.. They were Something More then just Dreams..


So the next day I found this place and the rest is history wine**
 
I'm not sure. I do know that I figured if I did have a past life I thought I would have been an artist or a writer or something. I never gave it much thought though. I thought reincarnation was for children and lunatics. I figured all through my life ( until I remembered past lives ) that if I didn't remember it then it never happened.
 
I grew up in a very religious household. I got tired of the dark cloud of religious dogma that I didn't even really believe in hanging over my head, so stopped going to church. I went through a phase where I did a lot of research on certain religions, how they formed, and where their practices come from. At that time I wouldn't call myself an atheist, but I was very skeptical about a lot of things. About a decade ago I started to seek out my own spiritual path. I was looking for something higher than myself, I just didn't know what that was. I started to read spiritual concepts that were different from what I grew up with. Along the way I was reading a book and came across the notion of past lives affecting the present. This was an idea that was completely foreign to me. To think we lived anything other than the one precious life we have would be blasphemous in the house I grew up in. God gave you one life, you either go to heaven or hell, that was it.

Once I came across the idea of reincarnation, something clicked inside me. I was hooked. I started seeking books and came across the work of Dr. Brian Weiss. I devoured everything he wrote. It all seemed very credible. What made it more fascinating is how it affected his patients in their current life. Then I started finding books written by Dr. Michael Newton. My interest deepened. Finally I started to learn about the work of Dr. Ian Stevenson. Wow, real world research backed by real world facts. This wasn't fantasy stuff.

One day I couldn't take it anymore and wanted to do a regression. I didn't have access to any professionals so I used recordings from YouTube. The results were immediate. I remember hearing that in a regression you're going to feel like you're making it up. Don't judge it, don't try to analyze or rationalize it. Just let whatever comes come. You can always analyze it later. That's exactly what I did, though I have to admit I DID feel like I made it all up. However, when I started to research the details later I found out that so many of the details I 'remembered' were real! I was stunned. This was not stuff that I knew prior. They felt like things that were just bubbling up out of my imagination, but they weren't imagination at all. I was both excited and scared at the same time. My mind was blown and I wanted to talk about what I had experienced, but who? Who could I tell that wasn't going to think I was a crazy person?

I started hunting online. I began messaging someone on YouTube that specializes in past lives. She did respond to me, but I quickly realized she was looking to add me as a client, i.e. pay her. That's fine, it's her business and she doesn't want to work for free. I get it, but that wasn't going to work for me. I dug further and that lead me to this forum. It was such a relief to find a community that understood and was interested in what I had to say. I found out I wasn't alone and I was grateful for that. I've been on a hiatus for quite some time, but it's nice to see the community is still active.
 
I was introduced to reincarnation at school in my religious studies classes. When I was younger I didn't have any interest in it at all, in fact I found the lessons boring. My parents weren't religious or spiritual so they never taught me about it.
When I was around 12 years old I started having memories from past lives, however since at the time I didn't believe in reincarnation, I just assumed they were from this life.
When I was around 13 I started to consider the idea of reincarnation, and after researching it I started to believe.
 
I wasn't raised with the idea.I didn't think about it until I was about 23 actually.I feel like it found me rather than me finding it! I had always had this weird habit of pointing my toes and putting my feet in certain positions.When I was really young I stood all the way up on my toes once.My parents couldnt figure out how I got that much strength in my feet! I don't do it all the time, but every once in a while it seems like I'm imitating ballet moves.I knew there was nowhere that I learned that.It was like an instinct! That was my first experience with something coming from another life and since then it's just kept happening with other things!
 
I had a cursory knowledge of reincarnation since I was young, I did and still have a keen interest in ghost and other unexplained phenomenon, reincarnation would come across my eyes every so often with a story here and there, and my mother would always comment, and still does, about how I look exactly, and acted like(when I was a kid) her grandmother and I would always jokingly say back to her; maybe i'm her reincarnation, I also had a recurring dream of me as a woman all in white, having her throat slit open in sacrifice, I could feel every emotion, every inch of the blade and the blood pouring out, my vision dimmed, and either the man who cut my throat, or something else, said that this is a waste, I was very scared and questioned what I did before completely blacking out then i'd wake up grasping my neck feeling like it was still cut, would explain my flinch when someone comes near that area of my body, so I thought maybe that's a past life and did not think much on that subject afterwards.
Basically my thoughts on rebirth was: if reincarnation exists then yeah i'd like to give this world another go, but hey, if it's just black nothingness, I won't remember a thing so what would it matter lol
I only really got into the subject recently when I did research for a story idea about a little girl recalling her past life as a legendary person who died a few years before. I could not just toss aside all the verified stories I read during the research, it was overwhelming to me to say the least, after asking myself some very important questions I became a firm believer.
 
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