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Reincarnation & Genetic Memory

Lightning-Nl

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Nov 11, 2012
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What are peoples opinions of reincarnation?

I ask because I could swear that I've lived multiple lives. I have memories that don't fit in anywhere in my life and I'm starting to wonder if they're residual memories from past lives; or perhaps genetic memories. That doesn't sound unreasonable does it?

Does anyone believe that you can inherit memories from parents, or perhaps even farther back than that?

I'd love to hear peoples thoughts. Thanks guys!
 
I'm not sure what I think about it honestly. Over the course of my life and as a result of my experiences and intuition, I currently believe that our lives exist in isolation. We are the universe experiencing itself from an infinity of perspectives across time and space in one infinite moment. When we die, that individual perspective is no more. I don't think we live a chain of lives and eventually ascend or something. This is how it seems to me. I think that we have all of the information there is theoretically available to us, I have accessed information outside of the scope of myself before. But it's not our normal state to have access to information outside of our individuated selves.

However I'm not closed off to the idea that we could carry genetic memories of our ancestors, or even that I could be wrong and we do live a successive chain of lives. I have experienced what seemed to be a ghost before. I know people who I trust to be telling me the truth having experienced visitation from recently dead relatives. So I'm not certain of my beliefs by any means.

It doesn't sound unreasonable, no. Although we are perfectly capable of inventing memories, we're actually quite good at it.
 
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woah


the universe experiencing itself just now made sense to me

given that we're all made of the same atoms created billions of years ago

holy shit

matter organized itself in a fashion that we can observe something that can't observe itself 8o but in a sense, it is observing itself ;), and our consciousness is still bound to the laws that exist :\, but don't know what they are doing 8(, and that we do know what they are doing (sorta) %), and that we're describing it :D, so the universe is describing itself :sus:

one day my atoms will disperse, like the ones that construct my neurons and stuff :?

why don't I do amphetamines more often holy shit why am I happy right now

EDIT: I'm so sorry I just realized I didn't talk about reincarnation. I don't know if it could happen in a spiritual sense, maybe in some weird systems theory physical sense.

I'm gonna go now. I'm so stupid.
 
Haha, I definitely wouldn't say you're stupid Nix. Glad it made sense to you though, took some mushrooms for it to make sense to me, long ago. I was probably about your age.
 
Stanislav Grof is one of the world's foremost researchers of non-ordinary states of consciousness. He is one of the founders of transpersonal psychology. Dr. Grof is the author of numerous books, and his latest, "When the Impossible Happens", presents a firsthand account of inquiry into such topics as survival of consciousness after death, synchronicities, reincarnation, and remembering birth and prenatal life. Dr. Grof lives in Mill Valley, California, and is a professor of psychology at the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco. Here he speaks briefly with Janice & Dennis Hughes about reincarnation.

Q:
You write a lot about reincarnation in your current book.

Grof:
Yes, I have a significant chapter in the book entitled "Have We Lived Before?" This is something that came up a lot when we worked with psychedelics. It's a very common, very important category of human experiences.

Q: Do you think past life memories are a result of people having actually lived previous lives or could they relate to tapping into the collective consciousness?

Grof:
Past life memories are experiences that often happened in other centuries and frequently in other countries that we know nothing about. And so in that sense, it comes from the collective unconscious. But does this prove that we have lived before as a separate unit of consciousness? I would have to say no. It's a very good hypothesis that explains certain observations, but it is still a hypothesis, and there's always more than one to explain the facts. In the history of humanity, there have been incorrect hypotheses to explain observations, such as Aristotle who believed that the earth was the center of the universe.

Reincarnation is our hypothesis to explain the characteristics of past life experiences that have been verified as fact, with clear information about certain cultures and historical periods. And these experiences also seem to be connected to various forms of emotional and psychosomatic disorders. Those are all facts that anybody who is open-minded and interested can verify by their own research. But that's not necessarily proof that we have lived before. Even in India, the cradle of ideas about reincarnation and karma, this would be considered a very low-level, popular explanation of these kinds of experiences. The high level spiritual teachings of India will tell you that there's only one entity that ever incarnates, which is Brahma. The whole universe is just one being that assumes these different roles--the split units of Brahma take on autonomous identities. So the experience of being separate is an illusion; we are all manifestations of the same being.

Past life experiences are among the most common phenomena in non-ordinary states of consciousness. They have occurred with extraordinary frequency in psychedelic sessions of my clients, and in the course of spontaneous psychospiritual crises (“spiritual emergencies”) of the people we have worked with. This happened in spite of the fact that I initially did not take the idea of reincarnation and karma seriously and saw it as a product of wishful fantasy of people who could not accept the grim reality of impermanence and death. In addition, these experiences were contrary to the beliefs of the culture I grew up in, since the concept of reincarnation is rejected both by mainstream science and by the theologians of our dominant religion. It is one of the rare issues about which materialistic science and Christianity are in agreement.

These karmic sequences typically took the individuals involved to some emotionally highly charged situations that were taking place in various countries of the world and different historical periods, both recent and remote. The content of these experiences usually came as a complete surprise and, yet, they were accompanied with a strange feeling of déjà vu. There also typically was a deep connection between the protagonists and events in these experiences and the individuals’ present lives.

I soon became aware of the fact that past life experiences had many characteristics that made it difficult to dismiss them as childish fantasies. They occurred on the same continuum with accurate memories from adolescence, childhood, infancy, birth, and intrauterine existence, phenomena that could often be reliably verified. They were also often intimately connected with the individuals’ emotional and psychosomatic symptoms and with important issues and circumstances in their present life. When karmic sequences emerged fully into consciousness, they frequently brought illuminating insights into various previously incomprehensible and puzzling aspects of everyday existence of the persons involved.

This included a wide variety of psychological problems and interpersonal issues for which traditional schools of psychotherapy failed to provide adequate explanation. I also witnessed repeatedly that past life experiences led not only to intellectual understanding, but also alleviation or complete disappearance of various difficult emotional and psychosomatic symptoms, as well as resolution of conflicts in relationships with other people. In addition, like the earlier mentioned ancestral, racial, and collective memories, past life experiences often provided accurate insights into the time and culture involved. In many instances the nature and quality of this information made it unlikely that these people could have acquired it through the conventional channels.

 
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I think it's more complicated than we can really understand, and maybe that's by design. I strongly believe and suspect that genetic/ancestral memory is a thing. We are living out ancestral crap all the time, in our bodies, personalities, experiences, etc. You could call this ancestral karma, to coin a term. Epigenetics is a fascinating field of study that has metaphysical applications. It turns out our DNA is not so fixed. It's constantly changing... by viruses, environmental stimulus, stress, all kinds of things. The Russian research shows that it may even be responsive to consciousness. So I think that what our ancestors experienced can certainly be experienced by us, in a materialistic way. We are running life programs that we think are of our own free will but really a lot of them have played out repeatedly over the centuries by our lineages. I look at my own living family and see this. I also know that much of it can be worked on and changed over time, maybe not all in my lifetime, but it starts here. I have this odd sensation that every time I heal something ancestral, it retroactively helps the people who came before me. Doesn't make sense really, not in a linear pathway anyway. And it makes me wonder if my ascendants are doing work in the future that's helping me now. Who knows.

I believe in reincarnation co-existing with mass consciousness. We are living out resonant experiences from the general human field, as well as individuated lesson plans. But they all integrate seamlessly, such that it's difficult to meaningfully separate it. It's a very large and complex eco-system. I recognize the past life flashbacks due to their manifestation in the body -- usually root or sacral in tandem with the crown. The mass consciousness stuff is a lot more subtle because of how diffuse it is, and it takes place over a much, much longer time frame... hundreds if not thousands of years. Recognizing one's own limitations in relationship to the current consciousness limitations of the species takes years of observation and I honestly don't think it can ever be fully ascertained. Nor does it really matter, because whether or not you can distinguish it, it's already playing out in your day to day life.

The stuff that is only relevant to this life, to this particular self, I tend to experience through the solar plexus. If I'm going into a wound or entanglement that has to do with the learned experiences in my initial growth, I'll feel it there along with the accompanying emotional releases. The past life stuff feels more removed... like I am seeing it and feeling it, knowing that it has something to do with me, but it's not me. It has a dualistic quality because this particular body has never experienced it but a field phenomenon relating to this body has. And I can't ignore it. And it drops in really strongly, more so than a deja vu, more so than a dream that feels realer-than-real. And it always has a timely quality... like I need to remember this for a particular application in the present moment. This has been affirmed by some of the research I've read, about how past life memories tend to arise only in utility to present requirements. You don't just remember things willy nilly. They come up if/when they need to.
 
I've experienced a lot of childhood memory recall over the last year, most have been easily confirmed in speaking with family members and often they were mundane events that really hadn't become part of dinner conversations or become stories told for years onward so I was actually remembering them as opposed to building memories of events I'd heard about. Some of these memories are challenging to sort through as they have an added issue to them in that I seem to have memory of the event from multiple perspectives.

At first I assumed I'd built these memories from some random retelling I'd heard from other people and simply added their shared story to my memory and somehow lost the defining line between what I was hearing and what I had experienced. I'm a skeptic at heart so I shared very little and simply accepted that my memory was probably being actively re-written as I was pulling up these old memories and looking at them again. We know that memories do change over time so having accurate retrieval of memories prior to walking seemed like a fantasy to me. recently though I've remembered events that included people that had died and I can see these events from their perspective, trivial events where they were simply present yet I have a visual memory from their perspective including some emotional elements.

I remembered this while looking backward at why I had developed specific habitual traits when dealing with people. They may be considered as tells in poker except for me they were facial expressions I had learned to use to alter peoples modes. If you've ever been told you have an amazing smile or you light up when you laugh it is that kind of expression I was trying to see where I had first started using it to derail other peoples negative emotional states. I have always used a smile as a simple wedge past negative situations but I also use it when I'm caught with my hand in the cookie jar. In looking back at memories I wanted to see when I first started using the 'smile when you're caught' trick. I found it and it was prior to walking and talking but the memory comes with other peoples conversations and I seem to understand what they are talking about in the memory. The difficult part is a now dead relative that was there at the time and I see this event from their perspective as well and feel a negative emotion directed at my father for not disciplining me. Because I was using a fetching childhood smile and laugh I wanted to avoid discipline. I was picking small pieces of cracked coating off his slippers and putting them in my mouth to taste them while he wasn't noticing. He saw it and quickly shoved his finger in my mouth to get these little pieces of cracked plastic (I think it was plastic) out. His fingers were huge and tasted bad and I was going to cry because he looked angry and in panic, I liked the taste of the plastic bits and he wasn't getting one of them out and didn't know it was there, I reached in and took it out to give it to him and tried to smile and laugh because I wanted him to stop putting his finger in my mouth. It worked and he laughed and explained what had happened to the others in the room and they all laughed about it then.

Where do I get a memory that is not my own of an event that involved me? I'm skeptical of my memory not because it is flawed or vague because it really isn't either, I'm skeptical because it seems insane. I thought I would post it here despite my intellectual self critic saying it would be a shorter post to just say "Hi I'm crazy" and avoid the story. Maybe there is some level of shared memory also built and I don't want to dismiss anything out of hand anymore. If I can't find a definitive reason things can't be 'so', I'm willing at least to allow for the possibility. I pass for completely normal in society with a very skeptical approach to everything, I've been fooled by so many of societies various controlling groups I no longer doubt myself in any regard until I can prove I'm wrong (religions taught me to ignore the judgement of others). Hopefully posting here will get a response that sheds light on mental gymnastics I might just be pulling in my own head to contrive these memories. There are many and they almost all carry 3rd party observation and often 3rd party emotion or thought.
 
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