How do people claim to remember past lives?
People can be presented with what appear to be past life memories in a variety of different ways.
Spontaneous recall
Especially with small children, memories simple appear to surface from nowhere. Some describe the process as being like a ”waking dream”. Images and scenes may come to mind and the subject may often find themself as a participant in the memory, though often they report feeling somehow different in the memory from their current self. Although it might seem like a daydream, the subject is often surprised by the unexpected nature of the experience and it can also be very intense.
Triggered recall
The memory is experienced in the same way “waking dream” fashion as with spontaneous recall, but it is triggered by an event of some kind. This event may be anything which appears to remind the subject of a key part of the memory – for example a particular smell, the sight of an object, a noise, hearing a particular word or phrase, a taste or being in a particular physical setting.
Dreams
Sometimes people have recurring dreams which do not seem at all to be the usual surreal type of dreams, but which have recurring scenes which seem strangely real. The vividness can vary from a dream which is thought-provoking to one which leaves the subject in a cold sweat or in tears.
Hypnosis
Hypnosis has been used for decades as a tool for trying to discover past life memories. Even though it has been studied for at least 150 years, little is understood about the actual process by which humans can be hypnotised. The effect of hypnosis is to put the subject into a trance state where they essentially put themselves under the practitioner’s instruction. The main advantage with this method for gleaning distant memories is that the subject’s mind can be focused extremely sharply under trance, to the extent that the mind can be made oblivious to sensations of pain in the body.
Hypnosis is used for many different reasons, e.g. by police investigators trying to glean extra pieces of information from witnesses or by people trying to rid themselves of smoking habits or eating disorders. Occasionally it has also been used effectively in the place of surgical anaesthesia.
Unfortunately as with many things, the results vary greatly from person to person, with some people being very difficult to put under hypnosis while others can be put into very deep trances indeed. With respect to past life regressions, here too results vary greatly. Some people can have session after session without getting any significant results, while others can unleash a torrent of information the first time they go under.
Naturally one important prerequisite is having an experienced practitioner who can guide the session responsibly and try to ensure the subject answers all questions as honestly as possible.
o IARRT Directory of Professional Members – an international index of members of the International Association for Regression Research and Therapies. Profound meditation Profound meditation is said to be able to give some subjects spontaneous memories which appear to be from past lives. Once profound meditative states can be achieved, the effect is similar to being under hypnosis, except that there is no strong external influence over the subject. The difficulty of this approach is that is can take years of intense meditation in order to perfect a particularly deep trance and even then there are no guarantees. Having said this, people who experience past life flashbacks or fleeting memories often appear to have a head start in this area, and can obtain results fairly quickly if they persevere.
It is worth noting that for thousands of years it has been the single most common method used by people of all religions or philosophies in order to gain mystical insights.
http://www.geocities.com/richard_holmes/reincarnation/faq.htm#e
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