salyavin, I think both believing in God, reincarnation, etc and not believing has the same benefit: making a person feel secure as they navigate through life. What's fascinating to me is that some people feel better believing in God and other people feel better not believing. When I really think about it, I wonder how is that even possible?!
On Sunday, April 20, 2014 8:41 AM, salyavin808 <[email protected]> wrote: What sure-fire proof is all about for me regarding these reincarnation stories is simply making sure that the information the children hold cannot have been acquired any other way. If the Scottish boy was from a remote Hawaiian island with no TV I'd be more inclined to give his tale of life on a remote Scottish island credence but as it is, he might have been sitting in front of the TV when a tourist board film was on and the plane landing on the beach might have been strange enough to hold a child's attention and he wove it into daydreams. I know did similar, I can trace a lot of my early dreams and nightmares to images and landscapes from TV's Dr Who, but I didn't actually remember that's where it came from until I was 20 and brought some old videos for the nostalgia and recognised the things that used to obsess me when I was a kid, particularly being trapped in caves. I wanted to be a caveman because of it! Maybe, given the right circumstances, I could have developed it into a "past life" memory? But you don't know what people they might have met, or what influences they picked up from wherever these days and it gets hard to be sure that you have a "pure" subject. I've heard stories of children claiming they used to be married to someone who lived somewhere else, they sometimes provide enough details for researchers to go and check but there are more misses than hits. I think any decent hits at all would warrant a serious investigation but at best it isn't enough to convince an open-minded sceptic, but like the hospitals with odd things on high shelves to test for out-of-body experiences, it's good to take paranormal claims seriously and test them because you never know what they might reveal about the mind. Of course, the fact the information in these stories hasn't been acquired from parents or the environment doesn't prove reincarnation, but it might mean some other unusual phenomenon is taking place under certain circumstances. The collective unconscious or telepathy or even the Maharishi Effect. Can minds affect and influence each other at a distance? I still actually keep an open mind to it, but I don't believe it. I think it should be priority number one at MUM as they are one of the few groups that claim to be able to do something paranormal predictably, which is a major part of science. Nobody can have an OOBE yet, the TMO should be a step ahead in proving or disproving it. Regarding "siddhis", same conditions apply. If someone can levitate they'd have to do it in a controlled environment and let me pass a hoop over them. At least. It doesn't sound like that would have happened with the Rama guy. The energy part is interesting, I've never met anyone like him or Marshy, who people tell me had incredible personal energy, I would suspect first that your opinion or expectation of them had caused the subjective visions (let's call them). Again it may be some sort of telepathic or charisma triggered thing but we'll probably never know which, if any, because like all this stuff they aren't predictable unless someone wants to have a go at proving it in a lab. Sounds like a great time though! Regarding proof, I think it doesn't matter whether everyone accepts it or not, as long as it stands up in court, or makes a case no reasonable person could refute. People will always have their reasons to disbelieve but just believing otherwise isn't a disproof, you have to come up with a better explanation or at least show where science has gone wrong. Most of us just want to know things for the sake of it. In the case of the Rama levitation you may say that any interpretation I make is just me trying to fit it into my worldview. And you could be right, science only works if something is repeatable, reading about someone's experience and passing it off as something we already understand is fraught with obvious dangers, but is a good place to start the planning on how to test it for real.Just wish I was there, I haven't had my beliefs challenged seriously for a long time. I have had proper weird shit happen but I was usually on LSD so that isn't going to be a good start for convincing most people! ---In [email protected], <turquoiseb@...> wrote : Just to follow up, Salyavin, what would you feel constituted "sure-fire proof" of something like reincarnation, or siddhis being performed? I can speak to the latter somewhat, taking for example the siddhi of levitation. Video wouldn't do it, because 14-year-olds can hack video these days to make it look like whatever they want it to look like. "Demos" in front of large groups of people wouldn't cut it, because then the "it must have been mass hallucination" folks would come out with that doubt-dick swinging. One of the things I learned first from spending time with the Rama guy was that "proof" is overrated, as is the belief that it would mean anything to most people. I've sat in lecture halls with a guest who jumped in her seat and exclaimed loudly, "Oh my God, he's floating!" when Rama did his thing, but who the next day claimed she'd seen nothing. In her case, it was because she was a TB TMer, and it so severely challenged her world view to have seen something that supposedly isn't possible outside the TM movement in a room in the L.A. Convention Center. So she just chose to forget ever having seen it. I've seen other people do the same thing without the TM indoctrination; they just couldn't get past having seen what they considered to be the laws of nature being violated in front of their eyes, so they just metaphorically closed their eyes and pretended later not to have seen it. After having admitted at the time that they *had* seen it, that is...given a night or two to think about what "having seen it" would do to their world, they chose "not to have seen it." I think this would happen with pretty much any "sure-fire proof" you could think up. Those who wish to believe would believe, and those who wish not to believe would not. I mean, there are people on this planet who still believe firmly that humans have never set foot on the moon, and what could have *been* more "real-time documented" than that event? The funny thing from my point of view is that I suspect that viewing video of siddhis being performed wouldn't do diddleysquat for the people viewing it, *even if they believed it to be true*. The reason I feel this way is that there is an *energy* that accompanies the performance of siddhis, and I seriously doubt that this energy could be captured on video. The siddhi itself -- Big Whoop. Seen one, you've seen 'em all. But the *energy*?! THAT was transformative. Below I mentioned being "blown out of the water" in terms of having your current beliefs so challenged as to evaporate and go poof! Watching someone violate the supposed laws of gravity -- *in conjunction with that energy*, whatever it was -- was that kinda belief-challenging "new start" stuff, in spades. Unless you blot it out of your mind and pretend that you didn't see it (like the people I mentioned above), you're pretty much stuck with some serious Cognitive Dissonance for the rest of your life. The *easy path* is to pretend you didn't see it. The hard path is to accept that you really DID see it, even if you have no idea what "it" was. I saw what I saw, and experienced what I felt. I can't "go back" from that, and pretend that I didn't. I don't claim to "know" what those experiences were, but they were mine, and I own them. I don't try to sell them to others, but I own them. I'll spend the rest of my life trying to figure out what some of them were. But I can't feel badly about *any* of them, because they were a real E-ticket ride and they were transformative, and they gave me more "new starts" than I can count. ________________________________ From: TurquoiseBee <turquoiseb@...> To: "[email protected]" <[email protected]> Sent: Sunday, April 20, 2014 1:32 PM Subject: Re: [FairfieldLife] Re: What are the *benefits* of believing in God? From: salyavin808 <[email protected]> To: [email protected] Sent: Sunday, April 20, 2014 1:24 PM Subject: Re: [FairfieldLife] Re: What are the *benefits* of believing in God? ---In [email protected], <turquoiseb@...> wrote : Even though I happen to suspect that there may be something to the reincarnation thang, I see no need to provide "proof" of it because it's just a belief, and I don't much give a shit what others believe about my beliefs. As I've stated here several times, I won't know whether it's an accurate belief until I kick the bucket, and if the folks who believe that we just wink out like a light bulb turned off are right, I won't even be around to be disappointed. So I figure mine is a "no down sides" belief. That said, I would never presume to try to sell it to anyone else or feel the need to "defend" it. IT'S JUST A BELIEF. I think the world would be a better place if more people felt similarly about their beliefs. :-) I have no real sympathy for it but the stories of the children that do remember things are fascinating. The Scottish boy who thought he lived on an island was taken there and behaved very oddly when they took him into what he thought was his house. It was quite upsetting to watch. I can see why anyone would have a job doubting his story. Lots of people wanted to get all James Randi on it and that would probably be impossible given the unpredictability and rarity of the phenomenon, not to mention it being potentially unfair on a three year old. I always look for the ways in which things can't work but remain curious as it's one of those things that I'd take to be sure-fire proof that we don't know anything about what's going on here at all. And that would be cool indeed. Indeed. I simply cannot comprehend those who feel threatened when something challenges their beliefs. I've had things I had believed in blown out of the water so many times that I've actually come to enjoy it. Forget being reborn -- having to drop whatever you believed in before and start all over again is the real "new start."
