Buddhists believe that a person's soul is able to go through many incarnations - reincarnations, and, having died, we can be reborn in the body of another person. Proof of this allegedly are numerous cases when people remember the details of their "past" life. Recently, the theory of reincarnation has become popular in the West as well.
In the East, it is generally accepted that a child, into whose body the soul of a holy person has taken over, has mystical knowledge from infancy and remembers the previous incarnation. Tibetan lamas regularly find the baby in which the Buddha reincarnated.
They are looking for him according to some signs, known only to the initiated. According to eyewitnesses, a boy, just a few days old, is placed on the altar in the temple, and suddenly he sits in the lotus position and begins to speak in the voice of an adult man: “I am Buddha; I am his spirit, and I, your Dalai Lama, left my old body in the temple and chose the body of this baby as my next earthly abode."
Buddhist is not equal to vegetarian
To prove the truth of what was said, he gives the smallest details of his previous earthly existence.
But the same happens to ordinary mortals. A person, sometimes a child, suddenly begins to talk about his previous life in a different incarnation, names the relatives of his “predecessor”, reports details that could only be known to him …
A few years ago, a five-year-old Swedish woman, Ingrid Lund, declared herself … William Shakespeare! What is common between a little girl and the great English playwright of the Middle Ages? Ingrid knows all of Shakespeare's works by heart, and has also written several plays that, according to theater observers, are surprisingly reminiscent of Shakespeare's in language and style!
Promotional video:
Two of them are at the Ingmar Bergman Theater. In a conversation with reporters, the girl is by no means a childish reasoning about philosophy and reincarnation. “The soul goes through many incarnations,” she says.
- We are born again and again in other bodies in order to receive life lessons. Once my soul walked the Earth under the name of William Shakespeare. Now I am back as Ingrid Lund. In this life I am going to write many more plays than Shakespeare created in the late 16th and early 17th centuries."
It would seem that all this looks like nothing more than a cheap sensation. Nevertheless, many famous and authoritative people, scientists, thinkers believed in reincarnation, and some of them even claimed that they remember episodes from their "past lives."
So, the famous psychologist Carl Jung argued that from the age of 12 he seemed to live in two worlds - modernity and the distant past. Once he saw a portrait of a doctor, painted in the 18th century. The doctor was wearing boots with buckles. It seemed to Jung that he had once worn such boots. Moreover, the psychologist believed that he was born not in 1875, but in 1775.
During a trip to Nairobi, the professor caught the eye of a black man leaning on a spear. Immediately there was a feeling that he had already been here 2 thousand years ago and met this man!
One of the cases of such "deja-vu" was described by Leo Tolstoy in a letter to a friend. Once, while hunting, his horse stumbled and threw the rider to the ground. At the same moment, the writer remembered: this already happened to him 200 years ago, but then he was a different person with a different name and destiny …
A staunch supporter of reincarnation was the famed car tycoon Henry Ford. He believed that in one of his last incarnations he was a soldier and died in the Battle of Gettysburg.
From a scientific point of view, cases of "reincarnation" were investigated by the Canadian-American psychiatrist Ian Stevenson. He describes more than 2 thousand cases when people (primarily children aged 2-4 years) recalled facts from their "previous life", which later could be documented. Also, various congenital defects and birthmarks on the body of children examined by Stevenson often coincided with defects and injuries on the bodies of their "predecessors".
However, Stevenson's research was subsequently recognized as controversial, since many of the information presented in his works were not confirmed. For example, one of his main "heroes" was a certain Edward Rayel, who claimed to have lived in England in the 17th century under the name of the farmer John Fletcher. But in the parish books there was no such person, there was no information about his relatives.
According to the staff of the US National Science Foundation, the belief in reincarnation is nothing more than a delusion. All allegedly “proven” episodes of reincarnation are associated with so-called “false memories”, when a person “recalls” information imposed on him or received earlier from some sources as events of his own life, although in fact they have nothing to do with him.
Today there is not a single scientifically reliable fact that can be considered proof of reincarnation, American experts say.
