Mod+ 239. DR. JIM TUCKER COMPILES DATABASE OF PAST LIFE MEMORIES

Because they've never seen one and it's not reproducible. And you can reference many documented cases of fraud (e.g. the Fox sisters). That makes it easy to think that explains all cases. However if you look at people like Harry Price who spent a lifetime investigating them and who was also was a skilled conjurer who exposed many frauds (mediums and hauntings)--he actually believed the phenomena to be genuine. And I'm sure for good reason. It's still understandably hard to convince some people.

Cheers,
Bill
Reproducibility only proves that a phenomenon is not caused by consciousness. If a phenomenon is caused by a consciousness (like a ghost), then the ghost might get bored or impatient. It is also possible that some skeptics don't have the patience to wait for a spirit to produce phenomena. That's why ghost hunters have to sit through hundreds of hours of video to get a good piece of evidence. I also get the impression that close minded skeptics can never be satisfied.
 
As
There was a question, now deleted, about whether I thought everything has a spirit. I didn't have time to answer it earlier (I just finished writing two articles) but wanted to comment. With the original question gone, I'll just wing it.

My impression is that matter is held together by spirit. This would mean that, if true, everything has a "spirit", including what we refer to as inanimate objects. This is not a unique idea, as anyone who looks into Eastern mysticism will discover. How it works is a separate topic that I don't want to speculate on. As for hierarchies among spirits, again, I have no idea if there is a hierarchy or how it would work if there is. For all we know, a spirit incarnated as a human today might enjoy being a tree for a couple hundred years before coming back as a human. A related question is whether planets and galaxies have spirits. I have read books by mystics who claim this is the case. I would say it is possible, but beyond that have no opinion. If this sounds strange, think of how strange it sounds for materialists to claim there is no such thing as a spirit to guide our bodies in this world.

AP
As we generally know consciousness, it requires some kind of sense organs, at least in this 3 dimensional reality. That other types of life has a kind of consciousness has some validity. As in the secret life of plants. (Trippy 1979 film) <
Inanimate objects may have consciousness,however, it may not be as we can imagine.
 
I am intrigued by these testimonies, however I do have a few problems, as always.
Firstly, I see a pretty severe conflict with mediumship
Secondly, if humans reincarnate, why not animals, it seems rather arrogant to suggest that only humans 'survive'
Thirdly, I find this hard to reconcile with darwinian evolution, (although Myers and William James didn't seem to in developing their theory of mind)
Fourthly, and this is more related to survival in general, why should any part of us survive death if we go blank when we sleep?
Fifthly, people have been 'dead' for several hours and then reanimated, so that should suggest that consciousness is brain based

First, there is no contradiction between mediumship and reincarnation, because I do not know of cases where a medium has contacted a deceased while another human being has memories of the life of the deceased, it is true that some spirits of the deceased through mediums have claimed that there is no reincarnation , but it is rather that they do not know if reincarnation happens, so they can be wrong.

Second, I do not know anyone who claims that reincarnation occurs only in humans. The most likely is that all living beings reincarnate, only that we are only aware of some reincarnations within our own species.

Third, there is no logical contradiction between reincarnation and Darwinian evolution. The evolution of organic beings could happen in parallel with the evolution of spiritual beings.

Fourth, if when we sleep, we lose consciousness may be because the living brain represses our consciousness. Once dead the brain, our consciousness is not repressed; this is the filter hypothesis .

And fifth, that people have been "dead" and then reanimated and those people report having perceived events that occurred during their clinical death suggests that consciousness does not existencially depend of the brain.
 
Mediums are seemingly able to contact 'spirits' years afterwards, yet these reincarnation cases seem to show a pattern of 18 months to two years. This is why I swing towards super psi, because it offers a more parsimonious and solid explanation.

The evidence about children who seem to remember previous lives suggests that only people who die violently soon reincarnate, then can only few people reincarnate. The super psi hypothesis is not more parsimonious than the afterlife hypothesis because the afterlife hypothesis is the direct interpretation of the data, besides that in some mediumship cases the information provided is not a single living being which the super psi hypothesis requires an absurd complexity while information provided is entirely on the deceased being, which the afterlife hypothesis is more probable.
 
Second, I do not know anyone who claims that reincarnation occurs only in humans. The most likely is that all living beings reincarnate, only that we are only aware of some reincarnations within our own species.

I actually this misconception is due to skeptical ignorance and/or deliberate evasion. Growing up in a Hindu household, I was very surprised to see increasing human population as an argument against reincarnation. In the Hindu texts there's mention of distant worlds and possibly even universes, not to mention souls moving from animal to human and back.

Now that said, I think all the ideas about karma are mostly wrong. Assuming this stuff is real, and I think there's enough evidence to at least muse on the possibility, I personally believe ancient factions took the evidence of past lives and used the ignorance of others to create a caste system favorable to the ruling class.

Of course taking mysteries and manipulating people into following isn't relegated to believers. We see similar concern that materialist evangelists are doing that now.
 
I actually this misconception is due to skeptical ignorance and/or deliberate evasion. Growing up in a Hindu household, I was very surprised to see increasing human population as an argument against reincarnation. In the Hindu texts there's mention of distant worlds and possibly even universes, not to mention souls moving from animal to human and back.

Now that said, I think all the ideas about karma are mostly wrong. Assuming this stuff is real, and I think there's enough evidence to at least muse on the possibility, I personally believe ancient factions took the evidence of past lives and used the ignorance of others to create a caste system favorable to the ruling class.

Of course taking mysteries and manipulating people into following isn't relegated to believers. We see similar concern that materialist evangelists are doing that now.

The population boom is a stupid argument anyway. It presumes that more people have lived than are alive now, which is false. 100 billion humans have lived and died, and there are 7 billion now, so that's more than enough to make up the numbers if reincarnation is a real phenomena.
 
The population boom is a stupid argument anyway. It presumes that more people have lived than are alive now, which is false. 100 billion humans have lived and died, and there are 7 billion now, so that's more than enough to make up the numbers if reincarnation is a real phenomena.
What is relevant is not the total (100 billion), but the max number that lived at any one time. After all, don't you think that reincarnation is supposed to have started before the current generation?
 
What is relevant is not the total (100 billion), but the max number that lived at any one time. After all, don't you think that reincarnation is supposed to have started before the current generation?

But we don't know if everyone reincarnates immediately. Or even if everyone reincarnates. We have more reason to suspect reincarnation - if it exists - is limited to a subset of souls.
 
Well if consciousness is fundamental, and it expresses itself through brains, for instance, then it wouldn't matter how many 'souls' there are. The humans and all other living beings would simply be manifestations of this fundamental consciousness that would hold some memories of corporeal existence. I am not saying this is true at all, this is purely conjecture.
 
But we don't know if everyone reincarnates immediately. Or even if everyone reincarnates. We have more reason to suspect reincarnation - if it exists - is limited to a subset of souls.
According to some sources, there are spirits that not only have never incarnated as human, but have never incarnated on Earth or anywhere else. Some incarnate many times, some once, some never. However, the conversation about numbers is pointless if souls cannot be counted for comparison, and they can't be.

AP
 
According to some sources, there are spirits that not only have never incarnated as human, but have never incarnated on Earth or anywhere else. Some incarnate many times, some once, some never. However, the conversation about numbers is pointless if souls cannot be counted for comparison, and they can't be.

AP

I believe Bernardo once suggested that if dreamers have dream characters who can in turn dream, we could be talking about Mind starting from Unity only to divide & unify Consciousness like drops of mercury on a table.

So the idea of a 1-1 correspondence between souls and individuated conscious may not be the right way to think about things at all...
 
Bucky, forgive me for taking your post out of its original thread and putting into this one, but 1) I don't want to derail that other thread, and 2) it fits nicely here. I just did a little search on this and wanted to post what I found.

You are talking about the Ryan case in Jim Tucker's book.
Explain how a children of 5 can provide the detailed life events of an unknown, uncredited movie extra from the 40s that not even experts were able to identify. It required researchers multiple consultations with specialists of the field, and multiple trips to the library of the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences, to finally identify the actor.

I think it's pretty difficult to avoid the "anomaly". Be it an elaborate scam of two psychopaths (the parents) and their brainwashed child or, at the very minimum, a case of multiple psi instances.
I haven't read the book yet, but given that I have an interest and some knowledge in old movies, I thought I'd look into this a bit more.

This article summarizes the story. Ryan and his mother are flipping through a Hollywood film book, Ryan stops at a still from the 1930s Mae West movie Night after Night, and his mother doesn't recognize the faces of the six men in the picture but Ryan points to one of them. "Hey Mama," he said. "That's George. We did a picture together." His finger then shot over to a man on the right, wearing an overcoat and a scowl. "That guy's me. I found me!"

The mom then identified George as George Raft, but the other man she was not able to identity. (Just as an aside, George Raft himself was not an obscure actor; he was part of Warner Bros.'s stable of lead men in the 30s and 40s and is easily identifiable by movie fans of that era).

The story continues: Cyndi wrote Tucker, whom she found through her online research, and included the photo. Eventually it ended up in the hands of a film archivist, who, after weeks of research, confirmed the scowling man's name: Martin Martyn, an uncredited extra in the film.

This is the part I researched. His name is actually Marty Martyn, and his name is supplied as part of the cast of the film on the Internet Movie Database (playing the character Malloy). Now that doesn't mean he is credited in the film, someone could have found it out and put it there.

But then I googled and found that the film is available on youtube, and the actor IS credited.

See at 0:57.

Marty Martyn credit.jpg

So that is an incorrect fact. (Although, according to IMDB, this is his only appearance in a movie.)

This then also makes me a bit skeptical of the account that it took this film archivist "weeks of research", unless it just took him that long to locate the movie. But I see it's been available since 2006 on a Mae West DVD boxset. (Although Martyn plays one of the several unidentified thugs in a gang in this movie, so I can understand it may have taken some time to identify which character was which actor.)

Hopefully what I posted is not too pedantic, and it doesn't change my appreciation of the unexplainable findings in studies of children's memories of past lives, but I just wanted to clear this up.

EDIT: Marty Martyn's bio on IMDB:
Marty Martyn was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in 1903. His birth name was Morris Kolinsky, and he was the son of Ukrainian-born parents, Philip and Rebecca Kolinsky. His father operated a clothes press in a tailor shop. Marty grew up in Philadelphia before moving with his younger sister, Florence, to New York, where, under the name Marty Kolinsky, he once lived in a brownstone apartment building at 108 West 69th St. Working as a dancer, he appeared in a Broadway production called "Gay Paree" in 1925. He only appeared in one film, "Night After Night," which starred George Raft. Martyn may have had a line that was cut from the final film, which would explain why his name appears in the credits even though he has no apparent lines in the version that reached theaters. Frustrated as a performer, Martyn opened the Marty Martyn Agency and became a successful talent agent. Among his clients was Glenn Ford. He had four marriages, one biological daughter and five stepchildren. He died in hospital in 1964, while suffering from leukemia. Immediate cause of death was a cerebral hemorrhage. His widow, Margaret, was the niece of 20th Century-Fox president Spyros P. Skouras.
 
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Thanks Ian. Good point.
I went back to the book and checked. Tucker says that Marty Martyn is credited in the titles (pag 192), but they initially thought he was an uncredited extra.
The problem is they were not able to put a name to a face, that which Ryan had indicated from a scene in the movie. The consultant then wen to the library, searched for all available material about the movie and found a picture with a caption saying that the man in question was Marty Martyn playing "a racketeer called Malloy".

Tucker says there's not a single reference to that name, "Malloy", in the whole movie. So this got them confused for some time.
( I guess the name was probably used in the script but never mentioned in the movie? )

The story continues: Cyndi wrote Tucker, whom she found through her online research, and included the photo. Eventually it ended up in the hands of a film archivist, who, after weeks of research, confirmed the scowling man's name: Martin Martyn, an uncredited extra in the film.
This is not how Tucker reports it. This phase of the investigation was pretty quick. The producer of "The Unexplained" (the TV show documenting Ryan's case) hired a consultant (Kate Coe) to help with the identification of the unknown extra. Tucker doesn't mention "weeks of research". She pretty quickly suggested the man was an uncredited extra and then sent the picture to other colleagues who were not able to put a name to his face.

So after this first phase of consultation they just had a picture of a "guy in a hat", but no name and a incorrect assumption that he was uncredited. Later she went to the library of the Academy of Motion Picture, found the book with the picture and credits and got the name.

So the difficulty in finding the actor was mainly due to finding a reliable source that could associate faces to names for such an old movie.

Cheers
 
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Thanks Bucky. That makes sense. I looked through the scenes with the thugs in the movie, and yeah they don't speak or are not named, so I can understand it would have been a problem to match the faces with the actors' names. So it's the article that has reported it wrong.
 
I believe Bernardo once suggested that if dreamers have dream characters who can in turn dream, we could be talking about Mind starting from Unity only to divide & unify Consciousness like drops of mercury on a table.

So the idea of a 1-1 correspondence between souls and individuated conscious may not be the right way to think about things at all...
Thanks

can you elaborate a bit about bernardo kastrup's dream analogy ?

i'm french and it's very hard for me to understand him as i would like.

What happens to us after death according to Bernardo for example ?

Thanks
 
Thanks Bucky. That makes sense. I looked through the scenes with the thugs in the movie, and yeah they don't speak or are not named, so I can understand it would have been a problem to match the faces with the actors' names. So it's the article that has reported it wrong.
There is an interesting addition to this case that I don't think I have heard before.
@JKMac posted this link in another thread: http://www.today.com/news/return-life-how-some-children-have-memories-reincarnation-2D80550946

In the video Tucker reports that Ryan claimed his previous incarnation ended at age 61, while the death certificate reported Marty Martyn died at age 59.
It turned out the certificate was incorrect. Martyn did die at age 61.

I don't recall having read this detail in the book. I don't have it right now with me, so I can't check.

cheers
 
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There is an interesting addition to this case that I don't think I have heard before.
@JKMac posted this link in another thread: http://www.today.com/news/return-life-how-some-children-have-memories-reincarnation-2D80550946

In the video Tucker reports that Ryan claimed his previous incarnation ended at age 61, while the death certificate reported Marty Martyn died at age 59.
It turned out the certificate was incorrect. Martyn did die at age 61.

I don't recall having read this detail in the book. I don't have it right now with me, so I can't check.

cheers
That fits with the IMDB bio data I posted above: 1903-1964 (61 years old), so it may have already been known that that certificate was incorrect (?).
 
I can't tell, so that's why I qualified my statement.
Sure, but it's just idle speculation, One might equally write, the dates on the IMDB page may be based upon Jim Tucker's research. One's as fair as the other, but neither helps us to reach clarity over what actually occurred.
 
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