by Mark Pitstick MA, DC
If you’ve not already, please read . . .
- ‘The Great News‘ (article #19 at SoulProof.com/Articles)
- ‘Eight Developments for Widespread Conscious Living Now’ (#125)
- Greater Reality LIVING Program: Integrating ‘The 8 Developments’ Into Your Daily Life (#72)
- Greater Reality HEALING Program: Journeying FROM Deeply Grieving TO Brightly Shining (#82)
The evidence-based information and holistic resources outlined in these articles will help you to:
- realize your true nature as an eternal being of consciousness / life-force / energy
- receive guidance and assistance from highly evolved energies and Source / The Light
- heal old wounds, release lower energies, and update erroneous teachings
- create the greatest life YOU have envisioned (YOU = your higher self / soul)
- help others by sharing your greatest gifts
- make our world a better place
As enough people do this, widespread personal and planetary change will naturally unfold.
Reincarnation / Cyclical Life Experiences
Four prominent men believed in the concept of reincarnation. It just made sense, they said, and explained many mysteries of life. It seemed to be part of a universal plan that conserves energy and knowledge from one lifetime into another. They believed that never-ending, but periodically changing, lifetimes would assist soul growth. These men found that model to be a guiding light in their lifetimes. They are highly respected in American history, but you may not have known about their beliefs. Who were they? Benjamin Franklin, Henry Ford, Thomas Edison, and General George Patton.
Reincarnation is the theory that we experience not just one, but many lives in the course of eternity. Although this concept may seem strange or foreign to some people, it answers questions that people of all ages have wondered about.
When I was ten years old, I sat in church and looked through its stained-glass windows while the minister talked about heaven. “One day,” he said, “we will all walk on golden streets and play golden harps forever.” Even at that young age, I thought: “Wouldn’t that get old after a while?”
Think about it with an open mind for just a moment. How long could you play a harp — even a golden one — before you would be ready for a piano, guitar, or even an accordion? Novelty and challenges make life more interesting and rewarding. A concept of never-ending, but sometimes changing, life experiences successfully addresses many questions.
Once a word has become well established in a culture, it is difficult or impossible to change its intrinsic meaning. I use various synonyms for ‘God’ and ‘soul’ because those words have such firmly entrenched and limiting meanings. The same challenge exists for the word ‘reincarnation’; it isn’t ideal for several reasons:
- Some people associate the word reincarnation with the occult or cults. That term can negatively trigger those with conservative religious beliefs and those who haven’t researched the topic for themselves.
- It implies a linear series of interrupted lives, deaths, and rebirths. But some evidence suggests life is a seamless series of experiences amidst eternity.
- The model of reincarnation suggests that we experience being different people in chronological order and separate places. However, some evidence suggests otherwise. For example, evidence for parallel or simultaneous realities indicates that your energy does not have to manifest in just one place at a time.Part of it energizes your current physical body, but another part might be experiencing other formed or formless possibilities. In addition, part of your consciousness might never have left Home / Source. From this vantage point – as the old children’s song suggests – life is but a dream. Reality may be more accurately understood as a series of virtual reality experiences as your energy visits other times and places.
As such, I will alternately use the following word combinations as synonyms for reincarnation: cyclical lifetimes, multiple lives, varying life experiences, and never-ending but periodically changing lifetimes.
Before examining the evidence for this view of reality, let’s discuss three common models about the nature of life.
Model A: If you are like many people in western cultures, you were taught that your life started with an earthly birth date. Your time on this planet can last from a few minutes to many years, and then you die. Then a long sleep in the ground until some judgment day, or an instant visit to the pearly gates. Finally, a judgmental God consigns you to heavenly delight or burning torment forever.
This model is full of problems. For example, how fair is it that your brief earthly experience determines your fate forever if you were: molested, raised by alcoholics, born a crack baby, influenced by atheists, struggled with mental illness, or had organic brain damage?
This model is a fairly bizarre one for even deranged humans to design. Are we really to believe that’s the best the Creator and Sustainer of All Life can do? This model didn’t make sense to me when I was a child, and it seems even stranger now. I consider this model to be a kindergarten understanding of reality.
Model B: The concept of varying life experiences throughout eternity makes more sense and is supported by contemporary evidence. A model of cyclical life experiences allows for the eventual evolution of all beings. We each have more than just this one earthly visit to learn and grow.
Reincarnation is a vast improvement over the conventional teachings of model A. To extend the analogy, model B is like a high school understanding of reality.
However, this model appears to be only relatively true because it implies dualism and all that goes with that. Richard Bach’s character in Running from Safety perhaps said it best:
“Do you believe in reincarnation?”
“No. Reincarnation is a series of lifetimes, isn’t it, one after the other, in order, on this planet? That feels a little limiting, it fits a little tight across the shoulders.”
“What fits you better?”
“An infinite number of beliefs of life experiences, please, some in bodies, some not; some on planets, some not; all of them simultaneous because there is no such thing as time, none of them real because there’s only one Life.”
Model C: This most accurate description of reality indicates that life is an uninterrupted series of experiences throughout infinity. All life is seen as sacredly interconnected with outward differences being trivial and transient. Ultimately, life is an eternal dance of energy as Creative Mind alternately manifests Itself. Each seemingly separate aspect of consciousness is like a single cell within One Mind. New scenarios and adventures are endlessly created as Life discovers its fullness.
In this model, physical death is not viewed as the beginning of a long sleep. Life is seen as an uninterrupted process as death opens new doors into the next phase of forever. Time and space are understood as being only relatively, not absolutely, real.
For those who are awakened to the big picture of life, death can be especially seamless – like walking from one room into another. Birth and death are realized to be no big deal, just commas amidst a never-ending sentence. We can best reveal our inner light and special talents when we realize our real selves are birthless and deathless. This is like a graduate school level of understanding reality.
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How can you rise above your kindergarten and high school levels of understanding? What will help you remember the grad school level insights and live accordingly? Everyone is unique but the following are a great start . . .
- Learn the evidence that life continues after bodily death (articles #1 and 60)
- Develop a big picture view of of life (article #68)
- Expand your evolved relationships and spiritual support (article #66)
- Optimally care for the temple of your soul (articles #12, 51, 87, 87, 88, etc.)
Past Life Regressions
Hypnotically induced past life regressions (PLRs) explore the possibility of you being in other times and places. Deep relaxation facilitates a calm but clear state of mind and less mental chatter. Quieting the brain’s frenetic analysis can enhance awareness of information not usually accessible in the waking state.
To skeptics who charge that PLR subjects are deliberately lying about their experiences, Edith Fiore PhD, author of You Have Been Here Before, responded: “If so, most should be nominated for Academy awards. I have listened to and watched people in past-life regressions under hypnosis for thousands of hours. I am convinced there is no deliberate, nor conscious attempt to deceive. The tears, shaking, flinching, smiling, gasping for breath, groaning, sweating and other physical manifestations are all too real.”
Brian Weiss MD, author of Messages from the Masters and other books, has received thousands of phone calls and letters from psychiatrists, psychologists, and other therapists who have done past life regressions for up to twenty years. Dr. Weiss states, “The letters describe detailed accounts of past-life recall, of patients recalling names, dates, and details of lifetimes in other cities, countries or continents. Some patients have found their ‘old’ names in the official records of places they have never even heard of, let alone visited, in this lifetime. Some have found their own tombstones.”
As described in Reliving Past Lives, Helen Wambach PhD evaluated over a thousand cases of detailed past lives and stated: “I reasoned that if past-life recall were fantasy, my subjects would include material in their regressions that I could prove could not have been true. They might have seen anachronisms of one kind or another — clothing and architecture that were completely wrong for the time period and place they had chosen — or a climate and landscape that would not match the map they flashed on. To my surprise, I found only eleven data sheets out of the 1,088 I had collected that showed clear evidence of discrepancies.”
Wambach analyzed these accumulated past life recollections and compared them for historical accuracy in the areas of social class, race, gender, clothing, diet, population ratios, and causes of death in particular time periods. For example, she found that 49 percent of past lives were lived as women, while 51 percent were those of men — what one would expect in a random distribution, not a hoax. She concluded, “All the data described in this chapter tended to support the hypothesis that past-life recall accurately reflects the real past rather than that it represents common fantasies.”
She also found that the number of lives reported around 1600 A.D. was twice that reported around 400 A.D. This number doubled once more around 1850, mirroring the actual increase in the world’s population. It is difficult, if not impossible, to believe that a group of randomly selected participants in past-life regressions could have co-coordinated their efforts to pull off such a colossal statistical hoax.
Joel Whitton MD, PhD was a professor of psychiatry at the University of Toronto Medical School and co-author with Joe Fisher of Life Between Life. They related Whitton’s clinical work with a client named Harold who, when hypnotized, described a former life as a Viking raider. Although he had never studied a foreign language in his life, the man spoke comfortably and confidently in a strange tongue that experts identified as ancient Norse.
Working independently, linguists who spoke Icelandic and Norwegian identified and translated some of these words. Several other words seemed to have a Russian, Serbian or Slavic derivation and these were also identified. One language expert stated, “It would be appropriate for a Viking to speak a language which contained words and phrases of other tongues in that period. I would say this could fit the language pattern of the roving Viking.”
During another past life recollection, Harold wrote what looked like a bunch of scribbles. The alphabet he used was identified by researchers as a long-extinct script used in Mesopotamia. That language bears no relation to modern Persian and hasn’t been spoken for more than 1300 years. Of Harold’s past-life regression experiences, Dr. Whitton stated, “To me, the case remains one of the most convincing arguments I’ve seen for evidence of reincarnation.”
One final example of a PLR with validation features was provided by Dr. Weiss. Diane, an RN, had been looking without success for a soul mate relationship. During a past-life regression with Weiss, she recalled an earlier lifetime as a pioneer woman who hid with her baby from Indians. To keep the baby quiet, she covered his mouth with her hand. Her baby, who had a crescent shaped birthmark beneath his right shoulder, died as she accidentally asphyxiated him. Several months after this regression, she treated a man with asthma at her hospital job. Diane nearly fainted when, while listening to his lungs, she saw a crescent shaped birthmark below his right shoulder. Both experienced an instant familiarity and connection that led to dating and a happy marriage.
Dr. Ian Stevenson’s Research
The massive amount of objective research by Ian Stevenson MD is the most impressive reincarnation evidence to date. His books include Children Who Remember Previous Lives, Cases of the Reincarnation Type, Twenty Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation, Where Reincarnation and Biology Intersect, and Reincarnation and Biology. The world’s leading authority on the subject, Dr. Stevenson is the author of more than a dozen scholarly books and 250 articles.
Stevenson, who headed the department of psychiatry at the University of Virginia, spent most of his sixty-year career perfecting methods for verifying past life memories of children. His work is not better known because he writes for other academicians, a fact to which anyone who has read his books can attest.
He and his staff compiled over 3,000 cases from Asia, Europe, Africa and North America. Nearly 900 of these were stringently verified; 35 percent of them had birthmarks or birth defects that matched injuries from previous lives. Eighteen of these cases involved two or more matching birthmarks. Stevenson calculated the chances that two matching sets of birthmarks — from a purported past life and the present one — would randomly occur to be only 1 in 25,600 times. The odds against this happening by chance eighteen times are astronomical.
Stevenson’s stringent standards of research rely heavily on private and repeated interviews over time. He wrote a clinical textbook for psychiatrists based on methods used by attorneys to reconstruct past events as accurately as possible. Dr. Stevenson and his team investigated children who remembered possible past lives and their families, as well as the family and circumstances of the alleged past life. Given the exacting methods of these professional researchers, it was virtually impossible for anyone — especially third-world villagers — to conceal a hoax.
Here are three summaries of Stevenson’s cases:
- Parmod, a 3 ½ year-old boy from India, remembered owning a soda and bakery store in another town. Upon arriving in that town, he led his family directly to the shop. Parmod knew how to repair a complex soda machine that had been intentionally disconnected to test his memory.
- Michael, a 3 year-old from Texas, remembered exact details of a fatal auto accident in his previous life. His recollection, although no one in the family had ever told him about the incident, was that of his mother’s high school boyfriend who had died just as Michael described.
- At just 1 ½ years of age, Sukla of India cradled a toy and said it was her daughter Minu. During the next several years, she remembered more details of her past life and her family took her to that village. Sukla directed them to her former home and enjoyed a reunion with Minu, whose mother had died when she was a baby.
Jenny Wade PhD, author of Changes of Mind, noted parallels between perinatal memories and accounts by children about past lives. (‘Perinatal’ refers to time periods just before, during, and after human birth.) She viewed these as supporting an argument for consciousness independent of a physical body. Wade stated that Stevenson’s research withstood every serious challenge to date because of the impressive documentation and rigorous scientific methods used. Especially convincing, said Wade, was the high incidence of birthmarks and deformities in this life that corresponded to injuries in a former life.
Of these correlating birthmarks, John Algeo – author of Reincarnation Explored – commented: “For example, a child may remember having lived another life including enough details about it (names, places, events) to permit investigators to identify the earlier personality. That personality died from a gunshot wound, and medical or coroner’s records establish the location of the entering and exiting wound marks made by the fatal bullet. The child who remembers the earlier life has birthmarks on places that correspond to the wounds of the prior personality. Moreover, the birthmark corresponding to the exit wound is larger than the birthmark corresponding to the entry wound, just as the wounds themselves were, that being the normal pattern for bullet wounds. That is one type of case out of many involving birthmarks and defects.”
In Stevenson’s book Reincarnation and Biology — an eight pound, two volume work with 2,268 pages — photos showed rare birth marks or defects that correlate with previous lives. One Burmese girl, born with her right leg missing just below the knee, remembered the life of a poor teenage girl who sold roses to passengers at the railroad station. A train ran over her and severed her right leg. The girl made detailed statements and recognitions that convinced the family she was the reincarnation of the teenager who was killed by the train. She also had a marked phobia of trains.
Other examples of correlating birthmarks offering physical evidence of past lives include an Indian boy who recalled being killed by a shotgun blast to his chest. On this little boy’s chest was an array of birthmarks that matched the pattern and location of the fatal wounds as verified by the autopsy report. Another shotgun victim was hit at point-blank range on the right side of the head as confirmed from the hospital report. The Turkish boy who remembered this life was born with a malformed ear and an underdevelopment of the right side of his face.
One woman had three linear scar-like birthmarks on her back. As a child, she remembered being killed by three blows to her back with an ax. Another boy in India was born with stubs for fingers on only his right hand — an extremely rare condition. He remembered a past life when his fingers were cut off in a fodder chopping machine.
Regarding the evidence about birth marks and defects correlating with alleged past life injuries, Stevenson stated: “I accept reincarnation as the best explanation for a case only after I have excluded all others — normal and paranormal . . . I regard my contribution as that of presenting the evidence as clearly as I can. Each reader should study the evidence carefully — preferably in the monograph (Reincarnation and Biology) — and then reach his or her own conclusion.”
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I hope this article helps you consider the possibility that your earthly visit is just a fraction of experiences you can have over time. Read my book Soul Proof to learn more evidence that we have not just one but many cyclical life experiences.
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Thank you for telling others about this article! Your life, and that of others around you, will be more enriched when you:
- read the article again so you really know it.
- discuss with close family and friends to more deeply internalize it.
- take action steps that seem right for you.
- share it with others via social media, discussion groups, and other ways.
Hugs, love, blessings, and let it shine!
Mark
Mark Pitstick, MA, DC
author, lecturer, counselor, and holistic chiropractic physician; spokesperson, research assistant, and strategic planner for the SoulPhone Project; founder of Greater Reality Living, Healing, Helping, and Sharing Programs
SoulProof.com SoulPhone.org GreaterRealityPrograms.com
Mark Pitstick, MA, DC is a master’s clinical psychologist, holistic chiropractic physician, and clinical nutritionist. He has also helped others in pastoral counseling and suicide prevention / education settings. His goal is to help you know and show that this earthly experience is a totally safe, meaningful, and magnificent adventure amidst eternity.
To learn more about the Greater Reality LIVING, HEALING, HELPING, and SHARING Programs, visit ‘Greater Reality Programs’ top tab at SoulProof.com and SoulPhone.org. Also see articles #19, 72, 82, 119, 122, and 125 at SoulProof.com/Articles.
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Note: This article is intended as a reference source, not to replace professional treatment for physical, emotional, or mental problems. The author disclaims any liability arising directly or indirectly from the voluntary use of action steps discussed in article.
I created this article while ‘wearing the hat’ of a clinician, counselor, and educator. My statements are based upon some scientific research; much clinical and experiential evidence; my personal experiences; and my best current understandings. This program does not reflect my roles with the SoulPhone Project since those require solid scientific data for all statements.
