Past-life 'memories'
One of the strangest aspects of the past-life memories phenomenon is the correspondence of birth marks or physical defects to memories of incidents from a past life. There are some extremely well documented cases. Here are a couple investigated by Ian Stevenson:
A boy in India born without fingers on his right hand remembered a life in which he had his fingers amputated after sticking them in a fodder chopping machine.
A boy named Maha Ram in India remembered being killed in a previous life with a shotgun fired at close range. Stevenson was able to identify the man killed and was able to obtain the autopsy report of the man supposedly reincarnated as Ram. It showed bullet wounds corresponding to birthmarks on Ram’s chest.
Stevenson investigated 210 such cases in all. As I say, they are extremely well-documented. He managed to get hold of a post-mortem report in 49 of those cases. They are extremely difficult to explain within the current scientific framework.
So what possible explanations are there? How can ‘memories’ – or more accurately, apparent memories or claimed memories – of incidents in a former life correspond to birth marks or physical defects? Even if we postulate reincarnation as an explanation for these ‘past-life memories’, it is still puzzling. What kind of causal link would there have to be between past-life wounds on the previous body and birthmarks or birth defects in the same place on the present body?
It may be that the effect is due to something like stigmata. There are well-documented reports of devout Christians developing wounds in the sides and nail-marks in the hands corresponding to Jesus’ wounds. Somehow the mind alone is capable of producing these physical effects . The devout Christian did not suffer on the cross. Empathy with the crucified Christ alone was sufficient to produce stigmatic nail marks on the hands and sides of the body.
Could ‘memories’ of a past life produce such effects even if they were false memories? It is conceivable . But remember, Stevenson’s research – and that of others – found that the claimed memories did indeed correspond to events in the lives of once-living persons down to fine detail in many cases.
Could a deep unconscious ‘imprint’ of a traumatic experience in a past life be capable of producing such an effect on the developing foetus? It is conceivable – but it would mean that memory exists outside the brain, as Sheldrake and others have postulated. It also presumes reincarnation exists in some form or another, a notion that many people find inconceivable – which it is, of course, within the current materialist mechanistic scientific framework of reality.
What else could produce the memories, if not reincarnation? One possibility is some aspect of the personality – of the deep unconscious – ‘tuning’ in to the past experiences of others born out of a deep-seated affinity or empathy. This would require a kind of morphic resonance that currently lies beyond the fringe of scientific acceptance – or something else that would make the accessing of past experience possible. It would certainly explain the phobia correspondence (past life memories often include incidents that seem to explain phobias in the present life) just as well as the reincarnation hypothesis. No doubt there are other explanations and we just haven’t thought of them. I have to admit (with some embarrassment) that the reincarnation hypothesis seems the best explanation if you just look at the data and disregard the obvious fact that it doesn’t fit into the current materialist paradigm.
I think the way to do research, though, is not to start with a theory or hypothesis and then go about looking for anything and everything that supports it. That’s arse about face (to put it crudely). The way to do research is to start with the phenomenon – claimed memories of past lives, in this case – and then go in search of an explanation (formulating hypothesis, designing experiments, collecting more data, rejecting hypotheses, testing new hypotheses and so on). That’s the way to prise out of nature her secrets, the way to truth not belief – truth wherever it may lead.
http://www.theepochtimes.com/n3/846178-a-theory-on-how-birthmarks-could-correspond-to-wounds-from-past-lives/