h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Hi Captain,


Let me be a psychologist for a while,

I really think there was a kind of regression, but not to a past life, but to your own past. What I think it could happen that day during that session was that you released an anguished feeling. Or maybe your mind created it at the moment?
You might have thought or feared at some moment , as a father , that terrible things can happen in this life to children, to our children.
Sombre thoughts that sometimes pass the minds of parents, other times they stay for longer.
The brain records not only facts, but also feelings, some of them experienced strongly. They linger in our brain, sometimes the feeling is deep in our mind.

The bit of the belly

Tell me, don´t you feel like a punch in your stomach when something big happens?
Do you know what psychosomatic deseases are?
The brain has some favourite places to put away the impact of strong feelings, like being in love or being stressed at job. One of these places is the stomach. Broadband with the brain!

Captain, you really felt that punch, I´ve not doubt. Your brain provoqued it.


About the sense of belonging.
I felt something similar when I was in Ireland. A beautiful land.
Who can´t not feel that warmth, that joy being in such wonderful places, like Dakota or Ireland… You are a sensitive man, that´s all.

::
The only session I´d go through, would be that where the psychologist could dig in my past and bring out something useful, even if the memory hurts.
Although, I think I don´t need it. My sister and me sometimes do that kind of diggings to explain some behaviours of us.
::
I don´t think there are past lives. We are unique since conception. Our personality and feelings develop with the influences around us. What we are depends on how our brain. Our mind develops with our experiences. There´s no software from past lifes.
When we die we finish, we aren´t flying around waiting for a new body to come to life again.

>> ...we aren�t flying around waiting for a new body to come to life again. <<

Except at a molecular level.
Open air cremation, popular in cultures that embrace the notion of reincarnation,
is probably the most efficient method of molecular redistribution.

Hard to imagine what the ancient bog people were thinking.


~jwf~

Give it 500 million years, burn it as coal, and get to be part of something more evolutionarily advanced?

Noggin

One of the more accessible "proofs" for reincarnation is hypnotic regression. Under hypnosis, people have come up with marvellously detailed and internally consistent "past lives"; the two most well-known of the genre are the Bloxham series, in which the good doctor discovered a cirle of friends and acquaintances who had all apparently shared intertwined past lives in the Languedoc region of France, during a crusade to wipe out a heretical verison of Christianity. (such a tolerant religion and so accepting of doctrinal differences). There are Stephenson's researches in India, which may have a little more validity: he reasoned that the place to go looking for evidence of reincarnation was a country where this was part of the dominant religion and an accepted part of life. (Christianity has culturally conditioned the West into beleiving the exact opposite: in this world-view you get one crack at getting it right, then you die. Game Over, Do Not Bother Inserting Further Coins, Your Score Will Be Announced Shortly. Even now Christianity has faded somewhat, this perception is part of the baggage it left behind. Hinduism takes it a step further: behave as though you only have one crack at getting it right, then you die, then Game Over, You Have Earned A Replay).

There is also the 1930's author Joan Grant, who wrote up her past-life regressions into novels of life spent in Ancient Egypt, quite naturally as Pharaohess. I think the core book is called Winged Eagle, or something like that, and she kick-started the vogue for Ancient Egypt being the cradle of civilization, and anybody who IS somebody must self-evidently have led a past life there....

Anyway, the woman who wrote her hypnotic regressions into a novel gave me the clue as to what's going on in hypnotic regression. It was confirmed when I had regression done on myself and some surprising things emerged.

The human being is a story-telling animal. We have active imagination.Where else do novels and fictions and plays and films come from?

Sit somebody down, relax them, strip away the usual inhibitions and prompt them with leading questions, and of course a story will emerge. Ask the right sort of leading questions, as Bloxham did, and you'll get a story set in the historical period and place you want, because the hypnotist genuinely wants to believe and the subject is eager to please them. But bring in a university professor of mediaeval French and the Occitan dialects of the South to talk to them? If I'd led a previous life in the Languedoc, it's perhaps fair to say that if I were regressed to it, an awareness of the 13th Century French I'd once spoken would also return. Yet those few of Bloxham's subjects who were so tested spoke no French at all, or a version of the rather formal stilted modern French taught in British schools today. (They didn't even know that one of the local peculiarities of French as spoken in that region is that it is heavily influenced by Spanish, so that the last syllable of a word normally left silent is sounded: thus "je t'aime" in regular French becomes "je t'aim-EH" in the Languedoc). Their stories also shed no light on the history of the times: nothing new was added to our historical knowledge of a significant period in the evolution of modern France. (Nor did Joan Grant's "memories" of ancient Egypt.)

Also, while not everybody got to be King or Queen, they all led virtuous lives and were victims of cruel opresssion - other people's opression. This is suspect: it's like the way everyone who drives a car on the road is a paragon of virtue and road-sense, and the dangerous buggers are other drivers. Nobody turned out to be a crusader who perpetrated atrocities: everyone under regression is a nice guy or gal.

It's obvious that all we're seeing here is the human talent for weaving a story (pretty phenomenal in itself). Well, they say there's a novel in all of us - for some people it's historical...

My own regression followed a similar pattern. I've always had a historical fascination for the Second world War period: I read the histories, I build the models, I've wargamed with the toy soldiers.

It wasn't surprising that what emerged from me was a story of having been a German squaddie in WW2. It was self-consistent: born 1919 in Leipzig-Chemnitz, conscripted in 1938, fought in Poland, France and Russia, at first gleeful at Germany's victories, then a mounting sense of horror and defeat as I realised the war was lost, finally killed as a junior officer, while trying to retreat from a German city surrounded by the Russians in late 1944.

Copied, by the way, from this talk thread:- http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/brunel/F19585?thread=5985941&skip=520&show=20 Note I didn't come out as an SS concentration camp guard - I was the "good German" who commited no atrocities. While I used a lot of German techical military terminology in the regression, and had to stop to explain what it was (the hypnotist seized on this as proof: later I pointed out I'd not come up with any new terms I didn't previously know) -and I'm pretty much up to speed with where the decisive battles were on the Eastern Front and when they took place. So while the reincarnation hypothesis is seductive, and there were one or two odd things in there, I'm inclined to believe it was story-telling. Besides, my general German is by no means native-fluent! I was hoping it'd improve after touching base with a past-life, but no such luck... if it helps, though, the story just flowed. once it started, it was unstoppable, and perhaps an effect of the hypnosis was that i didn't want to stop. A part of me was wondering what happened next, as if there were two levels of my brain at work, one time-lagged a little way behind the other - a really odd experience! My own experience of hypnosis for regression purposes: I didn't feel any different to the way I normally feel, except that I was somehow more detached and distanced from everyday reality. I felt that I could say or express whatever I liked without censure - the usual bars weren't there any more, the self-censor and the usual inhibitions. I had the freedom to speak, and this was somehow liberating. The odd thing was of feeling somehow "split", as if the everday rational core of me was there and conscious, but was lagging several seconds behind the speaking voice that was describing a life spent in wartime Germany. Damn it, I wanted to know how the story ended too! I could argue with the hypnotist: she was excited that I was using so much German and in what seemed to be its proper context, (she was very much pro-reincarnation, though to be fair I don't recall her "leading" me - once a theme started to emerge, she let me go with it, only giving little prompts to move the story on.) I did "emerge" to interupt the flow and say that I wasn't using any more german than I knew in this life: but then "sank2 again and let the voice carry things on. A name did emerge, although it's pretty much the German equivalent of "Jack Jones" - even in the Leipzig/Chemnitz/Dresden area, there'd have been dozens of blokes with this name in the Wehrmacht. (But my alternate persona was very clear that Chemnitz was his place of birth, which narrows it) I beleive the experience made me a lot more suggestible than usual and hyper-stimulated - I really felt the cold while I was talking about guard duties in a russian winter, for instance, and the moment of my alternate's "death" was VERY uncomfortable: I felt his fear at suddenly running into a well-armed Russian patrol, and the "experience" of being hit by a dozen or so bullets was like suddenly being jolted out of a very deep sleep, the same sort of shock and dislocation. As I say, nothing came out of it that I didn't already know. I'm prepared to beleive the "memories" of recruit training drew heavily on the real-life experience of doing the same in the British Army. I remeber one day spending an afternoon being taught to do the most difficult drill step on the parade ground - the Slow March - and talking about it with a fellow recruit, we both made the observation that had this slow, un-naturally stiff-legged walk been done more vigorously and quickly and the feet lifted higher, it would qualify as a goose-step. (Yes, the British Army goose-steps. Just watch the next Royal funeral when the order is "Slow - MARCH!") Again, a memory f mine that my alternate used. One thing was not consciously knowen to me: I described a wartime journey on German trains, and described how the glass windows had been taken out of the carriages and been boarded over, with only a pillar-box slit left to see out of. This

I not only get past life regression experiences, I get this life regression experiences. In my lucid dreams I sometimes go back and vividly relive memories. Like any memories of course I change the details to whatever I'm imagining at the time.

Several times I have had the dream where god tries to get me to believe in him. The last time he brought my dead mothers soul to implore me. I was so overcome with the most intense emotion. 'Is it really you?'
'No you idiot, it's your imagination, wake up, you're dreaming'

If you can't believe your own mother, who can you believe?

Another set of thoughts: one of my grandfathers has a family name which ultimately comes out of central Lancashire, near Pendle.

I recently went up there on a sort of "vision quest" to find a very tiny hamlet, near Nelson/Colne, which shares the family name. Now this name is not a common one. And while there are Irish and Lowland Scottish variants, the amart money, and most of the research, suggests that everyone in the world carrying this name comes back ultimately to this one small cormer of Lancashire. Demographics insist, too: the nearer you get to the "source", the more of the 10,000 or do people who share this name you will find. Hell's Bells, when I explained what I was there for, two people inn the pub in Nelson had that name!

I wqon't say I had a major epiphany or was bathed in light or anything like that when I found the scattering of houses and the very minor river that carry the family name. Just a sort of peaceful feeling at "locating", of fitting in, almost that the landscape was saying "welcome home, lad" ("and mind thi wipes thi feet and shuts door behind thee")

It was a nice feeling. I've been back a few times and there's a very definite pull about the area, Nelson in particular, extending over the hill through Bacup into Todmorden and Hebden Bridge and as far south as Rawtenstall.

I had a very nutty insight that hootoo readers might see a sort of warped sense in.

There's a lot of "rubbish DNA" on the human genetic signature that science can't see an appraent need or use for - it's just there and seemingly doesn't contribute anything.

But we know Nature isn't wasteful: appendicies and little toes may be vestigial, but still have some sort of job to do.

So what if this DNA has a more local use, relevant to the individual?

MY graet-grandfather might have been thirty when he fathered my grandfather. That is, a little bit of his DNA split off and got replicating with a similar offering from my great-grandmother. What if it carried, in some form, a synopsis of his most imprinted memories up to the age where he fathered my grandfather? And if my grandfather, aged twenty-eight, passed his ancestral memories on in the sprem that made my father? And my father, aged about thirty-seven, passed on thirty-seven years worth of his life memories and emotional imprints to me. all of which are lying dormant in my DNA (ancestral memory?) and just needed a nudge to awaken them, like my walking by the canalside in Todmorden, or up the hill to the market in Rawtenstall?

If nothing else, it would explain "deja-vu" - the feeling of having been there before. I might personally not have done, but my grandfather took my grandmother out courting there in 1918, perhaps. And that moment of well-being in his life came to me with the DNA.

And if these memories are't overwritten, but perhaps necessarily fade with the passing accumulation of every new generation's DNA, if something happens to spark a really old random bit of the personal family genome... could it trigger a "past life experience"?

Just a thought.... although I'm damn sure none of my relatives fought for Germany in 1943...

The pendle area is beautiful. I was there in the summer visiting my exes family, he was born in liverpool but went to school in a small village very close to Pendle hill. It's a stunning area and has a feeling. I dont know what it is but it's a lovely feeling.

Have you read Mists over Pendle? cracking good read I loved the galloping through storms and things I just love wild country



people!

Hi AgProv

Thanks for sharing your experience. It was interesting and touching but I have to ask, have you read any of the backlog in this thread? I don't know where to begin to answer.

Nice romantic idea but it's simply wrong. Nature is spectacularly wasteful.

DNA is a simple thing that makes an unimaginably complex thing, the human brain. It's the brain that forms memories from its experience. You can't share them except imperfectly through speech. By what mechanism can your brain then put those memories into your gonads so you can gift them to your kids? Even the simplest form of Lamarkism is shown to be impossible with genetic inheritence; you're speculating on something many times more complex.

You went on a vision quest and you had a vision. In psychology this is called confirmation bias. A half hour with a good hypnotist beforehand and your vision would have been many times better. That's what hypnotism is, a way to stir up and direct the imagination.

I can think of a fun psychology experiment. Get some subjects and ask for their names and as much of their family history as they can think of. Make a show of feeding the information into a computer which is programmed to produce a bogus gæneology. For each subject print out a romantic story about say, a courageous 'ancestor' who saved his wee Scottish village from Viking raiders. Then take him to the village and see how much he can 'remember'. I bet it's a lot.

They say that everyone has at least one book in them.
Many postings here have proven that.
Perhaps publishers should hypnotize everyone and take notes.


But I am not quite so ready to dismiss a cellular transmission of memories.
Especially those based on the `chemical` senses of taste and smell.
There are still too many otherwise unexplained `reflexive` behaviors which
we call `racial memory` for want of a better term. They typically surface in
unique, stressful or emotional, situations. And they seem somehow `deeper`
than learned cultural responses.

If one can allow the possibility of racial memory as a mechanism for these
`instinctive reflexes` then `family` generational memories could be a part of
the basis for such (well observed and documented) collective and generalised
responses in regionally distinct groups.

Exploring these questions though brings one up against the political correctness
police who will get all worked up as soon as you suggest that Scots are frugal,
Irishmen are angry drunks, the English...

See, it`s dangerous to even begin such a discussion.

And that`s really sad because we do have a vast storehouse of knowledge
regarding what to expect from assorted national and racial types. This storehouse
has been boarded up and labeled prejudice and any attempt to enter into such an
exploration could be considered a hate crime. (Or at least get ya yikesed around here.)


jwf

And Canadians are all *so* sodding polite!




(can I say 'sodding'?)

These are not unexplained, you just don't like the explanations. If I use a formula to make silver bells and then strike the product it will ring like a silver bell. It doesn't ring because it has a racial memory of its antecedent silver bells. It rings because I have made a silver bell and that's what they do.

If I have a reflex that is similar to someone elses in a similar situation it's because my brain is constructed in a similar way. Hardly surprising considering we all have the same DNA inherited from the same ancestors.

>>...it's because my brain is constructed in a similar way. Hardly surprising considering we all have the same DNA...<<

More or less. But your argument that we will have `similar` reactions because we have similar DNA does not allow for the realities of gene mutations and hormonal variations. These `genetic markers` are now known to produce `different` reactions to peanut butter, light, assorted bacteria, viruses and a universe of chemical and physical interactions. There are variables in every person`s DNA and these are the result of `changes`, very minute and subtle changes in our genetic make-up that have been ingrained along `family` lines.

If these genetic variances can produce abnormal reactions to a wide variety of stimuli then they can (they obviously do) produce similar reactions to other stimuli based on the experiences of the specific and particular ancestory of our families and written into our DNA code.

>> ...we all have the same DNA inherited from the same ancestors. <<

Your idea of the `family tree` is a rather tall stout and sturdy oak from a single nut. But there are many acorns on the forest floor and not all become mighty oaks. Each generation creates its own variables based on its experience, that`s how species evolve. That`s why no two trees are identical; some bend in the wind and others rot from the inside. Most have a common desire for sunlight, not all achieve it.

Organic reproduction and growth cannot be compared to a mechanical assembly line. Chemistry and biology are not as rigid as maths and physics.
peace
jwf

"racial memories"

I wonder which could be for Spaniards.
Before Romans came to the Iberian peninsula (Portugal and Spain) there had come here ( those that are documented at least):

Foenicians, Greeks, Ibers, Tartesses or Turdetans, Celts (many different tribes)After Romans, Visigods and Arabs (8 centuries were Arabs here)Add to all that, people from other countries who have come here to live since always.

Spaniards have inherited a cultural baggage from all those people, but do we react differently to the same stimuli due to our "inherited" DNA? Do we have behavioural Celtic, Foenician... DNA? We can conserve some physical traits but inherited behaviour, reactions... in our genes?
I doubt it very much. But I´ll listen to anyone who wants to discuss it.

There is some interesting work being done in epigenetics, which appears to be changes to genes which take place *after* conception in response to evironmental stresses. The work has been around the offspring of people who have survived traumatic events (holocaust survivors and 9/11 survivors) and the offspring of people who have survived famine. I don't understand genetics and I *really* don't understand epigenetics though. And there is certainly no putable method for epigenetics to carry the sorts of changes under discussion.

"putable"

What a lovely word. It isn't in any online dictionary I can find.
But it ought to be. I mean, I know what you mean, I think.
The root 'putare' means to think. And it avoids all the baggage of 'compute'
with all its modern association to thinking machines.
It's more organic. I like it!

And of course, as always, 'puting' is what I'm trying to get at here.


I acknowledge that Mrs Zen likely knows more about biology and botany than I ever will.
But I am trying to get outside the box of standard evolutionary theory which depends on
demonstrating how physical mutations have proved to be successful survival strategies;
like Darwin's finches with different beaks for harvesting different food sources.

First we need to recognise that with 'racial memory' we are talking about behavioral and
emotional instincts and not the physical feeding, fighting or mating methods that ensure
survivability. (Longer beaks, bigger antlers, sharper claws, airborne seeds, etc.)

For example: A cat always lands on its feet. This instinctive, reflexive ability is not a learned
behavior nor is it necessarily the result of any long term behavior pattern like feeding or mating.

Another possible example is the migratory instinct of some bird species although some of this
may be considered learned behavior.

Nesting, sexual attraction behaviors, fight or flea responses in many species seem to be innate.
A mouse doesn't need to be taught to fear cats; it just 'knows'.

So many innate instinctive responses are exhibited in so many species which cannot be explained
by obvious physical mutations or any observed learning experience. The instincts almost have to be
explained as some sort of 'racial or special memory' which must be built into the genetic make-up of
individuals by some biological process.

We don't know how these work, whether at a genetic or hormonal or cellular level but they are observable
along 'family lines'. And I am only asking we consider that these 'memories' are passed along as part of
the overall 'survival strategies' of most species by some sort of bio-chemical 'mechanism'.

In the longest possible evolutionary terms (millions of years) this means that cats land on their feet but dogs
and cows don't. In the short term (of a few generations) it means that we may well contain in our biochemical
make-up some sort of agreeable response to certain places and faces familiar to our grandparents. Negative
responses, negative prejudices, must be considered equally viable.
An open mind is the key to new understanding.


~jwf~

So, perhaps that's why I fancy redheads?

Careful here. It's not the genes that change under environmental stress, it's the expression or the products that change. Or, of the sum total of the genes, some subset gets expressed under some condition and another subset gets expressed under differing conditions.

An analogy. Say you have a box of Lego™ and instructions to make either a car or pickup truck or both. It depends on the number of Lego pieces and what kind they are. The same set of instructions can go one way or the other depending on the environment.

In any case this isn't relevant to the discussion which is about whether one can remember something that happened to someone else. No one so far has offered a nonmagical way that that can happen. The powers of the imagination on the other hand are quite well established so that would seem to be the best explanation for the phenomenon of putative inherited memory.

>> ...whether one can remember something that happened to someone else.
No one so far has offered a nonmagical way that that can happen. <<

Fair enough.



And yet I await some 'scientific' explanation of how the young in roaming herds 'know' they have to get up and walk and run very quickly after being born; or how birds 'know' they have to flap their wings when momma shoves them out of the nest; or how human babies automatically hold their breath when they are thrown in the pool; or how chicks 'know' when to start pecking at the eggshell from the inside.

These are all self-initiated actions that do not come from any conscious decision making process or learning experience.
How then, if not by some bio-chemical inheritance, is such 'instinctive' behavior passed on?

Perhaps another thread...


~jwf~

PS: It was recently hypothesized (some say observed and proven) that turtle hatchlings actually move toward the light of the moon and there-by find the sea. But even if mother turtle times the mooncycle and her gestation and chooses a beach front with the proper stellar alignment to provide them with this guiding light, what makes them move toward it?