New kid on the block + question.

[Rhoto]

Hi everyone. 20 years old/male/ brand new to all this. Buddy told me about all of this a few nights ago so I had to check it out. I came to this site believing in no god whatsoever and that death is nothing more than the biological end of being with nothing to follow. Honestly, I havent been able to stop reading all of this stuff. Its changed everything I ever believed and I couldn't be more excited about my new views. Im not a full believer yet, as the whole reason I didn't believe in god to begin with was because im a very realistic person and the god I was taught about growing up just didn't seem possible or plausible for that matter.

So there's a little bit about me, now here's my question:
How do we know how many passed lives we've lived before this one?is there any way to know if after this life ends, if we'll have learned enough to make it to the afterlife at last?

I appreciate all answers ahead of time. Thanks for everyone being so accepting of all views and ideas.

[Andrew]

Welcome, Rhoto! We're glad to have you on Afterlifeforums.com! You seem to be accepting a lot of what we discuss here very well for someone who was certain that death ended existent just a short while ago. It's quite natural to be skeptical on somethings though. I do plan on answering your questions in this post, but first I'm just going to mention what the afterlife evidence says about God:

1. God is not like how any religion describes Him:
In fact, my friend, God is so different from how earthly religions describe Him, that many of us here prefer not to even use the word "God". If you wish to call Him God, that's fine - it really makes no difference what you call Him. It turns out though, that the factual God is much better than any religion could have hoped! God has no vengeful anger, He doesn't judge us, and He doesn't seem to care at all what religion we chose to follow in life. As long as we were good (kind, caring, etc.), it makes no difference.

2. God is not physical, but rather Spirit:
When we die, there will be no bearded God, sitting on a throne surrounded by angels and saints. That's because God is not a physical person as religions often portray Him. God is actually Spirit. He is the light of the afterlife realms. This Spirit is completely perfect and loves everyone unconditionally!

3. God is all that exists:
I'm not sure if you have any of the threads here that deal with the universe being an illusion so I'll throw this in anyway: Nothing exists but God (we often like to call Him "Mind", because He's really a source of Creative Energy). Everything physical (including our physical bodies) is an illusion. We ourselves are a part of that Mind - and it is an illusion that we are separate beings from Him!

I hope this helps you with your views about God, dear Rhoto! God is not really as impractical as religions portray Him. If you are familiar with the Old Testament Christian God (who is also the Jewish God), then you'll be glad to know that He is nothing like that! If anyone in the OT/Torah was ever communicated with by God (personally, I believe some were really getting messages from a Higher Power, and some weren't), then somewhere the message got garbled up. God is not the vengeful monster about whom the OT is written. Now, on to your other questions:

1. I'm not familiar with a way of telling how many past lives you've had:
This is a very good question which, to my knowledge, has never been posted on the forums! I have never heard of someone saying that they had a specific number of past lives. I've never heard of a person who ran out of past lives to explore. Most of the time, however, there are hundreds of earth lives, and a few lives on other planets.

2. It's not black and white with reincarnation:
Reincarnation is not like any of the eastern religions teach it. When we die, we do not reincarnate if we didn't go so well and go to the afterlife if we lived perfectly. Normally, we all go to the afterlife and we have a life review. For the life review, we essentially watch a film of our entire lives, but this time we can feel how our actions affected others. We are asked to forgive everyone who ever wronged us in our life, and something even harder: we are asked to forgive ourselves. After that we enter into one of the seven levels of the afterlife (normally levels three though five). If we didn't do so well in that life, we might choose to reincarnate eventually to relearn the lessons that we failed last time. It is our choice to reincarnate though, no one makes us do it. Apparently, there are ways to learn the lessons we learn here in the afterlife, but it takes a lot longer. So, no matter what happens, you'll likely be going to the afterlife before coming back here!

3. There is such a thing as spontaneous reincarnation:
In rare instances, when a person has died a traumatic death, that person might sometimes attach itself to a passing pregnant woman and become the soul of her fetus. There are hundreds of reports of children, no older than five, being able to go to into a remote village they've never seen and find artifacts from their past lives. Clearly that's too many reports to dismiss. Most people, however, are not the victims of spontaneous reincarnation, so I wouldn't worry about it.

I hope these answers help to satisfy your curiosity. If you have anymore questions, please don't hesitate to ask us! If there's an answer, we are always happy to give it.

[Roberta Grimes]

Welcome, Rhoto! And thanks as always, dear Vita, for your wonderful summary. Dear Rhoto, it was for you that these forums were started, and just the fact that you are here and your mind is open is a wonderful gift to us all! Many bright people feel as you do - mainstream Christianity has proven to be unsatisfying, while mainstream science ignores our spiritual side altogether. Now that you are here, you no longer need to take anything at all on faith! Don't take anyone's word for anything, but instead give yourself the fun of personal discovery. There is a sixty-book study guide available for free at Fun of Dying.com (http://FunofDying.com/), and some of the books listed there are available as free downloads. All of this is objectively true - it has nothing to do with any religion - so you don't have to take anyone's word anymore, but you can learn it all independently! I share your bent toward being a realist. Even after decades of studying nearly 200 years of abundant and consistent afterlife evidence, I still found it impossible to accept these truths until I had figured out the science of it. Wonderfully, all of it stands up to scrutiny! Enjoy your journey, dear Rhoto, and please come by often and share your discoveries with us here. If you have any questions at all, please ask them; and if you disagree with anything said here, then we hope that you will challenge us. I envy you, starting this journey so young - you are going to have so much fun ;-)!!

[Rhoto]

Wow. I'm about to have a meltdown. I've written extensive replies 3 times now, and everytime something has happened and I've lost everything I've written. The first time I wrote it on my phone, went to post, didn't have signal so I lost it all when it went to the 'connection error' page. The second time, just a few minutes ago, once I had it almost complete, my cat jumped on my keyboard and hit a magical sequence of keys that deleted it all with no way to get it back. This final time, I had it written again and I clicked 'Reply to Thread' instead of 'Post' and it cleared the field. I'm quite frustrated at the moment, so i'm going to make it short and sweet.

Thank you both for your answers! I'm extremely excited to get started.
Now I have another concern. If this is most likely not my first life, it's possible that I have been to the Summerland before and chosen to reincarnate to learn what I had missed in my previous lives. If this is the case, how can I be sure that I will ever get to consciously enjoy the Summerland. For, I have no recollection of it from any previous lives, and I could just keep reincarnating with no memory of the wonderful place.

[Andrew]

Friend, you have accepted this evidence of the afterlife fairy easily, and this is evidence that takes a lot of people lifetimes to accept. This is not your first lifetime, my friend. Most likely you've had hundreds, like most people in this time. I can tell you without a doubt that you have been to the Summerland before. When you go back after you die, it will feel like home! Here is what the evidence tells us about memories of the Summerland:

1. We must promise to forget:
The reason you don't remember any other lifetimes or your life in the Summerland is that you promised not to before you were born. Think about it: if knew that this life was just a lesson, and there was a perfect eternal life waiting for you, would you care too much about this life? Most people wouldn't. That's why, before anyone is born, they must promise to play along with the illusion.

2. You can, however, get some of your memories back:
If you really want to remember your days in the Summerland (or from another life), then you can. There are ways to remember. Most of them would require that you go to a hypo-therapist that specializing in past life/between life regressions. These sessions are not cheap, but they have amazing results.

3. When you die, the memories come back:
At the end of this earth life, when you die, you will get your memories. I'm not sure if they come back immediately, or if you have to do something to regain them. Maybe Roberta will know the specifics, but I do know that you get them back. Take comfort, my friend, in the fact that the veil will be lifted!


So, to put it simply, you have experienced the Summerland consciously, and you will again! We spend so much more time there then we ever will here. Here are some points to help you understand the nature of the Summerland:

1. Life is a river flowing back to its source:
I'm not sure who said this, but they were completely correct! Our lives on earth happen in the blink of an eye from the perspective of someone in the Summerland. The afterlife is our home, this is just a learning facility.

2. We eagerly choose to come back to earth:
Living lives here helps us learn many different lessons - so we need many different lifetimes. The fact that you're here does not mean that you failed last time, it probably means that you needed to learn something different. We never just go from one lifetime to the other (on purpose). We take time to relax and rejuvenate. When we are ready to come back, we eagerly plan our major life events and what lessons we'll learn from them! Coming here is meant to be a good thing, my friend!

Please, keep asking your questions, dear Rhoto!

[Annie]

Hi Rhoto, welcome to the forum! I'm a lot like you, I came here not really sure what I believed in, but everything I learned started making a lot of sense when I read this forum and a few other good sites. This forum in particular has helped my perspective, not only on death but on my outlook on life.

Some other sites I might like that you might enjoy:

http://afterlifedata.com/ - Gives a lot of clear answers to questions people have about the afterlife using quotes from books
http://near-death.com/ - Has a lot of accounts of people who died temporarily and saw the afterlife, but came back and lived to tell about it, also has a lot of info about the afterlife in general
http://adcguides.com/ - This site has a lot of recordings from seances that people used to do, actual communications from the dead. The author, R. Craig Hogan, of it wrote Your Eternal Self and sometimes blogs on here. I've just found this site and will probably post about it on this forum because I'm a little confused about it, but it has a lot of interesting voice clips.

Oh yeah, and about reincarnation...I've read here and elsewhere that you don't remember your past life right away when you die. I don't know how you learn about it, maybe there's a place you go in the Summerland that lets you watch your past lives like a movie. Roberta might know more about this.

Vita, I think that's a good point what you said about being open to this information might mean that we've lived several lives already. The reason I find that comforting is I guess because I'm hoping that when I die, I won't feel so obligated to reincarnate again if I've already lived a lot of lives.

[Andrew]

Annie, thank you so much for posting all these wonderful websites here. I'm familiar with them myself and they sure do have a lot of information! I'm tempted to agree with you about not wanting to incarnate again after this. It might be nice though to come again and not have to learn anything and just be able to help guide people. Either way, the evidence tells us that we are never pressured into reincarnation - we always sincerely want to!

[Roberta Grimes]

Just want to post a quick answer to the question about retrieving our past-life memories. Our contractual amnesia is pretty strong during our lifetimes, but in my experience most of us have some ability to recall past lives:

1) Some children spontaneously recall past lives, especially those which ended violently. These memories tend to fade before the age of five, but in some cases they leave residual phobias - a fear of fire or of close places, for example.

2) Deja-vu and other random memories often happen. There are cases where people have visited a city they have never seen in this lifetime and been able to navigate the streets and predict the scenes to come around each corner; and cases, too, where people seem instantly to know each other deeply, as if they had lived together before.

3) Hypnotic regression therapy can be effective in curing phobias. Not only can you be hypnotically regressed to scenes of various past lives, but if you have a phobia you may be able to spontaneously recall how that fear started. And surprisingly, just remembering the incident is enough to permanently cure the phobia. I developed a fear of heights at around the age of twenty - it was more a fear of stepping off a height, so I wasn't bothered if there was a fence or window in place. I started to wonder where that fear had come from, and then I began to have flashes of being a young male Native American standing on a cliff at dawn, so certain of my spiritual purity that I was going to be able to fly. I was amused to think that maybe I had tested my flight theory and thereby learned to fear heights, but I thought nothing further of it until I realized perhaps a month or two later that I was leaning out an open 34th-story window in Manhattan to better admire the Chrysler building. My fear was gone - just like that!

And after we die, we do have much greater recall. Most of us have lived dozens or hundreds of lives, and our favorite - and more recent - lives are generally recalled once we leave our present lifetime. But we want to remember other lives too, especially those which are in some way related to the one just lived, so many people spend time in libraries where the records of all our lives are kept. One of the annoying things about doing afterlife research is that the dead often give us hints but don't tell us the whole story and there is no way to ask them follow-up questions, but I gather from many hints in the literature that we literally can re-experience any life that interests us as something akin to an emotional hologram, perhaps very much as we review our most recent life. I hope this answers your question, dear Rhoto!

[Andrew]

Thank you very much, Roberta, for clarifying for me. I knew that past life memories could be easily recalled after this life - I just didn't know the specifics.

[Annie]

Thank you for that thorough answer Roberta. I like that we are able to have a way of accessing past lives. Because I was thinking the other day...what's the point of living so many lives if we just end up forgetting them? So this is good to know!

[Annie]

By the way, how does one know if they've lived a lot of lives, or if they're a relatively new soul? Are the people who make a lot of mistakes and hurt others usually people who haven't lived many lives?

[Andrew]

Hi again, Annie! I am not familiar with a way of telling how many past lives one has had. I would agree that, as a general rule, someone who hasn't had many past lives would be more prone to errors. That being said, there is no such things as a relatively new soul. We are all eternal beings who have no beginning and will have no end. We existed even before the beginning of the illusion of time but, we didn't exist in the same, individual form that we think we exist in now (which of course is just an illusion). This illusion of the ego started the beginning of time, which is when the part of us that is trapped in time came to think it was separate from God and every other soul, which it is not. This happened for everyone at the same time though, so there are no new souls (or no old souls, depending on how you look at it).

This may seem confusing but, if you look at it, it makes perfect sense. Really, time doesn't exist and has never existed. So we couldn't have had a beginning because something that starts or ends depends on time. So, in that sense, there was no Creation. We just are and have always been. But, the illusion that we are separate and no one united Mind started for everyone in that illusion at the point, which was the very beginning of the linear timeline.

What I am not sure of is around what point in linear time we first started incarnating in the physical, or at what point we started in our earthly school. I supposed, for earth, that depends on which species of humans would have been considered able of holding actual souls. We are homo sapiens (latin for "rational man"), but there were others such as homo erectus (latin for "vertical man"). If they were considered capable of supporting intelligent life, such as humans, or if there was at one point on earth another type of intelligent life, then it's possible that we have been coming here much longer than we think. It's hard to trust the scientific dating of things, since their methods are often inaccurate. Besides, how many years ago things happen doesn't really matter linear time doesn't exist.

I hope this helps to answer your question, dear Annie!

[Wonderer]

if we knew that this life was just a lesson, and there was a perfect eternal life waiting for you, would you care too much about this life? Most people wouldn't. That's why, before anyone is born, they must promise to play along with the illusion.

What a point you made here InAevumVita!!! I have thought about this many many times. I've always said to myself...."Wouldn't life be less frustrating if we knew that all the pain we get on this earth is for a reason!?"

It's like going to an army camp, study and train very hard, but you never know why! As you know, in life many people have determination and do not give up because they have a specific goal. They know that all the pain and suffering will one day help them to achieve the goal, dream, whatever they set their mind to.

But in many cases, people suffer and pass through great pain without knowing what life is all about. Your point is very interesting indeed! It makes sense too. But the question is....should we know why life is so tough at times, why we are here? According to your point, we should not. Personally, for me, I think its better that I know, cause it keeps me going and I'll have more inner peace. It makes a huge difference at how I look at life. If something bad happens, I will be able to accept it with more ease. I would (do) definitely care to endure this life to grow spiritually.

People are different, so maybe its good that some don't know and some do. Don't know, maybe it also depends on their life purpose (lesson) too.

Then after all, my friend, this forum is breaking this promise. Cause all this information is helping us to know that life is a lesson :) I have also wondered why Yahweh talks about the afterlife so vaguely. I have always told myself....why didn't he just tell us plain and straight what life is all about, what happens after death, what's this whole existence is all about!? Well, I guess its for the same point that you have raised above.

The next question is...then why we (as in those who seek afterlife answers like us) know? ;)

Love
Wonderer.

[Andrew]

Hi Wonderer! This is a truly great question! It appears that, if we remembered the Summerland just as we remember our childhood, then things here would be too easy for us and we probably wouldn't take stuff seriously here. But, if we learned the truth for ourselves here, just as you and I have, then we weren't just born remembering, we had to actually work for the truth. And even though we know about the afterlife, we still don't remember it like it was part of our lives. It's still hard to do the right thing here, we all still struggle with that at one point or another.

So, I suppose, that if we find out the truth during our earthly lives, without having it handed to us in the form of memories, then we are elevating our spiritual awareness level and really growing in the process of finding that truth. Those are my thoughts on the matter.

[Wonderer]

Thank you for the answer, it makes lots of sense :)

I'm glad I came across this forum since I'm finding hard to discuss these matters with people around me. They are either not deep or interested or otherwise too blind by their religion.

Your answers (and those of others here) are a mine of gold ;)

Love
Wonderer

[Andrew]

Thank you for your kind words, dear Wonderer! I can sympathize with you: it is amazing how many people are so closed off to new evidence of the afterlife. As Roberta Grimes says in her book The Fun of Dying, scientists believe that there is nothing to discover, and the religious believe that God has told them everything and there is nothing left to find. But, if you keep your mind open, you will see that neither of those is true.

[Annie]

Hi Wonderer. I know what you mean, it's hard to find people who are as interested in this stuff as I am, plus people here know so much about the afterlife that I gain so much knowledge I wouldn't have before.

I have to agree with Vita, I don't think that knowing about the afterlife is cheating really, because it's not like we have memories of the afterlife. Having memories of it would certainly make life easier, but would we take it as seriously? For me, it's hard to say. Because I feel like knowing that the reason I'm here is to advance makes me more inclined to take life seriously and be more forgiving.

So I think we're all meant to know more about the afterlife and that's why there've been so many near death experiences and spirit communication. It's all here to bring us together and make us try to be better people I think, and make the world a better place.