we were discussing this at my sword group, but all traits attributed to past life experiences, could they just be ancestoral memories from our predecesors passed down through genes. This has been proven through studies of simplier animals(fish, rats, etc) but being the large brained mammals we are...where does esoterical end and psychological begin?

Would it mean that we do know all the answers, we just don't realize it yet?

i'm tempted to go with the past life memory...it's more exciting to think that i was at one point a keltic warrior rather than some twenty times great grandfather/mother and those insticts for survival and glory were passed down to me, but it does give a whole new concept to "thanking the ancestors"

wow... does that mean that my ancestors also attacked lamps in their sleep? you would think most of my forebearers would have been wiped out pre electricity...

this is memory silly, not dreams....

but arent dreams just memories that are randomly accessed?

dreams are just information stored in your subconscience mind, and when you sleep your mind deals with it, processes it etc...so i think this would be something different...it's a hardcoding i almost want to say*is going insane referring to the brain as a computer*

I think i need technical support...

going back to my favorite phscyologist, jung. He believed in the collective unconscious of all beings.

"Man is born with many predispositions for thinking, feeling, percieving, and acting in specific ways. A fear of something can develop quite easily if the predisposition to feel fear already exists in the collective unconscious." He showed that evoluton and heredity provide blueprints of the psyche as they provide blueprints of the body. The mind is preconfigured by evolution. Thus the individual is linked with his past, not only the past of his infancy but more importanly with the past of the species and before that with the long stretch of organic evolution.

He also believed in archetypes and primordal images, which were swimming in sorts, in the unconscoius. Its kind of hard to explain, but he believed that when every person is born, or even before their born, they have pri-mordal images that man inherits from his ancestrial past, a past that includes all human ancestors as well as his prehuman or animal ancestors. These racial images are not inherited in the sense that a person consciously remembers or has images that his ancestors had. Rather they are predispositions or potentialities for experiencing and responding to the world in the same ways that his ancestors did. In others words genetics, in my opinion(mutation, evolution, natural selection)

archetypes are another different and interesting part of it. ill post it later, sorry. You guys ever see that movie mindwalk, these posts remind me of it

you remind me of descartes rougue

All those traits are products of a fevered imagination.

Ugh celtic with a K...too slang like.

ok, think about this,... if this world is about survival of the fittest and evolution then why is it that when someone suffers brain damage and brain cells die, why don't they grow back?? What is the evolutionary advantage of that when 1.5 to 2 million people in the united states alone suffer from TBI (traumatic brain injury a.k.a. brain damage)?? Just posing a question because i myself don't even know,... it's just something me and my friends ended up talking about after discusing a similar topic,...

Yup

As for brain cells not growing back, apparently, following recent experiments, they do.

In the same experiments they also found that the bit about only using 10% of your brain is rubbish, 10% shows up in cat scans but with new scanners we can see that it's all pretty active.

I have it in a magazine here beside me but typing it all in is too much like work

I'll try and find a link

what magazine is that??

As for brain cells growing back technically the do but they never resume the same function and what ever cell memory was there is basically erased,... so basically it's all just gray matter when it does grow back,... it serves no purpose,...

Just so you know i've been studying this for about 6 months, since me and my friends had that descussion,...

I posted two links about the ten per cent myth on only now do people pay attention to it lol.
It was debunked in Fortean Times and New Scientist from my sources.Other ones would help.:B

I got it from Focus

umm, thanks... i think

so is it that we've forgotten these memories, or are they just hidden somewhere deep inside our subconscience, and sights, visions, thoughts trigger these memories to bubble up and that would explain why a person can see a picture of a coast with cliffs and know they've been there...or pick up a sword and have the instict to fight with it really well...why some seem more neanderthal than others, they are a smaller bloodline, more closely related to ice age man?

could that be the difference between learners and teachers, wisdom and knowledge, leaders and followers etc...?

well... if they are past lives, where is the seat of the soul? how does the soul interact with the concious/suibconcious mind?

if they are genetic memories, where are the engrams? from what i understand, the only GM/instincts we have are to grasp, to suck, and to cry... everything else is either controled by the unconcious brainstem/hippocampus or learned.

indeed, i cannot correlate the mind and instinctual behavior being geneticaly passed....i think that genetic blueprint simply shows what is to be the fucntion or purpose, but it's only like the contractor, it is up to you (or destiny ) to decide what shall be the purpose....

and to consider thinking and memories as evolutionary, it is indeed interesting, yet is the strictly correlated to linear time? if indeed there is past lives, could it eventualy be you now? could your past life live the same life, despite setting?

it would be very depression if my soul was just following the same pattern every go with only location and date changing..

i don't think that would be something to worry about rogue, my dear...I believe the concept of repeating a life is to learn what your "soul" needs to ascend, possibly achieving "nirvana"(whatevery ou view that as)If you learn a lesson, then you are passed on to live and learn again, slightly higher on the ascencion path...if you do not, or refuse to learn your lesson you'll be consitantly put in situations to learn those lessons you keep missing...*shrugs* but that's just my wacky theory