What do you fellow RfM's believe about people going around again, if they want to, after their first birth on earth? (As some people or religions appear to think is the case.)

Personally, I wouldn't care to do it---once is more than enough for me.

Still, I had an early spontanius miscarrage (about 6 weeks along), which means the fetus had a heart that was beating. The unborn fetus was all white, and about 6 and a half inches long. There was nothing I could do but flush it down the toilet--which was very hard for me to do.

Every once in a while I remember this incident, and so I thought maybe someone on this board has something to add to my story.

So, what do you-all think?

It's a good thing certain prolife types nowadays didn't try to arrest you for not having a burial or cremation for fetal tissue. That's what they are trying to do lately for surgical abortions in Ohio. They are really pushing the limits for personal intrusion, IMO.

I can't imagine how sad that was for you and how hard. You deserve support and compassion for what you experienced. Spontaneous miscarriages can be very painful and personal.

I don't believe in people going around again because the evidence is not convincing for me. I don't think I would want to do it again unless I could pick the circumstances.

Amen to Dagny
I express my sympathies.
For me once around will be plenty.

I join Dagny in offering my condolences and hoping you are doing okay now. I can't imagine anything more difficult than what you have just gone through.

I join with dagny and Lot's Wife in offering my condolences to you--I cannot even imagine how difficult that must have been for you.

If your underlying question (as I gather) is about reincarnation, I do believe that reincarnation exists.

Aside from reincarnation itself, though, there doesn't seem to be a particular, given "time" [in a pregnancy], when the "person" who will live in that body enters the body. It can be at any time during the pregnancy.

In addition (and to add to the confusion) there seem to be circumstances where the original "person"/"soul" who enters the body switches with another "person"/"soul"--so the "person" who is eventually born is not the one who originally entered the body. This can happen for a variety of reasons, including "second thoughts" which leads the original "person"/"soul" to decide that maybe what they THOUGHT they wanted (in this new life) isn't actually the right thing for them.

I think pretty much all of us are "old souls" of one kind or another--that, with perhaps a few exceptions here and there, most everyone living "now" was (prior to this current birth) someone else, living another life, probably in another place, learning lessons in that life that (at best) will lead to more wisdom, experience, expertise, and "being a good person" in this current life, and (ideally) in all future lives to come.

Life seems to be a school. When you learn the lessons of a given lifetime, you (ideally) proceed to at least a somewhat "higher" "grade,"...where you then learn even more.

When I was growing up I heard about a woman who, while granting that she had absolutely "no" talent in piano or music in her current life, nevertheless practiced piano every single day of her life so that, next time around, she would have already learned and absorbed enough basic musical material to have musical talent in her next time around. I have also heard about people who do the same thing with ballet dancing, mathematics, visual arts, and various sciences or science-based studies like medicine.

I challenged the members of the board over a year ago to do a guided meditation on past lives just to see what they got ---- for kicks as 'belief' is not necessary.

I believe 3 or 4 did it and got 'past lives'.

I definitely agree most of us have had past lives!

Well, that proves it is true.

I think that people can reincarnate if they wish to.

I'm sorry about the loss of your fetus. That must have been very difficult. My mother had an ectopic pregnancy that was doomed from the start. I sometimes think about my lost sibling.

Sorry about the miscarriage.

As far as reincarnation, it is what the vast majority of 'souls' do. It is true you can elect not to reincarnate.

As far as your baby. It is 'known' in advance whether a 'child' will be born. Even if a child is alive for minutes a 'soul' may or may not be assigned. A human/fetus/cells can live 'without a soul' for a period of time.

In the case a 'child' will not go full term --- why assign a soul?? Just a waste of time. Fetal tissue can live without a soul and does.

Even when a soul is assigned, souls are 'alive and awake' 24/7 --- they don't have to be confined to a baby in a womb 24/7! After birth they stay most of the time but again when you sleep --- souls don't need sleep and can frequently leave. They have 'social lives' also --- their friends may be similar to ours!


Others that believe in 'reincarnation' may have different opinions!



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 01/18/2021 11:56PM by spiritist.

My heart goes out. (Guess means still have one)
So sorry for this.

I think it all turns out okay.

I would say that we are our brains. I would say that it is a pretty sophisticated machine. It can be tinkered with. It can be effected by drugs just like your nerves and other body parts can be effected by various chemicals. That is what the evidence points to.
Some body parts can be removed entirely, like your finger, arm, leg, but removing a section of your brain has dire consequences to you personality. Take a look at the effects of strokes.
Lungs, nerves, kidneys can be changed.

I haven’t seen any convincing reason that a soul is required to make a human body operate. No evidence as to where it is located.
There is 0 data about the soul. Nothing about what it is made of and how it functions. That’s what you end up with when you invent something with no science backing it up.

There is no reason to think calculators and potatoes and trees have a soul.

~~~~iceman9090

iceman9090 Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> I would say that we are our brains. I would say
> that it is a pretty sophisticated machine. It can
> be tinkered with. It can be effected by drugs just
> like your nerves and other body parts can be
> effected by various chemicals. That is what the
> evidence points to.

Well, I would certainly agree that the brain is a very sophisticated machine, that can be "tinkered with" as you suggest, in a variety of ways with a variety of consequences.

But, the disconnect in this account is the suggestion that *therefore* "we" are our brains. Each of us has a host of cognitive capacities, some of which are computational (e.g. bodily functions). But the problem lies in explaining human mental capacities--for example thinking out of the box--that are manifestly NOT computational. If there is a single human capacity--e.g. creativity in any form--that can be shown NOT to be computational (algorithmic and deterministic), then your theory, "we are our brains" falls dead in the water. The literature is full of such questions and evidence that calls into question your thesis. One example is the so-called "frame problem" in artificial intelligence.
__________________________________________

> Some body parts can be removed entirely, like your
> finger, arm, leg, but removing a section of your
> brain has dire consequences to you personality.
> Take a look at the effects of strokes.
> Lungs, nerves, kidneys can be changed.

What is perhaps more interesting are the many cases of brain trauma and pathology that results in cognitive enhancement--rather than detriment. How is that possible? If I drop a computer on the floor, I will not expect it to perform functions that it otherwise did not perform before I dropped it. How is it that after a brain trauma, someone can become a genius in art or memory. (See Darold A. Treffert, Islands of Genius: The Bountiful Mind of the Autistic, Acquired, and Sudden Savant.)
___________________________________________
>
> I haven’t seen any convincing reason that a soul
> is required to make a human body operate.

It is not the human body that arguably needs a soul; it is the human mind. Frankly, I haven't seen any evidence that a physical computational machine, however sophisticated, can produce an independent, conscious, cognitive agent. The common assumption that "it must be the brain" because scientists cannot identify anything else than might cause it, is NOT a scientific explanation.
_____________________________________________

> No evidence as to where it is located.
> There is 0 data about the soul. Nothing about what
> it is made of and how it functions. That’s what
> you end up with when you invent something with no
> science backing it up.

Cognitive psychologists have spent decades studying human cognition; and how the mind works, without being able to link mental processes, e.g. thinking, problem solving, creativity, etc. with any specified and correlated computational, algorithmic brain processes. When I look at a computer screen, everything I see can be traced to the operations of algorithmic processes in the computer's hardware and software--including all images, functions, relations, etc. Not so with the mind and brain.
_______________________________________
>
> There is no reason to think calculators and
> potatoes and trees have a soul.

True, or computers! After all, they cannot do things that cannot be explained by their physical nature and properties. Not so with human beings (and other animals) Might that not be a clue that something is missing in our understanding of human beings?

Now, maybe there is no such thing as a soul; I grant you that. But to suggest that there is no scientific reason to believe in a soul; or no evidence suggesting the existence of a soul, simply because you cannot find the soul at some location in space and time; is just ridiculous; and the product of narrow, uninformed, thinking.

Polly, I’m so sorry that happened to you.

I hope that little soul has or will come back to this life as someone very dear to you.

My niece lost her twin daughters. She has a recurring dream that two adult women (which they would be now) are looking out for her in some way.

Take care of yourself.

Oh my, Polly - what a horrible experience for you. I like kathleen's idea, that maybe somewhere along the line, in the future, that precious little one will meet up with you in a special way.

I happen to believe in reincarnation. I grew up with the idea. My grandmother, who was born in a part of Germany that is now Poland, told me that when I was very small, just beginning to talk, I would sometimes recite bits of nursery rhymes in Polish. I don't speak Polish at all and have never studied it. She recognized it because when she was a child, she was in an area where there were both ethnic Germans and ethnic Poles, and they all played together.

So Grandma believed that I had been Polish in a previous life, and probably did not survive WWII. She was a very well-educated, bilingual, and sophisticated woman, so I have no reason to doubt her belief.

Sending cyber-hugs to you for your tragic loss. You were brave to share that story with us. Take care.

Belief in a soul makes no sense to me. And if there is no soul, reincarnation would make no sense either.

This is the point at which freedom of religion is most valid. One can hold thoughts of being born into another life, connecting with passed loved ones, journeying through 'eternal' progression, experiencing the "what if". . But those thought are individual and are based on ones sense of the world.

My personal belief is that we are an accumulation of our remembered and unconscious experiences laid upon a scaffolding of genetic predispositions. What I know of brain research, the trillions of neurons and synapses and all that organic stuff tells me that consciousness is this stored and remembered aggregate of life's experiences. And when we breathe our last, it's gone.

Therefore my view is that we grieve when we must (as you do, polly) but beyond that we must live this life for all it's worth.

How kind you-all are to provide me with such empathy.

Even so, I mid-led you without meaning to do so.

This miscarriage was my first attempt to get pg, and since then, I have been blessed with SIX (yes, six), children. All of them are healthy (not wealthy-but getting along OK), and wise.

Thanks again. :-)

I realized it was long ago. Still, no matter how many children we have later or how much time passes, it is still something very painful to experience.

Thanks for sharing this with us. I think it helps others who had similar experiences realize they are not the only ones carrying such memories.

There are many, many women and families for whom that experience changes life permanently.

Soylent Green isn’t bad on toast.

My understanding is that the soul enters the body at 7 weeks. I think a few of my wife’s six miscarriages were past that. We weren’t too happy about it either. That was the one time in my life I distinctly heard a voice in my head say “I’m sorry”. I do have a beautiful child now, though.

A miscarriage is the loss of a baby before the 20th week of pregnancy. The medical term for a miscarriage is spontaneous abortion. But it isn’t an abortion in the common meaning of the term.

As many as 50% of all pregnancies end in miscarriage -- most often before a woman misses a menstrual period or even knows she's pregnant. About 15%-25% of recognized pregnancies will end in a miscarriage.

More than 80% of miscarriages happen within the first 3 months of pregnancy. Miscarriages are less likely to happen after 20 weeks. When they do, doctors call them late miscarriages.

Symptoms of a miscarriage include:

Bleeding that goes from light to heavy
Severe cramps
Belly pain
Weakness
Worsening or severe back pain
Fever with any of the symptoms listed above
Weight loss
White-pink mucus
Contractions
Tissue that looks like blood clots passing from your vagina



A fetal heartbeat may first be detected by a vaginal ultrasound as early as 5 1/2 to 6 weeks after gestation. That's when a fetal pole, the first visible sign of a developing embryo, can sometimes be seen. But between 6 1/2 to 7 weeks after gestation, a heartbeat can be better assessed.

My daughter just had a miscarriage a few months ago. It was very difficult for her. My sister and my mother both had miscarriages. I only was able to get pregnant once, but got the twins. My aunt lost a twin to hyaline membrane disease at 1-1/2 days after being born. Her other twin is 59 now. I sometimes wonder if this is why she clings to the church so tightly. I can't imagine losing one of my twins.

Myself, I was just thinking about this. Who the hell came up with this idea? My boyfriend's dog is dying and I've been spending most of the day with her while he goes to work since I work at home and I get to pick my schedule. I also only work part time. It is so difficult to deal with life and death. I hate the idea of leaving my kids behind when I die. I had never thought of that until recently.

I'm not a fan of reincarnation, nor do I believe in it. I'd never want to do this again.