Past Lives: True or Bogus?

Philosophy: an intriguing and mend-bending subject. As a philosophy student at my local college, I was thrilled when my professor assigned what he called the “Real World Assignment.” The task was to take concepts of Western Philosophy and implement it into current events or to a true, personal experience. I chose the latter.

For my real-world assignment, I have decided to present the topic of past lives and where your soul goes after you die. Just a brief background, I’d like to explain that for me personally, although I respect and am interested in learning about all the different religions, I myself do not believe in religion. I do, however, believe that there is something bigger than us, whether you want to call it God, the Universe, Karma, Energy, or the Law of Attraction.

In 2016, I had my first past life regression reading. I went into it a little skeptical but kept an open mind. Since it was my first time doing this, I had no idea what to expect. I didn’t get my hopes up, but ultimately I was not disappointed. I actually saw an entire life that I had supposedly lived during the 1800’s. My name was Genevieve, I had long curly hair, my mother was a beautiful woman named Melinda, and we lived in a village in Germany. I saw many different memories over many different days in the years of this supposed past life of mine. I felt the love I had for the water and how swimming completed me. There was a little lake I saw in these memories that I loved to swim in. I saw the day where the village mourned the death of my father, Gary, after he was shot and killed in battle. I saw the memories of meeting my blonde husband, Anthony, and having 3 children named Stefan, Joanna, and Joseph. Finally, I also saw the day that I died. It was springtime and my 3 children were visiting me. They were all grown up at this point. My husband was still alive, but we were both old and grey. From these “memories”, I got the feeling that I was ill, which is why ultimately I passed away sitting in a chair in front of our home. At this point I saw an aerial view of my body, as if my soul was looking down at it, before everything went dark.

I believe this topic ties into philosophy through metaphysics, as well as one of the theories of knowledge, which is skepticism. Metaphysics deals with abstract concepts such as time, space, being, and personal identity. Past life regression is definitely an issue of time, space, and being. Where does one’s soul go after they die? Do souls really travel through time and space to transfer to a different living being? Hypothetically, if a soul does transfer into a different being, does the soul itself keep the same identity that it had in the previous life? This is where skepticism would come into the picture. If someone truly believes in past lives, a skeptic would argue that this sort of justification requires certainty. Skeptics yield to the ideas that beliefs are never certain, beliefs are never justified, and therefore, knowledge is impossible. Although I was so fascinated with what I had experienced in the past life regression, and find myself gravitating towards wanting to believe that it is true, there is no way to indubitably believe this to be true without any facts or scientific data to support it. Ultimately, as long as it does not harm anyone or anything, I feel that everyone should be able to choose what they want to believe without receiving judgment from others, since no religion or belief of this nature can truly be proven.