[MOTU] Reincarnation...

Myrddin

Ok ok, so I stole this from After Hours. But still, I thought it might make for some interesting discussion.

Ever since he was two years old and first started talking, Cameron Macauley has told of his life on the island of Barra. Cameron lives with his mum, Norma, in Glasgow. They have never been to Barra.

He tells of a white house, overlooking the sea and the beach, where he would play with his brothers and sisters. He tells of the airplanes that used to land on the beach. He talks about his dog, a black and white dog.

Barra lies off the western coast of Scotland, 220 miles from Glasgow. It can only be reached by a lengthy sea journey or an hour long flight. It is a, distant, outpost of the British Isles and is home to just over a thousand people.

Cameron is now five, and his story has never wavered

Explainable? Fake? Thoughts?

squonk

I haven't viewed the clip but I'm just thinking it's very nice of the reincarnation gods to keep him in Scotland at the very least. Common sense tells me that who knows what stories the child heard when he was much younger and that perhaps it's worked his way into his mind as reality.

Myrddin

squonk wrote: »

I haven't viewed the clip but I'm just thinking it's very nice of the reincarnation gods to keep him in Scotland at the very least

I had the same thought. Initially, having never heard of Barra, I thought it was some kind of long lost Atlantean type island. Slightly let down by the fact it's 200 miles away from where he already lives. I havn't watched the whole thing yet, so I'll reserve judgement until later on

Myrddin

Just finished watching it there. It's interesting, but obviously far from being conclusive. The child got some details correct, like the family name, the house location, the beach with the gate to the garden etc. But the death of the father figure wan't correct, not indeed did such a person exist despite Shane Robertson sounding like James/Seamus Robertson.

The reaction of the child at the gates of the house was odd too, almost as if revisiting a lost place that was once special to you. But then again, kids can have pretty vivid imaginations, in which case the child in question could have 'made' himself believe in this whole thing over time.

Certainly worth a watch anyway

Princess Peach

I'll have a watch after work.

I'm a little unsure about reincarnation. I kinda don't want to believe, but sometimes I have dreams where I'm in a place that I know is my home or my work or whatnot in the dream, but when I wake I realise it was a place I have never been before, despite being so sure in the dream.

Could be memories of a past life.

Myrddin

Princess Peach wrote: »

I'll have a watch after work.

I'm a little unsure about reincarnation. I kinda don't want to believe, but sometimes I have dreams where I'm in a place that I know is my home or my work or whatnot in the dream, but when I wake I realise it was a place I have never been before, despite being so sure in the dream.

Could be memories of a past life.

Yeah, you have to start asking what actually is consciousness, is it more than the sum of our physical parts? Or is it a natural evolution of our complex brain structure? What is a memory, is it more than just just a physical chemical bond in the brain? Or is it just that, & is a physical thing that can never transcend anything once its lost?

So many questions!

Andrew76

Interesting video but certainly not proof of reincarnation. One thing that stood out in the video for me was the lack of a father figure in his life - I didn't spot any mention of his dad? Maybe the Barra story and the dad that died was some form of coping mechanism for an absent father? Pure speculation on my part of course.

A white house on an island that can see a beach is hardly unique either, neither are gates leading to a beach or black and white dogs. I thought the mother was a bit leading in her questions sometimes, "is this the house you used to live in yeah?". Maybe he saw something on tv or pictures in a book.

The best thing about the story is that the kid seems to have moved on from the situation and can get on with being a child.

Personally I don't believe reincarnation is real simply due to the lack of evidence, once you die that's it. It's a comforting thought if it was true, but not real imo.

CiDeRmAn

My better half is a Hypnotherapist and there is a class of therapist that uses past life regression/therapy.
Often though it is less about having people walk through their past lives, seeing what their antecedents saw, but rather a way of interpreting the current mind, the unconscious, using a dreamstate of sorts.
My wife can certainly work with such therapies but has no truck with actual reincarnation, nor the metaphysical stuff that has piggybacked onto the hypnotherapy discipline over recent decades. (sorry to wander off topic)

Doc Ruby

squonk wrote: »

I haven't viewed the clip but I'm just thinking it's very nice of the reincarnation gods to keep him in Scotland at the very least. Common sense tells me that who knows what stories the child heard when he was much younger and that perhaps it's worked his way into his mind as reality.

In the Buddhist sense there are no reincarnation gods.

The actual mechanism by which one is reincarnated is for one to visualise two people getting it on (yes, really) after one dies, and then the spirit is incarnated in the fertilised egg. Also why Buddhists are against abortion, and apparently why the feeling of climax is called "the little death" by some. But it would explain why he was reborn nearby, as the spirit is most likely to visualise people it knew while alive.

If you buy that sort of thing.

As for this story, I dunno. Children are too easy to manipulate so unless there was unmistakeable evidence (like he knew where some buried treasure was or something) I'd strongly suspect interference from some source.

PhlegmyMoses

I'd say it's just a case of kids having a healthy imagination. I have a cousin in Boston who used to insist as a child that his parents weren't his real parents and that his real parents had died, along with him, in a car accident in Maine.

He had loads of details about where he was from and was real matter of fact about it so it used to creep his mam out. Nowadays he cringes about it and says he made it up, which is absolutely what happened, in fairness.

Myrddin

Forgive the bump but I spotted this in AH & thought it was interesting - http://wallstreetinsanity.com/3-year-old-claims-to-remember-who-killed-him-in-past-life-leads-police-to-body/#.U4JiYBmFGZY.facebook

“Suddenly the boy walked up to a man and said, “Aren’t you … (Eli [Lasch] forgot the name)?” The man answered yes. Then the boy said, “I used to be your neighbour. We had a fight and you killed me with an axe.” Eli told me how the man had suddenly gone white as a sheet. The three-year-old boy then said, “I even know where he buried my body.”

Lo and behold, the boy led the elders to the exact spot, a pile of stones, under which there lay a buried body. The buried man’s skull showed a split in the front. The boy also led the group to the spot where the axe was buried, forcing the accused killer to eventually confess his crime.

shanered

I seen the OP's video a long while ago, always found it interesting, he does 'seem' to know alot about Barra and got a few thing right which was interesting.
The second story of the kid figuring out the murder of his past-self is insane, again , if true would be a truely strange turn of events.
Reincarnation is a strange thing to even define as how much of the past self are you, and do these children forget their past-selves as they grow up or is it a purely childish thing similar to imaginary friends.
I'd love to see how these kids grew up and what they think many years later...

mummymoo

My 4 year old has been telling me about ' his house' which is in Dublin 12, he lives with his sister and grandfather and his parents have died, he keeps asking me can we go to his house and that he misses his family, no idea where he got it from we live in cork and he has never even been to Dublin and we never talk about it, ive put it down to the tv, id be watching Irish talk shows in the afternoon and he probably picked up on some story
That was on, don't think he is reincarnated haha similar to that boys story tho he might have seen it on this morning :L