CAROL BOWMAN ON CHOOSING ONE'S PARENTS IN THE PRE-EARTHLY EXISTANCE

The options are plentiful but not unlimited. 

Frankly, I myself have wondered how or why anyone would choose a parent or partner who is abusive to them as the soul plans the next incarnation. So though I'm partial to the idea that we do have many life experiences so that we can learn and improve ourselves, I feel that there is a risk in experiencing a life that makes us a worse person. I feel careful about having a "tit for tat" notion about spiritual experiences and using reincarnation theories as an excuse for bad behavior.

But let's see what Carol Bowman had to say in her book, which I highly recommend.

Page 144 : Not all souls participate equally in the planning process. Some are actively involved and choose carefully; others are passive, drifting into their next lives without much preparation.  Some apparently never leave the earth vibration and wander aimlessly until they fall into a convenient womb.  It's not a tidy process, not uniform or predictable, follows no formulas, and is definitely not the same for every soul.

Page 145 : It seems that in choosing a life the difference in the degree of planning is dependent on the soul's maturity and awareness. Studies agree that advanced souls spend more time in the afterlife learning and weighing plans for their next incarnation than less mature souls do. Since the advanced souls have mastered a higher level of lessons and skills on Earth, they have the understanding to create more ambitious and finely tuned plans.  On the other hand, less advanced "beginner" souls rush through the afterlife without giving much thought to what they are doing and jump back into the first body that seems good enough. These lives have a smaller chance of being productive compared with those that are carefully planned. The unplanned lives are more likely to end up being drab and meaningless or chaotic, or the individual may be overwhelmed by challenges it is not equipped to handle.

Carol Bowman's book was published in 2001 and so about twenty-five years ago.  I'm sure much more has been learned about reincarnation in the Western, Christian world, since then.  I'm aware that some Christian's believe that any belief in reincarnation is wrong, even demonic. I personally do not agree this is so. 

As a genealogist I encounter many family stories, many family secrets, many family scandals, and vow to show respect for those I work with and for by not revealing these to others. There is a lot of pain and shame in some cases. I realize that genealogy is most often promoted as a way to reunite a family, but sometimes the notion of "family" is one that needs to be redefined.

C 2025  Ancestry Worship - Genealogy BlogSpot

CAROL BOWMAN ON REINCARNATION : U TURN IN THE WOMB : MISCARRIAGE and STILL BIRTHS

Perhaps this may give some comfort to those of you who've had a miscarriage...

Excerpts page 159 - 160 :

From our ordinary, earth-bound perspective these changes of plan are called by the medical terms miscarriage and stillbirth.  Most people, if they have never been through the experience, can't understand how deeply the parents feel a miscarriage or a stillbirth as a death, an inexplicable loss that leaves them bereft and grieving for a child they never knew.  Their beautiful hopes and dreams for loving companionship with the new baby evaporate.  Adding to the pain, no matter what medical explanation is they inevitable blame themselves at some point, wondering what they did wrong.

Yet looking at miscarriage and stillbirths from the perspective of the incoming soul turns our thinking inside out.  From the soul's perspective, a decision not to be born at that particular time and to a particular mother is simply a detour, a zigzag in the continuing journey through eons of lifetimes.  Souls decide to switch course for any number of reasons; to change sex or birth order, to wait for a more appropriate body for the soul's purposes, to wait until the parent's circumstances improve or to readjust the timing of a predestined rendezvous with another soul already on Earth or yet to incarnate.  Or it may be due to the biological fact that the fetus was defective.

Whatever the reason, it is clear that in some cases souls wait for another opportunity to return to the same family. How do we know? Because some children remember the whole process.  Then one day, in the middle of a causal conversation, they tell their parents about it. They innocently describe earlier attempts to be born to the mother or through another woman in the extended family. The parents are always shocked at first if the child's claim corresponds exactly to a pregnancy loss that had been kept hushed up, a personal secret too painful to talk about, and something beyond the comprehension of such a very young child. But after absorbing the truth of what their child is telling them, their shock turns to joy and relief when they realize the baby who died in the womb years ago was not lost to them forever. 

I've been reading the death records of a town in Europe that experienced waves of Plague - Cholera to be specific. So very many who had a few months or years to live... So rare to find someone who lived to be 70 or 80.

C 2025 Ancestry Worship - Genealogy BlogSpot

REINCARNATION SYMPOSIUM WITH CAROL BOWMAN and HER SON CHASE BOWMAN

REVISITING CAROL BOWMAN'S RETURN FROM HEAVEN : RETURNING TO LIFE WITH UNFINISHED BUSINESS

I've posted on Carol Bowman and her work with children who remember past lives, as well as same family reincarnation, before.

Excerpt page 9 : If we die leaving with any kind of unfinished business - ding as a child in an accident or from a disease, as an adult filled with anger over an unsettled dispute, as a mother leaving young children behind, or simply with concern and ongoing for loved ones left behind --- the unfinished business travels with us when we return to Earth in another body, along with the impetus to complete or settle these issues.  If we return to the same family within a relatively short period of time, we practically pickup where we left off before we died.

Excerpt page 48-49 : I've collected hundreds of cases since 1988 when I began investigating children's past life memories. (Note the book was published 2001.) They come to me from people from all walks of life, from all parts of the United States and Canada, and some from Europe.  They come from people who have always believed in reincarnation, and also from people who clearly did not believe in reincarnation before it happened to them.  The cases are everywhere Once people discover that I know something about children's past lives, they open up and confess their "family secret."  I'm continually amazed at how often this happens, and how common these cases seem to be.  And since so many of them are same-family cases, their sheer number convinces me that same-family reincarnation is a much more common phenomenon than anyone suspects.

Bowman discusses the influential work of psychiatrist Dr. Ian Stevenson and questions of the mind-body connection, and the discovery that birthmarks in this life often appear where an injury occurred in another life.

C 2025 Ancestry Worship - Genealogy BlogSpot

RETURN TO LIFE by JIM B. TUCKER M.D. : ANCESTRY WORSHIP BOOK REVIEW

 

Jim B. Tucker was an Associate Professor of Psychiatry and Neurobehaviorial Sciences at the University of Virginia, continuing the work of the renown Ian Stevenson at the UVA Division of Perceptual Studies when he wrote this book which was published in 2013. He has continued on with his research since then.  The focus here is on finding cases of children who remember being someone else in a previous life who are American (or from Western Christian cultures) His predecessor found cases in India where a belief in reincarnation is strong. He prefers that the memories be spontaneous rather than achieved through hypnotic regression.  If it is not the memory of an individual's past life, then how does a child access information about someone else's life that can be checked out?

Remaining the scientist, Tucker asks this question:  Is MIND different than the organic BRAIN and how does that work?  Can understanding the potential of the mind explain why some children are psychic?

Does remembering a talent or skill or obsession from a past life explain the child protégée in sports, music, art?  Two of the children whose cases are revealed in this book claimed to have lived Hollywood lives. 

Does having nightmares or repetitive dreams have its basis in events that occurred in a past life?

Does everyone have one life?  Two?  Many?  Does a soul have a choice?

And of great interest to me is how these children explain how they died and where they were between lives. One child says the air all went out of her.  Another says that when she died she did not exist but turned into bits of dust which floated allover but other people who were dust there made friends with her.

Something else of interest in this book is Tucker's explanation that while more boys seem to remember past lives than girls, this may be because boys have a greater chance of dying accidently or prematurely.

In this book you will discover that some people think tumors and birthmarks may be coo related with accidents and injuries or illnesses in another life.

However, Tucker does ask if perhaps a person has disassociation or a multiple personality disorder or even possession.  And as he says, there are things that even hit into his "boggle threshold."

Worth a read!  (I'll excerpt in a future post.)

Link to the author's academic site here JIM B TUCKER - RETURN TO LIFE

THE ANGEL LAILAH

 

EXCERPT Page 65

This is when I came across a beautiful teaching in the Babylonian Talmud that seemed to make perfect sense.  According to this medieval Jewish text, the angel Lailah lives in the womb and watches over the embryo until it is time to be born.  The angel teaches the unborn child everything there is to know about the mysteries of life and his or her own soul.  When the time comes for the child to be born, the angel Lailah puts her finger in front of her own mouth as if to say, "shhh," and then presses the upper lip of the child so all the memories are forgotten.  According to the mouth, the light touch on the child's lip leaves a small indentation above the lip called a philtrum, which is something we all have. I started to think that perhaps the angel Lailah just hadn't pressed quite hard enough on some children's lip's, and this is why they had come into their current life bearing soul memories.

REVISITING DR. BRIAN WEISS - REINCARNATION RESEARCHER

BRIAN WEISS COM = REINCARNATION and PAST LIFE RESEARCH and BOOKS 

A Quote from this psychotherapist who has devoted his life to investigating past lives of patients and brought the discussion of reincarnation forward.

'You are not here by accident or by some coincidence of nature.  You are a spiritual being learning lessons of love in this earth school.'

CAROL BOWMAN's NEW ESSAY SUBMITTED to BIGELOW INSTITUTE FOR CONSCIOUSNESS STUDIES

CAROL BOWMAN NEW ESSAY  This will take you to her site and the page where you link to the essay that you can download as a PDF file or read on line.

Always impressed with her work!

CHILDREN's PAST LIVES by CAROL BOWMAN on NIGHTMARES

CHILDREN'S PAST LIVES
How Past Life Memories Affect Your Child
by Carol Bowman
C 1997 by Carol and Steve Bowman
A Bantam Book

page 257 by Carol Bowman

Some Children have NIGHT TERRORS... a series of sleep disturbance that is not in the same category as regular nightmares. "In a typical night terror episode, the child screams, thrashes about, and may even walk or run around and get violent, all while appearing to be awake. But afterwards, unlike a nightmare, the child has absolutely no memory of the incident and no dream story that might explain the bizarre behavior. This alone makes night terrors extremely difficult to treat. Scientists have no satisfactory explanation for what causes night terrors and no reliable remedy. But they do know that they occur during the deepest sleep cycle, and that they commonly begin between the ages of three and four, and fade by thee ages of five or six.

Since we know know that some nightmares have a past life cause, it makes sense that some night terrors would too. Perhaps during deepest sleep, a state furthest from waking consciousness, these children are being terrorized by vivid memories of a past life trauma. I think it's significant that night terrors occur at the same ages when children are most likely to have spontaneous past life memories...

C 2020  Ancestry Worship - Genealogy BlogSpot

REVISITING CAROL BOWMAN and CHILDREN'S PAST LIVES

After starting the rerun of Louis Henry Gates, I decided to check on YouTube for fairly recent talks that CAROL BOWMAN, perhaps the most respected researcher in Children and their Past Lives in America, might have given. 

As of December 2024 there are several videos featuring Carol.

Now I have to convince a friend of mine to consider past life experience as the reason for her grand-daughters overly dramatic fear of the loving family dogs. Her two year old sister shows no such fear but this one seems unable to get over being afraid of them.

LINK TO https://www.carolbowman.com/reincarnation-forum  December 2024

An appearance on Oprah got her a book contract.

Innocent children have no reason to recreate their last life traumas through spontaneous memory, through the art they make, and the way they indulge in play.

I admire Carol for all she's done to open our minds to this natural phenomena.

C 2020  Ancestry Worship Genealogy BlogSpot All Rights Reserved

LIFE TIMES by FREDERICK LENZ : ANCESTRY WORSHIP GENEALOGY BOOK REVIEW

Some people who do genealogy research or who are into family history collecting wonder if they are like any of their ancestors, ones they never met, whose photo they will never see.

Some wonder if perhaps they have reincarnated into the same family or if their soul was once embodied by a great grandparent or other ancestor.  

Why do we meet someone and have emotions about them that make no sense such as feeling instant empathy for them or greatly disliking them?

If you read around reincarnation hoping to encounter more fascinating or even stunning stories, you may find a few in Frederick Lenz's Life Times : True Accounts of Reincarnation.  A small collection of testimonials in this book are in the category of spontaneous recall, a category that does not require hypnotic regression and seems to me to be the most creative and thus unbelievable. There's a bit about Buddhism and Hinduism here too and the beliefs that are more alike than not. Since I know a bit more than the author when it comes to the belief in karma, let's just say that the author's understanding is not complete and I sense this book was intended to be a short one so there wouldn't be room for that explanation anyway...

For purposes of this blog, which I long ago promised to be a bit unconventional and spiritual, I think my readers would most be interested in defining Twin Souls,  Soul Mates, and Karma-Connected Souls.  The words karma and soul mates have entered our American vocabulary and are used by those who are not Buddhist, Hindu or who are ignorant of their meaning.  I'll paraphrase:

Twin Souls:  People with similar talents or interests who have incarnated with each other for many lifetimes or who are joined by experiences they shared.  They are not necessarily compatible but may enjoy their time together inventing, learning, collaborating on a project.  (page 130)

Soul Mates:  Feeling magnetically drawn to a person is an indication that you actually had a close personal relationship in another life time(s), and implied that this was romantic.  "It would appear that one can have more than one soul mate, and that soul mates can be of either the same or the opposite sex." (page 135)

Karmic Connection: "Karmically connected souls are persons whose karma (actions) have temporarily joined them,until such time as their actions together have been completed. The link between karmically connected individual s is not so highly developed as the bonds between twin souls or soul mates."  (page 145)

C 2019 Review and Excerpts  Ancestry Worship Genealogy

REINCARNATION

REVISITING CAROL BOWMAN PAST LIVES FORUM (REINCARNATION AS YOUR OWN ANCESTOR?)

New link as of Dec 2024 https://www.carolbowman.com/cpl-book

I spent a couple hours the other night reading posts from the forum. https://www.carolbowman.com/reincarnation-forum

Carol Bowman is one of the most respected researchers into past lives and reincarnation in the Western World.  I find the subject fascinating.  Especially when children remember their state before life on earth, or what happened between lives, or how it is that they came back.   The focus on children is, in part, because children before the age of five tend not be very exposed to history and tend not to have reason to lie.

I've asked myself if I'm the reincarnation of one of my own ancestors, since I'm one of those people who has felt that I got born into the wrong family.  To my knowledge I have not a single relative who thinks like me or is as open as I've been to learning about so many other cultures and spiritual beliefs.  I can't even locate a relative whose much interested in family history or genealogy.

However, there are a number of people in my heritage who were very religious in more conservative, traditional ways, including a few who qualify as Bible addicts.

I discovered one ancestor who may have been, in the middle 1800's to early 1920's a bit of a spiritual tinkerer, and I'm trying to find out more about this Catholic immigrant who was a Mason.

C 2016 Ancestry Worship - Genealogy BlogSpot

CHILDREN'S PAST LIVES by CAROL BOWMAN - CHILDREN WHO SPEAK FOREIGN LANGUAGES FROM ANOTHER LIFE

CHILDREN'S PAST LIVES
How Past Life Memories Affect Your Child
by Carol Bowman
C 1997 by Carol and Steve Bowman
A Bantam Book

page 184

"Another form of knowledge beyond experience is the ability of small children to speak in an unknown language that they could not possibly have learned through ordinary means. This phenomenon is called xenoglossy. Since language requires months and years of repetition and practice to learn, science is at a loss to explain how anyone, especially a young child, could speak a language that he has never been exposed to. In the context of past lives, however, xenoglossy is simply another example of something learned in the past that carries over to the present life.


Quoting a case in "Reincarnation: The Phoenix Fire Mystery," Bowman says that a prominent New York physician and his wife found their twin baby boys conversing between themselves in an unknown vernacular. The children were eventually taken to the foreign language department of Columbia University where none of the professors could identify their speech...until a professor of ancient languages happened to pass by and was amazed to discover that they were speaking ARAMAIC, a language current at the time of Jesus Christ....

"The boys weren't just mimicking a few words: they were conversing with enough proper Aramaic syntax and vocabulary for the expert to be able to recognize the language.

In one case as two year old boy remembering the life of a 19th century sailor, used terms like "spanker" sail. and when he knocked over a jelly jar, asked his mother if he would have to do "haze," the correct term for punishment in vintage sailor slang..."

C 2009 Ancestry Worship - Genealogy BlogSpot

CAROL BOWMAN's CHILDREN'S PAST LIVES : THE STORY OF JENNY COCKRELL

CHILDREN'S PAST LIVES
How Past Life Memories Affect Your Child
by Carol Bowman
C 1997 by Carol and Steve Bowman
A Bantam Book

Carol Bowman says that children can remember past lives spontaneously, through hypnotherapy-past life regression, or through dreams. On pages 250-251 of her book she tells the story of Jenny Cockrell who had childhood dreams and past life memories while a child in England in the 1950's. She saw herself as a grown woman, named Mary, who lay dying, sobbing with grief and tormented by guilt because she was leaving behind eight children.

"By the time she was an adult, Jenny had enough information from her dream and from her waking visions to trace her former identity to Mary Sutton, a woman who had lived in a small town north of Dublin, and who had died of fever, leaving behind eight small children. Jenny's long quest to discover her past life identity culminated in an emotional reunion with Mary Sutton's grown children in Ireland. Almost every detail that Jenny remembered was confirmed, including some things Jenny knew about Mary that no one outside the family could have known. Most importantly, after this contact with her children from a former life, Jenny was healed of the guilt and sadness that had tormented her since she was a small child...

"Across Time and Death" is the book...