Did you ever feel like you had been somewhere before or had already met certain people? I think that most of us go through this at least once or twice in our lifetimes. While most of us pass this off as just one of those crazy things that can't be accounted for, there are some that credit this to having lived before and having been to a place in a past life or having met people in a recent past life? I don't know how you, as the reader of this article, feels about this subject, but I can assure you that reincarnation is quite real to some people. Some people say that it is impossible on religious grounds and that we (our souls) go to either heaven or hell, depending on whether we have led good lives or not. Others feel that we are given chances, to correct our mistakes and misdeeds by being put on Earth again. The amount of chances being either limited to an unknown amount or unlimited and only recurring until we live our life correctly. When this happens, we then go to heaven. So what does this really mean? One interpretation is that Earth is hell and we are constantly sent here to suffer and correct our misdeeds. Another interpretation is that Earth is a place, neither heaven or hell, but more like purgatory, where we are given many more chances and ultimately most of us will land in heaven.

Could there ever be any proof that someone was reincarnated and had lived at least one past life? First of all there are three different things that could cause people to know things about past lives. I am not talking about people that just plain lie. The first thing would be that they actually lived past lives. Secondly that they acquired the memories, somehow, of people who died and lastly they heard about people who died, or even read about them and somehow they now feel that these facts are coming from their own memories. Hardly anyone, except me, believe that it might be possible to acquire the memories of a deceased person. The reason I believe it, is that our atoms go back into the ground all around us when we die and even some may go into the air. I fell that since insects can pass chemical memory, maybe through some unknown process, humans can do the same after they die. It might be just as easy as breathing in a few atoms form the air around us. There is also the fact that sometimes we read or hear about something, maybe when we are young and convince ourselves that it is our own memory. People can do this easily, especially if they dream about something enough. It then may become their memory. Of course this is always the chance that the person who thinks they were reincarnated, might be.

A six year old boy represents a fascinating case for reincarnation. He talks of a plane crash, where he was the pilot. The plane crashed off a Japanese island in World War II and the boy has all the memories of that day as the pilot of the plane. He has constant nightmares of being shot down. They are so violent that his parents have to wake him up. The nightmares began when the boy was only two years old. As is my custom, I do not use the names of people in these types of articles. As the boy grew older, more details about the crash would come out in his dreams. Those that believe in reincarnation also believe that the dreams of past lives are a lot more apt to appear in young children and that adults unconsciously block out these thought and dreams. As the boy grew he began to name the plane's designation and the name of the carrier it came from. The boy who was now six years old was taken to an aircraft museum and finally had to be taken out of the World War II section, because he wouldn't leave on his own. He would take his collection of toy planes and keep crashing them into the furniture. One day, when his father was reading a book of World War II, which had a map of Iwo Jima and Chichi Jima, the boy saw the book and while on his father's lap, pointed to the map of Chichi Jima and said that is where his plane was shot down.

The boy's father was having problems with all this, he just didn't know what to do. He decided to try and find someone who was on that flight and he succeeded. The man had flown an Avenger fighter Plane. The boy thought he had been a pilot with the group. He found out that 21 pilots had been lost. The father began to look through old World War II records to find out what happened to these people. It was then that he came across the name of a Lieutenant whose first name was James. He remembered that his son always signed his crayon drawn pictures of World War II planes with James 3. The pilot had been shot down over Chichi Jima. Since he was three years old the boy would walk around saying he was the third, James 3. The problem was that this person was not flying a Corsair, the plane that the boy said he was shot down in. The father investigated further and found a photo of the pilot standing in front of a Corsair. It seems that he was part of a special unit that flew them that had been disbanded just before he began to fly Avengers. The boy just knew too much about this pilot and there is no way of knowing how this young child could have acquired all this information. The boy also knew the names of other members of the squadron. Could this be a case for reincarnation? Some people think that this is not only a case for reincarnation, but the classic case.

The belief in reincarnation spans every country on the globe It is even studied in Iceland. In an informal survey of the Nordic countries, 43% of the people said that they believed in reincarnation. Is there a larger belief in reincarnation around the world than we suspect? It could be very possible. One researcher said that surveys of religious beliefs do not only reveal religious beliefs, but that they also reflect basic assumptions about the nature of man. Could it be more than an assumption, could it be a piece of information that is set deep inside our minds, that we don't even know exists. If reincarnation is a fact and that is far from having been proven, then why couldn't we know this fact? It might be lodged in our unconscious. Reincarnation is an element in some eastern religions and is accepted by many who practice a religion that doesn't espouse it.

Will we ever be able to prove reincarnation? While there are many tantalizing clues that lead some to believe in it, there is no conclusive proof that what they are experiencing is a memory of reincarnation. It is especially dubious when the reincarnation experience is brought out through hypnotism. People are just too susceptible to the hypnotist, who may not be implanting thoughts on purpose, might just muddy the waters. As for children having memories of past lives, we might just find out some day, that memories that some say are proof of reincarnation are the product of some other phenomena. By the way, I wonder if anyone who thought that they were reincarnated found out that the person that they thought they were in a previous life was still alive?