I was listening to one of those new age spiritual leaders talking about her memories from past lives, from ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia. Yeah, I know… She described them as flashbacks from her past lives.
And I asked her, did it ever cross your mind that those flashbacks could just be a product of your subconsciousness? Our brains have strong propensity for imagination. Even though imagination is not memory, people often do confuse them, for one reason or the other. Perhaps they wish their imagination to be real. I mean who wouldn’t? We call that wishful thinking, but there’s more to it than simple wishes. It’s the unwillingness to confront one’s own convictions. They’ll tell you they don’t believe it, but rather know it for certain, just like every believer will do.
But the real problem for them is actually math. It sounds way too convenient that in most of our past lives we were humans. Trillions upon trillions of animals, quintillion upon quintillion of insects and almost infinite number of bacteria. The chance of us being reborn twice as a human is 1 in several undecillions. You see, the chance is so small there are no words for such numbers. The actual probability is far lower when all is taken into account. Yet everyone was conveniently a human in many of their past lives. That’s simply mathematically ridiculous.
And then consider this. There were probably technologically advanced alien civilizations in the past somewhere in our universe, where many of us lived in the past if reincarnation is real. But how come no one in ancient Asia remembered how to make an alien grade artificial intelligence or fusion reactor? How come every technology is discovered only when there are sufficient means to do so? If reincarnation was real, that should definitely not be the case. Tesla discovered alternating current not before there were means for its discovery, but after. Same goes for Einsteins’s general relativity, Schrodinger’s equations, Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle and every other major discovery of our species.
There are many more examples where this philosophy completely falls apart, but I have no intention of beating a dead horse.
So why it’s narrow minded?
Because people who promote this spiritual philosophy never question their own convictions. They’ll always tell you they’re sure the reincarnation is real, that they know there are past lives, and by doing so they close the doors to all philosophies, all theories and all ideas that argue otherwise, which there are many, from scientific to philosophical.
There is a reason why only a skeptic is truly open minded. A skeptic simply says it’s not known and thus every theory and every idea has a potential to be true in his mind, if able to demonstrate its validity of course. I’m not saying reincarnation can’t be real and that there can’t be a thing like past lives. It’s possible, but those saying they’re sure about it only demonstrate their own narrow mindedness, and that’s something an open minded person should always avoid.