That does not meet any reasonable burden of evidence
"It worked for me is low standard"
Especially when the corollary to the claimed validation is, "...but it may not work for you." That fails the reproducibility test, the same thing that dooms all sorts of mumbo jumbo like tarot readings. (Tarot readers are not supposed to consult the cards more than once for the same question.) If the method only works for some researchers and not others, or one time but not another, then it is not an empirically valid method.
"Some people don't have past lives." Very well and good as part of the hypothesis, but then there's no observation that distinguishes the case of the method not working from the case of the method working but having no past life from which to draw results. The method is not empirically valid without the ability to make such an observation.
"If you're open-minded enough, you can try the method for yourself." This entirely misses the point and invites the critic to reason in circles. I'm open to the possibility that there exists a method by which legitimate memory regression can occur. However, I'm
prima facie skeptical because, as Dave Rogers notes, false memories are a well-studied phenomenon. Any proposed method has to deal with that. And any method claimed to have empirical validity must deal with the possibility of false memories empirically. And the meditation methods as expressed in Edward Conze's works are exactly the sorts of things that would give rise to false memories, and no control applies to validate them. (No, Buddha, I'm not going to allow my review of your methods to devolve into quibbling over irrelevant excerpts from some other author. This is about
your "empirical" proof for reincarnation.)
That said, I'm open-minded and willing to entertain evidence that the Conze method works. Conze provides none. And the experiment Buddha proposes has no control. I perform the procedure and obtain something that seems like a memory. By what observation am I expected to verify that what I've thought of is an actual memory from my life? That it simply exists is not the proof. Loftus
et al. showed the ease with which such false memories can take root. The empiricism relied on experiences which the researchers knew for a fact the subject had not undergone, but which were "recalled" later as if they were memories. Open-mindedness still requires me to have an observation by which a real memory that I conjure up Conzesequely can be distinguished from the false memories real science tells us will easily occur.
This method has no way to detect either false negative observations or false positive observations. It's empirical doo-doo.
But wait, there's more. The method purports to recover memories from past lives. Since the validity of the method in that respect relies on the premise that past lives exist, which is what Buddha is trying to prove, it's yet another example of his notoriously circular reasoning. Let's grant for this paragraph the condition that if past lives exist, then (without loss of rigor) a method could be said to produce evidence of it. But we're still stuck with mental images and snippets of what seem like recollection that now allege to come from possibly the distant past, placing them almost entirely beyond the range of one's own ability to verify. No observation distinguishes present-life memories from past-life memories; it's all the subjective impression of the subject. Whatever the subject "remembers" is labeled a past-life memory,
quod erat demonstrandum. Yet another circle in the argument.
When someone claims to be making an empirical argument, I assume he knows what empiricism means. This is simply and clearly not the case with Buddha. He demonstrates no working knowledge of empiricism as a theoretical notion or empirical methods as a practical approach to developing real-world knowledge. For someone supposedly well versed in empiricism to ask what "empirical controls" are is like someone claiming to be an expert in applied mathematics and not knowing what finite element methods are, or someone claiming to be an expert in control theory not to know what a differential controller is. It's that level of fundamental deficiency.
At this point it's clear what a waste of time Buddha's "proofs" are.
