Hello from a non-skeptic

[Gao]

As I said to you, my full name is Charles Edward Stuart Boden. My father gave me my name after Prince Charles Edward Stuart (1720-1788), so what was said concerning my having "the same now" was far from vague.

This doesn't make what the medium said any less vague. They didn't say that your name is identical, just that you had the same name. Did they mean first, last, or more than one of those? They didn't say. There's a good chance that they just meant "Charles", which is a common name that many members of the royal family as well as other nobles had over that 200 year period. This only seems specific when you retroactively decide that they meant all three names and that they were referring to the same person from that Ouija incident, but neither of those things was actually confirmed by this medium.

 

[Loss Leader]

It is of absolutely no relevance to me as to whom I might have been, only the fact that I might have been, with all the wondrous implications that would go with it.

What wondrous implications would those be exactly? It doesn't tell us anything about the nature of God, or how to live our lives. It doesn't even tell us that the soul is immortal, just that it lives longer than a single person. We don't know who we were or what themes we're doomed to repeat. We still have all of our obligations to the present life.

If it turns out my son in this life was my mortal enemy in the past, I still have to send him to school with lunch.

Seriously, what is so wondrous about reincarnation?

 

[Sledge]

And what is the use of knowing about reincarnation? We can't remember these past lives, we can't learn from them, so who cares? If you tell me I was Adolf Hitler, Martin Luther King or a Victorian chimney sweep, if I can't remember any of it, what difference does it make?

Although the last one would explain why my Cockney accent is so bad. Gor blimey, Mary Poppins! Cheroo!

 

[Olowkow]

[cockney accent] right you are guv! And what bleedin' gud is knowin' the future if you can't change it? Poppycock, innit! [/cockney accent]

 

[EHocking]

That's exactly the type of vague pronouncement for which cold readers are famous.

What could "have connections to" mean?

You read it to mean, or at least include, "related".

Would not someone who had worked on a documentary about a royal be "connected"?

Or involved with the medical care or finances or business dealings or...?

It really could mean anything. And that's the stock-in-trade of cold readers.

It means that the "medium" he has known for 12 (or 20?) years was very aware of Charles' claims that he is related to an UK royal line - through reincarnation (or was it a dream? I can't keep track now).

 

[Olowkow]

..but I came upon this forum thanks to a reference made by a member of Dr Carol Bowman's forum in a link I began there about the case of Jacqueline Pool,

Just a nitpick, I'm wondering what her doctorate is in. Her website states that she has a M.S. in counseling as of 2006. I'm surprised she would not have updated this.
http://www.childpastlives.org/aboutcarolbowman.htm

 

[Dunstan]

As I said to you, my full name is Charles Edward Stuart Boden. My father gave me my name after Prince Charles Edward Stuart (1720-1788), so what was said concerning my having "the same now" was far from vague.

Perhaps, but do you see how that makes your other "incidents" less remarkable? I think it's safe to assume that if your father was interested enough in the Prince to name you after him, he probably also told you many stories about him during your childhood. Even children who aren't named after princes tend to have fantasies about being one. So it's almost to be expected that -- having the same fallible human memory as the rest of us -- you would conflate your childhood daydreams and your father's stories with "real" memories you experienced. It would be surprising if that didn't happen.

Frankly, given that you've probably been alert your whole life to any possible coincidences involving the Prince or the Stuart family, you really ought to have a lot more "evidence" than what you've described.

 

[Emet]

Just a nitpick, I'm wondering what her doctorate is in. Her website states that she has a M.S. in counseling as of 2006. I'm surprised she would not have updated this.
http://www.childpastlives.org/aboutcarolbowman.htm

Maybe she had one in a past life?

 

[Akhenaten]

Maybe she had one in a past life?

Or a future one. The possibilities are unlimited if you're not being hamstrung by boring old reality.

 

[majamin]

Guys, as I said I am truly considering your explanations for the various episodes I came upon.

And we yours, although it may sound like pure vitriol at times.

As I said at the beginning of this thread, it is not one individual event that took me to believeing in what I believe, but the sheer volume of so many.

But, rare, unexpected events happen all the time, and not necessarily because of non-random effects.

1. Your assumption is that a large sum of (most likely) poor data can culminate in a collection that can be summarized as "good" data. Why? How do you know this?
2. How can you know how many of these events are true effects of some kind of ability, or just the consequence of probability?
3. How can you judge the quality of the pieces of evidence, and how do you know that their sum points to a particular ability?

 

[Pixel42]

And what is the use of knowing about reincarnation? We can't remember these past lives, we can't learn from them, so who cares? If you tell me I was Adolf Hitler, Martin Luther King or a Victorian chimney sweep, if I can't remember any of it, what difference does it make?

The idea of reincarnation has never made much sense to me either. I am the sum of my memories, my consciousness has been created and shaped throughout my life by my genetic inheritance, the people I've known and read, the things which have happened to me. How can someone who lived centuries ago, who had entirely different genes, influences and experiences and whose memories I do not share, have been me in any meaningful sense?

 

[Lukraak_Sisser]

One other thing about reincarnation that never made sense to me.
Where do the souls come from originally? There's about 8*10^9 people on earth now. a LOT more than a century ago and significantly more than even longer ago.
So new souls must come from somewhere.
Even if you accept animals as having souls, where did they come from? Earth was lifeless at some point in its past.
And at some point in the future earth will be lifeless again. What happens to those souls that have not finished their journey to wherever they go? Screaming in the void for all eternity?
And no alien life doesn't help with this, substitute earth with universe and the same problem applies.

 

[Aepervius]

The idea of reincarnation has never made much sense to me either. I am the sum of my memories, my consciousness has been created and shaped throughout my life by my genetic inheritance, the people I've known and read, the things which have happened to me. How can someone who lived centuries ago, who had entirely different genes, influences and experiences and whose memories I do not share, have been me in any meaningful sense?

Once you start believing that the consciousness is separate to the body (soul or whatever) then reincarnation make as much sense as going to paradise or hell. The thing is, you are talking about this as a rational person. Reincarnation believer don't, they wish for dream. Which is why many of them are reincarnation of princes, king, emperor, rich noble, heroe of wars , celebrities local or global. Lifes full of grandeur. Very rarely somebody says they are incarnation of lowly grunt with a miserable life. And don't start me on children lapping this to make themselves center of attention or to make their parents happy.

Reincarnation belief is a unadmitted daydreaming of something better than their own life.

 

[ReverendClog]

I posted this in another thread, but its stil TOTALLY relevant.

I firmly believe that Princess Diana was killed in the Titanic disaster while attempting to recover an illegal shipment of Plutonium that was being sent from Ireland to Mexico, via the fledgling reactor in Chicago and would have been sent from there as processed weapons grade material to Mexico and assembled into a working nuclear device.
Eamon De Valera was clearly of Mexican origin, (via Spain), and was the linchpin in this scheme, (to gain nucular weapons for the IRA), having heard a lecture given by Leo Szilard at belvedere college, which prompted his institution of the Trinity College archaeological exploratory digs in the Mourne mountains, the american 'Trinity bomb project was named after this as it used plutonium from this dig), which were purportedly seeking remnants of the fianna, but which were in fact to investigate and recover a noted rock formation which was known as 'the bright destroying one', in old Irish after the sword of finn, an Irish Hero. They found that the rock was radioactive and many of them died in its mining.

The ore was to be shipped to be processed when MI5 found out about it. We know that on another Timeline the U.K. was devastated by atomics in the early part of the 20th century, and an answer had to be found.
In keeping with its Royal Charter the Hapsburg Timegate trust needed a scion of the royal family to activate the time gate, and finding that Diana was in France, and by virtue of marriage was royal and possessed one of the gate gates activating crystals in her engagement ring from Charles, (which she was unable to remove, due to a 'Flem-Ath' seal), spirited her away, killing her companions and leaving a hastily grown clone, that would soon expire.

Using the French gate at Liny-Devant-Dun in northern France she led a team commando to destroy the shipment and lost her life heroically.

The film of the disaster which commemorates this event is known for the song, 'My Heart will go on', which is a cryptic reference to Diana who was the queen of all our 'Hearts'..

This is all predicted by nosferatu Nostradamus.

 

[steenkh]

"A member of that Royal Family that you have connections to is going to die this week. Pay attention to whom it might be..."

Why do everybody assume that "having connections to" a Royal Family would necessarily mean "being genealogically related"? You happened to be genealogically releated, but the cold reader who told you this could just as well have counted on you feeling connected to a royal family.

In a previous post I did mention the fact that if Diana's specific name had been given you would have found me frantically attempting to warn her about what had been said to me, and again running the risk of making an absolute fool of myself!!!

First of all, why do you think you could change history if it had been predicted by a psychic? If you could, what did the psychic then see? Secondly, I think it would be even more embarrassing for the psychic to have you trying to warn a royal who was not probably not going to die anyway.

If you read a standard textbook of cold reading, you will find that it is one thing to produce vague-sounding statements that will be interpreted as accurate statements, but that fairly accurate statements can also be thrown into the reading because people tend to forget them if there are lots of the other things that seem to fit, and this cold reader had read that the Queen Mother was having health problems at the time, a vague claim about a royal soon to die would be just the thing to try to gain credibility.

You now believe that you know exactly what was said at the time, but whenever other people have been confronted with actual recordings of what was said at their readings, they invariably realise that the words were not as accurate as they were remembered.

I once saw a British "psychic" in a Danish TV-documentary speaking with the dead, and at one point he mentioned something about the special shoes (which in Ian Rowland's "Full Facts of Cold Reading" is described as being a typical statement intending to to target women, because they always have an experience with shoes!), and a family in the audience broke down in tears. After the session these people were convinced that the "psychic" had explicitly mentioned that their dead father had been a circus clown (with large shoes)! But the tape showed that this had never been mentioned.

We cannot know if you remember correctly, but there are strong reasons to think that you do not. And your memory would not be worse than anybody else's for this to be true.

 

[steenkh]

Why do everybody assume that "having connections to" a Royal Family would necessarily mean "being genealogically related"?

I see that several posters have commented on this recently! Kudos to you all!

 

[dafydd]

One other thing about reincarnation that never made sense to me.
Where do the souls come from originally? There's about 8*10^9 people on earth now. a LOT more than a century ago and significantly more than even longer ago.
So new souls must come from somewhere.
Even if you accept animals as having souls, where did they come from? Earth was lifeless at some point in its past.
And at some point in the future earth will be lifeless again. What happens to those souls that have not finished their journey to wherever they go? Screaming in the void for all eternity?
And no alien life doesn't help with this, substitute earth with universe and the same problem applies.

I have asked believers in reincarnation that question and never recieved a sensible answer.

 

[Robert Oz]

I see that several posters have commented on this recently! Kudos to you all!

Hey! I commented on it way back on page 5.

It is quite possible that what you now remember as being a reading that included a distant family link may have initially been some added flavour to the prediction knowing you were born in Scotland. Not a link through familial relationship, but a link through nationality.

To Charles, "member of the Royal Family" means Diana and "you have connections to" means "you are related to", when there is no reason to interpret the prediction in this way other than that it fits for him.

 

[iknownothing]

Perhaps, but do you see how that makes your other "incidents" less remarkable? I think it's safe to assume that if your father was interested enough in the Prince to name you after him, he probably also told you many stories about him during your childhood.

And don't forget about his father frequently singing "Charlie is My Darling" to him. I wonder how many other ways his dad influenced him? It's not surprising that an imaginative child growing up in those circumstances would believe he had a past life from that time.

 

[dafydd]

And don't forget about his father frequently singing "Charlie is My Darling" to him. I wonder how many other ways his dad influenced him? It's not surprising that an imaginative child growing up in those circumstances would believe he had a past life from that time.

My Mam sang it to me.It was a popular song when I was a child.