Pre-birth memories

Karl Jung once wrote, “Religious experience is absolute. It is indisputable. You can only say that you have not had such an experience, and your opponent will say, “Sorry, I have.” And there your discussion will come to an end.”

Therein lies the problem of dealing with any personal experience. Some people claim that they have seen a genuine extra-terrestrial creature; I have not. We might assume that person was simply mistaken, fooled by some sort of optical illusion. Or we might even assume intentional dishonesty. Perhaps mental illness best explains why this person believes he or she has seen an extraterrestrial.

But what we absolutely  Des Moines cannot do is to claim with any conviction that this other person’s experience was imaginary or a lie, unless we can prove it.

Literally, if we weren’t there to see for ourselves, how can we possibly claim to possess this knowledge? Some people might argue that it’s logical to assume, or common sense to believe that there are no aliens in outer space because there is no evidence they exist. If behavior in the physical world was always logical and common sensical, computer programmers would never have to write code to handle exceptions.

Fortunately, I can understand this phenomena all too well, because I have publicly confessed that I believe that I have personally experienced supernatural phenomena. I specifically referred to paranormal entities that one might describe as a ghost or a demon, depending on one’s personal beliefs as to whether or not ghosts actually exist.

Whatever “it” was, this invisible entity was intelligent and had the ability to manipulate matter. I could describe these personal “ghost stories” for the reader. Critics may honestly confess that nothing remotely similar has ever happened to them, but as Jung explained, what those people cannot say (with any degree of certainty) is that my experiences were not real, simply because they have not had the same experience. That would be a most arrogant assumption expressing unwarranted confidence in the ability to exceed one’s own limits of personal knowledge, unless this person has a unique talent for telepathy, of course.

Recently, I wrote an article titled Blind from birth to share the story of Vicki Noratuk, a young blind woman who allegedly experienced the ability to see briefly during an NDE following an auto accident while she was dead – Vicki claimed to be separated from her physical body as it lay on a table in the emergency room. Someone complained that Vicki Noratuk (now Vicki Blazon) had not actually been born blind because she lost her sight as a newborn child in an incubator, not going blind until a couple of days had passed after her birth. Therefore, this particular critic hypothesized, Vicki had somehow managed to retain memories of being able to see from only a few days old, and did remember what it had been like to see.

I admit scoffing at the suggestion that someone could retain memories practically from the day they were born, especially considering the fact that I sometimes forget what I had for breakfast. Frankly, it seemed impossible that Ms. Noratuk/Blazon could accurately recall memories formed decades previously, especially given that she described things that she could not and would not have seen as a child, but my skeptical friend turned out to have a point after all.

Now I’m not so sure. I believe it might be possible for memories dating back to the moment of birth and beyond may lurk somewhere deep in our subconscious mind. Perhaps we even retain  buy provigil online europe pre-birth memories. Here’s the reason I’ve changed my mind…

Philip Pauli is considered a genius by any measurement of intelligence. At the age of three, the child prodigy studied astronomy.By the time he was four, Philip understood anatomy well enough to ask the curator of the Denver museum of Natural History why the skeleton of a dinosaur was missing several vertebrae (the answer was that it wouldn’t fit in the building otherwise.) By his eleventh birthday, Philip had completed a three year internship at that museum. More recently, he studied both theology and philosophy at Oxford.

(His story can be found at approximately the 36-minute mark in the video below…)

His mother and father are both quite intelligent people, but their DNA alone does not really explain why Philip was born so much smarter than the rest of us. His mother admits that she used to wonder from where her son’s intelligence had come. Philip once told her that heaven had opened before he was born, allowing him to choose her as the one to nurture him.

In other words, Philip claimed to retain memories of events that allegedly occurred even  prior to his own conception.

Before anyone assumes this young man suffers from a delusion or mental defect, please remember, he’s one of the smartest human beings alive. Before we assume he was being dishonest, please remember that he would be lying to his own mother. And, whenever it is being assumed that prevarication is involved, always ask the question: cui bono?

Who benefits from this alleged lie?

As Dr. Jung pointed out, just because I have no residual memories of my time in the womb, or even before that, I cannot with any certainty claim that Philip’s claims are false. To even form an opinion about his claims, my own confirmation bias will influence what I ultimately decide. It so happens that Philip’s extraordinary claim fits in nicely with my existing beliefs about eternity. Anyone who refuses to consider their own personal confirmation bias simply isn’t being intellectually honest in his or her approach to the alleged evidence.

I’ve never had a near death experience…well, that’s not entirely true. I’ve nearly killed myself by accident at least a dozen times during the course of my life, and either by luck or the grace of God have lived to tell the tale. Technically, due to sleep apnea, I have even stopped breathing temporarily in my sleep, but there were no bright lights or tunnels, no out-of-body experiences, and yet I believe that near death experiences are probably real, because some of the most well-documented cases involve the phenomena of corroborated, veridical new memories being formed by the mind, while the physical brain has been thoroughly incapacitated.

Hallucinations produced by a dying brain would not be real. Any “information” obtained from a hallucination should neither be previously unknown or verifiable, but that is exactly the sort of information these cases have produced. Those with confirmation bias predisposed to rejecting evidence of supernatural phenomena will tend to dismiss this empirical evidence as “anecdote” or even “unscientific.” However, real-life experiences can be notoriously difficult to reproduce in a laboratory environment, the silly movie “Flatliners” notwithstanding. Expecting  someone currently in the process of dying to follow the scientific method strikes this writer as perhaps just a little bit unreasonable.  I would assume the person going through the process of dying has more important things to worry about.

Because of the scientific evidence produced by the experiences of people like Pam Reynolds and Michaela Roser, I believe in the possibility of life after death.  Why not life before birth?

The problem with believing Philip Pauli is telling the truth is that we have no scientific evidence that might support his claim. It is neither testable nor reproducible, by my estimation. The problem with assuming that Philip is telling a lie is that it is an assumption based on total ignorance, fed by confirmation bias.

Philip Pauli

There is only one defensible philosophical position to take in regard to Philip’s claim: agnosticism. Why should we give him any benefit of our doubt? Well, for one thing, he’s one of the smartest humans on the face of the Earth. When he told his mother this story, he was still a young child, and children tend to be somewhat more innocent and honest than adults.

We simply have no reason to assume that Philip’s memories were false, unless our personal confirmation bias won’t allow hope for life after death, or life before birth.

Cui bono? Who benefits from this lie? Perhaps the better question is, who does not benefit from lying about pre-birth memories in heaven?

Answer: Philip Pauli.