【Another World?】There was a Person Called “River Person” When I Was a Child.

On an anonymous message board, a thread about past life memories was created. Various opinions were exchanged as the discussion gradually became heated.

What’s going on? There are already academic papers confirming people with past life memories exist. How are these memories carried over?

• [4]Logically speaking, it’s probably just a type of mental illness.

[6]The papers have obviously ruled out those possibilities and are discussing what remains as the final possibility.

• [5]They say memories can transfer during heart transplants, so memories must be stored somewhere besides the brain.
• [7]Like when you wash dishes but curry stains still remain. That kind of thing.

[9]What residue could possibly remain on a newborn baby?

• [14]Oh I see. I see, actually I don’t get it.
• [16]When souls are reincarnated, sometimes the purification process is incomplete in rare cases.

[23]Is a soul some kind of material substance? It seems impossible for memories to exist in nothing.

[17]I remember on Abema there was a boy with past life memories searching for his mother from his previous life, and apparently they found her after the program finished airing.

“Abema” is a Japanese internet TV station that broadcasts various variety shows. Special programs featuring past lives are quite popular.

• [20]Past lives are reeeeeal.
• [21]It’s possible to inherit memories from your parents, but past lives don’t exist.
• [25]Theory: if you live your current life to the fullest, past life memories disappear.
• [26]Basically, in this world the soul is like a dish with memories served on it. We’re being processed and eaten here.
• [27]If memories do exist, maybe it’s extremely rare cases where memories encoded in DNA are inherited?
• [32]It’s all in your head.

34Fiction theory, (2)Self-deception theory, (3)Coincidence theory, (4)Subconscious theory, (5)False memory theory, (6)Genetic memory theory, (7)ESP hypothesis (extrasensory perception theory), (8)Possession theory. Reincarnation theory is what remains after eliminating all of these.

• [35]Link to the paper, please.

[38]Google Ian Stevenson.

Ian Stevenson was an American psychiatrist famous for his research on past life memories. He investigated “past life memories” of thousands of children.

• [57]It’s because we’re not born brand new – we inherit our souls.

[40]Not sure if it’s genetic, but I wonder if there’s a possibility for that kind of information to somehow get encoded in DNA or something.

• [39]It’s the soul’s memory.
• [43]We were all originally one. That’s what this is about.
• [45]It’s fabricated memories created by interference between different memories.
• [52]The brain evolved from the intestines. Intestines = brain. Calves are the second heart. Humans have multiple hearts and brains. You get it, right?
• [54]I have a strange scene in my memories from before I was conscious that I still remember. It’s a narrow wooden room with rusty bunk beds on both sides, and everyone including me is sleeping naked. Maybe workers in a developing country mine or slaves from the past?
• [58]For example, we instinctively fear snakes because that information is written into the DNA we’ve inherited from our ancestors. Some people might just have this information more accessible to their conscious mind.
• [59]My theory is that people who lived long lives in their past life can better plan their current life and know how to make efforts. They have some vague vision of the future. People who died early in their past life from accidents, disease, or war struggle with figuring out how to live in this world.

[62]According to reincarnation theory, almost everyone who talks about past lives apparently met with an unnatural death. Like dying in an accident or being murdered.

• [64]I think certain factors are easily inherited. Like the predisposition for sexual crimes. I believe people with these tendencies have ancestors with similar inclinations that are encoded in their DNA. That’s why it’s difficult for the person to control, gradually becomes apparent around a certain age, and is difficult to cure or rehabilitate from.

[65]There’s talk that people with gender identity disorder who were men in past lives and women now may feel more gender dysphoria.

• [67]Some people claim they can see spirits too. Well, who knows.
• [68]It’s all suggestion. Nothing is less reliable than the human brain.
• [71]Maybe God is expanding the universe to mine cryptocurrency.

The topic gradually shifted from past life memories to hereditary criminal tendencies and social discrimination issues.

• [79]The idea that criminal tendencies are hereditary is actually being seriously researched. They say there might be issues with genes related to social cooperation. From there, the discussion jumps to claiming Australian soldiers are brutal because they’re descendants of criminals, but that’s just paranoid discrimination.
• [80]Actually, it’s strange that humans who aren’t taught anything by their parents know absolutely nothing.
• [83]People who think they have past life memories are actually imagining that the current world is a delusion.
• [84]I don’t know what’s true, but apparently stories or episodes heard when you’re about 3 years old get visualized during sleep and created. Not imagined, but created. At first they’re as inconsistent and fragmented as dreams, but if you become attached to these mental videos, you replay them over and over in your mind and gradually replace parts to make them more realistic. For example, if you happened to create a realistic mental video influenced by a historical drama, and then forgot about it around age 5. Then at some point, an unfamiliar but real memory might suddenly resurface. But it’s actually just a dream.
• [85]It’s not impossible. If memories exist as clusters of electrical signals floating around and they enter a person, memories could be passed on. However, at this stage, we can represent memories as electrical signals but can’t extract them and keep them suspended in the air.

Suddenly, a participant began to share a terrifying childhood experience. The atmosphere of the thread changed completely.

• [86]For example, in my case. When I was about 3 years old, a nasty old woman from the neighborhood would always tell me with a creepy smile when my family wasn’t around, “Don’t tell anyone about this, but >>1, if you jump into the river when no one is watching on a rainy day, you can go to the world of [anime].” My 3-year-old instinct told me this person was dangerous, and that if I told anyone about this they would feign ignorance and I’d just look like a liar. So I ignored her.
• [87]That’s scary.

[90]Who’s >>1?

• [91]Well, that didn’t affect my life at all. But thinking back, the situation that old woman warned me about combined with the shocking source of several dead children (coincidence in hindsight?) may have caused my brain to create a realistic video as if I had witnessed how those children died. Something like that.
• [93]>>90 Sorry, this isn’t my thread. My apologies >>1. These guys always suspect self-posting.

[94]I was surprised to find my thread being hijacked.

On anonymous message boards, “self-posting” (where one person pretends to be multiple people) is often suspected. Apologies were exchanged due to this cultural background.

• [95]So anyway. That experience didn’t become a trauma or anything. Looking back now, that old woman was a rare-level psychopath, but at age 3, I learned that’s just how some adults in the world are. My personal involvement with that old woman should have ended there.
• [97]But a few years later. Children with slightly diminished mental capacity in the neighborhood started dying in inexplicable ways one after another.
• [98]Looking back, I have no proof, but at that time I was convinced that young children (single-digit age from my perspective) who had been tricked by that old woman became victims. I was shaking with fear.
• [99]Because the rumored ways these mentally challenged children died matched exactly with that old woman’s repertoire of traps.
• [101]From that period on, strange phenomena started happening in my mind. Those dead children would appear in my dreams holding grudges against me, their realistic deaths being replayed over and over. And inevitably they would approach me saying, “Why didn’t you report to someone that that old woman was a liar!?” before I would wake up in a cold sweat.
• [102]Well, that didn’t affect my life at all. But thinking back, the situation that old woman warned me about combined with the shocking source of several dead children (coincidence in hindsight?) may have caused my brain to create a realistic video as if I had witnessed how those children died. Something like that.
• [104]Well, it’s a common story. Don’t you all have at least one mislead-to-death practitioner appearing in your past?

The topic was returning to past life memories, but strange experience stories continued.

• [105]There was a muscular guy wearing sunglasses who posted a video saying he couldn’t stop crying when he went to Okinawa. He didn’t know why, according to himself. But the video only got about 60 views before he seems to have deleted it.
• [108]Sorry for being completely off-topic. But I realized that people who set misleading traps all approach you with the same facial expression.

“Off-topic” is message board terminology meaning “diverging from the thread’s purpose.”

• [110]Even if you had something like past life memories. How can you definitively claim they’re past life memories? They could be memories from a future life.
• [115]If past lives exist. Which is more real, the current life or the past life?
• [123]Memories of the afterlife are more terrifying than past life memories.
• [125]My hypothesis is that past life memories are actually quantum entanglement. We aren’t unique existences, and there’s an entangled counterpart of us in the universe or another dimension. Even if this physical body disappears, our counterpart doesn’t vanish, so when a new body connects with that counterpart, the information the counterpart had flows into the new body.
• [129]Even if the memories described as past lives actually exist, it doesn’t prove that person themselves has reincarnated. There’s also the possibility they simply accessed those memories from something like the Akashic Records.

The discussion evolved into philosophical questions, extending to concepts like quantum physics and the mystical notion of Akashic Records. The curtain was about to fall on this strange conversation between unknown people on an anonymous message board.