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I've been reading up on reincarnation lately, and I've wanted to try and remember one of my past lives.
Has anybody done this and has an experience to share? Do you have any recommendations on how I can go about doing this?

From National Geographic, March 2005 issue:

"To focus the mind and increase awareness of self, Shingon Buddhists like Souei Sakamoto practice takigyo, chanting for hours while standing in frigid waterfalls at the Oiwasan Nissekiji Temple in Toyama, Japan.

For 2,500 years Buddhists have employed such strict training techniques to guide their mental state away from destructive emotions and toward a more compassionate, happier frame of being. Spurred by the cascade of new evidence for the brain's plasticity, Western neuroscientists have taken a keen interest. Can meditation literally change the mind?

For the past several years Richard Davidson and his colleagues at the University of Wisconsin-Madison have been studying brain activity in Tibetan monks, both in meditative and non-meditative states. Davidson's group had shown earlier that people who are inclined to fall prey to negative emotions displayed a pattern of persistent activity in regions of their right prefrontalcortex. In those with more positive temperaments the activity occurred in the left prefrontal cortex instead. When Davidson ran the experiment on a senior Tibetan lama skilled in meditation, the lama's baseline of activity proved to be much farther to the left of anyone previously tested. Judging from this one study, at least, he was quantifiably the happiest man in the world.

Davidson recently tested the prefrontal activity in some volunteers from a high-tech company in Wisconsin. One group of volunteers then received eight weeks of training in meditation, while a control group did not. All the participants also received flu shots.

By the end of the study, those who had meditated showed a pronounced shift in brain activity toward the left, "happier", frontal cortex. The mediators also  showed a healthier immune response to the flu shot, suggesting that the training affected the body's health as well as the mind's.

"You don't have to become a Buddhist" says the Dalai Lama himself, who is closely following the work of Western cognitive scientists like Davidson. "Everybody has the potential to lead a peaceful, meaningful life."

This makes so much sense!!!! I guess I knew i felt better ever since i started serious meditation, but this is a good scientific explanation for those who need it.

I think I may be clairaudient. For example: I seem to think things out of the blue that I usually wouldn't think of. Often this happens and someone will mention it a minute later. Or some song will pop into my head and the person I'm talking to will start to hum it.

Someone told me I may be clairaudient, but I was thinking about it and it may be that I am sending the messages.? Unfortunately, I can't really find a lot on this topic, so I would REALLY appreciate any method/book recommendations concerning clairaudience.

Also, if it is clairaudience, it may be linked to other parts of me: I'm a musician, I have no trouble whatsoever hearing astral sound, and tend to learn things better if they are spoken verses reading them.

Over this weekend I had finished meditating and got to thinking about what I could do in my immediate area to help get people to pay attention to stuff thats going on in the rest of the world (the war in Iraq, the environment, stuff i care about) and the first thing that came to my mind was a vow of silence. I thought about it long and hard and decided not to do it now, I would wait a bit.

I went to school saw one of my friends. I went over and began to talk to her when she handed me a card. It stated that she was taking a vow of silence to bring people's attention to her fear for the world today. I was speechless. We don't talk too much, because she's older and in different classes than me. We just share mutual interests and I respect her a lot.

I just found it very interesting and it shocked me a bit at first.

I've been thinking about fear lately (morbid topic, I know), and I just wanted some other people's opinions on it. Some of the things that crossed my mind:
1) Who is more afraid of dying, men or women?
2)What are people most afraid of? Dying is a common one, what about others?
3) Religion and fear. Why breed fear into worship? Isn't that kind of the opposite of what you want to do?
4) Why are so many people afraid of dying; whats so scary about it?
I find it an interesting subject and would like to hear what the rest of you think about it.

Simply for curiosity's sake, what are your views on animals and OBE's and AP? Do you think they can AP?

Recently I've been having some very disturbing dreams about being raped (there's a better description on the dream forum; Post Subject: Disturbing Reoccurring Dreams). A couple people have suggested that these dreams may be caused by negs feeding off my emotions. Extensive meditation and mental cleansing before sleep seemed to stop the dreams for a while, but they've started to come back. Any suggestions on how to protect myself from this?

About four weeks ago I started having these scary dreams about being raped. I have never been raped, molested, or anything like that, but in these dreams I simply knew I had been raped. The dreams didn't all go the same way every night, but the theme was the same in all of them-I was raped by someone older than me from school (not the same person each time).  I also thought this was strange because I'm a bit of an insomniac, so when I do sleep, I usually don't remember my dreams so clearly. Two weeks ago I started doing a little more meditation before I sleep and this seemed to help, but then I had one of these dreams last night. Any ideas on what's been causing them? how to stop them?