Carol Bowman Quotes

“Children who remember their past lives offer the most compelling evidence yet for reincarnation.”

“When small children share their memories with us, they teach us grown-ups something that we have forgotten, namely that life does not end with death.”

“A few researchers have studied telepathy between parents and children. Not surprisingly, it is more common between mother and child than between father and child.

Mothers are naturally attuned to their young children. After all, they carry them inside their bodies for nine months.

During pregnancy, psychologists believe, there is a fusion of consciousness between mother and child.

To some extent the mother’s thoughts and emotions are shared by the baby in utero. This deep connection is not severed completely when the umbilical cord is cut.”

“As the Buddhists teach it, karma is not a law of predestination, as some Westerners fear. Rather, it allows for free will.

The law of karma does not dictate how we act. It is an impartial law, asking only that we learn from our mistakes.

When we create 'bad' karma by acting selfishly, hurting others or ourselves, disrupting the harmony of the Universe (acts that some call 'sin'), the Universe doesn’t judge us. It simply loops the disharmony back at us, offering us another opportunity to respond correctly.

We create good karma when we act with awareness and in harmony with the connectedness of all things – in other words, with love and compassion. The compelling message of karma is that we are responsible for our actions.”

“Because most parents don’t know that past lives are even possible, they unwittingly compound their children’s despair and confusion by trying to explain away a past life dream.”

“Because we generally don’t accept reincarnation in our culture, conscientious parents often blame themselves and their parenting mistakes for any and all mental or behavioral problems their young children may have.”

“Curiously, an eleventh-century Tibetan medical text pinpoints the time when past life memories begin in utero, and agrees exactly with present-day scientific findings about the onset of REM sleep and dreaming.”

“Don’t worry about making a mistake.”

“Generally, open questions are best to draw out the most information.”

“If past life nightmares are not recognized and resolved, they can cause fears, insomnia, low self-esteem, and other problems into adulthood.

This is why parents must stop responding to nightmares the old-fashioned way – by brushing them off with “You’ll be okay”, by dismissing them as 'just a dream' (implying that the dreaming reality has no meaning), or by trying to prove in a patronizing way that no monsters are in the closet or boogeymen under the bed.

Never make light of your child’s nightmares! Instead, approach every nightmare as a possible past life dream and an opportunity for healing. See the terror not as the problem but as a symptom of a troubling past life that needs to be understood and resolved.”

“If reincarnation is a generic spiritual idea, not tied to any one religion or culture, why is it resisted in the West? Why is the Judeo-Christian culture different from most of the rest of the world?”

“If reincarnation was an idea in currency with early Christians, why have all traces of it disappeared from the Christian religion we know today?”

“If we believe what our children are saying, we open ourselves to the possibility that we too have lived before and will live again.

We feel greatly expanded and alive from this realization, knowing that the deepest part of us will always exist.

We feel connected to a greater power, the source of all energy and life. Our minds and hearts expand with new vibrancy.”

“In my recurring dream I saw myself as a grown woman in an unfamiliar city wearing clothes that were old-fashioned compared with the adults around me.

Although I saw the woman as 'someone else', I knew that she was really me in some form. When this sign is present, it is a strong indication of a past life dream.”

“In some cultures, such as those in West Africa, Bali, and Burma, as well as among Native Americans and Eskimos, it is expected that a person who dies, whether young or old, will reincarnate into at least the same tribe or community, if not into the same family.

When a child is born, they look for signs — birthmarks, especially — to learn which of their recently deceased tribesmen has returned. Later, to prove this identity, they test the young child’s ability to recognize personal objects of the deceased.

Among the Yorubas of West Africa, it is customary to greet a newborn with the salutation: 'Thou art come!' They name boys Babatunde, which means 'Father has returned', and they name girls Yetunde, which means 'Mother has returned'.”

“In the recurring dream of my Holocaust life, each time I saw the same vivid, colorful images of the woman wearing a hat and maroon coat, carrying a shoulder bag, and walking down the boulevard with a stone wall behind her.

This dream began as early as I can remember, and I always saw the same scene. It wasn’t until I was an adult that the dream progressed beyond the previous stopping point — when I walked up to the government building to confront the German officers.”

“In the weeks after the group regression, some of the subjects reported to her that their lifelong phobias had disappeared. These phobias were always related to the mode of death they had experienced in their past lives.

A fear of water disappeared when the subject remembered drowning; another subject lost his fear of horses when remembering a death caused by a horse; and a woman with recurring dizzy spells and an irrational urge to run found these were eradicated after she remembered being pursued by angry townspeople and chased over a cliff to her death.”

“In truth, children are God’s creations, not ours. They are born to us according to a plan that is vaster than we can imagine.

This subtle shift in attitude, this new humility, changes our role as parents. We see that our children’s development is not totally dependent on us.

It is, at the core, an unfolding of the individual destiny and purpose they were born with. This is more valuable and real than any plan we might have for them.”

“Just by remembering past lives, people could heal themselves of phobias. They didn’t even have to know that it was possible.”

“Karma is another idea, closely related to reincarnation, that is wide open to interpretation and is often misunderstood by Westerners.

On the simplest level karma is the same as the physical laws of cause and effect, action and reaction. Christians know it as the teaching 'You reap what you sow'.

But karma operates across many lifetimes. By this principle, everything we do, good or bad, has an effect on ourselves and others; and the consequences of each action eventually come around to us again, if not in this lifetime then in another.”

“Keep a record of your child’s past life memory. Write it down immediately after it happens, while it’s still fresh in your mind.

Record everything you remember: the words she spoke, the look on her face, body language, signs of emotion, what you said and the questions you asked, and how you felt and what you thought as you listened.

Also record what you and your child were doing at the time that might have triggered the memory.”

“Many of the white subjects who remembered previous lives in the twentieth century reported that they were black or Asian in their most immediate past life. This rules out genetic memory as an explanation for the phenomenon.”

“Many past life dreams repeat. They usually start and stop in the same place in the story, like a video cued up to play the same segment over and over.

Some are single, unmoving images that the dreamer sees in exactly the same way each time.

Others progress, then stop unresolved just at the point of crisis. The crisis could be an imminent death, or the dream could end just before an important fact is revealed.

Sometimes the story progresses slightly with each recurrence; in other cases, after making no progress in all previous dreams, the story jumps ahead suddenly to the point of crisis.”

“Most Jews will be as surprised as I was to learn that reincarnation is at the heart of esoteric Judaism, called the Kabbalah. Until I started doing this research, I had always thought that Judaism ignored reincarnation.”

“Once we accept the fact that some children have lived before, we see all children differently. It changes our concept of what children are.

We can no longer see them as inferior to us simply because they are little and can’t reach the faucets or tie a shoe. For we know now that children are
more than just biological beings shaped by heredity and environment.

They are spiritual beings, too, who bring with them wisdom and experience gathered from other lives on Earth. If we accept this view — that children are experienced souls in little bodies — we realize that they have more available to them, and more to offer us, than we ever thought possible before.”

“Parents shouldn’t feel guilty for everything in their children’s makeup. They should know that children do bring their own baggage with them from the past, and that not all of their feelings and behavior are a reflection of our parenting abilities.”

“Recent research has shown that babies in utero register impressions from the mother that affect the forming personality, so now some mothers feel guilty even for incorrect thoughts and feelings during pregnancy.

This self-blame stems from our Western belief in the tabula rasa theory — the idea from the old paradigm that children come in as blank slates to be written on first by parents.”

“Recent scientific studies have shown that babies in utero, beginning at twenty-six to thirty weeks, exhibit the brain patterns of REM sleep, which scientists know indicate dreaming.

What could these unborn babies be dreaming about, since their only experiences have been in the confines of the womb? Past lives is the logical answer.”

“Reincarnation and the law of karma explain the paradox we ponder in the West: why do horrible things happen to good people, while scoundrels seem to run free and easy?

Without seeing the cumulative aspect of karma, life seems random and unfair — a cosmic roll of the dice. Indeed, it is often impossible to see any moral justice or meaning within the confines of a single life when, for example, an innocent child dies, or is born blind or homeless.

But if we look at each lifetime as only one frame of a movie composed of many frames, our perspective changes. We understand that the movie seen as a whole makes sense and tells a story of balance, justice, and order.”

“Reincarnation is not, as many people in our culture think, a belief tied to India or to any particular religion or culture. It has been an enduring spiritual belief for billions of people for thousands of years all over the world, a global idea that sprang up independently among peoples on every continent, from the Celts and Teutons of northern Europe, to the indigenous peoples of Africa, Australia, and the Americas. Hundreds of millions of Hindus and Buddhists in the world today believe in reincarnation.

It is tolerated by Islam — the Islamic mystical sect, the Sufis, make it the cornerstone of their faith. From the point of view of most of the rest of the world, our Judeo-Christian culture, with its denial of reincarnation, is in the minority. In truth, there is no such thing as a single, fixed doctrine of reincarnation.”