essay about past lives

• Personality

Evaluating the Evidence for Reincarnation

Can deceased people somehow be reborn in a different body.

Posted December 20, 2021 | Reviewed by Kaja Perina

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• There are many cases of young children who report very specific details of an apparent past life, which are later verified.
• Some claim that children's reports of past lives could be the result of fraud, imagination, or embellishment.
• One striking case of past-life recall is Ryan Hammons, who made 55 very specific statements about a previous life that were verified.

The idea of reincarnation never sat particularly well with me. I used to think it was too neat and simplistic, a variation of the Christian reward-or- punishment -based afterlife — the idea that good deeds will lead to a better reincarnation in the next life, whereas bad deeds might result in spending your next life as a frog or worm.

However, in recent years I’ve become aware of well-documented cases of young children who have reported very specific details of a past life, which were later verified by investigators.

Research in this area was pioneered by Dr. Ian Stevenson , a psychiatrist at the University of Virginia School of Medicine, who spent much of his career collecting and examining such cases. Typically, between the age of 2 and 4 (with a mean age of 35 months) such children start talking about their previous life, often speaking about the events that led up to their death, and sometimes using the present tense as if their previous life was still continuing. In some cases, Stevenson was able to identify the person the child claimed to be and to verify the information by speaking to relatives of the deceased (1).

Since Stevenson’s death, other researchers have followed his lead. Now around 2500 reports of children’s past-life memories have been studied (2). Research has shown that normally the children’s reported previous lives ended prematurely and unnaturally, often involving violence, suicide , or an accident. In almost three-quarters of cases, the “previous personality ” (in the term coined by Stevenson) died relatively young. A quarter died before the age of 15. On average, the previous personalities died four-and-a-half years before the birth of the children with whom they were associated (3).

Modern researchers meticulously check the accuracy of children’s accounts, analyzing any possibility that they gained information through more mundane ways or were fantasizing, or that their parents may be embellishing their stories. Often, researchers give the children recognition tests—for example, showing them a set of photos and asking them to pick the one which relates to their previous personality. They might be shown pictures of houses and asked to pick the one their previous personality lived in. They might be shown pictures of women and asked to pick which was their previous personality’s wife (4).

The most well-known contemporary researcher in this field is Jim Tucker , professor of psychiatry and neurobehavioral science at the University of Virginia. I’ll describe one of the remarkable cases Tucker has investigated here.

The Case of Ryan Hammons

Around the age of 4, Ryan Hammons told his mother Cyndi, “I think I used to be somebody else.” Whenever they saw the Hollywood sign on TV, Ryan would get excited, saying that was his home and he wanted to return there. He said that he had been an agent in Hollywood and that the agency had changed people’s names. He talked about dancing on Broadway and living in a house with a large swimming pool. Sometimes when songs came on the radio, he would stand up and start tap dancing. He talked about going to fancy parties with a “cowboy man” who had a horse that performed tricks and also did cigarette commercials. At school, when asked to draw pictures of his home, he would always draw four people—himself, his parents, and “the old me” (5).

Cyndi began to write down everything that Ryan told her about his past life. She borrowed books about Hollywood from the local library, hoping they would help Ryan process his memories. In one book, they found a still from an old movie called Night After Night . Ryan became very animated and shouted, “Mummy, that’s George—we did a picture together!” Then he pointed to a man to the side of the photo and said, “And that’s me.” Ryan had always said that he didn’t know the name of his previous personality, and at first Cyndi was unable to identify the man he pointed at. However, she found out that the other man was an actor named George Raft.

When Ryan was 5, his mother made contact with Jim Tucker, who agreed to investigate his claims. A film archivist (employed by a TV production company who made a documentary about Ryan) identified the man Ryan said was “me” as Marty Martyn, a dancer, actor, and agent who died in 1964. When Tucker visited Ryan and his parents, Ryan was asked to pick out photos of people and places that related to Marty Martyn, which he did successfully.

Most of Ryan’s statements about his previous life had been recorded by his mother before Tucker got involved, and before Marty Martyn was identified. Some statements had already been verified by his mother. For example, she had confirmed that the cowboy friend he often spoke about was a man called Wild Bill Elliot. With Tucker’s help, other statements were verified from sources such as public records at national archives, newspapers, obituaries, travel documents, and census reports. (Since Martyn was an obscure figure, there was no information about him on the internet, at least at that time.) Martyn’s daughter was contacted and verified other statements.

In total, 55 of Ryan’s statements about his previous life were verified. For example, it was confirmed that Marty Martyn was once a tap dancer, that he ran a talent agency that changed people’s names, that he had several wives, that his favorite restaurant was in Chinatown, that he spent a lot of time in Paris, that he had a large collection of sunglasses, that he bought his daughter a dog when she was 6, and so on. When Cyndi took him to the beautiful old building where the Marty Martyn Talent Agency had once been, he acted “as if he were truly returning home after a long journey...His whole face lit up with joy” (6).

Now a teenager , Ryan no longer has memories of his previous personality, but still seems to carry some behavioral traits from his last life. For example, he loves to watch old movies and listen to big band music from the '40s and '50s. (For further information, see this video about Ryan Hammons.)

Other Explanations?

Are there any alternative ways of explaining this case, and many other similar ones? Young children have vivid imaginations, so perhaps they are simply fantasizing. However, there are hundreds of cases in which the details of the children’s stories have been verified, which wouldn’t be the case if they were just making up random stories of a previous life.

Another skeptical explanation might be that the children have overheard their parents talking about certain people and have constructed stories based on the information. However, in the vast majority of cases, the previous personality was someone completely unknown to the family who lived far away from them.

More mundanely, is it possible that parents simply feed information to their children? Perhaps parents pick a deceased person, find out about their life through the internet, and coach their children to pretend to be the person? However, in many cases (such as Ryan’s) there are documents showing many specific details before the children are linked to their previous personalities. In addition, since children start speaking about their previous personalities at a very young age—in most cases before they are three—it seems highly unlikely that they would be able to process and retain detailed information and be able to relay the information accurately to investigators.

In any case, a large number of cases date from the pre-internet era, when detailed information about deceased people was hard to obtain. And even most post-internet cases relate to obscure ordinary people, whose lives are not recorded in great detail. In many cases, it is difficult to find any information about them online at all, and researchers are obliged to search through specific databases or population records.

All in all, this evidence makes me feel that I have no choice but to accept that reincarnation is real. As a scientist, I feel obliged to revise my views in the face of evidence. As I point out in my book Spiritual Science , it appears that the idea of life after death is more than a naive superstition . In Shakespeare’s famous play, Hamlet describes death as “the Undiscover’d country from whose bourn no traveller returns.” But perhaps it is possible to return from death, and to even remember the previous journey we took there.

(1) Stevenson, I,. (1980). Twenty Cases Suggestive Of Reincarnation. Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press

(2) 'Fifty Years of Research.' https://med.virginia.edu/perceptual-studies/our-research/children-who-report-memories-of-previous-lives/fifty-years-of-research/

(3) Mills, A., & Tucker, J. B. (2014). Past-life experiences. In E. Cardeña, S. J. Lynn, & S. Krippner (Eds.), Varieties of anomalous experience: Examining the scientific evidence (pp. 303–332). American Psychological Association. https://doi.org/10.1037/14258-011

(4) Tucker, J. (2021) Cases of the reincarnation type. In Kelly, E & Marshall, P. (Eds.). Consciousness unbound.. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield.

(6) Kean, L. (2017). Surviving death. New York: Three Rivers Press, p. 66.

Steve Taylor, Ph.D., is senior lecturer in psychology at Leeds Beckett University. He is the author of several best-selling books, including The Leap and Spiritual Science.

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Have you been here before? The eerie sensation is the shadow of your mind searching inward for clues to its own survival

by Anne Cleary   + BIO

Déjà vu, the eerie sense that something new has been experienced before, has confounded us for hundreds of years. Along with the public, philosophers, physicians, intellectuals and, more recently, scientists have tried to get to the bottom of the phenomenon. Potential explanations have ranged from double perception (the idea that an initial glance at something was only partially taken in, leading to déjà vu upon a second, fuller glance) to dissolution of perceptual boundaries (a brief blurring of boundaries between the self and the environment) to seizure activity to memory-based explanations (the idea that déjà vu results from a buried memory). Now, research emerging from my lab and others suggests that déjà vu is not just a spooky experience, but a possible mechanism for focusing attention – perhaps an adaptive mechanism for survival shaped by evolution itself.

I first became interested in the topic after reading the paper ‘A Review of the Déjà Vu Experience’ (2003) by the psychologist Alan S Brown – probably the first treatment ever to appear in a mainstream psychology journal. Writing in the Psychological Bulletin , Brown described survey studies, case reports and theoretical ideas culled from more than a century’s worth of writings on déjà vu. Much of the available literature on déjà vu at the time came from non-mainstream sources (and some were even of a paranormal flavour). Still, from this largely fragmented literature, Brown managed to winnow some important clues and presented them in a language that cognitive scientists could work with and act upon: data and theory. The data from the survey studies provided useful empirical starting points, and the very old theories of déjà vu that Brown reviewed provided a scaffolding for devising highly specified hypotheses that could be tested in a lab.

From the large collection of surveys conducted over the years, Brown determined that roughly two-thirds of people experience déjà vu at some point in their lives. He also reported that the likelihood of experiencing déjà vu decreases with age, and that physical settings (or places) are the most common trigger. The finding that déjà vu is most commonly elicited by scenes (as opposed to just speech or objects) was a particularly useful clue for scientists: a new theoretical approach to autobiographical and event memory emphasises a role of scenes in the ability to recollect past life events. Partly based on newer understandings that brain areas critical for first-person navigation through places may also underlie recollective memory ability, the idea is that the first-person perspective within a scene is a crucial facet of human memory. Consider the last dinner that you ate at a restaurant. What is this memory like? Can you ‘see’, in your mind’s eye, where everyone else is sitting relative to you at the table? This illustrates how our ability to process, navigate through and mentally reconstruct our place within past scenes may be central to our recollective memory ability.

T he critical role of our place within scenes in memory may also be why the centuries-old memorisation technique known as the Method of Loci (also called the Memory Palace) is very effective and used by competitive memorisers; it involves envisioning your to-be-remembered information within particular scenes along a route that you regularly take, or within a building that you know well. For example, to remember his talking points in their correct order for his TED talk ‘Feats of Memory Anyone Can Do’ (2012), the science writer Joshua Foer created a visualisation of different points throughout his house, each with a visual-image cue attached to it so that, when he did a mental walk-through of his house starting at a mental image of the front door, he would ‘see’ in his mind’s eye an image cuing him for the next talking point.

In the foyer of his house, Foer had imagined Cookie Monster (the Muppet) on top of Mister Ed (the horse) as his cue to introduce his friend Ed Cooke at that point in the talk. Foer continued moving through various places within his image of his house to access his cues for the next talking points in the order in which he needed to raise them. For example, later on, when arriving at the kitchen in his mental walk-through of his home, he had imagined the characters from The Wizard of Oz along a Yellow Brick Road; this was his cue to describe how he had embarked on a journey and the many friends he met along the way. As Ulric Neisser, often considered the father of cognitive psychology, suggested decades ago, ‘a sense of where you are’ may provide a basis for recollective memory. Although déjà vu is more of a contentless sensation of memory than a recollection of autobiographical experience, the fact that it tends to be elicited by scenes hints at the possibility that it, too, emerges from the same basic scene-processing mechanisms that enable this ‘sense of where you are’.

An example is having a sense of recognition for a person’s face without being able to pinpoint just how you know them

Dovetailing with this useful clue about déjà vu, Brown’s 2003 review also mentioned the ‘Gestalt familiarity hypothesis’ – the theory that déjà vu results from a familiar Gestalt , a German word for the arrangement of elements within a space – such as when a new acquaintance’s living room happens to have the same spatial layout as a previously visited space that fails to come to mind. Brown linked this untested hypothesis of déjà vu to an ongoing approach for studying memory known as the ‘source-monitoring framework’, in which a person can recognise a situation as having been experienced before without pinpointing the source of the familiarity. In what seemed to be an invitation for cognitive scientists, Brown suggested that it would be straightforward to test such hypotheses in the lab.

At the time, I had been studying a phenomenon known as ‘recognition without identification’ and its sister phenomenon , ‘recognition without recall’. Both are thought to reflect the ability to sense that something was experienced before, even when no specific past instance comes to mind. A common example is having a sense of recognition for a person’s face without being able to pinpoint just how you know the person. I immediately saw a connection between my own work and what Brown presented in his review, and I set out to test his ideas.

One of my methods seemed particularly applicable. This was the recognition without recall method . In my original work , participants might receive a cue like ‘POTCHBORK’ that resembles an earlier viewed word, ‘PITCHFORK’. Although a person can successfully use the cue to recall the word it resembles, sometimes recall fails. Recognition without recall is the finding that people give higher familiarity ratings to cues that resemble unrecalled studied words than to cues that do not.

Applying this insight to déjà vu, my students and I developed a variant of the task using black-and-white line drawings. Each test image potentially shared an overall ‘Gestalt’ or arrangement, with an image that had been studied before. When presented with an image on the test, participants attempted to recall a previously viewed image having a similar arrangement of elements. They also rated how familiar the test image seemed and whether or not it provoked a sense of déjà vu. Images that fell into the déjà vu category tended to indeed match arrangements found in prior images, establishing evidence for the Gestalt familiarity hypothesis and setting the stage for what I would later facetiously refer to, in a TEDx talk , as a ‘déjà vu generator’– an implementation of the Gestalt familiarity idea in virtual reality (VR). Wearing a VR headset, participants would be sequentially immersed in different sets of visual surroundings throughout a study phase. In a later test phase, they would be immersed in new scenes, some of which share a spatial layout (ie, arrangement of elements) with scenes from the study phase. Here, the familiar Gestalt would be one’s visual surroundings within the VR environment, as might mimic real-life situations in which déjà vu occurs, and as might involve a sense of where you are.

I met Alan Brown in the summer of 2007 at the American Psychological Association annual convention in San Francisco after inviting him to give a talk on déjà vu. I told him how his 2003 review paper and later book , The Déjà Vu Experience (1st ed, 2004), inspired me to pick up the study of déjà vu myself. This formed the start of a long collaboration. Later over dinner at the 2007 annual meeting of the Psychonomic Society that November in Long Beach, California, we marvelled at how neat it would be to be able to test the Gestalt familiarity hypothesis in VR for an immersive experience in which the spatial layout is one’s visual surroundings within the VR environment. To the extent that VR allows for a simulation of life-like immersion within scenes, this approach might approximate the way in which an arrangement of elements in space (such as where a table, couch, floor lamp and artwork are placed relative to one another within a living room scene) might produce déjà vu in real life. It seemed like a castles-in-the-air idea.

But then in 2008, there I was with a group of students, down in a windowless cinderblock room in the basement of the old Clark Building on the Colorado State University campus, wrestling with a VR headset. Fifteen years ago, VR systems were quite crude. They lacked a user-friendly interface or any form of tech support, and required a lot of improvising in the form of makeshift workarounds. We were working with a set of eMagin Z800 VR goggles and were attempting to get The Sims 2 – a 2004 life-simulation game – to display within the goggles for an immersive experience with the game. This was not trivial. Fortunately, Ben Sawyer was among the tinkerers down in that basement. An undergraduate at the time, with a lot of technical savvy, Sawyer was a legend among the Clark A-wing basement-dwellers for having taken apart and reassembled the always-malfunctioning driving simulator, completely reprogramming it for functional operation in research .

Recognition without recall occurred in the form of higher familiarity ratings among VR test scenes that shared a spatial layout

The Sims 2 video game involves creating indoor and outdoor spaces by placing elements onto a grid from a bird’s eye perspective, and then zooming down into the scene from a first-person perspective to make adjustments and tour the scene. This provided a means by which a large set of scenes, each having an identically configured but otherwise distinct counterpart scene, could be created for viewing from a first-person perspective. For example, a clothing-store scene might have the same arrangement of elements on a grid (eg, the placement of hanging wall displays of clothing relative to a table with folded shirts) as a bedroom scene (eg, the placement of windows and end tables relative to a bed). So while Sawyer worked for months on getting the Sims 2 game engine to output in 3D to the Z800 goggles, I used a pad of graph paper to sketch out a bird’s eye view of dozens of pairs of distinct but identically configured scenes to then manually create within The Sims 2 game, soliciting scene ideas from other team members along the way and keeping a running list (eg, a clothing store configured the same way as a bedroom, a bowling alley configured the same way as a subway station, a museum configured the same way as a courtyard, etc). After many months of creating Sims scenes, and many remarkable improvisations that included having the machine output in 3D to the monitor or any attached display device, and creating short-cut keys to enable teleportation from one scene to the next within The Sims 2 structure (and with Sawyer at one point taking apart then soldering together a pair of non-functioning Z800 goggles that Brown had shipped to us), we eventually got the experiment to work in VR.

From within the goggles, which felt a bit like thick, heavy ski goggles edged with foam, a given cartoon-like Sims scene could be viewed through a square, straight ahead. The depth perception was comparable to that of a 3D movie viewed with 3D glasses, and turning your head enabled viewing differing aspects of the scene, such as looking up at the ceiling or down at the floor, or left or right.

The first VR experiment to examine the Gestalt familiarity hypothesis involved 24 college students. A short-cut key zapped the participant from a particular vantage point within one scene to the next and, from each pre-established vantage point, the participant was free to look around the scene by turning their head. After the first 16 scenes, the person viewed a new set of 32 test scenes, half having an identical spatial layout to one of the first 16. While viewing a test scene, the student rated how familiar the scene seemed, indicated if the current scene prompted any recollection of one of the earlier 16 scenes (and if so, which one), and indicated if déjà vu had occurred. After cycling through the 32 test scenes in this manner, the process started over with a new set of 16 study scenes followed by another 32 test scenes. Recognition without recall occurred in the form of higher familiarity ratings among VR test scenes that shared a spatial layout with an earlier viewed but unrecalled scene, and during recall failure, participants reported déjà vu 27 per cent of the time, compared with a baseline of 17 per cent of the time when there was no spatial layout resemblance to an earlier scene.

Although this study demonstrated interesting findings and represented a remarkable technological feat for its era, it was repeatedly rejected from journals before finally finding a home at Consciousness and Cognition in 2012. The topic of déjà vu, was, and still is, a tough sell in the world of science.

S till, the publication generated a great deal of media attention and public interest, and with that came a number of enquiries to me from the general public about the research, by phone, email and sometimes mailed letters. In many of these enquiries, people were reaching out to tell me that they thought the idea that déjà vu was grounded in memory could not be correct, or could not be complete, because, to them, déjà vu included a sense of knowing what will happen next. Some people even used the term ‘precognition’ to describe this. At first, I was not only sceptical, but also wary of venturing into what seemed like more of a topic for paranormal literature than mainstream scientific research, especially when déjà vu was already a tough sell as a topic within science. But the line of questioning kept happening, even in academic settings and, eventually, I started looking into it.

Was there a logical, scientific explanation for the sensation these people expressed? Perhaps if a situation was experienced before but failed to be recalled, the sense of how a similar situation would unfold might seem like a prediction? To test this with our spatial layout paradigm, we needed scenes to dynamically unfold over time. The Sims 2 platform was well suited to this because it was set up to easily create videos of virtual tours to publicise one’s Sims creations on YouTube. From this idea, the ‘virtual tour’ paradigm was born. Participants viewed video tours of the Sims scenes that had been used in the previous VR study, each taking a particular path with turns through the scene from a first-person perspective. In the test phase, the tours through scenes with identical spatial layouts also followed the same path as in the earlier-viewed counterpart scene, but only up to a point – the tour stopped short of a turn that happened in the earlier counterpart scene, and participants had to determine the direction of the next turn. If our hypothesis was correct, we thought, then we would find that, when participants experience déjà vu while viewing a tour of a scene with an identical layout as an earlier viewed but unrecalled scene, they should be more likely to successfully predict the next turn.

However, that was not what we found. Our new hypothesis was not supported and, deeming the study a failure, I let it sit for a couple of years.

Everything the doctor was saying was something she’d heard before, but also she knew what the doctor was going to say next

But the enquiries continued to come. One that stands out was when my office phone rang and it was a somewhat shaken man calling from Alaska. He’d had a strange déjà vu experience and was looking for answers. He found some of my research on déjà vu in an internet search. He had recently experienced a strong sense of déjà vu while on a hunting trip and was quite shaken by the fact that, during his déjà vu, he knew exactly what would happen next. ‘I am not a superstitious person,’ he said, ‘so I just don’t understand how this could be possible. I’m hoping maybe you have some answers that can explain this.’ He was distraught, looking for an explanation. I had no good explanation to offer.

Conversations like this continued to eat at me.

Then one day it occurred to me that perhaps the feeling of déjà vu is associated with an illusory sense of prediction. Digging back through old literature, there were some hints at this idea. For example, in a very old neurology case report from 1959, Sean Mullan and Wilder Penfield reported on a patient for whom electrical stimulation during awake brain surgery induced déjà vu. The patient reported feeling like everything the doctor was saying was something she had heard before, but also like she knew what the doctor was going to say next. Since the déjà vu was induced artificially through electrical stimulation to the brain, the accompanying sense of prediction must have been illusory in that case, rather than memory based.

So, I dusted off the old experiment from a couple of years earlier and ran it again with an additional prompt following the pause during each tour of a test scene: rate the feeling of being able to predict the direction of the next turn. And lo and behold, people felt pretty strongly that they knew the direction of the next turn when experiencing déjà vu, even though that was not the case. This finding persisted across many subsequent experiments, including in the original multi-experiment study that was the first to show it in 2018 and in the studies that followed it.

But this research still didn’t address the question of why people like the Alaska caller feel like they really did predict what was going to happen during déjà vu. So, we did a follow-up study , which suggested that not only is there a predictive bias associated with déjà vu, but a ‘postdictive’ bias (a feeling of having known all along how the situation was going to unfold) too.

As to what all of this means, it may be that déjà vu produces the feeling of being on the verge of retrieving a past experience from memory, leading to the belief that you can identify what will happen next (because it feels like how the situation unfolds is about to come to mind at any moment); then, as the situation does unfold in a certain way, its continued familiarity tricks the mind into believing that it knew it all along.

A lthough these research findings represent major steps toward understanding déjà vu, it wasn’t until I was able to experience déjà vu myself within the ‘déjà vu generator’ that I had what may be my most critical insight. It took a recreation of the VR déjà vu paradigm by someone else for me to have the experience myself. Because I had personally created most of the scenes in our previous work, and because I knew every scene and its counterpart, I could never experience déjà vu myself within our system. The scenes were just too familiar to me.

That changed when I donned an HTC Vive VR headset to personally run through a brand-new variant of the VR paradigm created by Noah Okada, then a computer science student at Emory University in Georgia.

I met Okada in 2019 while on a visit to Emory during my sabbatical. He was working with the neuroscientist Daniel Drane and the neurologist Nigel Pedersen – whom I was visiting – to create VR scenes for use in research. Pedersen and Drane work with people who have epilepsy. Our collaboration had formed a year earlier through Joe Neisser, a philosopher at Grinnell College in Iowa (who, somewhat serendipitously, happens to be the son of Ulric Neisser). Joe Neisser met Pedersen during his own sabbatical at Emory while attending a talk. Like most neurologists specialising in epileptology, Pedersen was familiar with seizure-related déjà vu, as neurologists have been writing about it for more than a century . Joe Neisser and I had met in Savannah, Georgia in 2012 during a symposium he moderated at the Southern Society for Philosophy and Psychology, where I gave a talk on our recent VR study of déjà vu. When Pedersen and Joe Neisser got to talking about seizure-related déjà vu, Neisser described the VR paradigm to Pedersen and suggested that we should all collaborate.

So there I was in 2019 on my own sabbatical, visiting Pedersen’s group at Emory to help get the video-based virtual tour experiment running on a portable computer that could be wheeled on a cart into a patient’s room. Patients with pharmacologically intractable seizures sometimes undergo pre-operative evaluation for surgical candidacy through the use of implanted electrodes with continuous monitoring. While hospitalised for the lengthy monitoring period, interested patients can participate in computerised cognitive tasks while their brain activity is being measured through the electrodes to better understand the function of different brain circuits. As many of the common seizure foci (and thus commonly implanted regions of the brain) happen to be implicated in seizure-related déjà vu, measuring neural activity while a patient completes the virtual tour task might shed light on the mechanisms involved in both familiarity-detection and déjà vu.

While I was there helping to prepare the computer cart for the task, I had a long conversation with Okada about it. An impressive and intellectually curious student, he had already read my publications on déjà vu, and already had several great ideas for extending the research using modern-day VR. He got to work re-creating the virtual tour task for use with present-day VR systems. Using the gaming engine Unity, he created new scenes with new layouts and programmed a VR implementation of the virtual tour paradigm for the Vive headset. The viewer is pulled on rails through a highly realistic scene on a particular path as if on a ride (similar to the It’s a Small World ride at Disney World). In a later identically configured but otherwise novel scene, that precise path is taken through the identical layout of that new scene.

It felt like my mind signalling to me to pause exploring the new scene and instead turn my attention inward to something in my memory

It happened as I sat there in 2022 looking through the Vive headset, in a VR lab room in the Behavioral Sciences Building at Colorado State, testing out Okada’s VR virtual tour program for the first time. I had been exploring the various scenes he had created, looking around while ‘riding’ through them and admiring the detail of the textures and the cleverness of the placement of various realistic-seeming objects within each scene. Then, as I was being pulled through a scene of straw huts along a boardwalk in an oceanside resort, I was suddenly overcome with an intense sense of familiarity. The sensation grabbed hold of my attention and I found myself no longer looking around and taking in the details of the scene but instead intensely focused on trying to figure out why it felt so familiar. It was déjà vu.

At first, I could not figure out exactly why I was experiencing it. That is, I could not identify a specific scene from earlier that might be responsible for the feeling. But my attention had now been fully devoted to trying to figure it out. So, as I continued to be pulled through the scene, I kept going through possibilities in my mind for what might be the reason behind the déjà vu. Eventually, by the time the tour of that scene came to an end and the prompts started appearing, I figured it out. It was the campground from earlier. The campground had an arrangement of tents along a dirt pathway and was identically configured to the layout of the huts along the oceanside boardwalk at the resort. And it happened several more times in several more test scenes as I continued through the program. What I noticed during these experiences was that, while thoroughly enjoying looking around a highly realistic, detailed scene that I had never seen before, I would be hit with a strong feeling of familiarity and would feel certain that the scene was reminding me of something I hadn’t quite placed yet. It felt like my mind signalling to me to pause exploring the novel and interesting scene and instead turn my attention inward to look for something in my memory. Then I would spend a lot of time going through possibilities in my mind. In many such instances, I would eventually figure it out: I would identify the previously viewed scene responsible for the familiarity.

This made me realise that there may be a component to déjà vu that we had been overlooking: it may prompt a flip of attention from outward to inward, to search one’s memory for potentially relevant information. For me, the déjà vu sensation in the VR environment was often a step along the way to eventual recall success, and this facet of the experience might be getting completely missed in our usual research approach of separating instances of recall success and recall failure. Instances of recall success may sometimes be preceded by a feeling of déjà vu – but our studies had not been set up to examine how the memory experience unfolds over time.

Perhaps déjà vu grabs attention and pulls it inward toward a search of memory for potentially relevant information? My students and I began to sift through some of our existing data sets in search of evidence that we might have previously missed. And we found some. For one thing, as reported in a recent article led by my former student Katherine McNeely-White, participants seem to guess more at earlier experienced scenarios when experiencing déjà vu than when not. That is, when experiencing déjà vu, they tend to type inaccurate information into the recall prompt rather than just leaving the recall prompt blank (leaving it blank more often when not experiencing déjà vu). This is consistent with the idea that, during déjà vu, people expend more effort searching their memory trying to conjure potentially relevant information, even if what they generate from the search is incorrect. For another thing, even when participants did leave the recall prompt blank during instances of déjà vu, they spent more time at the prompt before hitting Enter to move on, compared with when they were not experiencing déjà vu. This greater time spent at the recall prompt suggests that participants were likely trying a bit harder to recall an earlier scene when déjà vu was experienced than when it was not. Finally, participants were also more curious to discover whether a studied scene (and if so, which one) might map on to the current scene when experiencing déjà vu than when not.

There are other hints that déjà vu relates to attention. When it accompanies seizure activity, its pull on attention is so powerful that it may provoke some patients to confabulate memories – to invent recollections that help explain away the sensation of reliving something from the past. Much like the active search of memory I myself experienced, this kind of ‘recollective confabulation’ could represent an inward-directed accounting, and the information pulled up, real or not, could be a means of trying to provide oneself relief from the forced, prolonged, inward-directed attention that may ensue during seizure-related déjà vu.

Déjà vu may be an eerie shadow of the mind at work, and a window into the mind’s evolutionary past. Most of the time, our cognitive processing takes place smoothly and effortlessly – we just process the world around us and retrieve relevant information rapidly, without introspective access to how that occurs. It just does. Déjà vu occurs when there is a hiccup in the system, and we notice the pull on our attention; it grabs hold of our focus, allowing us to catch a quick glimpse of our memory’s operation occurring in slow motion. What would ordinarily take place quickly beneath the surface – the unfolding process of familiarity-detection followed by inward-directed attention and retrieval search effort leading to retrieval of relevant information – suddenly has a light shining on the spot where the halt occurred, where the retrieval piece was not successful, and we find ourselves in a heightened state of searching our memory, trying to find out why the situation feels so familiar. But rather than being an odd quirk of memory, this cognitive mechanism could be forcing us to retrieve the very memories we need to survive – and could be evolution’s way of forcing the mind inward, when it needs that insight most.

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My Sister Remembers Her Past Life. Somehow, I Believe Her.

Living with my sister during the pandemic taught me to suppress my cynicism and embrace her belief in reincarnation.

By Sara Aridi

When we were younger, my older sister Heba kept a photo on her dresser in our bedroom that always caught my eye. She said I was the young red-haired girl in the picture, but I was born with blonde curls and had light brown hair at the time. The girl in the picture was named Sara, like me, and I would later learn that the full story of the photo was too baffling for me to understand at the time.

My family is Druze, a thousand-year-old religion whose adherents mostly live in Lebanon, Syria, Israel and Jordan. Among the faith’s beliefs is that every human being is reincarnated. Your body is a shell, and your spirit can claim another life form to live on indefinitely. Many Druze say that certain people can remember details about their past lives. My sister is one of them.

I am more skeptical than Heba when it comes to spirituality, but I have never denied her experience. Because I had heard other stories about people from our hometown in Lebanon who died but “came back to life” in new bodies, it didn’t seem far-fetched that she had, too. Still, I wouldn’t discuss her past life openly — I imagined talking about it at dinner parties, only to be met with eye rolls, the same way I dismiss the conversation whenever my friends go on about their astrological signs. It wasn’t until I started living with my sister in New Jersey during the pandemic that I learned to suppress my cynicism — and embrace her beliefs.

I started questioning religion when I was 12. My family had just moved from New Jersey back to Lebanon, and I was shocked by the rampant sectarianism. Then, when I was 16, my father died of cancer, and I kept hearing the Arabic phrase “ maktub ” — “it is written.” While I understood the point of this tenet (to accept one’s fate), I thought it made all our human efforts seem futile. Similarly, my parents had taught us that our souls live on after death, but this belief made it hard for me to see life as precious. Since I couldn’t find comfort in faith-based acceptance, I searched for guidance in books about atheism, philosophy and science instead. Believing that our time on Earth is limited helped me to live life to its fullest.

Heba, who is eight years older than me, always leaned more spiritual. Unlike me, the way she made sense of her struggles was through faith, not necessarily in God, but in something greater, which included her belief in past lives. She was just 3 years old when she first declared that her name was Nada, and pretended to prepare sandwiches for her “husband,” Amin, to enjoy when he came home from work.

When my mother mentioned this, a friend said she knew of a woman named Nada who used to live a half-hour drive from our town. Nada had died, but had been married to a man named Amin. A few days later, Nada’s mother and sister knocked on our door and said they had heard about Heba. (Word gets around in small villages.) They asked if Heba would visit their home to see if she could recognize anything, maybe Nada’s room or her favorite nook. Out of politeness, my mother warily agreed.

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The powerful impact of the past: how it shapes our present.

The past has an undeniable influence on our present lives, shaping our thoughts, behaviors, and emotions in profound ways. Whether we’re aware of it or not, our past experiences, traumas, and memories continue to echo in our daily lives, affecting how we perceive ourselves and interact with the world. In this article, we’ll delve into the strong influence of the past and explore how it remains intertwined with our present realities.

• Unresolved Trauma: Past traumas that haven’t been properly processed can continue to impact us, leading to emotional distress and influencing our responses to current events.
• Negative Patterns: If we’ve experienced negative patterns in the past, such as unhealthy relationships or self-destructive behaviors, these patterns can persist and affect our current choices.
• Self-Identity: Our past experiences contribute to the development of our self-identity. Positive or negative experiences can shape our self-esteem, self-worth, and self-concept.
• Emotional Triggers: Certain events or situations can trigger emotions rooted in our past. These triggers can evoke strong emotional reactions that seem disproportionate to the present moment.
• Attachment Styles: Our early attachment experiences with caregivers shape our attachment styles and influence how we form and maintain relationships as adults.
• Cognitive Biases: Past experiences can lead to cognitive biases, shaping our perceptions and influencing how we interpret and react to new information.
• Expectations: Past successes or failures can shape our expectations for the future, impacting our goals and decisions.

Understanding the Connection

• Unconscious Influence: Often, the influence of the past is unconscious. Our thoughts, emotions, and behaviors may be driven by past experiences without us realizing it.
• Triggers: Emotional triggers, such as feeling anxious when faced with confrontation, can stem from unresolved past experiences that are similar in nature.
• Habits and Reactions: Habits and reactions that seem automatic are often rooted in our past conditioning and responses to similar situations.

Breaking Free from the Past

• Self-Awareness: Developing self-awareness is crucial to understanding how the past impacts our present. Recognizing patterns and triggers is the first step.
• Therapeutic Support: Therapy provides a safe space to explore past experiences, heal from trauma, and develop healthier coping mechanisms.
• Mindfulness: Practicing mindfulness helps us stay present and observe our thoughts and emotions without judgment, allowing us to respond consciously.
• Cultivating Positive Experiences: Creating positive experiences in the present can help counteract the negative impact of past traumas and memories.
• Reframing: Reframing our perception of past events can help us reinterpret them in a way that empowers us rather than holds us back.

Building a Resilient Present

• Embracing Growth: Recognize that the past doesn’t have to define you. Embrace the potential for growth and change in the present moment.
• Self-Compassion: Practice self-compassion by treating yourself with the same kindness you’d offer a friend who has experienced difficulties.
• Setting Boundaries: Establish healthy boundaries to protect yourself from negative influences and triggers associated with the past.
• Forgiveness: Forgiving yourself and others for past mistakes can free you from the emotional burdens of the past.

The strong influence of the past on our present lives is undeniable, but it doesn’t have to be limiting. By becoming aware of how the past shapes our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors, we can take proactive steps to heal, grow, and shape a resilient and empowered present. Through self-awareness, therapy, mindfulness, and self-compassion, we can release ourselves from the grip of the past and create a life filled with possibility, growth, and fulfillment. Remember that the present moment is an opportunity to shape your own narrative and rewrite the story of your life.

Home — Essay Samples — Life — Past — Identity: How Past Experiences Shape Identity  

How Past Experiences Influence Our Present

• Categories: Past Personal Experience

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Words: 564 |

Published: Nov 26, 2019

Words: 564 | Page: 1 | 3 min read

Should follow an “upside down” triangle format, meaning, the writer should start off broad and introduce the text and author or topic being discussed, and then get more specific to the thesis statement.

Provides a foundational overview, outlining the historical context and introducing key information that will be further explored in the essay, setting the stage for the argument to follow.

Cornerstone of the essay, presenting the central argument that will be elaborated upon and supported with evidence and analysis throughout the rest of the paper.

The topic sentence serves as the main point or focus of a paragraph in an essay, summarizing the key idea that will be discussed in that paragraph.

The body of each paragraph builds an argument in support of the topic sentence, citing information from sources as evidence.

After each piece of evidence is provided, the author should explain HOW and WHY the evidence supports the claim.

Should follow a right side up triangle format, meaning, specifics should be mentioned first such as restating the thesis, and then get more broad about the topic at hand. Lastly, leave the reader with something to think about and ponder once they are done reading.

Hook Examples for Essay about Identity

• The Tapestry of Experience: Our lives are woven from the threads of our past experiences, creating a rich and intricate tapestry that influences our present and future. But how do these threads shape the fabric of who we are?
• Unlocking the Secrets of Memory: Delve into the labyrinth of human memory and discover how our past experiences leave an indelible mark on our present. What we remember, and how we remember it, holds the key to understanding our journey through life.
• Recreating Childhood for the Next Generation: Why do we strive to recreate the magic of our own childhood for our children? Explore how our past experiences drive us to shape the future experiences of our loved ones.
• From Victims to Architects: Our experiences shape us, but we are not powerless in their wake. Discover how we can transform ourselves and others by rewriting the stories we carry from our past and creating new, positive experiences.
• The Legacy of Experiences: We are all products of our past, molded by the experiences that have defined us. Yet, we have the power to reshape our destinies by forging new experiences that leave a lasting legacy of growth and positivity.
• Wertsch, J. V. (1997). Narrative tools of history and identity. Culture & psychology, 3(1), 5-20. (https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/1354067X9700300101)
• McLean, K. C., & Pasupathi, M. (2012). Processes of identity development: Where I am and how I got there. Identity, 12(1), 8-28. (https://doi.org/10.1080/15283488.2011.632363)
• Heineman, D. S. (2014). Public memory and gamer identity: Retrogaming as nostalgia. Journal of Games Criticism, 1(1), 1-24. (http://gamescriticism.org/articles/heineman-1-1/)
• Kehily, M. J. (1995). Self-narration, autobiography and identity construction. Gender and Education, 7(1), 23-32. (https://eric.ed.gov/?id=EJ521022)
• Stryker, S., & Burke, P. J. (2000). The past, present, and future of an identity theory. Social psychology quarterly, 284-297. (https://www.jstor.org/stable/2695840)

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Every Past Life All At Once: Alternate Realities and the Immigrant Experience

The films Past Lives (2023) and Everything Everywhere All At Once (2022) pose a quintessential question for Asian Americans and other diasporic identities—how do immigrants reconcile the lives they leave behind with their new ones? And they ask, more universally, how we all might grieve the roads not taken; the lives we don’t get to live.

In Past Lives , the decision to immigrate forecloses the possibility of other lives, no matter how alluring they might be. In Everything Everywhere All At Once , those choices only seem to be closed when in fact, they coexist in a multiverse that can be traversed with the right skills. The first is a realist film told in three understated chapters over the course of 24 years. The second is a maximalist science fiction that takes place over a single day, but also stretches from the dawn of humanity to an unnamed future where people jump across alternate realities.

Both films are distributed by A24 and break down the dichotomy between arthouse and Hollywood, between traditional narrative and experimental storytelling. Both center Asian American women who leave their home countries when they are young for economic reasons. Nora in Past Lives leaves Korea as a preteen because her artist mother and father decide to move to Canada (which Nora, in turn, leaves for New York). Evelyn in Everything leaves China as a young woman to be with her fiancé Waymond, who promises the excitement of American entrepreneurship.

The two films capture a feeling particular to immigrants of a certain age, known as the 1.5 generation, who are old enough to remember their first homes but young enough to adapt to, and even fit in their new ones. It’s different from the experience of the refugee or the exile—upheavals that often make it harder to imagine an equally contented (or difficult) life in the homeland. The moment of departure for 1.5 migrants becomes not just a demarcation of a before and after, but what is and what could have been.

This is the phenomena for which both films build a visual language, one that might be described, to borrow Cathy Park Hong’s phrase, as a “minor feeling”—so nuanced and ignored that it’s easy to pretend, individually and socially, that it isn’t there. How do you film the unruly ways memory and imagination create alternate lives? The ways they collapse decades and continents, or construct fantastic worlds then let them crumble in a blink? How do you capture the emotional wakes that follow?

Part of Evelyn’s struggle in Everything is that she and those around her ignore the immense loss of a life that could have been. These manifest in everyday details like condescending customers and the googly-eyes her husband Waymond places everywhere. She’s lost her homeland, her family, her ambition. And she’s powerless to repair that loss. Meanwhile, Nora in Past Lives moves from Korea to Canada to New York in order to build a life as a working artist whose plays are produced and who has the leisure to go on residencies. Despite her hard-won success, we sense a loneliness and longing below the surface. That feeling is strong enough that she initiates a regular Skype call with her childhood sweetheart Hae Sung across a 13-hour time difference—a displaced, double life that is more fulfilling than her “real” one.

David Eng and Shinhee Han, in their book Racial Melancholia, Racial Dissociation , use Freud’s concept of mourning and melancholia to understand their Asian American students’ struggles with depression, anxiety, and suicidality. Asian Americans must mourn our homelands, a mourning that is permanent and therefore turns, as Freud said, to melancholia. But unlike Freud, Eng and Han de-pathologize melancholia—it’s not an illness, it simply describes a condition we face.

Assimilation denies the capacity to face this melancholia: to belong, merely to survive in America means severing those lives without turning back. To retain them—those customs and ways of moving through the world—would mean standing outside American society as an “other.” There’s no room to metabolize melancholia. The importance of art, then, is to remind us of those choices; to understand the quiet, violent severing of the past.

Both films use quick cuts to traverse time and space and find the roots of their protagonists’ melancholia. In Everything , we jump between wildly different worlds to glimpse what Evelyn might have become. It’s something that we normally wouldn’t accept as viewers, yet the film brilliantly trains us in this central conceit, building until we accept absurd worlds where stones talk to each other, or where humans have evolved hot-dog hands. Here, cuts across genre and time and other universes resist melancholia. They open portals that aren’t possible in our mundane worlds, arguing for the full use of our imaginative powers.

A pivotal scene in Past Lives shows Hae Sung and Nora meeting again in New York after 24 years apart in front of a public sculpture in a verdant park. We get a quick flashback to one of the first scenes in the movie, in which the two of them as children play in another sculpture park in Seoul. It’s a deeply complicated moment: that memory was, in a sense, constructed by Nora’s mother, who wanted to give her beautiful memories before leaving Korea. The present moment is fraught with Hae Sung’s unstated intention to see Nora and create a life together—an intention that he hardly admits to himself, let alone Nora. Here, with the shocking quickness of memory, the cut shows us both the sweetness and loss of Nora’s past.

But if these films, and film in general, offer new ways to understand the sweep of space and time, it’s harder to visualize the subtle emotional pull of that distance, or to show how we face and hold the lives we can’t access.

Everything Everywhere offers a sweet if unsatisfying answer: we are living our best possible lives, and to accept that, we must accept the people around us. Once Evelyn learns to “fight” like the compassionate Waymond, once she empathizes with her cruel tax auditor, once she embraces her suicidal daughter Joy, she can settle into her life of laundry and taxes.

This resolution doesn’t quite make sense. Loving relationships certainly help us weather grief and change in life, but have they ever meant we didn’t have to face them? The conclusion is made less convincing because the critical moment of repair, when Evelyn confronts Joy outside the laundromat and determines to stay with her, is emotionally muddied. Joy isn’t asking for Evelyn to stay with her, she’s asking to live an integrated life across the multiverses and to reconcile the wildly differing expectations and pressures that tear her apart.

Still, emotional resolution between Evelyn and Joy isn’t as important as the ride we take to get there. We are treated to a fantasy tour through martial arts, Bollywood, soft-focus romance, and Wong Kar-Wai neo-noir; all the genres of film and life one could imagine. We’ve eaten at the infinite buffet so that by the end of the journey we, like Evelyn, crave a simple soup. The last scene at the IRS office suggests that Evelyn retains the power to glimpse other universes. She appears wistful for them, yet is content to stay in hers.

Past Lives offers a more direct and less glamorous resolution: you must say goodbye to your other lives to accept this one. The quiet climax of the film is given in the very first scene—we watch Nora and Hae Sung talk at a bar in Korean while Arthur, Nora’s husband, sits awkwardly to the side. We hear the voices of two people speculating on their relationship, unable to determine who is in a relationship with whom; a speculation that prophesizes the film’s central tension. By the time we revisit that moment towards the end of the film from a closer camera angle, we understand the intimate,fun, and loving relationship that might have been between Nora and Hae Sung, and the poignancy of getting to taste it.

In the film’s very last scene, the camera follows Nora and Hae Sung as they walk to meet the car that will take him back to the airport, then follows Nora on her way back home where she finally breaks down in the arms of the waiting Arthur who embraces her and makes room for her loss. The distance of the walk is not just half of a New York City block, but the distance of the intervening decades, of the 8,000 miles between New York and Seoul; it’s a final goodbye to the person who was her first and perhaps truest love. And though in retrospect it seems inevitable, and though Nora and Arthur’s relationship isn’t defined enough to tell us how much Nora might have given up had she chosen Hae Sung, it’s still a shocking experience. It’s a surprise to see a film that asks us to grieve the beautiful relationship that could have been instead of fulfilling that fantasy.

Less important than the question of which film “gets it right” is how they point to the same phenomenon through their respective truths. Together, Everything and Past Lives form a powerful dual portrait: life is both extravagant and simple. The wildest journeys are accessible to us yet it’s the quiet, painful goodbyes that ultimately matter.

Nora describes the concept of in-yun as the thousands of years and encounters it takes for two people to meet in this life; a sort of fate. A more direct translation of that Buddhist phrase would be “causes and conditions,” one of the philosophical pillars of Buddhism. The Buddha said that it is essential to acknowledge causes and conditions, to accept that each of our actions has consequences. Fate is only half of it. Yes, we are born into myriad circumstances beyond our control, but we are also fully responsible for these lives we didn’t ask for.

We often ignore or deny this responsibility because it requires us to mourn the constant what-ifs, to face the rawness and heartbreak built into the small, endless decisions that make up our lives.

But if we don’t grieve these lost possibilities, we remain in denial, a state of wishfulness or dissociation in which our choices do not matter and our fates are entirely out of our control. These are the states we find Nora and Evelyn in: Nora’s dissociation from her deeper longing, Evelyn’s denial and feeling of powerlessness. Both Nora and Evelyn ultimately go back to their lives, but they cannot truly “go back.” They are forever changed. They escape the miring anxiety and melancholy of what if by forming deeper and more honest relations to their lives. They’ve given wholehearted attention to those causes and conditions, those other possibilities, then let them go.

Migration is one of the most powerful reminders of the impermanence and mutability of life. To be a migrant is to face all the lives we are not living and cannot ever live. And to lose our language and culture and place and loved ones is true for all of us—whether it is to cross an ocean or watch our neighborhood change, to lose lovers to distance or to death. We are all migrants through this brief life.

— Ryan Lee Wong is author of the novel “Which Side Are You On.” He has written on the intersections of arts, race, and social movements. He holds an MFA in Fiction from Rutgers-Newark and served on the Board of the Jerome Foundation. He lived for two years at Ancestral Heart Zen Temple and is based in Brooklyn, where he’s the Administrative Director of Brooklyn Zen Center.

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My Past Life (Essay Sample)

Table of Contents

My Past Life

Life is always essential for a person’s well-being because it represents how it can facilitate decisions, activities, and the existence of an individual. Each person can on only live once, which enhances the credibility of the organization to become productive as well as to ensure that the level of their credibility becomes responsive to environmental stimuli. Life is always precious that all organisms want to maximize this opportunity so that they can establish a fruitful and productive well-being that can inspire other individuals. However, past life is something that is considered sensitive because there are different arguments that could tackle about the norms and the practices that past life events can influence our present generation. This paper aims to discuss about my past life that makes a significant reason to my existence in life.

If you are basing from flashbacks, my past life can be recalled as a person from the past generation who also lived in a simple life from the previous generation. It was a generation that learned something different due to the existent facilities and situation that are comparable in the present society. My past life reveals a story on how I successfully managed my life gracefully until my demise and then reborn in the present day. For this reason, past life is a significant measure for myself to become true to my past activities because there are background of interests that can generate a significant improvement with my present activities. Although others find it weird, my past life reveals that I have a mission in the present society where I can show relevant information from the previous activities that can be corrected.

The advantage of having a past life is that you are able to recall your past experiences in your present body that reflects your previous status. Your spiritual essence will bring you the norms and practices that you have already been applied from your past life, which could ensure that you will prevent past mistakes that happened in the past. This is similar with the accomplishments made from the past that it can be continued from the present day as your second life. The disadvantage is that your re-existence in the present day will generate a few believers. The reason behind is that there are interests of the general population have yet to prove this theorem in their studies. Lack of evidence pointing towards the past life endangers a person’s susceptibility to become reliable due to the narrative experience being shared without citing relevant facts.

The learning insight that can be taken from this story is the ability of an individual to share their thoughts and experiences to others. For this reason, sharing informative scenarios and experiences creates a relative advantage to the routine of an individual towards others. The relevance of revealing the past life may not be an easy task to fulfill, but it is still important for the world to know that there are such things that comprehends with the traditional belief and values in the present society. My past life reveals that there are helpful practices from the past that allow your present body to change it and will start performing a productive lifestyle. Reminiscing past life enhances a creative framework for individuals to become aware about unconventional issues that relates with their present activities and issues in the present life (Harvey, 2012).

• Harvey, Peter (2012). An Introduction to Buddhism: Teachings, History and Practices. Cambridge University Press. pp. 57–62. ISBN 978-0-521-85942-4.

Home / Essay Samples / Life / Life Goals / Contrasting Life in the Past and Now

Contrasting Life in the Past and Now

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• Topic: Finding Yourself , Life Goals

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