Theoretical Frame

It was difficult to come up with or find a theoretical frame that I could incorporate into the many different cases and aspects of my paper. I ended up looking back into the text our class read towards the beginning of the semester. There I rediscovered Carl Jung’s book and also remembered how he wrote about synchronicity. While no researcher in the field made no direct link, I decided to look deeper into the meaning and found that synchronicity does play a role in many of the cases that I looked into.

For my paper, I used this quote about Jung, who deciphers this meaning as, “in cases of [...] precognition, and similar inexplicable phenomena, one can very frequently observe an archetypal situation. This may be connected with the collective nature of the archetype, for the collective unconscious” (Jung 450).

Within my paper, I am using this meaning synonymous with having a domino effect. My paper begins to describe this frame as one that is the moment where there is a widely accurate discovery that ultimately forms the domino effect of experiences that led children and their families towards a result. The way that Jung writes about how one can “frequently observe an archetypal situation” (Jung 450) relates to the journey of recurring motifs families find themselves in when trying to discover the previous personality of their child. This journey can then be symbolized as the “collective unconscious” that occurs when families find themselves having/finding crucial information to appear or become noticed randomly.

For example, one breaking point for James Leininger was when he and his father looked into a book that James bought for his father a while before. When just randomly flipping through the pages, James found the base at which his previous personality was stationed. While this would not be characterized as the main point of the case being solved, it is one of the main ones. These instances are ones that I have noticed to have a presence within mostly all the cases I have explored. Cases with these occurrences solidify the act of synchronicity, and this is how I plan to use it as my theoretical frame.

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Topics for Consideration

For this assignment, I had some difficulty deciding on the main topic that I would want to tackle. At first, I was considering looking into the Mandela Effect. I found this idea fascinating in terms of how a group of individuals can form a collective memory that somehow, in some cases, years later find out was misheard or misread. However, looking into the matter, I realized that some of the Mandela Effect’s examples were already things that I have always thought to be correct. In searching for another exciting topic, I came across the frequently asked question of what life is beyond death. As a child, like most other kids, there was this idea exposed to us of heaven and hell or this fantasy land that long-awaited us after death. However, having a Hindu upbringing, there is a major tenet towards reincarnation. For this project, I feel it would be interesting to explore the different ways that life after death is carried through different cultures, religions, and even how it is present

Scouting the Territory

My topic has not changed since the first blog post. I have not redefined it, but I know that I would like to also focus on the cases of children who remember their past lives. So while I explore the afterlife, I want to incorporate and add on the reincarnation aspect seen with these cases. Looking on Google, keywords like “afterlife,” “reincarnation,” and “children with past lives” opens up a realm of possibilities for exploring routes for the paper. The word “afterlife” showcased a variety of shows and documentaries from Time and Netflix. Using “reincarnation” brought me to links that we’re defining what the term meant, but interestingly, it also showed results of ways in which it’s real and the signs that prove it. On Wikipedia, most of the information was based on the different types of ways religions saw the afterlife and dove into the issue's psychological and philosophical sides. The arguments presented were just trying to find ways to prove what the afterlife is like and had

Research Questions and Scholarly Sources

Shifting away from the afterlife and into past lives, there needed to be a little bit of adjustment; however, I believe I included the research questions I’d like to explore. Many children are able to vividly remember and provide descriptions of what they preserve as their “past life.” How accurate are these cases, and do these cases pose any benefits for children? Are children just highly imaginative, and does a child’s highly developmental mind play a role in their experiences? Could there be any overlap between these children? Sources: Haraldsson, Erlendur. “Children Who Speak of Past-Life Experiences: Is There a Psychological Explanation?” Psychology & Psychotherapy: Theory, Research & Practice, vol. 76, no. 1, Mar. 2003, p. 55. EBSCOhost, doi:10.1348/14760830260569256. Kean, Leslie. Surviving Death: a Journalist Investigates Evidence for an Afterlife. Three Rivers Press, an Imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a Division of Penguin Random House LLC, 2018. Pasricha, Sat

The UneXplained: Past Lives

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