Instinct VS Past Life Memories

Before coming here, I've spent a lot of time looking for something like this in order to find answers about myself. Now that I am here, however, I find myself quite without questions. I'm finding that knowing who I was before, in a dragon life or otherwise, is becoming less and less important to me. With all the emphasis i see others place on their past lives in order to explain/come to understand their kin side I am finding my own growing indifference to my own past lives perplexing. This is not to discount those who use their past lives in this manner. I, for one, think anything that helps a person find their whole is a good thing, so long as it does not create harm to themselves and those around them.

While talking to Tala'orin on AIM i found that he was surprised that he was the first dragon i had, knowingly, talked to one on one. He said it seemed like i had talked to many other dragons before by the way i was acting and what i was saying. For this I had no real answer. I suppose its possible i was born with more of my dragon instincts intact than others might have. And looking back and at myself this starts to make some semblance of sense. My dragon identity never came out of gleams of my past lives. The one past life i have seen i was a human in. Everything i now consider as a part of my being a dragon i do, and have always done, without thinking about it. For all i know, i was a grand important dragon of this, that, or the other thing. If i was to find out i was...i doubt it would matter all that much to me.

All in all, this has been tickling my gray matter. Has anyone heard or experienced anything like this. Even if you haven't, anyone's input is welcome.

I don't think what we do really has to do with past lives because it's our being raised now that influences us. I've talked with another dragon and me and her are nothing alike, but that's because of how we grew up. I think being similar to another person is coincidence and nothing more, being dragons doesn't really matter. I have the same "instincts" as every other human, I just choose to listen to mine more often than not.

--Sarah

While I think past lives are possible, and a past life being possible with my situation, I don't really care too much about it. It's interesting to learn about, but it wouldn't change anything. If that past life was me, and I'm still me, then there's no need to learn about the past live since nothing new would be learned. If anything, there's more to learn in this life since I haven't finished experiencing it yet.

I'm not sure about the whole "dragon instincts intact" thing, though anything's possible really. Humans are like a blank canvas, so if a reincarnation (or incarnation) did occur into a human, the canvas would probably accept the past instincts and feelings relatively easily.

Once I accepted it, it wasn't much of a major thing. The past life I feel I had was simply being able to put a name to certain odd quirks, things that I now call my 'holdovers' from that lifetime. But other than that, the whole otherkin deal isn't terribly important to me.

I attribute all of my physical characteristics to my overly complicated human genome and my behavioral ones to both brain chemistry and how I was raised...the things I've been through, etc. in *this* life. I don't remember much of my past existance aside from the events that led to me being here typing this right now. I personally believe that people will rememeber those parts of a past existance that could help them in this one. We aren't meant to base our present on our past, let alone a past life completely different from our current lives. Can't let the past dictate the present.

I am who and what I am *shrug*. I've never known myself differently, didn't have an epiphany awakening or anything. I've been me since birth.

I don't personally believe we keep too many instincts from our past lives. Maybe memories of them but not keeping them and our brains acting upon them. Humans do have their own ways of interacting with the world around them... an instinct for a dragon wouldn't work for a human nor would a human instinct work for a dragon.

Though I do admit that a couple years ago while in Paris, I almost snarled when I saw someone throwing trash in the already overly-polluted Seine when I visited there a couple years. I had no idea where that came from to be honest, but I do like to think that I have a strong connection with water so I guess it ticked me off. <!-- s:oops: --><img src="{SMILIES_PATH}/icon_redface.gif" alt=":oops:" title="Embarrassed" /><!-- s:oops: -->

Instinct, or gut feeling, seems like such a poor source of personal identity and belief.. I just have to say it..
Whenever someone says the words "trust in your instincts" I want to smack them upside the head with a baseball bat because trusting in our instincts is what many, many, MANY, predatorial people depend upon. If our instincts, as human beings and otherkin, were at all trustworthy, then why are there con-artists? Why are people in the otherkin community so easily led astray by misinformation and bs? Why does [url=http://www.demon-sushi.com/warning/mee.html]this site[/ur] even exist?
Instincts are probably what is most easily affected by what we "want" to be true, but they aren't innately false, I'm not saying that instincts will always be false, but they are easily tricked and should be treated with at least as much salt as even the most innocent of past life memories. Both can be nothing more than figments of our imagination created to make us realize what we want to realize about ourselves so that we do not have to face ourselves as we are right now. Both can be created simply so we can "feel special" even..

Being otherkin doesn't mean you "have" to believe in reincarnation.
It doesn't mean you even "have" to believe in the existence of the soul.
You can be a psychological otherkin and that's just as "real" as the rest of us.

So no, you do not need the confirmation of past life memories to "be" otherkin, but you shouldn't "just" go with your gut feeling either..

There's so much in human behavior and instinct that can account for "Otherkin" traits, often within the normal, average range of human behavior.

The odds of all of those instincts coming together in one package? *shrug* We haven't crunched the numbers but it seems like 'kin-like packages would come up reasonably often given how many people there are in the world - how many rolls of the dice - plus synergy between traits and the fact that we've all been primed to accept the combinations of traits in these other beings as logical.

We've studied enough psychology to know that memory is malleable, and easy to create out of a few suggestions about what the memory "should" be like - priming again.

I feel a little redundant saying it all after Freetha's given a very similar viewpoint, but it deserves to be said again and with as many rational arguments as possible.

As for us personally, we feel that coming to an acceptance of our 'kintypes as possibly archetypal, and feeling that that would be okay, was a big milestone in our personal development as Otherkin.

-Svanni

Quote:Whenever someone says the words "trust in your instincts" I want to smack them upside the head with a baseball bat because trusting in our instincts is what many, many, MANY, predatorial people depend upon.

And yet so many victims should have done exactly that, trusting their instincts. I've heard it so many times, "I had a feeling such and such was going to happen" or "Something felt off about that person, but I didn't know why so I ignored it". I too learned the hard way of ignoring those sorts of feelings; I ended up getting into a car crash, among other things.

True, they can be malleable, but there is a difference between feelings/instinct based on social standards pounded into you (like automatically being wary of Muslims because of the association with terrorism) and feelings/instincts that occur because something is amiss or you're going the wrong way (like a lone woman going down the alleyway at night, those red flags are there for a safety reason). I think the latter should be listened to, and not ignored.

WhiteFox Wrote:

Quote:Whenever someone says the words "trust in your instincts" I want to smack them upside the head with a baseball bat because trusting in our instincts is what many, many, MANY, predatorial people depend upon.

And yet so many victims should have done exactly that, trusting their instincts. I've heard it so many times, "I had a feeling such and such was going to happen" or "Something felt off about that person, but I didn't know why so I ignored it". I too learned the hard way of ignoring those sorts of feelings; I ended up getting into a car crash, among other things.

The problem with that statement is that it shows exactly how these things go.. it's either "I should have listened to my instincts" or "Thank god I listened to my instincts" and then almost only when a negative event has passed, add to that two easily noticable things, one; the individual's dislike of being wrong, and b; the unreliability of memory. No matter what our instincts tell us at the time (and I've seen this over and over), after the person who we thought was wonderful turns out to be a right bastard, we still like to be able to say "I knew it!" after the fact.

WhiteFox Wrote:True, they can be malleable, but there is a difference between feelings/instinct based on social standards pounded into you (like automatically being wary of Muslims because of the association with terrorism) and feelings/instincts that occur because something is amiss or you're going the wrong way (like a lone woman going down the alleyway at night, those red flags are there for a safety reason). I think the latter should be listened to, and not ignored.

This is also rather incorrect. Yes, these red flags exist for a reason, such as making us get an uneasy feeling around areas where predators would skulk, but the thing is, the same processes are involved with an irrational instinctual response and a rational one because they are all "rational" ones. It's a mixture of past experiences, teachings and natural responses that go into this. This is the exact same psychological process as "first impressions".
You take a person X, and when you look at him/her for the first time, your memory associates him with person/archetype Y, and it can easily do this subconsciously. X might have nothing in common with Y other than a shirt and a haircut. They might be different in every other way, but if Y has been a problem in your past experiences (someone you saw beat someone else up when you were three years old and have no conscious recollection of what so ever is enough) then you will instinctively see X as a danger, a threat, a problem, even if that person might otherwise be a perfect kitten.

Now, if you read through my whole post the first time around you'll notice that I said then and will repeat it now, instinct "can" get it right.
However, just cause you instinctively think there's something oogy about the person you're looking at, doesn't mean there is and it's entirely unfair to person X to treat him/her as Y if he's never done anything to deserve it. And exactly the same is accurate in the opposite direction, just because your instincts tell you X is a great person doesn't mean that he's not every bit like Y.
The thing is, no matter what your instincts tell you, you should exercise caution and use at least a little logic and reason. Don't assume, basically, to think that you can know anything for certain about what you haven't done yet, or don't know, or haven't met yet. Your instincts might get it right sometimes, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't keep the old salt shaker at hand.