Do animals reincarnate?

[Deb]

Yesterday a question popped into my head, "do animals reincarnate?" While the idea has crossed my mind in the past due to some experiences I've had with some animals, I'd never really questioned beyond that. But now...

I currently have 6 backyard chickens. They are a new flock, the 4 chickens I'd started out with 8+ years ago are all gone now. My previous chickens were very tame and would let me pick them up, would hop up on a patio chair where I was sitting, sit in my lap, etc. The new chickens are skittish. They are 3 months old and I need to work on taming them. They will eat out of my hand and gather around me when I'm pulling weeds, but will not let me touch them.

Except for one. She's gigantic, twice the size of the other chickens. When I sit down on the lawn, she often will climb onto my lap and hunker down. She likes me to pet her head, neck and back. Considering these were day old chicks when I got them, incubated and hatched in a chick hatchery, they have had no previous human contact other than mine. So for a chicken to do something like that with no prompting seems unusual. Chickens are prey animals and are not domesticated like dogs, where they would instinctively 'know' a human lap is a place to sit, and that being touched is good rather than bad. It makes me wonder if she's come back from my other flock.

I figure Seth had something to say about everything, and so I did a little search and this is what I came up with:

"(Our dog Misha died in 1963. Jane had him when we met in 1953.
("Where is he?")

"He is in this territory, in a litter of pups, and in one way or another he may try to find you. After 4 to 6 weeks he may end up in your local shelter."

(This data was quite unexpected by us, although this afternoon I had mentioned Mischa to Jane in passing, remarking on a similarity of pose struck by our cat Willy as he stood in the studio, intently listening to a sound outside. I hadn't intended that any remark of mine about the dog lead to this kind of data, nor did Jane interpret it that way. In fact, we know so little about animals, let alone animal reincarnation, as far as this material goes, that it hasn't occurred to us to ask this kind of question. By "this territory" Seth meant Elmira, New York."

("As a male, same color?" Brown and white.)

"I believe (pause), he belongs in a litter born in approximately the same area that he died. Now I am not certain of the sex, though the general appearance is more or less the same.

"There may possibly be a marking on the tongue.

("Will this dog have any empathy with us?"
(Leaning forward.) "The marking reminiscent of the affair at Saratoga. And to your question, yes." (Mischa had briefly tussled with another dog.)

"There is a strong possibility that he would be a female.

Now my best wishes to you both, and I will not keep Ruburt barking for me any longer. (Humorously:I am an old dog, and I remembered you."

—TES9 Session 448 November 13, 1968 - (drawing of Misha on the next page)

"Reincarnation exists, then, on the part of all species. Once a consciousness, however, has chosen the larger classification of its physical existences, it stays within that framework in its "reincarnational" existences. Mammals return as mammals, for example, but the species can change within that classification.1 This provides great genetic strength, and consciousnesses in those classifications have chosen them because of their own propensities and purposes. The animals, for example, seem to have a limited range of physical activity in conscious terms, as you think of them. An animal cannot decide to read a newspaper. Newspapers are outside of its reality. Animals have a much wider range, practically speaking, in certain other areas. They are much more intimately aware of their environment, of themselves as separate from it, but also of themselves as a part of it (intently). In that regard, their experience deals with relationships of another kind."

—DEaVF1 Chapter 5: Session 903, February 25, 1980

[jbseth]

Hi Deb, Hi All,

Thanks for sharing this.

I forgot what specifically Seth had to say about animal reincarnation and what you've captured here from Seth, really says it all.

Years ago my wife and I had 2 mini-dachshunds, Tasha and Deek. I use to try to call Tasha by name, mentally, to see if she would respond. Surprisingly a lot of the time she did.

My wife told me that many times, when I came home from work and she (my wife) was already home, our 2 dogs would sometimes start waiting for me by the door, several minutes before I even got home. This wasn't really a timing thing because I rarely came home at the same time every day.


I think that animals are often in tune with us and our emotional state and they often seem to respond favorably to people who they sense have a loving nature.

I love the story about Mischa. It would have been awesome if Jane and Rob would have found her in the local shelter 4-6 week after this message from Seth. 

Do you think that maybe this chicken has reincarnated and came back to be with you?   
(I love that idea) 


-jbseth

[Deb]

My wife told me that many times, when I came home from work and she (my wife) was already home, our 2 dogs would sometimes start waiting for me by the door, several minutes before I even got home. This wasn't really a timing thing because I rarely came home at the same time every day.

I've actually read articles about studies done about that. If you take away routine, consistent timing and the sound of your car considering the distance, I think that leaves telepathy. I think animals, even domesticated ones, are more in tune with their inner selves. I've also read more than one article about dogs who will lie on their owner's grave and I wonder (if the articles are true) how the animal knows their owner is there. I just don't get how a dog could understand that their master is buried, considering all the complexities of the whole funeral/burial process.

As far as my chicken, part of me does wonder if she's one of my old chickens that has returned. I accidentally called her by the name of my last surviving chicken from the earlier flock. She was 8 years old and a coyote jumped my fence and grabbed her mid-day in early April. After 8 years, she was more of a family member than a chicken. She was in perfect health and I assumed she would have been around for a couple more years. It was pretty traumatic for me.

I wonder why Jane and Rob didn't go looking for Misha?

Several years ago a bird shop was boarding my Congo Grey while I was on vacation. I went in to get her, and in the "community" cage my Congo was in a Timneh Grey saw me come through the door and did the "I know you I know you take me home" gyrations as soon as he saw me. He had been relinquished by his owner, who didn't look anything like me. He acted like he knew me all his life, BFF stuff. I ended up bringing him home too, as a companion for my Congo. Unfortunately they ended up hating each other.

[jbseth]

Hi Deb,

Talk about synchronicity. This morning, before going to the pool, I was briefly looking through the book, "Life After Death" by Deepak Chopra. I've had this book for several years now and just haven't got around to reading it and as soon as I'm done with my present book I plan to read it.

What I discovered this morning in Chapter 14 of this Deepak Chopra book is that Rupert Sheldrake performed an experiment using dogs. He placed dogs in outbuildings completely separate from their owners. Then he asked the owners, at randomly selected times, to think about walking their dogs, for 5 minutes before they went to get them. Along with this, he also video-taped the dogs.

What Sheldrake found was that when the owners started to think about taking their dog for a walk, more than half of the dogs responded by running to the door, wagging their tails, and circling restlessly. Furthermore, they kept up this behavior until their owners arrived. On the other hand, he also found that no dog showed this anticipatory behavior when the owners weren't thinking about taking them for a walk.

Did the dogs tune into their owners somehow. I think that they probably did.

Regarding dogs sleeping on their owners graves, as you know, dogs have a very acute sense of smell. Perhaps they smell the scent of their owners from the clothes that their owners were wearing when they were buried.

-jbseth

[Deb]

I think I read the Chopra book, that sounds familiar. It was just another step towards finding Seth. I remember him saying that someone had psychic contact with or a dream about a parent who in life was a real problem, but in the afterlife the true essence of the person was warm and loving—their pure self unpolluted by whatever burdens they carried in life. That kind of stood out to me.

I love the Sheldrake experiment. I've had some amazing personal experiences with animals and for some reason get emotional over instances of deep communication with animals—something about realizing there was contact that went beyond than the surface stuff and was a pure meeting of spirit or mind.

dogs have a very acute sense of smell. Perhaps they smell the scent of their owners from the clothes that their owners were wearing when they were buried.

Wow, that's an amazing sniffer if a dog can smell its human through the embalming fluid and other chemicals, a lined and sealed coffin, a concrete over-coffin and six feet of dirt!

Here's a story: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5418077/Peace-dog-slept-masters-grave.html  The cemetery was a long way from where the owner lived and the dog had never been to the cemetery before. But he managed to find both the cemetery and the correct tomb. Supposedly.

If dogs are more in touch with the 'real' reality than we are, you would think it would realize the person it loved was a soul and not the body that it occupied for a while.

[jbseth]

Hi Deb, Hi All,

Many years ago, I read a book by Dr. Oliver Sacks, titled, "The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat". Dr Sacks is a professor of clinical neurology and his book, contains 24 chapters, each one about some rather interesting people situations.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_Who_Mistook_His_Wife_for_a_Hat

https://www.amazon.com/Man-Who-Mistook-His-Wife/dp/0684853949/ref=sr_1_2?keywords=oliver+sacks&qid=1566402264&s=gateway&sr=8-2

In Chapter 18 of this book, titled "The Dog Beneath the Skin", Dr. Sacks relates the story of a man, Stephen D, a 22 year old medical student, who had been taking highs (Cocaine, PCP, amphetamines). This Stephen D, had a dream one night that he was a dog. Then for 3 weeks after this dream he says he had an extremely heightened sense of smell. He says that he went into a scent shop and he could distinguish each one instantly and "I found each one unique, evocative, a whole world."

"He found he could distinguish all his friends – and patients – by smell: I went into the clinic, I sniffed like a dog, and in that sniff recognized, before seeing them, the twenty patients who were there. Each had his own olfactory physiognomy, a smell-face, far more vivid and evocative, more redolent, than any sight face. He could smell their emotions – fear, contentment, sexuality – like a dog. He could recognize every street, every shop, by smell – he could find his way around New York, infallibly, by smell."

He also says, "Sexual smells were exciting and increased – but no more so, he felt, than food smells or other smells. Smell pleasure was intense – smell displeasure too- but it seemed to him less a world of mere pleasure and displeasure than a whole aesthetic, a whole judgement, a whole new significance, which surrounded him."


For some reason, I've always remembered this specific part of this book and I've also always wondered whether this is what it might be like, to be a dog. I have a feeling that a dogs experience is something similar to this and that they probably have an experience with their sense of smell that we can't even begin to grasp.


As you know, dogs are regularly used to search for missing people and they are also used to sniff out drugs. With a heightened sense of smell, I'd say that dogs also apparently have a heightened sense of being able to distinguish certain smells (drugs) from all the other smells that they sense.

When people are buried, they are only buried about 6 feet deep. Given the small air gaps that probably exist in any casket and the porousness of the earth. It may not be that difficult for a dog to sense its owner, who is buried underground, via its sense of smell.

This is the reasoning behind my comments in reply #3 above.


- jbseth