Exist Before You're Born? Children Say Yes

An amazing thing.  Children in a recent study said they believed they didn't have eyes or a head before they were conceived but that their soul -- their essence -- was around before they were even physically formed.

 Boston University postdoctoral fellow Natalie Emmons studied both children who came from a background with no cultural references to religion (no school, no church, no TV) in remote Ecuador as well as an urban area near Quito where children did have access to such amenities.

 Emmons found, according to newswise.com, "Both groups gave remarkably similar answers, despite their radically different cultures. The children reasoned that their bodies didn’t exist before birth, and that they didn’t have the ability to think or remember. However, both groups also said that their emotions and desires existed before they were born."

 Emmons says that, while the children generally reported that they didn’t have eyes and couldn’t see things before birth, "they often reported being happy that they would soon meet their mother, or sad that they were apart from their family."

 That means, she explains, that they have a concept of their soul, something that is real and them, before they are even a physical presence.

 “Even kids who had biological knowledge about reproduction still seemed to think that they had existed in some sort of eternal form," newswise.com quotes Emmons. 

 I know when I was trying hard to have a baby, and miscarried twice, that I felt something around me.  I can't say it was their souls, but especially, the first time, it was a real baby to me.  I needed surgery to end the pregnancy and all I remember, lying on that table before the procedure began, was, I want my baby. Don't take him from me.

 That child would be 15 today, to my son's 12, but I still feel him around me, maybe now more than ever, as Phillip grows up and I can envision the child that never was, as he would be today. 

 Emmons adds that even children seem to hope "there’s a master plan for the universe, we see purpose when there is none, and we imagine that a soul survives without a body."

 I don't know about you but that kind of blows my mind.

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