People are naturally inquisitive, so they often come up with questions about things they see or hear, and they often develop ideas or hypotheses about why things are the way they are.
This introductory sentence is not my own; I found it in Wikipedia under the heading of Scientific Method. Through history this method to find "the truth", to better explain the nature of reality, has evolved to the point that a lot of apparent truths simply fall outside the realm of science. This means that a lot of observable truths will never be proved scientifically. But does that mean we just act as if these truths don't exist?
Unfortunately we do. All accounts of people experiencing past-life events, UFO's seen sometimes by tens of thousands of people at a time, they just get discarded, forgotten and eventually frowned upon simply because science refuses to deal with them. This is unavoidable, though, because of the way science works.
source: Wikipedia
If we describe science in it's broadest sense, we could say that it is a method to find truth, to explain that which we call reality. Do religious people not try to find truth in their own way? Isn't faith, or religion, born of a similar hunger for truth? As such, could faith be science to then? Yes it can, and it has been for the longest time and still is in some cases. The Catholic Church and it's missionaries have been the authority for truth in the past, just as Universities and scientists are now.
Science is just the best method we have to come to shared truths, in my opinion. I never was a religious person, but I also do not believe that you and I are our material selves, we're much more than just "the stuff" we're made of. And that is why science, as we know it now, will never be able to explain the realities of life, love and wonder in a completely satisfactory manner.
The limitations of science become apparent when we delve into the "scientific method":
The Oxford Dictionaries Online defines the scientific method as "a method or procedure that has characterized natural science since the 17th century, consisting in systematic observation, measurement, and experiment, and the formulation, testing, and modification of hypotheses". Experiments are a procedure designed to test hypotheses. Experiments are an important tool of the scientific method. To be termed scientific, a method of inquiry is commonly based on empirical or measurable evidence subject to specific principles of reasoning."
source: Wikipedia
At it's core, this method lends itself very well for explaining the material world, or at least that which we all see as reality. At it's very basis this method is dependent upon independent and repeated observations that can then be tested by an independent peer through repeated experimentation by which the hypothesis to explain the observations is proven or disproved. More often disproved: I heard one scientist describe his profession as "the art of being wrong all the time" and "we don't answer questions, we create them".
source: Wikipedia
And this is why so much of the things we heard about so often, are thrown at a side, never to be looked at again, simply because they are almost all one-of-a-kind-once-in-a-lifetime personal experiences. You just can't experiment on that; a vision, a memory cannot be transferred to a lab to be put under a microscope.
I'll try to illustrate this with such a case that isn't dismissed or refuted by science, but can never be investigated or scientifically proven.
There once was this boy in America, not so long ago. He and his parents lived a fairly ordinary life and were mostly a happy family. Concerns began when one day the boy's teacher called the parents to make an appointment for "a serious talk"... The boy behaved different than the other kids, almost never wanted to play and, most disturbingly, his drawings were full of explicit, bloody violence. Where the other kids drew houses and trees and stick-figures, "our" boy depicted war-scenario's full of stick figures with machine-guns and others laying on the ground in a red pool of blood...
Psychiatry didn't help. Long discussions, an overdose of love... nothing seemed to help; the boy was a "lone wolf" and kept displaying hostile tendencies towards his fellow classmates. It even became worse when at some point the boy began crying for no apparent reason, he himself couldn't explain why he was so intensely sad at random times. And things became scary when he started remembering things. Things he shouldn't be able to know.
He remembered his name, the names of his brothers and sisters, he knew the name of the marine-ship he served on and the names of a lot of his shipmates. One day he remembered that the ship was an aircraft-carrier... Of course the boy's parents and the counselling agencies and professionals that helped the family investigated this. It turned out that the ship really existed, the names really were actual crew-members and "our boy" was a fighter pilot! He even remembered the exact location where his plane crashed near a coast during operations at Pearl Harbor in World War 2.
source: GoodFreePhotos
That boy is okay now. His parents booked a vacation and went to the place the boy's plane had crashed in another life; upon arrival "our boy" had an uncontrollable crying fit that seemed to last forever. Since that day, the violent drawings stopped, he became part of the wolf-pack, "our boy" was finally able to truly become his new self.
Now, this is a story I heard in a documentary a long time ago, so I cannot give you a link for you to verify my words; and since we're all trained in the scientific method, since we're all visual creature's for whom "seeing is believing", this account about "our boy" will forever be just a story, something you tell each-other for entertainment, stop a second, and then laugh it away... And that's the point I'm trying to make; don't discard it just because it falls outside the realm of science. Science has it's limitations.
Also remember this: in a much lesser degree, we all are this boy. We are all part of each other and part of the world and universe. This isn't some spiritual feeling only: it is an observable fact and even scientifically proven. Read my previous posts the law of Six Degrees Of Separation and Science Vs. Buddhism to delve deeper into this reality. We influence each other continuously, we make each other and we break each other and we all stand on the shoulders of giants.
I won't leave you without any reference material, that's just not who I am. So, here's a good selection of documented past-life experiences by Ervin Laszlo, a scientist and classical pianist. I think an awakening is taking place and science will perhaps evolve to a point where the extraordinary will be treated a bit more like the material and mundane. Read The Evidence for Reincarnation:
Scientifically Documented True Stories That Prove Past Lives Are Real.