Reincarnation

I must admit that reincarnation has been one of the hardest concepts to swallow on my spiritual journey. Nevertheless, with some overwhelming personal evidence and various tweaks, I have a working theory that’s…currently working.

So yes, past-life memories can be real. I’m sure there can be plenty of false positives too. The research is actually quite voluminous, though I’m just starting to look into it myself.

All living beings, and maybe all matter period, contain consciousness, or what might be thought of as a soul. So there’s no need to draw the line somewhere, like between plants and animals, primates and (also-primate!) humans, or bacteria and humans for that matter. (We are our bacteria anyway.) Some buddhists consider it worse to kill a hundred shrimp than one cow, which is missing some point of our interconnectedness. Death is a part of life, and you gotta eat. (Not that the developed world’s meat-hungry factory farming complex is at all sane or aligned with reasonable ecological principles; we should all eat a mostly-vegetarian diet.)

Skeptics question how reincarnation can work if the world’s population has exploded so dramatically. As soon as each bacterium in your gut has its own soul of sorts, this criticism no longer really applies. Perhaps there is a finite amount of consciousness at our disposal; it’s just getting spread thinner than it was. If souls really can be “old” or “young,” maybe there are just a lot more young ones running around. Given the state of American politics right now, that wouldn’t surprise me.

So things aren’t as cut-and-dry as conventional models might suggest (surprise of the century), but there’s something going on here. Maybe it’s just that some recycled piece of consciousness winds up inside you, making itself known as a memory from a past life. Maybe it isn’t even that time-linear: I’ve had a vision more like déjà vu from a concurrent present-day life. I’m also experimenting with the notion that we have “soul siblings,” beings living simultaneously with whom we share remarkable, synchronous similarity.

The exact mechanics of all this are obviously unknown, but that’s why I created this site. For now, I can say with high confidence that life is cyclical: birth is remarkably like death, with a subsequent “forgetting” in childhood of all those great lessons learned over previous lifetimes. Once we’ve cultivated enough internal consciousness—or, maybe just when it’s our time—we recycle our store, repeating the grand adventure of corporeal life.

Don’t ask me about karma yet. Everything happens for a reason, but that’s a whole other discussion…

 



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