REINCARNATION
A SOUTHWESTERN AMERICAN INDIAN CHIEFTAIN nearing death proclaimed to his tribal members in attendance that he would come back as a male child soon and would be known by a birthmark commensurate with a mark upon his skin acquired in the course of life. Soon after his death a baby was indeed born replete with birthmark.
In Tibet before the ultimate takeover by the Chinese, lamas and shamans of note and worth were “recognized” by elders as “recognized incarnations” such as the current Dalai Lama. Mummification was used for some of these exalted ones of the past and it is written that they are indeed recognizable by the reincarnated one.
“Twenty Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation” researched by Professor Ian Stevenson, U-V 1974, scientifically or at least empirically and professionally examines stories on location with much verifiable evidence of the possibility and ineluctable plausibility of this phenomenon.
One account by an art student of the 1960s has him while perusing art works in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York transfixed by a wooden sculpture of 14th century France, anonymous artist, and coming to the conclusion that he had carved it centuries ago whilst in a French incarnation. He intimates being rather entranced by the experience and imagining the actual carving of the female ¾ size body, feeling the subtleties of form and how it was accomplished in wood with mallet and chisels, sanding and preservative patina. This now mature artist claims he still feels this same sense though has not viewed the sculpture in five decades. Other French influences including the language had intrigued him through life.
In the materialistic world this is of course debatable though arguable pro and con. The stories are legion of rebirth and karma, the spiritual version of cause and effect though ranging through different lifetimes as experienced by the eternal soul in materiality instead of strictly a contemporary basis. This naturally conjures the logistics of existence between lives. If so, and of necessity since if one were alive more than once, it propounds the theory that one must have consciousness between earthly sojourns. Heaven and hell as concepts indeed don’t make sense when taken out of context of biblical apocalyptic transformation, a mystical precept if ever were one. The prevalent theorem of heaven and hell is that the soul is born at physical birth – thereby the anti-abortionists – and at death transfers to a heavenly realm otherwise undisclosed. This would mean though that an infinite number of souls are to inhabit heaven or perhaps hell if so bound. Calculating abstractly the number of babies to be born until the sun’s nova, the number would be astronomical and impossible to conceive the rationale for such interminable creation of new souls.
Spiritual “seers” explain that a finite number of souls were conceived in the Beginning, something in the trillions or more, a veritable shower of life procreation by the unseen God Creator or Big Bang as the Large Hadron Collider seeks to identify.
Reincarnation makes sense in the cause and effect rationale since it explains why some are born in want and some in largesse, some deformed of body and some perfect. Materialists, atheists, secular humanists and the like don’t adjust warmly to such, as they would phrase it, wildly imaginative science fiction proposals. Dry bones excavated add to the perplexity of human development since many are more simian-like than homo-sapiens. The Darwinian theory also makes sense because it is demonstrable in evolutionary and mutation terms. Crawling from sea slime, however, to sit in an office cubicle, indeed to philosophize in lucubration towers, to create magical symphonies for the ear, to create masterpieces in marble, seems over the top in fantasy equally as much as being created in the beginning some 13.81 billion years ago if science is correct, 4.5 billion in Earth terms. Evolution alone doesn’t make sense.
The material minded are not about to accept theories beyond what they see, hear, taste, touch and think. Clearly any concept that involves retribution in a future life is not considered as realistic because anyone who delves into the shady dealings so available in life, if suddenly stricken with regret or fear, would not be so involved but would prepare for better circumstance should any judgment arise, thus ignores such possibilities in lieu of immediate gratification whithersoever it comes. Agnostics straddle the crevice; existentialists party; atheists opt out.
Those of intermediate logic and belief combination of perception will live lives of compromise and caution, both dealing with the realities of life and the potential of a heavenly reckoning. Secular humanists, the latest round of agnosticism, tend toward having a lucrative lifestyle, up on current events, cavalier in their personas, and intellectual in poised or posed demeanor and wherewithal of solvent existence, sophisticated at all costs, feeling rather above all forms of religious experience and willing to accept the emptiness of death after a life lived to fullest extent in ethical if not overly moral terms, live and let live philosophy as it were.
Oddly or commensurately both the working folk and the upper echelons of conservative business and politics adhere to the belief system of a God and Jesus and a heavenly respite when once the race on Earth is run. In this is found almost inevitably some hypocrisy, speciousness, arrogation, even arrogance, self-aggrandizement and self-righteousness. Conversely the liberal mindset adheres to the self-made man both figuratively and literally, that is evolutionary and determinedly. To be allegiant to a Creative force v. having created oneself cocoon to butterfly is the common battleground.
In the middle and outside the circle stand the knowers. These are the modern day Druids. In the Western World there exists no category other than mystics and the like. In Tibetan monasteries, those that still survive, and Southwestern American Indian tribes, still independent of absolute European pogrom, are still found legends of this system of belief and lifestyle. Likewise the Australian Aborigine people retain visions of life after death and future life on Earth, to them known as “dream time”, existing in both worlds. For these it is enough to “know” without need of trying to explain the inexplicable to hierarchical castes. Indeed what purpose?
Detractors will surmise that such fantasies are but cognitive dissonance bids for salvation from this world of woes and sorrows, death and taxes. And this is not far amiss in rational terms for all must succumb to the inevitabilities of life. The factor not considered by most is the unknown “if” of accumulated debt by dint of iniquities toward fellow mankind, greed, force, murder &c. Sometimes deathbed reconciliation will manifest as one nears the point of no return, so they presume, and possibly to enter some ethereal space of reconnaissance. Then they, as related elsewhere, either find contrition by seeing the light or feeling the heat.
Somewhere in another earthly dimension stand the bogus gurus who find ways of convincing others that they themselves are the truth, the light and the way, a perversion of the advent of Jesus and parables, ascension, apostles et al. These false prophets amass great fortunes and almost invariably end in ignominy or premature death pulling others down with them as if a drowning man. The era of such proliferations has seemingly passed but the legacy lives on and disparages many from seeking spiritual guidance in other than conventional ways, namely the traditional church. The church is a fine institution if not entirely forthcoming with explanations, rather vague but excellent beginnings for children and any who may need a guiding light and the sense of community available therein. Corrupting of this bastion in any way or sense is blasphemy and treachery for it involves falsifying and capitalizing on the most basic instincts of mankind, viz. the eternal search for beginnings and endings, for meaning. This phenomenon is reckoned to be evil because of the ancient adage of sins of commission being forgivable whereas sins of omission are taken to task. Church can be comforting if kept free of self-righteousness.
The bible is likewise a fine history book and a guiding light to most seeking persons who wish for a decent life and comprehension of the fabled good and evil presentiment of mankind. The books of various principled accounts are at once dreary and enlightening, religion being not that which was propounded by the Christ figure but intrinsically was His total reckoning with past and future perception and attuning to a spirit un-seeable but certainly tangible to the conscience. Considering that the biblical passages changed the course of history, changed the calendar and gave us the only account of ages past until archaeology came to the rescue, and provided the basis for moral thought, it is a remarkable book. The Old Testament though allegorical in origin of species and ponderous in sermonizing sets the cadence for ethics and morality if a bit tweaked toward the adage “spirit’s willing, flesh is weak”. The sense in the New Testament through Jesus is that he speaks of past lives, ethical conduct, transfiguration of the body through meditation and living a pure life, that we may do as He did, and that links with the distant past and equally distant future are possible, not a bad pep talk to start one’s day.
In any case the dichotomy is of phenomenon v. noumenon, or sensory v. sensitivity. Noumenal perception needs no sensory input but is a mental exercise or a spiritual one. Phenomenal input is that which we experience in materiality. Everyone feels both senses though many deny the mental as being “only in your head”. Citing the strange stories of “The Three Faces of Eve”, “A Search For Bridey Murphy” and suchlike, some explain these phenomena as psychological disorders, some as past life reconstructions seeping through via negative experiences of one sort and another, tragic childhood, traumatic experiences &c. Predictably the materialist will conjure ways and means of explaining noumena in phenomena terms whereas the spiritualist, if s/he’s honest and sincere, will try to conflate the two concepts as one.
There are quite a lot of books on these subjects, out of body travel, past life remembrance and reconstruction, hypnosis to track past memories subdued, record of lost civilizations via spirit guides, and so on. Predictions of future events also enter the field. Of course some will posit that they’re coming back as a cat, for instance, making light of the whole concept but the gist is that people are thinking and talking about this more lately, the sign of the Aquarian Age encroaching. Taken lightly or taken seriously, there are examples of supernatural events and premonitions extant and it’s safe to state that many have experienced this as a sense and not a sensory attribute. Denial of this is ubiquitous since the social order is not attuned willingly to such extrasensory perception or ESP, this still being relegated to the psychic and charlatan realm. ESP, telekinesis and other anomalies are not reproducible in the laboratory, lending weight to the materialist purview whereas the unseen is experienced psychically or noumenally, i.e. rational perception without sensory input.
Though reincarnation has been a recurrent theme throughout history the contemporary mindset is tipped more toward the secular humanist evolutionary theorem, pseudo-scientific arrogance, slightly or heavily invested in education leading to higher paying employment, leisurely lifestyle and cavalier attitude of nonchalance. Acceptance of this world as imperfect goes with that demeanor and we find little or no resistance to the impossible imbalance seen almost everywhere. These are content to coexist as long as they ac quire the sought after amenities and largesse that money and social position brings. Western world societies still offer this. And even the less than solvent, with much ingenuity, can afford the luxuries available in complex society, this being the salve for imperfect representative Democracy, this in itself a somewhat biblically based polity though now modulated toward the secular as evidenced by the Orwellian conversions and blatantly corrupting inversions.
Reincarnation, the concept thereof, can change everything nonetheless. As said, when once the idea has been broached many other questions naturally follow. Most who have tried to reason the potential truth of this concept have rejected the notion as unworkable, un-provable, and unrewarding. There are indeed many roadblocks to untangling this thought pattern due to the unpredictability of physical matter, time, space and fate. Clever banter suffices to cover any traces of having once contemplated the ineffable. The dedicated seeker though will find what s/he seeks if timing and social circumstances coincide. But since this is not the public perception in these times those who do manage to discover esoteric truths must of necessity keep them hidden from most of life’s interactions. Historically this has proven true too, silence for sake of safety, esoteric truths held closely to trusted groups. The Essene community from which the Christ child was born lived removed from the Jewish mainstream.
Most people will go through birth to death enfilades without so much as a thought to anything beyond supper and bed after the day’s chores are done. They are conscripted to whatever platoons of work and service they fit best with and reduced to automatons to grind through life like a file in metal cutting their notches to crawl through. The “Wheel of 84” so-called is the pattern of endless reincarnation whereas past lives can actually reach into the tens of thousands for those who remain unaware that they might step out of such pattern and into lives leading to transcendence of interminable repetition. The further along the journey to transfiguration the lesser become the earthly sojourns broached until finally all karma has been satisfied and higher journeys commence, which is in essence a return to the beginning of consciousness and being, so impart the soothsayers.
This cannot be fully explained in earthly terms yet, the language not having evolved to encompass the complexities of all existence. Earth comprehension has come leaps and bounds from the simpler lifestyle of homesteading or wandering but much has been lost in so doing. The big city towers and canyons only obscure the inner workings of mind and soul. It is soul itself that lies at the base of consciousness, that spark of godhood or energy that was created in the one and only beginning. Coming to planet Earth as sentient bodies happened, as told by various seers, over the course of some ten and one-half million years. This has been corroborated enough times via different sources over many years to satisfy the seeking ones. Language is still in second infancy having been reduced from original comprehension and formulation of thought into vocalized and written emanation. This world is still trying to arise from the ten thousand years of post-flood era until the following Christian era which retained the bloodletting and obtuseness still current, only the Celtic Druids, ancient Greeks and Romans having retained the light of learning. Until the thought potential increases, the linguistics remain limited.
Be that as it may and in fact is, one can only proceed accordingly. Rational man seeks understanding of that which he is capable of assimilating, nothing further. Sensory deprivation scares him and sense, that is, the noumena is left for dreams of which he can simply dismiss any allusions to out of body experiences as fantasy and mental caprice.
It has been postulated that with the ancient conflating of soul essence with the animal kingdom originally populated by fission of evolution in Darwinian style, also a one-time occurrence since life cannot be generated from nothing in laboratory experiments, there remain some vestiges of animalistic genetics in the human strain as evidenced by occasional bestial or deformed bodies and certainly minds. It has been explained by psychics that the original sin was that of partaking of animal, vegetable and mineral growth and thereby becoming lodged in those forms, actually reproducing from cohabitation with others of that varied caste, that is, half man, half animal or other earthly forms. Then as written the continued copulation between the cryptic Adam and Eve manifestation produced continued oddities of nature such as the centaur, mermaid Sphinx and so on. The remnants of this legend are to be seen in many locations, the half-man half-animal artifacts worldwide. But this is of course scoffed at by the multitudes as fairytales and given no further thought. It is, however, the history of this world as told by those in other dimensions through the auspices of those in earthly form who are attuned enough to pick up the messages from those that are known as spirit guides. This conflation began as early as ten and one-half million years ago, the as-said earliest date recorded of human or half-human manifestation. Some interference from unknown sources at some point, the inference being God, precluded the ability to reproduce offspring from such varied forms, much as the equestrian inability to reproduce mules from mules, and no more mixed or half-beings were born from that indeterminate point in time. Thus the images remain as mythology only for the general public and academia.
That is all in accord with the idea of reincarnation of course since none of that would be possible without further births. Records available in esoteric writings tell that slowly the animal appendages were removed through technical and spiritual rituals over the course of many years until now there are virtually none left but for the odd genetic quirk as intimated. Evolutionary theory of animal to man draws on this verisimilitude of ostensible genetic origins.
Also there are the legends of Atlantis and Lemuria to consider. Uniformitarianism being the current popular geographical theory, that is, slow evolution of the planet’s land masses and seas, all traces of those legends have vanished but for the Easter Island monoliths and a few other enigmas from the distant past which are inexplicable to modern man. Most humans are content to leave them as mysteries and not delve any deeper into meanings or origins, even scholars falling into this mindset. Scientists nonetheless are faced with many obstacles to uniformitarian evolution. The finding of whale remains in Michigan’s Lower Peninsula for instance is anomalous for obvious reasons. Remains of tropical plant life and animals found in Alaska and Siberia defy logic since they were found fast frozen and still edible as it were. These animals are huge tropical beasts frozen solid as if all at once. Rhinos and the like, mammoths, herbaceous, could not possibly exist in such climates, not for a day. Yet how came they there? Certainly they didn’t migrate from tropics to frozen north. Clearly the climate was different at some time and would indicate different climates in other parts of the world, perhaps a slippage of the polarity of northern and southern poles to different locations even as now the true North Pole is not at the point of actual polarity but is moving as the Earth planet rotates and revolves in its precession orbit. Scientists tell of many reversals and shifting of polarity throughout the eons of space and time.
The natural sciences therefore face many enigmas and yet are not free to openly discuss much of these findings due to lack of acceptance by the media and the public. Even scholarly journals rarely publish any traces of what is known to the scientific coteries.
Each one is of course free to accept or reject such theories according to his/her own lights. To wander in darkness is anyone’s prerogative just as all are free to seek the light. Those who come to acknowledgement that there must be something more than endless plodding along on trails that lead nowhere do have something to approach as possible alternative. But as with anything in sentient life one has to really want it. Such is the statement by Far Eastern mystics that enlightenment is elusive but may be found in an instant even after a lifetime of searching. The Eureka moment as it were may be sought prodigiously but only found through unwarranted sources, a mysterious process that may be worked toward but only discovered by chance or dedicated devotion to the premise, a combination of all resources and then some happenstance.
Surely we all die just as surely as births are inevitable. What happens at death? As Omar Khayyam poeticized, Strange, is it not? That of the myriads who, Before us pass’d the door of Darkness through, Not one returns to tell us of the Road, Which to discover we must travel too. Yet there are and have been for time immemorial those who have brought the news and tidings of past experiences to contemporary man. It is also written that the Age of Aquarius heralds a return to esoteric knowledge in a mainstream consciousness. Armageddon, the Second Coming et al is of long prophetic legacy. The Revelation of John holds some clues as to what might transpire though as with the poetics of Nostradamus the wordings are indecipherable other than a mystical sense of doom and resurrection garnered. Clearly both were in a sort of trance when transcribing such convoluted verbiage.
In any case, in a senseless world, which is predominantly what we inhabit in so-called civilized cultures, the only sense to be derived comes through esoteric or spiritual channels and since science itself is leaning toward similar conflation the study is recommended for everyone who wishes a better world or at least seeks the understanding of what eludes most of us in this imperfect world. Otherwise there really is nothing to look forward to, nothing to live up to and nothing to lose or gain. Man does not coexist well with existentialism as a guide. Church is a guide, yes, certainly, but also a less than all-seeing one with many inconsistencies and inexplicable catechisms and even some evils inherent in the guileful that utilize the consecrated bastions for their personal lecheries and profit. The church to reiterate is good for children to have a moral rock to stand on and of course for those who seek consolation from a life of iniquities. There is another path. Again, when once reincarnation is broached everything falls into place if pursued to its logical extents. For can the world be illogical? Society, yes, assuredly; but not the All of existence – that is the realm of the existentialist and the atheist to dismiss all of creation as pointless other than personal gratifications. Creation by whatever name we call it is eternal and infinite as are we else we’d not have been around as long as we have. Reincarnation answers all questions. The end-time so-called scientifically when the sun burns out is so far in the future as to be unimaginable, virtually eternal.
To the sentient naysayers this is meaningless inasmuch as here and now is concerned since the one life precept takes nothing else into consideration. Theirs is a personal decision to be decent and independent, or indeed indecent and cunning, traits found both in secular and religious enclaves. Even atheism is theism. The quandary comes to why should one act ethically in a meaningless world without retribution if one can get away with it, this concept of one life and one life only; indeed why be kind or decent if no negative repercussions interfere? Materialistic thought does not cope willingly with morality or ethics but preferably only with stark realties, health, economics, laws and social codes, saving feelings for family and friends. Reincarnation suggests that one should act in accordance with that which one feels is right and righteous, not self-righteous, more the futuristic approach to living a life that leaves no stains, no regrets, hopefully some moral accomplishments or at least ethical stance.
To have lived before, to live again is the principle, eternal life – as indoctrinated biblically without explanation – in reincarnated terms a logical evolution as the soul gains experience via physical interactions, mental dilemmas, life lived as many times as necessary to arrive at the understanding of what it means to be a living entity but with a responsibility to assume the role of sons and daughters of the Creative Force and act in accordance with that great power.
mjmackay 