REINCARNATION

Here’s where the reasonable dematerializes into the spiritual without any consideration of a creator being involved. I wanted to make that clear up front before anyone assumes I’ve gotten religion. So follow this train of thought and maybe you’ll arrive where I have. Heh, heh.

So, I’m sitting in my garden shed, companion cat, Priest, still shedding on my lap basking in the rising fireball filtering through trees shedding more rapidly in the gusts from this blustery, nippy cold morning, taking occasional warm sips of ganjava and I’m thinking, this is that place where all those people whose writings and conversations inspired me most in my life were coming from. Cosmic fractal metamorphosis through metaphorical metabolism repeats the theme of life through chicken clucks, playing dogs’ snarls, wind chimes, a fence-line of trees, each taking the fondlings of the wind unto itself in turn as winter has its way with everyone.

I recall that when I reread one of those inspirational writers I come across phrases that make me realize precisely where I got the wherewithal to come up with my own entertainment, conversation with friends and jots in my journal. I have become that part of those people in the collage I am like any groupie. It would seem we’re all a synthesis of our inspirations, as solid as reincarnation needs to get to be a valid concept to my way of thinking. Each of us live on as a part of those we have inspired. There is no doubt; my parents live on in me. My Dad’s practicality (he always kept a sea chest of provisions for emergencies) and my mother’s love of fantasy (couldn’t pass up a patch of clover) have shaped this very post.

If there is any creation involved in who we are it is the choices we make throughout our lives; at first, unconsciously through our genetic memory and then consciously as we encounter situations too unnatural, arbitrary and new fangled for evolution to have imprinted in our genetic composition as an instinct or intuition. Aswim in this sea of fickle affections and rules from parents in preparation for more of the same from society, the developing psyche goes with what seems to work, testing the limits of punishment and reward in love and obedience, which pretty much sets the pattern throughout a life coping with civilized society.

I really have no idea about whether the Dalai Lama is a successive embodiment of one coherent personality or not. I feel very strongly that if children were appreciated for the clarity of wisdom they bring their civilization-beleaguered parents one hundredth as much as he was, we would realized a peace that is the natural state of the planet as it has always been, unattainable by civilization’s wars. As it is, the child must get lost in the miasma of society to learn its language to express his or her pure message understandably, by which time, none but the most honored at birth remember or intuitive rediscover.

I do understand the role of reincarnation in the wheel of life scheme the Hindu religion has worked out and find it more plausible than any other afterlife theories floating around just for its continuity of the natural process of transition rather than episodic beginnings and ends. For myself I find that whole story applies more substantially to the many revolutions of that wheel within my own lifetime with its rebirths emerging from the nurturing compost of lessons learned on the last revolution, with karma being the link from the one who knew too much to the one with broader questions.

As far as my experience of death goes — a potato with infinite eyes closes one. The potato with infinite eyes also opens a brand new, spanking fresh, debt free, clear eye elsewhere-when-who as yet another unique event quickly made common.