Hi Kimberly, nice essay, and some good advice, especially around the post-death rituals.
I lost my last 2 grandparents last year (both suspiciously soon after receiving a certain pharmaceutical), and every night for 40 days, I lit a candle and some incense and said prayers to my gods for them. 40 days is the time prescribed in the Tibetan book of the dead for how long it takes the soul to move over after death. Weirdly, my parents seemed to just want to get the funerals arranged and move on with their lives. They never speak about their parents now, and change the topic quickly if I bring them up.
For what it's worth though, I'm pretty sure my last incarnation was as a female spy born somewhere in Eastern Europe after WW2 and who died in her 30s in East Germany in the early 1980s, shot in a basement somewhere - she did not die well. I believe her family was also killed when she was young.
I visited Berlin once, and it brought up some strange emotions. Nostalgia (especially the GDR museum), sadness and dread were the main ones, though at the time I had no idea why.
I was born into this life in the late 1980s, and up until I was 20, I was dogged by the persistent belief that I and my parents were about to die soon, and had a general mental attitude of paranoid hypervigilance (I dealt with this via video games to emotionally detach, which was not a great strategy, in hindsight) Every birthday, I was kind of surprised to have made it another year. It may have also given me my inbuilt mistrust of authority and ability to circumvent the rules, whilst still presenting a "good citizen" outward appearance.
I think I also died relatively young (40s) as a British airman in WW2, presumably somewhere over Germany/Eastern Europe (as JMG has said before that where you die can affect where you are reincarnated). However, before the war, I was living it up in the 1920s and 30s as a pilot flying around the world, including some time in Egypt, which was presumably why I was obsessed by all things ancient Egyptian as a child in this lifetime.
There's a few other ones I'm not sure about, but I get hints of being around in the French revolution (as an ordinary Parisian woman caught up in the chaos - I've been to France generally, and Paris specifically, and I couldn't wait to leave) and possibly as a US army scout on the American frontier in the early 1800s (he also died young, though from something stupid like frostbite or tetanus, so I hold no ill feelings about the beauty of the American midwest) Going further back, I think I may have been a Japanese shinobi in the 1600s before they were all rounded up and killed (noticing a theme here?), a Japanese wandering monk in the 1700s and possibly a Portuguese sailor in the late 1500s who visited Japan, as I got a real sense of 'home' when I visited Portugal some years ago, and I've always wanted to (re?)visit Japan. (And was going to in 2020, but then some stuff happened... And now it's gone from being just "very" expensive to "unbelievably" expensive)
Interestingly, I absolutely hate flying in this lifetime (and yes, I realise the irony in the places I've visited above - my parents took me on holiday each year as a child, and every time I'd throw up for a week beforehand in anxiety about flying. I've not been on a plane in 7 years now), and the thought of guillotines practically made me hyperventilate as a child, so I think we carry over a surprising amount of emotional baggage between lifetimes, particularly about the manner of our deaths.
Reincarnation is now basically an unrecognised scientific fact as well. There's an organisation called the Bigelow Institute who research it, and they have documented over 2000 cases that indicate reincarnation (eg. knowledge that a child would have no other way to know, etc). They have some great downloadable essays of evidence on their website. The response from the scientific community is "Well your methods and findings are unrefutable, but we don't have any theoretical basis for how reincarnation could work, so we will reject all the evidence". Much like "structured water" (read: homeopathy), "low-temperature nuclear reactions" (read: cold fusion) and radionics machines, if it doesn't fit in the current model, there is no place for it - evidence be damned! Unfortunately it's a pretty common story with so-called Science these days, as the past 3 years have shown with stunning clarity. Trying to go up against the establishment with facts is a fool's game though, you're better off just circumventing it - in the same way that Florida water is marketed as a "cologne".
It's a shame (or not, if you believe as I do, that suppression of this knowledge is intentional - the original versions of the Bible make reference to reincarnation in such a way that it was seemingly common knowledge, but later revisions edited it out), as since I came to believe in reincarnation, I lost all fear of death. Not in the sense of going out of my way to do dangerous stuff (I don't really want to have to learn to walk, talk and read all over again in a hurry), but taking the long view of "how will this action affect my next life?". I, for one, hope to survive at least long enough that the population starts dropping, so that I reincarnate when the rubble of the long descent has stopped bouncing and industrial civilisation has finally collapsed. Sounds kind of selfish, I know, but I don't really feel like growing up in either a failing techno-dictatorship megacity or a savage hinterland getting hunted by drones and warbands.
Caste systems are a very ugly interpretation of reincarnation though, I agree. If we assume that you "did your time" in the Afterlife, why should you be punished further in your next life? And from the higher-caste perspective, wouldn't treating people like trash just mean you get to be reincarned as lower-caste so that you can feel what it's like? Seems very short-sighted.
Mr. Crow
Ps. How were the Aztec sacrifices supposed to keep the priests out of reincarnation? Just by accruing lots of bad karma to stay in the Bad Place for longer? If so, that seems like... an odd strategy.
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timeasmymeasure
no subject
Date: 2023-08-08 11:26 pm (UTC)I lost my last 2 grandparents last year (both suspiciously soon after receiving a certain pharmaceutical), and every night for 40 days, I lit a candle and some incense and said prayers to my gods for them. 40 days is the time prescribed in the Tibetan book of the dead for how long it takes the soul to move over after death. Weirdly, my parents seemed to just want to get the funerals arranged and move on with their lives. They never speak about their parents now, and change the topic quickly if I bring them up.
For what it's worth though, I'm pretty sure my last incarnation was as a female spy born somewhere in Eastern Europe after WW2 and who died in her 30s in East Germany in the early 1980s, shot in a basement somewhere - she did not die well. I believe her family was also killed when she was young.
I visited Berlin once, and it brought up some strange emotions. Nostalgia (especially the GDR museum), sadness and dread were the main ones, though at the time I had no idea why.
I was born into this life in the late 1980s, and up until I was 20, I was dogged by the persistent belief that I and my parents were about to die soon, and had a general mental attitude of paranoid hypervigilance (I dealt with this via video games to emotionally detach, which was not a great strategy, in hindsight) Every birthday, I was kind of surprised to have made it another year. It may have also given me my inbuilt mistrust of authority and ability to circumvent the rules, whilst still presenting a "good citizen" outward appearance.
I think I also died relatively young (40s) as a British airman in WW2, presumably somewhere over Germany/Eastern Europe (as JMG has said before that where you die can affect where you are reincarnated). However, before the war, I was living it up in the 1920s and 30s as a pilot flying around the world, including some time in Egypt, which was presumably why I was obsessed by all things ancient Egyptian as a child in this lifetime.
There's a few other ones I'm not sure about, but I get hints of being around in the French revolution (as an ordinary Parisian woman caught up in the chaos - I've been to France generally, and Paris specifically, and I couldn't wait to leave) and possibly as a US army scout on the American frontier in the early 1800s (he also died young, though from something stupid like frostbite or tetanus, so I hold no ill feelings about the beauty of the American midwest) Going further back, I think I may have been a Japanese shinobi in the 1600s before they were all rounded up and killed (noticing a theme here?), a Japanese wandering monk in the 1700s and possibly a Portuguese sailor in the late 1500s who visited Japan, as I got a real sense of 'home' when I visited Portugal some years ago, and I've always wanted to (re?)visit Japan. (And was going to in 2020, but then some stuff happened... And now it's gone from being just "very" expensive to "unbelievably" expensive)
Interestingly, I absolutely hate flying in this lifetime (and yes, I realise the irony in the places I've visited above - my parents took me on holiday each year as a child, and every time I'd throw up for a week beforehand in anxiety about flying. I've not been on a plane in 7 years now), and the thought of guillotines practically made me hyperventilate as a child, so I think we carry over a surprising amount of emotional baggage between lifetimes, particularly about the manner of our deaths.
Reincarnation is now basically an unrecognised scientific fact as well. There's an organisation called the Bigelow Institute who research it, and they have documented over 2000 cases that indicate reincarnation (eg. knowledge that a child would have no other way to know, etc). They have some great downloadable essays of evidence on their website. The response from the scientific community is "Well your methods and findings are unrefutable, but we don't have any theoretical basis for how reincarnation could work, so we will reject all the evidence". Much like "structured water" (read: homeopathy), "low-temperature nuclear reactions" (read: cold fusion) and radionics machines, if it doesn't fit in the current model, there is no place for it - evidence be damned! Unfortunately it's a pretty common story with so-called Science these days, as the past 3 years have shown with stunning clarity. Trying to go up against the establishment with facts is a fool's game though, you're better off just circumventing it - in the same way that Florida water is marketed as a "cologne".
It's a shame (or not, if you believe as I do, that suppression of this knowledge is intentional - the original versions of the Bible make reference to reincarnation in such a way that it was seemingly common knowledge, but later revisions edited it out), as since I came to believe in reincarnation, I lost all fear of death. Not in the sense of going out of my way to do dangerous stuff (I don't really want to have to learn to walk, talk and read all over again in a hurry), but taking the long view of "how will this action affect my next life?". I, for one, hope to survive at least long enough that the population starts dropping, so that I reincarnate when the rubble of the long descent has stopped bouncing and industrial civilisation has finally collapsed. Sounds kind of selfish, I know, but I don't really feel like growing up in either a failing techno-dictatorship megacity or a savage hinterland getting hunted by drones and warbands.
Caste systems are a very ugly interpretation of reincarnation though, I agree. If we assume that you "did your time" in the Afterlife, why should you be punished further in your next life? And from the higher-caste perspective, wouldn't treating people like trash just mean you get to be reincarned as lower-caste so that you can feel what it's like? Seems very short-sighted.
Mr. Crow
Ps. How were the Aztec sacrifices supposed to keep the priests out of reincarnation? Just by accruing lots of bad karma to stay in the Bad Place for longer? If so, that seems like... an odd strategy.