Reincarnation is a belief for some, I know. Other people think that it’s just a parlor game like playing with a Ouiji Board. I remember reading a book ( a silly novel ) maybe 30 -40 years ago where the author wrote that it happened 60-90 days after the death of one person ( and the birth of the new person ).
Many of you here will find that to be nothing but Tripe. You might be right, too. That said, what is the superstition? If it was ‘real’ how many days was it again?
After we determine the number of days then we can all put on our tinfoil hats and say,
“Wow… I’m Napoleon…!”
Why does no one ever consider the legal issues surrounding reincarnation?
If It’s still me, can I designate my reincarnated self as my legal heir? What about any other heirs? Can they contest that, leaving new Baby Me destitute? And if I can inherit, is it held in trust by my current parents until I come of age?
And what if I was a criminal, in prison? If I die 5 years into a 10 year sentence, does Baby Me get sent to Baby Prison for 5 years? Or do they defer that until I turn 18 (again)? What do they do if I abscond at 17, and go live someplace with no extradition treaty?
I guess marriage is mostly okay, with the “'til death do we part” part.
We had a “Past life” expert do my family when I was a kid, and oddly, none of my past lives were kings, etc- but several were minorly important- in one I was a Roman Senator during the Republic- but a “back bencher”. So altho i believed it not, she at least didnt come up with those tired tropes of “You were Napoleon in a past life”. My Mother was a noted “Psychic” when she retired but her shtick was actually good solid advice from a woman who grew up on a farm during the depression, then became a “Rosie the Riveter” then worked to help put her husband thru college to get his Masters. And she did a meditation thing of staring into a candle and letting your pain go out. She would accept no money but a silver coin.
I don’t believe in reincarnation, but I don’t consider it ‘superstition’ or ‘tripe’ any more than I consider the beliefs of any major religion to be so.
In fact, I’d say that the belief that a soul gets to be incarnated into increasingly higher forms until they reach Nirvana makes more sense than “worship me and my son and follow all my commands, however arcane and possibly irrelevant to modern life, or be thrown into a lake of fire for all eternity”.
Most cultures have a belief in a soul, we will call it, of some kind, that YOU whatever that is continues beyond death. YOU will meet dead relatives, ancestors, and learn the secrets to the universe, perhaps meet your idea of God.
What people don’t like to think is that when you die YOU just kind of fizzle out. YOU are not a separate entity at all. YOU are a brief chemical reaction called life.
The universe is very, very lazy, it does nothing without getting something back. E or energy equals M or matter. No trade and nothing happens.
So what is maintaining this afterlife? Heaven, Hell, it would take some energy. Who is doing the monitoring?,What is deciding when a soul gets sent back to try again? And most important, where is the energy exchange coming from?
What about when your cat dies? It had a soul, where does it stop? The ant you stepped on this morning, why doesn’t it get a second chance? YOU, your cat and the ant just discontinue.
The universe is lazy, and will do nothing without energy. The simplest thing, and also the fairest thing, is that YOU, the ant, everything just dies and fades away. There is no YOU after death, you get the same treatment as the ant.
If reincarnation is a thing, and people come back as other people, why is the human population growing all the time? And if beings are reincarnated as “higher” life forms for living a good life or doing good deeds, such that the ant comes back as a cat, and the cat comes back as a human, who is deciding what those “good” deeds are?
There’s a very famous children’s book called I Love You Forever and if you’re a parent it will rip your heart out. But it’s about a Mom raising her little boy and how he changes over time, and she always rocks and sings to him in his sleep. Then, at the end, the now-man goes to see his dying mother, rocks her and sings to her, and then returns home to his newborn baby girl, whom he rocks and sings to, using the same song his mother sang to him.
I love you forever
I’ll like you for always
As long as I’m living
My baby you’ll be
This book confuses the hell out of my son. It starts with a baby and ends with a baby. Pretty early on he became convinced that when you get old, you turn into a baby and the cycle just repeats itself. It took repeated efforts to disabuse him of this notion but he still comes away confused about who the hell all the people are (because their ages change throughout the book.) He’s too busy figuring it out to notice me crying.
I’m a Zen Buddhist and don’t believe in reincarnation, but there are some Buddhists who stridently insist you’re not a Buddhist unless you believe in reincarnation. They are mostly on Reddit.
