Pondering The Big Cosmic Surprise

If reincarnation exists, and growing anecdotal evidence suggests that it does, it changes everything.

Author Carol Bowman didn’t believe in reincarnation until her five year-old son began panicking at loud noises. Eventually under hypnosis he described his past life as a Civil War soldier where loud noises were terrifying.

Bowman’s two books on the subject (Children’s Past Lives and Return from Heaven) chronicle her investigations, which include startling accounts of reincarnation within family lines. According to her research, you could wind up becoming your own relative, like a grandchild!

My interest in reincarnation is that it’s so deliciously creative. It fills up a lot of loopholes in the justice of love.

People who believe that physical life is a one-way trip (whether to heaven or to hell or to eternal nothingness) don’t necessarily have an investment in how they leave the planet. They feel that they can use up natural resources and devote their lifetime to acquisition of wealth and play unfairly with other people’s lives, because when life is done, that’s it.

But what if it turns out that we come back? If this were known fact, I believe that we would have a different society. More of us would want to pay it forward.

We might not be so eager to let neighborhoods fall into disrepair, turning into ghettos, if we thought we could end up being born back into one. Maybe we would look at educating and inspiring our young people differently if we realized that somewhere down the road we would have to be educated and inspired again.

We might not be so interested in ravaging the land for natural resources if we thought somehow, somewhere we could be reborn in a place ravaged and depleted. We might be more interested in planning for the future if we knew we were the future.

Maybe we would look at criminals in a different way if we thought we might be reborn within the circumstances that drive people to crime. Maybe we would care more about victims of all kinds if we thought destiny might fit us inside their shoes next time.

Maybe we would look at our mate in a different way if we thought we might come back in that gender’s body forced to deal with somebody like us.

Maybe if present-life heterosexuals considered a future-life drill as a gay person, we’d see some attitude changes.

Maybe we would be more compassionate to problems suffered by other racial and ethnic groups if we thought that we might spend our next life fighting those same problems.

Maybe we would not be so quick to condemn somebody’s religion or spiritual practice if we considered a future life of being born into that world.

Karma is not about punishment; it is about the big cosmic surprise of reaping what you sow.