Reincarnation Rocks

I had a surprise in my email box yesterday. I learned that a kindred blogger in Salem, Oregon had written about yours truly and The Big If.

Brian Hines is the author of Church of the Churchless: Preaching the gospel of Spiritual Independence. I became aware of him through an article his wife Laurel wrote for the local Salem Monthly.

I am still new to blogging. It still produces a strange feeling to send material out into the blogosphere having no idea who, if anyone, reads this stuff. I envision with wonder who my thoughts might touch in ways that I most likely will never know about. It thrills me when I actually hear something back from somewhere, a ping back from the sonar.

In his blog entry Brian discussed reincarnation and wondered why coming back to this earthly life was so great. Fair enough. I wonder that, too.

As I’ve written before, I first heard about reincarnation from Betty Bethards, a psychic and frequent radio talk show guest in San Francisco in the 1970s. (She crossed over about a year ago.) I immediately loved and woo-hooed the idea.

It made so much more sense to me that we grow through many different lifetimes, stepping into different gender, ethnic, racial, and economic roles, until we eventually pop out at the finish line ready to depart Earth for some other reality.

Back then it was a much better idea than the prospect of going to Vietnam at 18 or 19 and getting my head blown off for a cause I didn’t believe in (because the people who explain wars didn’t do a wowser job of showing why the anti-war voices were wrong). Quite frankly, selfish as I may have been as a teenager, I did not believe that spending my one life to live on combat should take priorities over other things, like discovering the secrets of lovemaking, which at the time I was also quite naïve about.

It’s not that I want to come back to Earth over and over again. My intuition and my reading in NDEs tell me that living the physical life is much more challenging than living in the thought world. This is tough duty. Material living means getting your face dirty in all the needs, obligations, and limitations that make most of us crazy.

In material life we need money. For me that pretty much says it all. While most of the things I love to do are either free or cost very little, such as blogging, the bottom line is that you need financial energy to keep going. But I suspect you know that.

The thrill of reincarnation for me is more a window through which to gaze at this world and all its events. Coupled with all the input I’ve been getting on what it’s like to die, which NDErs keep insisting is a piece of cake, I get excited about the implications of the system. Reincarnation rocks!

For example, the news bombards us with visions of death. I have come to view this as infotainment. On last night’s news there was an opening story about a horrific crash on I-5 that obliterated a couple of cars. It looked like great gore. Great video of another oh shit moment. I also believe that this style of news presentation is a form of socially acceptable hypnosis that conditions us all to the whole death is final routine.

Now I look at these stories with my NDE & Reincarnation filter firmly in place. I see victims transcending to another place. I don’t see it as tragic. I see the victim as having a life review, studying in the light, and eventually coming back to lead another life. I don’t see it as much different than how a screenwriter or novelist factors in a character’s death in a plotline to make some sort of statement to the whole of the story.

Reincarnation explains diversity. The American version of reincarnation (being the sum of everything I have read about and intuited) answers nearly every “Why me Lord?” question with “Because you (as a soul) chose it.”

While that’s not always an easy answer to hear, it is much more liberating to me than trying to figure out why God chose a fate for you. I like thinking that I am part of my soul’s progression through physical life. Someday I will be able to poke my head above the earthly fog into the sunlight of clear vision and be able to see exactly why my soul chose certain conditions for every lifetime.

Reincarnation can be very jarring. For example, as I ponder possibilities for another life on this planet, I am well aware of places or situations I would absolutely hate to be born into. I cannot imagine what would have motivated souls to choose to incarnate into Iraq, for example. But for some reason that was a hot ticket for millions. I can also imagine people in many places on the Earth thinking about how frightening it would be to be born an American in their next life.

When I look at people and life through the filter of reincarnation, I have much more sensitivity to (and hopefully empathy for) their challenges. An obvious example is choosing to incarnate in a deformed or weakened physical body. You know going in that in our society it’s pretty much a recipe for mental torture. In schools kids will scar you for life with their mental cruelty. All through life you’ll have to endure “not being good enough.” It creates a much different ball game to realize that this wasn’t a case of bad luck in the gene pool; it was a deliberate decision, part of the challenge your overseeing professor soul created for your educational harvest.

For me now, the biggest question I have is why hasn’t the arts & entertainment industry at large picked up on any of this? For me this is riveting stuff. It totally revolutionizes the world view. We could be churning out entertainment that is so much more intriguing than bang-bang you’re dead.