A Question on Reincarnation

A question I was asked:

In regards to reincarnation, if something becomes something else (i.e. a different personality as a different person), then in what way is it the same? If it’s still in some manner what it used to be, how is this reincarnation (coming back as another)?

I don’t usually answer questions about reincarnation, but I am moved to address this one. Reading through the existing answers, I see ones that are enlightened, judgmental, esoteric and angry, in about equal measure. I know that those reading them will pick the ones that fit their worldview and dismiss the rest. In my years with this subject, I thought I had seen it all, but one answer contains a clever bit of arrogant judgmentalism that I haven’t seen before! Human beings are nothing if not endlessly creative!

I lean toward the actor analogy: That the “you” that you are now is a part you are playing, and that there is a greater and more fundamental “you” that is the actor playing the part of “you” in this lifetime.

Most of the questions and misconceptions in the idea of reincarnation come from human centrism, the idea the humans are the measure of all things. That each person’s personal experience of being at the center of the universe extends to all things, material and spiritual. That whatever your experience, whatever you believe, that is the one and only way to experience and believe. Flat Earthers are a perfect example of this. While it is easy to find things in the physical world that can be explained by the idea “the world is a sphere,” they choose to come up with complex and often nonsensical explanations of why the world looks round, but isn’t. The key point here is we choose to believe something, then tailor our perceptions to match that belief. This goes for culture, religion, hobbies, pretty much any endeavor that humans engage in.

This question assumes that the personality that you have now, with all its personality, memories and quirks, is the only real, authentic, “you,” and if you remove any of those elements, you would not be “you” anymore. Also, that who you are now is the most important you, and must be preserved for “you” to continue on. But, what if there was a “you” independent of all that? What if you were more than just a collection of memories and feelings? What was the “you” that existed before you were born, in the womb? Before you had memories? Ideas? Thoughts? A personality? Are you your thoughts, your memories, your personality? Or are they just something you have?

There are more versions of reincarnation than you can shake a stick at. The one that I find most consistent with the research at University of Virginia, the work of Dr. Brian Weiss and the recall of people who have Near Death Experiences, to site a few sources, is that there is a greater “you” that exists outside of time and space, as we commonly know them, that extends itself into our reality to become a soul of a child and experience life as a human in our 3-D reality. This soul forms the basis of your personality and your ethics, and sometimes exposes memories of other lifetimes and other realities. These souls come here of their own free will, with agendas that have little to do human values and religions, especially those that teach exclusion, hate and fear.

You will, of course, take from this what you will. Jesus said to let those with eyes, see, and ears, hear; you will take from this what you are ready for. Good luck and take care.

The Soul of the Matter

What is a Soul? The Psyche, Spirit, Awareness, Consciousness? I think all of these are the same, different words for the same experience, with each word having it’s own connotation and context. Soul and Spirit are most at home in the religious and spiritual, while Psyche, Awareness, and Consciousness are mostly used in the secular sciences. Surly it doesn’t surprise you that scientists the deal with the mind would want to have words that have as little religious and metaphysical baggage as possible? And philosophers sit somewhere in the middle, not wanting to be too objectively scientific, nor too dogmatically religious, use words from both sides.

But, what is this thing we are talking about? I was re-reading Carlos Castaneda’s first book, The Teachings of Don Juan, and there was a passage near the end that talked about Diableros who could steal your soul and keep it imprisoned. For some reason, that gave me pause. Not because I hadn’t heard stuff like that before, but because I’ve learned and experienced a lot in the past few years and that whole idea just didn’t seem right to me.

There are a lot of Christian, and Christian-derived, traditions that share the idea that the “soul” is something indefinable that everyone gets, but can be given away, lost, sold or stolen without the person even noticing. How can a soul be so important, if you can’t even tell when you’ve lost it? (Some traditions get around that by saying that when “sell you soul” bill doesn’t come due until you die.) For this, and other reasons, I’m convinced that the soul, spirit, psyche, whatever you call it, is such a fundamental and necessary part of who you are, that it cannot be lost, stolen or given away. And that separation of the soul from the body results in sleep, coma or death, depending on how deep and long the separation is.

The concept that there is something of us that continues after death has been around, probably, as long as there have been humans who could think about it. But what that “something” is have varied a lot throughout history. You can browse through Wikipedia, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, and EgyptianMyths.net to see some of these ideas, but the takeaway here is that the Western concept of the soul, the one through which we view all others around the world and throughout history, is a relatively new invention, and it differs so dramatically from what came before that we have no words to understand them. Hence the confusion of words.

Our modern version of the soul, heaven, hell, and the devil, are pretty much an inventions of medieval Christians, and survives today most strongly in Evangelicals: Your soul is the eternal part of you that is subject to eternal torment in Hell, by the Devil and his minions, unless you are 'saved' by by absolute faith in Jesus Christ. If you followed that link, you won't find that wording there, for they tend to downplay obedience/punishment aspects of their faith when dealing with "outsiders." But it's so fundamental to them that the idea of doing away with hell is sparing a religious war.

The reason for this is fairly obvious, without a single, fixed, eternal “soul” that can be “sent to Hell,” there is no need for a “savior,” and Christianity itself serves no purpose. This will probably offend some people, and it’s true that other sects are much less strident about this, but the fact is that judgment and punishment is the underlying message of every Western religion, regardless of whatever other messages are put in top of it. The only way out of this “obedience or punishment” mindset is to drop the very idea of a judgmental god altogether. 

That was a long digression. I put that in to demonstrate how deeply religious and historical contexts shape our ideas, and how often those ideas can be heavily influenced by politics, and cultural, and religious, necessity and biases. Given all that, is it possible to step away from what we’ve always taken for granted and view our inner lives with fresh eyes? I think so.

What is a soul? In terms of experience, the soul is that thing that makes you, you. It’s that fundamental thing that you refer to when you say “I.” The thing that has the personality, the memories, and the feelings that are uniquely yours. It’s that awareness that is aware that it is aware. In terms of structure, the soul part of a multilayered thing that we currently have no name for, but encompasses consciousness and self-awareness, on one end, and our Higher Selves, or our connection to All That Is, on the other.

The soul is not consciousness or personalty, consciousness and personality are a result of the soul interacting with the physical world. Consciousness is like the surf upon a beach, it is the result of Awareness, (the ocean), coming into contact with physical reality, (the shore), creating the personality, (as anything from small ripples to crashing surf). Once created, this personality can exist without a physical body, though it tends to lose a lot of it’s ability to function in this reality, making it difficult to communicate with. Like trying to participate in a video game without having your own character, you can kibitz, whisper in people’s ears, and send messages, but the players will usually be too busy to pay you much mind, if they notice you at all.

Though I’ve just scratched the surface, I think that’s enough for now! These are just my ideas, and, in my mind, ideas are only as good as how useful they are in everyday life. I fully intend to explore these ideas and how they can make your life happier, more peaceful, and productive.

Take care.

Taking Care of Family

I regularly go to a hypnotherapy MeetUp where I learn new techniques, and every time I do, I ask for volunteers to practice on. I usually get a couple of takers. This is one of those sessions.

The new techniques are for quick inductions, like you see in hypnosis stage shows. But this client really didn’t need anything because she, as long as I have been working with her, she can go under with a single command, but I got my practice in anyway.

The client wanted to get completion with her older sister, call her A, who had died a few years ago. In the process she ended up visiting another sister and some other people as well. The client is female, in her 70’s, and had two sister, one which was very psychic and one that was staunchly atheist/materialistic and thought all that paranormal stuff was pure bunk.

The induction went fast, and she when directly to a beautiful place: “I found myself sitting on a stone floor in front of a stone throne that was two steps up from where I sat. Behind me was an almost life-sized Buddha figure. The room was ringed with small stained glass windows with Christian themes. The stone floor and throne setting seemed very old and had a roughish, primitive appearance. The floor, though, was very smooth and comfortable. The room seemed to me to represent various faiths that I had encountered and the idea that I had accepted parts of each one and the room illustrated that. I think I laughed out loud several times as I found the room quite delightful.”

She did laugh, and cry, many times throughout the session.

When she finished describing the room, I asked A to join her: “I had a very hard time not seeing her as a dead body, but gradually bits and pieces of her personality began to come through. She said to me, laughing ‘I can sparkle and (?) for you if that’s what you want, but you know we don’t really need that.’ Not her exact words, but that was the general idea, that if I needed to see her as lively and ‘lifelike’ she could do that.”

“I had felt that I had let her down as she was dying by not impressing on her that she should look for the light, a guide, etc., but she had turned to a standard form of religion not long before she died, and I realized that I hadn’t felt right about ‘imposing’ my beliefs about the afterlife on her at that point.”

“We ‘talked’ for a while, and she reminded me that we both knew there were no boundaries and that we could communicate without outside support. I gave her permission to ‘drop in’ whenever she felt like it.”

The client laughed and cried during this conversation. She then said her “so longs” to A (No Good-Byes here, they would be talking again!). Something she said made me suspect there might me more to do here, so I suggested that she see if there was someone else she wanted to talk to:

“Then I looked for my other sister. Call her B. She died a few months after A. I had felt really bad that I was unable to understand what she was saying the last time we spoke, as her voice was very rough and she was sort of mumbling. I felt worse that I had no idea whether the last words I spoke to her conveyed anything of my feelings about her. We never did address that in this session, but it didn’t seem to matter.”

“When I first saw her in this session she was sitting in a sort of office – a small room with books, papers, a computer. She said she knew she was dead, but thought she might just as well stay in her little room as she didn’t believe there was anything else out there.”

I was looking for a way to get B to consider leaving the room. B had said that she was writing letters, so I asked something like, would the people they were addressed to ever read them. That gave B pause, she had never considered that. Somehow in the conversation, the fact that one of her sons had died, came up. A suggested the client go with that: “I asked her if she knew that one of her sons had recently died. At this point, Rod asked me to encourage her to open the door of her room, and when she did, the son was standing there. They eventually walked off happily together.”

Then the client switched back to A: “She more or less brushed off all my apologies, conveying to me that it wasn’t important, that what I had or hadn’t said to her didn’t impede her in any way. Our Dad came to get her, and the two of them walked off together. I just realized that it didn’t occur to me to try to speak with my Dad. He said to A that, although he had never actually said it to her, he hoped she knew that he had always loved her very much.”

“While she and I were talking, I felt that I wanted to hug her or touch her in some way. I realized that we had never been ‘huggy’ with each other, but we did have a very strong bond. She was very lighted-hearted and laughed a lot, which was typical of her in life.”

“Rod brought me back to the original room.” (The “Chapel”) “I felt much more peaceful that I had at the beginning.”

I had a “Ah Ha” moment during this session. There was one point where it felt like I had lost focus, or my mind had wandered. This has happened, from time to time, and I usually just feel bad and double my efforts to stay focused. This time I got something totally different, because I realized that it had happened right after I had the client to give a suggestion to one of her sisters. What had actually happened is the that energy of the room had shifted, which I believe meant that the sister we had been talking to had had an insight and we were making progress!

When I read this, I can’t help but think that there are some important points that are missing, but I just can’t remember them. Lesson learned: I need to start recording all my sessions.