Understanding the reincarnation belief temptation

As part of my series on clear thinking and developing or regaining your ability to discern between facts and fiction, believable and unbelievable, I want to present here some simple pointers about why people are so tempted to believe the fallacy of reincarnation.

First of all, I'm not going to write a big long essay proving that reincarnation does not exist. If you are reading this blog, you know the authority with which I speak.

But it is important to have some compassion and understanding about why some people continue to believe in it. I have also observed that even those who have come to understand that there is no reincarnation still have residual thought habits that came from their previous belief in reincarnation that they still need to break and release.

The most important point that I want to make in this particular blog posting is that "believing in reincarnation" does NOT mean the same thing as it does in the old religions who believe in it, such as Buddhism, and the new cults and variations that are "New Age" or "$cientology," or even those who think they are practicing the old religions but are contaminated by modern contexts.

The traditional old faiths that believe in reincarnation did not try to manipulate their families, friends, loved ones or community members based on reincarnation belief. In other words, they believed in reincarnation but it had NO effect on their day to day lives except to live in a way that would be worthy and merit the best next step in the reincarnation cycle. So no one even thought about "who they used to be" or "who Aunt Nettie was in a previous life." It would not even cross their minds to think like that. It would be viewed as an impossibility to ascertain anyway. For thousands of years people who belonged to the mainstream reincarnation faiths never applied that belief in their day to day life. That would not even occur to them. What they did do was to revere life (in theory) and try to follow a kind of "golden rule" philosophy. People kept their actions in check and their morality high because they felt they would be reincarnated in a more desirable life form because they merited a better material and spiritual status for their good behavior. But they never speculated that they could either recall a theoretical past life, nor did they think they could assign a past life identity to their family and friends. The only time an effort would be made is in the priestly class if, like Tibetan Buddhists, they have a lineage of a religious class or role that they think is immediately reincarnated on the death of the previous incumbent of that role.

Traditional mainsteam reincarnation believers were humble and would never think to manipulate their relationships based on theory about past lives. They made no assumptions, for example, that people "stayed together" from one life to the next. Remember, there is a wide range of merit even in families. It would never even dawn on them that they could resurrect quarrels or relationships from supposed "past lives" with each other. They would think that it was a disgusting suggestion if you said, for example, that one of a married couple had a different gender or relationship with the other spouse in a previous life. They "let go and let the universe" decide reincarnation, and their day to day lives had no literal influence from belief in reincarnation except as a moral compass.

This is why people would be astonished on the rare event when a child was born who seemed to be a direct reincarnation of a villager or a famous (or notorious) person. If you read the academic literature about such cases, people are genuinely astonished if a literal example of "reincarnation" seems to appear "close to home." If they were all thinking that they stick together in posses, families or adversaries from life to life (implying that the merit of each person did not break up the family or acquaintance units), their faith would have weakened (since obviously folks were sticking together no matter how they behaved morally on an individual basis) AND they would not have been surprised, and hence run to journalists or so forth, when literal cases do actually seem to take place.

So, modern cult believers in reincarnation are in total error to point to the traditional reincarnation heritage of faith and claim validation or kinship. They have none at all. It is a modern "power grab" to believe that people are reincarnated due to past groupings of love, hate, relationships, wars, communities, etc. The traditional faiths are very clear that it is an individual journey, not of a social cohort, because people are reincarnated, they believe, based on each individual person's deeds and morality, thus meriting an individual "next life" that is a progression from their previous life.

Here's an analogy. Suppose you have a classroom where on a test some get A's, some get B's, some get C's, some get D's and some get F's. In this example, suppose "BANG!" based on their grades they die and are going to be reincarnated based on those scores. Suppose a girl got a B and her boyfriend got an A. The girl would go to a life that is a natural progression for someone who scored a B in the previous life. The boy would go to a life that is a natural progression for someone who scored an A in the previous life. Relationships would be broken because they have no meaning in the next life. Each "next life" would be a place and time that is merited by how the individual "scored" materially and spiritually in their previous life. In fact, it would be very unlikely that a person who progressed, in theory, by getting an "A" would be in even the same country that they were before, and certainly an A-F relationship would not be "recycled" in the same community and same circumstances as where they succeeded, or failed, before. So it never would occur to the traditional reincarnation believers that family members or even community members had anything to do with one another in a previous life. Each person would assume they each "got there" due to their own chain of past lives and circumstances.

So you can see that there is an irreconcilable difference between the true traditional faiths that believe in reincarnation based on individual development and merit and the totally ego maniacal and whacked out beliefs of so called modern believers in "past lives," who steal the phrase "reincarnation" but not the genuine heart and spirit that the traditional faith holders possess. It's actually a parasitic insult for cultists to call themselves believers in "reincarnation." Modern cultists have this entertainment and drama self brainwashing where they think the universe is operated by the powerful over the weak, by "lessons" having to be "learned" (even though no one remembers them), and by, frankly, theater and gamesmanship. "Secret knowledge" and "knowing who someone really is" is a cheap con based on at best easily manipulated and naive thinking and at worst a psychosis based on the craving to have power over others. That's why cults make up the most unbelievable crap, with space opera wars, drama, Satan, the saints, and much stupid scenarios that a well educated science eight year old could refute. (For example, aliens fighting around volcanoes that did not even exist in the geological time that they claim the fight took place).

Now, for some people we must be kind about why they believe in reincarnation, even of the modern form. Here is why. People have forgotten how to be academic detectives when they encounter something unexplainable. Not too many Sherlock Holmes around, where they deduct theories based on facts and observations. People who are genuinely analytical are able to take a puzzle, such as someone who has knowledge of someone who "lived before," and come up with a number of plausible theories, not just glom onto reincarnation. There are honest people who have extrasensory seeming experiences that they instantly assume are "signs" of "reincarnation." But because these people tend to be, well, sensitive and artistic would be polite terms, they tend not to be academic and open minded to a number of plausible explanations. They'll believe the first scam artist (or equally, um, weak in the facts type person) who comes along and says, "Oh! You are remembering a 'past life!'" They never even think that there are other explanations for what they experienced.

Not to go into a long explanation of where perception that one has had a "past life experience" comes from, but let me demonstrate that there are many explanations for them. First, let me eliminate those sensations that come from emotional stress or trauma, mental illness, use of mind altering substances, or brain damage, either from accident or illness. Many brain studies show that small damage to certain parts of the brain can induce incredibly realistic fantastical "landscapes" and "situations" that are totally imaginary but feel real. So there is a multitude of physical, emotional, mental and spiritual causes of experiences that may feel like they are pieces of recall of a "past life," but are actually a neurological phenomena.

So instead, let us focus on "legitimate" instances where a person does actually collect information that he or she have no immediately explanation for. People can draw a direct correlation between a special human shared "reservoir" or "network" of knowledge that exists outside a body with what we call "instinct" in animals. While much animal behavior is learned and passed on from mother to child (for example, how to hunt), many animal behaviors are "known" at birth. For example, fish that are born and immediately swim, know what to eat, know to hide from predators, etc, without any contact or instruction from a parental fish. That knowledge is encoded in their genes and is, in a sense, an ancestral knowledge that they can draw upon. With animals it is a knowledge that resides physically in their body. Humans likewise have a deep ancestral knowledge encoded in their genes, but they also have a mental network where information is shared and retained.

It's scientific and demonstrable: there is no reason to be all occult and spooky about it. For example, do we not all have examples of where we "knew" someone was staring at you? Where we "felt" when something had happened to a loved one who is far away? Everyone knows from just sheer common sense that humans share a mental "information network." The problem is that people who ought to know better jump from this biological reality to assuming that somehow the occult must be involved. If I read one more time some idiot who makes money saying that people in heaven are "directing" thoughts and activities on earth, I'm either going to puke or think about how they should shove a sock in their money grubbing and egomaniacal pie hole. When you have one of the experiences I just mentioned, such as "knowing" that a loved one is in trouble or ill, etc., all of that information is being shared among human beings in their real lives and bodies right here on earth, just as flocks of thousands of starlings can fly together without colliding and turn on a dime without getting the instruction book from "The Great Mother Starling Who Accesses The Spiritual Archives In The Happy Hunting Ground."

Not only do people share thoughts, knowledge and experience, to varying degrees among each other, but they leave a residue of their impact in that collective network even after they die. This does NOT mean that the dead are contributing! No one on earth is accessing information from those who have died. It simply does not happen. There are some people who cannot process in their minds the information they gain from the human collective network without putting a mask on it that it is coming from their dead Aunt Nettie. But the truth is that it is not coming from dead Aunt Nettie or anyone else. It is coming from the collective network of the living that is shaped and still holds the contribution of the dead, but is not refreshed by knowledge from either heaven or hell. There is no capacity to interact between the living and the dead. Jesus even addresses this question when he explains that the rich man Lazarus who ends up in hell for his neglect of the poor cannot contact his brothers to warn them of their fate.

The psychic Edgar Cayce is an example who needs to be better understood. Cayce received medical advice from what he called "The Source." What he was in truth doing was tapping into the collective knowledge of real humans who lived and practiced medicine. His brain mashed the various sources of knowledge into a perception that it was from a singular spiritual entity that he called and genuinely perceived as "The Source." But nothing of his knowledge came from the heavenly abode. All of his knowledge came from the shared human knowledge network that contains information and experiences from both those who lived contemporary to him, but also from men and women who had died. It is a rare and genuine talent. But I repeat, it is RARE. And it is an attribute and talent, but not a mark of particular spirituality. One of the great temptations, which he fell into like Icarus, is to now imagine that he and his clan were reincarnated Jesuses and so forth. Humans cannot avoid repeating the sin of pride, vanity, and hubris. This is why he had such a contentious life even though he was "doing good." He canceled out his "good" by creating the "reincarnated Jesus and family" club in his mind. He is like the genius surgeon who then decides that he is so brilliant that he should have some "God given" exclusive. Instead of just being humble and grateful for his surgical talent he figures that he must be so awesome because he treated John the Baptist's diaper rash in a previous life.

So people are able to glean from the shared network among humans information and experience that seems to be real slices of life from a "past life." But it is their accessing that slice via what can be thought of as a shared film library of life; it is not because they lived that life and it is not their "exclusive" experience. I don't even need to wise crack about how many people have thought they "were Cleopatra in their past life." What that comes from is that everyone can feel and access experience around a human experience, such as aristocracy. The human brain plucks a theme of experience that all humans have in their reservoir (slave, ruler, parent, child, rich, poor, pampered, poor) and then match that sensation or insight with a template, such as "Ancient Egypt" or "Biblical Times" that they know about from day to day exposure. So, looking at Cayce again, he immediately assumes he must be from the top family that ever lived, the family of Jesus. But the reality is that he probably gleaned much of his knowledge from wise but unknown doctors and herbalists who left their mental imprint and experience in the human network.

So you have some idiots, like, for example, a man who runs around saying, "Oh! I feel like I know what it is like to be a woman! I must have had one or more past lives as a woman!" Um, no, but you have a current life as a moron. Half of the people contributing to the information network that we all share are, um, women and the other half are, um, men. I'd be astonished if a sensitive person with psychic (as in extra sensory) capabilities was only selecting information and experiences from the male contingent LOL. I mean, come on, have a little common sense. This is an example of how crazy and irresponsible cults have become, against the general foolish background of New Age fuzzy thinking. Instead of realizing that shared information is contributed equally by all people living, the person assumes his experience is unique to him having a "past life."

So to summarize this section of teaching, the sharing of information and experience of people who are both alive contemporaries and those who have died and left residue is a COMMON experience to ALL people. What is rare is instances where a person is genuinely able to target knowledge or experience out of the human network of a specific person or event. That is not unheard of, obviously, but it is much rarer than people think. Often so called "psychics" tap into a common human experience, such as being a particular class of person, and then slap their own self aggrandizing (or martyr syndrome) identity to that experience. It's like if you tap into the common human experience of drowning, and then immediately assume that out of the millions of people who have drowned in human history that you must have been royalty on the sinking of the White Ship, instead of being a poor nameless peasant who drowned in China. Both assumptions are wrong, of course, since you are accessing the experience of drowning, but not the reality of having lived that life experience, or indeed that life, yourself.

One more way to give you the scientific perspective. We know that an incredible range of capabilities and emotions/thought patterns are encapsulated in each person's genes. Much of that "feeling of familiarity" or "knowledge I could not otherwise 'know'" comes from talents and information given through the genes. Suppose that your ancestral biological history includes genes from island dwellers who are powerful swimmers. You might have an odd thought or experience that is like an ancestral memory of swimming/drowning/being under water. Some jump and say, "Ah ha! Reincarnation!" But what it is much more likely is that you have genes from generations of ancestors who had natural selection for swimming capability, and so you have a "knack" for water that you may not even realize you have. Or that "knack" for swimming could be manifested as a fear of water since you live a real life that is estranged from the genetic heritage of your ancestors. So you have a "relationship" with water that is transmitted in your genes. The much quoted examples of this is how humans have an "inborn" fear of certain ancestral threats such as snakes, spider, or the dark. It's not because someone was reincarnated as any of the above or got chased by one in a past life LOL. Our bodily ancestors were real people who lived and died and many of their talents, traits and experiences are encoded as genetic tendencies.

I hope this helps. People need to get sane, logical and more discerning in a hurry.

Pondering: message to the youth (4)

How is it that the World War II generation became the last real generation? And why is it that I am explaining to you that none of the generations since then have been real generations, but instead fractured parallel partial artificial "generations?" Here is why.

In the 1960's people deviated from generational aspirations in order to "specialize." People felt individual callings that were based on what they felt were high priority issues or behaviors that they wished to pursue. Instead of maintaining a baseline, a foundation of aspirations and priorities, and from there taking on one or more of the new issues, they "branched out" to specialize in that issue (or "Lifestyle Choice"). In other words, suppose each generation is a single giant tree. Instead of taking close looks at branches that need attention, while still understanding that the branch is part of the tree, and relies on the tree for its long term survival, people started to believe that they are on a branch and that branch is independent from the tree. Let's look again at the World War II generation. They had a huge branch, the war, that they had to focus on and attend to. But they never lost their identity as a generation with that entire tree. I don't mean patriotism, I mean their aspirations for peace, home and prosperity. So they could focus on the fighting of the war, but they all still felt the over arching identity of what they hoped to achieve in life. Like I said in my previous post just before this one, even if the aspirations were blocked due to poverty or discrimination, people all still shared the hope and aspirations to achieve those good things. The fighting of World War II did not totally distract that generation from their overall life view.

But as people addressed both the vital and serious (discrimination and civil rights, subsequent conflicts, the global economy, socialism and communism, education, crime, the environment) and the temptations (addictions, free sex, abortions, "anything goes" and alternative lifestyles, consumerism, artistic impulses, the entertainment industry, self empowerment, the occult) they broke apart from their generation and regrouped around specific issues. I'll use some short hand here, and I mean no offense, I'm just trying to explain the dynamics. Instead of "baby boomer generation" you had generation socialist/communist, generation struggle for civil rights, generation make a lot of money, generation hedonism, generation "free spirit," generation entrepreneur, generation against the war, generation earth day, etc etc etc. Individuals broke out of the trunk of the tree of their generation and gathered together in clusters of people who focused only one one or two issues or lifestyle choices.

For example, many who fought for Civil Rights set their target to be, "whatever white people have, we should have too." That's fine if you are talking about wanting to be in a color blind and totally equal society that is not discriminating on racial lines. But the social cohesion of what white society had was dissolving, and while collecting the correct rights such as voting, equal pay, abhorrence of race baiting and violence, education, promotions, housing, equal access of services. those who focused on the Civil Rights struggle inadvertently "followed" branches of the white generational splintering into terrible loses of prior strengths. The black family, which had held together even during the horrors of slavery itself, followed the cadre of the white anti-family generation. The blacks who were once victims of police violence and bullwhips followed the white cadre that formed the "generation drugs and guns." So "baby boomers" of the Civil Rights struggle inadvertently followed the trail of "rights" that led down individual branches of generations that were forged by splinter white groups. Blacks won the right to vote, but they inadvertently demanded, and got, the right to destroy families, have abortions, beat on each other, just like the whites do.

Generation environmental went off into la-la land where animals are "better," "more spiritual," and "more soulful" than human babies. While fighting the good fight for the environment, and I tried to be a leader (but was shut out) in that, I noticed from my position on the tree trunk that many environmentalists had climbed out on a branch and declared that free food and birth control/abortions were the ecological way to end poverty! Many environmentalists lost their love for their neighbor and for the human race. They left the generational tree trunk.

The War in Vietnam and governmental corruption sucked the life of a generation right out of them, for those who could not separate dealing with those issues from still maintaining a balanced world and life view. Instead of being wiser discerners about who to trust, they decided not to trust anyone "in power," and many of them went on to be the untrustworthy power brokers themselves.

I don't need to say anything about generation shake your money maker.

So you see, since World War II there was no generation. People specialized themselves right out of their own generation. They lost common agreement on what it even means to be alive.

No tragedy is a good excuse for abandoning generational human aspirations. Even HIV/AIDS, with all that trauma and loss, was not a good excuse for abandoning a collective humanitarian view based on the goodness of family and community. During World War I there was the terrible Influenza Epidemic that killed something like 17-18 million people (have to check the numbers). Villages were wiped out in the USA and millions dropped and died. Yet people did not stop being members of their generation, of their goodness and cohesiveness in time of need, even as they experienced an inexplicable tsunami of disease. (And remember, antibiotics had not been invented; there was literally nothing that could be medically done for those who came down with this strain of Influenza). Yet after that plague, did any of them run around and say that the Influenza was invented by the Kaiser of Germany, or by Woodrow Wilson, in order to "insert whatever conspiracy theory they might want to believe here." Of course not. Doctors and nurses, police, government workers died in their tracks by the thousands trying to help people with a disease that had no cure or even palliative remedy at all, but the disease did not divide the human family. Who can say this about this "generation?" Don't even get me started about one sub-generation demanding a pill to cure everything, while their neighboring splinter sub-generation wants to sue over every pill and vaccine? No one is pulling together for a quality and reasonable approach to health care, and I don't mean the insurance, I mean the humanitarian aspirations that motivated and inspired all the generations before these sub-generations

So, dear youth, you've really been ripped off. All of you have grown up in a country and time where your parents handed you branches and told you those were the true trees. And for those of you who did grow up in well centered and aspirational generational identities, the consumer and secular society views you as just dummies, but dummies with charge cards and Paypal. You have to constantly resist in order to maintain an aspirational generation cohesiveness at all. A true generation works for individual good within the framework of the greater good - ALL of it, not within fake "specialities" such as "climate change" and "pro choice." You don't recommend cutting off branches under others and even yourselves as the way to "make a better world." A wise generation "follows the money" in order to discern its value and its applications, not to be led by the nose.

I see some positive signals and I pray for more. I hope that this youthful age group cadre can regain a generational identity that is aspirational toward the culture of life. Perhaps this age group cadre can pull together back into a cohesive unit that does not have to agree with each other about specifics, but is constantly working on restoring a positive love of children and of the goodness of life, instead of either "living large and fat on the hog" OR "let's force people into a tiny 'carbon footprint.'"

Ponder: youth outreach (3)

Hi again, circa 40 year olds and younger, "youth outreach." Age is an odd thing or, at least, our perceptions of age. I tend to think less of age in term of years, and more in term of generations. So in one respect I'm like the marketeers, but I'm different from them in every other respect. Marketeers differentiate by age and generation to market both their products, but also to manipulate taste and consumer demand. That's social engineering and that's a really bad thing when it is context free social engineering. In other words, people do not care about the overall well being of the individual or age cohort, but only the ability to make a sale. I'm not naive or totally idealistic. The trick is that marketeers have taken over what I call "each generation's priorities."

Generations tend to have a set of priorities that large numbers of individuals have in common. They are both good things and hopes that they have, and also issues and situations that they must face. Examples of priorities that previous generations have had include owning one's own home, and fighting a war as a nation. The World War II generation (the ones who were adult and fought the war) are the classic example. The entire generation, whether in active service or not, was totally committed to fighting the war and getting it done. This same generation then became committed to bringing the soldiers home and ensuring that every young family could find and afford a first home.

So the priorities of a generation "glue and bind them together" to have a mostly common world view. The priorities bind rather than the individual ages. For example, many who served in World War II were the usual ages of late teens and twenties... but very many of them were also in their thirties and forties! Think about it. They were a social cohort, a single generation, even though individual members of that "generation" ranged in age from 17 to almost 50. My dad, for example, was forty years old when he enlisted during World War II. The younger members of his company called him "Pop," because of his gray hair and age. But still, they were social contemporaries. They had different ages with spans of twenty years between them or even more, yet they returned to America after the war as a single generation. Teens and grown men returned to go to college, return to their original home places, or to buy their first home for a new family. Millions of men and women at this wide span of individual ages were forged into what Tom Brokaw calls "the greatest generation." Young men in their late teens had the same set of values as older men in their twenties, thirties and forties. It was a remarkable time in history, one that I don't think people understand in the way that I've explained it here.

The bonds that this widely aged generation felt also overcame educational, class or regional differences. World War II, both in combat and at home, truly united the country in its priorities across age and background. I'm not talking here about some idealistic perfect country, where racism and so forth didn't exist. I'm talking about aspirations. Everyone had the same aspirations. They wanted to win the war, have peace, raise their families, and have their first home. The black American may have suffered dire discrimination and hardship, but their aspirations and hopes, their priorities and values were the same as even the most privileged white. Their aspirations were the same and that bound them together, but it was the unequal or blocked access to achieving those aspirations that brought about the much needed changes. But my point is that from all parts of the country, that generation was united as no other generation was, or has been since, because they shared the same aspirations.

I hope this helps you to actually look at some verbiage and assumptions with different eyes. For example, everyone talks about "baby boomer generation." But that was not a generation. That was a fractured collection of three generations. So even though the term "generation" referred to a tighter age grouping, the aspirations were not shared by any means across that generation. And it was not even a two way split. I would argue that the so called "baby boomer generation" is actually an artificial term based on the grouping of age cohorts, and that there really was not the widely vaunted generational traits and self identity at all. If I were writing an essay or a thesis I could easily demonstrate that the baby boomer "generation" was, instead, three or more parallel generations that occupied the same space at the same time, yet did not share priorities or issues at all.

So you, dear young people, are the children of parents who themselves "thought" they were part of a single generation, but were instead foot soldiers in one of many parallel and often competing "generations." The whole thing about "values" of the "baby boomer generation," "Generation X, Y, Z?" and the "Millennium babies" is really a myth, and a political and marketing artificial social construct.

Furthermore, and of even greater concern, the term "generation" has become less about priorities, hopes and aspirations, and more about the troubles and tribulations of that age cadre, plus their marketing potential as consumers. You really are not part of a "generation," and have not been since World War II. A true generation has a shared set of aspirations and priorities. But the rise of consumerism, and the hostility between "generations" from the social revolution of the 1960's, plus the influence of socialism, has fractured the definitional term of generation. Now a generation really is a simple date of birth grouping. It is not the shared aspirations that previous generations had, even before the incredibly unified World War II generation. You, dear friends, are defined as a generation according to your age, what you are willing to buy and be sold, and the woes that you face.

Being aware of it and not just accepting labels is an important first step. Too many people have accepted speaking and thinking in "marketing short hand." It's like acronyms or text abbreviations. You have been raised referring to yourself and thinking of yourself as a generational grouping, when all that you really are is an age pool of people with charge cards and a pack of problems. I don't think of you that way, but I'm sitting here in my (virtual) rocking chair explaining to you another way that I think you have been cheated. You don't know the incredible comfort and strength that comes from being part of a generation that has un-manipulated aspirations.