Reincarnation

Reincarnation is the cycle of birth and death, death and rebirth. It is an endless cycle with no beginning. The soul passes from body to body as a flame is passed between torches. One flame dies out and yet it continues on the second torch. Both flames may go out but fire is never truly gone. It waits eternally to be called back into existence. So too does the soul leave this realm only to return when summoned. 

There is a continuity of self between lives in the same way that there is a continuity of self between moments, for the body is in a constant flux of both consuming and shedding, renewing that which it is made up of, and likewise the mind and emotions are in constant motion, so that one cannot be said to be the same person, with the same thoughts and the same emotions, at any two points in time. And yet there is something that remains through these changes that identifies itself as being the same being. One may have dreams in which they are not the same person and where nothing around them is familiar and yet the same sense of self persists. This sense of self is the experience of being. It precedes any sort of identification with a name, an appearance, a family or upbringing, any jobs or hobbies, one’s friends or possessions, tribe or nation, language or religion. It is that which passes through to the land of the dead, and there drinks the waters of forgetting in order to begin a life anew.

The paradoxes and fallacies of the eternal afterlife of Christianity or the nothingness of atheism are not present in reincarnation. There is no requirement to believe in anything for which we have no experience, such as heaven, hell, or nonexistence. Much of life’s cruelty is alleviated by reincarnation. Death becomes less fearsome, pain and suffering less permanent, and time less fleeting, while possibilities become endless, diligence is rewarded, and progression becomes inevitable. There is justice and forgiveness for all, no casting of stones, and the idolatry of one’s fellow man. Life is celebrated in reincarnation. The world is seen as a blessed place, everything in it divine, all its pieces are fragments of the reflection of God.