Sometimes I get the feeling that, not only is reincarnation in some form real, but we experience it in some way within our lifetimes.
I realize this one will make me sound a bit unhinged or out of touch with reality (more so than usual, haha), so if you’re not in the mood feel free to navigate away to some other part of the internet and I won’t blame you. I won’t be upset, because I don’t think people should take things personally that come from other people. If God is real he probably uses people as instruments, and if you have a bad interaction with someone that just means he was trying to use that person to teach you a lesson. People aren’t people with free wills, everyone is just an NPC but doesn’t think they are one. (For more on my thoughts on god/religion/free will, please see my other essays and the book that is coming soon probably. Too much to get into here).
Okay, now that I have weeded out the people not into my more unhinged and abstract essays, here goes. Back to the reincarnation stuff.
When I was younger, there was a period in my life in which I was insanely terrified of cats. So much so that it was kind of a joke to some of the adults in my family: whenever there was a stray cat in the neighborhood, my reaction would always get a big laugh. And this fear was not just limited to childhood. As embarrassing as it is to admit, I was scared of cats as late as my early teenage years. It was partly because they looked so sullen, but the other big thing for me is that I’m allergic to them and I always thought I’d have some kind of life-threatening allergic reaction if they got too close. Fast forward a few years, and as anyone who knows me is already aware: I have a cat now. He sleeps at the foot of my bed when I sleep and everything. He’s a good guy.
My point in mentioning all of this to you is that, sometimes I get the sense that I’m not even the same guy I was all those years ago when I was scared of cats. Of course an aspergery person who doesn’t believe in mysticism might tell me the simple explanation is: I am the same person, but it feels like I’m not because I’ve had many years in between in which I matured and the fear went away and blahblahblah. You can also see the same idea in how people’s tastes tend to change over the years: as a kid you might not like spicy food, and when you get older your taste buds appreciate the pepper. Or maybe you didn’t like certain works of art, but as an older person you like stuff you previously didn’t. It’s a common thing.
But I think what I’m getting at is, essentially, humans are not real, fixed people like we tend to believe we are. So much has already been said about “the ego” and things of that nature, and I won’t repeat it, but it’s similar to what I’m trying to explain here; sometimes when I look at my cat I can remember the exact feelings I had as a child, when I was scared of cats and didn’t want them to get any closer than they already were. However, the memory now feels like it wasn’t even me. In some ways it kind of feels like I dreamt it, or it was almost from a past life, if that makes sense. I almost can’t believe that memory could have happened in this same lifetime because of how comfortable I am with my cat (and all cats in general) now.
I know that “reincarnation” is a hell of a stretch, and I will sound crazy to most people. I fully accept that, and don’t care because I’m just thinking out loud here. At the same time: this reincarnation concept does not feel any less dumb or real to me than any number of other strange things human do. How is the concept of reincarnation any dumber than someone who is political about things like climate change, yet travels the world and has a super high carbon footprint? Everything is dumb if you dig deeper.
It seems like when these types of “reincarnation” examples in life happen, it’s almost like a glitch in some kind of system occurring that you’re not supposed to be seeing. What I mean by this can probably be best understood through the feeling of “deja vu,” in which one has the brief sensation they’ve experienced something already before. When this feeling happens, it’s incredibly trippy because you get the momentary sense that whatever you just experienced was real. It happened already even though it didn’t, because you just saw it sort of.
What I am trying to describe is sort of an inverse deja vu, in which you remember something from your past life that actually did happen, but it seems like such a thing could never be the case now for the current version of yourself. It’s almost as if you are being reminded of a previous iteration or version of life you were once apart of, but because it’s your past and it is so long ago that dude might as well be dead, so how is it not a form of reincarnation? Once again: under the lens of science and that shit I know I’m technically wrong. And yet at the same time….fuck you, I’m right haha.
As a final example of what I’m getting at, think about what happens when we go to sleep. No one fucking knows. To this day, scientists are still figuring out what exactly it is that happens when a human being sleeps. We know certain things, and we’re learning new shit all the time, like the fact that our cerebrospinal fluid actually washes our brains when we are in a state of deep sleep, cleaning out toxins that build during the day. That’s a fact we only found out as recently as 2019! It’s amazing to think that it’s 2022 and we still don’t fucking know everything about something we spend so much of our lives doing.
And that’s my point: who the fuck knows if we don’t actually just die every night? And when you wake up you’re just a reincarnated person in the same body. You might feel or even look like the same person, but you’ve actually been reincarnated and you have no idea. The word reincarnation might have a stronger connotation to it than what I’m suggesting, but IYKYK lol. This is partly why stuff like younger people being “theys” and “thems” and being gender fluid etc makes older generations so uncomfortable. The truth is that no one is anyone. They never were, and it’s always been like this, since Adam and Eve fucked in that forest and even before then. Nothing matters as much as you think it does, nothing is real. People shouldn’t take pride in anything because it wasn’t them that did it, they were just the vessel. Your identity is meaningless, you die every night, and the things that matter to you are only the things you’ve chosen to pay attention to in that 24 hour window, but it could really have been anything else.
I’m done with this one now, but I should give you the disclaimer once again: this is all for fun, I’m just playing around and don’t believe any of this, I’m not crazy haha😄😄😄.