On reincarnation

 I'm so excited that I get to share one of my favorite things here today! I probably have before but maybe not.

Now this has been something that I have been really inspired by. It has helped me gain a of perspective on life which has influenced the way I think. For instance, to see the mainland, from Western Europe and Northern Africa to East Asia grow and flourish where the fringe areas hardly grow, you see the way human beings share and spread knowledge and probably commerce. Also, and this is what I am using this video to illustrate, it shows how human beings populated the earth.

I am not a believer in reincarnation. I don't believe in it for a couple of reasons, and probably foremost because I have a great love of myself and do not wish to share myself with someone else. This is oddly, if not totally beastly, lost in an instant when thinking about passionate love. Oh! Who I have carried with me! But in reality, reincarnation seems to me a little less than a nice idea. If you watch the video, and this is my biggest problem with reincarnation, the only real ways of believing in reincarnation are these-

    1. The souls of men have become thin like a cheap smear on a bagel.

    2. We are all doomed to the last judgement because every soul who has ever lived is back on stage  RIGHT NOW!

It just isn't sound. You understand.

On to the next topic,

I was reading my bible this morning. I haven't been feeling well and have been dealing with an exorbitant amount of stress lately, so I have been reading the bible a lot. I find comfort and meaning in life when I read the bible. Psalms. In the second psalm we read God calls David his son. The allusion doesn't stop there. He gives him power and authority. I have read things before about allusions to Jesus in reference to David. Then enters the idea of reincarnation. 

I used the book of Revelations as a key to understanding this mystery. I often look at the whole picture, and I am glad of that, because if I did not, I would never come to conclusions. Doesn't the word conclusion allude  to a very solid and complete view of something? You know, I am a fan of Chekov, and I think that may be because of his placing importance on the use of the right words. Mark Twain said this, too. This is what I am talking about. Truth, thoroughness, all of these things make greatness. Don't you think? 

To get back on target, it is completely ludicrous to say that Jesus was David reincarnated. I have a knack of forming good likenesses of people in my mind, I do not see the man Jesus in David. I even applied it to myself, as I have had this weird David thing in my life. Now bear with me, I do not want to appear to be delusional. For one reason or another, the man David has influenced my life. (When I was 30 I found myself believing in David as a means of escape. It began in a mall in East Tennessee, when I saw Hebrews, 10:10 on a t-shirt, I went home to read my bible. A story I relayed many times, in the bible under Hebrews 10:10 was a clipping of my daughter's hair. Also, in the bible upon going home to read it, the verse there was different. I do not remember why. Only that the verse was important as it had said by this "will" and I had just recently found a lost relative by that name. And as it was Hebrews 10:10, and the year was 2010. You see where this is going...)

This is personal, but seeing as human beings do these kinds of things and as these things help in the long run to understand the faux pas of religious mysticism, I will keep it. I decided to make these numbers important to me. I do not know how long it took for me to find, but I eventually found that David was made a king in 1010 BC. Interestingly, my family's nickname for me was BC. I sort of took this all to heart. So, having taken it to heart, I have come to this conclusion. That if I am like David, it is like the grocery store man said, I will link this HERE, that I have a spirit in me that is familial, like the sharing of blood by family, to the Hebrew people. This is not reincarnation, friends. That is mystic faux pas. In the straight way, Father Abraham did not mean to have a few children, shattered as though from one light, as in the Kabbalistic tradition, which one day become part of the light, spinning in chaos trying to create something that already was, AGAIN. I feel like a lot of mysticism is like philosophy. It seeks to join religious tradition with scientific fact. Instead, as a man and wife are joined a family, so the believer is bonded and sworn to in faith their religion.

I am still looking at the big picture, but religion is so sacred. We cannot forget that one thing is understanding, the other is worship, reverence, and all the fruit that it bears. In understanding things, we might make better use of our faculties to fulfill that which is expected of us. This is something which is greatest importance, as was evidenced in the finality of my argument for life and consciousness. (use it or lose it)

 I read a very little about philosophy this week and I found Plotinus. He was an outstanding intellect. I was assured of this because other great, like-minded people also agree as well.

 To be fair to the part of our race of men who wish to believe that the only reason for the perpetuating belief in an existence of a "God" is for the never ending formation of a perfect view of his place in the makeup of time, space and existence, let us just say that the accuracy of their discoveries have never reduced them to something of the ignorant minority. To the contrary, it is almost always the determination of a one against another which propels most learning. Some are happy just to worship.

I believe that the spirit of God is a real thing, and that the spirit that we receive from those we see in books and what not, also has a way of living on, in our minds, as we have seen, and this is of the greatest importance because it is a piece of the puzzle, although not the answer to the puzzle. We know and love those who are heroic, beautiful, they are enduring. In words we know people intimately. They do not live on, but inspire in us something which can become greater the more we progress through this thing called life. Imagine a time before the bible. What a time it was! Imagine those people as they gathered their history and tradition together. 

When I was coming here today, I was explaining to myself my method for weeding out things in my head, because even having had the thought of reincarnation in reference to Jesus Christ seemed enormously blasphemous. In order to sort of quell the feeling of disrespect within myself, I looked into reincarnation. I found its roots in religion and mysticism, which helped to reconfigure my own view of the way things are. Why not? Some do. It became clear that it was a matter of editing. The way I think that is. I have a sort of stream of consciousness in my thinking, of course we all do, and then I make a claim. My claim can be the most outlandish of things, and this works well in writing sometimes, I wrote something terrible once in my writers block and it quickly fixed itself. 

Then after the claim I look at how closely I came to hitting my target. Sometimes I am far off, and then at other times I am very close, and I get closer the more I do this. My education level has probably upped my IQ. I am absolutely positive in the correlation between the two. 

Proof? I thought you would ask. In IQ tests folks have a tendency to perform worse if they are under stress, this is a contributing factor to why kids who are impoverished perform worse than others with parents who take them to the park in Land Rovers after school. One kid is swinging and another might be being forced to do homework at a separate table from their peers for an hour without any real help from these supervisors. But, if you are already able to have mastered content because you have a better understanding of it, or if you have become familiar with concepts and reasoning, you perform no matter the stress. Because you are used to performing that task.

Sitcom Pilot: Woman and other woman are working in a fast food restaurant, the one is new, the other breezes in, obviously in a bad mood. The one is struggling with the ice cream machine. The one in the bad mood comes over and hits the machine in just the right spot and then barely turns the handle just so. The girl and the audience is left with a kind of awe. Later in the show, she is still struggling, even though she knows "The trick" but as the day goes on, more of the familiar characters come and show the girl the trick, handle it with ease, and leave the girl feeling like a failure. At some point, a kind soul says, you'll get the hang of it. By the end of the episode she is able to master the malfunctioning machine. 

We might have viewed the one as the only smart one. We might have come to a conclusion about the other one if she had not been guided by more and more who knew what was going on. This is the way I look at the intelligent mind. I have gone out of my way to look at what makes one person a success and another a layman. What have I found? The people who thrive come from families who have the same interests or interests in important things. Do you know how many who are great at art and science and music were from families of musicians? Does it come as a surprise to you? Do you look at the music? It is inspiring, yes, and it teaches, yes, but what do we know about playing the piano? I have a good ear for music but until I sit at the keyboard and run my fingers over the many keys over and over and learn all the techniques and chords, I better had be of an almost divinely gifted person to master the instrument all by myself. You learn by doing, and practice! This is what we gain by having music people in our lives!

My mother is a writer, she showed me her editing techniques. How fortunate for me! 

Also, with great respect comes greater learning. Those who have respect for things of the highest order will heed their advices and warnings. The world sets itself a certain boundary line in the things it values, and, to come back to where we started, so does God. So, without taking this very much further, let us remember that God promised Abraham that his children would outnumber the sands of the sea. God does not lie. We are each of us unique, with a shrewd eye for the details, but God in his word has defined his limits. This is of the greatest importance.

*As an aside, I wanted to give a little credit to the educated mind, and it is not just as Aristotle said, being able to hold an idea, it is also the ability to recapture the contents of your mind, as a fisherman with a net, and make it profit you. I will not at all leave off the great poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning in my inspiration for being an educated woman, her Aurora Leigh affected me by its use and knowledge of Greek or Roman mythology. I had always meant to study that, maybe someday. At least it made me study stuff.