And Now the Topic is Reincarnation…

In this post, I want to return to the ponderings about what we are/what we are not. I started to talk about this in What's Left and Absorbed Into the Whole....before I got off topic (no big surprise there, eh?) Anyway, following is the next post I had planned in that "series"....

Further proof of the very real danger of taking one teeny, tiny step onto the proverbial, oft warned about slippery slope and the subsequent spiral down,down,down into apostasy….the topic on EU  shifted to reincarnation. Just kidding about the apostasy part, of course, however, I’m pretty sure I'm not all that gung ho on this reincarnation stuff. The main drawback for me is that I don’t want to believe it. It scares me because it involves forgetting/losing the identity I’ve come to know as Cindi.

Just what is the pay off in reincarnation, anyway? Going through those unsettling déjàvu  moments over and over again for hundreds...thousands of years? No thanks. And truly, I don’t care if I’ve been here since the first century BC in some spiritual form….hanging out waiting to get a body…nor if I have reincarnated dozens (hundreds) of times through the centuries. If I don’t remember any of it, what good does it do me? To me that equation equals "dead as a doornail." I know what Paul said about the inner man being renewed while the outward man is perishing…but does it really have to happen again, and again and again. Does it take a couple of dozen lifetimes to accomplish this?

Maybe. And listening to the conversations on EU, I can see that if it is a choice God allows us to make…and we are up for the adventure, it might not be too bad. But would we ever, eventually, get to remember all of the lives we’ve lived? I would never want to forget the births (and lives) of my kids. I wouldn’t want to forget what I’ve learned in this lifetime. I wouldn’t want to forget annie or my other buddies on EU and SCT. I would not want to forget that I married Keith and that I love him. I wouldn't want to forget my sister...my grandparents (dysfunctional as they were) or this life.  But, hey...there are parts I would like to tweak, refine, completely change.  I have quite a few regrets about opportunities squandered, boats missed, and ships that never came in. 

This reminds me of something I read by Plato (ever the intellectual, I am...reading Plato and all :) which I will talk about in my next post.

I did come across something on reincarnation from a Christian perspective via google…and not while googling reincarnation either. I was looking for some background information on the Odes of Solomon for an upcoming blog post. Coincidence that I happened upon a long, detailed writing about reincarnation from a Christian perspective? Did God somehow sneak that in there?  Hmmmm…..

Anyway, the article is called May a Christian Believe in Reincarnation? It covers topics such as scriptural references, the words of Jesus, early Christian writers, belief of the apostles, the Jewish people and more. Swami Nirmalananda Giri is the author. Yeah, I know.  Not exactly your stereotypical Christian name.  It is posted on the author’s website Atma Jyoti…which is actually a site well worth checking out. It has many sacred writings from all different kinds of religious persuasions.

More on the Er thing….tomorrow…..