If you can find some words sometime, I would be interested.
I was raised traditional Methodist, with one earthly life and one afterlife the extent of my learned dogma.
Universities and a post-grad degree expanded my horizons somewhat and exposed me to other religious teachings.
During this time, I made a self-study of religion that was as intense as my later Civil War studies. My inference was that more cultures than not believe in some sort of earth/afterlife cycles, or reincarnation if you will.
Some case studies, such as child prodigies and deja vu, seemed to support the idea of a dimly-remembered previous existence.
Around this time in my studies, though, the New Age movement began and suddenly everyone was recalling past lives. Before long, it got fairly ridiculous because folks seemed to only have been someone famous, like Cleopatra or Julius Caesar. No one ever was Joe who shoveled up the camel dung. As a result, I tended to reject the concept so as not to be tarred with such a silly brush.
But time and age have brought a wee amount of wisdom hopefully and I have considered the subject with more receptive eyes.
I know how to do certain things that I was never taught and never picked up from anywhere. I have a vivid dream, in color, and always the same, of being in combat as shells shriek in and set fire to the tall weeds around me.
I constantly evaluate ground as I travel and as a result, my directions are worthless to most folks since they never seem to notice that rolling plain with the narrow defile leading up to the hogback ridge.
If I had to prove reincarnation in court, I couldn't begin to exhibit enough solid, subjective evidence that I was ever General Pickett, or whomever.
But if you ask me if there are mysteries in the universe that we cannot possibly explain, but which seem to indicate existences beyond our ken, I would have to say there is definitely something to that.
I'll tell more later about what my psychic buddy tells me about this sort of thing. |
