Two views on reincarnation

Saturday April 8, 2006

10 a.m. I see the value of re-reading old sessions slowly. Am at 9-11-01 and I have been meaning to ask – which is it, personal reincarnation as you seemed to indicate then and in early sessions, or resonances and not necessarily physical continuity as seems to be your statements more recently?

Resist the pull of premature clarity. Neither view is quite true, both may be seen as true. With time, you see that nuance is all.

Hard to see how it can be just a matter of choice, so to speak. Surely it is more one than the other?

Well, let’s look at it. Perhaps the easiest approach is via definitions.

Your question assumes definitions that are contradicted implicitly in the same definition.

For instance, individuals.

We have said that what look to you like individuals may look to us like rings holding threads – knots, as Buckminster Fuller said. Thus, a container of threads is not the same thing as an unchanging “something” that had taken the threads and made them into a welded object. That is, your bodies look solid to you, even though you know intellectually that they are in continuous flux. Similarly, your psyches.

Well, you may treat those bodies and psyches as individuals, as units, and you will not be wrong. You may treat them as collections of components, shifting over time, and you will not be wrong. Either view emphasizes certain qualities and in so doing automatically de-emphasizes other, contradictory, qualities.

Remember as you can, we advise you always to shift points of view, or overlap them so as not to stick yourself in a place of false precision. It is perfectly fine to consider that people reincarnate and go from task to task, from purpose to purpose – so long as you remember that this is one way of seeing things. Someone looking from a microbe’s scale, or a cell’s, or an organ’s, or TGU’s — J — would see flow where you see stability, would see continuity where you see distinction, would see separations that do not exist for you.

Well, I do see that I have been getting caught up in one way of seeing.

Good. Now leave it but don’t leave it behind. Embrace the many and leave the one. Rather than Emerson’s “make your option which of two” we argue don’t, or, if you do, revisit frequently. You aren’t after an award for consistency.

This helps quite a bit. Thanks.

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