Did You Deja Vu?

Metamorphosis is more than a big word. It's an actuality. Quite the series of events! It seems there was hardly an age when I was not mesmerized by its contentions. We are ourselves, perhaps, metamorphic. We are changelings. We grow from pupae to caterpillar to butterfly. And seeing the pupae again, do we remember our state of seeming stasis? How far back can we recall?

Ontology, defined, means meaning-making. Big words do that. They can be off-putting. So too for big events. They can be so laden with the yeast of time-past or time-future that we hardly can conceive of the product; we are too immersed in the particular. Yet, paradoxically, even en route we might be thinking of where we were, what we still want, or be recreating the feeling we felt when.... Apparently, whether sensate or sentient, we reincarnate*. At issue is whether we do so in dribs and drabs of soul-force, or as an integral entity. We'd much prefer to stay whole.

Grief will do that. Some of us leak with grief all our lives. Phrases arrest our attention 'like petals on a wet black bough'. (Ezra Pound can bludgeon us 'with a grievous crab-tree cudgel'.) Places and moments, memories and persons, rocks and shells, fragrances and tastes, these are the detritus of our past, and they cling to us, or us to them, sufficient to evoke tears or smiles. We are attached to the past. We are attached to the present. And we project ourselves into the future. All around us is impacted by our existence, and we too are impacted in turn. Naturally.

Reincarnation has as its first premise the possibility that it's all about ‘Me’. We love to project our lives past the still point of no longer really-truly knowing. We love to presume that I, me, and mine retain an identity even when the flesh and bones are incinerated to ash. (Some of us prefer to stay down there, among the worms, rather than risk the forcing of one's soul away from the corporeal by the fires of the furnace.) And hell or heaven await, depending on the directions we've taken on the pathways of our respective journeys. Some do not believe we even have a soul! Concepts! Meaning-making is given over to belief, and Belief in turn becomes so strong that we kill for it, incarcerate, or at least judge others so severely as to apportion ourselves from them in every conceivable club, clan, and custom. (One for one, despite overpopulation, hm?)

Love is a concept; it certainly is debated. Hate appears more easily universal. Fear is easily inculcated. Knowledge is provable or refuted. Facts are facts. Intuition is loaded. Inference is rampant. Speculation is rife. Angels and Demons hover around us. Not all witches are white.

Our grief brings us to the ineluctable disbelief that there is a never-no-more. We feel the presence of angels, see the ghosts, and are conscious of ephemeral presences. We sense our soul age. We harbour the déjà vu of our voyages but briefly; we are oft too intent on the present journey such that the sense of having been-here-done-that-before is temporary, indistinct. Yet it is there! There is a definite sense of before-ness to so very many events, feelings, sensations, that we more and more-easily are determined that we, as an individual, existed before now.

Refutation of reincarnation cannot be based on fact. There is too much in all of history that would support the angels among us. (Too many others evoke karma and consequence and voodoo and devils too.) There is too much in our own experience that would make it seem as though Existentialism, alone, by itself, apportioned from all else, is insuperably the Substantive Proposition. We people continue to meld and mix and make much of our yesterdays and tomorrows. So be it. Spiritualism can be a badge decorating our egos. It is the I, me, and my that gives rise herein to my rumination: At what risk is one of being mostly self-serving if all others around me and all other coincidences are because, as a tadpole, I stayed in the same pool as the rest of my ilk, and clung to their belief on the way to our each becoming a frog? Hm?

http://www.oprah.com/inspiration/Dr-Brian-Weiss-Past-Life-Regression-Therapy-Common-Signs