The Reitterative Flesh

My husband, the scientist, does not believe in reincarnation, you know, the believe that our souls inhabit other bodies before and after (or either/or) our existances in our present mortal forms. I can't say I believe in it per say, can't say I don't either, but I have always thought the idea intriging and have imagined what my own past lives might have been like even if it is all total fancy which it probably is.

I need to pause and say this: My husband, the non-believer, does vehemently defend the existance of Bigfoot or Saskwatch, Chupacabra and the Lockness Monster. But mostly Bigfoot. I do not dare interupt him when he's watching a show on the History channel or Discovery about the lastest cryptozoological findings on the man-ape.

The belief in and study of reincarnation is ages old. The Buddhists, Hindus, Jains, and other variations thereof - including Scientologists and Theosophists - all support the notion of reincarnation. So do a whole heck of a lot of New Age thinking type of folk. While the belief in reincarnation spreads wide, other world religions reject the idea. You might, if you look hard enough, interpret small portions of Islamic or Christain scripture of making mere refrences to such a concept. But for the most part, they are absent of such thought. However, extra-Talmudic Kabbalists and some orthodox Jews support the notion of reincarnation, calling it the gilgul. Some Islamic Sufi groups claim to find reference for reincarnation in the Quran.

From the movie, Kundun

I have friends that support a belief in reincarnation. They are not alone. Movies have been made (Dead Again with Kenneth Branagh, Birth with Nicole Kidman), songs written, books published, centered around the concept of reincarnation. Some people believe whole heartedly, while others flirt with the idea, fun but nothing to take seriously. Herman Hesse, 20th century German writer, said that reincarnation was "a mode of expression for stability in the midst of flux." I guess I rather side with him on this, besides being he is one of my favorite writers, it makes sense. Maybe it puts people at ease to consider reicarnation. After all, who doesn't want a second chance at life. Who doesn't want to have answers to the questions they have about themselves, their situation in life and of birth, their relationships and relations. And ultimately, we all retain questions about our own existence and experience that cannot be concretely explained. Why? Why? Why?

I read the book Many Lives, Many Masters by Brian Weiss. Weiss is a disguished psychiatrist who is now a popular writer and speaker on the subject of reicarnation. In his books, he details pyschotherapy sessions, mostly involving hypnosis, in which patients describe past lives. In Many Lives, Many Masters, he discusses the initial experience he has with a female patient that spurred his deep conviction that past lives are real. This patient named Catherine had reoccuring nightmares and anxiety attacks. Through hypnosis, after describing all her childhood experiences that she could remember to age three, she began recounting memories that occured before her birth; in other words, her other lives. The book, and its stories, are compelling.

Weiss isn't the only so-called social scientist to research and elucidate on reincarnation. Professor Ian Stephenson, author of Twenty Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation, spent decades researching subjects, documenting children's memories that corresponded with the actual details of the lives of persons already deceased.

What do I believe? Like I said I don't not believe in reincarnation, but I don't exactly believe in it. For now, I think it's fun. Given I have an active and colorful imagination, it's hard for me to give my ideas of what my past lives might have been much credence. I have imagined myself - these ideas derived mostly from dreams I've had - to have been a nomad boy in the Sinai Peninsula, a wife and mother in India with a sari and bangles, a banker in Colonial New York City, a captain in the British Navy. It's all good fun.

I did have a thought though. What if reincarnation wasn't reincarnation at all? Here's a theory: Our DNA carries memories, is imprinted with memories of our forefathers. Some of the life experience of others, others from possibly very long ago, are still caught somewhere in our genetic material. My decendents for the past few centuries were all Western and Central Europeans. But it's likely my decendents are decendents from elsewhere - the Middle East, the Asian Steppe, who knows - given transcontinental migration over the ages. Maybe some of the memories of human beings that came before me are immemorial, destined to wind themselves into my flesh by way of those tiny strands that make up my genetic substance.

Dispossession

I can't think of a clever title for this topic. Yet, I can say, my writing on this topic is prompted by the fact that I just finished the book "Eat, Pray, Love," by Elizabeth Gilbert, a wildly popular book which I imagine is read heavily by women. Women my age probably (that's 26, if you have forgotten or thought it was older). Well, Gilbert spends a year traveling to Italy, India and then Bali after a painful, bitter divorce. In Italy she takes language classes and eats a lot, in India she goes to an Ashram, and in Bali she spends time with a medicine man and has an affair with a Brazilian expatriate.

The book's somewhat interesting but Gilbert comes off, in my eyes, as a flake. In fact, she pisses me off a bit because what she and the majority of us first-world liberal types usually do - albeit I've tried to be a little more conscientious - is blah blah blah about meditation and enlightenment and yoga, our connection to god and how we need to follow the example of those wonderfully devout Hindus and Zen Buddhists and all that. Meanwhile, all the meanwhile, forgotting that this line of thinking is a privilege of our origin of wealth, that it is a product of wealth, and that in India, China, Nepal, Burma, the "enlightened" Buddha/Upanishads led crowd subscribe to cruel caste systems, and often their people are deluged by poverty and violence, a direct result of our 20th century colonization and 21st century globalization that inform this system.


I am a believer, by all means, but the dispossession and displacement of self, of individual, group and national selves, simply relinquishes ownership in what is simultaneously beautiful and flawed: our skin, our culture, our past, our values, our religious and spiritual traditions. This is not to say we can not swim in other waters, so to speak, or even adopt them. But, be true.