Reincarnation
02/26/2003 07:37 p.m.
This morning Helen and I were talking about reincarnation speculating on how it works. After you die, does your soul still keep aspects of your personality and if so when it transmigrates into another body what happens to the personality of that new individual – say an infant or newborn? Does the old one just meld with the new one – but as an infant there is no new one – yet – will that infant develop a personality of its own? Or will it somehow be an amalgam of the two?
I sometimes think I was a Cardinal in a previous life. This thought came to me in an American Indian-styled campout/workshop many years ago in which I was leaning against "my" tree meditating and heard a bird whistling at me… I KNEW it was singing to me to give me a message. It was then that I decided that I had been a Cardinal but I thought it was a Cardinal of the Catholic Church, rather than a bird. But who knows… maybe I misinterpreted it. Anyway, thinking of myself in that previous life as a big church Cardinal – I could visualize myself as pompous and powerful – without wit or art or giggles or smiles that didn't stop off in the mind on their way to my face. And maybe in my present life, I in my A.D.D. ness and impulsive Self, made up for that lack of authenticity of that old churchman, for the audacity of knowing THE truth—by knowing only A truth here and there when it chooses to settle into my soul after sifting through the chaos.
If this is the way it goes, then, as I see it I started out with a Mom who loved the Church and used it as an anchor in the dark underbrush of her own tangled psyche. The assigner of bodies-with-souls looked at her and said maybe I'll use this lost soul to create something that will throw off the shackled of dogma, take the kernel of goodness that is there, and, like a vagabond, search in his own jungle for pieces of the truth – never being quite as SURE as his former Self of what THE truth is.
So maybe that old soul, once it finds a body – or is assigned one by that cosmic triageator in the sky – eventually disappears into the new one – who will be formed by the souls who have Earthly custody of it – their Light entering him in the interstices of their own struggles.
Hmmm… maybe there is a poem somewhere in all of this.

I am currently Bemused
I am listening to Spirit Nation