Are you sure you chose the right word? Do you mean “Reincarnation” or “Metempsychosis”? Is it “Incarnation” or something else?

I’m asking you because I believe it’s all a big mess and I have no idea who and when mixed them all up in this super-tight knot. I am not suggesting that behind this mess hides any kind of God. The Divine Power, which is implied when we speak of God, is not a person with passions, so it would be better not to entangle it with our own emotional instabilities.

WE create the mess. But what are we trying to say in plain words?

If we think that our soul will take a small break after it finishes what it’s doing now and will come back in another body, then we talk about “Metempsychosis.” If you refer to the possibility of a higher power that “descends” and borrows a body, then maybe we talk about “Incarnation.” If finally this something higher is going up and down for its own reasons, we probably refer to the condition of Reincarnation.

There is one thing to be precise, after our death, our body becomes dust, and that dust isn’t possible to be reformed back to a body.

One more thing, testified by thousand of those who remember their past lives, has been some essential historical figure – something like ancestors who participate in this process. John, Nick, and so many others who believe that were once Alexander the Great must simply decide. One Alexander, dozen of current incarnations. This doesn’t match any kind of theory that attempts to explain those possibly well-intentioned memories.

Oops, just mentioned a lousy word. “Memories.” If the human is his memories, we have a problem. Do we remember all of the events of our present life? I very much doubt it. So which memories can I carry with me in any afterlife process that allows me to use them in my next life?

What about the sad side of our story? For example, children that die at a very young age with no logical explanation. What really happens? Please, don’t tell me once more that the death of one person can give a lesson in someone else’s life. That idea really bothers me. A drunk driver kills a child so that the child’s family gets a lesson while the driver will be reborn to atone? Mercy!

We should ask ourselves, do we actually need the restart, or did we invent it to avoid the importance of our lives? And maybe the most important question of them all… what is the purpose of such a procedure?

Personally, as I have already stated in the title, I have no answers. But this I can say with relative certainty, the final lesson of life cannot have a petty strategic character.

To be more precise: If life’s purpose is the deification of the human being, then, what he takes with him afterlife, cannot be minor to daily experiences such as how a car works or ways of which you can deceive others in everyday life.

The human being must, some time in his life, focus on this question. If anyone knows the answer, I would appreciate it if he shares it with me. I am still looking for it.

Many years ago, I started translating a book by Sri Aurobindo – I will give you his resume in the future – and the following excerpt is the book’s introduction.

THE PROBLEM OF REBIRTH

… The theory of rebirth is almost as ancient as thought itself, and its origin is unknown. We may according to our prepossessions accept it as the fruit of ancient psychological experience always renewable and verifiable and therefore true or dismiss it as a philosophical dogma and ingenious speculation; but in either case the doctrine, even as it is in all appearance well- nigh as old as human thought itself, is likely also to endure as long as human beings continue to think.

In former times the doctrine used to pass in Europe under the grotesque name of transmigration, which brought with it to the Western mind the humorous image of the soul of Pythagoras migrating, a haphazard bird of passage, from the human form divine into the body of a guinea-pig or an ass. The philosophical appreciation of the theory expressed itself in the admirable but rather unmanageable Greek word, metempsychosis, which means the insouling of a new body by the same psychic individual.

The Greek tongue is always happy in its marriage of thought, and word and a better expression could not be found but forced into English speech, the word becomes merely long and pedantic without any memory of its subtle Greek sense and has to be abandoned. Reincarnation is the now popular term, but the idea in the word leans to the gross or external view of the fact and begs many questions. I prefer “rebirth,” for it renders the sense of the wide, colorless, but the sufficient Sanskrit term, punarjanma, “again-birth,” and commits us to nothing but the fundamental idea which is the essence and life of the doctrine…

And this is the way.