As we enter the New Year I wish a good year ahead for everyone else including myself.
Looking back at the sixty odd years that have gone by in my own life, I regard some years as bad years and others as good ones. Well! The bad years too had a lot of good moments and the good years had their bad ones, but, on the whole enough had happened in some years for me to be able to characterize some years as fraught with difficulties, painful struggles, troublesome worries, fears etc. to be counted as bad and vice versa. A few days ago I made a count of the bad years that lay scattered across my past as stray leaves across a garden. Three plus one plus six plus three plus half etc. It came to a total of fifteen bad years and forty-five good years. Thus I should regard this life as a fortunate one since only a quarter was something that might be regarded as bad and except for about half a year, no period was really terrible.
Examining the bad years of my life carefully, I realize that even those were fortunate years since much of my maturity and wisdom came from those hard times. They were necessary for the education of my soul and moreover one cannot appreciate spring fully unless one has faced a bitter winter, and, to me the purpose of life is the evolution of the soul that comes through education provided by life experiences. It is one of the few things one carries across to the next life.
I do believe in reincarnation and future lives. For those who do not believe in reincarnation, the education or evolution of the soul or our inner selves may not seem like a big deal since a lifetime is just a little blip in the vast eternity of universal time, and it would be lost with this life along with all other acquisitions when this life is over. However, since I believe in reincarnation of my own soul, I also believe in the reincarnation of the souls of everyone else as well. The components of all life are essentially similar, therefore I believe that not just me but everyone else too benefits substantially from evolution that experiences of life brings. However any good education program should in the main be fun and therefore I wish many good years ahead for all my friends, family, acquaintances and everyone else besides.
Returning to reincarnation, persons who have grown up in predominantly Christian cultures tend to believe less in reincarnation than others. It appears than references to reincarnation were common at the time Christianity was born but the latter guardians of the religion eliminated such references or at least as many references to it as they could. I have wondered what the motivation or reasons for this might have been. It could not have been that reincarnation is a fantastic magical sort of concept since other even more magical sort of concepts such as those of hell fires and magical heavens have been left in. My guess is that reincarnation was eliminated as a concept because then the early guardians of the religion could not effectively scare humanity into compliance. Just a lifetime of hardships is not as scary as a hellfire that burns forever and forever for all eternity, hardly sufficient to scare the shits out of a reluctant believer (pardon the language). Moreover what can be more just than eternal damnation for a mere life full of sin? No, just one reincarnated hard life won’t do! It would not produce enough believers, so damn reincarnation in favor of eternal damnation. If love of God cannot easily be found then let it be the fear of God!
However the argument had a flaw as all false arguments must. The very reasons for rejecting reincarnation reinvented it - a reincarnation in hell or heaven.
