Reincarnation

Citations:

Artlink- art link- http://wonderlustboudoir.blogspot.com/

Excerpts from Bucklands Complete Book of Witchcraft

Reincarnation

Reincarnation is an ancient belief.  It is part of

many religions (Hinduism and Buddhism, for example)

and was even one of the original Christian tenets, until

condemned by the Second Council of Constantinople

in 553.  It is believed that the human spirit, or soul, is a

fragment of the divine and eventually it will return to its

devine source.  But, for its own evolution, it is 

necessary that the soul experience all things in life.

It seems the most sensible, most logical, explanation of much

that is found in life. Why should one person be born into a 

rich family and another into poverty?

why should one be born crippled, another fit and strong?

if not because we must all eventually experience all things.

Reincarnation seems the most logical explanation of child prodigies.

A musical genius, composing concertos at the age of five (as did Mozart),

is obviously carrying over knowledge from one lifetime into the next.

This does not usually happen, but it can.  In the same way, homosexuality 

might well be explained in the same way, homosexuallity might well be 

explained through reincarnation: a person male in one lifetime and then

female in the next (or vice versa) might have carried over feelings and

preferences from one life to the next.

For someone who does not believe in reincarnation, it is difficult to 

understand the death of a child.  What was the point of the child living at all,

if only for a few short years? For the reincarnationist it is obvious

that the child had learned all that had been set to be learned in that 

perticular lifetime and so was moving on.  A very good simile for this is the

grades of a school.  You enter school ina low grade and learn the basics.

When you have mastered these you graduate, take a short vacation, then 

come back into a higher grade to learn and experience more things.  So it is in 

life.  In each life you have a certain amount to learn and to experience.

When you have done that, you graduate (i. e. you die). To come back into 

a higher grade you are reborn in a new body.  Occasionally remembrance of

previous lives, or parts of them, is experienced but more generally you do not

remember (it is possible, of course through such procedures as hypno-

regression, to go back to previous lives and bring them once more to the surface).

Perhaps one of the most common of occult experiences is that of dejavu the feeling

that something has happened before so often attributed to reincarnation

(though by no means is reincarnation the only possible explanation of all cases

of this); the feeling being a brief flash of memory of something that happened

in a previous life.

In what form do we return to the earth? Some believe (the Hindus, for example)

that it is not necessarily in human form each time. Certain Hindu sects teach

that the soul may b e reborn as a plant or an animal.  However such beliefs are 

not generally held in Western civilization.  Some say there is a progression

from the lowest life forms to the highest putting humans at the top.  But then

who is to say the order? Is a dog higher than a cat, or a cat higher than a dog?

Is a centipede higher or lower than an earwig? Does this mean, when every soul

has finally passed up the scale and graduated, that in the afterlife there will

be no plant, animal or insect life?.  It seems unlikely.  In Witchcraft the belief 

is that all things have souls. In Saxon Witchcraft, for example, it is believed

that a dog will go through many incarnations, but always as a dog; a cat 

always a cat; a human always as a human.  There is reason for all things to be here..

what we term the "balance of Nature".  It seems we cewrtainly have a choice, within 

our species, of being either male or female, in order to experience and appreciate

the different aspects.

One argument often put forward by non reincarnationists is "If what you say 

is true, how do you explain the fact that the world population is continuously

growing?" Of course it is! So is the population of souls/spirits.  There are not

simply x number of souls who all started their development together. New souls 

are being introduced all the times.  So we have so called "new souls" those on

their first incarnations and "old souls" those who have been through a large number

of lives.  It is possible that eventually, when the gods decide enough souls

have been introduced, there will be a stabilizing of the population followed later

by a decline, as old souls in their final incarnations make their graduations.

There is yet another thought that might be considered here... where do these souls

originally come from and where do they go after that final graduation? 

One possibility, of course, is that we not only experience lives here on Earth,

but also on other planets and in other reality systems.  Who knows?

perhaps we go through the cycle here having already been through it a dozen times

or more on other worlds.  There is obviously much food for thought,

very little (if any) proof of preferences and great scope for new tenets.