From Stephan Pastis yesterday. Click the image to be taken to a larger version at the "Pearls Before Swine" Web page.
I don't know about the same life over and over . . . thinking back on all I've been through, only an idiot would want to go through it all over again! As for a different life, as I suppose is anticipated by those who believe in reincarnation: the ways of human suffering are almost infinite. Why would I want to experience them? And why is it that most of those who claim to believe in reincarnation always assert that in a past life or lives, they were royalty or holy or rich or something eminently desirable? Why were so few of them peasants who got eaten by a passing crocodile or lion?
I recall a lady who claimed to me that in a previous life, she'd been an Egyptian high priestess of Isis. I assured her that yes, she had been, just as I'd been an Egyptian high priest of Ra. In fact, I recalled lending her several hundred gold staters way back then, that she'd never repaid. That meant, at compound interest over the past two and a half millennia, she now owed me rather more than the national debt of the USA. She accused me of not taking her seriously. Me? As if I'd do a thing like that!
Peter
14 comments:
My masseuse has told me she feels like she's a non-Terran human soul reborn into her current life/body.
I just responded "Ok, you do you."
Yeah, she's very "out there" but she gives a great massage, so....
The best argument against reincarnation is Hebrews 9:27, "And as it is appointed unto men once to die, but after this the judgment". I find that rather conclusive. :)
You could pair that with Rev 20 calling the lake of fire the 2nd death. Definitely puts a cap on what came before that final judgement.
If they were all royalty or rich as Solomon, they were real turds to have been born as common dirt folk now. I wonder if they ever contemplate that.
Next stop, sh-thouse fly....
So explain why you are here experiencing this incarnation in the first place. Of course the ego that is at the center of the self-contraction wants this or NONE of it would be happening. There has been a relinquishment of the divine realization in favor of an attachment to the manifest. Those blessed who come to share the truth about the divine ALL call everyone to relinquish the ego, the self-contraction, and the impetus to cling to the attachments of mind and body that have led to the incarnation in this form. That we do not learn or commit ourselves to the relinquishment of it is why it all continues to manifest in these forms.
OT question for Peter:
I too, have a couple of accounts on Blogger. When I look at my stats I see a huge number of hits coming from Singapore. A friend blogger also notices the same thing. I cannot imagine that anyone in Singapore has the faintest interest in my small blog. Are you seeing the same thing? Any explanation?
JWM
@JWM: No idea. I presume it's a botnet of some kind, but why they'd pick on any particular blog, I can't say. Pity we can't monetize it somehow . . .
James Doolittle, who led the B-25 Tokyo raid in WW2, titled his autobiography "I could never be so lucky again". This was his answer to one of those "if you had it to do all over" questions. While I have nowhere near the record of adventure and accomplishment that General Doolittle had, I strongly agree with him, as I believe our host would.
Peter, let me break that steak for you. In my past incarnations I have been,
A Grunt level Hospitaller solder based at Malta
A carpet bagging banker after the civil war.
A horse thief shot in the back in the Appalachians.
A 12 year old boy who died as a result of his crippling injuries from being hit by a car.
The 'highest rank' the I know of was being a village drude in Gall in the late Roman period.
Nothing spectacular.
And most of the folks that I have talked to who have done similar dives, have reported similar results.
Some of those folks I'm flat ashamed of.
You should have kept the cash and invested in a wind farm.
I am inclined to believe that reincarnation is the truth simply because it's the option I hate the most, and I have found that reality in general tends to follow the trend of doing whatever I hate most.
Reminds me a bit of school at times:
"You should go into $FIELD!"
"No. I HATE everything in and about $FIELD."
"But you seem so good at it."
"Only because I WANT TO NEVER DO THAT [MANURE] AGAIN!"
Jataka Tales
These are stories of prior embodiments of Siddhartha Gautama.
Yeah, not everybody could have been Caesar. If my previous self were around way back then, given my predilections, I'd probably have been the slave boy who smeared goose grease on the axles of Caesar's chariot before he went out on his Triumph.
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