“I seem to have loved you in numberless forms, numberless times… In life after life, in age after age, forever.” – Rabindranath Tagore; Unending Love
Reincarnation has been a trope and a theme in every major mythology except the Christian. This is of course because the Abrahamic religions treat time as a straight line and reincarnation is replaced with rebirth after resurrection.
All Oriental religions however treat time as a circle. They believe that thanks to the merits we earn in one birth we are re-born after we die as something better or worse.
Kurt Cobain too, among others, had famously quipped once, “If you’re really a mean person you’re going to come back as a fly and eat poop.”
It is nigh impossible to know about your previous births, although many people have experienced flashbacks under hypnosis.
So how do you know if you are not debuting at living? Well, these six signs are pretty tell-tale:
1. You are incredibly difficult to deceive
You know how after being duped again and again by a green grocer, you start understanding that you shouldn’t be shopping at that particular shop again? This is like that. When people try conventional manipulation tactics on you, they just don’t work. You can see right through them. Manipulative and deceptive people have met you in your past lives as well and by now you just know which shops to not go to.
2. You are empathetic
By now you know how to read people’s emotions on their face. And you also know how to cure them of their negative emotions thanks to past-life experiences. You are sensitive enough to feel what your peers are going through.
3. What the world offers you seems “like a radio tune, you swear you’ve heard before.”
The world and its experiences give off vibes that scream, “I have been here before”. It is like a major league déjà vu. Consequently, most of the times you make sure to not repeat your mistakes. Things that you see every day and in some cases people too, seem familiar; the moment seems like a film being replayed. Only this time, the character can do something different.
4. You have vivid dreams
Dreams are the best ways of tapping into one’s subconscious memories; things that don’t manifest on the surface but remain repressed. In other words, memories of past lives. You see very real, very fast paced dreams which you remember clearly enough to write them down. It is in those dreams that you can remember your past lives, or in more scientific terms, it is in those dreams that your repressed memories from your past lives manifest themselves.
5. You treat life like a guide-book
You know even if you make the same mistakes, it’s not the end of the world. You know somewhere deep down in your heart that you will get another shot at this. Every experience is a part of the learning curve and every night when you close your eyes you know you learned something new. And consequently you take nothing frivolously or lightly. You give your best at everything and pay attention to the minutest details in things.
6. You are the wallflower in the corner of the room, never quite at ease
There is a constant sense of being at a strange and alien land; a sense of urgency in you. You always seem ill at ease, because your soul does not know exactly where it belongs yet. You constantly feel like you have to be home; some place that seems better suited for you.
And we hope you get there! In the next birth, if not this.
I identify with some of those points but I must tell you that if we were to reincarnate into the same life, it would mean that free-will is a mere illusion since we repeat the same script over and over.
What is most likely is that all of us are the same being reincarnated throughout time as everyone that has ever existed and will ever exist.
The free will issue is another topic but I think we have none of it.