So Many Worlds, So Little Time

Okay, I've finished one of my library books (The Paradox of Choice) and am about halfway through another (Different Lives, Different Masters). Despite all the hype, I was not overly impressed with The Paradox of Choice. There's a lot of interesting market research, if you're into that kind of stuff, but I was looking for some major epiphany about how too much choice affects our lives. I mean, I'm already too aware of it, especially in the realm of personal leisure products. I don't make many major purchases, but I got an mp3 player for my birthday back in May. I thought it was the bomb. Now, five months later, I still love it, but I've become increasingly aware of the tbetter models out there that look nicer, hold more music, and are cheaper than my Rio Cali was back in May. Yet I know if I upgrade, two more months will roll by and I'll be behind the curve again. It's the same way with the "hip" clothes I bought last season and our upgraded cell phones (that don't even take pictures or double as defibrillators). I need to stay off the hamster wheel called durable goods, I guess. Or is that nondurable? I guess the missus, MBA candidate and super genius, will correct me if I'm wrong.

Anyway, Many Lives, Many Masters is much better. I think I may have actually read this book before, but I can't remember. It may have been in another lifetime. Anyway, the author, a psychiatrist, encounters this patient who has terrible neuroses and anxiety and depression that are not being cured by his conventional therapy, so he puts her under hypnosis to try and find whether there are any repressed childhood events causing her duress. Much to his dismay, she regresses back to several lives, all of which she describes in incredible detail. Once she begins reliving the traumas of her past lives, she makes a remarkable improvement in her current one. Mind you, this patient is not crazy or fantastical or even very interesting—in fact, she's rather dull.

One interesting thing that the psychiatrist learns from the "masters"—the gatekeepers between the patient's lives—is that each life has a lesson in it for us to learn individually, and when we learn that lesson, we die. Therefore, if a ten-year-old child dies of cancer, whatever lesson he or she needed to learn was already absorbed, and we shouldn't dwell on the short, tragic nature of their life. In fact, that ten-year-old child could actually be quite far along in their spiritual development, ie, several incarnations ahead of us.

Another interesting thing is that clusters of people tend to reincarnate together. I don't know whether this is because they are at the same stage of spiritual development or what, but apparently people the patient knew in her current life (including her psychiatrist), she also knew as many different people in many different incarnations before. For instance, your mother could have been your sister or your son or a friend several lives previously.

It's somewhat comforting to think that it's not the "end" when you die and that each life, in fact, is a long lesson, during which you'll run into the same kindred spirits again and again. It also takes some of the fear out of dying, out of finding out you have inoperable cancer, etc, that everything happens for a reason. At the same time, it's distressing to know that although this life has a lesson in it for me, the life in itself and my stay here as "Jen" isn't "unique," that I in fact have been many different people and will continue to be. However, I suppose the essence of who you are continues its journey, whatever that essence is.

If you believe that sort of stuff. However, there were mentions of reincarnation in the Bible that were stricken by some religious sect or another, kind of life the lost gospels, so the whole idea is not as new-agey a concept as one would think. I just don't understand those "literal" bible thumpers--there is much historical evidence to show how much the Bible has been altered over the years for politcal purposes, yet you still have people claiming its absoluteism. Kind of like all the evidence out there that points to George W. Bush as being a devious sombitch (er, puppet) of the Project for a New American Century to establish bases in Iraq to control the world's milk and honey (er, oil). And yet you still have people claiming he done it all to protect as from terrah. And they swear on the Bible he's right. Maybe they'll reincarnate as Iraqis.