Reincarnation Quotes

Don’t grieve. Anything you lose comes round in another form.

Each night, when I go to sleep, I die. And the next morning, when I wake up, I am reborn.

What, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: 'This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more' ... Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: 'You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine.

If you're really a mean person you're going to come back as a fly and eat poop.

Sex is one of the nine reasons for reincarnation. The other eight are unimportant

Have you ever met someone for the first time, but in your heart you feel as if you’ve met them before?

I recognized you instantly. All of our lives flashed through my mind in a split second. I felt a pull so strongly towards you that I almost couldn't stop it.

He made me feel unhinged . . . like he could take me apart and put me back together again and again.

My biggest fear of death is to come back reincarnated

I shall not commit the fashionable stupidity of regarding everything I cannot explain as a fraud. —address to the Society for Psychical Research in England

I want an avowed atheist in the White House. When time comes to push that button, I want whoever's making the decision to understand that once it's pushed, it's over. Finito. They're not gonna have lunch with Jesus. Won't be deflowering 72 virgins on the great shag carpet of eternity, or reincarnated as a cow. I want someone making that decision who believes life on this Earth isn't just a dress rehearsal for something better -- but the only shot we get.

Doesn't reincarnation strike you as just another form of procrastination?

He would reach for me in the middle of the night, nearly every single night, wrapping one of those solid arms around my waist and pulling me in close. So. Close.

I will look for you in every lifetime and love you there.

I believe in reincarnation,” [Bjorn] said. I KNOW. “I tried to live a good life. Does that help?” THAT’S NOT UP TO ME. Death coughed. OF COURSE... SINCE YOU BELIEVE IN REINCARNATION... YOU’LL BE BJORN AGAIN.

Unending Love I seem to have loved you in numberless forms, numberless times... In life after life, in age after age, forever. My spellbound heart has made and remade the necklace of songs, That you take as a gift, wear round your neck in your many forms, In life after life, in age after age, forever. Whenever I hear old chronicles of love, it's age old pain, It's ancient tale of being apart or together. As I stare on and on into the past, in the end you emerge, Clad in the light of a pole-star, piercing the darkness of time. You become an image of what is remembered forever. You and I have floated here on the stream that brings from the fount. At the heart of time, love of one for another. We have played along side millions of lovers, Shared in the same shy sweetness of meeting, the distressful tears of farewell, Old love but in shapes that renew and renew forever. Today it is heaped at your feet, it has found its end in you The love of all man's days both past and forever: Universal joy, universal sorrow, universal life. The memories of all loves merging with this one love of ours - And the songs of every poet past and forever.

Maybe love at first sight isn’t what we think it is. Maybe it’s recognising a soul we loved in a past life and falling in love with them again.

I think it would be very glamorous to be reincarnated as a great big ring on Liz Taylor's finger.

I like the relaxed way in which the Japanese approach religion. I think of myself as basically a moral person, but I'm definitely not religious, and I'm very tired of the preachiness and obsession with other people's behavior characteristic of many religious people in the United States. As far as I could tell, there's nothing preachy about Buddhism. I was in a lot of temples, and I still don't know what Buddhists believe, except that at one point Kunio said 'If you do bad things, you will be reborn as an ox.' This makes as much sense to me as anything I ever heard from, for example, the Reverend Pat Robertson.

Flowers are reincarnation. They come out of the earth of our ashes. Nothing else looks so soul-like.

Birds are and always have been reincarnated old men with Tourette's syndrome having somehow managed to dupe the reproductive saga. They fuck each other and tend to their home repairs and children while never missing their true mission. To scream at the top of their lungs in horrified hellish rage every morning at daybreak to warn us all of the truth. They know the truth. Screaming bloody murder all over the world in our ears, but sadly we don't speak bird.

Whether you believe in God or not does not matter much, whether you believe in Buddha or not does not matter so much; as a Buddhist, whether you believe in reincarnation or not does not matter so much. You must lead a good life.

Life and death, they're equal to this cosmos. We enter the material world and we go away again, reincarnated into something better.

In Mongolia, when a dog dies, he is buried high in the hills so people cannot walk on his grave. The dog’s master whispers in the dog’s ear his wishes that the dog will return as a man in his next life. Then his tail is cut off and put beneath his head, and a piece of meat of fat is cut off and placed in his mouth to sustain his soul for its journey; before he is reincarnated, the dog’s soul is freed to travel the land, to run across the high desert plains for as long as it would like. I learned that from a program on the National Geographic Channel, so I believe it is true. Not all dogs return as men, they say; only those who are ready. I am ready.

My parents didn't raise me to be religious. The closest we come to worship is the Trinity of Visa, Mastercard, and American Express. I think the Merryweather cheerleaders confuse me because I missed out on Sunday School. It has to be a miracle. There is no other explanation. How else could they sleep with the football team on Saturday night and be reincarnated as virginal goddesses on Monday?

For the first forty days a child is given dreams of previous lives. Journeys, winding paths, a hundred small lessons and then the past is erased.

So once you're dead there's just nothing? Mari: Basically... Korogi: I get so scared when I start thinking about this stuff. I can hardly breathe, and my whole body wants to shrink into a corner. It's so much easier to just believe in reincarnation.

The wise grieve neither for the living nor for the dead. There was never a time when you and I and all the kings gathered here have not existed and nor will there be a time when we will cease to exist.

The Revelation of Sonmi 451 To be is to be perceived, and so to know thyself is only possible through the eyes of the other. The nature of our immortal lives is in the consequences of our words and deeds, that go on and are pushing themselves throughout all time. - Our lives are not our own. From womb to tomb, we are bound to others, past and present, and by each crime and every kindness, we birth our future.

But I don't believe in reincarnation!" he protested. SQUEAK. And this, Mr Pounder understood with absolute rodent clarity, meant: reincarnation believes in you.

She is the glorious reincarnation of every woman ever loved.

And then a new screen, one I had never seen before, never even heard of popped up. It gave me a choice. I could become the new Lord of Darkness myself, or I could take a gamble and be reincarnated. I chose wisely.

if, in the beginning, there were so few people on the face of the earth, and now there are so many, where did all those new souls come from?" The answer is simple. In certain reincarnations, we divide into two. Our souls divide as do crystals and start, cells and plants." Our soul divides into two, and those souls are in turn transformed into two and so, within a few generations, we are scattered over a large part of the earth. We form part of what the Alchemists call the Anima Mundi, the sould of the world; the truth is that if the Anima Mundi were merely to keep dividing, it would keep growing, but it would also become gradually weaker. That is why, as well as dividing into two, we also find ourselves. And the process of finding ourselves is called love. Because when a sould divides, it always divides into a male part and a female part. In each life, we feel a mysterious boligation to find at least one of those soul mates. The greater love that seperated them feels pleased with the Love that brings them together again. But how will i know who my soul mate is? By taking risks. By rising failure, disappointment, disillusion, but never ceasing in your search for love. As long as you keep looking, you will triumph in the end.

I melted into the dream as if I had always been there. I knew where I had come from; I knew where I was going.

Yes, I am white now,' said Gandalf. 'Indeed I am Saruman, one might almost say, Saruman as he should have been.

The love of every single one of my lives.

Heaven and hell - nirvana and Valhalla, reincarnation, hauntings, and so many underworlds, one would think the grave was a corridor with a million doors

When they bombed Hiroshima, the explosion formed a mini-supernova, so every living animal, human or plant that received direct contact with the rays from that sun was instantly turned to ash. And what was left of the city soon followed. The long-lasting damage of nuclear radiation caused an entire city and its population to turn into powder. When I was born, my mom says I looked around the whole hospital room with a stare that said, "This? I've done this before." She says I have old eyes. When my Grandpa Genji died, I was only five years old, but I took my mom by the hand and told her, "Don't worry, he'll come back as a baby." And yet, for someone who's apparently done this already, I still haven't figured anything out yet. My knees still buckle every time I get on a stage. My self-confidence can be measured out in teaspoons mixed into my poetry, and it still always tastes funny in my mouth. But in Hiroshima, some people were wiped clean away, leaving only a wristwatch or a diary page. So no matter that I have inhibitions to fill all my pockets, I keep trying, hoping that one day I'll write a poem I can be proud to let sit in a museum exhibit as the only proof I existed. My parents named me Sarah, which is a biblical name. In the original story God told Sarah she could do something impossible and she laughed, because the first Sarah, she didn't know what to do with impossible. And me? Well, neither do I, but I see the impossible every day. Impossible is trying to connect in this world, trying to hold onto others while things are blowing up around you, knowing that while you're speaking, they aren't just waiting for their turn to talk -- they hear you. They feel exactly what you feel at the same time that you feel it. It's what I strive for every time I open my mouth -- that impossible connection. There's this piece of wall in Hiroshima that was completely burnt black by the radiation. But on the front step, a person who was sitting there blocked the rays from hitting the stone. The only thing left now is a permanent shadow of positive light. After the A bomb, specialists said it would take 75 years for the radiation damaged soil of Hiroshima City to ever grow anything again. But that spring, there were new buds popping up from the earth. When I meet you, in that moment, I'm no longer a part of your future. I start quickly becoming part of your past. But in that instant, I get to share your present. And you, you get to share mine. And that is the greatest present of all. So if you tell me I can do the impossible, I'll probably laugh at you. I don't know if I can change the world yet, because I don't know that much about it -- and I don't know that much about reincarnation either, but if you make me laugh hard enough, sometimes I forget what century I'm in. This isn't my first time here. This isn't my last time here. These aren't the last words I'll share. But just in case, I'm trying my hardest to get it right this time around.

A little while, a moment of rest upon the wind, and another woman shall bear me.

Birth in the physical is death in the spiritual. Death in the physical is birth in the spiritual.

The entire universe is God's cosmic motion picture, and that individuals are merely actors in the divine play who change roles through reincarnation; mankind's deep suffering is rooted in identifying too closely with one's current role, rather than with the movie's director, or God.

Somewhere, you see, in the river of time, I am already alive.

I don't think that science and the paranormal have to be at war; in fact, it's crucial that they work together. It seems naïve to believe that the world is exactly as it seems.

Whether you believe in God or not does not matter so much, whether you believe in Buddha or not does not matter so much; as a Buddhist, whether you believe in reincarnation or not does not matter so much. You must lead a good life. And a good life does not mean just good food, good clothes, good shelter. These are not sufficient. A good motivation is what is needed: compassion, without dogmatism, without complicated philosophy; just understanding that others are human brothers and sisters and respecting their rights and human dignity.

Voicemail #1: “Hi, Isabel Culpeper. I am lying in my bed, looking at the ceiling. I am mostly naked. I am thinking of … your mother. Call me.” Voicemail #2: The first minute and thirty seconds of “I’ve Gotta Get a Message to You” by the Bee Gees. Voicemail #3: “I’m bored. I need to be entertained. Sam is moping. I may kill him with his own guitar. It would give me something to do and also make him say something. Two birds with one stone! I find all these old expressions unnecessarily violent. Like, ring around the rosy. That’s about the plague, did you know? Of course you did. The plague is, like, your older cousin. Hey, does Sam talk to you? He says jack shit to me. God, I’m bored. Call me.” Voicemail #4: “Hotel California” by the Eagles, in its entirety, with every instance of the word California replaced with Minnesota. Voicemail #5: “Hi, this is Cole St. Clair. Want to know two true things? One, you’re never picking up this phone. Two, I’m never going to stop leaving long messages. It’s like therapy. Gotta talk to someone. Hey, you know what I figured out today? Victor’s dead. I figured it out yesterday, too. Every day I figure it out again. I don’t know what I’m doing here. I feel like there’s no one I can —” Voicemail #6: “So, yeah, I’m sorry. That last message went a little pear-shaped. You like that expression? Sam said it the other day. Hey, try this theory on for size: I think he’s a dead British housewife reincarnated into a Beatle’s body. You know, I used to know this band that put on fake British accents for their shows. Boy, did they suck, aside from being assholes. I can’t remember their name now. I’m either getting senile or I’ve done enough to my brain that stuff’s falling out. Not so fair of me to make this one-sided, is it? I’m always talking about myself in these things. So, how are you, Isabel Rosemary Culpeper? Smile lately? Hot Toddies. That was the name of the band. The Hot Toddies.” Voicemail #20: “I wish you’d answer.

If I get reincarnated…, I wanna become a clam.

And only the enlightened can recall their former lives; for the rest of us, the memories of past existences are but glints of light, twinges of longing, passing shadows, disturbingly familiar, that are gone before they can be grasped, like the passage of that silver bird on Dhaulagiri.

The kiss. Oh, the kiss. What a perfect, unnerving, luscious kiss. He made me feel unhinged . . . like he could take me apart and put me back together again and again.

Alden seems like a very nice boy. The kind of boy I'd like to see you hanging out with." I almost laughed out loud. If she only knew! A reincarnated, soul-sharing lunatic. Ghost Boy---every mother's dream.

Leaves turned to soil beneath my feet. Thus it is, trees eat themselves.

I feel as though I have lived many lives, experienced the heights and depths of each and like the waves of the ocean, never known rest. Throughout the years, I looked always for the unusual, for the wonderful, for the mysteries at the heart of life.

Patricia embraces me on the station platform. 'The past is what you leave behind in life, Ruby,' she says with the smile of a reincarnated lama. 'Nonsense, Patricia,' I tell her as I climb on board my train. 'The past's what you take with you.

I’d like to think our love does return to us reincarnated in different human forms. That people might be temporary, but love is permanent and it just changes form.

The short conversation that follows eventually led to a tree religion. Its tenet of faith was this: a tree that was a good tree and led a clean decent and upstanding life could be assured of a future life after death. If it was very good indeed it would eventually be reincarnated as five thousand rolls of lavatory paper.

The longer I lived, the longer it would be until I saw him alive again, until I could taste his new lips and run my fingers through his new hair. We could be young and beautiful again . . .

The existential void is the core of our souls, shaping energy and vibration into existential form. Our fate and personality are shaped and written in DNA, so free choice is a dream until the next rebirth.

Have you ever met someone and felt like you’ve known them forever?

And why do you want to be near me?" Because you're all I can think about, day and night. I don't know what the hell is going on with us; I only know I can't get rid of it. I don't care if you're batshit insane and think you're the reincarnation of Cleopatra. I hear voices; you hear dogs. We'll work it out. Maybe get a discount on therapy.

Today, suddenly, I reached an absurd but unerring conclusion. In a moment of enlightenment, I realized that I'm nobody, absolutely nobody. When the lightning flashed, I saw that what I had thought to be a city was in fact a deserted plain and, in the same sinister light that revealed me to myself, there seemed to be no sky above it. I was robbed of any possibility of having existed before the world. If I was ever reincarnated, I must have done so without myself, without a self to reincarnate. I am the outskirts of some non-existent town, the long-winded prologue to an unwritten book. I'm nobody, nobody. I don't know how to feel or think or love. I'm a character in a novel as yet unwritten, hovering in the air and undone before I've even existed, amongst the dreams of someone who never quite managed to breathe life into me. I'm always thinking, always feeling, but my thoughts lack all reason, my emotions all feeling. I'm falling through a trapdoor, through infinite, infinitous space, in a directionless, empty fall. My soul is a black maelstrom, a great madness spinning about a vacuum, the swirling of a vast ocean around a hole in the void, and in the waters, more like whirlwinds than waters, float images of all I ever saw or heard in the world: houses, faces, books, boxes, snatches of music and fragments of voices, all caught up in a sinister, bottomless whirlpool. And I, I myself, am the centre that exists only because the geometry of the abyss demands it; I am the nothing around which all this spins, I exist so that it can spin, I am a centre that exists only because every circle has one. I, I myself, am the well in which the walls have fallen away to leave only viscous slime. I am the centre of everything surrounded by the great nothing. And it is as if hell itself were laughing within me but, instead of the human touch of diabolical laughter, there's the mad croak of the dead universe, the circling cadaver of physical space, the end of all worlds drifting blackly in the wind, misshapen, anachronistic, without the God who created it, without God himself who spins in the dark of darks, impossible, unique, everything. If only I could think! If only I could feel!

If you want to believe in reincarnation, you have to believe that this life, what you're living through right now, is the afterlife. You're missing out on the afterlife you looked forward to in your last existence by worrying about your next life. This is what happens after you die. Take a look.

I know I'll never love anyone like I love Baz. I know he's the love of my life. Of all my lives. The Mage believed in reincarnation. Of a thousand lives stacked on top of each other. ''Some lives we squander,'' he said. ''And some we seize.'' This was my life to find love. The truest love. The biggest.

Most people in the world are Christ lovers. And then there are Christ haters. But all of them are fixated on Christ, and he perpetuates for ever.

When we can't understand the science behind something in this world, we make up mythological entities that we can relate to. We personify the forces of nature that mystify us, using our boundless imaginations to comfort us and make us feel like we have some control over these things that are much bigger than we are.

Everything is connected, like a delicate web. Ever growing, ever changing. New silvery strands come together every day, and once the strand is formed, no matter what superficial circumstances may sometimes keep you apart, it is never broken. You will meet again, perhaps in another lifetime. The connection is unbreakable, lying dormant in your subconscious.

Not since North Korean media declared Kim Jong-il to be the reincarnation of Kim Il Sung has there been such a blatant attempt to create a necrocracy, or perhaps mausolocracy, in which a living claimant assumes the fleshly mantle of the departed.

There is no death as we know and understand it – only life and energy going from one stage to another. Imagine a pool of sparks going in and out at an atomic level. From one void to another – that’s what we are in the deep, existential void.

Some say Karma is a bitch. It all comes back to you, eventually. If this world can be boiled down to two truths. It would be the second law of thermodynamics (entropy) and the law of action and reaction (Karma). Well, if Karma really makes up the fabric of this Universe, if it is really a bitch, then prove it in this life itself! Why wait for reincarnation? Do you think I would be me once I die and transition to another body? No! What makes me, me, are my memories.

Is it true that soulmates always end up together? I didn't think so, but I hoped that if there was such a thing as reincarnation, we would meet again in a another life and try again. If it was possible, I'd find him, for another chance at love.

He had a thousand-year-old stare.

This is what we get for thinking that scaley orange skin and fake hair could keep that former demon out of elected office.

These debauched folks, these intemperate, depraved, corrupt lowlifes, know the speed at which Karma works. They don’t care about their next lives (even if they believe in reincarnation). All they care about is now. And why wouldn’t they? As I told you, they wouldn’t be them in their next lives. This is why even the most metaphysical of them live like there is no tomorrow. They hurt, they cheat, they gormandize, they lead a lecherous life with utter disregard for others, all because they know this is a Devil’s world.

Words are vehicles of ideas, and unless they are understood properly misunderstanding is inevitable.

No. I came here to see you. I didn’t believe the rumors,but after hearing it on so many continents I had to come andsee for myself.” “See what?” His eyes widened in adulation, his voice taking on areverent tone. “If it was true that Helen of Troy, nay, Aphrodite herself had been reincarnated in gym teacher form.” The room was utterly silent. Except Vicious Redhead’s jaw dropping to the ground with a little plink. Or maybe I imagined that. And then the class did the worst thingpossible: They started giggling. Miss Lynn was going tomurder me.

You always tell me it's too late for you to read, with your poor liver, your exhausted bones, that after everything you've been through, you'd just like to rest now. That reading is a privilege you made possible for me with what you lost. I know you believe in reincarnation. I don't know if I do but I hope it's real. Because then maybe you'll come back here next time around. Maybe you'll be a girl and maybe your name will be Rose again, and you'll have a room full of books with parents who will read you bedtime stories in a country not touched by war.

Let us remember to always rediscover one another because we are forever changing.

As a man, casting off worn out garments taketh new ones, so the dweller in the body, entereth into ones that are new.

We do not remember days, Shemei, we remember moments, and the richness of life lies in memories we have forgotten.

This life is but a brief tenure, one of many perspectives a spirit must experience in the quest for eternity.

Loving you feels like my commitment to eternity a long time ago

Thank you, baby, for being my rock, my safe place to land, my inspiration, and my heart. No matter what, snaring you as a husband will always remain my greatest achievement. I love you.

Everything is connected” was probably a phrase first coined by an Old Soul.

I was an afterthought, five thousand years later. A mistake, because Ciana was gone. I was the dissonant note on the end of a masterpiece symphony. I was the brushstroke that ruined the painting.

Odd: I wish I could believe in reincarnation. Chief Porter: Not me. Once down the track is enough of a test. Pass me or fail me, Dear Lord, but don't make me go through high school again. Odd: If there's something we want so bad in this life but we can't have it, maybe we could get it the next time around. Chief Porter: Or maybe not getting it, accepting less without bitterness and being grateful for what we have is a part of what we're here to learn.

There must have been a time, in the beginning, when we could have said – no. But somehow we missed it. Oh well, we'll know better next time.

Everything turns in circles and spirals with the cosmic heart until infinity. Everything has a vibration that spirals inward or outward — and everything turns together in the same direction at the same time. This vibration keeps going: it becomes born and expands or closes and destructs — only to repeat the cycle again in opposite current. Like a lotus, it opens or closes, dies and is born again. Such is also the story of the sun and moon, of me and you. Nothing truly dies. All energy simply transforms.

Every atom you possess has almost certainly passed through several stars and been part of millions of organisms on its way to becoming you. We are each so atomically numerous and so vigorously recycled at death that a significant number of our atoms - up to a billion for each of us, it has been suggested - probably once belonged to Shakespeare. A billion more each came from Buddha and Genghis Khan and Beethoven, and any other historical figure you care to name. So we are all reincarnations - though short-lived ones. When we die, our atoms will disassemble and move off to find new uses elsewhere - as part of a leaf or other human being or drop of dew.

Until we find out who was born this time around, it seems irrelevant to seek earlier identities. I have heard many people speak of who they believe they were in previous incarnations, but they seem to have very little idea of who they are in this one. . . . Let’s take one life at a time. Perhaps the best way to do that is to live as though there were no afterlife or reincarnation. To live as though this moment was all that was allotted. (132)

This has been a really tough lesson for me to learn. The people I love, I love hard and without conditions. My loyalty, once earned, will be with you for a lifetime. I really get that we are all connected and that until we all get it, no-one is getting it. That said, I'm also learning that some people are not a good match for us and their presence in our life is incredibly toxic. We can still love them, we just need to love them from a distance. Maybe after a few more reincarnations, we'll be able to love them up close again.

Religion is a totalitarian belief. It is the wish to be a slave. It is the desire that there be an unalterable, unchallengeable, tyrannical authority who can convict you of thought crime while you are asleep, who can subject you to total surveillance around the clock every waking and sleeping minute of your life, before you're born and, even worse and where the real fun begins, after you're dead. A celestial North Korea. Who wants this to be true? Who but a slave desires such a ghastly fate? I've been to North Korea. It has a dead man as its president, Kim Jong-Il is only head of the party and head of the army. He's not head of the state. That office belongs to his deceased father, Kim Il-Sung. It's a necrocracy, a thanatocracy. It's one short of a trinity I might add. The son is the reincarnation of the father. It is the most revolting and utter and absolute and heartless tyranny the human species has ever evolved. But at least you can f#$%ing die and leave North Korea!

Once I had an odd dream. A person I don’t remember was telling me in my sleep that unless one is properly buried or cremated with rituals, the soul remains tethered to the body. So, you are conscious of everything, even when you die. You hear everything. You see everything. You see your own dead body from above, and only when the funeral is over, you detach from it and make the transition to a fresh one.

I have always believed reincarnation to be true. This will go on and on until one discovers oneself. But at times, my thinking deviates a bit from eastern philosophy. I don’t think our bad karmas would make us cockroaches, rats, pigs, etc., in our next lives. I am of the view that achieving Moksha isn’t possible unless we experience everything that could be experienced. I have to experience oppression, but I also have to oppress. I have to be a sparrow to experience the joy of flight. I have to be a bee to experience colours beyond the visible spectrum. And I have to be a dog to hear ultrasonic sounds. Do you get it? I have to experience everything to achieve moksha. Becoming a bee in the next life is not the result of my bad Karma. It is instead a stepping stone. The path to ascension has to be a spiral. Not round and round. Every decision of mine has to lead there. Every step has to lead me towards self-actualization.

I am born as the sun, But then turn into the moon, As my blonde hairs turn Grayish-white and fall to The ground, Only to be buried again, Then to be born again, Into a thousand suns And a thousand moons. HYMN OF THE DIVINE DANDELION by Suzy Kassem Copyright 1993-1994 - A SPRING FOR WISDOM

How I picture it: We are all nesting dolls, carrying the earlier iterations of ourselves inside. We carry the past inside us. We take ourselves–all of our selves–wherever we go. Inside forty-something me is the woman I was in my thirties, the woman I was in my twenties, the teenager I was, the child I was. Inside divorced me: married me, the me who loved my husband, the me who believed what we had was irrevocable and permanent, the me who believed in permanence. I still carry these versions of myself. It's a kind of reincarnation without death: all these different lives we get to live in this one body, as ourselves.

Vimes died. The sun dropped out of the sky, giant lizards took over the world, and the stars exploded and went out and all hope vanished and gurgled into the sinktrap of oblivion. And gas filled the firmament and combusted and behold! There was a new heaven - or possibly not. And Disc and Io and and possibly verily life crawled out of the sea - or possibly didn't because it had been made by the gods, and lizards turned to less scaly lizards - or possibly did not. And lizards turned into birds and bugs turned into butterflies and a species of apple turned into banana and a kind of monkey fell out of a tree and realised life was better when you didn't have to spend your time hanging onto something. And in only a few billion years evolved trousers and ornamental stripey hats. Lastly the game of Crocket. And there, magically reincarnated, was Vimes, a little dizzy, standing on the village green looking into the smiling countenance of an enthusiast.

What we call life...is the combination of the Five Aggregates, a combination of physical and mental energies. These are constantly changing; they do not remain the same for two consecutive moments. Every moment they are born and they die. 'When the Aggregates arise, decay and die, O bhikkhu, every moment you are born, decay, and die.' This, even now during this life time, every moment we are born and die, but we continue. If we can understand that in this life we can continue without a permanent, unchanging substance like Self or Soul, why can't we understand that those forces themselves can continue without a Self or a Soul behind them after the non-functioning of the body?

Once the caravan reached the Kashmir Valley between the Great Himalayas and the Pir Panjal Range, in the northernmost region of the Indian subcontinent, Jesus continued the journey with a small group of locals until he completed the last leg on his own, guided from one place to another by the local people. Some weeks later, he made it to the Indian Himalayan region where Jesus was greeted by some Buddhist monks and with whom he sojourned for some time. From that location, he then went to live in the city of Rishikesh, in India's northern state of Uttarakhand, spending most of his time meditating in a cave known as Vashishta Gufa, on the banks of the River Ganga. Jesus lived in those lands for many months before he continued traveling to the northeast, until he arrived in the Kingdom of Magadha, in what is presently West-central Bihar. It so happened that it was here, in Magadha, that Jesus met Mari for the first time, the woman better known today as Mary Magdalene...

Tell me something, Mari—do you believe in reincarnation?” Mari shakes her head. “No, I don’t think so,” she says. “So you don’t think there’s a life to come?” “I haven’t thought much about it. But it seems to me there’s no reason to believe in a life after this one.” “So once you’re dead there’s just nothing?” “Basically.” “Well, I think there has to be something like reincarnation. Or maybe I should say I’m scared to think there isn’t. I can’t understand nothingness. I can’t understand it and I can’t imagine it.” “Nothingness means there’s absolutely nothing, so maybe there’s no need to understand it or imagine it.” “Yeah, but what if nothingness is not like that? What if it’s the kind of thing that demands that you understand it or imagine it? I mean, you don’t know what it’s like to die, Mari. Maybe a person really has to die to understand what it’s like.” “Well, yeah…,” says Mari. “I get so scared when I start thinking about this stuff,” Korogi says. “I can hardly breathe, and my whole body wants to shrink into a corner. It’s so much easier to just believe in reincarnation. You might be reborn as something awful, but at least you can imagine what you’d look like—a horse, say, or a snail. And even if it was something bad, you might be luckier next time.

I ran across an excerpt today (in English translation) of some dialogue/narration from the modern popular writer, Paulo Coelho in his book: Aleph.(Note: bracketed text is mine.)... 'I spoke to three scholars,' [the character says 'at last.'] ...two of them said that, after death, the [sic (misprint, fault of the publisher)] just go to Paradise. The third one, though, told me to consult some verses from the Koran. [end quote]' ...I can see that he's excited. [narrator]' ...Now I have many positive things to say about Coelho: He is respectable, inspiring as a man, a truth-seeker, and an appealing writer; but one should hesitate to call him a 'literary' writer based on this quote. A 'literary' author knows that a character's excitement should be 'shown' in his or her dialogue and not in the narrator's commentary on it. Advice for Coelho: Remove the 'I can see that he's excited' sentence and show his excitement in the phrasing of his quote.(Now, in defense of Coelho, I am firmly of the opinion, having myself written plenty of prose that is flawed, that a novelist should be forgiven for slipping here and there.)Lastly, it appears that a belief in reincarnation is of great interest to Mr. Coelho ... Just think! He is a man who has achieved, (as Leonard Cohen would call it), 'a remote human possibility.' He has won lots of fame and tons of money. And yet, how his preoccupation with reincarnation—none other than an interest in being born again as somebody else—suggests that he is not happy!

also in the boom of the big bell there is a quaintness of tone which wakens feelings, so strangely far-away from all the nineteenth-century part of me, that the faint blind stirrings of them make me afraid, - deliciously afraid. never do I hear that billowing peal but I become aware of a striving and a fluttering in the abyssal part of my ghost, - a sensation as of memories struggling to reach the light beyond the obscurations of a million million deaths and births. I hope to remain within hearing of that bell... and, considering the possibility of being doomed to the state of a jiki-ketsu-geki, I want to have my chance of being reborn in some bamboo flower-cup, or mizutame, whence I might issue softly, singing my thin and pungent song, to bite some people that I know.

dear samantha i’m sorry we have to get a divorce i know that seems like an odd way to start a love letter but let me explain: it’s not you it sure as hell isn’t me it’s just human beings don’t love as well as insects do i love you.. far too much to let what we have be ruined by the failings of our species i saw the way you looked at the waiter last night i know you would never DO anything, you never do but.. i saw the way you looked at the waiter last night did you know that when a female fly accepts the pheromones put off by a male fly, it re-writes her brain, destroys the receptors that receive pheromones, sensing the change, the male fly does the same. when two flies love each other they do it so hard, they will never love anything else ever again. if either one of them dies before procreation can happen both sets of genetic code are lost forever. now that… is dedication. after Elizabeth and i broke up we spent three days dividing everything we had bought together like if i knew what pots were mine like if i knew which drapes were mine somehow the pain would go away this is not true after two praying mantises mate, the nervous system of the male begins to shut down while he still has control over his motor functions he flops onto his back, exposing his soft underbelly up to his lover like a gift she then proceeds to lovingly dice him into tiny cubes spooning every morsel into her mouth she wastes nothing even the exoskeleton goes she does this so that once their children are born she has something to regurgitate to feed them now that.. is selflessness i could never do that for you so i have a new plan i’m gonna leave you now i’m gonna spend the rest of my life committing petty injustices i hope you do the same i will jay walk at every opportunity i will steal things i could easily afford i will be rude to strangers i hope you do the same i hope reincarnation is real i hope our petty crimes are enough to cause us to be reborn as lesser creatures i hope we are reborn as flies so that we can love each other as hard as we were meant to.