Paranormal & Fortean : Reincarnation Part One

Here I go. Ready to start a new series, one that I hope will have some things in it that everyone who visits here regularly can enjoy, learn new things-as I am at the same time I am doing it and hopefully will comment on with their own views, experiences, opinions-really anything! I am learning so much from the people that I link to and that comment here that it is truly amazing to me. The only things I will break up this series with are poetry and if the muse ever comes back to me examples of my writing. In this series there will be a chance for me to hopefully show a bit of my writing when I get to the part of it that is 'my story' and experience. I do have my experience written down already on paper, but not written in the style that I enjoy when my 'muse' comes for a visit. I definitely agree with wise woman-you can't rush or even beg for creativity to come-it just comes-no sense at all in fighting it. This series might end for a bit after awhile and return as I am also developing a theory or hypothesis as to the nature of the 'human reality' and the human soul. Even if 'my' hypothesis takes flight with anyone as I go along, I would never claim it as 'mine'. I am drawing on the work of a vast number of people, opinions, philosophies and religions-both in the mainstream and from the borderlands of our world that I take such delight in. I would also like to apologize for not having more examples of my writing here for folks to enjoy or criticize-I have a ton of 'bite sized' as in the previous examples I gave, of work done but have resolved not to post any more until it is as lengthy or longer than say my longest post in the H/A series. There is just -to me anyway no sense in posting writing I have done until it is a lot more polished. I am working on this also as I will work on this series.


The developing thoughts on my experience and that of trying to develop a 'new' theory of human reality and also thoughts along the lines of how big and incredibly strange, yet beautiful the universe or perhaps multi-verse we live in started coming to me in large parts from reading the men and women who blog under the category of synchromysticism. They also started developing when I began pondering on things like, 'what does our human reality look like from a higher dimension of space time', or from a timeless dimension. What constitutes a human soul? Are cycles of time (historical) in any way reflections of other historical periods? Perhaps the historical eras are 'spiralling' in such a way that 'time' to us is speeding up? Is there an archetypal realm, maybe the 'pleroma' talked about by the Gnostics and Carl Jung, that somehow projects itself into our daily three dimensional space and time? Are there different-maybe unimaginably so, realms of existence? Maybe there are an infinite number or 'planes' of existence? Do the psychic, synchromystic, UFO and paranormal experiences people have come from these other realms or planes of existence? Do the various religions and philosophies that believe in reincarnation and a multi-level view of reality provide a good 'map' to go by when talking about things like this? For tonight's kind of 'introduction post' I would just like to lightly touch on two or three of these questions.


What makes up a human soul or spirit? I have almost lived 15,000 days. During this time I have been so many different 'people'-indeed in the course of a day I think people can see they play many roles and their thoughts and moods change wildly, sometimes from hour to hour. How is it that I view myself as a continous being? I am a greatly different person not only from say 10 or 15 years ago, but even from a year ago. I only remember very little of those 15,000 days, some of the memories being wonderfully positive and of course some negative. With all of these gaps in my memories and the vagueness of some of them I can almost start to think that maybe people as different as the science fiction author Philip K. Dick and some modern philosphers and scientists might be on the right track when they talk of tales or theories that our memories 'lie' and that indeed that we only think of ourselves as continuous souls or beings based on these misperceptions. How do I know, going back to thinking on an earlier post-'Questions about the nature of reality', that I am not some 'program' that is run in a universal CPU-maybe named Devin version 2.0 :-). Maybe all of my thoughts, experiences, dreams only came into existence this very second? In my almost 15,000 days I have very few memories of my very young years and my life viewed over the vast panorama of human history-if indeed human history is 'as advertised' covers an immensely small portion-not to even speak of astronomical and geological time scales. Yet there has been this one area of feeling-maybe memories maybe not of perhaps being 'here' in a different historical period of perhaps 17 to 5 years before 'I' was born and in a greatly different culture than the one 'I' currently identify with.


In regards to other realms, levels or planes of existence I would like to give a very brief overview of one of the major religions that believes in reincarnation-yet very interestingly-says that there is no actual 'self', soul or person that is reincarnated-just a set of 'karmic' tendencies. I find this extremely intriguing because it gets back to issues that deal with the nature of the soul and personality. Tonight I will just touch on the different levels of reality this religion believes in because this is also central to my developing theory. Note to reader: There are different schools of thought in Buddhism-this is only the most generalized look at the belief structure.
1) Naraka beings, these beings exist in the hell realm or lowest realm in Buddhism. There are many different types of 'hell' in this religion and also levels. I wonder-could this realm be where we encounter such paranormal subjects as possession, 'bad' near death experiences and cases of malevolent hauntings, maybe this realm could even account for many UFO experiences that an abductee has that they consider terrifying. Also very interesting to me, in the UFO literature there have been encounters with occupants who tell the contactee that 'they' have no souls and are very curious about the human experience because humans do have souls and personalities.
2) The animal realm. This is pretty obvious and self-explanatory. Some sects in Buddhism think the animal realm overlaps the human realm but is obviously a different level.
3) The Preta or 'hungry ghost' realm. This level is sort of self explanatory. It should be noted that this realm to some schools of thought overlaps the human realm, but the beings are usually invisible to humans. It should also be noted that this level is only considered to be slightly above the hell realm and is a terrible one to be re-born in. In this level of reality the beings are always hungry but never sated. This can be with issues in the previous life such as addiction, emotional and psychological issues and the like. I wonder if many paranormal phenomena humans detect come from this realm also, involving hauntings, electronic voice phenomena, images of 'ghosts' on video and photos etcetera.
4) Human realm. Very obvious here-our realm. The human realm as good or as horrible as it can be depending upon the immense varieties of human experience is considered a very good one to be born in if the human uses it to break the cycle of suffering and re-birth, samsara. I will get much more into the topics of karma, samsara and maya later in the series.
5) The Asura realm. I have always found this realm to be somewhat confusing as to exactly what it is supposed to represent. This realm is not recognized by Theravada Buddhism. This is the realm of the demons, titans, low deities and 'gods' who are always fighting. As much as this realm is sometimes confusing to me it also fascinates because I wonder if many synchromystic and archetypal phenomena could emanate from here and I also wonder if some of the vast variety of experience in the UFO/abductee literature might be explained by this plane of existence. Many people who have had ultra-terrestrial contact have felt they were in the prescence of beings not completely friendly to human beings and also some who have had these experiences appear to be in contact with an archetypal realm. I have wondered if this could be the realm that the archons and demiurge of Gnosticism have their foundation and being in. Perhaps this realm could also be were the ancient gods of Egypt, Greece and Rome emanate from.
6) The Deva realm. This is the highest and most glorious of the realms. The 'heaven' plane of existence. This realm would include brahmas, gods, high deities and beings and what we would think of as angels. Reincarnation into some of the various heavens or Pure Abodes can only be attained by beings who have conquered being caught in the constant cycle of death and re-birth.

The image is of Salvador Dali's, Gala~Abraham Lincoln. I included it in this post because in this series I want to explore how deeply we may all be connected to each other and various other places in our own and other levels of reality. I hope to anyone reading the first post of this series I did not throw out too many things at once and that I made some subjects as clear as possible. Believe me by the time I am done with the series I hope to make everything I post about into as seamless and connected a 'theory' as I can. I would greatly welcome any comments about anything I talked about in this post or any experiences people who read it may have had and any criticisms also. I also want to give these two links to wikipedia because I will be returning later to these religious philosophies and others as I go along. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buddhism
and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gnosticism