Maybe in one sense there are different starting points. I've heard that one personality can split further. Thus, there might be two persons, or four, who could legitimately claim to be the reincarnation of some one individual. The various personalities we see, each seemingly with his own mind, is actually the product of a split mind, the mind of the proverbial prodigal son. This makes us all old souls, so to speak. There is an ultimate unity, if you go back further and further in time. Technically, there is no such thing as a split mind, but it is an illusion the prodigal son was able to "manifest" through the magic of imagination and faith. As there are not really more than one mind, there is not more than one "soul". So the next time a christian accuses you of being involved in the original sin, accept it. But also tell them that you also accept, and admit, that you participated in the making of this world. I mean, if you're going to be laden with so much blame and responsibility, you may as well go one step further and take all the blame, and all the responsibility. That's actually what Jesus did, and why he has this reputation as having taken all the sins of the world upon his shoulders. Yes, in theory, that's what he did. But he also washed himself clean by the waters of truth. In truth, all sin is bogus, false, void and moot. This is why he also gained the reputation as having no sin. First you accept responsibility for all sin, then you realize, in truth, that sin does not actually exist, since sin is all that is untrue, including itself. Sin, technically, is a lie, more specifically, a self deception. it's about remembering. So some of us, like this little kid, remembered a past life without much effort, probably because the end was so traumatic. It is actually possible to remember all one's past lives, as did the ascended masters, but more importantly, it is possible to remember a condition before any incarnations ever began to manifest. If you go back far enough, you will remember what i call "Christ", but which has no name. You remember your nameless Self. This is the basis of what Jesus was saying about "Do this in remembrance of Me", as is commonly repeated at the "Lord's Supper". By taking a loaf of bread and breaking it up into pieces, each representing a person, he was pointing back to an original unity, and how the breaking up of the original unity is what manifests individuals. The same starting point, so to speak. Also, the wine, distributed from one cup to all the individuals. And saying, "this is my blood, given for you.". He is saying that the existence of individuals depends upon the destructive killing of the original unity, specifically, the original Self, which i call "Christ". Not one so called christian has yet to admit this. But unless we admit it, there is no way we can remember the original Self. It's actually the other way round. Christ is not a substitute for people. People are substitutes for Christ. It's people who are the dying and dead Christ. To substitute for Christ, you must first kill the memory of Christ. Indeed, everything a substitute does, is against Christ in some fashion or another. This is the basis for the famous "Either you are for or against me" claim of a dichotomy of enmity. Especially in laying claim to existence and calling it "life". Substitutes are not actually alive. But if they were, they would be in direct competition with Christ for Christ's attributes. Kind of like identity theft on a grand scale. Anyways, substitution is so foreign to Christ that they cannot coexist. So either Christ lives, and people die. Or, Christ dies, and people live. This is the status quo. And not a good thing. And yet, people actually continue to hope it's true that Christ can die. They hope to be washed by "blood" and not actually the truth. Anyway, the remembrance of Christ, the Self, is the END of any other so-called self. There is no coexistence. No shared experience. One experiences one or the other, but not both, not at the same time, not ever. This is the basis of the saying, "Unless you lay down your life for MY SAKE, then you will lose your life". The reason people will lose their life unless they lay their individuality down for Christ, is because Christ WAS (and still is) their life. There is no other life. When the entire split mind, and all its pieces remember the original condition, then is the end of the material world. It ends as individual pieces and parts of a split mind, admit, and realize, that the material world never even began.
BTW, this YouTube came into my feed and i though i would post it here. It's another example of children remembering things, and parents doing research. YouTube is chock full of these anymore. There is even one boy who remembers going down with one of the buildings in 911. But this one is noteworthy because it emphasizes what i've said about how we change genders and races in between incarnations. This this case, the child changed both gender and race. Possibly, he didn't have much choice in the matter? Since he said he was thown back (to earth) by "god". Definitely not something a christian would want to hear? They are hoping to be reincarnated in the grand resurrection as part of an elite group. Not like this. This would be a good time to mention the position of the two ascended masters that were appearing to the man i mentioned earlier. While yes, reincarnation is a phenomenon which we experience while we have yet to ascend, it is not anything we need to actually believe. But at the same time, they are equally adamant about the need to disbelieve everything we see (taste, smell, hear, feel) and experience, including the incarnation we are experiencing at the moment. Experiences are not realities, just as if we were to have experiences if we took some harsh drugs. Those experiences are induced by the mind, a wayward mind, usually, and so is the experience of incarnation. They insist it is technically not actually happening. To the extent we believe it, we remain rather trapped by it. The ideologies we believe in, deep in our collective psychology, are like a harsh drug. So, skepticism is not actually a bad thing. It can be very productive if applied to the right cause. Disbelieving reincarnation, while believing in incarnation is not a virtue worth signaling. Believing, if you've read much of what i've said in the past, is not a virtue. It is actually the water that sin swims in. (S.I.N.~ Seriously Insane Notions about Christ) It's important to consider that Good knows everything, and believes nothing, while mankind believes everything, and knows nothing. The exact opposite. (This is why it is so silly to insist that God appears in the flesh. It's hypocritical, imo, or cognitively dissonant, to contest the changes that transgender activists insist are true, while at the same time insisting that God has truly trans-morphed into everything Good is actually not.) Appearance is the key word here. Man remains an image which appears. if you can see men, or women, there is a very specific reason deep within one's psychological ideology going back before time began (which it really didn't). If faith (belief) was removed from that ideology, man, and his entire environs would then disappear. I am just mentioning this because if more people were aware of this, if people were a little less bigoted and this was allowed to seep into the political conversation, we wouldn't have arguments anymore about race and gender, which are currently heating up to red hot, to where people are actually starting to experience pain and suffering. The left seems to be just as bigoted about this as the right. The left is playing identity politics, pandering to subgroups of minorities to hopefully bind them together into a fascist bundle of reeds that, individually can be broken, but together, can't be broken at the polls, seeking money (ie reparations) and power. You can only play those politics if you insist that each person's race or gender, whatever they are currently claiming to be, is WHAT they ARE. Meanwhile, the right continues to insist that whatever you are currently born as, then that is WHAT you ARE, by gods design, permanently imprinted forever. If that were true, i would still be a baby. But mankind is observably a creature that is under continual and constant change. Arguably, without that change, mankind would not exist. That is, in order to make man, or to make himself into a man (or woman) the prodigal son needed to change the otherwise changeless Christ, only to condemn himself to constant change in order to "exist". Both sides are wrong because they are too bigoted to see the bigger picture. Nothing that we change into, between incarnations, or during incarnations, is WHAT we ARE. Neither will concede to the evidence presented here, and thus, are condemned to a political life where gnashing of the teeth never ceases. So i argue that it might be helpful for society if people were to at least temporarily "believe" this evidence. If someone were, to my face, insist they were, say, black; i would ask them first how long they have been black. Maybe they will give their age. But no matter what their age, i would insist that they can only qualify to be black if, out of the last 1000 incarnations, they were black at least 51% of the time. In which case they would also be a Democrat.
Christians will believe anything. The young kiddie should make for a very fine Republican politician when he grows up, perhaps even surpassing Trump in the bs stakes.
Very interesting perspective and thanks for devoting so much time to that post. You put a lot of effort into clearly and interestingly stating your beliefs but then brought it all undone with your very last paragraph. Perhaps the last sentence is a quip? Nonetheless,it undoes your credibility as a freethinker and philosopher without agenda.
The last sentence is a quip. Some sarcasm. People take race way, way too seriously. So yes, if someone were to make claims on race to my face, i would challenge it, maybe even sarcastically. They clearly do not admit, as evidence, in the little court of a bigoted mind, the possibility of reincarnation, many times, as every possible race, gender and creed. I don't have a lot of patience for this kind of bigotry, because its so easy to break out of. So at some point, in order to get anything out of the conversation, i have to get at least a laugh. Of course, you don't have to qualify over 1000 lifetimes, nor does one need to be 51% a particular race to qualify as that race. The quip is ridiculous and is intended to emphasize just how ridiculous it is to insist that one is one particular race, or another, based on one birth. The political party that is playing that card the heaviest, these days, is the one playing identity politics, the Democrats, to whom 51% ought to be meaningful. However, i do come down on the Republicans, which contain the most people who insist that what you are born as, this most recent incarnation, is WHAT you ARE, as if this is not changeable, when we are changing all the time. It's not a coincidence, either, that blacks vote Democrat, as a block, 90% together, in response to decades of pandering, a number which is down from 95%, and now rapidly decreasing each year. Voting, based on race, is, imo, bigotry in regards race (ie racism). It's ridiculous. We will know the US is no longer racist when blacks vote 50% for either party, within a margin of, say, 10%, one way or another. This would be a normal spread among free-thinkers. Anyone who would insist emphatically, they are one particular race or another, is, imo, a racist, and their political party too. It's the seriousness with which people take their politics which really condemns them to a lifetime of gnashing of the teeth. Hence the need to laugh, especially when all one's comedians have become angry activists.
%% AMEN; i love Jesus Christ king of kings+ king David + king Solomon's Proverbs. Jesus Christ, aka Alpha + omega [a+ z in English]
I could say smoke and mirrors, but I won't. Like trying to describe fish or fishing, to everyone, they have a different emotion and experience.
Few understand that the parable of the prodigal son is a revision of history, a new understanding of cosmology, the story of the beginning and the ending (alpha and omega) of the phenomenon of the material world. Few understand that this was Jesus own story, making him the alphas and omega, but that it is also our own story, given the unity at the beginning, and the unity at the end. If you were a follower of Jesus' 2000 years ago, and you looked just like him, like a twin, would you love him enough to try to get him sprung from Roman custody, just before the crucifixion, by substituting yourself for him, and taking his place? Either through bribery or trickery?