Does Reincarnation Really Happen, And If It Does, Can We Really Choose Our Parents?

This post contains adult themes and the subject of suicide. It contains other themes that some may find disturbing.

In this question and one long answer on Quora, I found the subject I had read about earlier: people who claimed to be reincarnated. They sometimes, as children, remember their past lives (but most vividly their deaths) and remarkable things happen. There are many stories of highly detailed accounts of people remembering their lives in the past, to the point where they can speak foreign languages, give their fathers instructions for installing brakes on a car, identify the house they lived in and, again, how they died in exacting, gruesome detail. One person recalled being burned, then being above their blackened body, watching medics put it into a body bag — everything that would be done for such a casualty.

These people report a place, afterward, where they sat and a being with a blindingly lit face offered them a choice as to what their next life would be, starting with a compulsory selection of who their parents would be.

This really disturbs me. It supposes that there is some predestination, some element of fate involved, a concept I disagree with. Yet even in that disagreement, I find no way to argue against it, as it does not seem to cancel our everyday freedom of choice. We still live and make our own daily and long-term decisions.

Or do we?

You know what this seems like to me?

Total Recall. As in, the films. Both were awesome movies but dissimilar. Arnold’s blockbuster was a pretty weird and funny science fiction thriller, while Colin Farrell, Kate Beckinsale and Jessica Biel chewed up the big screen in 2012. Sorry, but I like both movies equally. The 2012 version is much darker, and didn’t need to exploit little people or use a fake breast prosthetic (with 3 breasts!) to make it weird. Arguably, Kate Beckinsale was a sexier and far more terrifying antagonist than Sharon Stone, Farrell was more action and less one-liner-silly than Arnold, and Biel was so good that we fell in love with her.

Some might even have imagined another movie with Beckinsale and Biel in an MA-rated love scene. Okay, I lied. I don’t know if some people imagined that.

But I did. And I’m still in love with both of them.

Wait a minute, what was I writing about? Hold on while I scroll up and see.

Okay. The concept that one soul, between lives, gets to choose their next gender and even their parents.

Look, it’s 19:21 and I’m just now on my morning coffee. Be patient, I have feelings, you know.

Wait, okay? Can I help it if I ran out of coffee last night and had a long, drugged, peaceful sleep, nightmare-free, and willed myself back to sleep about fifteen times until 16:00?

No, of course not. We all want just one night like that. I wish we had more of them. Uh…what was I talking about again?

Oh. Our hero, Quaid. He got to sleep with Kate Beckinsale and Jessica Biel. Don’t you just hate him?

Shit. Where was I?

Oh, the Recall thing. Idea was, you paid your credits and they’d download memories of anything you wanted into your brain. Far fetched science fiction, but very well done.

The suggestion that one is “between lives” and gets to choose their next parents, is, frankly, disturbing. One woman had a miscarriage or stillborn baby. Later, she gave birth to a son. As he learned to speak, he told her, “Do you remember the baby you had in your stomach? I made him go away so I could be born. I picked you.”

That’s about as creepy as anything I’ve ever read. As a spirit, he killed a baby in his mother’s womb?

If it’s hard to swallow, welcome to the club. But, what if?

Then there was a case where an even more disturbing concept was presented. It involved a spirit who chose to be born to pedophiles. Yes, it seems that between lives the being with the glowing face can give you “previews”. You can still accept or reject the parents you’re shown.

One individual chose abusive parents because he or she wanted to protect others from being born to those parents. They also reported feeling that it was better to be a victim than a perpetrator.

Another little girl described being trapped in a tight space and drowning. She told her mother about it. She said she picked her mother. Instead of being unreceptive, her mother described being a Native American mother who searched for her missing daughter. She found the child dead under a layer of ice in a river or large stream. She held her daughter and said, “I looked and looked for you, but it was too late.

Another child said to a mother who lost her father at age 11, “You were my child now I am yours”.

The case of the drowned girl choosing the same soul to be her mother is touching and puts forth the idea that we may get not just second chances, but do-overs. A mulligan in real life.

This part of reincarnation is new to me. It is frightening but heartening at the same time and naturally makes me question why, if I had such a choice, I would have chosen my evil, sick parents.

Why would I do such a thing?

Of course science rejects all of this out of hand. I love science, despite rarely understanding it. I get good articles out of livescience though, and they’re great for the average reader.

Wait. What’s an average reader?

Americans are becoming less literate. Really. Remember when I complained about the media using the word “tout” when I’ve never once heard it spoken aloud in my presence? There are worse examples.

Deja Vu All Over Again

Since we’re talking about memories of past lives, let’s talk about Deja vu (sic). The French meaning is “already seen” and has nothing to do with the feeling that one has been somewhere before when they know they haven’t.

More and more, I attribute such a feeling as a memory or cognitive misfire in the brain, or a normal event we do not know how to take and cannot understand. I rarely accept reincarnation as a cause of the feeling unless the person experiencing it can add detail which can be checked. Many of those cases have been followed up by researchers and often, the stories and details do match to the degree that it’s possible. It could all be real.

But the news media is guilty. A simple yet egregious grammatical error which gets used all the time is “Deja vu all over again” and quite simply, it is redundant and should be glaring to people who have degrees in communications. Perhaps we’re too far gone. Soon, English will no longer be anything but gibberish.

Where was I?

Oh! Past lives. Well, I’ve had memories that I cannot explain. I’ve written about them before so I won’t rehash them, but two seem to have taken place in Maryland. Now if I chose my parents and was given a peek ahead, would I have done it because I wanted to be in Maryland? That thought connected to a mystery which has plagued me to no end.

The out of place memories aren’t nice. One was about losing a woman I loved.

Did I think, or was I shown, some scene where I found her, also in her next life?

Because, and this part bothers me, as for most of my life I have been stuck with a mental picture of a woman’s face. A beautiful woman with long, straight, black or dark brown hair. Long ago, she would have worn a hat. I can tell you that she was taken by a man in a buggy drawn by a horse or a double team. I watched helplessly, couldn’t stop it. I believe I may have committed suicide afterward. I later found the house that I believe I was staying at the time.

That’s an experience that will have you sleeping with the lights on.

In the last century I have a memory of sitting with a woman on a beach watching the sunset. Her face I can’t see. Could any decision I possibly have made “between lives” have been to find her again? If it happened during World War Two, and other memories lead me to believe it did, and the beach scene was before I shipped out, never to return, could I be searching through time for what some people call a “soul mate”? Because obviously, in order to pick your own parents, you would need to be conscious that you are in fact a soul without a body. You would probably remember everything about any and all past lives. You would be aware that others go through the same thing. A process, if you will. If you have ever loved someone with an intensity such that their loss so damaged you that you never truly recovered from it, would you choose horrible parents if you knew that there was a chance to find your lost love in your next life?

I dare say that not many would turn down the chance, because love like that is, in my eyes, quite rare. I think you and I would gladly endure anything to find our soul mates again.

In “this life”, I’ve always been romantically attracted to women with long, straight hair of black or very dark brown. That’s confusing. A source of frustration and puzzlement. I never understood. And yes, all my life I’ve seen her; even as I think of my earliest memories.

Could be why I loved Kate Beckinsale so much in Total Recall. She looked like what I saw in my mind.

****

A therapist once told me something without even pausing to think about it. I missed someone I loved, but was never with. It was after my father’s business, East-West Trucking, folded. I couldn’t stop thinking about her. I did love her, but I was worried that I might be obsessed. So I asked if the therapist thought so.

“No, thinking about her isn’t obsession and I believe you love her, but I think she also reminds you of someone else.”

And that could be true.

But if the woman I loved at the time was the one from the past, we missed each other. When we met, we were both married with children. No relationship was possible.

But something remains unanswered. What about choosing parents who wouldn’t love me, instead causing great trauma? One person claimed it was better to be a victim than a perpetrator. If he was only given two sets of parents to choose from, then holy shit.

I would not want to see his other choice.

Another claimed to know that if they lived hard lives they would be motivated to teach, and help others. While that may not seem to make sense, people with answers like those can be considered “old souls” whose past lives have been difficult, and there have always been many of them. They choose adversity to gain knowledge and therefore to help, as an example to others and as being experienced and worthy of trust from those in times of need and great pain seeking counsel.

I don’t know. I’d like to believe that someone can get a chance to prove their soul is better than what God may not wish to judge them them to be after a life ends. I’d like to think old souls volunteer to go through horrors to help others. That’s noble, a rare human quality.

But losing your soul mate and never being able to be close to them again?

That’s so sad that I cannot readily believe that God would put us through that. And I also still find predestination problematic theologically, scientifically and therefore improbable.

But it does make one think.

And that’s always a good thing.