by Suzy Charnas

Created on: June 17, 2008

I don't know for certain why we live; but lately I've had some ideas about an answer, prompted by a ten-year period of very vivid and memorable dreams. These dreams took me through what appeared to be one past life after another, with myself as the "central character" in each one - from the Viking navigator to the miller's wife, from the boy settling into a Tibetan monastery to study to the Egyptian tomb-worker getting a trepanning job to take care of a terrible headache (it worked), from a haulier feeding his pack horses brandy-soaked oats to keep them alive longer on the cold Russo-Polish border to the chanteyman on a medieval ship plying the waters off the coast of India, or the favorite wife of a great African explorer, or the French magistrate hiding from the Revolution he had initially supported, or the hired assassin working for a Middle Eastern warlord of centuries ago, and on and on and on.

I would look over my notes all wide-eyed and wondering (I was writing these things down because they were so unbelievably clear when I woke), and I began to think: suppose I have actually *lived* all these lives, and more; suppose that reincarnation isn't just a theory or a belief but reality?

But why? What would be the purpose of such a system, whatever its details (which vary from culture to culture wherever reincarnation is regarded as the rule), as opposed to a one-shot life as envisioned in traditional Christianity, Judaism, and Islam?

What I think I see here is this: that we are souls first, bodies second, and that souls come to the world and incarnate in it over and over in order to experience everything that can only be experienced *only as flesh*. We come here to do the physical phase of our existence. We come here to find the delights, and the horrors, of life in flesh, experiences which simply are not available to us as spirits *except* as incarnated in flesh and senses. So, why come back over and over? Because one limited little lifetime isn't nearly enough to comprehend the full range of what it means, what it *is*, to be souls living in animal bodies in a physical environment. The world is a very big, varied place; no one lifetime could even begin to give us a sample of this planet's magnificent variety, or of the manifold forms of human cultures, interactions, and relationships.

And if you do come back, over and over in different surroundings with different foci and different goals, surely, at long last, you would learn sympathy, and empathy, and compassion?

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