REINCARNATION Is reincarnation the most bogus idea anyone ever came up with, or what? Try as I might, I can't seem to come up with any possible usefulness for a past life that I can't remember. You say, "I've got a past life, but I don't remember it," to which I must respond, "Then what the hell difference does it make?" If you can't remember it, it's the same as if you never had it. But even if you could remember it, what’s the point? It's water under the bridge. What the hell difference could it possibly make? I suppose that some people want to believe in it so much because they can't stand the thought of dying and being gone forever. It's something they just can't comprehend, and therefore accept. So they've come up with something that seems to prove that maybe we don't just dissipate like some sort of gaseous cloud. Actually, when you think about it, it is a little more profound. Not only is the prospect of death looming before us, of being gone forever, but the very real possibility that it will then become as if we never existed, which is what death appears to be. But if that is the case, we should have no fear because it has already happened. There has already been a time when we didn’t exist, the time before our life, which I have elsewhere (The One Thing) referred to as our prior death. And whatever else we say about that death, one item especially should stand out above all others: it didn’t seem to have the power to keep us from being here now. Indeed, as Alan Watts pointed out, the nothing is where we seem to be coming from at each and every moment:
When I ask myself the seemingly meaningless question of what it is like to be nothing and never to have been, I think first of the way my own head looks to my eyes. For, going by the sense of sight alone, there is not, right behind the eyes, a dark place, or a hazy place. There is a positive sensation of nothing – which is quite different from saying that there isn’t anything, because, after all, I see out this nothingness. (The Reality of Reincarnation, 1972)
From this highly intriguing observation, Watts arrives at the conclusion that the possibility of reincarnation is indeed a viable one:
It strikes me as utterly amazing that I did indeed come from this nothing. If I came from it once, I see no reason why I could not come from it again; for if, as is indeed the case, I did come from it once, this nothingness is, to say the least, unexplainably frisky.
Interestingly enough, modern physics agrees, the nothing is amazingly “frisky.” As a matter of fact, I suggested in The One Thing, that twentieth-century physics provided us with one of the major discoveries of science, right up there with learning that the earth is round, when it delved deeply enough into the structure of matter to see that it is mostly nothing. But the corollary to that discovery is equally compelling. Not only is all the something mostly nothing, all of the nothing is mostly something! The so-called vacuum of space is literally boiling with activity with "virtual particles" coming to be and passing away all the time. But, be that as it may, I’ve got to stick to my original position. Okay, so you’ve got a past life. Well, hooray for you. What are you doing with this one? That’s what I’d like to know. To spend too much time trying to find a previous one seems like a waste of the present one. Somehow, it seems like you’re supposed to be doing more with your present life than searching for evidence of a past one. Where Did Everything Come From?
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