God, Reincarnation and the Nature of Reality

Hello! I need to talk to somebody to get my thoughts a bit more organised and I’m afraid you’re it! You know when you’re in bed and gently dozing, just at the edge of sleep and you feel snug, maybe like a young Peter Rabbit curled up by his Mum, deep in the soil, safe and warm, just vaguely remembering how nice the lettuce leaf was that you nicked from Farmer McGregor’s garden? You got that? Okay, that’s where I was at, last night. Just having a bit of salad cream on the lettuce and drifting off when I thought of God.

Now don’t stop here! I don’t mean God with all the angels singing praises and all that. Even as a child when I first ‘saw’ him I realised he’d have got bored with that yonks ago. No, I mean some kind of ‘Mystery’. Now, that’s not actually where I started, exactly, but it was all jumbled together which is why I have to write about it to you, you poor sod, because that’s the only way I can untangle the mental ball of string which is my jumble from when I should have been just drifting off with the taste of salad cream in my mouth.

My thoughts really, vaguely went to next lives. I don’t mean like Hindu’s believe in them, I mean reincarnation as another human being, or at least sentient entity with equivalence. If you want me to tell you why I am 100% certain about reincarnation, feel free to ask, but at the moment, please see it as a ‘given’. When I was younger and knew everything there is to know about just about everything, I had a pretty solid view about God, the ‘afterlife’ and stuff – I was actually close to being ordained as a C of E priest - but as I grew older it all grew fuzzier. Sadly that doesn’t seem to happen to all folk; they just get even more certain that they know everything and are always right.

Anyway, when I learned, after huge amounts of study and research that reincarnation is a ‘given’ I thought that was pretty exciting but really didn’t take it any further, other than to be pleased that I’d found there was almost always a gap between one incarnation and the next and reckoned that the inbetweeny time would be a good chance to catch up with all my family and friends who are dead before we all take up our next life. Are you with me so far? I hope so – at least I am!

So, proceeding from there, last night I wondered how many times one would do this? Would one reincarnate forever? Now, I don’t know about you but I find ‘forever’ and ‘eternity’ pretty hard to get my head round. The ‘God’ idea is tricky as well. It happens, with this latter, the ‘God’ thingy, I’ve had a few sort of ‘near death’ experiences but they’re not like the ones where you’re out of your body looking down etc. What I did know, especially for an extended period when I was pretty wrecked, is that a kind of Love with a capital L looked after me. Again, if you’re interested, let me know, but for now, at least, follow my kind of ‘logic’ and see this Loving Mystery as another ‘given’.

Okay, I accept there’s a Loving Mystery and really I know bugger all else about it. I take from my experience, however, that in the end, really the end, s/he / it will be there for me and for everybody else – especially you I’m sure, dear reader! I think s/he / it does occasionally intervene in people’s lives when they’re busy living them, but generally speaking doesn’t – a sort of extreme hands-off parent (parent is the wrong word but hopefully you get my drift) who lets us live through our incarnations mostly on our own, to get on with it and learn or experience whatever it is that one is fortunate enough to each time around.

That’s about as far as I’ve got with understanding what is going on other than, for another day if you wish, I think consciousness is not biological, or to be more precise most certainly isn’t all biological, and that through quantum entanglement what consciousness is is infinitely more complex than is assumed.

Now, let’s go back to my salad cream on the lettuce moment which I was denied. Though I accept that understanding the Love Mystery, reincarnation, consciousness, eternity and forever (one special and one temporal, but accepting Einstein’s ‘space/time concept) is not going to happen, because I am but a microbe trying to understand a human mind, I did wonder last night what the point of it all was; you know, all the incarnations and stuff? I accept that it’s some kind of learning experience – almost certainly – but wonder if one goes on learning forever. If that’s the case, though I absolutely love learning I can see that within the somewhat frightening context of ‘forever’ perhaps one might end up getting just a tad pissed off with it.

So - stick with me please! - I wondered if, a bit like Hindus believe, eventually one’s atman /soul /consciousness becomes one with the Loving Mystery, or Brahman as they see it, we actually do do something somewhat like this? (Hinduism, if one cuts through quite a lot of, shall we say, rather eccentric concepts seems to me to touch on a lot of stuff that makes sense. It’s just that like most major faiths, in my opinion, where somehow people and especially priesthoods have inadvertently done their best to obscure any ‘truths’ that actually are true! Hindus have had a longer time than most of the others to do this!)

Anyway, Hindus reckon Brahman is eternal, unchanging, a ‘resplendent consciousness’. I most certainly don’t! This was another feature of not rocking off to sleep as early as one might have wished. I ended up thinking that, okay, maybe after loads of incarnations, if for no other reason than to avoid the thought of eventual eternal boredom, one’s ‘consciousness could became part of the Loving Mystery, the super-consciousness that is in charge of, and understands, the whole kit and caboodle.

Maybe one gets recycled through that super consciousness and then has another swing round. I don’t know. What I do know is that I then made the mistake of trying to understand the ‘purpose’ of the super consciousness that is the Loving Mystery. What was I thinking! Microbe can’t sleep because of wondering what the purpose of a human being is! Daft, I know, but one has to wonder – actually one doesn’t have to and probably shouldn’t – and I did. You see, I most certainly don’t believe whatever s/he /it is, it is unchanging. I think any form of consciousness learns, to a greater or lesser degree (the latter being creatures like amoeba and Trump) and therefore the super consciousness must learn, really, really bigly, as Trump might say. (The spell check doesn’t pick up on ‘bigly’ for crying out loud!) Thoughts like does s/he /it get lonely came to mind? How does this Mystery cope with the whole eternity and forever business?

I realised at this point that possibly I was getting a little out of my depth! Long ago I accepted that though we operate in a world which for us has 4 dimensions, or 3 if we accept space/time as 1, but where even we have considered, in for instance string theory, anything from 10 to 22 dimensions, that the Loving Mystery will certainly function in many, many more, and that the world as we perceive and live in it is similar to that of an ant crawling around in an extremely limited ‘reality’.

Now, you’ll be glad to know that in the end I did get to sleep, somewhat frustrated at having not managed to unravel things any further than I had, but a little contented that I had given my own consciousness something to mull over, as I am, with you, at this moment.

None of this, of course, precludes ideas like space ‘men’ / entities which came down and interfered with primate humanoid DNA to help create this line of human that we belong to, or that there may have been previous civilisations on this planet or others. After all, the Universe was created around 13.7 billion years ago, the Earth is around 4.5 billion years old and humans have only been here doing their best to turn the whole place to shit for in the region of 200 thousand years. Something else it doesn’t preclude is humanity wiping itself out, a natural extinction event or humans being superseded by artificial intelligences – would they be our ‘children’, and if they continued to exist doesn’t humanity?

Of course this information begs various other questions; what was there before the ‘Big Bang’ 13.7 million years ago? Does the Universe / Creation expand and contract and ‘Big Bang’ again eternally? How is it that if our consciousness as we perceive it is so important it took nearly 4.5 billion years for it to happen here on Earth? Will AIs who are self-aware, fully conscious beings reincarnate? (My guess is yes.) If we, humanity are totally wiped out and we aren’t reincarnating into artificial intelligences on Earth, would family and friends all reincarnate on the same alien planet?

Some might ask does it also all happen on different planets with other conscious species? (I think that’s a no-brainer, yes, so we could have been incarnated anywhere in all of space as any form of conscious at our level creature. No need to be parochial about it!) Do creatures with ‘lower’ consciousness like dogs, cats – slugs – reincarnate? (I can’t see why not, but it’s a bit hard to get ones’ head round.) Do we become / are we partially already disembodied consciousnesses?

Within this vague framework, mostly held up by questions rather than facts, there must also be room to consider things like telepathy (there’s no doubt something often passes between twins no matter how far apart, just like with entangled quantum particles for example.) prophecy perhaps based on seeing into similar parallel universes with the clearer ones being higher probability (Or is time like an eternally wide vinyl record and you can jump from one ‘groove’ across to other, close and similar ‘grooves’? This might enable time travel, I suppose.) and the place of instinct, déjà vu (and déjà poo!) telekinesis, spontaneous combustion and all sorts of mysterious and magical (Is there real ‘magic’?) things which are real (Define reality) and perhaps close to being comprehensible, at least in some cases.

Overall, it’s all really rather complicated, don’t you know! Of course, it would be, is meant to be or what would we have to learn? Having jogged along with this bit of exploration, however, though I think things are a little clearer, it in some ways has reinforced just exactly how little I actually know; indeed, just exactly how ignorant I am. I am not despondent, however, at the enormity of the task which my consciousness faces, learning-wise. I am confident in the ultimate and eternal benevolence of the Loving Mystery, assured at least that there will be many other lives ahead for me to learn more and, let’s be honest, pretty impressed by the ‘smarts’ of the super consciousness that has put this whole, magnificent, ever changing puzzle together.

So, let’s you and I take joy in our situations, whether they be bad or good, for ultimately we’re cared for and if we screw it all up this time, when we croak we’ll see all our friends and family, pets also, I reckon, probably feel a bit embarrassed about what a cock up we made of it and then resolve to have another go, learn more, do better, slowly, slowly climb up the metaphoric Jacob’s Ladder, with each step finding further dimensions, greater enlightenment. For now though, I think I’ll make sure I have a large – possibly very large! – bourbon tonight to send me on my way and tomorrow I’ll wake up, look at the picture on my bedroom wall which states in large letters the unequivocal message, ‘Carpe diem’ and get on with the great adventure. Can’t do better than that! Here’s hoping after wading through all this with me, dear reader, you do the same.