Reincarnation Directory

I’ve been thinking about setting up a reincarnation directory. I read an article in the New York Times about young people who said that they had other lives before they were born. They told stories about their lives with former families. And when those families were contacted to confirm whether the stories were true, all the facts checked out.

In many cases there were just no way that a child could have known so much about the deceased person who they said they were. And while still anecdotal, there are just too many stories like this.

In my family, we think of reincarnation as an obvious affair. We believe or feel with certainty that the soul is eternal and so we live our lives in such a way that we came from a former family and will likely go to a new one after we die. The Hindus and Buddhists fundamentally believe this too.

But as more stories come to the surface and as I have inklings of a former life in my meditations, I feel that it is odd to just consider this phenomena as just an interesting fact. There must be some value in actually contemplating on this truth and trying to gain value from it in our current life.

The whole idea of reincarnation is that we just keep coming back to experience more of what we want to experience or more of our karma. We come from a larger plane of existence and continuously experiment what life on earth is like.

From the perspective of the soul or consciousness - what you essentially are - the average 80 year life is like a second in the space-time continuum. So you might want 10 or 20 or 1000 seconds until you feel like you’re done with this experiment, after which you will choose not to return to earth.

From the perspective of the soul, it is in our best interest not to continue reincarnating and therefore we must release ourselves from the bondage or karma of this world to stop the cycle.

Karma is not always a negative affair, it might be that you wish to come back to have more sex or to reconcile an unpaid debt. The human mind sees each of these as positive or negative activities respectively, but the soul has no opinion, it is just here to experience life in all its glory.

But having said that, if it’s in the best interest of the soul not to continue reincarnating, it might be cool if we can track our incarnations. What if we could have a live directory of all the lives we’ve lived.

Once you die, everything that is associated with you dies with you, but the internet lives on. So what if over time we all become more aware of our incarnations and can track back to previous lives lived.

More than being cool, it might provide us with clues as to what karma we are here to release. Or what reasons we might have chosen to return. (As I write this, it starting to feel a bit Black Mirror vibes - but I’ll continue) What if we could optimize the journey for the soul, reduce the number of incarnations and thereby reduce our many experiences of suffering.

Or on a lighter note, maybe we could get clues about our passions, curiosities and former stories so we could use the wisdom therein to make faster leaps in each incarnation.

Maybe the road to making sense of life would be so much shorter if we had a way to ‘dial into’ experiences of former lives. Maybe we could grow up faster with the basics and then lean into more grander ideas of being human.

It does seem sort of odd to keep going through this cycle of love and fear. What if we could use such a directory as not just one life of wisdom but many lives of wisdom so that we might transcend fear altogether and build ourselves on the basis of love.

Maybe such a directory would allow us the space to not take ourselves so seriously because ‘we’ve been through it already,’ not rush through life to achieve our goals because a new one is not far away.

Maybe we can just take a moment to joke about the idea that we’re being up-cycled and take a minute to relax, put a pause on all this chaos and laugh into the abyss.

Stay tuned: I will think more deeply about what this directory could like and how you can record your life on it. And if all this sounds too weird, think of it as a loftier version of instagram where you do this anyway.

- Sameer

Note: Hit me up if you want to help me design such a space, we’ll talk more.