Pack Creek Ranch, San Juan County, Utah
February 2025 – mild winter weather continues – cold, clear nights, mild, clear days, no wind or snow or even frost. Getting a little monotonous.
REINCARNATION
Hinduism is often called the world’s oldest religion. Its history and beliefs are also the most complex. It has no founder, no basic book, many deities, and an estimated more than 1.1 billion followers. Even the largely western practice of Yoga has its roots in ancient Hindu tradition.
Basic to most forms of Hinduism is the belief in reincarnation. Life and death are circular – the soul does not cease to exist but returns to life in another persona. And in that next life, one is rewarded or punished for the deeds in a previous life. Many Hindus believe that animals – cows, for example – have souls and a person may be reincarnated as a cow and vice-versa.
Hold that thought.
I would like to believe in reincarnation, and so I wonder:
If my soul returns to a temporal body, will I have the same brain?
And will that body return to the same place and time?
My cultural matrix until 16 was conservative Southern Baptist Christianity. The Bible, my church, and my mother said that the righteous went to heaven when they died and the wicked went to hell, and that was that. When I left home and went out into the world to seek my own ways and thinking, I began to change my mind.
Now, I do not want to go to heaven when I die.
I want to come back here and go around again and again.
And I think the Hindus are on to something.
(Keep in mind that I make no claim to being sensible and rational.)
This wiggy thinking reflects the wish that I would have an improved brain each time I returned. The brain I have was not wired to be multilingual. Nor did my culture or environment or education support speaking more than English.
Next time I want a brain wired for easy language acquisition.
What languages you may ask?
Music – I want to be able to readily read those black marks.
Sign Language (ASL) – I’d like to be able to speak with my hands.
Braile – To read with my fingertips.
Math and Physics have a unique language I’d like to know.
Shorthand would come in handy.
There are at least 6,000 active, functional languages plus dialects. Not all the spoken languages have written alphabets. Students of linguistics say there have been 100,000 or more – but many of them are now defunct – no longer spoken.
As I write this, I realize that where I live in Utah, there are at least 7 active languages – English, Ute, Navajo, Hopi, Spanish, Apache, and a growing mix of English and Spanish – Spanglish.
Language is a flowing river not a series of infinite ponds.
Enough.
The Photo Above
The painting of the cow on roller skates.
For many years I had a conversation with a scholar of comparative religion. When I shared the thinking with him I’ve just shared with you, he once said that if the Hindu vision of reincarnation was true, and he factored in what he knew about me, he predicted that I would likely return as a multilingual cow.
But on roller skates? Why not?
Now you know.