Reincarnation

From the Egyptians to the Greeks, to the Buddhists and the Hindus, the soul was considered a pre-existent entity which took up residence in a succession of bodies, becoming incarnate for a period, then spending time in the astral form as a disembodied spirit, but reincarnating time and time again. Each religion had its own belief that the soul existed as a part of man and was immortal. Somewhere between Judaism and Christianity, the west lost the ancient concept of reincarnation.

The world has always had inspirational leaders in a variety of fields of expertise. Many, such as, Aristotle, Leonardo di Vinci, Dante, Shakespeare, Benjamin Franklin and even General George Patton, were avid believers in reincarnation and spoke or wrote of their stance on the soul's immortality and life after death. Unfortunately, most of these writings are little known and somewhat difficult to locate. Because of the important content, I would like to share a few of them here, with you.

Henry David Thoreau wrote in "Letters":
"I lived in Judea eighteen hundred years ago, but I never knew that there was such a one as Christ among my contemporaries."

Albert Einstein wrote in "The World As I See It":
"I maintain that cosmic religious feeling is the strongest and noblest incitement to scientific research."

Walt Whitman, in "Song of Myself", wrote:
"And as to you, Life, I reckon you are the leaving of many deaths, (No doubt I have died myself ten thousand times before.)"

Thomas A. Edison wrote in "The Diary and Sundry Observations":
"I cannot believe for a moment that life in the first instance originated on this insignificant little ball which we call earth... The particles which combined to evolve living creatures on this planet of ours probably came from some other body elsewhere in the universe."

Ralph Waldo Emerson, nominalist and realist, wrote:
"It is the secret of the world that all things subsist and do not die, but only retire a little from site and afterward return again... Jesus is not dead; he is very well alive; nor John, nor Paul, nor Mahomet, nor Aristotle; at times we believe we have seen them all, and could easily tell the names under which they go."

Carl Gustav Jung, considered the founder of analytical psychology initially avoided addressing the possibility of reincarnation. Later in life he began his exploration and wrote:

"This concept of rebirth necessarily implies the continuity of personality. Here the human personality is regarded as continuous and accessible to memory, so that, when one is incarnated or born, one is able, at least potentially, to remember that one has lived through previous existences, and that these existences were one's own, i.e., that they had the same ego form as the present life. As a rule, reincarnation means rebirth in a human body."

"What happens after death is so unspeakably glorious that our imagination and our feelings do not suffice to form even an appropriate conception of it... The dissolution of our time-bound form in eternity brings no loss of meaning."

Marcus Tillius Cicero, (106 B.C. - 43 B.C.) is, to this day, considered the master of ancient Roman literary and oratory style. Cicero, an active Roman politician, is also considered one of the great philosophers of that time. In his composition, "On Old Age", he writes:

"The soul is of heavenly origin, forced down from its home in the highest, and, so to speak, buried in earth, a place quite opposed to its divine nature and its immortality..."

"It is again a strong proof of men knowing most things before birth, that when mere children they grasp innumerable facts with such speed as to show that they are not then taking them in for the first time, but remembering or recalling them."

Julius Caesar, a contemporary of Cicero's, concluded that the Celts were fearless warriors due to their belief in reincarnation. Caesar wrote:

"They wish to inculcate this as one of their leading tenets, that souls do not become extinct, but pass after death from one body to another..."

William James, renowned American psychologist and philosopher, delivered a significant science-based lecture, called "Human Immortality", at Harvard, in 1893. He later expanded his concepts to specifically include reincarnation. On this he wrote:

"... I am the same personal being who in old times upon the earth had those experiences."

Thomas H. Huxley wrote in "Essays Upon Some Controverted Questions":
"I am certain that I have been here as I am now a thousand times before, and I hope to return a thousand times."

Francis Bowen wrote in "Christian Metempsychosis":
"Why should it be thought incredible that the same soul should inhabit in succession an indefinite number of moral bodies? Even during this one life our bodies are perpetually changing, through a process of decay and restoration; which is so gradual that it escapes our notice. Every human being thus dwells successively in many bodies, even during one short life."