Okay, Iāve asked here some of the questions raised here.
Concerning the āwho decides?ā thing, she does say there is a godly judgement involved in deciding who gets reincarnated as what. She says she rejects pantheism.
Cirdan:
Many reincarnationist theories (RTās) are not pantheistic, so that fits. In some RTās there is no one who makes or sets up the rules. Each soul decides for itself, usually with lots of baggage from that pesky past life. In other RTās certain souls achieve higher states and are considered āteachers.ā In still others, loose souls can choose a consensus type of rule, and impose, or, at least, suggest it to their brethren. So, thereās lots of discord. Oh, and by the way, it lends itself well to the instantiation of ānewā RTās and practices.
I once spoke to an RT believer who told me that when souls are loose, thereās no rhyme or reason where said soul ends up next; thereās no dictate that specifies that the ensuing life form be human. He said that theyāre cult believes that a loose soul could end up in any life form.
Of course, I asked if that also meant bacteria, to which he replied, āYes. And, even plants.ā
I said that if I get to choose, Iād like not to find myself in an amoeba in some forsaken sludge pond, somewhere. He asked, āWhy?ā And I said, because "Amoeba donāt die. They replicate by simple cell division, which means, the old one lives when the new one is made. So, I can see myself living for eternity as an amoeba, which is of no interest to me. (BTW, he also believed that our souls were infinitely eternal: no date of creation, and no date of ultimate passing away.)
Concerning the memory thing, she says that you do at the end of your life get judged as per the Christian viewpoint and go to purgatory and eventually heaven, but while you are there you are āoutside timeā. I didnāt quite get what being āoutside timeā meant although I asked several times but I guess it means that āworld timeā does not apply there so when you do come back (as at some point, having spent enough time in paradise you will long for another life) you could be reincarnated at any other period in history.
This theory is not unusual. RT requires that souls have an existential duration of their own, with each theory defining that duration differently.
I asked whether this meant that there could be two or more people living simulatneously who share the same soul but she says no, that isnāt so.
In my experience with the RT (above) he said that no two people could share one soul, but, that any one person could share many souls. These sharings of many souls are what caused aberrations within animated life forms.
She says that before you are born you leave your memory behind and start with a clean slate but can reclaim your past memory after you have died. But that memory does leave certain traces in the living that people with sufficient training can access.
The man I spoke with indicated that you absolutely kept your memories and your personality. And, you knew that you had existed in another body before, perhaps thousands of times. Further, he suggested that the quanta of life submerges these facts from most of us, and, in order to find them, there are certain ritualistic things that one must go through to bring them back to the surface.
Which RT do you like?
God bless,
jd
