iVillage

Let’s begin with a discussion of reincarnation. Here is a concept that can be a real puzzler. It’s the prefix ‘re’ that causes all the excitement, the idea that incarnation is something we somehow can renew or do again. Incarnation appears to be a fact of life—maybe the fact of life. And yet I have always been intrigued by a line that Shakespeare wrote in one of his sonnets that suggests incarnation is not something to be taken for granted. He writes:

“You are no more yourself than you now here live.”

Thus, incarnation or life itself can be seen to have its moments or flux and, like all the cycles we study in astrology, rises and falls with the tides of each day. In other words, some days we feel much more ourselves than on others. Some days we live more in what we hope to be our future (where we want to go), and others are spent (seemingly against our wishes) mired in the past.

Before we hazard a guess about how we might ‘re’ incarnate, it is important to know something about how we incarnate. Instead of trying to peer beyond the walls of our lifetime to we-know-not-where in an attempt to grasp this esoteric concept ‘reincarnation,’ we can perhaps see this idea at work around us now in day-to-day life as we already know it.