Imbolc and the 3/4 Moon

Sunday gratefuls: Past lives. Near death experiences. Mystical experience. Reincarnation. Ode. Cooking. The meister chef, Tom. Cabbage and beef soup. Catfish. Chicken potpies. Rigel. Drinking. Ruth, so much better. Jon, too. Gabe, puzzling. My mind twisting round. The lamp, Ruth assembled. Swapping out coffee tables, the new one down here. The old one upstairs.

Sparks of Joy and Awe: Reincarnation

Mind. Blown. Where to? Don’t know. That ship haha has sailed. Into the area of the map famously identified by: Here there be monsters. Or, angels. Or, Grandma. Or, the Otherworld.

My buddy, Ode, who has long insisted that reincarnation is a fact, long proven, as might a friend of both Terence and Dennis McKenna, has finally pushed me aboard the good ship Beyond. As most of the scientists in the video below claim, I don’t know where the ship has set sail for, nor how to interpret the evidence in a definitive way. But I’m aboard, maybe as a reluctant stowaway, but I want in on this journey.

No accidents. Not sure this idea and the idea of post mortem consciousness belong together; however, it is the case that for the last four years plus I’ve studied kabbalah, an ancient Jewish mystical philosophy that includes reincarnation as a reasonable and accepted part of its world (otherworld) view.

Astrology, too, as well. A brand of this even more ancient discipline called Evolutionary Astrology which presupposes reincarnation and strong hints about yours revealed by the nodes of the moon in your natal chart.

You might say, well, Kate’s dead so these ideas have more traction? Or, this is the day before your 75th birthday. What better time to throw on a sash that reads, Reincarnated! An escape hatch at last.

Those could influence me, I suppose, but all my life I’ve thought on my own, accepting ideas and rejecting ideas because they listen well in my inner chambers of judgment. Or, because they seem like nonsense. The video below listens well there.

An old and strong aspect of my thought could be called flat earth humanism, or as Ed in the video rightly calls it, physicalism. Materialism in its fancy philosophical dress clothes. Existentialist me, a Camus influenced college part of me, faced the darkness unafraid. Willing to make my own meaning. Living because I wanted to live, not because I had to and not because anyone told me how.

That Alexandria First Methodist guy, a young one, had some notion of the afterlife. My mother’s death at 47 took it to the grave along with her. Not fair. Not fair at all. Therefore neither just nor loving, both attributes of the one, the true, the mighty.

A while later I picked up the Christian mantle again and threw it over my shoulders, but this time I was not interested in the next world, but this one. How might we live here? Right here amidst war, the Vietnam War, economic injustice, racial and gender discrimination? I found answers in old Jewish notions of just kingship and a New Testament that demanded extension of love and compassion to the poorest and most despised among us.

Nowadays the Great Wheel, that pagan metaphor of life’s seasons, including the long fallow one in which we temperate folks find ourselves right now, guides my thinking. I can fold this post mortem idea into it.

This is a willed rejection of Wittgenstein in the Tractatus when he says: Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent. I shared this chivalric reticence, its honesty, for a long, long time. Now I feel it reveals fear rather than expressing a stoic truth.

Over the course of the next few years I plan to continue my study of kabbalah, astrology, and tarot. I ordered the three books of Edward Kelly. Gonna read them. I’m also reading two new anthropological books reassessing human development from physical, historical, and genetic perspectives. Taoism is in there, too.

The Rockies and the complicated textbook about life and change that they are teach me everyday. Pursuing these investigations because they interest me. I may have a book in there, some way of showing others how the natural world can teach us what we need to know about life, and now perhaps, death.

Gotta do something with this extra time the oncologists have given me. May as well be of some use.

And, happy birthday to me!