Perhaps you already know something about reincarnation, being born again in another body to live another life, and you do not find it inherently absurd – or even particularly weird. And perhaps, like most people who have reached that point in their thinking and reading and discussing with like-minded friends, you will have begun to wonder about your previous lives and how those lives might be affecting the life you are living now.
The carry-on effect from past lives into the present life is called Karma. It is an Indian (Sanscrit) word that those of you who (like me) practise yoga may have come across when talking or reading about yoga philosophy.
Karma means the baggage we bring with us from one life to the next. It is NOT judgement and punishment for one’s sins. It is simply a matter of cause and effect: like if you smoke or drink or eat too much and get ill, this is not a punishment, it is simply a consequence.
Things you did, and things that happened to you, in previous lives can have very grave consequences in this life. And knowing about them can make all the difference.
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Schopenhauer
Were an Asiatic to ask me for a definition of Europe, I should be forced to answer him: It is that part of the world which is haunted by the incredible delusion that man was created out of nothing, and that his present birth is his first entrance into life.
Socrates
I am confident that there is such a thing as living again, and that the living spring from the dead.
Albert Schweitzer
Reincarnation contains a most comforting explanation of reality by means of which Indian thought surmounts difficulties which baffle the thinkers of Europe.
Josephus (most well known Jewish historian from the time of Jesus)
All pure and holy spirits live on in heavenly places, and in course of time they are again sent down to inhabit righteous bodies.
Paul Gauguin
When the physical organism breaks up, the soul survives. It then takes on another body.
[Paul Gauguin was one of the great French post-impressionist painters. Here is his masterpiece “D’où venons nous, que sommes nous, où allons nous?” – “Where do we come from, what are we. where do we go?”]
Leo Tolstoy
As we live through thousands of dreams in our present life, so is our present life only one of many thousands of such lives which we enter from the other more real life … and then return after death. Our life is but one of the dreams of that more real life, and so it is endlessly, until the very last one, the very real life – the life of God.
Henry Ford
I adopted the theory of reincarnation when I was 26. Genius is experience. Some think to seem that it is a gift or talent, but it is the fruit of long experience in many lives”.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
I am certain that I have been here as I am now a thousand times before, and I hope to return a thousand times.” “As long as you are not aware of the continual law of Die and Be Again, you are merely a vague guest on a dark Earth.”
David Thoreau
As far back as I can remember, I have unconsciously referred to the experiences of a previous state of existence.
Jack London
I did not begin when I was born, nor when I was conceived. I have been growing, developing through incalculable myriads of millenniums … All my previous selves have their voices, echoes, promptings in me.
William Wordsworth
Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting …
John Masefield
I hold that when a person dies
His soul returns again to earth;
Arrayed in some new flesh disguise,
Another mother gives him birth
With sturdier limbs and brighter brain
The old soul takes the road again.
George Harrison
Friends are all souls that we’ve known in other lives …
Richard Bach (Jonathan Livingston Seagull)
Do you have any idea how many lives we must have gone through before we even got the first idea that there is more to life than eating or fighting …?
Freidrich Nietzsche
Live so that thou mayest desire to live again – that is thy duty – for in any case thou wilt live again!
Mahatma Ghandi
I cannot think of permanent enmity between man and man, and believing as I do in the theory of reincarnation, I live in the hope that if not in this birth, in some other birth I shall be able to hug all of humanity in friendly embrace.
Diordus Siculus (c. 60 BC – 30 AD)
The Druids believe that] the souls of men are immortal, and that after a definite number of years they live a second life when the soul passes to another body. … And Pythagoras learned from Egyptians his teachings about the gods, his geometrical propositions and theory of numbers, as well as the transmigration of the soul into every living thing
The Zohar (The fundamental text of Kaballah)
The souls must re-enter the absolute substance whence they have emerged. But to accomplish this, they must develop all the perfections, the germ of which is planted in them; and if they have not fulfilled this condition during one life, they must commence another, a third, and so forth, until they have acquired the condition which fits them for reunion with God.
The Bhagavad-gitā
As the embodied soul continually passes in this body, from boyhood to youth to old age, the soul similarly passes into another body at death. … As a person puts on new garments, giving up old ones, the soul similarly accepts new material bodies, giving up the old and useless ones.
Swimming in the Sea of Time 