This post was not written using AI.
It’s not on dogmatic grounds that I reject reincarnation. It’s not even on rational grounds. Disbelievers should take the time to challenge themselves with a close examination of the work of renegade psychologist Ian Stevenson, who spent a scholarly career documenting cases of spontaneous past-life recall in children. (In fact, his work got into even eerier areas, such as xenoglossy and birthmarks.) Even the arch-rationalist Carl Sagan found Stevenson’s work worth noting as one example of research into paranormal phenomena that was worthy of open-minded consideration.
I’ve read a good deal of Stevenson’s work, so I am aware of the strength and strangeness of the evidence that can be mustered on that side of the argument. I’m more generally familiar with broad spiritual and religious arguments in favor of reincarnation: the good sense of a worldview in which our education as souls can take longer than one, often tragically truncated, human life; the built-in salutary relativity that suggests we have been many things other than we are, and thus inculcates some baseline sympathy for people who are quite different from ourselves; the sense of a common fate with the animal world; compassion for those who are suffering in conditions we think ourselves immune to in this life; the intuition of a universe of souls extending into unknown pre-incarnate and post-incarnate expanses. I sense the spiritual and existential power of these ideas to color, alter, and strengthen our presence in this life with a savor of other, larger worlds.
And yet, as I kissed my little girl on the forehead and tucked her into bed last night, and she turned over to hug her lobster (yes, a stuffed lobster; it’s the current favorite), I felt: it is all of her that is precious to me, precious beyond my ability to express. As I sang to her in The Wexford Lullaby, she is equally “flesh of my flesh, bone of my bone” and “heart of my heart, soul of my soul.”