Once I was a Cossack... Using estimates from populations and religious tenets, there are over a billion people in the world right now who believe in reincarnation. Are you one of them?
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Faith had believed in reincarnation for as long as she could remember. But recently, her interest in her past lives had reached a new level. Now that she was visiting the medium mystic Marjorie, for the first time she had information about what her past lives were really like.
Most of what Marjorie told her was about her previous incarnation as Zosime, a noblewoman who lived at the time of the siege of Troy. She heard about her daring escape first to Smyrna and then on to Knossos. She was apparently both brave and beautiful, and she fell in love with a Spartan commander, whom she lived with at Knossos for the rest of her life.
Faith didn't check the real history of Troy to try to verify Marjorie's story. She did not doubt that hers was the same soul that had lived in Zosime. She did, however, have a nagging concern about what this all meant. Much as she enjoyed the idea of being a Greek beauty, since she didn't remember anything of her life in Knossos or have any sense of being the person Marjorie told her about, she couldn't see how she and Zosime could be the same person. She had found out about her past life, but it didn't seem like her life at all.
Source: Book two, chapter XXVII of An Essay Concerning Human Understanding by John Locke, 1706.
Baggini, J., The Pig That Wants to Be Eaten, 2005, p. 193.
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What do you think? What kinds of links count to make some prior version of "me" actually me?
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Faith had believed in reincarnation for as long as she could remember. But recently, her interest in her past lives had reached a new level. Now that she was visiting the medium mystic Marjorie, for the first time she had information about what her past lives were really like.
Most of what Marjorie told her was about her previous incarnation as Zosime, a noblewoman who lived at the time of the siege of Troy. She heard about her daring escape first to Smyrna and then on to Knossos. She was apparently both brave and beautiful, and she fell in love with a Spartan commander, whom she lived with at Knossos for the rest of her life.
Faith didn't check the real history of Troy to try to verify Marjorie's story. She did not doubt that hers was the same soul that had lived in Zosime. She did, however, have a nagging concern about what this all meant. Much as she enjoyed the idea of being a Greek beauty, since she didn't remember anything of her life in Knossos or have any sense of being the person Marjorie told her about, she couldn't see how she and Zosime could be the same person. She had found out about her past life, but it didn't seem like her life at all.
Source: Book two, chapter XXVII of An Essay Concerning Human Understanding by John Locke, 1706.
Baggini, J., The Pig That Wants to Be Eaten, 2005, p. 193.
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What do you think? What kinds of links count to make some prior version of "me" actually me?
