The August 27 NYT had a long story about a revival of interest in reincarnation. The revival is being led (or advanced?) by psychiatrists, not theologians (according to the NYT). Apparently the notion of reincarnation offers some therapeutic value to the psychiatrists' patients, “allows you to experience history as yours. It gives you a different sense of what it means to be human.” I found it somewhat amusing. It does hark back to the foundations of psychiatry, Freud's infatuation with cocaine, the weird anti-scientific theories, the religious fabulations of it all. But the piece that kept popping into my head was 'where did all the souls come from?' Everyone in the article had prior lives as human beings (which is itself pretty odd), and of course all led pretty admirable lives -- he heroic anti-Nazi German, and so on. No drunks or laze-abouts, all hard working and admirable. The first oddity, as noted, is that they all claimed prior lives as human beings, and that is a bit odd. There are far too many people alive now for it to be plausible that they all were human beings before. There are not enough dead about to fill al the bodies. Some of them had to come from some other line of biota, or be brand new. o the souls fissure? Is there some block of memory from time as other forms of life? I think it would be very interesting indeed for some of the reincarnated to recall life as a dog or a penguin. Do they jump across families? Can one go from the selfless morally great spider to a human being? Anyway, where did they all come from? The second oddity was no one seems to have been a sluggard or creep or thief or anything less than admirable the last few times around. How come? Is there some memory limitation on bad behavior, or do the bad folk get sent down as it were, to become raccoons or wasps or slime mold? (It is true that plenty of mammal lines are dying out and some of them could be pushed up the ladder (so to speak) but you still will be pretty short of souls.) And what do insect souls spend their time on?
Which all leads back to -- psychiatry -- it is no wonder they still lag placebos.
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