The Comfort of Reincarnation

The story of my first fifty years, poorly disguised as a post about reincarnation

You’ve done this before

Are You Willing to be Disturbed?

One of my favorite bits of scripture comes from the Gospel of Thomas, rediscovered only in the last century:

Those who seek should not stop seeking until they find. When they find, they will be disturbed. When they are disturbed, they will marvel, and will reign over all.

[And after they have reigned they will rest.]

-Jesus of Nazareth, Gospel of Thomas

I spent a lot of my life trying hard not to be disturbed. Careful not to read the wrong books or articles that might challenge the stringent Christian beliefs of my younger years.

And those of us who grew up with a more traditional Christian background had to be cautious, because believing the wrong story (or even doubting the right story) could result in an eternity of agony.

Of course that ideology is a prison. A prison of fear and limits.

But we want to expand. We’re looking to be free.

And so even if you find the idea of reincarnation silly, triggering, or incongruent with your current worldview/faith, I encourage you to take a deep breath and allow yourself to read this entire post.

Maybe even allow yourself to be disturbed.

This is the post I wish someone had sent to me five years ago when I first stumbled on the possibilities of reincarnation, and my goal is to take you through my journey (regarding not only reincarnation, but the struggle of life itself) in a way that provides as much hope and comfort as possible.

First some background…

Part of my story in 30 seconds

I grew up Southern Baptist. Heard every Bible story on repeat beginning around age four. Met with our pastor to talk about the book of Revelation and the potential last days at age seven. Attended a Baptist school from age eight to eighteen. Had a brief rebellious period in college where I tried to extinguish God so I wouldn’t feel quite so guilty about using steroids and smoking weed.

Graduated. Got a job. Met a girl. Got married.

Fell back into faith, finding myself in Evangelical circles. Liked the community and the excitement, but eventually discovered many of the leaders had been seduced by unchecked power and money.

Read a bit too freely and discovered ideas that cracked my faith.

Ended up in the wilderness of life, unsure of what to believe, fairly sure I’d wasted my best years because all I’d grown up with was wrong.

I had a beautiful life throughout this period:

Material abundance, an amazing child, the best wife; but emotionally I could access none of it. I was numb to all the goodness and in agony about the rest.

I found myself depressed, feeling alone, with almost no one to talk to about any of it.

For years.

Forever young

One of the more challenging things I wrestled with as my faith collapsed was the idea of eternal life. I had really liked that part. That existence never ends. It always felt right to me.

I didn’t want to die. I didn’t want it to end. Not that I was particularly having fun. In fact, for a brief period of time there were many days I didn’t even want to exist any longer; but I felt that if I just had enough time I’d be able to get it all sorted out.

Around this same time I stumbled into the emerging longevity space. It was a nice distraction, and seemed to satisfy some need deep within. I liked the concept of healthspan¹ and the idea that I could probably live to be about 100, while maintaining my cognitive and physical abilities if I made certain choices now.

This would give me time to figure it all out.

Losing the idea, or even certainty, of “eternal life” was depressing, but this concept of longevity was a positive distraction. I lost 1/3 of my body weight, got healthier physically, mentally, and emotionally, and almost miraculously regained my youthfulness.

But even through this process I had enough self awareness to see what I was doing.

I was trading one version of eternal life for another. Not that I was totally satisfied with the trade, or viewed it as being equivalent, but it did give me some comfort that I’d now almost certainly have a few extra years to pursue my nagging sense that there was still some mystery in the Universe waiting to be discovered and potentially understood.

Even in those years of uncertainty I retained a deep curiosity and hope that there was still some magic in the world, and that I could find it if I just kept searching.

Pressing forward

Even in the wilderness of my agnosticism I was still a steady reader of all sorts of spiritual material. I sought to understand how various religions emerged. I wanted to know more about how the Bible actually came together. I studied the early histories of Christianity. And I was still looking for answers on those things that seemed unexplainable.

Things like near death experiences and individuals who returned from the other side with fascinating stories. Stories of bliss. A peaceful existence that awaited us all.

So maybe there was life beyond death? What a lovely thing to imagine.

I was beginning to think I could handle anything.

But I was wrong.

An Unsettling Discovery

In the Summer of 2020 I stumbled upon the research of Dr. Ian Stevenson of the University of Virginia, who’d compiled evidence since the 1960s of children who seemed to recall past lives.

Dr. Stevenson and his successors had spent over 50 years rigorously documenting over 2500 cases of small children who seemed to remember previous lifetimes with stunning accuracy. These specific details of the child’s “memories” were often confirmed by family or friends of the deceased person that the child now recalled being.

Most of these cases occurred outside the United States in cultures who were more open to the idea of reincarnation, and where the parents were more curious about the child’s “recollections.”

The researchers seemed to maintain a healthy balance of curiosity and skepticism throughout their careers, quickly eliminating any cases that seemed illegitimate. I detected no sensationalism or attempts to stretch the data to fit a certain conclusion.

Rather I found it all to be quite compelling evidence for reincarnation.²

No thanks!

And so while this past life research was powerfully convincing, it was also quite unsettling.

I’d worked really hard in the previous few years to have a bit of mental and spiritual stability, and while I was generally happy, I was also sort of exhausted. I had no appetite for the idea of starting all over again as somebody else.

If it had taken me 40+ years to find a semblance of peace in this life, was I fated to start again from scratch once it was over? A neverending carousel of death and rebirth for all eternity?

This sounded like the opposite of Heaven to me.

Reflecting back on those early negative feelings now, I believe this was because my framework was limited to certain societal preconceptions around reincarnation.

In the West we tend to view reincarnation as starting over from zero with deep ties to Karma, meaning our next life is a direct result of the choices and actions of our previous life. (While I do believe Karmic principles are a spiritual reality, just as Jesus spoke of sowing and reaping in the Christian tradition, I believe they are nuanced and widely misunderstood in the West.)

Within my limited framework of reincarnation I found the idea quite depressing. I found myself pining for the idea of total annihilation after death. Permanent rest via oblivion. The deep sleep of eternity.

But I have a strict rule: don’t argue with reality.

Not that I was convinced reincarnation was reality, but I had to at least hold it in my mind as a possibility, and as a driver for my future curiosity and research.

Helpful, regardless of truth?

I’ve found the phrase “helpful, even if not true” to at times be quite useful in life.

And this was one of my initial takeaways when the possibilities of reincarnation entered my mind.

If we all came to the understanding that reincarnation had at least some chance of being true, how would that inform the way we lived our lives?

How would it impact the way we thought about the future?

I thought well, if we can’t create a better world for our grandchildren, maybe we could at least selfishly create a better world for ourselves, since we’re gonna be back here at some point?

Could the poor, uneducated part of the world (that I rarely think twice about) that’s plagued with repression, violence, and desperation be my destiny in 100 years?

If so, how would it change my approach to this life?

What would be the harm of living my life as if one day I’d be back again? And again? These thoughts suddenly gave me a little more incentive to try and be a part of creating a better world.

I imagined it could provide a new outlook for how we treat our neighbors, nature, and even those across the oceans we’re told are our enemies.

Not that we had to turn it into a religion, but just use it as a helpful personal guide.

I also began to find comfort in the idea of reincarnation as a way of taking the pressure off. This life not living up to expectations? Oh well, there’s always next time. And maybe I can do some good along the way.

And so that’s where I landed after thinking about the topic for quite a while.

Possible, but probably too mysterious to really understand.

Let’s get woo

Three years after my initial discovery of the research I began doing a deep dive on the UFO/UAP topic which was increasingly in the news. That’s a whole other topic that I’ll explore here soon, but in all the information I digested I began to stumble into more and more research on various Parapsychological, or Psi, phenomena.

And one area that caught my attention was the topic of Past Life Regression therapy.

I read a large portion of the research of Michael Newton, Ph.D., who was a self-admitted atheist who made the unsettling discovery that his patients could find relief from life long problems while in a hypnotic trance and recalling “past lives.”

Newton, as a good scientist, followed his curiosity, despite being an atheist, and eventually he and others helped document thousands of such cases where individuals, regardless of their personal beliefs or faith, recalled past lives while deep in hypnosis.

I read dozens and dozens of the individual case studies, documented by multiple practitioners, and what struck me was the consistency of stories and descriptions across patients and practitioners.

I even watched what might be the world’s most poorly produced documentary, called The Flipside, which dives deep on hypnotic past life regression. And while the production quality of the film was unfortunate, the conclusions were quite compelling.

Throughout all the past life regression cases the same themes and descriptions of life beyond death arose again and again. All of the recalled “experiences,” without fail, were positive. Time and again individuals recalled entering a realm beyond death where they did a sort of life review with loving guides, who helped them reflect on what they had learned in their most recent life before preparing them for the next life.

There was no judgement, no condemnation, no punishment, no hell; regardless of how they had lived their life. Occasionally there was some regret on the part of the individual for certain choices they’d made that had harmed others, but the guides helped them work through this regret so that they could try to do better the next time.

While these past life regression accounts still felt a little nebulous, they did provide further comfort that if reincarnation was a reality, it at least seemed to have some positive trajectory, meaning each life was building upon the previous lessons, building towards something more.

Triangulation

I found it interesting that both Dr Stevenson’s research on children who seem to recall past lives and Dr Newton’s case studies on past life regressions both matched up quite nicely with the research we have on Near Death Experiences (NDEs.)

Anytime I’m trying to confirm an idea or concept, I find it valuable to have at least three independent sources that point to one another, and while the triangulation of these three areas of research didn’t necessarily prove reincarnation, it certainly created a compelling case for some sort of overwhelmingly positive existence beyond death.

And with that I felt peace.

I arrived at a place feeling that while I may never discover the secrets of the Universe, or the mysteries of God, at least I felt some comfort that death was not the end. And that whatever awaited us on the other side was overwhelmingly positive.

I even had a few experiences in the fall of 2021 where on late night walks I seemed to find my own eternal self. A self disconnected to my current personality.

In those moments I could actually observe the human that goes by the name my friends and family call me, but I had no attachment to him. I could see that one day he would die and be buried and ultimately be forgotten, and I felt no sadness about any of that.

I felt only peace. The deepest peace.

Around the same time I had another experience one night as I was falling asleep. It was the experience of briefly remembering that I wasn’t supposed to remember. That there was a veil preventing me from recalling who I really was.

And deep in my heart I knew it was true.

The Mystics arrive

As I’ve shared previously it was in the late Summer and early Fall of 2023 that I discovered a very helpful map of consciousness that led me to the mystics.

While rare, there have always been a small number of individuals throughout human history who’ve achieved the very highest levels of consciousness. In many spiritual systems this is broadly referred to as enlightenment, although even with enlightenment there are many stages.

These enlightened few are often known as mystics, and they’re present in every viable spiritual system that we know of. There are Christian mystics, Buddhist mystics, Sufi mystics, Hindu mystics, Jewish mystics, Shamanistic mystics, and the list goes on.

Mystics don’t get their ideas from teachers or holy books. Mystics hold their truths based on direct experience. This might be difficult for most of us to understand or relate to.

Mystics don’t “believe” anything. They experience it.

And every mystic I’ve encountered in my deep research, regardless of their spiritual background, understands reincarnation to be a basic fundamental of reality.

I was most surprised to find all these Christian mystics who treated reincarnation as an absolute given.

Mystics understand the Earth as being a sort of school that allows souls to progress through the levels of consciousness until we all “graduate.” We each have as much time and as many incarnations as needed to reach our destiny of becoming a realized being.

Realization simply means understanding and remembering who we really are.

Karma (or sowing and reaping, if you prefer) is simply the primary law of the Earth school. This is the spiritual law of cause & effect, which is key to understand as we make decisions on how to live.

Why do the mystics believe this? Not because they read it in a book or because of some agreed upon doctrine, but because they’ve experienced it directly. The most advanced mystics remember some, if not all, of their previous incarnations in the same way you might remember who you used to be in high school.

While this level of certainty about reincarnation, especially from a Christian perspective, was new and a bit disorienting to me, it did sort of make sense when we think of harmonizing our understanding of the spiritual world with our natural world.

After all, the material world is filled with examples of death and rebirth cycles. What if the spiritual world was no different?

Natural cycles are everywhere.

Summer, fall, winter, spring.

Day and night.

The tides.

What if all of creation was cyclical?

Not just nature, the material world, but also the spiritual aspect of things?

One of the greatest insights I’ve found in studying mysticism is that there is no hard line between the material and the spiritual; it’s a continuum.

And so it seemed the mystics understood that we are not human personalities who have a soul that carries on beyond the death of our physical body, but rather we are eternal souls currently experiencing what it’s like to have this particular human, material body with a present-day personality.

I’ll say that again: you’re not a someone who has a soul; rather, you’re a soul who’s experiencing a particular human life.

And again this stance and experience is consistent across the mystics of all faith traditions: Christian, Sufi, Hindu, Buddhist, Jewish, Shamanic, and Indigenous spiritualities.

But what about the Bible?

Those readers with a traditionally Christian background (who’ve made it this deep into the article without unsubscribing) may be asking “Why, if reincarnation is such a fundamental mechanism of the Divine plan, isn’t it in the Bible?”

This is a great question and one that requires a suitable answer for many, because they place so much weight and importance on the Bible. In fact, most of Western Christianity worships the Bible more than they worship God.

In those circles it’s ok to question God, but you better not question the Bible.

See the problem?

The Bible is a collection of stories and myths that serve various purposes.

While there are specific parts of the Bible that definitely seem to be inspired by the Divine, it’s not a historical document, nor was it always seen as a historical document the way many Christian circles see it today.

And while the early church fathers felt scripture was Divinely inspired, the more specific idea of Biblical inerrancy is a relatively modern invention of the mid-1800s.

Some of the Biblical events and stories almost certainly have a basis in history, but their primary purpose has never been to serve as a perfect historical record.

The Essenes³, a mystical sect now widely believed to be the group that Jesus arose from, were believers in multiple incarnations. Being mystics, they also viewed the Earth as a school of sorts that we spend many lifetimes in, learning lessons as we grow spiritually.

In fact, we have evidence that much of what Jesus taught was a doctrine we can think of as Esseneism, and that it was actually a continuation of many of the great mystical truths that had been taught in secret for millenia, rather than something new that Jesus brought into the world.

Jesus was perhaps history’s greatest mystic, although his message was deeply misunderstood and eventually corrupted in the decades and centuries following his time on Earth.

That’s great, but there’s got to be something in the Bible, right?

By the end of the First Century nearly all of Jesus’s original followers had passed, and the movement was inherited and often misinterpreted by early-consciousness leaders who were often more interested in structure and power than spiritual truth. A couple of centuries later the Empire co-opted and corrupted what remained of The Way to such an extent that any competing mystical sects were literally wiped from the Earth, with the few surviving mystical Christian traditions forced into hiding for over 1000 years.⁴

And through this great perversion any explicit teaching or doctrine around reincarnation was lost, suppressed, or altogether wiped away.

It’s also impossible to overemphasize how distorted our views of the ancient world are based upon the filters we’ve used to look back at it. Because literally all of our historians, theologians, pastors, and priests have long dismissed reincarnation, there should then be no surprise that they cannot find it when they examine early Christianity.

But, if we look closely, we may still find hints that an understanding of reincarnation was held not only by Jesus, but also by those who followed him, and that there are remnants of this understanding that survive in scripture.

The great contemporary mystic Daskalos had this to say…

Yeshua said that John the Baptist came in the Spirit of Elija or Elias and His disciples understood that He was speaking about John the Baptist, saying that he was Elijah. Christ did not say Elijah came as John the Baptist but that he came in the Spirit of Elijah! The Spirit, which humanised Elijah, now humanised St. John the Baptist. That was explicit. And when the disciples went to John the Baptist and asked: "Are you Elijah:" he did not have the right to say, "I was Elijah" or "I am Elijah" because he can only say that if he reaches the ultimate stage of 'At-one-ment' to his Spirit-Ego. Nonetheless, he gave the common characteristics of the 'two' saying: "I am the voice in the wilderness" for as Elijah was, he was also the voice in the wilderness.

Therefore, Yeshua stated clearly who St. John the Baptist was.

And what did Yeshua state clearly about Himself? He said to His disciples: "Who do people think that I am?" They told Him, believing in reincarnation, "One of the old prophets who was risen again." Definitely, Christ had the opportunity to reject that and reply, "What you are saying is of no sense!"

But He did not.

I’d also say part of the reason more of these teachings may not have survived and aren’t more explicit in the Bible is perhaps because it may not always be helpful for souls who are experiencing earlier levels of consciousness to know this information.⁵

Spirit has revealed itself in many different ways to different societies over many millenia, in every part of the world, including long before the Judeo-Christian era.

The courage to erase hell, and kill your small God

For those raised within certain versions of Christianity, once we discard the idea of “one life to live,” we can also dissolve the early-consciousness idea of an eternal hell; and along with it dissolves much of the power and control that the church and Corporate Christianity have wielded for centuries.

Perhaps easier said than done, but this is the journey of expanding consciousness, to find the courage to kill the small God that has oppressed you in order to make way for a greater expression of the Divine.

It may lead to a season of agnosticism. Or a period of atheism.

This of course is what happened to me as I experienced my own decade of spiritual wilderness. It’s a beautiful story now, but at the time I nearly lost all hope.

Except for the love of my wife, the love of my child, I might not be here today.

And there was a moment, I can still remember it clearly, where standing in my kitchen on a Saturday afternoon I left that small God behind, declaring that whatever spiritual hell I’d been threatened with my entire life, it could be no more severe than the hell I’d already found myself in, and in that moment I set out in search of freedom.

I never looked back.

And while it’s been a long and winding road, at times lonely and dark, the exploration and eventual understanding of just how beautiful, just how vast, just how luminous and loving the Divine really is has made the journey all the more worthwhile.

Today I love my life.

I’m a storyteller at heart. And the Divine has given me many stories to tell.

Finally, peace

I’ve had an interesting relationship with these ideas my entire life.

As a small child, maybe around 3 or 4, I told my dad…

“Right now I am small and you are big, but one day I’ll be big and you’ll be small.”

Was I just being a naive kid? Was I sharing deep wisdom from beyond the veil? I don’t know, but it’s fun to think about.

We’ve done this before. We’ll do it again.

And despite some initial discomfort, exploring reincarnation has ultimately brought me deep peace, purpose, and comfort.

I pray the same for you.

See ya next time:)

Thank you for reading. And thank you to all who support financially. Even $5/month has a weird way of prompting me to write more articles and publish more frequently. If you feel drawn to support this writing, thank you. I never take it for granted.

What’s been your experience with exploring the ideas of reincarnation? Let us know in the comment section…and so we can cover in future posts!

And if you enjoyed this perspective please share with any friends or family members who might share these interests.

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1. A person's healthspan is the length of time that the person is healthy—not just alive.

2. I’d encourage anyone who’s curious about the research to dig deeper here.

3. The Essenes were a mystical sect, likely far more complex than they’re painted by writers like Josephus. They were a mystery school. And mystery schools had that label for a reason. Outsiders were unaware of what beliefs were held within them.

4. I should probably write an entire post about how George Lucas’ Star Wars has been used to prime and prepare a whole generation of modern mystics to awaken; everything from the Jedi and their teachings, to the Imperial purge and hiding that followed, all have real-life connections to mysticism. There’s a reason Star Wars, especially the original six films, has resonated so deeply with humanity.

5. For more on this see A Jesus Story for Every Level of Consciousness which suggests that those at the Dominance level have different spiritual needs than those at the more expansive levels.