Reincarnation

April 27th, 2023

I don't believe in it. Of course not. Obviously not. No way. I am too rational for it. There is no scientific proof of it, and it cannot be any proof of it by design. It is only a spiritual, or worse — religious matter. And frivolous matter at that. So there is no room in my mind for any exception — it doesn't exist. Very clearly and irrefutably and completely.

But…

Since it is proven that every newborn has an ingrained capability to learn something so complex as a language that is carried and created by genes, and there is an ingrained understating of symbols of societal and spiritual matters easily recalled by every person who ever lived again carried by some yet wholly understood flow of shared consciousness then —

Is it beyond the realm of possibility that we can have deep-seated memories and recollections of times passed? Of times and places and people of which we couldn't have built any stores of memories in our current conscious lives?

There are places in a particular time I recall often, with alarming clarity and knowledge and embedding into the encompassing wholeness of an experience. Time is the late part of the XIX century, and possibly just a sliver of the beginning of the XX century — there is nothing there to indicate the common mass sleepwalking into the madness of the First World War (and everything that followed), so that time ends before 1905. And the places are widespread provincial towns in Austro-Hungarian Empire — from Moravia to Bohemia to Transylvania to Transdanubia to Bukovina to Galicia and Londomeria. Only towns — there is no indication of the grandeur of Vienna and Budapest and Pressburg and Lviv. Only small and boring and steeped in the sameness of vistas and thoughts and backwater lives of its inhabitants — towns. It would have to be a semi-important official to travel to those various areas, seeing those towns. Or maybe a train driver or a conductor, who would have this vast visual geographical knowledge. So there is that. It is possible — especially since it is tied to a geographical place in the past time. And two years ago, walking in Przeworsk where I was for the first time — I knew the layout of the market square and buildings there before I saw it. The same last year — walking in Eger I knew the way in the maze of streets to get to a place that was just a townhouse without any historical significance, but where I had to go and had shivers running down my spine as I saw the front facade…