Here's the thing about reincarnation though: it is the most defining and sublime talent of our species. But for some reason it gets marginalized into a kind of a voodoo cartoon and dumbed down to a B-movie horror gimmick that only goth dolts are supposed to dabble in. Like if you say the right incantation you can make Aleister Crowley or HP Lovecraft inhabit your body.
This is so wrong. When it comes to transmitting information across time there is nature and there is culture. Nothing more. Nature carries the code using the genome. Culture is everything else, everything we've made, all of our artifacts. And if you study to comprehend the culture created by someone else - specifically someone who is dead - you are reincarnating him. Simple. And magical.
To the extent that I study the works and words of Margaret Fuller, she begins to inhabit me. Maybe this is a little spooky, I don't know. Considering that until development of written language 6,000 years ago no reincarnation of this sort had been possible anywhere in the known universe, and now everything and everyone is utterly dependent on it - it is kind of profoundly defining. But no one seems to give that much thought unless they're experiencing it as some science fiction or horror conceit.
Anyway, reincarnation is merely one example of vital and profound truths pulled down to blithering nonsense by association with fantasy dreck. Some others:
We take the sacrament that is the flesh of animals then factory farm and sanitize this into tasteless pucks to be gulped down thoughtlessly or tossed away uneaten.We make trinkets of our sacred things, put our gods out with the garbage.
We take the miraculous vessels that are children's minds and assault them with random noise and light until they clog and close and grow angry.
We take the beautiful and mysterious mechanics of evolution and through some absurd contortion trivialize these and position them in opposition to divinity and religion.
We take the magic of nature, technology and intellect that crackles and shimmers everywhere and blind ourselves to it, insisting that there is no magic.
Am I missing something, or is this just incredibly lame?
