Recycle yourself?
Reincarnation... Twenty, twenty-five percent of people in our more or less secularized, de-Christianized West, are not averse to the fact that we might come back. Says the researchers. So not just become energy, Nirvana, or live on in some kind of diffuse heaven, but actually continue in a new body much like the one you have now.
How is it that? Perhaps a growing individualism has influenced in that direction, made the idea feel reasonable and appealing? That is to be able to continue with one's projects, interests, realizations, possibly after a little "holiday".
Know that CS Lewis, the author and theologian, said that such notions come as if automatically when people have no shepherd, i.e. the church, or a wise, well-educated priest, who keeps order.
Or, it is that reincarnation is simply a fact. The tilted theology of the Church has loosened its grip and what is fundamentally true is allowed to rise out of consciousness as a hunch, a certainty.
But I'm sitting in the subway and wondering if the whole recycling philosophy hasn't done its job? In the past, people threw their rubbish where they stood and walked, in the ditch, out the window, or just in the lake. Miraculously gone. That's not the case in our part of the world anymore. The circular mindset is always present. Everything comes back. We are constantly fed it. Maybe done something with our self-image, our expectations, that too?