Reincarnation

By Madeleine Kando

My grandson Marshall asked me if I believed in reincarnation. Maybe he worries that I will die soon and wouldn’t it be nice if I came back somehow to keep adding to the vast amount of presents he is getting for Christmas?

Reincarnation derives from a Latin term that literally means 'entering the flesh again'. Some people believe that reincarnation is a process with rules, like the rules of traffic. Leading an exemplary life will place you on a higher echelon of the reincarnation ladder than if you were a bank robber. That is why believing in the afterlife keeps you on the straight and narrow.

I told him that I did not believe in reincarnation. Having to come back to start the whole exhausting process of being born, growing up, and dying again does not appeal to me.

But if there is an afterlife, I think there are no rules of conduct. Just like in life itself, most of it would depend on random luck. This means you can lead as bad a life as you want, although ultimately it is the people whom you leave behind that will pay the price for your badness.

To lead an exemplary life, you must know the difference between right and wrong. But who says that, of the millions of species that are imbued with the force of life, you would come back as an entity that has a sense of morality?

If there is an afterlife and we somehow could have an influence on it, it is not so much the rungs of the social ladder that I am concerned about.

If you came back as a worm, would you have a moral compass? Or is it only bank robbers that come back as worms?

But who decides whether a worm is less worthy of a righteous life than a person who reincarnates into a bishop or a Guru?

If I had a choice, I would not even bother about morality. For 99.9% of species on earth, morality is not even on their radar.

What matters for most species, is the amount of time they have to live a good, fertile, happy, stress-free life.

If I came back as a mayfly, I would live for one day. I would have to cram all my earthly business into a twenty-four-hour period. I wouldn’t even have time to eat or go to the bathroom, let alone think about right and wrong.

Ok. So a mayfly is out for my next life. But what about a Ming clam? They live for 500 years, so that sounds like a good choice. Except that the last ming clam died at the hands of a group of scientists who fished it out of the water to study it.

Ok. Maybe not a ming clam, but what about a Greenland shark? They also live for half a century, slowly swimming around in the frigid waters of the Arctic Ocean. But their habitat is not perfect for someone like me, who suffers from poor blood circulation.

No, if I had to come back, I would probably choose to be a black coral. They live for 4,000 years non-stop! And the best part is that they grow in my favorite place on earth: the oceans around Hawaii!

I would have to sacrifice locomotion for longevity. No more dance parties for me and I would be at the mercy of hungry parrot fish nibbling at my polyps.

Black corals are carnivorous, so would I be tormented by the idea of eating too much zooplankton? Even so, I would have millennia to make up my mind about this moral dilemma.

I finally told Marshall that the smartest choice for someone who believes in reincarnation is to come back as an ‘urritopsis dohrnii’, a.k.a. the immortal jellyfish.

When they get injured, sick, or old, they revert to the polyp stage, like Benjamin Button. It’s called ‘transdifferentiation’, which reverts them back to a previous stage of their development.

This can go on indefinitely, effectively rendering the jellyfish biologically immortal.

In fact, if I came back as an immortal jellyfish, I would have killed two birds with one stone. I would have answered Marshall’s question by rendering it moot! leave comment here