Sneak Peeks

Wednesday, October 17, 2012

How Science Supports Reincarnation Or: Why I believe you were once Joan of Arc

Instinct.
It’s the scientific explanation for why animals can perform complex tasks without training or guidance.
 
Instinct is a word that’s thrown around a lot, “He instinctively recoiled.”, “I went on instinct and distrusted him.”, “It was basic instinct.” But when you stop to really consider what’s being said, the implications will shock you. True instinct is something incredibly amazing. We’re talking about cellular memory; the ability of a single cell to remember a complex experience and pass that memory on through generations.
 
Like the Monarch butterfly. Monarchs make an inexplicable journey every year from North America down to Mexico. These little creatures are born with the knowledge of how to get to their overwinter sites, though each generation has never experienced the migration before. This is an extremely complex memory to pass on, perhaps more so even than animal mating dances and emotive facial expressions. They are born knowing how to travel over the Earth. They are born with the memory of their predecessor’s experience. Incredible.
 
We all know that every piece of us has been recycled countless billions and trillions of times. Every part of us was here from the firmament of the Earth’s first eons as a planet, to the sultry days of the dinosaurs. All the matter that makes up our bodies right now has always been affected and entrenched in this world. If you look at the palm of your hand, you must realize that each cell and hair and drop of blood you see was once a kernel of wheat, a snowflake blown through a Russian palace, and the salt on a dolphin’s back. The people we are now were formed from all the people and creatures that came before us. From the bodies of our parents, then from the things our mothers ate. And every carrot, lima bean and sip of water that she had was passed through something else as well. When Victor Lindlahr said, “You are what you eat,” he wasn’t kidding.
 
Now consider that you are what you breathe. The theory of Caesar’s Last Breath states that if you take into account the volume of air held within a human’s lungs and equate that with the volume of air on the Earth and the passage of time, that at this point we’ve all breathed in at least one molecule of the breath that Julius Caesar of Rome released as he died on the steps of the Senate. In fact, all the air we breathe has passed through all the people and animals and oceans and plants and dinosaurs and...well, you get the picture, everything that ever existed. DNA has been retrieved from specimens that are thousands of years old. It’s no great stretch to imagine that we’ve been breathing in all sorts of bits and pieces of DNA from some pretty amazing sources our entire lives.
 
All living organisms contain DNA, including our friend the Monarch butterfly. DNA that carries instructions on how to build a new human or butterfly or lima bean. It also obviously stores important information such as the flight path the Monarchs should take down to Mexico. It isn’t a leap of logic at all to infer the possibility that the fresh DNA we consume every day could pass its encoded memories on to us. We must at least agree that the experiences of our parents and their parents and so on could be, like it is with the Monarch, passed intact down through the ages as a key part of evolution. If a flight path can be recorded and passed on, then so should a more simple experience, like, say, the moment you saw your husband returning from the war. So what if it was a war that occurred one hundred and fifty years ago? If a part of you was there, then why couldn’t that memory still be contained in the DNA you carry?
 
The simple answer is: it can.
 
So when you tell me that you can remember a dark tent, lit only by candlelight, filled with men who stand shivering and wet with the rain, and when they speak to you it’s in a language that rolls in familiar tones, and that the name on their lips is Joan...
 
I believe you.
 
 
This is for all my disbelieving friends out there who think that denial of faith in a deity precludes having faith in reincarnation. There ya go.