“I love the Buddhist idea of reincarnation. For me, reincarnation is the explanation for déjà vu. Why do I feel like I have been here before? Because you have been. Why do I know exactly what he is about to say? Because you’ve heard it before.” –Pew Research Center, May 2013.

“Roughly one-in-ten white evangelicals believes in reincarnation, compared with 24% among mainline Protestants, 25% among both white Catholics and those unaffiliated with any religion, and 29% among black Protestants,” according to Pew Research in a 2009 study on Eastern and New Age Beliefs.

Additionally, NPR reported in 2013, one-fifth of Americans are dropping their religious attachments. In the same report, it was noted that a third of American’s youth have no religious ties. Now in 2015, I suspect more and more people are studying the world’s religions and taking from them practices and beliefs of interest.

The list of my personal beliefs includes reincarnation. It makes sense that Mother Nature jointly with the infinite scheme of things and in pure love would give a human being chance after chance at becoming as grand as the advanced spiritual way-showers such as Jesus Christ, Buddha and Krishna. Hinduism and Buddhism accept the belief in reincarnation. Islam, Judaism, and Christianity believe in life after death, with a percentage accepting the likelihood of reincarnation.

Furthermore, the poet Rumi is thought to have been describing reincarnation in some of his poetry. In addition, many more poets and writers held a belief in reincarnation—Walt Whitman, Mark Twain, Carl Jung, William Wordsworth, Leo Tolstoy and Benjamin Franklin to name a few.

Some information regarding early church history and the idea of reincarnation comes from the Institute for the Integration of Science, Intuition, and Spirit (IISIS). In fact, according to IISIS, Christianity believed in the doctrine of reincarnation up to the 6^th century when the idea was voted out in 553 CE by the Bishops at the Fifth Ecumenical Council, mainly to the credit of the Roman Emperor, Justinian and in direct opposition to the Church Father, Origen, who whole-heartedly supported the idea of reincarnation.

James Dillet Freeman, who served as Poet Laureate of the Unity Movement for many years, takes up the idea of reincarnation in his book, A Case for Reincarnation. I recommend the insightful book covering the possibility of life after life.

These are some lines from a poem in Chapter 3 of Freeman’s book on reincarnation:

“…..What fair land, what far shore the wind blows from,

I cannot say, but when the wind is blowing

It blows to me a sense of truths more true,

Of lives beyond this life, and worlds past knowing.

Companions, does the wind not blow for you?”

Lifetime after lifetime of opportunities to grow and evolve spiritually sounds unconditional loving and grace-filled. There certainly may be a spiritual cycle of reincarnation after reincarnation until the soul is one with its true nature. God, the Creative Force is not wasteful. To have only one lifetime to accomplish becoming a being of light sounds almost incredible.

The nature of life is a perfect recyclable system. Why wouldn’t a person after seeming death, begin to journey and evolve into another rebirth, then another and another until the soul became ready to graduate into even higher advancements. It seems some animals remake themselves through the process of hibernation. Reptiles renew their skin by shedding their previous one. Whereas, butterflies have a unique cycle of metamorphosing from caterpillar to butterfly—a cycle of rebirth. Likewise, National Geographic News reports: “Antarctic fish hibernate in the winter,” which is part of an annual cycle; “Antarctic cod go ‘on ice’ and take a nap during the long winter months, a new study shows.”

In whatever we choose to believe about the on-going human life-cycle; it is engaging to entertain, investigate, surmise, and learn of reincarnation.

Rev. Frieda King