Posted by:
Tevai
(
)
Date: March 14, 2019 07:24PM
Red Wrote:
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> Honest question: what about reincarnation do you
> find "SO logical "?
Honest answer: I was born in (near "downtown"/central) Los Angeles, and raised in the San Fernando Valley, to relatives on the maternal side of my family who were proud descendants of Southern slaveholders (and a step-grandfather who, when he was a young man, and an adult attorney, in Kansas, was KKK), and grew up listening to endless "reminiscences" of how WONDERFUL my slaveholding ancestors had been, and HOW MUCH their slaves had loved them, and how utterly saddened and bereaved their slaves had been when they lost their beloved owners during Emancipation. [You can take a barf break here if you need to.]
Even as a little kid (like four or five years old), I knew this was wrong. When I would try to talk about it, or ask questions, I was told that I was just being obstinate, or was being a b*tch, because I just couldn't accept that the slaves my blood family once owned had been over-the-top giddy at their good fortune to be owned by my family.
Despite a number of serious (and permanent) problems in my nuclear family, I was living a really superlatively good life compared to most of the people on this planet (beginning with: the black kids who had moved into the houses WE, our larger extended family, had once had lived in, as part of post-WWII white flight....when my extended family, thanks to the GI Bill and postwar prosperity, had moved en masse to the SFV).
So I got this intensely good life, with all of these amazing benefits (educational, financial, social-networking)...and the kids who were living in the house I once lived in on Santa Barbara Avenue (now: Martin Luther King, Jr. Blvd.), and in the houses my other relatives had once lived in, were living in poverty, barely scraping by, and going to schools which once (when my Mom was in secondary school) had been good, but were now lousy.
I grew up in the western San Fernando Valley, in places which had become literally mythical because they were so omnipresent and familiar on the movie screen (from the beginnings of the silent film era, through 1950s Western, and the "family film" and "teenage film" eras, in particular), among an assemblage of incredibly intelligent and creative people, who had (mostly) all used their GI Bill access to leap up the social, and financial, and creative ladders.
So what was the difference between me, who once lived in a particular house on what is now MLK Blvd., and the black kids who moved into that same house after me?
Why did I get all these enormous benefits in public school? Not only scholastic benefits (although these were substantial), but INCREDIBLE social networking benefits of all kinds: I went to school with all kinds of kids who were somehow associated with the industry (there were special rules at my junior high school for students who were employed in the industry: they could wear curlers in their hair on the days where they later performed that night (this being before the days of blow dryers), they were automatically excused from school on any days they worked, tests would be given specially for them if they missed taking them because of work....and the PARENTS of many of the kids I went to school with were known worldwide--and I am thinking here specifically of Roy Rogers and Dale Evans, but there were many other actors and performers in the families of the kids I went to school with, as well as (beyond the before-the-camera people) double or triple numbers of families who worked either behind the camera, or were integral parts of the industry: agents, p.r. people, studio execs, etc.). (My uncle owned a company which provided power and lights to filming which was taking place on location--meaning: outside of the property confines of the individual studios.)
I had the most incredible benefits, ALL AROUND ME, ALL THE TIME, when I was growing up....and simultaneously, I never, EVER, forgot the kids who had moved into what had once been "my" house on MLK Blvd.
As I grew up, I paid attention to what I learned, as well as what I was being taught (not always the "same thing"), about the rest of my fellow Americans, and my fellow human beings around the planet--and I thought, continually, about "why" I (and my friends I was growing up with, and my neighbors, and those in my community, and in "my" Valley) had it SO GOOD (regardless of the particular problems in any given family), and why OTHER kids, in OTHER places on Earth, had it so bad: they were enslaved, sold as children into marriage or worse, they lived in near-starvation poverty, if they were girls they were constantly under attack, if they were the "wrong" [anything] they (girls and boys, both) were constantly under attack, their parents were murdered (or worse)...and I was living one of the best lives on the planet.
Why?????
When I reached the age where I started to really understand what I was being taught in Sunday School (Hindu/Vedanta/Advaita), and at home, about reincarnation, it made SO MUCH sense to me--there was some kind of logic involved somehow--there was some kind of ORDER going on--and, in the end of all of this overall, greater, process of "living," there was an inherent equality that prevailed.
Just like you can't "see" and understand a movie from a few isolated inches of physical film in your hand, you can't "see" and understand "a" life from only a limited number of lives (in any person's "Long History")--but if you have a few inches of filmstock from "Gone With the Wind" in your hand, you DO know that it is part of a much larger story arc--beyond, perhaps, your ability to "see" or comprehend at that moment, but THERE.
Within a framework of reincarnation, it all makes some kind of sense (whether we understand the individual dynamics or not).
WITHOUT a framework of reincarnation, life throughout human history, and around this planet, makes absolutely no sense at all.
At least to me.
> All the available scientific evidence is once the
> brain goes in a human, what makes us, well, us
> goes with it.
What we know to be scientific evidence today will be eclipsed by the scientific evidence of a hundred years from now, or a thousand years from now.
Science "moves."
Our understanding of "what is" moves with it.
Edited 3 time(s). Last edit at 03/14/2019 08:44PM by Tevai.