Reincarnation - Fact or Fiction?
Take a few minutes to watch the video presentations below, then read the compelling statements of several famous persons that follows. Finally, decide for yourself; do we only get one life and nothing more, or have we lived many lives in the past?
Benjamin Franklin
The body of Benjamin Franklin, printer (like the cover of an old book, its contents worn out, and stripped of its lettering and gilding) lies here, food for worms. Yet the work itself shall not be lost, for it will, as he believed, appear once more in a new and more beautiful edition, corrected and amended by its Author.
"I look upon death to be as necessary to the constitution as sleep. We shall rise refreshed in the morning." And, "Finding myself to exist in the world, I believe I shall, in some shape or other always exist."
Jack London, author, best known for book Call of the Wild
"I did not begin when I was born, nor when I was conceived. I have been growing, developing, through incalculable myriads of millenniums. All my previous selves have their voices, echoes, promptings in me. Oh, incalculable times again shall I be born."
Napoleon
Napoleon was fond of telling his generals that he believed in the law of reincarnation and even told them who he believed to have been in a previous life.
Mark Twain
"I have been born more times than anybody except Krishna."
Leo Tolstoy
"As we live through thousands of dreams in our present life, so is our present life only one of many thousands of such lives which we enter from the other more real life and then return after death. Our life is but one of the dreams of that more real life, and so it is endlessly, until the very last one, the very real the life of God."
Henry Ford
"I adopted the theory of reincarnation when I was 26. Genius is experience. Some think to seem that it is a gift or talent, but it is the fruit of long experience in many lives".
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, (German poet, playwright and scientist)
"As long as you are not aware of the continual law of Die and Be Again, you are merely a vague guest on a dark Earth."
Freidrich Nietzsche
"Live so that thou mayest desire to live again - that is thy duty - for in any case thou wilt live again!"
Mahatma Gandhi
"I cannot think of permanent enmity between man and man, and believing as I do in the theory of reincarnation, I live in the hope that if not in this birth, in some other birth I shall be able to hug all of humanity in friendly embrace."
Ralph Waldo Emerson
"The soul comes from without into the human body, as into a temporary abode, and it goes out of it anew it passes into other habitations, for the soul is immortal." "It is the secret of the world that all things subsist and do not die, but only retire a little from sight and afterwards return again. Nothing is dead; men feign themselves dead, and endure mock funerals and there they stand looking out of the window, sound and well, in some strange new disguise."
General George S. Patton
"So as through a glass and darkly, the age long strife I see, Where I fought in many guises, many names, but always me."
Albert Schweitzer
"Reincarnation contains a most comforting explanation of reality by means of which Indian thought surmounts difficulties which baffle the thinkers of Europe."
Walt Whitman
"I know I am deathless. No doubt I have died myself ten thousand times before. I laugh at what you call dissolution, and I know the amplitude of time."
William Wordsworth
"Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting; The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star, Hath had elsewhere its setting. And cometh from afar."
Jalalu Rumi (Islamic Poet of the 13th century)
"I died as a mineral and became a plant, I died as a plant and rose to animal, I died as animal and I was man. Why should I fear ? When was I less by dying?"
Carl Jung
"My life often seemed to me like a story that has no beginning and no end. I had the feeling that I was an historical fragment, an excerpt for which the preceding and succeeding text was missing. I could well imagine that I might have lived in former centuries and there encountered questions I was not yet able to answer; that I had been born again because I had not fulfilled the task given to me."
Henry David Thoreau
"Why should we be startled by death? Life is a constant putting off of the mortal coil - coat, cuticle, flesh and bones, all old clothes."
Socrates
"I am confident that there truly is such a thing as living again, that the living spring from the dead, and that the souls of the dead are in existence."
Jesus Christ in Gnostic Gospels: Pistis Sophia
"Souls are poured from one into another of different kinds of bodies of the world."
Voltaire
It is not more surprising to be born twice than once; everything in nature is resurrection."
Koran
"God generates beings, and sends them back over and over again, till they return to Him."
Josephus (most well known Jewish historian from the time of Jesus)
"All pure and holy spirits live on in heavenly places, and in course of time they are again sent down to inhabit righteous bodies."
Honore Balzac (French writer)
"All human beings go through a previous life... Who knows how many fleshly forms the heir of heaven occupies before he can be brought to understand the value of that silence and solitude of spiritual worlds?"
Arthur Schopenhauer (Philosopher)
"Were an Asiatic to ask me for a definition of Europe, I should be forced to answer him: It is that part of the world which is haunted by the incredible delusion that man was created out of nothing, and that his present birth is his first entrance into life."
Paul Gauguin (French post-impressionist painter)
"When the physical organism breaks up, the soul survives. It then takes on another body."
George Harrison
"Friends are all souls that we've known in other lives. We're drawn to each other. Even if I have only known them a day., it doesn't matter. I'm not going to wait till I have known them for two years, because anyway, we must have met somewhere before, you know."
Pythagoras
Among the ancient Greeks, reincarnation was a doctrine closely associated with the followers of the philosopher and mathematician Pythagoras. According to Pythagorean teaching, the soul survives physical death.. After a series of reincarnations each one following a period of psychic cleansing in spiritual environments the soul becomes free eternally from the cycle of reincarnations.
