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This Idea is for any Religion that promotes reincarnation. It is
also thoroughly half-baked, as you will quickly notice.
Basically, in reincarnation philosophy, your soul will eventually
acquire a new baby body, and you will grow up not knowing
anything about a previous life. For believers,
though, deep
hypnosis supposedly can bring up past-life information. And
occasionally there are reports of young children claiming to
remember stuff that turns out to be verifiable.
Well, what of the stuff you accumulated in your most recent past
life? If you knew you were likely to be born again, wouldn't you
like to claim it, instead of having to collect it from scratch all
over again? I'm talking mostly about stuff that has sentimental
value, not the kind of stuff that the typical grave-robber would be
interested in. Your journal or diary, for example. Maybe a
collection of books or magazines. Favorite toys.
So, as you approach the end of the present life, instead of buying
a plot of land to hold a worthless corpse, you plan on burying a
time capsule there, instead. Well-sealed against deterioration of
its contents, of course.
Later, after being reborn, and learning who you used to be, all you
need to do is prove it enough that you can then claim ownership of
the time capsule's contents. That's the Half-Baked part of this
Idea, of course!
Dogbert's version of this Idea
http://dilbert.com/strip/2016-08-28 He seems to be assuming that you get reborn shortly after you die. But what if a century goes by, first? Dogbert probably isn't going to live that long.... [Vernon, Aug 28 2016]
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Annotation:
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Some popular series of detective private eye novels have equally strange premises. |
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Examples: Dexter the Medical Examiner who is also a serial killer. Didius Falco is private dick for the Roman Emperor. |
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A time capsule detective working for Citibank, Chase, or LLoyds seems almost tame. All you need is a past life detection gimmick that is half way believable. |
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Sooner or later your legs give way, you hit the ground
Save it for later don't run away and let me down.
Sooner or later you hit the deck you get found out
Save it for later don't run away and let me down, you let me down. |
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So not a full reincarnation. Just a half baked one, dragged down by baggage. |
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[+]. I think it makes sense to do this even if you don't believe
in reincarnation because in a way that stuff is more you than
your body is. How about a method of disposing of the dead
which is utterly unsentimental about the bodies but
sentimental about the personal and cultural impact of the
personality? So you just use the body for medical purposes
and compost it or something, but revere the diaries and
pottery. |
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Regarding reincarnation itself, it always seems odd to me that
people seem to remember geographically and historically
local lives in the past rather than a random selection of lives
throughout space and time. The passage of time is just
something we experience in our own lives, surely? Why would
it apply to the non-living phase of experience? Why don't we
remember a life as a lobster-like lifeform living in an ocean of
liquid ammonia somewhere in the Whirlpool Galaxy a few
billion years in the future or
something? Why is it always Cleopatra? |
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I have this recurring nightmare that I've died in my
sleep and been reincarnated as a middle-aged
scientist in Cambridge who suffers from recurring
nightmares. And every damn time I wake up, it turns
out to be true. |
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