PythagorasThe following lines are from the poem "Looking into a Face," from The Light Around the Body, a 1967 collection that won the National Book Award for the American poet and activist Robert Bly (1926 - ).
I have wandered in a face, for hours,
Passing through dark fires.
I have risen to a body
Not yet born,
Existing like a light around the body,
Through which the body moves like a sliding moon.
Bly's narrator in this quotation is the soul/spirit/mind, which Bly conceives of as moving from body to body in the course of successive incarnations. The lines "I have risen to a body/ Not yet born" describe the moment that the soul attaches itself to the soon-to-be-born fetus. "Existing like a light around the body" refers to the energy body, or aura, with which the soul/spirit/mind surrounds the physical body, expanding and contracting as the mind goes in and out of gear. Some people are able to see this "light around the body," while others claim that they can't.
Fiero (2002, Bk 1, Reading 1.9, pp. 60-61) quoting the following lines from the Bhagavad-Gita, which she describes as a dialog between "Arjuna, the warrior-hero, and Krishna, the incarnation of the god Vishnu and a divine manifestation of Brahman," observes that "Krishna's answer to Arjuna--a classic statement of resignation--represents the essence of Hindu thought as distilled from the Upanishads":
He [who] knows bliss in the Atman
And wants nothing else.
Cravings torment the heart:
He renounces cravings.
I call him illumined.
Not shaken by adversity,
Not hankering after happiness.
Free from fear, free from anger,
Free from the things of desire,
I call him a seer, and illumined.
The bonds of his flesh are broken.
He is lucky, and does not rejoice:
He is unlucky, and does not weep.
I call him illumined.
The significant characteristic of Krishna's description of an "illumined" person is that this person has no feelings, no emotional responses, and is completely indifferent to everything, whether good or bad. This is precisely how Merlin Zauber experiences existence in the afterlife.
The Christian Rationalism site provides a long list of Westerners who believed in reincarnation. Each is allotted a paragraph of description and a quotation. Among the famous people who believed in reincarnation, Christian Rationalism includes the following:
Pythagoras
Jack London
Richard Bach
Napoleon
Benjamin Franklin
Honore Balzac
Arthur Schopenhauer
Ralph Emerson
Henry Ford
Paul Gauguin
Mahatma Ghandi
J.D. Salinger
Plato
Isaac Bashevis Singer
Leo Tolstoy
Walt Whitman
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Henry Thoreau
James Joyce
Herman Hesse
To each of the figures cited is a quotation from that person attesting to belief in reincarnation. For example, according to Christian Rationalism, the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer put it this way:
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."
Christian Rationalism points out that even Henry Ford said "Genius is experience. Some seem to think that it is a gift or talent, but it is the fruit of long experience in many lives."
To read the entire list of quotations from famous Westerners, go to Famous People and the Law of Reincarnation.
Christian Rationalism (2005). "Famous people and
the law of reincarnation." Retrieved 10/04/2005 from
www.geocities.com/athens/academy/4678/reincarn/famous.html.
Fiero, G. K. (2002). The first civilizations and the
classical legacy. Book 1 of The Humanistic Tradition,
4th ed. 6 Vol. New York: McGraw Hill.
© Copyright 2005 by Robert J. R. Rockwood. All rights reserved.