Incarnation is an idea from Hindu philosophy, popularized in the West by the Beatles in the 1960s, and later in movies. It has permeated Western society. In the baseball movie “Bull Durham,” the Susan Sarandon character Annie says that she was Catherine the Great in a previous lifetime. The Kevin Costner character “Crash” Davis laughs, and says why do people always assume they were someone famous in their past life? “Maybe they were just plain old Joe Schmoe.”
People instinctively understand the idea of incarnation.
More formally, Richa Yadev, in the “Philosophy of Indian Religions,” writes:
“Reincarnation or rebirth is an important concept of Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism. The doctrine of karma and rebirth represents perhaps the most striking difference between Western (Judeo-Christian and Islamic) religious thought and the great Indian religious traditions.” (Whitley, Kaufman).
“...According to Hindu scriptures, individual souls pass through many cycles of births and deaths, until they are liberated from the bonds of nature through the true knowledge of the self or soul. The impressions called “sanskaras” of our actions make a lasting impression on the mind. When a person is about to die, the soul carries with it a small residue consisting of dominant desires and tendencies as latent impressions. They become the reference for the soul’s next birth.”
SpringerLink, at https://link.springer.com/referenceworkentry/10.1007/978-94-024-1036-5_316-1
The Soul
The soul is a common theme in both Eastern and Western spiritual tradition, and it implies that the essence of a human being is a consciousness that is not dependent upon the human body.
Life after death is embodied in the Western tradition of Christianity, when Christ ascends to heaven on the third day after dying on the cross. Hindus just take this idea to its logical conclusion: The Ascended soul not only has the ability to return unharmed out of the body after death, but also has the ability to return to earth in another physical body. If we accept the idea of incarnation, then a human being is essentially a physically independent consciousness that has the ability to enter a physical body, live a life, ascend to a spiritual place, and return after a period of time to incarnate in a different human body.
Which means that the essence of every human being is an independent spiritual entity.
The Avatar
Ascension and rebirth is embodied in the Hindu concept of an Avatar. Even Wikipedia, the home of orthodoxy, defines Avatar this way:
Avatar is a concept within Hinduism that in Sanskrit literally means 'descent'. It signifies the material appearance or incarnation of a powerful deity, or spirit on Earth. The relative verb to ‘alight, to make one's appearance’ is sometimes used to refer to any guru or revered human being.”
Wikipedia, "Avatar"
The Hindu Encyclopedia says that
Avatāra literally means ‘one who has descended’. The idea of people being avatars is applied today wherein certain persons today are considered avatars. These include examples such as the current Dalai Lama and the Dharma Raja (Spiritual Head) of Bhutan being incarnations of the Guatama Buddha
Swami Harshananda, from The Hindu encyclopedia
So an avatar is the incarnation of a powerful deity or spirit on earth. These definitions of Avatar, however, always limit these entities to almost unattainable personalities like Christ or the Buddha.
Our religions and spiritual traditions, and especially Science, teach us that the “normal” run-of-the-mill human being cannot be divine personalities like Christ or the Buddha. Of course not! A “normal” human being can never attain this status because the human being, science says, is a mere collection of cells and protoplasm. Our “consciousness” is simply a materialistic stimulus-response mechanism to our environment, and when the body dies, the human personality is dead forever.
The New Testament of the Bible is essentially the story of the Christ Avatar telling everyone he meets that human beings are divine, and can all be powerful creators in their personal lives. This message really pissed off the authorities of the time, who felt that this message threatened their power. So naturally, they had to kill him. Modernly, this message pisses off the Transhumanists and the ScienceTM “experts” mired in materialism, so they have to shoot the messenger on mass media and social network platforms.
Why do human beings assign divinity only to Avatars?
I don’t know. Figure that out and you will free humanity from its self-imposed prison. We’ve been convinced that human nature is crude and destructive. Well, those are just beliefs – self-imposed limiting beliefs that 8 billion people create every day.
Perhaps we are all Avatars. An Avatar is a spiritual personality, independent of the body, who incarnates on earth. A human being is a spiritual personality, independent of the body, who incarnates on earth.
Maybe human beings need to re-define who they are.
Redefining the human being
This re-defining process is ongoing, but those who are doing the redefining are the Transhumanists/transgenderists. Their new “redefinitions” of human being ignore the realities of the biological body, including gender.
The astute reader will recognize that if a human being is defined as an independent spiritual entity, not dependent for its essence on biology, then an independent decision about gender is always possible. But you have to live with the consequences of your decision.
At this point you cannot reverse the process. CRISPR technology is in its infancy. Gene splicing and alteration is completely hit and miss. And if you want my opinion, scientists who want to mess around with the human body will discover down the line that it will not lead to good results. In my opinion, Transhumanism and transhumanism are evolutionary dead-ends, as I have said many times before in this blog.
Don’t believe it? Well, fuck around and find out.
If you decide to cut off your breasts or castrate yourself, you gotta live with that. And what if you change your mind later? That’s what de-transitioners are facing up to.
Transhumanism is a complete rejection of the biological body and biological society. Transhumanists want to replace the physical body with printed bodies, or artificially-enhanced biological bodies. Or electromagnetic containers that supposedly store a person’s consciousness.
Good luck with that! Again, FAFO.
The creations of the Creator are greater than the creations of the creations of the Creator. Transhumanists and transgenderists are going to find that out the hard way.
The good news? A human being who understands his or her divine origins and looks inside for wisdom will find it, because the human being is much more than a bunch of chemical DNA and RNA strands. All human beings have an esoteric component that connects us to the Godhead. All human beings are avatars; divine personalities having a temporary physical experience.
This is embodied in the concept of reincarnation.
What would human society look like if people had a greater idea of themselves?
Even the most obtuse, miserable person will discover the Truth of reincarnation when they take their last breath. And it doesn’t matter how bad your physical lifetime was, or how cynical you were.
All endings are happy endings.