Reincarnation

They had been many things over innumerable lifetimes. A magnificent tiger, stalking through the brush. A dolphin, chattering among its pod, cresting waves in glittering leaps. Picture them, perhaps skittering across cracked desert sand, stinging prey with a whip of their tail. See them now, dancing the mating dance in colored plumage, caught twitching in a spiders web, gliding above continents, on shimmering wings. They crawled and slithered, ran and bounded.

They had seen struggle, to swim upstream in the last days of fall, to rush the gauntlet of hungry beaks in the quest for their first taste of salty freedom, to run miles amid the pack to feed their litter. Defeats had been many. They starved in freezing winter. They were mauled and feasted upon by predators they could not outwit. They lost mates to powerful specimens of their own kind.

Let us not forget to mention their less animal iterations. Once, a matron living in decadent opulence. As a doctor they cured sickness never turning away the helpless no matter how poor. They were a gladiator for a time, thriving in the sweaty rush of survival, until the day they were among the pile of the dead. In some times they had many gods, and worshipped according to the variety of life. In some, they had few, choosing paths among the vegetation. And in some, they had none.

To think that their lives could be plotted out on a graph is to misunderstand. They could have been the mantis whose belly was filled by the beetle and the beetle who filled it. The knight in armor driving his spear through the horse of his opponent and the tree giving limb to shaft the lance. The dancer and musician, the pauper and the prince.

Why had they endured? To become this man. He who used to be they. Thee.

Thee lived an enlightened life. He felt at all times the transience of being. Time did not move the world around him or push him ever forward, it rather moved through him rustling his indistinct parts like a gust of wind through loose clothes. Conglomerations of various pasts, all melded together in dark pockets he felt no need to probe, moved him sometimes, and other times did not. Neither bothered him much. Thee was not a monk or a priest, those were the efforts of men trying to become. He had already arrived.

If you were to have asked Thee if he remembered living as a cricket or swimming the Atlantic, the answer would have been no. It wasn’t about how many lives he lived or what he did. Quite the opposite. The various pasts meshed together inseparably, and in fact served to make the events of his life less discrete. Deja vu was embedded in his every day, coloring his experiences with odd shades, and throwing the focus into angles and shapes.

Some people would have considered him a simpleton. They would not have been wrong, but were not correct either. Thee was Thee, and that was consistent to a degree that radiated off of him to everyone he met, striking some offensively but most in a gentle calming way.

Thee did not consider his thoughts a reflection of himself. How absurd would that be, to judge such a vast universe by the murmurings of a single voice...

He did not disregard them however, who is to say how many perished to provide him with this wisdom. He merely listened. Thee didn’t seek out pleasant encounters, interesting occurrences or comforting surroundings. His existence justified itself and he lived it as it moved him, with countless strings pulling this way and that. One day, he died and was buried in the garden where he had lived his days.

The story should end here. Thee should have found nirvana waiting for him, an endless embodiment of the peace he had earned, or ultimate enlightenment, some kind of vast knowing and being at the same time. Maybe he should have become one with everything, whatever that might mean, perhaps submersed in the universe like a cipher, or pulsing and dispersing like energy. But it didn’t. He didn’t become God, or the universe. Thee once again became they.

This new they, that was once a he, was very confused. So confused in fact, that they no longer found themselves buzzing over a pile of dung with the same sense of certainty. They hunted and mated, scurried and burrowed, darted and hovered, but it was not urgent and lacked the motion of destiny. It was like some giant organism became aware of how pointless it all was, that a grand circle was still a circle no matter the scale. So the lion didn’t hunt one day and instead ran with the deer. A lone ant did not bring his crumb back to the colony and instead munched on it, under the shade of a pebble. Birds stopped migrating, and stayed chirping year round on the sunny coastal beaches.

A whimsical sense of doubt was everywhere. Somehow when death lost its weight, survival became less clogged by driven energy. People began to live presently, and let the unknown be.

Did the cycle begin again, did time corkscrew in on itself or flow through the same riverbed, tracing the hollows it had once before? It’s hard to say what happened to Thee, he may never have become again. The certainty may have evaporated totally, or simply become too loose to recognize itself. Maybe the disparate identities were not so indelibly linked after all. Or maybe he did. Again.