A Ramble about Reincarnation

Originally published as a Facebook Note April 2nd, 2009

I've worked in the receiving department at a local Wal-Mart now for over a year and a half. Ever since I was hired the department was considered well below where the Corporate powers that be wanted it to be and what it was supposed to be accomplishing. Don't get me wrong, I and the other unloaders work hard, really hard to fight to get the freight unloaded and out to the floor on time to be stocked by the next shift of stockers. But somehow we never quite seemed to make the cut.

The standard management response to this continued under performance is to locate the problem employees and weed them out, replacing them with employees who will or at least might perform according to expectations.

In over a year and a half, I am the sole unloader left from the original receiving team when I was hired. The average size of a team is supposed to be eight people on any given night. The average length of service in receiving is about 4 or 5 months. In the time I have been there, we have undergone a complete turnover in personnel. We have changed supervisors three or four times. We have had four or five Assistant Store Managers in succession overseeing the backroom and we have had two store managers at the store's helm.

I'm reflecting on this recently, because the underperformance continues seemingly uninterrupted, the internal problems, complaints, and attitudes are exactly the same as when I was hired, the greivances between employee and manager continue to be identical, and yet it's not the same set of people.

It got me thinking. We're not the same set of people at all, and yet in some way we are. We have our own lives, our own personalities, our own sets of strengths and weaknesses, and yet we continue to perpetuate the same cycles of performance as those who came before us. It is likely that after I leave Wal-Mart, it will continue on uninterrupted still.

We do tend to carry on the ideas, attitudes, and ways of thinking of those that came before us whether we're conscious of them or not. When someone who is racist has a child, and they teach that child racism and hatred, that child, if he does not choose a different path, continues that cycle of racism and hatred. It becomes re-incarnated from parent or teacher to child or student. Racism is just one obvious example, but there are other things which get passed on. Some of them, like prejudice, are harmful, some of them, like ways of dressing or speaking, are benign, and still others, like faith and compassion, are beneficial. But they get passed on and re-incarnate into the next generation, just like the attitudes and ways of thinking have re-incarnated from unloader to unloader and manager to manager.

I've heard a lot about generational curses and how these are passed down from parent to child. I'm sure there are such things in this line of thinking as generational blessings as well. One generation seems to be reborn in the next.

The soul or psyche is unique to each individual; being a combination of the material and immaterial parts of the human being just as each physical body and life experience is unique to each individual. It does not, and really cannot transmigrate. But we do suffer the consequences of the thoughts and actions of those who come before us as they transmit those to us, either by taking on their suffering and ignorance, or by reaping the benefits of their blessing and enlightenment, or at times a mixture of both.

As I look at my children and interact with them, I see myself and my wife in them as well. We are in turn reincarnated in our children as we pass on our traits, physical and psychological, natural and learned, to them. At times it's like looking in a mirror. And yet they are themselves, unique individuals all three of them. My children both suffer for and reap the benefits of the consequences of our thoughts and actions as well more acutely than anyone else I come into contact with.

In this we also have choices to make and can make the choices to move past our generational and experiential programming. These are hard choices to make, but they can be made. My son can make the choice to react as I do to different circumstances, or he can choose a different path if he is willing and able to see it.

The choice to be a Christian is the choice to allow a single Person to override all of our physical and experiential programming and to re-incarnate Himself into us. His traits imprinted over ours, everything that He is being reborn into us. The scripture says "for you have died and your life is now hid with Christ in God." Everything which came before us and reincarnated intself into us suddenly has a death certificate signed on it, and the only real input that matters is that of Jesus Christ.

But this reincarnation takes place upon a choice which we must make on a decision by decision basis. Do we continue to dwell in our own selves, the combinations of biology and experiences which form who we consider ourselves to be, or do we abandon this self to death, pursuing Jesus Christ and who He is.

We know that this self, one way or another will end in death. This is unavoidable. We know that those who have been baptized into Christ Jesus have been joined to His death and died with Him already, so that when this person physically dies, it is no great loss. It is only the finalization of what already is. And as we were joined with Him in His death, so we are also joined with Him in His resurrection. His thoughts, and actions, and who He is overrides who we are or were, as the case may be. He breaks the cycle as we are united to a single, immortal Being.

With this in mind, it could be said that the true Christian life is the practice of re-incarnation, as we choose to practice the re-incarnation of Jesus Christ in us.