A Young Girl's Idea Of After-Death

By Shlomoh
July 16, 2008


I was speaking with Tiffany the other day. She is quite a thoughtfull ten year old with definite ideas about the world.

She mentioned to me that she had experienced a scene a few days earlier which she was sure she had witnessed sometime before in her life.

I said that all people have this experience which is called deja vu.

Deja vu, she said, must be a memory from a previous life.

So I asked her, So do you believe in reincarnation?

She nodded. Reincarnation makes more sense to me than heaven and hell.

To be sure, if there were something more when we expire, reincarnation definitely does make more sense than heaven and hell.

What are heaven and hell? They are not primarily places where we simply take up residence when the breath
leaves us. No, They are primarily places for reward and punishment. If so, then they are places where you simply cannot relax and just be. They are not even places where you can learn to do better and be better.

Well, people who believe in these fabulous places will tell you that you had time enough to learn to be better although not do better. There were people here on earth who told you about heaven and hell and you just didn't want to listen. Well, why should you listen? People are liars. In fact, people LOVE to lie. People are devils and are liars from the beginning. So why should you believe anything they say and can't prove? Heaven and hell make no logical sense whatsoever, and even a ten year old knows that better than an adult who talks about the nonsense of Hebrew mythology as though it were somehow better or more reliable than stories about Thor, Odin, Zeus, or Ba'al.

Well what about reincarnation as a more sensible belief than heaven?

Tiffany says, When a person dies, the electrical energy has to go somewhere.

I said, By "electrical energy", do you mean the life force?

Yes, she says, the life force.

And why not?  This ten year old perceives that matter breaks down and changes and perhaps it rests. Energy however seeks a resting place - as electrical energy seeks to rest within the light bulb or TV set.

So the energy of the life force, which is as undying as any other energy, seeks another corporeal form within which to rest. It can't rest within a body which already has its own life force. And so it seeks a recepticle which as yet has no other life energy - the unborn, - not a rock or metal which it cannot animate - but a person, an animal, an insect, or a plant. Although Tiffany thinks, it probably prefers another host of the kind it is already used to - a human being, or a cat if it has previously inhabited a cat. And so forth.

The ideas of children give us insight into the ideas of our primitive ancestors.

Before our ancestors were capable of imagining that they could live up in the sky or beneathe the ground, there was only one place they COULD live - here on earth. So their souls could migrate to the body of their unborn descendants - and as another identity the soul could learn from past mistakes and be a better soul than before.

Tiffany does not know it but she has anticipated the Jewish idea of GILGUL, - the belief that God will return the soul of a sinner to the body of a new baby in order to do better and atone for its past bad deeds.

I think that unless we become as children, we will not enter the Kingdom of Heaven.


This essay was originally submitted by Shlomoh to the YAHOO group, exorthodoxjews.

ExOrthodoxJews is a YAHOO discussion group for former members of the Jewish fundamentalist religious experience. You don't have to be Jewish to join but you should be familiar with the major ideas and practices of Judeo-Christian biblical religion.



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