Born Again

Reincarnation is often lazily presented in the modern West as an “Eastern” curiosity, an exotic import from Hinduism or Tibetan Buddhism. But the idea that consciousness persists through multiple lives has haunted—and inspired—the mystic imagination for thousands of years, across continents and creeds. It is not an ornamental superstition tucked into esoteric religion; it is one of humanity’s most enduring metaphysical currents.

Among the Greeks, it was central to the thought of Pythagoras, who claimed to recall his own previous incarnations, including as a warrior and even as a beautiful courtesan. Plato carried the flame forward, weaving reincarnation into the Myth of Er and other dialogues, framing it as both a moral law and a cosmic inevitability: the soul returns, shaped by its past deeds, until it learns the deeper truth. The Stoics, too, flirted with the concept, folding it into their cyclical cosmology.

Judaism, contrary to the assumption that it rejects all such notions, preserves a mystical tradition of reincarnation known as gilgul. By the medieval period, Kabbalists openly discussed the soul’s repeated journey through various bodies as part of its divine refinement. Even within early Christianity, the idea had its adherents: Origen of Alexandria, one of the Church’s great theologians, speculated on the soul’s pre-existence and hinted at its return to flesh. His eventual condemnation by the Church says less about the implausibility of reincarnation than about the tightening of orthodoxy.

In other words, reincarnation was not always the eccentric cousin of metaphysics….it was often a major topics of serious theological discourse across the near east and Mediterranean as well.

Fast forward to our current century, and reincarnation is not merely a mystical inheritance; it is being prodded gingerly by the tools of modern research. While the mainstream scientific establishment is still deeply skeptical, there exists a growing body of work that refuses to be hand-waved away.

Near-death experience (NDE) studies have uncovered intriguing hints. Pioneers like Dr. Pim van Lommel, in his long-term cardiac arrest research, have documented cases where patients return from clinical death reporting vivid encounters—not just with a “light” or deceased relatives—but with sequences of lives, as if they momentarily stood outside the wheel of existence and saw the spokes radiating backward. These cases are rare, but persistent.

Then there are the past-life recall investigations of Dr. Ian Stevenson and later Dr. Jim Tucker at the University of Virginia. Across decades and cultures, they recorded thousands of children describing precise, verifiable details of lives they could not possibly have known. Many spoke of traumatic deaths, later confirmed by local historical records. While memory is fallible and cultural contamination is a concern, the statistical improbability of some of these matches has forced even hardened skeptics to admit there is “something” here—though what that “something” is remains contentious.

This is not conclusive proof in the materialist sense (which I personally don’t need) , but it is an accumulating weight of data that is inconvenient for strict physicalism. Reincarnation here is not a matter of blind faith; it is a hypothesis with emerging lines of empirical pressure.

Modern occultism, unfortunately, has often cheapened reincarnation. The metaphysics becomes a stage for ego’s costume party: the Tarot reader who is sure she was Cleopatra, the ceremonial magician convinced he is the reincarnation of Eliphas Lévi. Even Aleister Crowley, for all his genius, indulged in self-serving identifications with past adepts as a way of bolstering his mythos, ultimately staining the cause (like many things Mr Alister touched).

Such vanity reincarnation mistakes the point entirely. It treats the doctrine as a prop for self-importance rather than as a metaphysical law. A real engagement with reincarnation strips away the glitter of imagined past grandeur. If the doctrine is true, it means that the soul has been through an uncountable number of bodies, many of them forgettable, some squalid, others perhaps noble. You have likely been both saint and butcher, healer and betrayer, pauper and aristocrat—roles assigned not by destiny’s favoritism but by the mechanics of karmic unfolding.

For the mystic, reincarnation is not an accessory to personal narrative. It is the supra-mundane reality in which the drama of awakening takes place. If consciousness survives death and returns, it does so not for your entertainment, not to flatter you with illusions of specialness, but to offer repeated opportunities to exhaust the illusions altogether.

If taken seriously, reincarnation is not a “sexy” doctrine at all. It is exhausting in principle. It means endless beginning again—birth, struggle, attachment, loss, death—over and over. It means returning to a world still full of violence, ignorance, and suffering, sometimes in better circumstances, often in worse. If you imagine eternity, do not picture harp music; picture the grindstone turning, turning, turning, while you are pressed against it until you learn how to step away.

This is precisely how many Eastern traditions frame it: not as a romantic cycle but as bondage. The samsaric wheel is not celebrated; it is escaped. The Buddha’s great insight was not that rebirth is beautiful, but that it is inherently unsatisfactory—dukkha—no matter how high you climb or how sweet your temporary joys. The real work of the mystic is not to “remember” all past lives but to awaken so completely in this life that there is no compulsion to return.

From this perspective, the plausibility of reincarnation is not just a curiosity—it is a spur. If true, it calls for urgency in the spiritual quest. Every life lived in half-conscious wandering is another turn on the wheel. Liberation, then, becomes not an abstract goal but the only rational response to an otherwise interminable cycle.

In the end, reincarnation stripped of ego-trinkets and pop-mysticism becomes an uncomfortably plausible picture of our chaotic reality. It aligns with certain ancient teachings, resonates with persistent modern cases, and presents a moral structure that fits the lived experience of injustice, unfulfilled longing, and unfinished business. But it is not comforting in the way the ego hopes.

It is a law, not a lullaby.

If we live again, it is not because the cosmos is giving us another chance to be Cleopatra, Perhaps it is because we are not yet free to leave the stage.