FAMOUS BELIEVERS IN REINCARNATION … (continuing)

I don’t know about you – but I’m finding it fascinating to discover just how many famous believers in reincarnation there were (and are)!  Here are a few more such believers, starting with a former British Prime Minister:

David Lloyd George: "The conventional heaven with its angels perpetually singing etc nearly drove me mad in my youth and made me an atheist for ten years. My opinion is that we shall be reincarnated."

George Harrison: "Friends are all souls that we've known in other lives. We're drawn to each other. Even if I have only known them a day, it doesn't matter. I'm not going to wait till I have known them for two years, because anyway, we must have met somewhere before, you know."

Henry David Thoreau: "Why should we be startled by death? Life is a constant putting off of the mortal coil - coat, cuticle, flesh and bones, all old clothes."

Carl Jung: "My life often seemed to me like a story that has no beginning and no end. I had the feeling that I was an historical fragment, an excerpt for which the preceding and succeeding text was missing. I could well imagine that I might have lived in former centuries and there encountered questions I was not yet able to answer; that I had been born again because I had not fulfilled the task given to me."

Koran: "God generates beings, and sends them back over and over again, till they return to Him."

Socrates: "I am confident that there truly is such a thing as living again, that the living spring from the dead, and that the souls of the dead are in existence."

Rudyard Kipling: “They will come back–come back again–as long as the red earth rolls. He never wasted a leaf or a tree. Do you think He would squander souls?”

Balzac: "All human beings go through a previous life.  Who knows how many fleshly forms the heir of heaven occupies before he can be brought to understand the value of that silence and solitude of spiritual worlds?"

Somerset Maugham: "Has it occurred to you that transmigration is at once an explanation and a justification of the evil of the world? If the evils we suffer are the result of sins committed in our past lives, we can bear them with resignation and hope that if in this one we strive toward virtue our future lives will be less afflicted.”

Thomas Edison: “The only survival I can conceive is to start a new Earth cycle again.”

William Butler Yeats: “Many times man lives and dies...”

Kahlil Gibran: “A little while, a moment of rest upon the wind, and another woman shall bear me.”

Plotinus (Greek philosopher & founder of Neo-Platonism, 204-270): "Thus a man, once a ruler, will be made a slave because he abused his power and because the fall is to his future good. Those that have money will be made poor -- and to the good poverty is no hindrance. Those that have unjustly killed are killed in turn, unjustly as regards the murderer but justly as regards the victim, and those that are to suffer are thrown into the path of those that administer the merited treatment. It is not an accident that makes a man a slave; no one is a prisoner by chance; every bodily outrage has its due cause. The man once did what he now suffers. A man that murders his mother will become a woman and be murdered by a son; a man that wrongs a woman will become a woman, to be wronged."

Gustav Mahler: "We all return. It is this certainty that gives meaning to life and it does not make the slightest difference whether or not in a later incarnation we remember the former life. What counts is not the individual and his comfort, but the great aspiration to the perfect and the pure which goes on in each incarnation."

Rudolf Steiner: (Austrian philosopher and spiritualist, 1861-1925) claimed in his book Reincarnation & Karma to have gained many mystical insights into the mysteries of life and the afterlife. "Thoughts that deny reincarnation are transformed in the next life into an inner unreality, an inner emptiness of life; this inner unreality and emptiness are experienced as torment, as disharmony."

Finally (at least for now!):

Pythagoras

According to Pythagorean teaching, the soul survives physical death. After a series of reincarnations, each one following a period of psychic cleansing in spiritual environments, the soul becomes free eternally from the cycle of reincarnations.

There – I hope you agree that my most recent posts have given a good cross-section of famous believers in reincarnation? 

MORE FAMOUS BELIEVERS IN REINCARNATION

As there’s been a great reaction to my last blog, here are the views of a few more famous believers in reincarnation for you:

Leo Tolstoy: "As we live through thousands of dreams in our present life, so is our present life only one of many thousands of such lives which we enter from the other more real life and then return after death. Our life is but one of the dreams of that more real life, and so it is endlessly, until the very last one, the very real the life of God."

Friedrich Nietzsche: "Live so that thou mayest desire to live again.  That is thy duty - for in any case thou wilt live again!"

Albert Schweitzer: "Reincarnation contains a most comforting explanation of reality by means of which Indian thought surmounts difficulties which baffle the thinkers of Europe."

Walt Whitman: "I know I am deathless. No doubt I have died myself ten thousand times before. I laugh at what you call dissolution, and I know the amplitude of time."

Goethe: "As long as you are not aware of the continual law of Die and Be Again, you are merely a vague guest on a dark earth."

General Patton: "So as through a glass and darkly, the age-long strife I see, where I fought in many guises, many names, but always me."

Schopenhauer: "Were an Asiatic to ask me for a definition of Europe, I should be forced to answer him: It is that part of the world which is haunted by the incredible delusion that man was created out of nothing, and that his present birth is his first entrance into life."

Gauguin: "When the physical organism breaks up, the soul survives. It then takes on another body."

Let’s end, for today, with this famous epitaph – written when its author was just 22 years old …

Benjamin Franklin:

The Body of B. Franklin, Printer,

Like the Cover of an Old Book, contents torn out

And stripped of its Lettering and Gilding,

Lies Here

Food for worms,

But the Work shall not be lost,

For it will as he believed

Appear once more

In a New and more Elegant Edition

Revised and corrected

By the Author.

Have you seen enough for now – or would you like to hear from still more famous believers in reincarnation?

FAMOUS BELIEVERS IN REINCARNATION

Among the many famous believers in reincarnation, one of my favorite poets, John Masefield, said this about it:  “I hold that when a person dies his soul returns again to earth; arrayed in some new flesh-disguise another mother gives him birth. With sturdier limbs and brighter brain the old soul takes the road again.”

Here are some further views that I think will interest you:

Henry Ford: “I adopted the theory of reincarnation when I was 26...Work is futile if we cannot utilize the experience we collect in one life in the next. When I discovered reincarnation it was as if I had found a universal plan... Time was no longer limited. I was no longer a slave to the hands of the clock... Genius is experience... It is the fruit of long experience in many lives... The discovery of reincarnation put my mind at ease...”

Richard Wagner: “In contrast to reincarnation and karma, all other views seem petty and narrow.”

William Wordsworth: “Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting; the soul that rises with us, our life’s Star, hath had elsewhere its setting, and cometh from afar. Not in entire forgetfulness and not in utter nakedness, but trailing clouds of glory do we come...”

Goethe: “I am certain I have been here as I am now a thousand times before, and I hope to return a thousand times.”

Voltaire: “It is not more surprising to be born twice than once; everything in nature is resurrection.”

George Elliot: “Our deeds still travel with us from afar. And what we have been makes us what we are.”

Do you have some views to share on famous believers in reincarnation? Great if you do!

DO YOU BELIEVE IN REINCARNATION?

Well - do you believe in reincarnation? If you do, you're in excellent - and somewhat diverse - company!

Napoleon not only believed in reincarnation, but liked to tell his generals who he believed he had been in previous existences.  Walt Whitman, Albert Schweitzer, Socrates, Voltaire, Pythagoras and Carl Jung were believers - as were Wordsworth, Gandhi, Tolstoy, George Harrison, General George S. Patton, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Mark Twain.

Henry Ford said: "I adopted the theory of reincarnation when I was 26. Genius is experience. Some seem to think that it is a gift or talent, but it is the fruit of long experience in many lives".

And here are Benjamin Franklin's thoughts: "I look upon death to be as necessary to the constitution as sleep. We shall rise refreshed in the morning."

Author of CALL OF THE WILD, Jack London maintained: "I did not begin when I was born, nor when I was conceived. I have been growing, developing, through incalculable myriads of millenniums. All my previous selves have their voices, echoes, promptings in me. Oh, incalculable times again shall I be born."

                                        
Incidentally, two of my novels deal in different ways with reincarnation and they are FREE on Amazon today:   Find them HERE.

GHOSTS ON DARTMOOR

It is said that Foxtor Mire on Devon's Dartmoor was Conan Doyle's inspiration behind the Great Grimpen Mire in The Hound Of The Baskervilles, where Stapleton met his death attempting to escape from Holmes and Watson along his secret path between pools and swamps.

According to R.W. Bamberg's HAUNTED DARTMOOR (A Ghost-Hunter's Guide) 'Childe the Hunter' died there when separated from his companions while out hunting and succumbing to exposure on this desolate spot.  Before freezing to death, he (probably a Saxon lord called Ordulf) is said to have written a will in his own blood, leaving his Plymstock estates to whichever church gave him burial.

The monks of Tavistock found his frozen body, carrying it back to their abbey and so gaining the nobleman's rich legacy.  Childe's Tomb at Foxtor Mire marks the spot where he died - and sometimes at dusk, in conditions of poor visibility, a procession of grey-clad monks carrying a coffin has been seen by pony-trekkers and solitary walkers in the vicinity. This has emerged briefly from the mist, while a plainchant is heard on the wind.

THE HOUND OF THE BASKERVILLES

Did you know that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle is thought to have been inspired for his book The Hound Of The Baskervilles by the Dartmoor legend of Squire Cabel - an evil huntsman said to have sold his soul to the Devil?  The Squire was buried in 1677 in Buckfastleigh churchyard and legend has it that phantom hounds surround his tomb on dark, stormy nights, filling the air with their unearthly howling. Stories circulate about a flickering red glow and the shadows of bars being cast on the church wall, with Squire Cabel's ghost rising from his tomb to hunt with his spectral pack along an ancient track known to locals as the Abbot's Way.

I shan't be visiting the grave after dark, since glimpsing the phantom is believed to mean death within the year!

Here's the Squire's grave - which I visited by daylight!

Locals created this inscription as the original one is now indistinct.