Yeah I had this conversation with a friend recently. They were talking about what we might come back as and I said "Odds are we would be bacterial or something like that." They felt that we would be limited to higher order life and I was like "Why?"
I’ve been thinking about this lately. If you had unlimited time to experience every possible version of life would you? Would you want to know what it means to be a tree or a bacteria or an ant or an Egyptian slave building a giant triangle in the desert? Would the boredom of infinity and the curiosity of omnipresence drive you to explore everything life can be?
On top of all that during the lifetime event you likely have no recollection of being inbetween. While alive the concept seems intriguing but in-between it's just another Tuesday.
There’s an interesting short story called “The Egg” where the only two beings in the universe are you, and a higher being that is maturing you, and doing so by reincarnating you as every being to have existed and to exist, and every being you see is you having been reincarnated at a different moment in time, and that by experiencing everything to live you ascend to godhood
I think I saw a video made from that! There is another one called Flatland that I watched also and both have really influenced how I think about the nature of life
I’m going to remind myself of that when I look at the sky and try to understand beyond my ability to comprehend. It would probably suck to remember life as a higher intelligence and then live with that knowledge but without the ability to use it
well that's a strain of mystical thought, omar khayyam wrote about that one
A moment guessed—then back behind the Fold
Immerst of Darkness round the Drama roll'd
Which, for the Pastime of Eternity,
He doth Himself contrive, enact, behold.
we're not the first people ever to think about this stuff, and we don't actually know the truth about death & existence any better than they did, so our thinking isn't of greater sophistication
If you had unlimited time to experience every possible version of life would you? Would you want to know what it means to be a tree or a bacteria or an ant or an Egyptian slave building a giant triangle in the desert? Would the boredom of infinity and the curiosity of omnipresence drive you to explore everything life can be?
Nope I wouldn't. I won the ultimate planet earth/existence lottery once and feel totally grateful for it and would like to dip out into nothingness when it's over
Maybe that’s why we’re all saddened watching this. Because throughout all of our numerous lifetimes we have all been this one specific single celled organism and we’ve all just watched our own death.
If I could reincarnate but be able to remember all my lives, I’d definitely want to experience every possible perception I could have or being I could be.
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u/ContributionFlat7082 16d ago
What if reincarnation is real and we have an equal chance at becoming any life form. Becoming human again would be like .0000000003%