Coming Back To Clean Up Our Acts
Author: Shadow
My life (or at least my current life) has been a series of struggles, a series of lessons I had to learn, and a series of battles I’ve had to overcome. I’ve dealt with depression, with my sexuality, with feeling like an outsider, and even with thoughts of suicide. And here I am, still alive, full of life, forging a path that I will make for myself. I’ve faced a lot of pain and personal demons, and I’ve come out of it stronger, with a smile on my face. And I’m only eighteen.
Some of the people I tell my history to are surprised that I’m still here. Even I’m amazed that I’ve made it this far. No, this is not some pity party, but rather a reflection. When I look back on what I went through, I find myself pleading with God as to why he put me here, why he made me go through this. Since becoming a Wiccan, I’ve written journal entries questioning why the Goddess and God put me in such compromising situations, and why they didn’t pull me out of it in my darkest hours.
But I’ve since grown from that. I know that, while the Divine may have put me here, it was my choice to come back. So now, I’ve redirected my “why was I put here” question from targeting the Divine to instead targeting myself. When I’m drawn back to wondering about why I was reborn here, I ask myself, “What could I possibly have gained from living in an environment such as this?”
The answer to that is actually very simple: to learn lessons from a different perspective. I believe, as I’m sure many do, that when we move from one lifetime to another, the lessons and values we hold, about others and about ourselves, becomes imprinted on our soul and are carried with us into each and every reincarnation. In this way, we find ourselves becoming more and more open minded.
And as the times change, we find new social groups from which we can learn from. Until the fifties and sixties, for a white person to even let a black person have their way before his or her own was almost unthinkable. Before the seventies, a woman following through with feminist ways was looked down upon. And prior to the Stonewall riots, homosexuality was considered a perversion which could get somebody killed without a second thought.
All that is different now. Non-Caucasians have the same legal rights as Caucasians, and throughout the majority of America, they are treated with respect. Women and feminists have the same rights as men in all aspects of work and society. And being non-heterosexual is becoming protected more so every day.
Why have people, especially in the last century, gradually let go of their preconceptions and started treating everybody as the same? I believe it’s the result of personal experience. I feel that everybody, at one point or another, were born into situations which held them back. For example, someone could have been an African-American before the civil rights movement, and have come back as a white man. In this case, in his new incarnation, the white man understands on a soul level the trials of being African-American, so instead of adding to the problem, he works to eliminate the difficulties.
Long story short, by being born into restraining circumstances, we can come back in positions of power to help equate change. That’s my theory on reincarnation as a whole. But why? If that’s why we keep coming back, why don’t we all just learn to tolerate and get along with each other, so that there would be no need to return? That’s another roadblock I’ve considered, but I believe that there are those who have been born into powerful situations who have no idea of the pain of those who are different. As a result, they don’t understand, and a natural reaction for something humans don’t understand is to fear or hate it. In my opinion, this is why we have such radicals as Fred Phelps, the most infamous anti-gay preacher in America. It’s why we have White Nationalists like David Duke. It’s why we have insurgents in Iraq. They hate because they don’t understand. And they don’t understand, in part, because they never had a past life where they were the people they hate.
We can never move on if we have hatred or fear holding us back. We can never grow with that on our souls. So we must return, to learn about the trials that minorities endure. This way, we can reflect on why we were so afraid of certain people, learn to live freely with them, and even work with them to bring them to equal status as citizens.
I believe our ultimate goal as souls is to return to the Divine. But to do that, we have to learn everything we can about different groups. We can only return when we have learned all the lessons that are out there. But that’s not an easy task. Worldwide, we tend to have a limited number of groups we believe exist, when in fact there are thousands, if not millions or billions, of cultures and societies, each with their own views on the world. As a result, we have to come into contact with as many of these societies as we can in order to acquire all the lessons there are.
In the end, though, I believe the ultimate reason we come back is because there’s too much to learn about other people in one lifetime, and the more we learn, the more we take the lessons of the past and make strides to promote a better future. Each lifetime, we come into contact with people and groups we never even knew existed, and who may even be restrained because of that status. And if you feel the urge to put those people down, bear in mind that, at one point, that could very well have been you. If you were in that person’s position, would you want to be oppressed or treated like an equal? Look back to the past, your past, and you’ll have your answer.
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