The Father-Son Talk: Reincarnation

Author:   Panisch Lockelear 

So one day I am minding my own business reading a magazine, when I hear my seventeen-year-old son come banging down the stairs. I mean, is there any other way a seventeen-year-old comes down the stairs? He walks right up to me and asks a question. Normally, I am quite immune to the questions my teen-age son asks of me. We have an agreement that he can ask me anything. However, this time I was a little startled.

“Dad, what does your faith tell you about reincarnation?” ” I mean what is it all about?”

I blinked several times at him going over the vast amounts of answers and ways I could answer him in my head. I caught myself just in the nick of time, as I was tempted to give a quick answer and be done with the subject. Upon pondering the question, I told him to let me think of how I could explain it to him, in terms he might understand and I would get back to him.

Very clever on my part, I must say myself.

However, I was now stuck pondering this and trying to coming up with an answer he would accept and one that made sense to him. I thought about it and asked the Goddess for the wisdom to explain this to my son in a good way that he might understand it.

I did think of a way to explain my thoughts and views on what I believe in regards to the subject. And with the help of the Goddess, I came up with a way to get the idea and the belief I share, to my son. This is what I told him…

Imagine that you are a thread pulled from the hem of the Lord’s garment and Lady’s gown. Imagine that our cosmos and all the planes or levels in our cosmos are similar to a train station. Now imagine that the Lord and Lady pull that thread from Their robes and They lean over and drop it into the train station. As the thread falls, They give it a name.

They give it your name.

You then awaken in the train station. There is a large round building with thousands of doors encircling the station. Each door has a name above it. You look around and you can see that there are hundreds and hundreds of train platforms as well.

Imagine that as you look around behind you, there is a door with your name on it. So you decide to go into that door. You open it and walk inside. Inside you see a vast room with rows and rows of empty shelves lining the walls.

Not really understanding what they are for, you leave your room and go back into the large train station.

A thought hits you that as long as you are in a train station you might as well ride a train. So you pick a train that is closest to you. You go out and stand on the platform and are then loaded onto a train that says “WOMAN” on the side. You sit down in the seat and the train leaves the station.

As the train pulls out and enters under a golden arch you are born as a woman. You live your life as a woman. You get to experience what it means to be a woman and all the mysteries of that life.

As the train runs the rails, so do the days of your life. During Midlife, the train does a u-turn and starts heading back to the train station. As your life as a woman starts to end, you enter back into the train station. You pass through the veil and can now see that you are seated back on the train as it pulls to a stop.

If you have learned what you needed to learn in that life as a woman, the conductor on the train will walk up and give you a trophy. You then get off the train with that trophy and enter the train station again.

You watch as other riders go into their own doors with their trophies. So you walk up to your door and go inside. Inside, you carefully take your trophy and put it on one of the shelves.

Looking at all that shelf space, it becomes apparent to you that you must ride many, many more trains.

So you set out to ride the trains. You ride the trains and come to know what it means to live as a man and a woman in different lives. You come to ride the trains and live as an animal and perhaps as a plant. You ride and you live all these different kinds of lives. You might even ride a train in which you are born as light or darkness.

Every time you ride and learn whatever that life had to teach you, a trophy was given as a testament to your newfound knowledge. Each time, you enter into your personal door and room and place your new trophy on the shelves there.

At some point you will ride every train in the station.

Some long trains and long lives. Some not so long and some very short. Some very difficult lives and some very easy. As you ride the trains you are filling up your shelves in your personal room. With trophy in hand you walk in to your room and place it on the very last spot, on the very last shelf. You look around and there is no more space. Perhaps not knowing what else to do, you leave your room to enter the train station again.

As you open the door you find yourself face to face with the God and Goddess. They greet you and lead you a place overlooking the train station. They point down at the people all running about on the floors below. The Lord and Lady then simply vanish leaving you to ponder the train station below you.

You look around and notice that you have a small thread hanging from your robes. You pull the thread and speak the name ‘John’ or perhaps ‘Mary’ as you drop it into the train station.

Then you watch and listen as they ride the trains…

At the end of my story my son stood there blinking at me in wonderment. “That’s so cool, Dad. I know exactly what you mean. That’s how you see reincarnation?”

“Really, really cool … can I have the keys to the car now?”