Reincarnation

I recently read The Forgetting Time by Sharon Guskin and loved it. It is a fictional story of reincarnation, but it is grounded in the work of Jim Tucker and Ian Stephenson. Because I found the novel so compelling, I decided to read Life Before Life: A Scientific Investigation of Children's Memories of Previous Lives.

While I wouldn't say I'm a firm believer in reincarnation, I am a firm believer in possibilities that I cannot understand nor explain. 

Whenever I think about what happens after death, I think about the first law of thermodynamics, that energy is neither created nor destroyed. But I am not a physicist, so my understanding of the laws of physics are preschool-level (and I'm being generous). If you actually look up the first law and reincarnation, you then get sucked into a great mind-numbing debate on discussion boards that makes me wish Neil deGrasse Tyson would apparate and explain it to me in dumb-person language that I can wrap my head around.

As much as I value science and evidence, I also value that there is much that we don't yet know or understand. This is to say that at some point, we may have definitive evidence, but right now we do not. 

I don't need proof, really, because I think it is pretty fun to just ask the questions and wonder.

What is consciousness? 

What is the soul?

Are they the same?

Is there an underlying consciousness that all of our disconnected consciousnesses feed into or come from? And does that mean that there is only one consciousness and we are all just little feeder shoots off of it?

Is that what we call God?

Is memory real and trustable? (I think not)

If reincarnation does happen, what does that mean that the "me" I think of as "me" actually is? 

What does it mean if my consciousness isn't really mine? (And is that "possession" a stupid way to think of it anyway?)

One of the reasons I wonder about reincarnation is because of M and his ear-twiddling, which he continues to do now and has done since he was an infant nursing at my breast.

Is there a gene for ear-twiddling? Is that an actual trait that gets passed along from parent to child?

Because my deceased father-in-law was an ear twiddler. He didn't do it to everyone, but I was one of those people.

And it may be entirely possible that ear-twiddling is actually encoded in DNA, so it makes perfect "logical" sense that M does it.

But if it isn't, then how and why does M do this, especially since his siblings do not and his father does not?

I don't think M is his reincarnated grandfather, but I do wonder if consciousness of some kind is a plane of existence we cannot sense except in weird ways. 

My father-in-law died unexpectedly, and M was an unexpected birth control pill-conception. 

I like to think that his ear-twiddling is my FIL's consciousness reaching out to us, but I have no proof that it is. And if I did have proof that it isn't, that is ok, too. 

I also have what I have always thought is a dream, but maybe it isn't a dream. In this dream or whatever it was, I am conciousness but not corporeal, and I'm not even entirely sure that I am Carrie-consciousness. I have consciousness of being in existence but there is nothing else. Everything is black. 

If it was a dream, I don't know what the point was. 

And if it wasn't a dream, I don't know what the point was.

But I'm ok with either one.