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Word Gems 

exploring self-realization, sacred personhood, and full humanity

Reincarnation On Trial

Some of the absolutely most accomplished
scientists, philosophers, and writers of
history were the least experienced. But,
if experience is the golden key to becoming
a super-advanced person, how could this be?

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Some of the absolutely most accomplished scientists, philosophers, and writers of history were the least experienced. This is fact. But, if experience is the golden key to becoming a super-advanced person -- the more, the better, they say -- how could this be?

Consider these examples:

Kant

Immanuel Kant, the short-of-stature professor from Koenigburg, is probably the greatest philosopher of all time; greater than the ancient Greeks. Single-handedly, without laboratory or high-tech instrumentation, he perceived that space and time are illusions! – and this, 150 years before Einstein.

But how could this occur? It is widely reported that Kant lived a plain-vanilla hum-drum life, never traveled, with the farthest reaches of his venturing a mere 50 miles from his doorstep. He lived by unremarkable habits and narrow routines. Every day, mid-afternoon, rain or shine, to the minute, he would take his constitutional walk. So dutiful was he to this mundane practice that his neighbors, it is said, could set their clocks by the passing-by of Professor Kant out for his daily perambulation.

Barrett

Elizabeth Barrett, arguably, is the greatest poetess of history. I feature her prominently in a major article on the Word Gems site; also, with samplings of her writings on the homepage. In tribute to her, I felt moved to comment, “We gasp in astonishment at the beauty of The Great Poetess’s testimony, a startling, vivid display of words-as-imagery pressed into love's service”; and also this:

During the last 25 years, the construction of Word Gems, I have reviewed the literary work of many great female thinkers of history. Among this “natural and irresistible aristocracy,” as Thoreau viewed it, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Heloise of Argenteuil, Emily Dickinson, and Abigail Adams I count as most wise and, indeed, most felicitously and passionately articulate.

But, within the realm of authentic romance - though we mourn with Heloise, her "how much I have lost, beloved, in losing you," and with Emily, her “terror” of love gone astray which she “could tell to none” - we must offer some small measure of deference, I think, to Elizabeth, the great artist and sage, the great wordsmith and evangelist, of the heart’s raptures.

I am living for you now

Elizabeth's fervent assertions, an outpouring of inmost being, "how can it make me happy, such a thing as my life, it never made me happy without you," strike at the depths of our humanity, "what we stay alive for"; or, as the once "drooping untrained honeysuckle" announced to Robert, "I am living for you now." Is there another reason?

How did Elizabeth manage to virtually define romantic poetry with her stellar insights of life and love? Whatever the cause, it wasn’t experience. She herself knew this as painful truth. She’d been a recluse due to illness and an over-protective, domineering father who would not even give her permission to marry (she and Robert had to elope and flee the country). In her own words, in a love letter to Robert, she sorrowed,

"My sympathies drooped toward the ground like an untrained honeysuckle… It was a lonely life... Books and dreams are what I lived in… And so time passes and passed – and afterwards, when my illness came, I seemed to stand at the edge of the world with all done … I turned to thinking with some bitterness that I had stood blind in the temple [of life] I was about to leave – that I had seen no Human nature, that my brothers and sisters of the earth were [mere] names to me, that I had beheld no great mountain or river, nothing in fact… I am, in a manner, as a blind poet… how willingly I would as a poet exchange some of this lumbering, ponderous, helpless knowledge of books, for some experience of life and man… What is to live? Not to eat and drink and breathe, -- but to feel the life in you down all the fibres of being, passionately and joyfully.”

We may yearn, as did Elizabeth, for the knowledge that experience provides, as we, by nature, delight in knowledge, as Aristotle observed; but this deficit per se does not rule out a coming to great insights and spiritual evolvement.

Newton

Coming to mind, too, is the young Isaac Newton, destined to overturn long-held concepts of science, entrenched for 2000 years. But he arrived on the world scene without fanfare. During the plagues of London, he sought refuge at a relative’s farm, well away from the epidemic. To that point, he’d been a lackluster student, but, though he’d not had a full education, during his time on the secluded farm, he began to study his math books in earnest. He’d go as far as he could until stymied by something he didn’t understand, and then he’d start all over again from the beginning of the textbook. He did this several times. From this effort, eventually, would come the creation of calculus.

Fermat

“Fermat’s Last Theorem” defied solution for 350 years. It represented an unreachable height, a holy grail of mathematical problem-solving. Its creator, however, Pierre Fermat, was not a professional mathematician but a self-taught hobbyist. He traveled little, never left, it is said, his native southwest France, and did not communicate with other mathematicians of his day. Yet, his seventeenth-century achievement stumped experts until the unraveling of his famous theorem in the 1990s.

something never seen before

How do you invent calculus? How do you get from “here to there,” to “something never seen before”? -- as "The Wedding Song" employs the phrase. How do you create the astonishingly picturesque phrases of life and love? How do you perceive that space and time are illusions, when the five senses swear to their objective reality? How do you construct a math theorem that the best mathematical minds of the coming hundreds of years will fail to negotiate? -- apparently, for all of these, not by a plenitude of experience. Concerning any ground-breaking thought or invention, how could it be otherwise? How can you reach the lofty bar of "something never seen before," the utterly and transformingly original, by the preceding? There's no incremental gain in this. If something's brand new, there's no bridge to it, because we've never seen it before; there's nothing like it.

To attribute all this to "past lives" is a rather a feckless explanation. If there were such a thing as past lives, which do not exist, but if they did, and if these purported prior abilities had been available and in place, why then weren't these great achievements bursting forth in those earlier times? The answer is that "past lives" is a fairly tale. We have ample evidence that the true cause, some of it, concerning sensational abilities and prodigies relates to attached spirits. Dr. Wickland invested 40 years, with thousands of cases, analyzing this area of attached discarnates.

'one moment of cosmic clarity' - not experience, as such

In the “Creativity” article, we discussed how luminaries of history advanced, not due to experience so much but, by “one moment of cosmic clarity,” one timeless, blazing perception of “no-mind,” of attunement with energies superseding the mundane.

It is the destiny of everyone to engage in this process. In the four “Spirituality” articles, we learned of “going within,” of tapping one’s “soul energies.” This transforms us from the inside out. We ourselves will not readily perceive the metamorphosis, but those around us will know something’s different with us. As one’s personal development gains momentum, those who know us best might very well comment, to the effect,

'Why didn’t our common experience shape you into the common form?'

“How did you become so different? How did you improve beyond the rest of us? There are 100 or 1000 people in our circle of family, friends, and acquaintances, and we've all had pretty much the same experiences, and so we all, more or less, think the same thoughts and live the same lives – and you, too, are from that same mold, but you’re not like us anymore, you've somehow grown beyond us. How did you do that? Why didn’t our common experience shape you into the common form?”