For those who believe in reincarnation, does it at all depress you that all of your wisdom from this life might not be carried over or remembered in the next life?
For example - in this life you believe reincarnation to be true, for whatever reason. You might have thought hard to come to the conclusion of reincarnation. In the next life, you are statistically likely to live a life ignorant of that conclusion. Does this not bother you, that in the next life you may not be as philosophical or as wise as you've become in this life?
Well, when you put it like that it does sound a bit lame, fortunately reincarnation doesn't really work that way. Part of the problem with reincarnation is how it is generally conceived. To be honest, many ideas about reincarnation and some long-standing traditional views are simply incorrect and bear little resemblance to the process itself. One of the biggest erroneous ideas is that it is an inexorable path from the inanimate to animate, from ordinary into divine, that once one is committed there is no going back. It is seen as a distinctly linear process, where in fact, and I say that with more than a measure of amusement, where in reality it is much more like a game of hop-scotch or leap frog. No life is truly forgotten and is stored in the "memory" of the larger identity though that larger identity may certainly decide not to pursue some things you were quite enamored with. In a way that is hard to describe, you can decide to strike out on your own, as it were and follow your interests wherever they take you. There is no limitation in regards to time frames, for example, and it's not like it's a race, so all expression can be explored at great leisure.
Believing in or not believing in reincarnation is simply not relevant, as the point of reincarnation is to create a meaningful existence in a given time and space and to learn about aspect of reality that are of interest to the individual. That said, it might be helpful to think of reincarnation as a wheel, but rather than relentlessly moving forward with that wheel, if one considers a given lifetime to be one of the spokes, part of the experience is becoming aware of a central hub, to which, all the other spokes are also connected. The realization of this central hub is not something that, once discovered, is ever lost much in the same way that once you learn how to ride a bike or how to swim, you never really forget the mechanics of doing so. Likewise, it may take a bit of experimentation to get the realization "down pat" like rekindling the knowledge of how to ride a bike or swim, but it does become easier to make the connection... after all, you're done it before.
Then again... I could be quite wrong...
