Insights on Life after Death and Reincarnation

The nefarious just-one-life concept has not affected those thinkers during the last 500 years, who have considered that life continues after Earthly death and rebirth is an important part of the knowledge of life.

David Hume (1711-1776):

Reasoning from the common course of nature, and without supposing any new interposition of the supreme cause, which ought always to be excluded from philosophy, what is incorruptible must also be ingenerable. The Soul therefore if immortal, existed before our birth … The souls of animals are allowed to be mortal; and these bear so near a resemblance to the souls of men, that the analogy from one to the other forms a very strong argument. Their bodies are not more resembling; yet no one rejects the argument drawn from comparative anatomy. The Metempsychosis is therefore the only system of this kind that philosophy can harken to.⁵

Johann Gottfried von Herder (1744-1803)

Do you not know great and rate men who cannot have become what they are at once, in a single human existence? Who must often have existed before in order to have attained that purity of feeling, that instinctive impulse for all that is true, beautiful and good — in short, that elevation and natural supremacy over all around them? …

Have you never observed that children will sometimes, of a sudden, give utterance to ideas which makes us wonder how they got possession of them, which presuppose a long series of other ideas and secret self-communinings, which break forth like a full stream out of earth, an infallible sign that the stream was not produced in a moment form a few raindrops, but had long been flowing concealed beneath the ground? …

Have you never had remembrances of a former state, which you could find no place for in this life?.. Have you not seen persons, been in places, of which you are ready to swear that you had seen those persons, or had been in those places before?.. And such are we; we who, from a hundred causes, have sunk so deep and are so wedded to matter, that but few reminiscences of so pour a character remain to us. The nobler class of men who, separate from wine and meat, lived in perfect simplicity, temperate and according to the order of Nature, carried it further, no doubt, than others, as we learn from the example of Pythagoras, of Iarchas, of Apollonius, and others, who remembered distinctly what and how many times they had been in the world before. …

I am not ashamed of my half-brothers, the brutes; on the contrary as far as they are concerned, I am a great advocate of metempsychosis. I believe, for a certainty, that they will ascend to a higher grade of being, and am unable to comprehend how anyone can object to this hypothesis which seems to have the analogy of the whole creation in its favor.⁶

Johan Wolfgang Goethe (1749-1832)

Ich bin gewiss, wie Sie mich hier sehen, schon tausendmal dagewesen und hoffe wohl noch tausendmal wiederzukommen. (Original)

I am certain that I have been here a thousand times before, and I hope to come back a thousand times.⁷ (Translation)

Und solang du das nicht hast, Bist du nur ein trüber Gast Auf der dunklen Erde. (Original)

This: Die and Become!, You will only be a gloomy guest on this dark Earth.⁸ (Translation)

Henry Ford (1863-1947)

I adopted the theory of Reincarnation when I was twenty six. Religion offered nothing to the point. Even work could not give me complete satisfaction. Work is futile if we cannot utilise the experience we collect in one life in the next. When I discovered Reincarnation it was as if I had found a universal plan I realised that there was a chance to work out my ideas. Time was no longer limited. I was no longer a slave to the hands of the clock. Genius is experience. Some seem to think that it is a gift or talent, but it is the fruit of long experience in many lives. Some are older souls than others, and so they know more. The discovery of Reincarnation put my mind at ease. If you preserve a record of this conversation, write it so that it puts men’s minds at ease. I would like to communicate to others the calmness that the long view of life gives to us.¹¹