In the middle of a vast North American evacuation I found myself with my sister on a ferry boat. I was sad about dying as it seemed likely we wouldn't survive the journey and even if we did, our destination was uncertain.
At my lowest point, as a deep sense of grieving enveloped me, I suddenly found I believed in reincarnation. Not a romantic fantasy in which "I" survived lifetime to lifetime. My life, my identity, would end, and in the universal, it would end soon. On this flight from disaster to the unknown or in forty years of heart failure, the "me" I clung to would die. But I had this sense of continuation.
A purely scientific version of reincarnation is recycling - the physical material that made up my body would become part of trillions of other beings and features in the world, as happens every day of my life right now anyway.
I had the sense of something beyond that, a sense of who I had been in this life informing the world and future "me"s, a sense that I was shaping myself and the universe by existing through lifetimes, in a way that was real despite my own ignorance in each lifetime that I had already existed and evolved.
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