My Experiment with Re-incarnation

I am a strong believer in re-incarnation. People much wiser than me have said that it happens, and I believe them.

Recently, I found the ultimate proof of re-incarnation. My wife and I were working in the kitchen, preparing a meal of rice, vegetables and lentils. To be precise, my wife was preparing the meal; I simply boiled the rice and made a yoghurt mix.

The results were beyond delicious. We ate to our heart’s content but still couldn’t finish everything. We put all the leftovers in one bowl and placed it in the refrigerator. After this, we went into yoga nidra; being on the spiritual path, we no longer call it an afternoon nap. Trust me, Yoga nidra works best after a heavy meal that includes a lot of rice.

The next day, re-incarnation happened.

We took out the bowl and put the contents into a pan. When we heated the pan, the contents were re-born as a delicious khichdi. Again, we ate as much as we could but there were still some leftovers.  We put them back in the fridge and enjoyed another perfect afternoon of yoga nidra.

The next day, re-incarnation happened again. My wife made small patties from the left-over mix of rice, vegetables and lentils. She pan-fried these patties to make super delicious, crispy crunchy Tikkiyas. We ate with some re-incarnated tomatoes in the form of ketchup.

This was nirvana for the tongue, and after this delicious meal there was no more re-incarnation of the rice, vegetables and lentils.

The restaurant industry runs on re-incarnation. The left-over buffet lunch gets re-incarnated as dinner at twice the price. Chopped vegetables get re-incarnated as filling for cutlets.  Nothing gets wasted in a well-run establishment and this is really good for the environment.

Alcohol gets re-incarnated into a thousand different types of drinks.  It’s almost like the demon Raktabeeja, as alcohol keeps on re-incarnating into different beverages containing the same essence. It takes a huge amount of effort to kill this particular demon.

Almost all the products we see in homes, offices or on the street are re-incarnations. Hardly anything is created out of nothing. A horse with a rider was re-incarnated as a horse with a carriage. Later, the horse was replaced by an engine, and the contraption became a car. Even today, we measure the output of the engine in horsepower. The car, itself, became re-incarnated into many other devices that run on wheels.

As I write this blog, I sit on a wooden chair with a laptop in front of me. I remember that when I was a kid, I loved to climb on trees and sit on the branches, while reading a book.

The perch in the tree has now been re-incarnated as a chair, made from similar ingredients from a tree. The hard copy book has re-incarnated as an e-reader, which is designed to look like a book. Only the form has changed, the essence remains the same.

The laptop itself is a digital computer. The word digit also means fingers, and it’s easy to see the connection. We used to count on our fingers to do our math, and this simple action has been re-incarnated many times. It re-incarnated as a multiplication table, then as a calculator, and still later, as a programmable calculator. The latest incarnation is the digital computer that does the math really fast as well as performing many other functions. The essence remains the same, with each re-incarnation of the same product.

When I look around me, all I see is re-incarnation. Everything changes form, but the essence is the same as it was thousands of years ago. Even humans are still re-incarnations of monkeys, we jump excitedly from one activity to another, just like monkeys. What else do we do?

Since everything around us is a re-incarnation, it makes perfect sense to use this principle a bit more in our homes. Instead of buying more things all the time, we could try to “re-purpose” what we already have – just imagine the benefits to the environment. Old jeans can become new shorts; if they are torn, so much the better as they will make a stronger fashion statement. Old shirts can be re-purposed as cleaning cloths, or mops. There is no need to throw anything away. Old tires can become flower beds, old shampoo bottles can readily be re-incarnated as soap dispensers. The possibilities are endless.

Re-incarnation may well be the solution to the world’s growing environmental problems.

In a previous blog, I mentioned my New Year’s resolution:

No more returns.

This is a worthwhile resolution, as, sometimes, the goods we return end up in landfills. Perhaps, we need to go one step further: buy less goods, and re-purpose the goods that we already have.

Our new mantra for the New Year could well be:

Re-use, recycle, re-incarnate.

Let us put the ancient theory of re-carnation into a practical form, something we can use in our daily life.

Re-use, recycle, re-incarnate, and save the planet.