When I look at the wave of transhate and transgenocide sweeping the world over the last couple of decades, and the endemic white supremacism/racism and misogyny/misandry/sexism and other forms of bigotry of millennia, I have to wonder:
why?
There are, of course, many causes - some structural and best dealt with by changes to society (difficult to achieve but doable - look at changed attitudes towards slavery over the last few centuries, over drink driving in the last century, and over climate change in the last decade or so), some personal - often so-called “unconscious” or habitual (which largely means: taught by parents/peers/people of significance, and by the deliberate, malicious, and very active social engineering of elites - including and especially so mainstream religions - over the last two millennia), and others best identified by activists and other experts (yes, good activists are experts) in those fields.
But there is another category I'd like to touch on, which relates to my understanding of Reality as a Pagan:
past life influences
When we meet people, we may have an instant like or dislike for them. That can be caused by reading their energies now, by associations with some aspect of their being (e.g., their hair may remind you of a past figure from this life), by what has been told (whether true or false) about them, or some other influence ... but it could also be a residual, unconscious memory from an interaction in a past life.
The typically ascribed associations are:
- like - pleasant past interactions;
- dislike - unpleasant past interactions;
- strength of feeling indicates strength of past interactions.
If one feels strong dislike for, say, an accent, or people of a particular relative height, or a type of place, one may have, for instance, been assaulted or killed, perhaps murdered in such a place, either by, or when you noticed bystanders with, that accent or relative height.
One may have formed an association because you noticed people while someone else was attacking you - they may not have been the assailant, but they were who you could see and thus provided an aspect you could form an attachment (dislike) to, even if that attachment is wrong.
The heart is not always perfectly logical.
That’s all fairly routine in the world of past lives.
There are also karmic aspects, but that’s something that requires quite a bit of explanation - particularly as:
(a) many people try to use it as an excuse or scapegoating mechanism to blame other people instead of identifying dislikes they may have from past life interactions,
(b) many people ignore vitally important aspects such as people taking on suffering, despite having no karmic debt that could oblige them to do so, as a TEST OF OTHER PEOPLE AROUND THEM - i.e., will they act, or will they say “that’s your karma, you deal with it” (or, particularly people in rich nations, dismiss what is happening to poor people as somehow their fault, rather than being a test of the rich nation person’s generosity and sharing ... which most fail, as too many also fail dealing with bigotries in their own nation, especially white supremacism),
(c) some people allow their fear of what they MIGHT have done so overwhelm that they deny there is any form of spiritual accountability, and
(d) some people get so caught up in their personal need to learn the hard way that they cannot comprehend - or will not allow - that there are ways to deal with karma that involve voluntarily and genuinely learning one’s lesson and making restitution beforehand, so that the need to go through something is reduced. I can still recall a discussion with a very spiritually immature/religiously old (old in a bad way) person who stubbornly insisted that everyone HAD to go through all the suffering they had caused in a life when they died without any deviations or minimisation because any restitution they personally made would obviously mean nothing - which said a great deal about that person’s state of mind & being, none of it good, and also ...
(e) is a perfect example of the FACT that so many people forget karma is not only about bad things, but also GOOD things (at least Buddhist understand that, and generally make the effort to append the correct adjective).
Going back to the purpose of this post, one may have decided in a past life that one liked what another group was experiencing, and chose your next life in that group - but then you may have found it was not what you expected, or circumstances may have changed so what you liked no longer exists.
As an example of that, you may have decided you envied the rich their during a life as a poor person in the 1930s, during the Great Depression, and decided to be reborn as a rich person (it’s not quite that simple, but this will do for now) - and then finds that taxation and ideas of social responsibility (which, to some extent, used to be something some rich people had and referred to - annoyingly - as noblesse oblige) meant you weren’t allowed to run rampant over others and do as you wished, so the experience was not what you expected (to which I say, in this example: GOOD!), ... but that might incline you towards attacking society and democracy through things such as neoliberalism and other excesses ...
Or if you’re not quite in the rich you might become an enthusiastic lickspittle - perhaps a member of a neoliberal party, with the possibly unconscious belief/expectation/desire of being a rich **** like the ones you so (wrongly) admire.
Another possibility is that you might have seen something you thought would be good, and decide to live in that role - and here I am thinking about gender roles in particular.
In past life as a woman you might have envied men their social freedom, and then found you had to put up with a lot of toxic masculinity, or possibly got railroaded into a physical war with all its violence and found that quite overwhelming and unpleasant.
As a male you might have decided you envied what you thought was an easier life as a woman, working at home - and then discovered periods and period pain, the TRUTH about how demanding housework and child-rearing are, and what child birth is like - possibly even died during childbirth.
Can you imagine how conflicted people in the above examples could be, no matter what their their gender was, in their third life in that sequence if they chose not to learn and evolve spiritually?
Another possibility is that you find the life you imagined is what you wanted ... but then that is challenged. The example I gave above regarding a rich person being challenged by a more progressive society is one, but so too could be a life in one of society’s assigned (and wrongly limited) binary gender options.
The test to consider here is how one is handling those challenges:
- if you are learning from them and become a more deeply spiritual, inclusive person, or are possibly helping any changes for the better to happen, you are probably handling the situation well (i.e., growing spiritually aka generating good karma);
- if you are resisting those changes and causing harm, as is the case of neoliberals and similar rich people mentioned above, and transgenocidal people - especially cisgender women - you are handling the situation badly - i.e., devolving spiritually aka generating bad karma.
Also, keep in mind that, with regard to any/all people you may read about, that it is quite possible none of the above apply - but I do consider it to be potentially spiritually beneficial to at least consider the above in relation to you and your own life and your own reactions/feelings.
Leave other people’s lives / reactions/feelings to them, their Higher Selves, and their BPM Guides - but do take BPM action against their actions, if wrong (e.g., if they promote white supremacism, or transgenocide).
Assumptions / basis
In writing this, I have assumed / started from the following:
- reincarnation is real;
- spiritual accountability is real;
- we are meant to grow (evolve) spiritually;
- what we do to make the world a better place is a measure of our spirituality;
Possible flaws
Where I can, I will try to highlight possible flaws / issues you should consider:
- there may be flawed logical arguments in the above: to find out more about such flaws and thinking generally, I recommend Brendan Myers’ free online course “Clear and Present Thinking”;
- I could be wrong - so keep your thinking caps on, and make up your own minds for yourself.
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Finally, remember: we need to be more human being rather than human doing.
