As I said in a reply to Stu earlier, I don't really much give a shit whether reincarnation is a fact or not. Sure seems like it to me, given my personal experiences, but I won't know until I die. Neither will anyone else, no matter how much they claim to know.
But that doesn't keep me from trippin' on the idea of reincarnation, just for fun. Here's one such trip that I find interesting, and it is slightly reincarnation-themed. I have a collection of photos that I sometimes show to people as a kind of conversation starter. They are all photos of buildings set in the mountains, and all of the buildings and all of the mountains are similar in appearance. But the photos come from three different locations: the South of France (Cathar ruins), the U.S. Southwest (Anasazi ruins), and Tibet (ruins of ancient monasteries there). I dare them to tell me which photos are from which locations. Most often, they can't. So what do these three places have in common, other than the countryside itself and the style of architecture used to construct buildings? Well, one of the things that they all have in common is that the people who built the build- ings all believed in reincarnation. For the Tibetans, that was a given. They had whole sciences and disciplines related to the transit between one life and the next. In the American Southwest, some of the latest research into the Anasazi indicates that they probably believed in not only an afterlife (like many Native American tribes) but in reincarnation as well (unlike other Native American tribes). And in the South of France, the Cathars differed from the other religions predominant in Europe at that time by having a very strong belief in reincarnation. There are actually legends in Tibet that link the Anasazi to Tibet. Padmasambhava is said to have banished the Bon shamans who were giving him shit about spreading Buddhism from Tibet forever, and having sent them magically "across the great water." This was about the same time that the Anasazi stopped being nomadic and started creating buildings that cannot be easily differentiated from similar structures in Tibet. The Anasazi themselves, as best as can be determined, had "creation myths" that said that they had reincarnated *as a group* to that area, and that when the time was right, they would leave and reincarnate *as a group* in another place. As it turns out, the Anasazi did disappear, as a group, in what is considered the greatest archeological mystery of N. America. As far as I know there are no legends linking the Anasazi or the Tibetans with the Cathars. :-) But I still think it's fun that these three cultures, so far away from one another physically, left artifacts that resemble each other phys- ically, and shared similar beliefs in reincarnation.
