Re-Incarnation: Why We Need to Re-Learn and Re-Discover

Cerrado by Bill McDavid

There’s a saying: experience is the best teacher. Years ago, a friend of mine updated this by saying: other people’s experience is the best teacher, so we don’t need to make the same mistakes. I accepted this idea and kept it for some time, but then I went back to the original idea.

We say history is there so we can learn from it. We say parents teach their children about their mistakes so their children will be exempt from repeating it. We say society has rules formed from empirical experience, and it is the result of a long process, therefore these rules must be obeyed if we want a safe and happy society.

But do we really learn from other people’s experiences? Do we really obey what other people tell us to do when they say it’s for our own good? Do we really look at our ancestors and do everything in our power to avoid making the same mistakes?

Learning from experience

To some degree we do learn from other people’s experience, such as in developing technology. But in the personal character arena, I believe that a person still needs to make her own mistakes in order for her to learn the lesson. She might listen to much input from people around her about how bad it is to stay in an abusive relationship, but she needs to experience the pain herself to learn and accept that it is bad, regardless of how much she feels she can’t let go.

There are a lot of do’s and don’ts that our society has in its collective memory. And by their own merit, these empirical observations do have their value. Yet we largely only accept these observations with a light regard and rarely consider seriously the weight of the words and the process behind it.

As humans and as individuals, we learn best from first hand experience. We accept fire is hot when we burn ourselves while playing with it even though our parents have told us not to. We understand what we want and what we don’t want through trial and error, and accept that happiness comes from within after we’ve tried pursuing material wealth and failing to find happiness (even though we may have read countless self-help books that tell us otherwise).

The repetition of mistakes

This is true reincarnation: every generation needs to re-learn and re-accept universal principles that apply using their own senses and intelligence. Even though the principles stay the same, each generation and each person needs to find her own words to phrase it so she can understand and internalize it in an appropriate context according to her necessity. This is how we learn as humans, by rediscovering what has already been discovered and making it into our own.

However, the problem with this behavior is that we will always make the same mistakes. You’d think after countless wars and hundreds of millions of casualties we would stop fighting each other, but we still do to this very moment. You’d think with all the loneliness and depression abundant in this connected but separated world we would know the essence of happiness, yet we still make material wealth our primary pursuit.

So how do we really learn? I believe the human ego plays a large part in determining whether we can accept these principles with humility and with understanding that things are not truly different from the past. The challenge is in being aware of the size of our ego, and making every mistake count towards our growth as a person and act upon it as fast as humanly possible.

What do you think?

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[1] For further reading, check:The Universe Consists of Only One Image, 2009
[2] Photograph by Bill McDavid. Because burning is the symbol of reincarnation