Reincarnation

For some reason there is a New Age vibe around me lately, namely, friends who are reading Henry Grayson (New Physics of Love, Mindful Loving) and books on reincarnation, psychic ability and intuition. As my thoughts wander through recent conversations with these friends, I am meditating on links between reincarnation and adoption from a philosophical point of view.

In his 1999 book "Old Souls," Tom Shroder writes about children in Lebanon, India and the U.S. who claim to remember past lives. Shroder is a journalist, and so tries to see these cases as either "true" or "false" but he would have done better to approach the subject as an anthropologist. There are certain cultures and religions that believe in reincarnation and it is in these cultures that remembrances of past lives seem to be more common.

I myself have been reading "The Singing Creek Where The Willow Grows: The Rediscovered Diary of Opal Whitely" published in 1986. Opal Whitely was born in Washington state in 1897, but she was convinced all her life, starting from a very young age, that she had been adopted by her American family. She believed her first parents, whom she called her "Angel Father" and "Angel Mother" were Henri d'Orleans and Princess Marie of France.  No one believed her, of course, nor did they believe that she could know French or all the historical details that filled her  childhood diaries. Hoff called her a schizophrenic and a genius.

I think most children wonder how they came to be born in a certain time and place, to certain parents.  Many non-adopted children have adoption fantasies, wishing or wondering if maybe they were adopted as infants.  And I'd guess that adopted children fantasize about what their lives would be like if they'd stayed with their birth families.

You hear people talking about how an adopted child was "meant to be" with their adoptive parents, but I think that's just a way of making people feel better. It's true that I can't imagine not being my children's parent, but that is the mystery of the bond of love.