Dead or Alive?
At the Louvre, while strolling for hours, I noticed something that struck me as bizarre: many of the portraits in the Flemish and Northern School rooms reminded me of famous people who are alive. One was Daniel Day-Lewis; then I saw Johnny Depp in XVII century clothes. Blinking, doing double-takes left right and centre, I asked my friend if he saw it too. He smiled, laughed, and at times nodded his agreement.
This made me think about the Soul Factory.
Can it be that there are a limited number of souls, or, at any rate, souls that come back, again and again, and those who were once famous for the right reasons, come back, again and again, until they stop, as famous?
And, can it be that souls who (yes, who, not which), for one reason or another, have a particularly tricky mission to accomplish get split in two or perhaps even more, thus dividing the task?
Naturally, all this rests on the assumption souls exist, and many would disagree. I can't think otherwise, despite lack of scientific proof.
When there are so many people who look like other people, this question comes to me. However, never before had I noticed this between someone who's dead and someone who's alive.
Antonio Moro's Portrait d'Homme Désignant une Pendule
Michael Keaton
Is it striking or is my mind playing tricks on me?
2 comments:
Quite striking. It'd cause a double-take and then unabashed staring, although I'll assume the gent in the portrait smells pretty bad at this point.
It is possible, I think. I don't think that there is a spliting of souls though. If I'm not mistaken, soul recycling is part of the Hindu belief. At some point, the soul/physical being is able to achieve equilibrium and the spiritual self passes into the next life to stay. It also raises other questions as well. At some point are souls depleted by all passing into the next existence?And in contrast to that question, with the increasing population, are there enough souls to go around? So I think there is a new generating mechanism and a recycling mechanism. It would be wonderful to be able to come back and accomplish all of the things we want to accomplish in life since it seems that there is always one thing more left undone; or so we think.
I do think we all have a destiny. I see it shaped in hindsight toward an indeterminate future guided by the decisions we make in the present. Of course, we never know if we attain that destiny or not. In the end as we leave this existence, we can only assume that whatever our purpose is, we have fulfilled it, since we never really know for sure. In that ether zone between dimensions, perhaps it is there we learn if ours has been a life worth living.
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