Fate, God, Reincarnation. I believe it all.

Today I was thinking about my life and all the things that needed to occur in exact order for me to be where I am now. There was so many decisions, good and bad that has led me to where I am today. It has got to be fate, right? Truthfully, I used to hate the idea of fate. When I was younger the thought that my life experiences were already predestined really bothered me. I hated the thought of not being in control of my own actions. I was such an avid believer in heaven that the very idea of someone believing in something different seemed ridiculous to me. But as I got older I became more critical, started asking more questions, and decided I needed to do a little research before stating what I believed in as cold, hard fact.

I have always been such an avid reader and figured that the answer had to be in a book somewhere ;) I was a little naive as a girl. In any case, my quest to figure out how life worked spiritually speaking (I'm not a physicist like my brother) has brought me upon a lot of different ideas. Some people believe in God, the Bible, Jesus Christ, but the idea that God was all knowing and loving one minute and was a plague causing, world flooding, son sacrificing psychopath the next, never really rang true with me.

Some people believe in reincarnation and karma and if you do well in this life you can move up in the next. Move from a bug to bird, a bird to a cat, well you get the point. But this never really rang true for me either. I guess I'm too self centered to ever believe I lived life as a bug. And I mean come on, bugs are near perfect organisms, would I really be moving up in the world by becoming human?

Other people believe in the idea of Fate. That everything we see, feel, and experience, we were meant to see, feel, and experience. Fate suggests that we all play some intricate roll in our universe and we really don't have any choice in what that roll is, whether it be the hero, victim, marter, killer, etc.

And of course there's those who believe in nothing at all. That this life is all we get, we eventually die and if we live on at all, its as matter.

Now i don't believe in any one of these ideas wholeheartedly but I like to think Ive taken a little from each. I have a hodge podge of ideas about how my world, and possible afterlife works. So here it is. I believe that there is a God, that he is all knowing and that he has come to be this way because he is willing to learn, through us, his smaller working parts. Thus we are all pieces of a bigger whole, and are all interconnected, or as Jesus would put it "do unto others as you would have done unto you" because, literally, we are all one, I am you, you are me, and thus karma is instantaneous.

I think that the afterlife is not the answer we all search for but another step in the process of understanding ourselves. I believe that we do crossover (I've seen and experienced way too many spooky things not to believe in an afterlife) and that on the other side we are happy and content and perfect. So how are our souls to grow if there is no conflict to speak of? Well this is where the idea of reincarnation comes in. We reincarnate back on earth in order to experience new things through conflicts, and challenges. However, before we reincarnate we decide what kind of things we would like to learn more about. We make ourselves a lesson plan so to speak. For example, on the other side, a soul may decide it wants to learn more about patience and so reincarnates as a Duggar and has 18 children and counting. Creating a specific lesson plan can make it seem as though life is fated to happen in a certain fashion. Finally, when a persons soul decides they have learned all that they could from different lifetimes they eventually become part of God again, a part of a bigger whole, matter if you will.

So those are my ideas (right or wrong) about life, death, and life again. Like I said its a hodge podge of ideas, but I think its better to have your own ideas than to live and die by someone elses.