For those familiar with Greek literature, you may recall that a recurrent theme is the inheritance of ancestral guilt, especially blood-guilt. We inherit the guilt of actions we ourselves didn’t commit, and are punished because of them. The concept that blood-guilt can be inherited from ancestors lies at the root of reincarnation in the Orphic tradition. Because our ancestors, the Titans, killed the God Dionysos, we inherit that guilt. Thus, we are responsible for atonement. This idea also prevailed among the ancient Egyptians, who believed the soul, after leaving the dead body, would travel from one body to another for thousands and thousands of years to gain experiences in each stage of life.

Speaking personally, I would be deliriously happy if reincarnation were real. That idea touches I would be deliriously happy if reincarnation were real. The idea touches something very deep within me. Hoping to find evidence for reincarnation, I would journey through history, even to the great heyday of the Roman Empire, observing developments under various emperors and leaders. I would even come up to the day of the Renaissance, and get a quick picture of all that the Renaissance did for the cultural and aesthetic life of our civilization. 

It was around 530 BCE, when Pythagoras travelled to Kroton, a Greek city that is in present-day Italy; where he settled and founded his own philosophical school. He taught the centrality of mathematics for an understanding of the universe; and the idea that numbers are somehow fundamental to reality. In fact, to be a scientist today is to understand and to do mathematics; such is perhaps the most distinctive legacy from the scientific revolution. 

In the early 20th century, often ill and isolated, Bohm railed against the orthodox interpretation of quantum physics and agitated for a theory he hoped would replace it. At the time of Planck's announcement, no one knew the Milky Way was a galaxy of stars, nor did they realize the so-called nebulae were other galaxies in a vast universe. The discovery of the Big Bang by Edwin Hubble occurred decades after Planck's announcement in Berlin, and evidence for the Big Bang emerged several decades after that. One of Thomas Young's innumerable contributions to physics was the idea of polarization. Despite his genius, he was disparaged by the professional English physicists of his time, principally because Isaac Newton had proposed that light was composed of particles. In England, to disagree with Newton was sacrilege and heretical. Newton was subject to both traditional Church of England and Presbyterian influences when he was a teenager. 

It may seem like I enjoy complicating things just for the sake of it. I swear I do not. In my humble experience, this is fascinating, not only because it provides the archetype for our modern-day justice system, but also because it highlights a belief that parallels reincarnation. In these matters, I fear, we've been "missing the point." In looking back, I see now that we have been overly fixated on our own biological death (it is now patently unclear to me, however, that we ever actually die in this way). An attentive retelling of the tale of transmigration, from my perspective, would reveal that all valuable things—material, spiritual, and moral—can be traced back through countless generations.

Thinking of my inclinations on the one hand and of my littleness and my limitations on the other, I was dazzled as I became aware that my fate had been cast for eternity; I came out of my mother's womb, but I entered the womb of the world. At the age of 12, I fell violently into the Neo-Platonism pushed by Raphael and Michelangelo, and I met Plato, who gave me definitive birth at the age of fifteen. Through literature, I learned that life is endless, that these qualities in me are a tribute not to me, but to the incarnation, a curious mixture of Titus, Nerva, Trajan, and of course, Marcus Aurelius, whose letters spoke to me as if he were still present.

I always felt that I was born too early or too late. I realize now that my existence has numerous dimensions, like an echo across the ages that mixes and mingles in different ways with the cosmos; only now do I feel that I arrive on time everywhere because I am in the eternity of the essential. Now I know that I am more of a ghost in life than I will ever be in death.

Inspiring results is our legacy.