Sevenfold Silence

My friend got kittens. They're cute, they stumble around and chase each other and sleep three quarters of the day, and they have no memory worth speaking of.

And it's the latter one that's important. Kittens don't remember. They remember in the vaguest sense--they might like you a lot--but they won't remember that it's because you held them for a two hour car ride (like I did to our kittens). They may hate you, but they won't remember that it's because you stepped on their tails. They may be scared of you, but they won't remember that it's because you made loud noises at them. Their memory's experiential, but not event-based. (Presumably. To be fair, I haven't done much research on kittens. This is conjecture.)

If we accept reincarnation, well...in terms of our past lives, we're like kittens. We may remember likes, dislikes, loves, hates, and still have them affect us, but we can't remember far enough back, beyond this life, to remember why we feel like we do. We can't remember the metaphorical steppings upon of the tail, or the holdings and lovings. Living in the present, affected by the dark past--like kittens.

Which makes me wonder, in a roundabout way--if this metaphor's at all accurate or worth playing with!--if people with better memories have better past life recall. (As in, they can remember back further and more accurately, essentially.) I'm suspicious of this whole notion, primarily because I have a memory like a steel trap, at least in this life, and can't remember a blessed thing reliably from any past lives.

(Note: there's a conclusion I think you can maybe draw from this, which is that if we have better memories than kittens, maybe there's something out there that remembers things from past lives routinely, and thinks of us human-bodied things as being silly and forgetful like kittens! To which I say--maybe, but strictly in the realm of theory. Unless somebody remembers being such a creature?)

Another quote and response from the discussions that have been going on on the LJ otherkin community. This one's from this post.

"I then got thinking about a favourite topic of mine, the topic of ‘religion’. Now, a religion that holds a special fascination for me is Hinduism and, as we all know, Hinduism is hella down with reincarnation. [...] In fact, Vishnu himself has had many incarnations on Earth, so he has in a way experienced reincarnation himself, although arguably tenuously. So, if Vishnu has had incarnations on Earth, what about other gods? [...] Now, what if a god or goddess, supposing for a moment that they are real, was to ‘come down’, as it were, and live among us mortals in a human incarnation. Would they then experience the same phenomenon as otherkin?"

In the event that this happened, sure, hie would. I guess, though, that I'd be pretty suspicious of it, for a few reasons.

Particularly in Hinduism (note: I'm not an expert) when gods incarnate on earth, particularly Vishnu, they do so for a concrete reason. They're needed, and have some purpose in the scheme of things--Vishnu, for instance, tends to incarnate to promote order and repel evil, in very concrete ways. (Think big, climactic, heroic battles.) Plenty of otherkin have "callings"--healing, protecting, the like--but I think this is an order of magnitude larger. Imagine not being incarnated to do something over the course of a lifetime, but being incarnated to do one particular thing. And everything before that is a preparation to that point. There are exceptions to this rule--Krishna's a good one; he does a lot of very varied things over the course of his incarnation--but it's a general pattern.

Second, most of these avatars, particularly in Hinduism, incarnate with a whole cluster of very obvious powers that transcend anything I've ever seen in otherkin. Slaying demons, saving the world, reconciling all opposites, ending ages, committing mass murder on a group of individuals 21 times, creating multiple copies of oneself on earth to make love to milkmaids, being able to scorch the earth with a glance...et cetera. These aren't claims being made for past lives or trueforms or astral-foo-foo nonsense; these are things that Vishnu's incarnations on earth can, according to the mythology, do. So according to the Hindu definition, if you can't pull these off, you probably aren't an avatar. (Mind you, I don't typically adhere to the hard-and-fast definitions--I have previous posts about this--but I do think they're something to take into consideration rather than rejected entirely. If you don't adhere to these definitions, why not? What alternate explanation do you have, and how reasonable is it?)

Still on the subject of refutation, I'm enormously suspicious of anyone who claims to be a reincarnated, particular god, for the same reason I'm suspicious of anyone who claims to be a reincarnated, particular fictional character--most mediakin/fickin/otakin/the like. You're THE incarnation (assuming there is a single incarnation, a whole kettle of worms in and of itself) of THE Sephiroth from Final Fantasy, really? And I'm lucky enough to meet you? I find this enormously unlikely. To put it in less-mediakin terms, I am much more willing to entertain the notion that you are a reincarnation of an elf from Middle Earth than I am to claim that you are Legolas.

Refutation aside, the subtext is potentially grating. We accept claims virtually unconditionally in the otherkin community, on the very simple grounds that these claims are, at their core, unprovable. We also treat each other in light of our identities, and take them into consideration. Subtext being: if you claim you're a god, what do you want--for me to worship you? If I don't treat you with that sort of reverence, will you claim that as the repudiation of your claims that's so scandalous in our community? Will you be offended? Will you want me to debase myself? How will I know you're not doing this for an ego-trip? Again, this doesn't really repudiate at all claims of being something divine, but it is potentially troublesome, and I think it's the subtext of a lot of the complaints about claims of being a divine entity.

The claim itself isn't outrageous, but it strains credibility for those reasons--and that's why I give the claim a critical eye.