Prior to this life I used to live somewhere in Netherlands, don’t remember it not because of bad memory, but because nomenclature isn’t primeval, it is only now that Google Maps exists to quickly disillusion us on Washington and Washington DC. Back in those times, I used to breath light, people used to believe that light is essential for a living—not only believing in knowing-sense of today’s life, but we used to believe that life is not possible without light. So thousands of people born in the daylight were exposed to extreme lighting (fire basically) in the night. The carbon formed due to the fire, in turn, killed many people. Lot of people actually dared to step outside in the night, other ones thought that some power out there was calling them and that those people were fodder for the “powers” in the jungle. After sometime, people started sacrificing few for the powers. I didn’t believe that that is what was happening—it was the only sensible thing that I was exposed to. When I think back now, I think most of the people who dared to go outside and other people who were sacrificed, probably got lost in the thick forest, and some might just have served food to the predators. The faintest memory tells me that that is how I got disconnected from my tribe and got transported into another one.
I felt different, every time I used to get away few hundred miles, to another place, eating anything that looked good on the trees. To my surprise, I always found people operating in societies. Learning one, giving up another and learning one again, quietly, I used to absorb everything that seemed to have been thrown at me, rather than me choosing anything. I did not even know that we can “choose”. Under-development of brain? Nah, Hippy possibly? Or a self less vagabond perhaps? Not sure about selflessness either, but I remember that the only time I and people around me were bothered was when there used to be a change in paradigm related to things that we had to fear. First it was the sunrays, it became rain after sometime, then the snow, lightning, and all other things, which we now know from science as natural phenomena’s. In that life, in Netherlands, it wasn’t easy, to understand whether life was doing something to us or we were adding something to life.
It is far more difficult, to adjust, when you wake up from a dream, finding yourself in war, with a gun in your hand and dust in your mouth. It happens suddenly, like it happened to my friend (who also remembers everything, unlike others) who was fishing with his dad, somewhere in a lake in Alaska, the next moment he realized that he was facing Pakistani soldiers, the realization and the connectedness was sudden, a snapshot really, that happens when some prehistoric chicken eggs hatch into ducks. A constant, but random alternation between consternation and reality, switching so fast in front of the eyes, that me and my friend think about switching roles, just to see if we can fool reality, or illusion perhaps, something, perhaps, that we do not know about, really, no?
In every life, sadly, we were told that we are going to move to another life just when we thought we had it all figured out. In one of them, I had just invented a potion that would allow me to live forever. I don’t remember when that was, somewhere in Nicaragua, I was 24 then, I am 24 here in this life too, when I was about to drink that untested potion, when a snake bit me and I realized what happened after 20 years in Netherlands. The tune-distorters don’t come into play that quickly, they come to being, when hopeful become hopeless: when rules become laws: when existence gives away to survival, when, let me tell you—“I am the only person who was affected by Korean War” becomes true.
Right now, in this life, nobody except me empathizes with me. Nobody knows how much I have experienced, people are hinged on a small single lifetime—the now. Nobody thinks I can remember what I remember, just because they can’t, I am not allowed to? There was a friend who told me that he had got orders to shift to another life, just the memory is what remains, but I didn’t believe him. I had explained him what I felt, but he had never approved of what I said, now, I felt that he thought that I was making fun of him. But after some days, he started crying that nobody including I, who he thought would understand him, didn’t. It is funny, it is circular, we feel exactly what others feel, but still don’t think that we understand each other, as if we all have been through different lives, and not a single one—that we are going through now, funny.
But the recurrent images make more sense in this life, as we know from everybody who we see around us—“It’s evolution, what is there to know about it? That’s life my friend, it works in mysterious ways. It can suck you one moment, allow you to suck sometimes, and allow you to feel as if you are controlling the entire sucking process”. I suddenly woke up into a technological world from an ancient one. I have been lucky that I have lived the industrial revolution started by the Brits, and I have seen a part of Silicon Valley revolution, so being thrown in front of Google browser wasn’t that difficult for me. Back in Bolshoy Lyakhovsky, we foraged into so many places for food, but we have evolved I say to myself now, now, whenever I want to eat, I first search for the items on the Internet—which makes me believe that people from different worlds do similar things differently. Comparing things in different worlds, strange–that I see that I can do the same in this life alone, without needing other lives for doing so—there just too many places here, where I do the same.
Greedy as we are wired to behave, we would have wanted the best things from all the lives, overcoming the shortcomings from each of them. If we had given been chart explaining the list of lives that we will be living, and then the project would have been complete by now. If it happens now, may be we can, then, exchange lives (on the list) with each other, suited to our needs, because we want the best from all the worlds. Say if you are jazz drumbeater, then you will want to live a life from the early 50s and 60s; so, you would want to exchange that with somebody who wants a life from 2269–where people no longer wear clothes—because somebody always thinks about living such a life where electrical generators do not exist, because all the electricity is produced from burning everything that is possible—so the explanation for not wearing clothes, you see? Again, we cannot just throw it on evolution, can we? Or can we? May be evolution is leaking into our nature, like excess water from a badly done roof, but we adjust, we put a cloth directly under the affected roof, and use extract the water from the cloth for feeding the plants, it all seems, well, very, very purposeful.
In a strange turnaround of events, it happens that I got a mail from Alpha yesterday, asking for change recommendation in the existing system of letting-humans-live. I recommended him the concept of time-travel– lot of times, I feel like going back to that life in Netherlands. “But you always wanted to overcome the constraints, live freely, more so at least, isn’t it?” asked Alpha. I am not cocksure, but I didn’t know that reincarnation will come with its own cactus, its own thorns, and its own fucking what you like to call– “the evolution”. I had wished for a stinger, without the poison, without the sack to store that, without the teeth, but look what you and I have got.
Before this life, I don’t remember having the power to comprehend what I can do now. My emotions, my feelings never went under the scanner of intelligence, or so do I assume at least. If experience is the only incentive I get, I would instead like to have an AI to manage these reincarnations. May be, then, I can forget multiple lives that I have to lead and think about a single life and single death. What do we do then? Still go back to Netherlands? A pervert like me surely will—there is clear evidence that we averaged more than 20 minutes a day of sex back then as compared to less than a minute a day in this life. Or would you still like to remain here like a rootless tree tied to a memory?
This life has given me lot, without asking most of the times–that is how it works in this life—as I said it’s about evolution. But I am not getting the best, which is what I am arm-pitting about. There is no cease, no matter how many lives we live, we always will have qualms about living one than another and rightly so, what’s the point otherwise? Most of it, it seems like isn’t even what I intended for, neither do I know if that is what people are also looking for, but from a distance, I always look back, thinking about all the lives that I have lived so far, only to understand every single moment that this is what I have—I live here.
