I WASN'T CLEOPATRA,
AND YOU WEREN'T PHARAOH
Are you the one of
those people who think that they had a past life, that they were
Pharaoh or Cleopatra? I'm talking about reincarnation, the belief that
we are born again with a new body and a new personality. I'm calling
it a belief because it hasn't yet been proven that one actually can
have another life on earth after death. However, people love to
believe this, and they love to think that they were a king or a queen
in their past life, and to imagine the wealth, comfort and power they
would have had. Thinking about these things adds a little color to
everyday life.
Well, I must confess
that it sounds interesting to me, too. For instance, I can imagine
myself as a child in the Stone Age, wearing a bone on my head and
drawing funny animal pictures on the rocks. In other words, having a
life like the Flintstones: I'm little Pebbles, and I have a friend
called Bam Bam. My mom cleans the house with an elephant’s trunk, and we
have a pet called Dino. Only, it might get boring after a while.
Better to put myself in
the Middle Ages, like in the movie "Pride and Prejudice." I'm wearing a
dress with puffy sleeves, and am having dinner on a big rectangular
table with candles on it and a big family sitting around it having a
conversation. But this is positive thinking! What if I was a slave or a
maid in the Middle Ages? I don’t even want to think about it.
I always dream about
myself as being in a better situation than that. I know I couldn't be a
queen, because I love to work so much, and a queen wouldn't do that.
Maybe I could be Mona Lisa? You know, the woman in the famous painting.
Or maybe I inspired Shakespeare to write one of his plays. How magical
to imagine that! Or, maybe I invented something, like the telephone or
the computer. However, I know that the inventors of both of these were
males, and I ought to be a girl in my reincarnation.
Maybe Eros, the god of
love, was my father--maybe I was Aphrodite? Or maybe I was Helen of Troy--maybe
I caused the Trojan War. Of course, I wouldn't actually want to cause a
war! However, this is mythology, anyway; we don't know if such things
really happened.
There are also some
people who think that they were really bad in their past life. This is
because they think their present life is terrible, and they must be
paying the price for what they did in the past. It's more realistic to
think this way, because everyone couldn't have been Cleopatra or Pharaoh.
You might have been the worst person in the world, or one of the
helpless people in the middle of a war. Anyway, I love to think of
myself in the PRESENT, whether it's good or bad. What I see seems safer
than what I dream.
Gülay Acar (COMD/III)
howtoreachgulay@yahoo.com
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