The Transmigration of Tom Cruise and Other Scarey Thoughts

There are some who argue that as a child we are born tabula rasa, that is a blank slate without any influence of genetics or any other influences bred into us. There are others who believe that we are born preconditioned with lessons and experiences imprinted on us. Nature versus nurture. I am not sure where I lie in this argument, some people feel that they have some sort of past life that has been encoded into them, while others feel that there was nothing before them and all that shaped them were present day living. There are certainly arguments floating around on both sides of the issue, but really only one entity knows for sure and apparently He or She isn’t sharing that with us at this point.

There are the discussions of Plato who argued that there are a fixed amount of souls. According to the writings of Aristotle, the soul is not what makes a body move. Even before that step, a soul must first take what biological entities we are made up of, all those different chemicals and water and turns that into a body. A corpse is not a body and as such a body is not a corpse, contrary to all those police procedural dramas on TV. The soul is what makes it exist as a living body. Unlike the body, which has being only through the soul, the soul itself is a principle of being, and therefore, once created, cannot not be. In other words, the soul is incorruptible, and never ceases to be what it already is. And the circular notion of that argument is supplanted only by the poison scene in Princess Bride.

The Greeks jumped in with their idea of Metempsychosis (μετεμψύχωσις, for those of you who crave detail) which is a philosophical term again referring to transmigration of the soul. Scientology believes that there are only a fixed number of souls, which means that Tom Cruise has really existed for eternity and it certainly felt that way if you ever had to sit through Mission Impossible 3. The Taoist also have similar thoughts and ironically this belief gave me the central arc of my comedic screenplay, “If This is Heaven...”, where the fixed number of souls has created a way-station in paradise before allowing the soul to move on. Nietzsche has weighed in on this as well, but I think I have bandied about enough names and beliefs for now, I can sense your eyes, as mine, are glazing over.

Suffice to say, this is a time honoured and an ongoing debate and the only time the answer becomes apparent is when you die and then I figure you have to sign an Oath of Secrecy to never reveal this information to mere mortals. Well, unless you are Tom Cruise and then apparently the rules of the universe are thrown out the window, metaphorically speaking.

So what is the point of this article you may well ask? I was asking the exact same question about three paragraphs ago. You have to remember that my education was rooted firmly in economics and all of this philosophical stuff sounds like, well, greek to me. But I am sure many people say the same thing about economic theory (What you say? There is such a thing as economic theory?).

As mentioned, I am not sure where I fall in all this, but there are some very odd memories that have been with me for many years. Uncomfortable moments that for some reason cause the hair on the back of my neck to rise. One of the most vivid and dread inducing things I can see is a shipwreck of any kind. I do not know why it is, but if I see a lake freighter aground or even a pleasure boat upside down my breath gets short and I have a strong desire to emulate the figure in the Edvard Munch painting, The Scream. This is not a good thing for a guy who scuba dives. Acute anxiety does not play well a few atmospheres below the water. Encountering an underwater wreck? It feels the way I would image someone walking all over my grave. To quote David Letterman, there is just something hinky about the whole damn thing.

The other is the American Civil War. I remember collecting bubble gum cards in the early 1960's that had such a graphic depiction of the war that I am surprised they were even sold. Try to do that nowadays and you would be buried under a sea of sociologists, psychologists and every concerned parent for the normal development of a child breathing down your neck. But in my generation, they were just pictures a of a very, very bloody war, probably a good lesson to pass on. But I always felt somehow I was part of it. Which side has never really manifested itself, whether Union or Rebel, I don’t know. I just have this feeling I was in it somewhere and probably died in it somewhere.

I doubt I am the only one who has had this type of feeling, that somehow you have experienced something that was foreign to you but at the same time feels somewhat familiar. Maybe it awakened some long buried thought causing an avalanche of unexperienced memories to flow forth. Whether these are false memories as some claim or really are imprints from another soul, again we won’t ever know for sure and that kind of adds to the romance of the thing.

I found a paperback many years ago (Decisive Battles of the Civil War by Lt. Col. Joseph Mitchell) that listed all the Civil War sites and overlapped them with modern day maps and highways. I have a fascination with taking that trip someday to see if anything twigs. I wouldn’t quite say it was a compulsion, that brings up images of Richard Dreyfus in Close Encounters with the Third Kind, kind of compulsion. But I would like to make it an adventure sometime. However with my luck, I’ll go for a leisurely scuba dive and come across a Civil War sunken ship and from that double whammy my friends, it will spell the end of me. Well, until I park myself in some other body.. corpse... entity, well you understand.