Metempsychosis Quotes

“Some stories last many centuries,
others only a moment.
All alter over that lifetime like beach-glass,
grow distant and more beautiful with salt.

Yet even today, to look at a tree
and ask the story Who are you? is to be transformed.

There is a stage in us where each being, each thing, is a mirror.

Then the bees of self pour from the hive-door,
ravenous to enter the sweetness of flowering nettles and thistle.

Next comes the ringing a stone or violin or empty bucket
gives off --
the immeasurable's continuous singing,
before it goes back into story and feeling.

In Borneo, there are palm trees that walk on their high roots.
Slowly, with effort, they lift one leg then another.

I would like to join that stilted transmigration,
to feel my own skin vertical as theirs:
an ant-road, a highway for beetles.

I would like not minding, whatever travels my heart.
To follow it all the way into leaf-form, bark-furl, root-touch,
and then keep walking, unimaginably further.”
― Jane Hirshfield, Given Sugar, Given Salt

“A more common explanation for the feeling of being Old in Soul is tied up in Buddhist and Hindu ideas of reincarnation, or metempsychosis. Interestingly, this is most likely where the origin of the phrase “Old Soul” came from in the first place.”
― Aletheia Luna, Old Souls: The Sages and Mystics of Our World

“What is man? and what difference is there between him and other plants, between him and all the other animals of the world? None, obviously. Fortuitously placed, like them, upon this globe, he is born like them; like them, he reproduces, rises, and falls; like them he arrives at old age and sinks like them into nothingness at the close of the life span Nature assigns each species of animal, in accordance with its organic construction. Since the parallels are so exact that the inquiring eye of philosophy is absolutely unable to perceive any grounds for discrimination, there is then just as much evil in killing animals as men, or just as little, and whatever be the distinctions we make, they will be found to stem from our pride's prejudices, than which, unhappily, nothing is more absurd.

If all individuals were possessed of eternal life, would it not become impossible for Nature to create any new ones? If Nature denies eternity to beings, it follows that their destruction is one of her laws. Now, once we observe that destruction is so useful to her that she absolutely cannot dispense with it, and that she cannot achieve her creations without drawing from the store of destruction which death prepares for her, from this moment onward the idea of annihilation which we attach to death ceases to be real; there is no more veritable annihilation; what we call the end of the living animal is no longer a true finis, but a simple transformation, a transmutation of matter, what every modern philosopher acknowledges as one of Nature's fundamental laws. According to these irrefutable principles, death is hence no more than a change of form, an imperceptible passage from one existence into another, and that is what Pythagoras called metempsychosis”
― Marquis de Sade, Philosophy in the Boudoir

“Yo fui un soldado que durmió en el lecho
de Cleopatra la reina. Su blancura
y su mirada astral y omnipotente.
Eso fue todo.

I was a soldier who slept in the bed
of Cleopatra, the Queen. Her paleness,
her starry and omnipotent gaze.
Nothing more.”
― Rubén Darío, The Complete Poetry

“Cloning must be sacrilege to the doctrines of metempsychosis, as it interrupts the sequence of reincarnations and the migration of souls. But it is also sacrilegious where the laws of evolution are concerned, since it is tantamount to an unlimited perpetuation of the species.

In the body, a will to help begins to form. It is the body that chooses, among the innumerable pathogenic elements at its disposal, the illness that will purify you by diet and fever.”
― Jean Baudrillard, Cool Memories V: 2000 - 2004

“For attempting to have sexual relations with an elephant, Tram Chung Song, who had said in his defence that the elephant had suddenly seemed to him like a reincarnation of his wife, was taken at his word by the judges and sentenced to seventeen years' imprisonment - the usual sentence for marital rape.

The subject who takes himself for what he is is mad. But if he senses that he is not really what he is, then he can use that identification as a mask. This is the way it is with truth too: if you claim to possess it, you are mad. But if you know it doesn't exist, then you can make use of all the signs of truth.”
― Jean Baudrillard, Cool Memories V: 2000 - 2004