Almost everyone at one time or another gets the feeling that they were "born in the wrong century" or a similar notion. They are fascinated by, and feel they relate better to, the 1960's, the Victorian era, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, ancient Egypt, et cetera. I, on the other hand, sometimes have the bizarre notion that I was born not only in the wrong time, but as the wrong species. Okay... maybe that's a bit much. I probably would've made a good Lakota, or Yoruba, or Maori, or Ainu, back in the day before "Taker" cultures overran and destroyed them. But I also feel I could've been a good white-tailed deer, or gray whale, or manta ray, or emu, or earthworm, or even a redwood, blue-green algae, or amoeba. (Okay, the last is a bit of a stretch, but I chalk that up to my being biased as a complex organism at present. If I were a paramecium now, for example, and assuming I had the conscious ability, in a paramecium kind of way, to imagine myself as another being, maybe I'd be biased against consisting of more than one cell. And being an animate creature right now biases me away from imagining that I could've been, say, a rock in a past life.)
I tend to wonder if this sort of thing --- people thinking they were born in the wrong time period, or otherwise "wrong" --- is partially beause the soul "remembers" (for lack of a better word) parts of its past, the ages and/or states that it has already been through. Skip to the next paragraph if you're already sick of my drivel, but for those interested, I will clarify that I don't mean transmigration of souls in the sense that most people think of it: I don't believe in the soul or spirit as an indivisible whole that gets passed on completely intact from one human body to another, or even between species for that matter. Maybe in a past life, part of me was a deer, part of me was grass, part of me was a snake, part of me was dirt, part of me was an amoeba, part of me was an earthworm, part of me was a piece of coral, part of me was a mushroom, part of me was plankton, et cetera ad infinitum. And that's all just one past life (or rather, the past lives summed up which happened to immediately precede this particular spark of life now inhabiting this particular body in this particular state --- which is, of course, completely in flux, but I already droned on about that, and other ideas about transmigration of souls, in a past entry about the self).
Anyway, what I meant about feeling I'm in the wrong species or culture has a lot to do with guilt. I'm not ashamed of being Caucasian per se, nor am I ashamed of being human, per se. It's more of guilt by association. I understand all too well the horrors perpetrated by others of my own species and culture (or, even if I can't completely understand them, I know enough to be horrified by them anyway). And I, too, am a part of it, because of the way I live. I drive a car, so I contribute to global warming and air pollution, not to mention all of the atrocities committed in the name of obtaining crude oil. I still eat some conventional produce, so I still contribute to widespread pesticide use, and other effects of totalitarian agriculture. I use paper of all sorts daily (from the books I read, to the claim forms I send out at work, to wiping my arse after using the toilet), so try as I might to reduce and reuse and recycle, I still contribute to global deforestation. I live in the United States, so as much as I oppose the war in Iraq, and various other crimes against humanity and nature perpetrated by the U.S. government, my tax dollars still go to fund these heinous acts. Et cetera... et cetera... et cetera.
So is my guilt misguided? Does it have to do with lessons my various past lives were trying to tell me? If a large majority of the atoms that make up by body were at one time part of the body of an elephant killed for my ivory tusks, would I be that much more outraged by the crime of poaching? If I were a poacher in another life, would I be "sentenced" (for lack of a better word) to a lifetime of being poached, or of fighting against poaching? Truthfully, I don't know. Maybe it's not my place to know. Whether or not part of me was a white soldier annhialating the Navajo, or a Portuguese slaveship owner, in a past life, or if I was one of the Navajo or one of the Africans, is a moot point. What matters more, I think, is that now, in this life, I am aware of all these things. And perhaps even more important is what I choose to do with this particular consciousness in this particular life.
The serenity prayer talks of accepting the things you cannot change, changing what you can, and knowing which events fall into which categories. You can only do so much. But just because you can only do a little is no excuse for doing nothing at all.
"As the bombshells of my daily fears explode, I try to trace them to my youth. And then you had to bring up reincarnation over a couple of beers the other night. And now I'm serving time for mistakes made by another in another lifetime. How long till my soul gets it right? Can any human being ever reach that kind of light?" Indigo Girls, Galileo
