If we’re going to be dedicated reincarnationists, it makes sense that we would also be students of the future… Allow me to introduce you to THE SINGULARITY HUB, a very interesting site that tracks trends in the futurist realm:

The Future Is Here Today…Robots, Genetics, AI, Longevity, Singularity

Here’s an example from the site:

Child Receives Trachea Organ Transplant Created With Own Stem Cells

A 10 year old boy received a new trachea grown from his own stem cells attached to a colagen scaffold.

Thank you to Tanya Egan Gibson for answering this week’s Reincarnationist Q&A!

Tanya Egan Gibson is the author of How to Buy a Love of Reading (May 2009 – Dutton), a novel about nouveau riche parents who try to cure their teenage daughter’s hatred of books by commissioning a custom-written novel for her and dubbing themselves the Medicis of Long Island.  She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with her husband and two young children.

THE QUESTIONS:

What is your most marked characteristic that you believe could be a hold over from a past life?

I value difference/uniqueness over nearly everything (except kindness).  I rarely feel like I want to be just like someone else or look like someone else or create something that has already been created.  I have a feeling that if were, indeed, someone else previously, that person was no doubt a bit eccentric or iconoclastic.

What is your principle defect that you believe may be inherited from a previous incarnation?

That would be stubbornness.  Because it couldn’t be *my* fault.  Certainly not.  Must be a holdover from past incarnation, one that wasn’t always, you know, *right.*

Which of your favorite heroes do you think you could have been and why?

I’ve been thinking about this question for, well, days, and I can’t exactly answer it, maybe because “heroes” is a loaded word for me (do I think I could have been heroic?  Not sure), or perhaps because I tend to think of heroes as characters in fiction (and it wouldn’t make sense for me to think I could be the reincarnation of someone who never existed in “real life”).  What I *can* say is that I’d like to imagine that I was some sort of explorer–someone who would be willing to put it all on the line to discover new things.

What three people from history would you like to have over to dinner for a discussion about reincarnation?

F. Scott Fitzgerald (who would undoubtedly sound less and less, er, coherent on the subject as the evening passed), Oscar Wilde, and Kurt Vonnegut.

What do you think happens when we die?

That’s a question I tried not to think too much about until recently, when my five-year-old daughter’s pet frogs died. My husband and I are blessed with an abundance of grandparents for our children, all of whom have different ideas about religion and what happens after death.  So when Dylan’s sweet little pets died, I found myself putting forth a hodgepodge of ideas taken from different belief systems.

She imagines Toady and Little Frog living now in Frog Heaven, where they tell other pets about how much she loved them.  But because one of her grandmothers told her that when things die, they return as energy to make new beings, she also imagines them becoming baby frogs all over again.  And finally, because we told her when we buried them in our yard under the Calla Lilies they were being returned to the earth to help other things grow, she tells us that she imagines Toady and Little Frog holding little gardening rakes.  She says they’re making flowers for her.  (All of which makes me cry when she’s not looking because it’s so sweet and wonderful.)

So what do *I* believe happens when we die?  Anything my little girl believes is probably right.

When you come back next time, who (or what!) would you like to be?

Someone who can keep houseplants alive (apparently, you are supposed to water them), enjoys cooking (rather than thinking putting that Trader Joe’s pizza in the oven is a lot of work), organizes closets (so that things don’t fall on one’s head when one opens them), and writes thank-you notes on time.  Fortunately, my sweet children and patient husband forgive me all this and more.

Can’t get rid of your memories? Call Death Bear

A shadowy, masked New Yorker relieves people of painful remnants of their pasts: love letters, photos, even underwear. To the man under the giant bear head, it’s performance art.

[Death Bear visits clients in their homes and accepts love letters, old photos, anything they can’t just throw away. The man behind the mask, Nate Hill, says he wants to create art that helps people. (Carolyn Cole / Los Angeles Times / March 18, 2010)]

By Tina Susman

Reporting from New York – A biting wind whipped down a dark street, where a man crouched in the shadow of a building. He pulled on black gloves and glanced up and down the avenue. Satisfied that no one was watching, he pulled a mask the size of a beach ball out of a bag, pulled it onto his head and wriggled it into place: snout in front, eye holes over his own, rounded ears pointed skyward.

Death Bear was ready for his mission.

A man in the second-floor unit of a nearby apartment building in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn was desperate to get rid of something that was too torturous to keep but impossible to discard.

The anguished individual had turned to Death Bear, a macabre performance artist who silently walks the city streets in a one-man quest to relieve people of painful remnants of the past: love letters, photos, gifts, dog tags, underwear — a lot of underwear, it seems — anything that might reduce an otherwise well-functioning person to a sniffling wreck.

His service has spread through word of mouth and the Internet.

“Help me, Death Bear!” read a typical plea that flickered via text message onto his cellphone…

For the complete article, click here.