Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Saxon Hawke]

Another area prime fiction comes up far too lacking in is the Intaki “rebirth” process. Since we’ve got the ball rolling with some collaborative “fill-in-the-blanks” on Intaki history, I thought I’d take Ken’s advice and do the same with rebirth.

Since a lot of Intaki RP draws its flavor from Hinduism, we can start there.

According to Hinduism, a soul reincarnates again and again on earth till it becomes perfect and reunites with it Source. During this process the soul enters into many bodies, assumes many forms and passes through many births and deaths. This concept is summarily described in the following verse of the Bhagavad gita:

"Just as a man discards worn out clothes and puts on new clothes, the soul discards worn out bodies and wears new ones." (2.22)

According to Hinduism a being has to live many lives and under go many experiences before it attains perfection and becomes one with the Divine. The Hindu theory of creation suggests that creation begins when the individual souls becomes separated from the undifferentiated One. It continues as the evolution of life and consciousness in matter progresses. During this process some of souls journey back to God through the transformation of matter or prakriti in which they were hidden. The remaining souls continue their existence and rejoin Him in the end, not through transformation but through a process of great destruction. Thus the great cycle of creation, stretching over millions of years, comes to its logical end.

As I understand it, in Hinduism, every soul is reborn. It’s pretty clear from PF that this is not the case with the Intaki. This is something that would need to be accounted for to translate the tradition into the Eve Universe. However, we can draw a correlation between the Idama and someone who, in the Hindu tradition, is nearing perfection.



The Tibetan system, called the tulku, is (once again as I understand it) specific to the leadership class.  In this system, Buddha's soul never vanishes, but reincarnates in succession to lead his followers and to accomplish his mission. There are a group of reincarnates called the Gyalwas and among these the Dalai Lama and the Panchen Lama are the most prestigious.

Tibetan reincarnation is not achieved through a ceremony, but religious rituals are used to locate the reincarnated entity. During the process, dozens of candidates are tested with the late lama's possessions; those who have amazing knowledge in identifying their predecessor's belongings win and become the final candidates. From there, a lottery of sorts is held with the name of the next Lama drawn from a special golden urn.

This isn’t an exhaustive look at reincarnation by any means, but a point to start the discussion.

[GoGo Yubari]

I've written about this subject before, so I'll just throw a few links in and see about contributing more later on when I find the time and inspiration. Here's (link #1) me looking at the PF facts and here's (link #2) me taking it a little bit further in the same thread. Since the concept of the Idamas is related to this, here's (link #3) me going on about that as well. Sorry for just spamming you with links, but I've written about this before and don't feel like repeating it every few years.

[Ciarente]

In creating Ciarente's culture of origin, I put two separate waves of Intaki colonization on her home planet (now home moon due to CCP's progressive nuking of every temperate planet in her home system with each expansion, but that's a different story).

The first, having lived an agrarian lifestyle for generations, see rebirth in terms of the cycle of death and rebirth in nature. The most common metaphor is that of water in the river - "Always and never changing, ancient as the hills and born with each rain. We come from the River and go back to it. Dip a bucket from the spring, from the flood, from the delta, and see the difference. Tip them back and try to find them. I am not who I was. I will not be who I am. I will always be of the River."

In this idea of rebirth and reincarnation, the old is blended with the new, just as a single drop of water may make the circuit from rain to river to sea and back, but not as part of exactly the same river each time around.

The second wave of colonists have a view of reincarnation that is much more the idea of the individual returned, the same person in a new body. I think that view is closer to the idea of the Intaki reborn as seen in PF, having read about the Idama and the Way and now refreshing my memory with GoGo's links.

This led to quite some religious conflict in the early years of the second colony.

If anyone is interested, I'd be happy to go into more of the specifics in a different thread.

[Saxon Hawke]

Thanks for the links, I hadn't seen those threads before.