One day I was examining all paper submission, when, I finally strucked to one paper with this interesting topic, “Reincarnation”. In my humble opinion, the writing worth better audience than my cold-silent email inbox. So, here is a brief story about reincarnation, written by the talented Ni Luh Larasathy Pinkan, a pretty Balinesse girl, law student in Law School President University Cikarang, who’s now in pursue of her legal career through internship in one of leading technology company.

Reincarnation is the philosophical or religious concept that an aspect of a living being, starts a new life in a different physical body or form after each biological death. The theory of reincarnation or “life after death” is believed by certain community such as Buddhism and Hinduism. Although, there are also several philosophers who also believe in such theory, such as Curt John Ducasse, Pythagoras, Socrates, etc.

Ducasse, a French philosopher, stated that reincarnation is a form of life after bodily death in which the soul becomes incarnate again through reentry in a new human or possibly animal body. From the aforementioned definition, it can be noted that the individual soul lives in a body on earth not once but several times. While Pythagoras, a Greek philosopher, apparently was famous as an expert on the fate of the soul after death, in which he thought that the soul was immortal and underwent a series of reincarnations. Such statement was disclosed by Cuffman, a leading scholar on Pythagoras theories. As for Socrates explanation on reincarnation, he said that if the soul existed before birth then the soul exists after death.

Reincarnation, as what has been stated before, is also believed by several religions such as Buddhism and Hinduism, and usually being attributed to the idea of Karma. In Christianity, they do believe in Karma in a different term. In Galatians 6:8, it says “Whoever sows to please their flesh, from the flesh will reap destruction; whoever sows to please the Spirit, from the Spirit will reap eternal life”. Or in Bahasa Indonesia, it is commonly known as rule of “tabur tuai”. Karma itself shall mean a result of what we have done in our whole life. If we did something good, then our Karma will be good, and vice versa.

According to Hinduism, reincarnation is one of 5 beliefs in which all Hindus shall have faith in them, as the main destination of a living being is not heaven, but rather Moksha. Moksha is a term which refers to freedom of the soul to become one with the God. When our soul reaches Moksha, there will not be life anymore. We will be released from all the good and bad. There will only be silence and peace. In order to reach that, Hinduism believes that human needs to go through several lives in this world in order to purify, and release their soul from all the bad karma they have done in life. That is why in Hinduism we are required to stay in line with Dharma, and do all the good thing to all the living beings in this whole entire world. Whether it is our fellow human, or, animals and even plants.

The idea of reincarnation also related to the existence of heaven and hell. We will be reborn after the death, and whether or not we will be reborn as a human in a good and perfect condition, it depends on our past lives. If we conducted more good things instead of the bad ones, we will go to hell before our soul stay in heaven while waiting for our turn to be returned to the world as the most perfect living being, possessed with integrity and common sense, called human. And if otherwise, we will go to heaven first to get a reward for the good things we have done in life, and after that our soul will go straight to hell, while waiting our turn to be returned back to the world whether as a disabled human, or even worse animals or viruses or plants