Dear Karl and Rick,
The more I observe and study things, the more convinced I become that sorrow over separation and death is perhaps the greatest delusion. To realise that it is a delusion is to become free. There is no death, no separation of the substance. And yet the tragedy of it is that though we love friends for the substance we recognise in them, we deplore the destruction of the insubstantial that covers the substance for the time being. Whereas real friendship should be used to reach the whole through the fragment.
The idea of reincarnation is sound. It is nature's kindness that we do not remember past births. Where is the good either of knowing in detail the numberless births we have gone through? Life would be a burden if we carried such a tremendous load of memories. A wise man deliberately forgets many things. Death is but a sleep and a forgetting.
Happy to be your friend whilst I remember it so.
Paul
P.S. The above combination of words is largely borrowed from Mohandas K. Gandhi (1869-1948)