You are older than the stars

2026

Jehnna and I were chatting while taking an evening stroll. We were talking about each of us having an old soul, something people have said about us separately when we were growing up. Where she is more spiritually-anchored, I tend to be in meaning-making mode. The conversation drifted into reincarnation, and whether I think this is a thing that happens. My answer is: I don't think so, but I have the brain of a monkey, so how can I really know?

This notion of the human brain as merely a monkey brain is something I find solace in, ironically. We humans can't truly objectively process the world around us, we are made of it and are within it. I can see a person with my human eyes. A snake will see a person with their snake eyes and comprehend it differently. Dogs, cats, bugs…they all see the world through a very specific range of visual and aural wavelengths. We do not live in the same world. Humans see a human world. 

Alan Watts famously stated: "Through our eyes, the universe is perceiving itself. Through our ears, the universe is listening to its harmonies.” We are the only way the universe knows it exists.

And now we also have recent confirmation from quantum physics that the atoms inside us, without us being consciously aware, are connecting to each other and to other atoms across the entire universe. This is called Quantum Entanglement. It's a scientific fact. 

So what is this feeling we humans have that can be expressed as a soul, something that can be reincarnated, that survives us after our bodies have been exhausted? Are we feeling something vast and ancient within ourselves? Are our atoms, borrowed from asteroids, meteors and stars, either missing their entangled friends or merely trying to reconnect back into the stars they came from?

What we know is true: the matter in every human body was forged in the cores of stars that exploded billions of years before the earth existed. The iron in our blood was made in a supernova. The calcium in our bones was assembled in the heart of a star. The oxygen we breathe was scattered across space by stellar death and eventually pulled by gravity into the atmosphere of our small planet, orbiting an ordinary star among an estimated ten to twenty sextillion stars in the observable universe, in an unremarkable galaxy among two trillion galaxies. Does the universe care that I have a soul? Maybe it created it. 

We are, in the most literal sense, made of ancient things. Things that have cycled through the universe for billions of years, changing states, changing forms, never being destroyed, just transformed, recombined. Our bodies will do the same thing, again and again, as part of a universal clock that operates far beyond human scale (from ashes to ashes Ecclesiastes noted). These transformations will take billions of years, which seems an unimaginably long time to a human with a life expectancy of 76.5 years for men, 81.4 for women in the US.

Every culture that has ever existed has had some version of this conversation. 

The Egyptians weighed the heart against a feather to determine what happened next. Jewish mystics described the Neshama, the breath of God temporarily housed in the body, cycling through lives in search of its Tikkun, its repair. Islamic tradition holds the Ruh, the divine breath, in trust until the body is finished and the soul returned to its source. The Hindus mapped the soul's journey through successive lives with extraordinary precision. The Christians built a heaven of reunion and recognition. The Buddhists described a consciousness that neither persists nor disappears but transforms, the way a flame passes from one candle to another is neither the same flame nor a different one. Some indigenous traditions keep the ancestors present, speaking, still involved in the lives of the living.

Different instruments for measuring what's felt but invisible. The same feeling underneath. The sense that the energy of a person, the particular, irreplaceable current of a specific consciousness, doesn't simply stop. That it goes somewhere. Changes states. Returns in some form.

Our ancestors were doing physics without the tools for physics. Feeling the conservation of energy before anyone had named it. Sensing Quantum Entanglement and translating it into the language of souls and ancestors and heaven because that was the only vocabulary they had to build an answer from.

They aren’t wrong. There is truth in it all. 

Physics can tell you that the matter in your body has been cycling through the universe for billions of years. It can tell you that energy is conserved, that nothing is truly lost, that the current keeps moving through new forms. It can tell you that you are made of star stuff, entangled with everything that has ever existed.

What it can't tell you is why you specifically are here. What this particular temporary form is for. What you're moving toward. Whether the arc of your existence bends toward anything, means anything.

Reincarnation doesn't just say you've been here before. It says you're here for a reason. That the soul is moving toward something, that this life has weight and direction and consequence beyond the accident of your birth and the certainty of your death. Jehnna holds that. Most people do. On certain days, honestly, I gravitate towards its safety.

The current has direction without destination. That's what I believe. Here’s what else I believe:

Our atoms hold a secret they've been whispering to us our entire lives.

You are here. You have always been here. And you will always be.