The Stage of Life

In one of Shakespeare’s famous soliloquies he gives a metaphor for life which begins:

“All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages.”

Shakespeare then goes on to describe the ages of life:

• The “mewling and puking” infant,
• “The whining school-boy”,
• The young lover “Sighing like furnace”,
• The soldier “full of strange oaths, and bearded”.
• The “justice, in fair round belly”,
• The man of “shrunk shank” “his big manly voice, turning again toward childish treble”,
• And finally a “second childishness”, “Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.”

An unconventional interpretation of this ancient concept of the ages of life is to view it as a metaphor for reincarnation or successive embodiments. This topic is one we delicately, and perhaps wisely, avoid when possible, as it is one of the fissures that sharply divides the testimony of spirits.

Speaking as one of “fair round belly” and “beard of formal cut”, it is a fact that I have incarnated over the past 72 years in a succession of bodies, connected by a tenuous thread of memory. Of my infancy, my recollection is as void as that which preceded conception in my mother’s womb.

It is fair to say, that in each of these stages, bearing a familial likeness to the man I am today, that these previous persons were, in a sense, distinct selves, separate embodiments of one spirit. Many of their passions and dreams and ambitions lie dashed upon the rocks of time and exist now only as phantoms haunting the gallery of memory of that which I call my life.

While this life has a beginning and ending on earth, I am certain of it’s continuance beyond the dissolution of the body which presently anchors me to this world, an evanescent form that in time will vanish as the morning dew.

I recall in a vague sense, the persons I have been heretofore in this life, but of that greater spirit, the I AM THAT I AM, I confess a shameful ignorance of that eternal one that sent me as its emissary into this world.

It is said that God is the great mystery, but the eternal self, if such self exists, is also a great mystery, of which the present embodiment that I call myself is but a pale shadow, a faint echo of a voice that thunders.