Chasing Karma: Why My Brain Keeps Inventing Reincarnation
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I’ll be honest—I’ve spent the last decade bouncing between hardline atheism and this weird, unnamed spirituality. Grew up in a strict church, rejected it completely in undergrad, and now, at 41, I’m back to wondering if there’s something bigger. Not God, exactly. More like… patterns.
Lately, I’ve been obsessed with karma and reincarnation, but not in a mystical way. I’m looking at it through a grad student lens. When you study how the human brain works, it makes total sense why we invented these ideas. Our brains are prediction machines. Predictive processing theory suggests we’re constantly trying to reduce uncertainty. Karma gives life a narrative arc. It turns random suffering into "lessons" and random luck into "merit." It’s psychologically soothing, even if it’s not literally true.
I keep coming back to the Tarot, specifically the Wheel of Fortune and the Death card. They aren’t just spooky imagery; they’re visual shorthand for transition and cyclical time. Jung called these archetypes, and honestly, that’s where I land. The symbols work because they map onto how we actually process grief, change, and the illusion of control. I use them less as divination and more as a mirror for my own cognitive biases. When I run a reading during my MoonRituals or journal in the DreamSanctum, I’m not asking for prophecies. I’m asking: "What blind spot am I avoiding right now?" I’ve even started tracking my recurring dreams and emotional cycles in a notebook. It’s not about predicting the future; it’s about understanding my own mind. When I look back at the years of bouncing between belief and skepticism, I realize I’m not really searching for cosmic justice. I’m searching for coherence. My brain craves a story where pain has purpose, where endings are just beginnings. And maybe that’s okay. Maybe inventing these frameworks isn’t a flaw—it’s just how we make sense of a chaotic world. I’m still figuring it out, but for the first time, I’m okay with not having all the answers.
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What if that craving for coherence isn’t actually “making sense” of chaos, but just another form of spiritual bypassing that blocks the raw, non-narrative work of evidence-based therapy? I’ve seen too many clients use karma or archetype frameworks to dodge sitting with unprocessed grief, so treating these cognitive shortcuts as therapeutic tools might actually reinforce the avoidance you’re trying to overcome.
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