Reincarnation is now

I started researching reincarnation and realized something: it’s happening right now.

You don’t wait for death to come back as someone else. You’re reborn into a different mask while still alive. New job, new city, new relationship — you put on a new self and forget the old one was ever a costume.

It’s like that SpongeBob scene. What did I do this time? — I don’t know, I guess he just doesn’t like you. — Pretend to be somebody else! And he just… does. Swaps selves, no problem.

And about caretaking — your life gets swapped out for some imitation of it. Take care of yourself first. Put your own mask on.

A mask is fine. Trouble starts when you pretend it isn’t one. Once you see you’ve been swapping costumes your whole life, you get to choose which one — instead of getting handed the next one.

Here’s the real insight: you are not your character. The character is the playable piece — Nikolay, the freediver, the writer, the father. It isn’t a lie; it’s just the part others see from the outside. But you are the one watching it. You don’t have a self you observe — you’re the observer that never shows up in the frame.

Notice this and a strange thing happens: the character starts to feel like a costume from the inside too, slightly unreal. Psychiatry has a name for that feeling — depersonalization — and files it under disorder. Here it’s the goal. What a clinic calls illness, every contemplative tradition calls waking up. The only difference is whether you arrived by accident and panicked, or on purpose and relaxed.

So if there’s someone you want to become — you’re already him. He’s not ahead of you, waiting to be built. He’s under the layers, and the work is to clear away everything that isn’t him. You don’t add the new self. You uncover it.

The end of rebirths while you’re alive is the end of trying to be someone you’re not, of trying to fit in. You don’t have to try to be “somebody” or “some way”. Become yourself and live your own life, and whatever you don’t like in yourself, fix it. That’s the one thing you have some control over.

What’s in the way? Fear. Except it isn’t real.