Epigenetics and Reincarnation

William Enckhausen November 9, 2026

I recently heard a very enlightening explanation of reincarnation from the Tibetan Buddhist tradition given by the renowned Chilean neuroscientist Francisco Varela, who was a practitioner of Buddhist meditation. He said that the idea of a mind reincarnating in a current lifetime does not necessarily mean that the reincarnation is a former version of one´s own ego, as if I were the author of actions in the past and now I am either reaping the benefits or experiencing the suffering of those actions in my present incarnation. Instead, the concept is that some form of pre-existing consciousness is connected to my present state of consciousness. My consciousness is not a "tabula rasa," or a blank slate open only to present and future influences. Nor is my state of consciousness a linear continuation of my present ego from its own past. For certain "karmic" reasons I resonate with these pre-existing structures that influence and determine my experiences in this life-time. What reincarnates are these patterns and not necessarily a previous version of my own ego.

I really like this explanation because it coincides with my own thoughts and contemplations on reincarnation. The notion of a past ego that reincarnates seems but a projection of one´s current, finite ego that imagines some previous, linear influence as oneself instead of pre-existing conscious structures that are out there in the cosmic soup. Instead of the idea of reincarnation being the story of one ego passing through several life-times, the story of reincarnation becomes the story of how one ego incarnates and processes the experiences of the collective mind. One is reborn with psychic and spiritual structures imposed on the mind yet they may just resonate with your current state of consciousness instead of being your actual, former mental make-up. Perhaps what reaps past experiences, evolves and changes is the collective mind as a whole while each individual mind is doing its part to process and integrate the entire myriad of human experience.

Precise knowledge of these karmic vestiges in the mind require a very precise intuitive vision. While I do believe it is possible to "see" and comprehend these past life impressions, I think that people imagine and project these ideas almost all of the time. We are story tellers that like to have a meaningful narrative for our lives and so it is all too easy for the mind to think it is perceiving past life influences when really the mind is trying to create a narrative and meaningful story that answers the difficult "hows and whys" of finite, undetermined existence.

Science is not capable of giving us any information about past lives either. However, there are some interesting ideas about epigenetics that have some parallels to the idea of reincarnation. Epigenetics is the study of how your behaviors and environment can cause changes that affect the way your genes work.

The linear ego is rooted in the fear of separation. Some people tell their stories out of trauma, loss, of fear, of ambition and pride. What seems to hold their story together is the fear of not being able to project some image of oneself. When one awakens a little from this constant state of clash and cohesion, one can question what the true "I" is. While meditating on the feeling of "I exist" one finds a great and happy space. If one´s fears are surrendered there, then some graceful form of consciousness auto-pilot kicks in. When all of conflicts of the separate ego are brought into this space of silence, there is an echo that reverberates into and enlivens all of the dark areas of your being. An image and a story is given to you. And as the story comes from your greater self it really is for you and fits you perfectly. Instead of being based on fear and willful projection, the greater I within narrates your life to you. You are seen as the macrocosm sees you. That image is secure in that it is based in the life of the universe instead of complex idiosyncratic fears, desires and projections. Your story becomes part of the story of the universe.

It is from this perspective that we can see so-called past lives, which are all of the influences that compose my sense of self. We resonate with perceptions of some past life because something in us needs to resolve the issue that the past life symbolizes. Imagine that Gabor Mate had dreams that he was a prisoner in a concentration camp. He could interpret that as perhaps knowledge of a past life that comes into awareness through a dream. Perhaps he thinks he lived or died in the Halocaust in a previous existence. The dream gives form and meaning to one´s complexes. I think that is what most people do when they have such dreams - project some kind of linear story into it instead of a symbolic interpretation. While the dream may give you a symbolic interpretation of the conflicts in your mind, it is not literally true. In his case, it may have been the epigenetic influences from his mother´s experience that have replicated into his DNA. Although the situation is given to him to resolve it is not necessarily a linear story from his own past to present self. Perhaps he is helping to resolve the story of his own family and the collective consciousness of his Jewish ancestors. Making that greater narrative part of one´s own narrative certainly expands the boundries of one´s story.

Yet, let us say that he resolves all of that history within himself. Perhaps his digestion of part of the collective complex helps others to also transcend those very same limitations. A successful pattern of understanding and transmutation is created in the individual mind which percolates into the collective mind. What next? Is there anything left to tell once such a great story is told?

Even in one lifetime we can have so many deaths and births and we face even greater challenges now that we have a firmer footing, until we are bold enough to face the non-linearity of the ego and the myriad of influences subjacent in the mind. The process continues until the microcosm merges into the macrocosm, when one´s personal life becomes the life of the universe.

I share the following stories contemplating the mixed ethnicity of my children. Not only are the lives of their two parents and their personal psychologies converging into their unique creation, but perhaps all of the experiences of our ancestors as well. They have my wife´s Meso-American eyes and my fair skin. The eyes of the most beautiful and beloved woman are reflected in a shared image of myself. They are definitely "ours" but how deep does the idea of "ours" go? Does this notion extent back to our grandparents, great-grandparents and entire family line, back into the history of our respective cultures, or reach back even further into the history of humanity as a whole? As I contemplate each microcosmic existence as a reflection of the macrocosmic whole, I think of the One in the many, of human migration, the mixing of different peoples and the issues of racism and reconciliation that result from this process. I also recall my grandfather and the process of racial reconciliation that he went through.

My grandfather had some really intense experiences during the second world war. As a farm boy who knew how to drive a tractor, he continued to drive a tractor in the war, albeit a giant one, all across Italy.

He was always very intuitive. Once, when he was a teenager, he told his cousin that he had better pull the car over because the tire was about to explode. His cousin thought it was nonsense. A minute later the tire exploded. It turned out that this intuition saved him several times in the war, from the beaches of Anzio into crossing of the Po River Valley.

He and his high school friend were taking their tractors from one battle site to another during the invasion of Italy. German Junker dive-bombers were screeching down to attack them. In the middle of the journey they come across some UK platoon commanded by an Indian Sikh officer. He ordered them to dig a trench with their giant tractors to protect them from artillery. My grandfather saw in his mind’s eye that all of these men were about to die and that he had better leave. He disobeyed this officer and drove away. Just when he was leaving a shell exploded and killed the whole platoon.

He once had to clear the path across the Po River which was blocked by American tanks destroyed by German artillery. His officer gave the order and he said, “I don’t mean to be disrespectful sir, but there are 2 dozen dead men in those armed tanks that tried to cross the river. My tractor is open-caged and all I am wearing is a t-shirt.” His officer replied, “Don’t worry son, we have got you covered.” It took him 30 minutes to clear the path. All the while he had bullets bouncing off of his tractor and shells exploding all around him. When he returned to the shore nobody could believe he was alive.

His fellow soldiers started to note how he escaped the most impossible situations and began to stay close to him in conflicts because they knew he would be alright. He was always very calm and peaceful. I always felt safe with him and always lived nearby. He would often take us to his childhood cabin where he lived before the war and take us for walks in the woods. He would sometimes say "I am about to find an arrowhead", and then he would find one on the ground.

It was customary for my mother to take us there regularly to be in the woods without electricity and stay in the cabin for the weekend. One day my grandfather told me that we could not go and stay in his old cabin for a while.

I asked him why and he told me there was a family of Mexicans living there. I was surprised and asked him why he gave them permission to live there. He told me that they had no permission to be there, and I was even more surprised. I asked him why in the world he would let strangers stay there? He said they were nice people and were taking good care of the place. He said he went there and saw that a family had been staying there. It was well kept and the trees around the house were even well trimmed. He said that with all of the problems of vandalism that he has had there with drunken white teenagers that the place would be well taken care of with the Mexicans living there. He did not meet them and thought maybe they fled to the woods to hide after hearing his truck arrived. He just left and later returned to see from far away that they were staying in the house. Therefore, we did not go there for the 6 months that they were there.

When I was older I realized that Mexicans were really native Americans. It was interesting to realize this obvious connection. For me, Native Americans really seemed to only exist in movies. I had never met any until I was an adult. However, in Texas we were always surrounded by Mexicans but very few people seemed to make the connection that Mexicans were native to this continent like the so called American Indians.

My mother explained to us that my grandfather´s grandmother was Cherokee. She told us that her family had traces of "Black Dutch." I had always heard the term and thought that it referred to Dutch immigrants who had black hair. It seemed so remote to me as my grandfather looked nothing like an Indian. It was not until after the university that I traveled around and started to appreciate the different physiognomy of people that I could start to see some Native American characteristics in my grandfather. More recently I showed some Mexican friends a photo of my grandfather and they said, "Oh yes, he looks like one of us. He is a Mestizo but mostly white, like 75 percent, but you can see Indian in him too. Reflecting back on the Mexican visitors at his house I imagine that he saw them as people similar to his own grandmother; campesinos - good-hearted people that live close to the land.

Even as a child I admired his point of view. However, he was not entirely beyond racism. He sometimes had a disrespectful attitude toward black people, however his wife and children would stifle him whenever he said something rude.

Once, my mother told me about an incident when she was with her mother in a store in Alabama in the early 1960s. They reached the end of the check out line. The people waiting in front of them were all black women waiting for their turn to pay at the cash register. According to the convention, the ladies left their positions and tried to get behind my grandmother at the end of the line. My grandmother did not let them. She said they were there first and that they should go in front of her. The other white people were offended by this. “Why does another white person come here and break the rules of our established order?,” they said. This happened in the early sixties before the Civil Rights Movement.

Although he simply had a very conventional, white Texan prejudice, he tried to justify his grudge against blacks based on a situation in the invasion of Italy during World War II. A black regiment retreated at Monte Casino and supposedly caused a lot of damage to his white regiment by not holding their ground.

I was already in college by the time he told me this and thought that if I were a black man in the 1940s treated as a second class citizen, then why in the hell would I want to go and kill for whitey in his segregated army in a psychotic world war between a bunch of genocidal imperialists? Sure, the Nazis were the greatest bastards of all but the English, American and French allies were also imperialist bastards that had enslaved Africans and exploited just about everybody else on the planet. "Just let all those crazy white bastards fight it out among themselves," I would say, imagining myself as a black man with my own rebellious, college boy ideas.

He was getting older and told me many things about his experiences in the war as well. He made some confessions about the terrors he experienced in Italy. He had held on to intense traumas his entire life. As he was nearing the end of his life he had a need to make peace with it. It also seemed that he knew he needed to get beyond this prejudice against blacks as well. And so it is in cases where people really need to make great internal changes, the living and conscious universe presents situations, circumstances and people that help us move onward.

Around his property people had sold off their farms and now there were many small, half acre lots all around his 40 acre lot. Many years earlier after the Mexicans left the place kept getting vandalized. He got really angry one day and the old sergeant in him manifested and he just had the place bull-dozed. My mother retired and built her home close to where his old home was.

About the same time he was telling me his war stories there was a black kid in the neighborhood surrounding his old house and property. My mother knew the family of the boy, Tyrone, and was very worried about Tyrone roaming around the neighborhood all alone while his mother and grandmother would stay inside their trailer house drinking all day. My grandfather would sometimes give him some candy and help him learn to ride his bike. It was really a touching memory to see him spending time with this kid and making him feel welcome in the neighborhood, and in the worldI recently heard a very enlightening explanation of reincarnation from the Tibetan Buddhist tradition given by the renowned Chilean neuroscientist Francisco Varela. He said that the idea of a mind reincarnating in a current lifetime does not necessarily mean that the reincarnation is a former version of one´s own ego, as if I were the author of actions in the past and now I am either reaping the benefits or experiencing the suffering of those actions in my present incarnation. Instead, the concept is that some form of pre-existing consciousness is connected to my present state of consciousness. My consciousness is not a "tabula rasa," or a blank slate open only to present and future influences. For certain "karmic" reasons I resonat with these pre-existing structures that influence and determine my experiences in this life-time. What reincarnates are these patterns and not necessarily a previous version of my own ego.

I really like this explanation because it coincides with my own thoughts and contemplations on reincarnation. The notion of a past ego that reincarnates seems but a projection of one´s current, finite ego that imagines some previous influence as oneself instead of pre-existing conscious structures that are out there in the cosmic soup. Instead of the idea of reincarnation being the story of one ego passing through several life-times, the story of reincarnation becomes the story of how one ego incarnates and processes the experiences of the collective mind. One is reborn with psychic and spiritual structures imposed on the mind yet they may just resonate with your current state of consciousness instead of being your actual, former mental make-up. Perhaps what reaps past experiences, evolves and changes is the collective mind as a whole while each individual mind is doing its part to process and integrate the entire myriad of human experience.

Precise knowledge of these karmic vestiges in the mind require a very precise intuitive vision. While I do believe it is possible to "see" and comprehend these past life impressions, I think that people imagine and project these ideas almost all of the time. We are story tellers that like to have a meaningful narrative for our lives and so it is all too easy for the mind to think it is perceiving past life influences when really the mind is trying to create a narrative and meaningful story that answers the difficult "hows and whys? of finite, undetermined existence.

Science is not capable of giving us any information about past lives either. However, there are some interesting ideas about epigenetics that have some parallels to the idea of reincarnation. Epigenetics is the study of how your behaviors and environment can cause changes that affect the way your genes work.

Unlike genetic mutations, epigenetic changes are reversible and do not change your underlying DNA sequence. Instead, they act like a collection of cellular controls, turning specific genes on or off, or turning their activity up or down. Because your lifestyle alters these tags, researchers have discovered that some epigenetic patterns can even be passed down to future generations, meaning your grandparents' environments could potentially influence your health today.

Gabor Mate´s writings on epigenetics are intriguing with very personal examples. He spoke of how his patterns of anxiety were probably epigenetic influences passed down from his mother who was a prisoner in a concentration camp during World War II. He writes about how is personal awareness permitted him to become aware of these patterns and eventually accept that they are part of his existence and he must work through them. He says that instead of blaming Hitler for his life-long neurosis he now must do the work himself to make deep personal transformations. His ideas are very humane and optimistic in that a conscious individual is able to work through these pre-existing patterns that influence the psyche.

I share the following story contemplating the mixed ethnicity of my children. Not only are the lives of their two parents and their personal psychologies converging into their unique creation, but perhaps all of the experiences of our ancestors as well. They have my wife´s Meso-American eyes and my fair skin. The eyes of the most beautiful and beloved woman are reflected in a shared image of myself. They are definitely "ours" but how deep does the idea of "ours" go? Does this notion extent back to our grandparents, great-grandparents and entire family line, back into the history of our respective cultures, or reach back even further into the history of humanity as a whole? As I contemplate each microcosmic existence as a reflection of the macrocosmic whole, I think of the One in the many, of human migration, the mixing of different peoples and the issues of racism and reconciliation that result from this process. I also recall my grandfather and the process of racial reconciliation that he went through.

My grandfather had some really intense experiences during the second world war. As a farm boy who knew how to drive a tractor, he continued to drive a tractor in the war, albeit a giant one, all across Italy.

He was always very intuitive. Once, when he was a teenager, he told his cousin that he had better pull the car over because the tire was about to explode. His cousin thought it was nonsense. A minute later the tire exploded. It turned out that this intuition saved him several times in the war, from the beaches of Anzio into crossing of the Po River Valley.

He and his high school friend were taking their tractors from one battle site to another during the invasion of Italy. German Junker dive-bombers were screeching down to attack them. In the middle of the journey they come across some UK platoon commanded by an Indian Sikh officer. He ordered them to dig a trench with their giant tractors to protect them from artillery. My grandfather saw in his mind’s eye that all of these men were about to die and that he had better leave. He disobeyed this officer and drove away. Just when he was leaving a shell exploded and killed the whole platoon.

He once had to clear the path across the Po River which was blocked by American tanks destroyed by German artillery. His officer gave the order and he said, “I don’t mean to be disrespectful sir, but there are 2 dozen dead men in those armed tanks that tried to cross the river. My tractor is open-caged and all I am wearing is a t-shirt.” His officer replied, “Don’t worry son, we have got you covered.” It took him 30 minutes to clear the path. All the while he had bullets bouncing off of his tractor and shells exploding all around him. When he returned to the shore nobody could believe he was alive.

His fellow soldiers started to note how he escaped the most impossible situations and began to stay close to him in conflicts because they knew he would be alright. He was always very calm and peaceful. I always felt safe with him and always lived nearby. He would often take us to his childhood cabin where he lived before the war and take us for walks in the woods. He would sometimes say "I am about to find an arrowhead", and then he would find one on the ground.

It was customary for my mother to take us there regularly to be in the woods without electricity and stay in the cabin for the weekend. One day my grandfather told me that we could not go and stay in his old cabin for a while.

I asked him why and he told me there was a family of Mexicans living there. I was surprised and asked him why he gave them permission to live there. He told me that they had no permission to be there, and I was even more surprised. I asked him why in the world he would let strangers stay there? He said they were nice people and were taking good care of the place. He said he went there and saw that a family had been staying there. It was well kept and the trees around the house were even well trimmed. He said that with all of the problems of vandalism that he has had there with drunken teenagers that the place would be well taken care of with the Mexicans living there. He did not meet them and thought maybe they fled to the woods to hide after hearing his truck arrived. He just left and later returned to see from far away that they were staying in the house. Therefore, we did not go there for the 6 months that they were there.

When I was older I realized that Mexicans were really native Americans. It was interesting to realize this obvious connection. For me, Native Americans really seemed to only exist in movies. I had never met any until I was an adult. However, in Texas we were always surrounded by Mexicans but very few people seemed to make the connection that Mexicans were native to this continent like the so called American Indians.

My mother explained to us that my grandfather´s grandmother was Cherokee. She told us that her family had traces of "Black Dutch." I had always heard the term and thought that it referred to Dutch immigrants who had black hair. It seemed so remote to me as my grandfather looked nothing like an Indian. It was not until after the university that I traveled around and started to appreciate the different physiognomy of people that I could start to see some Native American characteristics in my grandfather. More recently I showed some Mexican friends a photo of my grandfather and they said, "Oh yes, he looks like one of us. He is a Mestizo but mostly white, like 75 percent, but you can see Indian in him too. Reflecting back on the Mexican visitors at his house I imagine that he saw them as people similar to his own grandmother; campesinos - good-hearted people that live close to the land.

Even as a child I admired his point of view. However, he was not entirely beyond racism. He sometimes had a disrespectful attitude toward black people, however his wife and children would stifle him whenever he said something rude.
Once, my mother told me about an incident when I was with her mother in a store in Alabama in the early 1960s. They reached the end of the check out line. The people waiting in front of them were all black women waiting for their turn to pay at the cash register. According to the convention, the ladies left their positions and tried to get behind my grandmother at the end of the line. My grandmother did not let them. She said they were there first and that they should go in front of her. The other white people were offended by this. “Why does another white person come here and break the rules of our established order?,” they said. This happened in the early sixties before the Civil Rights Movement.

Although he simply had a very conventional, white Texan prejudice, he tried to justify his grudge against blacks based on a situation in the invasion of Italy during World War II. A black regiment retreated at Monte Casino and supposedly caused a lot of damage to his white regiment by not holding their ground.

This is just one little story in the plight for humanity to find wholeness. Each successful story leads us closer to integration as a human society. However, the mass of the collective consciousness of humanity is largely an ugly, unformed monolith of brute instinct and shallow, socially conditioned awareness. Each change or shift within the consciousness of individuals or collectives is an artful chink in the monolith, giving it more form and meaning. The clashes and cohesions of the macrocosm played out in each microcosmic consciousness is the evolution of a beautiful form that tells our story all of the way from to the foundations of fear to the bliss of freedom. Each one of us contributes something to this beauty if we only learn to overcome fear, and listen to and follow the inner voice of life.