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Infinite metempsychosis (without trying to justify metempsychosis as a belief): ...for all I know it may be true, and indeed, more plausibly, it may be that it is neither true nor false, that it is one valid way among others of reading a particular structural similarity between life stories separated in time with no observable causal interaction. This would make it one among many interpretations (another being chance), between which there is no ultimate way to decide which is most valid for all possible uses and contexts... ...the true significance of metempsychosis for Tiantai thought, given... the assertion of the legitimate forgetting of past lives as a form of their continuity (metempsychosis does not necessarily entail any sort of claim about lucid presence of past-life memories of any kind in the present conscious thought), lies in providing what might be called the availability of infinite horizons of meaning for every token of experience. ...the real impact on present experience of the notion of beginningless and endless metempsychosis is not to comfort one against the threat of extinction... but to posit a literally infinite number of alternative narratives of which this present life, and any portion of it, may be read as a part, each of which bestows on this part a different meaning, significance, value, and indeed identity. What I am doing here now is a part of an endless number of different stories, and each of them makes this moment of experience something different and allows it to read out as some other quiddity... The significance of this act changes with its incorporation into various narratives and there are an infinite number of contexts into which it legitimately fits. But this establishment of infinite horizons of relevance, and hence infinite meanings of every token, is perhaps established on purely philosophical grounds, having nothing to do with metempsychosis, in the Three Truths. It may be that if a particular concept of death could be proved true, this would prove to be an obstacle to the infinite horizons claim. But as long as we are not sure if death spells either extinction or a single particular eternal destiny (in the Tiantai system, these two alternatives amount to the same thing)... the pure possibility, the non-knowing itself, of unspecified outcomes and premises is enough to guarantee infinite meanings...