Tag: reincarnation

From New Dawn 101 (Mar-Apr 2007)

Belief in reincarnation is one of the oldest and most durable of human traits, so old and persistent, in fact, that the psychologist C. G. Jung went so far as to call it an archetype. “Rebirth,” Jung wrote, “is an affirmation that must be counted among the primordial affirmations of mankind. These primordial affirmations are based on what I call archetypes.”¹ This meant for Jung that regardless of its truth or falsity, the idea that we have lived previous lives and will, after our deaths, return in other lives, is somehow ingrained in our psyche. 

We are, to use computer-speak, programmed to think it, and although not all of us accept the idea, it seems to share prominence with other fundamental ideas about the meaning of death and what, if anything, happens to us after it.

These ideas seem to be surprisingly few. There’s the possibility of reincarnation or rebirth, as mentioned, with the belief that eventually one will have worked off one’s karmic debt and so have escaped the wheel of lives; one is then absorbed in some way into the all. There is also the idea of an afterlife in some “other” realm, whether the heaven of Christianity, the paradise of Islam, the Valhalla of Norse legend, or the Elysian fields of ancient Greece. I should point out that not all afterlives are desirable: fire and brimstone await the wicked in Christianity’s hell, and the Greeks, perhaps the greatest lovers of earthly life in history, regarded the idea of a shadowy eternity in the underworld with abhorrence. In any case, all these scenarios posit only one life on earth. Once we get through it, depending on how we conduct ourselves, we then go to our just reward or punishment, as the case may be.

The pagans believe that once we die and our bodies decay, the matter they are made of returns to Nature along with the spirit or soul. We may then possibly enjoy a kind of afterlife as flowers, trees, or grass.

There also is the belief that once we are dead, that’s the end. We no longer exist; our beliefs, ideas, feelings, values – everything important to us – are obliterated when the brain stops working. In this view, our present life is all there is, and after it is nothingness. Many associate this view with modern science, but its roots are in fact very old. The ancient Greek philosopher Democritus, who proposed an early version of the atom, argued that everything was made of little bits of matter that he called atoms (meaning “indivisible”). When we die, he suggested, the atoms that make up the self disperse.

To these classic ideas about death we may be tempted to add one very new one: cryonics, the practice of freezing ones diseased body with the hope that in the future medical science will have discovered a cure for the illness. One can then be thawed, repaired, and brought back to life. On consideration, however, this seems to indicate less idea belief about what happens after death than a faith not only in modern medical science but in the robustness of the cryonics companies offering the service. Surely, as you lie in the freezer awaiting resurrection, the one pressing worry is whether the company keeping you on ice will stay in business. And if it doesn’t, what then? Unless you buy the notion that is hyped periodically that science will one day soon “conquer death,” this seems to me more of an attempt to put off facing death than any kind of engagement with it.

My own feelings about death and what may possibly transpire after it fall into the camp of the agnostic. I simply don’t know – which isn’t to say that I don’t recognise the importance of having some idea about it. In truth, I’ve always been partial to the view presented by the playwright George Bernard Shaw in Back to Methuselah. Here Shaw argued that human beings die not from disease or old age but from discouragement, from loss of purpose and the will to live. Decades later, in his book Man’s Search for Meaning, the psychologist Victor Frankl corroborated this insight in the gruesome setting of a Nazi concentration camp, when he observed that the prisoners who had something to look forward to survived, while those who gave up hope were often the first to perish.

Shaw argued that our present life span was far too short, because it is only toward the end of a long life that some people begin to have a glimpse of its value. To die at eighty just when you are beginning to have some insight into the whole affair seems pointless. Shaw envisioned the possibility that some people might learn how to live longer, so long that, barring accident, they might reach the age of three hundred. This, he thought, would allow them the time to put to some use the insights the rest of us take to the grave.

I should point out that Shaw’s long livers – whom he calls the Ancients –  gain their longevity not through any technological or chemical means, nor through following a strict healthy regimen, although Shaw himself, who lived to be ninety-four, was a vegetarian. They accomplish this through their sheer will to live – and their willingness to fulfil the purposes of what Shaw calls “the life force,” a kind of evolutionary drive that compels life to understand and transcend itself. In his earlier play Man and Superman, Shaw spells out the philosophy of his “life force worshippers” in dramatic and comic detail, and for a time after reading Back to Methuselah I became fascinated by accounts of writers, artists, and thinkers who lived well into old age. There was Shaw himself. There was also the novelist John Cowper Powys, who died at ninety-one, the literary critic and philosopher Owen Barfield, who died at ninety-nine, the German novelist and essayist Ernst Jünger, who died at 101, and many others, including the composer Jean Sibelius, and the philosopher Bertrand Russell, whom lived into their nineties.

In his science fiction novel The Philosopher’s Stone, Colin Wilson – a Shawian himself – suggested that there was some connection between the pursuit of ideas and longevity. His insight was that an interest in objective values – mathematics, philosophy, and, in a similar way, the kind of impersonal beauty that we find in, say, Sibelius’s symphonies, with their deep feeling for nature – is in line with the designs of “the life force,” which urges us to transcend our all too limited personal and subjective aims and goals. Someone who could perceive the objective beauty and “interestingness” of reality and sustain this would, Wilson argued, never be bored and hence have every reason to want to go on living.

Now, whenever I’ve mentioned this idea to friends or acquaintances, the usual reply is something along the lines of “Three hundred? God, who would want to live that long? Wouldn’t you get tired and want to move on?” This is interesting, because I get a similar response whenever I bring up another idea that, for better or worse, has always had a strange appeal to me. Rather than reincarnation, which has us returning to earth again but in a different body and as a different person in a different time (though somehow with the same soul or spirit), ever since I first came upon it as a teenager in the writings of the philosopher Nietzsche, I’ve had an odd interest in the notion of “eternal recurrence.” This idea suggests that we have, as Rudolf Steiner calls them, “repeated earth lives,” but instead of different lives, we have the same one, over and over. This means that I have sat down in front of my computer an infinite number of times in the past to write this essay and that you also have read it an equally infinite number of times, and that both of us will continue to do so ad infinitum. I will be born to my parents again, go through the same childhood traumas and delights, leave home and have the same experiences, the same failures and successes, eventually die – and the whole wheel will turn around to the beginning and start again.

Most of us on hearing this will reject the idea, wincing either at some past incident we would very much want to avoid or, more generally, at the prospect of eternal boredom such a notion offers. The idea of coming back to earth again as a different person seems much more appealing, and even the notion of complete annihilation seems preferable to going through the same round over and over again. I understand this perfectly, and I’m in no way arguing that eternal recurrence is true or preferable to reincarnation or to other ideas of what, if anything, happens after death. But I have to say that coming back to my books, friends, children, joys, and sorrows does strike me as more appealing than the eternity of blissful contentment spent floating amid cherubs and clouds that some forms of afterlife offer.

I have to admit that one reason (and not the most important one) I’ve remained partial to this idea of eternal recurrence is precisely because of the reactions it elicits from others. Several years ago I worked at a metaphysical bookstore in Los Angeles. Among the fads and crazes of the time – crystals, the goddess, neuro-linguistic programming – one of the most popular was the idea of exploring one’s past lives. Among the many people interested in this who came to the store, I was surprised to discover that all of them seemed to have had infinitely more interesting lives before their present one. No one ever said, “God, how boring that past life was,” or “Gee, I’m glad I’m living this life now.” There were also a good number of people who, if not famous in their past lives, were still somehow important. Priestesses in Egypt, magicians in Atlantis, kings, queens. Not many tailors, butchers, or farmers. Sadly, whatever the truth about reincarnation, many of the people who spoke about it seemed to regard it as a way of making themselves more interesting in this life. So when I remarked that I was always more attracted to the idea that there is only this life and we live it countless numbers of times, I received looks implying that I was either crazy or lying. Despite the incredulous reactions it causes – or perhaps because of them – Nietzsche’s philosophy of recurrence deserves consideration.

Far from some Machiavellian figure, Nietzsche was most troubled by the problem of human suffering, which I think he rightly saw as the central question from which the great religions emerged. Through poor translations and tragic appropriations by racist thugs like the Nazis, Nietzsche acquired a reputation as a philosopher of cruelty and tyranny, his übermensch or superman popularly depicted as a muscular fascist, lording it over the masses. In reality, however, Nietzsche was a very gentle, considerate, even timid man, so shy that he had to ask a friend to propose marriage for him to the woman he loved (not surprisingly, she declined). In fact, Nietzsche was burdened with an almost morbid sensitivity to suffering, whether human or animal. This fact is enshrined in a famous story of his final collapse, which occurred when he was already suffering from what scholars suppose was late-stage syphilis. In this story, Nietzsche saw a coachman whipping a horse. Tears in his eyes, he threw his arms around the neck of the poor creature, trying to comfort it. He then fell to the ground and when he awoke was no longer sane.

Nietzsche didn’t believe in an afterlife in any form, and especially not the heaven of the hypocritical Christianity he attacked in one of his last books, The Antichrist. He did, though, have a powerful appreciation of the meaning and beauty of this life, a poignant, almost mystical sense of the value of our present world, an insight into its drama and mystery that most of us lack. In fact, Nietzsche believed that all ideas about an afterlife were really the product of an inability to face the uncertainty and sometimes terrifying facts of this life; they were, he felt, a kind of slander against life, a rejection of what, to him, was precious and almost painfully valuable. Rather than accept the conditions of life – which include pain, suffering, and tragedy along with beauty – and make something of it, Nietzsche believed that many preferred to consider it worthless, when compared to an ideal “other” world that we would enter after death. In many ways, ideas about an afterlife were, to him, a kind of sour grapes.

In his notebooks – published after his death – Nietzsche did try to prove that recurrence was a fact, drawing on the science of the late nineteenth century and the enshrined law that matter can be neither created nor destroyed but only transformed. His arguments, however, are not very convincing. Given a limited amount of matter and energy but an eternity of time, he tells us, the universe will necessarily go through its astronomical but ultimately finite number of combinations. After this, it will start repeating itself, and the arrangement of forces that led to my writing this essay and you reading it will eventually recur. Subsequent philosophers have shown where Nietzsche confused things – he was never good at math – but the force of his ideas about recurrence doesn’t lie in these proofs, and, in any case, Nietzsche wasn’t really interested in devising some explanation for the mechanics of the cosmos. What appealed to him about recurrence was its poetry, the insight that such an idea invested life with a new and dramatic meaning. It was this sense that led the novelist Milan Kundera to draw upon Nietzsche’s ideas in his book The Unbearable Lightness of Being.

The thought of recurrence, Kundera believed, gives weight to our existence, a gravity without which it is in danger of floating away in inconsequence. This is so because the idea that our actions will recur again prompts us to consider them differently. Is what I am doing now something I wish to do for eternity? Nietzsche believed that the thought of recurrence could act as a kind of test, a challenge to determine one’s attitude toward life. Think of your own life. How does the idea that it will return in all its details strike you? Are you, Nietzsche asks, crushed by the thought, meaning that your life has been such a burden that going through it again would seem the worse kind of punishment? Or have you instead experienced moments of such joy and fulfilment that you would accept the times of suffering, embarrassment, or just plain boredom in order to experience them again? Nietzsche’s view was holistic: everything was linked, part of the great chain of fate, and to say yes to one joy, he tells us, necessitates saying yes to all the pain and discontent that accompanied it.

In The Gay Science, written in 1881 – the title refers to the kind of philosophy he proposed, light-footed and able to dance – Nietzsche summed up this idea in a motto. Amor fati, “love of fate,” was, for Nietzsche, the test of one’s character. “I want to learn more and more to see as beautiful what is necessary in things; then I shall be one of those who make things beautiful. Amor fati: let that be my love henceforth.” In his brilliant if unusual autobiography Ecce Homo, written just before his final mental breakdown, Nietzsche put it more forcefully. “My formula for greatness in a human being is amor fati: that one wants nothing other than it is, not in the future, not in the past, not in all eternity. Not merely to endure that which happens of necessity… but to love it.”

For Nietzsche to arrive at such a philosophy was no small achievement. Throughout his life he suffered incessantly from an assortment of ailments: migraine, near blindness, and intolerant digestion are only a few. He also was one of the loneliest of men, living in poverty and forever moving from one cheap pension to another, constantly in search of the right climate, to possibly gain some brief respite from his condition. He was practically friendless and for the most part unread. Today he is one of the most discussed thinkers of the nineteenth century, on a par with Darwin or Marx, but during most of his lifetime he was unknown or ignored. That someone with such an experience of life should embrace the idea that it will be repeated eternally gives one pause.

Other thinkers have taken up the idea of recurrence. The Russian writer P. D. Ouspensky, for example, made it the theme of his novel Strange Life of Ivan Osokin. Ouspensky looked at recurrence rather differently than did Nietzsche, and his ideas influenced another “time haunted man,” the writer and playwright J. B. Priestley. Priestley’s popular plays I Have Been Here Before and Time and the Conways are perhaps the most accessible treatments of the idea. Where Nietzsche argued that everything in our life recurs exactly as it did before, Ouspensky offered some hope of change, suggesting that in each life there are slight variations and that through these we have a chance to alter things for the better.

In a sense, if we think about it, Nietzsche’s insistence on the exact recurrence of each detail actually leads to the conclusion that all we really have is this moment. If everything recurs exactly as it did – if it is, as he also called it, “the return of the same”  – then each recurrence is really only this moment. The next recurrence and the previous one were exactly like our present one, and so there is really no means of distinguishing one from the other. And so, in a practical sense, all we ever experience is now. Ouspensky’s version is somewhat closer to reincarnation, in that he posits the possibility that with each recurrence we have the chance to make some changes for the better and so can develop ourselves and eventually escape the treadmill.

Nietzsche would have thought Ouspensky’s theory simply another attempt to escape the demands of life. My own feeling is that while it may be interesting to debate the two, in the end they really serve the same function. Personally, I don’t think we can ever prove recurrence one way or another. And in any case, if it is true, and if it ever was proven, then by necessity it always was. The real value of the idea for me is the meaning and significance it can give to our lives. Granted, a paranoid take on it could have us worrying about every little action, concerned that it may be the start of some infinite series of mistakes. But then, we could also say that if something is happening now, it must have already happened. In that case, we might fall prey to Kundera’s feeling of inconsequence: what does it matter what we do, if it has already been done countless times before?

For myself, however, the idea that my life might not be merely so many years of meaningless activity but might instead have some connection to the vast eternal scheme of things is at times encouraging, even inspiring. I may or may not have been here before, but I can act as if I have. Recognising this, I can look forward to another visit.

This article is reprinted with permission from Quest Magazine, Journal of the Theosophical Society, www.theosophical.org, March-April 2006, pages 57-60.

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Footnote

1. Cranston, Sylvia and Joseph Head. Reincarnation and World Thought. New York: Julian Press, 1967.

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What happens to us when we die? It’s a question everyone eventually asks themselves at some point in their life. It transcends racial, social, political, economic and gender lines, making it the one question common to all human beings whether we like it or not.

Yet ever since the first men and woman began pondering their mortality a hundred thousand years ago, the answer has eluded us. What does happen when we die? What becomes of our soul, our mind, our personality – our very essence? For that matter, do we even have such a thing as a soul, or is it all an illusion we have created to give ourselves a sense of permanence and the hope of immortality?

The rationalist answers this query by proclaiming that since we are nothing more than a collection of cells and our brains simply tissue encased within a mantle of bone, nothing can happen to us when we die. The essence, personality, mind – soul – or whatever we wish to call our consciousness, ceases to exist, endowing our time on this planet with no more meaning than that which we choose to give it during our brief sojourn here. This is, of course, the position of the atheist, which is what makes atheism, in my opinion, so easy. It requires nothing because it offers nothing, which strikes me as a fair trade.

To most people, however, this answer is unsatisfactory. It suggests that we are little more than some great cosmic accident and that, consequently, our life has no ultimate purpose, forcing us to contemplate an existence without meaning in a universe that, despite all its beauty and splendour, has no more significance – or ultimate permanence – than a flower that briefly blooms in the spring only to wither and die after a few short days of vibrant life.

I suppose there are people for whom such a prospect is acceptable. It does, after all, tidy things up and make life simply a little game we sentient beings like to play for no particularly good reason other than because we have no choice. Yet something deep within the human heart knows better. We instinctively understand that we are more than the sum of our parts, which is why most people believe their personalities will survive their physical demise in some form and will continue on long after their bones have turned to dust. This, of course, brings us to our second option, which is that the personality/ego/true self/whatever you want to call it does survive the demise of the body to exist – at least for a time – as a separate disembodied consciousness. If this is the case, however, the next question that logically follows is what happens next?

Some believe, for example, that we become ghosts – little more than disembodied spirits aimlessly wandering the Earth, capable of perceiving the physical realm but unable to interact with it in any meaningful way. They can even point to various evidences to support this contention, from reported hauntings to automatic writing, séances, and apparent disembodied spirits caught on film.

While I personally have no problem with the idea of ghosts, I don’t think existing as a disembodied consciousness is truly a viable long-term option for what happens to us. Ghosts always struck me as being transitory; beings stuck on the Earth plane for a time only to ultimately move on and so essentially vanish from our physical realm. As such, even if we are to become ghosts, it will be, at least for the vast majority of us, a brief experience and not our eternity. I suspect we all eventually move on to ‘greener pastures’, so to speak.

Now, however, is where things get more interesting. Most people, regardless of whether they believe in ghosts or not, believe that the essence of who we are – our “soul” if you will – goes some place. Heaven is the favoured destination for most; a place where our conscious personality, no longer shackled to the limitations and burdens of physical existence, survives within a perpetual state of bliss and joy throughout eternity. Some add to this by also embracing a belief in hell; a perpetual state of torment for those who turn to evil and so are doomed to exist forever within a conscious state of agony, regret, and fear.

Both positions, however, suffer from the same problem, and that is that they see our time here on this planet as but a blink of the eye of eternity, with the decisions we make – or fail to make – while in the body having profound and eternal ramifications. Unfortunately, this reduces the physical world to little more than a cosmic hatchery that exists only to birth new souls, each of which will spend a short time in it before winging – or, potentially, plunging – to their ultimate destiny.

While admittedly this idea does manage to make this single life of paramount importance, it also forces one to wonder why a physical realm is necessary at all. If the physical universe exists merely as a vehicle for our creation, why couldn’t the process be circumvented entirely and we be created directly into the spiritual realm – as was supposedly the case with God’s angels?

Why all the unnecessary pain and hardship of a physical existence – especially if there exists the very real danger that we might earn hell through our misdeeds – if the spirit realm is the only destination that awaits us? In such a context, physical existence seems not only pointless but, in many ways, even hazardous.

So where does that leave us? If no Heaven and if no Hell, then what’s left?

There is a third position to consider. It is one that until recently has been largely ignored in the West but has been embraced by literally billions of people around the world for thousands of years. It is the belief that this physical existence is neither insignificant nor transient, but instead is perpetually ongoing. It is the concept that our soul lives on not in some ethereal Eden – or Hades – somewhere, but realises perpetual existence through a process of continual rebirths into the physical realm, making our time on this planet not one single, brief experience, but a repetitive process realised through literally hundreds of lifetimes. It is a timeless belief – one that predates both Christianity and Islam by many centuries – and one that is known by many names in many cultures. It’s been called rebirth, regeneration, transmigration of the soul, even metempsychosis, but is perhaps best known to us today as reincarnation.

Upon first consideration, especially to those who haven’t given the idea great thought, reincarnation may seem to be a foreign or exotic concept, especially to the Western mind steeped in the scientific method and drenched in two thousand years of monotheistic religion. It is something for Hindu holy men to ponder, or New Agers to embrace, but nothing that seems particularly relevant to most Westerners today.

I can easily understand this perspective for it is one I held myself for the first forty years of my life. And the truth be told, it is an Eastern concept – one in vogue more than four millennia before Christ was born and a belief held to by nearly two billion of the world’s population today – making it one of the oldest and most enduring belief systems known to man. In fact, it may be the original post-mortem belief among early humans who probably considered the idea when they began noticing strong similarities between recently born offspring and their deceased ancestors. Perhaps the mannerisms or interests a child displayed reminded one of a deceased loved one or a birthmark mimicked that found on a long-dead grandparent, leading village elders to imagine that the dead ancestor had returned a second time – a not unreasonable assumption in cultures that naturally assumed the soul to be inherently immortal.

Unfortunately, Westerners have traditionally had a tendency to consider foreign or primordial religious concepts as primitive and so reject them out of hand. However, this perception appears to be slowly changing as reincarnationist beliefs have become more prevalent in the West, especially in the last fifty years, and is becoming increasingly popular to ever growing numbers of people.

A Lost Western Tradition of How the Soul Returns

Of course, unbeknownst to most people, reincarnation has always been a part of Western thought. The prospect that the soul repeatedly returns to the flesh flourished in ancient Greece almost three thousand years ago and may have played a far more important role in our development as a civilisation than traditional histories have led us to believe. Aristotle, Socrates, Plato, and Pythagoras all taught and believed in some form of rebirth, the foundations of which were later adopted by the great Roman philosophers Ovid, Virgil, and Cicero, along with a host of other great thinkers of antiquity.

In fact, reincarnationist concepts were so prevalent in the centuries immediately preceding the birth of Christ, that they played a major role in many of the “mystery” religions of the Mediterranean; religions which were themselves to become the template for other later mystical faith systems of the region. Reincarnation, then, far from being a purely foreign concept was, in fact, widespread and may have strongly influenced the shape and thrust of Greek and Roman philosophy.

Even more of a surprise to many people, however, is the fact that reincarnationist concepts were also part of some of the more mystical branches of traditional Western religion, from the Sufis of Islam to the Gnostics of the early centuries of Christianity, and even within the Hasidic and Kabbalist traditions in Judaism. In fact, at times it virtually flourished and, especially in the case of Christianity, almost became the predominant belief system during the first few centuries of the Church’s existence until it was forced underground by the more traditional, non-reincarnationist branches of Christianity. Its proponent’s writings declared heretical and burned, the concept was so successfully suppressed by the Church of Rome that few Christians today even realise it was ever a part of their own faith.

Why was it suppressed? The obvious answer is because it threatened authority. Western religion is largely dependent upon the belief that man is destined to “die once and then be judged” to maintain control. In promising multiple rebirths, however, reincarnation renders the proclamations of the Pope or the Grand Mufti or whomever was the ruling head at the time transitory and, the truth be told, irrelevant. As such, reincarnation threatened the Church’s very livelihood, making it a very dangerous idea that had to be either suppressed or labelled as heretical in order for the Church to maintain its power base. As a result, the concept remained largely unknown outside of Asia for probably seventeen of the last twenty-one centuries.

Its revival in the West was imminent, however, with the arrival of the Age of Enlightenment in the eighteenth century. Once the long forgotten writings of the ancient Greeks again became available and one could hold to previously forbidden ideas without forfeiting their lives, such once forbidden concepts as reincarnation became increasingly popular, especially among the intellectual elite of the era. Amongst those who held to some form of multiple rebirths are such notables as Charles Dickens, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Benjamin Franklin, Shakespeare, Leonardo Da Vinci, and Voltaire, among others.

Interpreting What it Means to Reincarnate

However, since its reintroduction into the Western consciousness, reincarnation has undergone a transformation. It is no longer the unending “cycle of life” wheel taught by the Hindus and Buddhists, but has become a “school of higher education” designed to bring us to ever greater levels of spiritual enlightenment. This is why when a Hindu or a Buddhist and their fellow Western reincarnationist talk about the subject, it often appears as though they are speaking two different languages. This is because in some ways they are, which is where the confusion comes in.

To the Hindu, the soul is essentially stuck in a never ending cycle of rebirth which can never be broken due to the continual need to balance one’s karma. In effect, with each incarnation into the flesh, the human personality – a by-product of the underlying soul that birthed it – accumulates a degree of bad karma that must be worked off in order to restore balance to itself. Some of this karma can be worked off in life in the form of good works, but this is seldom sufficient to work off the entire debt, which must be accounted for in the next life by having the soul take on an incarnation that may be more difficult so the ongoing karmic debt can be worked off.

On rare occasions, a life may be so exemplary that the person might be born into a higher station (or caste in Hindu parlance) but as a rule, bad karma tends to outweigh good karma and, in being continually accumulated through each lifetime, adds to the growing debt that remains to be balanced and so perpetuating the rebirth cycle. (Of course, if one accumulates too much bad karma, they may not be reborn as a person at all, but could come back as an animal or even, in some teachings, an inanimate object such as a stone. This belief is called “transmigration of the soul” and is also a major element of Hindu teachings.)

Buddhism, on the other hand, while understanding the process of reincarnation in much the same way as does the Hindu, differs in that it teaches that the cycle of rebirth can be broken through achieving nirvana (literally, enlightenment), at which point the cycle is broken.

Enlightenment means essentially to be become aware of one’s true nature and to the realities contained within the Four Noble Truths as articulated by Gautama Buddha over two thousand years ago. These are: first, to be alive is to suffer due to the imperfection of human nature and the world around us; second, that the cause of suffering is attachment to transient things (in effect, craving or desiring things); third, that one can learn to let go of these attachments; and, finally, that the process of achieving enlightenment is progressive and may itself extend over many lifetimes.

In sharp contrast, to many Western reincarnationists, the purpose of rebirth is to learn the lessons we need to learn in each incarnation in order to advance to the next spiritual level which, while having some similarities to the Buddhist concept of slowly achieving enlightenment over a number of incarnations by practicing the Buddha’s Eightfold Path (right view, right intentions, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, and right concentration), is actually quite different.

The Buddhist does not believe that one is “learning” new lessons with each lifetime, but simply applying the principles contained within the Eightfold Path until craving, ignorance, delusions and its effects gradually disappear as progress is made towards enlightenment. To the Western mindset, attachment is not seen as the source of the problem (though it does generally acknowledge that an obsessive attachment to things can be detrimental to spiritual growth).

Another significant difference between Eastern and Western concepts of reincarnation have to do with the perception of what it is, exactly, that is reincarnating. The Hindu sees the soul – the divine essence of God – as being the generator of each incarnation, with the individual personality or ego a transient expression of that soul.

In marked contrast, the Buddhist doesn’t believe in individualised souls at all, but believes the sense of self is merely an illusion created by our own perceptions – a conscious “memory” if you will, conceived by our assumption that we exist separately. To the Buddhist, we are all a part of a larger, divine consciousness that has simply taken on the very brief “illusion” that it is separate. The Buddhists compare our sense of existence to the waves upon the ocean; just as a wave is a temporary phenomena caused by wind and currents, our personality is equally as transient and is, upon death, absorbed back into the divine consciousness in the same way that a wave upon the ocean is eventually swallowed up by the ocean itself.

In the West, however, the personality – or ego – is more robust and generally considered immortal. To many, the soul and the personality are considered essentially synonymous, so as a result, when we die, our basic personality – complete with all its memories, life experiences, knowledge, and traits – returns in another body to continue its existence. It may not have a direct memory of its past life – though some people claim to be possess the ability to consciously remember their previous incarnations – but it is essentially the same personality starting life over again in another context.

The personality may experience dramatically new surroundings – for example, it may experience one incarnation as an Indian girl who lived and died in the nineteenth century and then return as a Spanish man in the twentieth century – but it is still the same “person” underlying each “role.” Of course, the experiences and environment it finds itself in through each subsequent incarnation will affect the base personality in both subtle and sometimes substantial ways, but this too is a part of the process. This is why the Westerner sees reincarnation in the context of “lessons.” After all, the Indian girl was able to experience and learn only so much in her short time on Earth, mandating that she return again – this time as a Spanish male – to learn those things she either neglected to learn or hadn’t the opportunity to learn in her previous incarnation.

This makes spiritual enlightenment a type of “to do” list that needs to be checked off in its entirety before we can cease the process of rebirth. (What happens after that is equally open to speculation among Westerners: some imagine we come back as avatars or spiritual teachers; others speculate that we start the process over again on another planet, while still others maintain that we move onto other dimensions. Apparently, the options available to the enlightened soul are extensive.)

I wonder, however, if the truth is not a conglomeration of each of these perceptions? Clearly the Eastern concepts of a parent soul that births each and every individual personality has merit, as does the Buddhist belief in the transient, temporary nature of the ego that is birthed. And the Western concept that we reincarnate until we learn what we need to know also has some validity and seems to parallel in some ways the Buddhist idea that the cycle of rebirth ends upon achieving enlightenment – however one chooses to define the term.

I often wonder if we aren’t all looking upon the same phenomena and not simply seeing only those parts of it that speak to us personally. I suspect our understanding of the purpose for reincarnation is lacking in many ways and may never be entirely complete, though I also believe we are making progress in coming to a fuller appreciation for its complexity and sophistication. Perhaps one day East and West will come together and merge their different perceptions and in so doing, form a complete whole that answers everyone’s questions.

Of course, I recognise that such may sound like a contradictory process. After all, how can there be a soul and yet not a soul, and how can the ego be immortal and yet transient? To combine both Western and Eastern concepts of reincarnation would seem to embrace paradox, but I have found it is often within the complexities of paradox that the truth exists. In fact, it is only our limited ability to understand that makes these apparent contradictions paradoxes in the first place.

I wonder if they would still appear as such were we to find the capacity within ourselves to truly understand on a level our current mental capacity does not permit. On the other hand, perhaps understanding these concepts is not done at a mind level, but on a spiritual level, which is a difficult place for many people to go.

Maybe in the end we were never meant to fully understand how reincarnation works, and that may be where the adventure really begins. Perhaps the question of what happens to us when we die was never meant to be answered but merely explored, for it is in seeking – not necessarily finding – the answer that growth can take place.

It may be, in fact, that it is only in abandoning our need to find the answers that we give them the ability to find us. In effect, we may be like the man who is so busy looking for treasure that he fails to realise he is searching for it within the bowels of a gold mine. Were he to but look up and see the treasure that shimmers all around him, he would realise how silly his fervent quest had been all along. Perhaps we need only do the same.

Jeff Allen Danelek’s book The Case for Reincarnation: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Soul (Llewellyn, 2010) is available from all good bookstores.

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