Can you hear me (can you hear me)
Through the spaces (through the spaces)
Wondering in this wonderland…
–Appleton
Reincarnation
Reincarnation is an old idea that some people love and others hate.
Hindus, Jains, Buddhists, Taoists and many New Age enthusiasts from
around the world believe in this well-worn idea.1
The theory of reincarnation takes several forms but, generally speaking, the soul is said to enter creation like a spark from a fire, beginning its long journey through life on a low plane of awareness.
As the soul passes through repeated cycles of bodily death and rebirth, it gradually increases in knowledge and moral goodness until achieving perfection.
Once perfected, the soul apparently is liberated from worldly suffering and desire as it breaks free from the chain of death and rebirth.
At this point, the soul is no longer unique nor bound by time–instead, it merges with the eternal godhead.
Some Indian schools of philosophy differ, however.
Ramanuja (1017-1137 CE), for instance, forwarded the notion of ‘qualified monism’ where the soul retains a sense of individuality and rests – as opposed to merges – within the godhead.
And most schools of Buddhism assert that there never was any reincarnating soul in the first place, only the illusion of one. For Buddhists enlightenment means ridding oneself of a whole host of false notions, including those of self, soul, God and individuality.
Karma Defined
Karma is a Sanskrit term that means “deed.”
Essentially, karma is the accumulated merit and demerit of one’s past life actions.
Morally good and bad deeds add up on a kind of cosmic balance sheet. Good deeds bring future benefits. Bad deeds bring misfortune and suffering.
But it’s not quite that simple nor mechanistic because in theistic religions God’s grace can mitigate the negative effects of bad karma.
And even though Buddhists tend to see God as a mere conceptual construct instead of an all-powerful being, within some Buddhist schools the compassionate gaze of the bodhisattva roughly parallels the idea of God’s grace.
Not entirely unlike an all-powerful creator God, the bodhisattva may lessen the negative impact of bad karma.
Popup Illustrations
Another Possibility
Some people are convinced that they have had past lives and it is conceivable that they have. But it’s also possible that they interpret unusual experiences so as to believe in reincarnation when in actual fact they haven’t lived through any past lives at all.
In addition to alleged ‘flashbacks’ and ‘past life regressions,’ most have heard stories about individuals claiming to have located objects in distant countries they’ve never visited. And some speak of esoteric but seemingly rational connections from a past to a present life, as if there’s a great mystical thread weaving everything together, time after time.
But none of this proves a belief in past lives.
Another equally plausible explanation is that these believers are being deceived by a demonic being.
The idea of demonic deception probably sounds a bit less weird these days with the rise of successful TV shows like Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Supernatural.
And if it does sound weird, it’s arguably no more so than the idea of reincarnation, which so many seem to readily accept.
Discernment
One of the most valuable ideas found in theology is that of discernment.
In one sense discernment is described as a gift and developed ability where one learns to differentiate among
- Evil spiritual influences
- Divine spiritual influences
- One’s true self
Father Edward Malatesta, S. J. writes on the deeper, fuller meaning of discernment.
By the discernment of spirits is meant the process by which we examine, in the light of faith and in the connaturality of love, the nature of the spiritual states we experience in ourselves and in others. The purpose of such examination is to decide, as far as possible, which of the movements we experience lead us to the Lord and to a more perfect service of Him and our brothers, and which deflect us from this goal (cited in Green, p. 41).
Fine and dandy, but a very real problem arises.
Many people claim to discern but their alleged messages from the Divine often prove to be false or at odds with others also claiming to discern the true light and will of God.
In fact, ‘discernment’ may degenerate into nothing more than taking an alarmist view of issues one doesn’t understand, projecting bad habits and transferring unsavory psychological contents onto scapegoats.
Needless to say, this has little, if anything, to do with mature discernment3 and is arguably the dynamic of an overzealous, hypocritical or underdeveloped personality.4
Now to return to the idea of reincarnation, many believers say that destructive personality traits carry over from past to present lives.
Within Catholic mystical theology, however, bad things experienced in one’s present life could be taken as evidence of obsession or possession.
In the Catholic sense, obsession is the unhealthy and significant influence of evil spiritual powers or beings, whereas possession is a permanent, temporary or sporadic loss of self-control due to spiritual attack.
Catholicism has no need to postulate ‘past lives’ when obsession and possession explain just as well, if not better, what reincarnationalists attribute to bad karma.
Rethinking Space-Time
There’s another way to explain the unusual experiences often taken as evidence for reincarnation.
Instead of falling prey to demonic deception, it’s possible that sensitive individuals might be piercing through the veil of space-time and wrongly interpreting this as proof for reincarnation.
According to recent subatomic cosmologies, past, present and future don’t necessarily follow a one-way vector nor do we experience linear time at a consistent rate.
Instead, past, present and future apparently exist in an interactive field. That is, space-time is regarded as a continuum.
In his book Deep Time the physicist and astronomer David Darling says questions about the origins of the universe are misleading because past, present and future exist in a unified loop.
Surely there had to have been some special point of origin? But no. What was needed was a more panoramic view in which the universe, past, present, and future, was seen as having always been there–a permanent, all-encompassing, space-time eternity. Of course, it was natural for man, whose left-brain consciousness produced the illusion of “passing” time to think of past and future as somehow different in status. To dwell, moreover, on that elusive moment called now which transformed the potentiality of future events into the actuality of the past. But “now” was, in truth, only a chimera. Every point in space and time coexisted with equal importance. The future was there from the beginning as surely as was the past.5
Not unlike Darling, many theologians, mystics, philosophers and artists speak to the possibility of intimate connections among space, time and eternity.
The German mystic Meister Eckhart (1260-1327) wrote:
The Now in which God created the first man and the Now in which the last man will disappear and the Now in which I am speaking–all are the same in God, and there is only one Now.
But to say, as Darling does, that the past still exists and the future is already ‘out there’ doesn’t sit well with some theologians. For them it’s more sagacious to say that God simply knows the past (which no longer exists) and the future (which does not yet exist).
And we can only wonder if these theologians are just regimented and afraid of change or whether they’re on to something true.
Part of the problem here relates to how one defines God.
Natural pantheists say that God’s mind is the universe, while theistic “I-Thou” schools maintain that the mind and creation of God are very different.
Reason to Believe
Roderick Main, a leading Jung scholar, says that Jung “concludes that under certain psychic conditions time and space can both become relative and can even appear to be transcended altogether.”6
We can’t know for sure if the past and the future exist right now, but we can at least consider the possibility that they do, and moreover, that they influence or even interact with our lives as experienced in the present.
Individuals perhaps genetically hard-wired for a different kind of sensitivity could be more attuned to other time periods and souls living therein.7
If all events potentially interact within space-time and eternity, this would mean that the present influences future and past situations along a kind of ‘horizontal’ axis.
But we need another axis to fully account for the moral dimension. Thus ethical choices made in the present could also impact not just the past and future but various heavens and hells along a kind of ‘vertical’ axis.
For instance, Satan and his demons cackle with glee when we do bad things, and the angels and saints in heaven rejoice when we choose the good. Traditional, maybe. But possible.
This notion of ‘horizontal’ and ‘vertical’ axes helps to conceptualize things but shouldn’t be taken as an absolute or complete schema.
We could, in fact, radically simplify this model by hypothesizing that each aspect of space-time-eternity has a potential influence on all other points.8
An interactive, multidimensional model no doubt challenges conventional assumptions about life, the afterlife, past and future.9
It cannot be proved through conventional forms of experimentation10 but those experiencing unusual psychological phenomena nevertheless could apply logic to their experiences, thus giving them reason to believe.
In like manner, the Protestant theologian Paul Tillich distinguishes experiential from experimental verification.
In experiential verification we cannot quantify data and construct repeatable experiments, but we can make observation, accumulate knowledge, and learn from our experience.11
Of course, there’s a stumbling block here that might never be fully overcome but only improved upon. This is the problem of extricating oneself from one’s current beliefs and related theoretical constructions.
In such a reflection on the ultimate in hermeneutics of the subject matter, the writer will be undoubtedly influenced by his/her own hermeneutics and idea of ultimate reality and meaning. This may lead to an unwarranted conclusion specially if one’s own hermeneutic of ultimate reality and meaning is not consciously differentiated from that of the other. But one-sidedness can be remedied in certain degree by inviting more than one specialist to study the same topic.12
Taking this into consideration, the multidimensional model seems more current and flexible than the age-old belief in reincarnation.
Although some people try to justify their religious beliefs by saying they’re ancient and predate other religions, this argument doesn’t make much sense.
Just because something is ancient doesn’t make it true.
And with regard to ethics, the current schema doesn’t allow for the avoidance of personal responsibility on the basis of hypothesized karma from equally hypothesized past lives.13
One of the most striking features this author has noticed when trying to have intelligent conversations with some believers in karma is their complete unwillingness to step away from their belief structures and consider alternatives.
Indeed, some believers in reincarnation seem just as dogmatic and intransigent as extremists of any stripe, be they materialists, environmentalists, fundamentalists, liberals or conservatives.
Clannish unthinking and ‘following the crowd’ rarely paves the way toward better theory.
Conclusion
The above may seem to dwell on esoteric points of little or no practical value. But considering human evolution and our existence within the extended universe can we really afford, morally or economically, to stop developing our cosmology?
Old, outmoded models usually hurt good people and waste good money. And it seems the only way to change that is to modify our deeply ingrained ways of thinking.
Instead of clinging to the past or being analytically stunned by the latest technological gadgets, multidimensional theory combines science, religion and philosophy in a new kind of holism more appropriate to the 21st-century.
This new approach could have a tremendous impact on social spheres such as education, psychiatry and religion–providing the keepers of the keys are willing to admit that the old ways just aren’t working any more.
—
1. (a) While Buddhists speak of becoming ensnared in cycles of rebirth, anatman theory says that the very notion of the soul is ultimately illusory. Therefore reincarnation doesn’t really occur. It only seems to occur until one is liberated from a false belief in individuality.
2. An inner spiritual body.
3. If we’re all imperfect, the development of true discernment is probably a lifelong process. Some believe that the Holy Spirit can override personal biases-i.e. an imperfect person makes a perfect discernment. We can also differentiate between (a) the initial discernment and (b) one’s reaction to and interpretation of that discernment.
4. Those political and religious figures behind the Inquisitions and the cruel torture of so-called witches in the Middle Ages would fall into this juvenile and horrific personality type.
5. (a) David Darling, Deep Time (New York: Delacorte Press, 1989), pp. 187-188.
6. Roderick Main. Jung on Synchroncity and the Paranormal (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), p. 18.
7. Subjects whose brainwaves are measured during meditative states reportedly feel as if they travel though time. However, it’s possible (if one is willing to consider the influence of departed souls on the living) that one could confuse the presence of a departed person for the presence of a person living in another historical time period.
8. By way of contrast, the Cambridge biochemist Rupert Sheldrake says in Dog’s That Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home that past habits, not the future, influence the present (New York: Crown Publishers, 1999: 305).
9. The idea of multidimensionality was forwarded by Jane Roberts with some interesting differences, most notably Roberts’ advocacy of interactive parallel universes and corresponding rainbow-like variations of the self.
10. (a) This would not upset the Austrian philosopher of science Karl Popper. Popper says that scientific statements cannot be proved, only disproved. Of course, Popper’s assertion is open to various avenues of debate, beyond the scope of this article.
(b) George P. Hansen recounts a lab experiment that could be taken as support for the idea of the future influencing the present. See George P. Hansen, The Trickster and the Paranormal (Xlibris, 2001: 328-336, 342).
11. Andrew J. Peck, Tibor Horvarth et. al., eds. American Philosophers’ Ideas of Ultimate Reality and Meaning. URAM Monographs, No. 1. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994, p. 7. Several strands of Western philosophy challenge the distinction between experimental and experiential verification–for instance, Solipsism, Berkeley’s Idealism and, to some extent, John Locke’s critique of “secondary qualities.”
12. Ibid., p. 10.
13. It should be noted that conscientious believers in the idea of reincarnation say we must make positive choices to overcome bad karma. And, again, it’s believed that God’s grace can lessen the negative effects of bad karma. But still, the idea of karma is often abused around the world in a unforgivable attempt to legitimize disparity.
Further Readings about Time
Benford, Gregory, Timescape (Bantam, 1992). A sci-fi novel informed by scientists.
Flood, Raymond and Michael Lockwood (eds.), The Nature of Time (Blackwell, 1988). A good, popular book.
Hawking, Stephen, A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes (Bantam, 1990). Hawking is a great popularizer who somehow doesn’t sacrifice precision.
Paige, Huw, Time’s Arrow and Archimedes’ Point: New Directions for the Physics of Time (Oxford, 1996). A somewhat more technical book but not exceedingly so.
“Farewell to Karma – ‘past lives’ are just so yesterday…” © Michael Clark. All rights reserved.
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Copyright © 1996, 2008 James Arraj. All rights reserved.
