Introduction
"The
illusion that we are separate from one
another is an optical delusion of our
consciousness." A.
E.
Reincarnation
is for Christianity a subject of discussion
and speculation ever since its beginnings.
For the common man it is an occult form of
knowledge: how can one ever be sure of
something like a body in a previous life that
does not exist any more? Still many modern
people like the idea of having existed before
and lead positive spirited lives in the hope
for a possible rebirth. Rationally it is
difficult to accept that we possibly change
bodies the same way we change clothes or
cars. To the rational mind that knows its
remembrance to take place in the brain, it
doesn't make much sense to remember a
previous life of having another brain. Still
that rational mind has all kinds of
irrational associations, preferences and
fears that cannot directly be explained out
of the experiences of his own life. The main
argument of Christianity against
reincarnation is as formulated by
one
site on comparative
religion:
"...reincarnation represents a threat to
the very essence of Christianity: the need
for the Lord's redemptive sacrifice for our
sins. If we are to pay for the consequences
of our sins ourselves in further lives and
attain salvation through our own efforts, the
sacrifice of the Lord becomes useless and
absurd. It wouldn't be the only way back to
God, but only a stupid accident of history.
In this case Christianity would be a mere
form of Hindu Bhakti-Yoga." . So how
should we answer to this philosophical
dilemma of having possibly other lives but
this one that inspire and motivate us at the
one hand and a strong theological and
rational argument against it at the other
hand?
1.
The Fear of Time
"The
Supreme Lord said: "Time I am, the great
destroyer of the worlds engaged here in
destroying all people, except for you
[brothers] only, will all the
soldiers who are situated on both sides, find
their end." Bhagavad
Gītā 11-32
1.1
A bad call
Time has a
bad call with humanity. It is the one monster
we cannot defeat. It always destroys our
lives and everything we have build up.
Eventually the whole planet will disappear
from the universe after this Sun has exploded
in a Supernova. Sooner or later the game is
over, and for what purpose should we live
then? Certainly not for the purpose of
returning to see everything going down in a
big blast or seeing everything decaying
slowly with the law of entropy. No ..., time
is a frightening reality of incessant and
inescapable destruction. At this point of
reasoning though we have to check out with a
psychologist. Wait a minute: without dreams
and ideals you will be doomed for
depressions, drug abuse and self destruction.
No Future is No Life. You have to be
motivated to make the best of your life.
Without belief, hope and love, what can your
life be but a story of lies and misery? All
this dreaming and hoping of witnessing a
better future to which one has contributed is
not just a trick of conditioning you to be a
neat citizen. It is a life's necessity. It is
a scientifically irrefutable fact of human
existence. Concerning reincarnation the
psychologist will explain to you that it is
an interesting thought experiment, but
difficult to prove. Nay you better speak
according to them in terms of positive
identifications with other historical
personalities. It is always good to identify
with as well hero's as losers in human
history and learn from their lives lessons.
In fact this is the essence of human culture:
because of this process of identification
with our ancestors we do not have to repeat
the same mistakes over and over and thus we
can progress: "Those who cannot remember
the past are condemned to repeat it."
G.
S.
1.2
A demand for manhood
But has the
psychologist settled the issue this way?
Identifications can lead to conflicts of
philosophy as one hero wouldn't follow the
same mind as the other character of the past.
And certainly that will not be without mutual
refutation if the characters lived (or still
live) at the same time in history. It is
either this movie-star or that one. Both is
one too much. One cannot serve two Lords at
the same time and two sinners even less
likely. So how to continue? Apparently we
have an existential need for things like
either identifications or previous lives. In
fact our behavioral repertoire is completely
composed out of it. We learn not just by
precept, but also by example. A little boy
plays daddy with Dinky Toys and the little
girl plays mommy with her dolls. This is
irrefutably basic to our human lives. Whether
it are identifications or previous lives, we
cannot do without them and therefore we have
to reason all the way down through human
history to get over our existential fears of
time. And this a demand for manhood in
stead of just being mankind:
"H.
is right having said that man learn from
history as people never learn anything from
history" S.
1.3
The threefold nature of the
fear
Time is not
just fear-arousing because of its destructive
capacity. No, in fact it is also fear
arousing because of its creative and
maintaining capacities. It would be easy
enough to do away with time as something
horribly materialistic, illusory and
destructive. Lots of modern spiritual and
religious timelessness-preaching as well as
classical forms of it must be debunked as
fraudulent and escapistic from this point of
view. It is easy to reduce the complete and
complex of human history to a modern mind
without a conscience and memory of previous
historical happenings and persons. That is
rightout dangerous. Let's not even try to
give an account of the numerous sayings in
the world literature stating that those who
do not learn from the past are doomed to
repeat it (see quotes).
No ..., time is the essence of our life. It
is one of three pillars of the objective
reality (God's creation!) of space, time and
matter. Trying to escape from the subject is
a futile attempt for simplicity; a true
heresy against human reason and the complex
cultural historical reality. No, from a sane
point of view there is no escape. We have to
face the fact that also from the maintaining
and creative point of view time is of
foremost importance, and, as said, fear
arousing.
1.4
Narrowing the problem down
If we live
the continence (the self-restraint) of keeping the lessons of
history, then we are overwhelmed by the sheer
volume of it. The very human soul of history
will expand our vision beyond our capacity of
coping with it: we are afraid of it; afraid
to collapse at the confrontation. We can try
to narrow our vision to merely a Jewish
history book covering a few thousand years of
experience with the God of Time, but the
world is much bigger. We also have our own Greek/Roman history of experiences as well as
an unbelievable claim of historical time from
the old Vedic culture before that. And how to
think of the history of God in Time since the
year 1.A.D., and what about all the other
cultures that also gained in experience in
China, the Middle East, South America and
where not? From this perspective of
fear-management we can safely say that for
the sake of simplicity we do not look further
than our own noses, not into other cultures,
nor into other lives of possible
reincarnation. Our own simple life in our own
simple local cultures is difficult
enough.
1.5
The need to be serious
Well so be
it. Let the lay think narrow like that, but
intellectuals and state-officials cannot make
for a world order or any meaningful and
enduring peace without a broader vision of
the history of Time-management in the world.
And that was just about the maintaining
aspect. We didn't want to reform anything yet
as might be expected from learning a lesson
in studying our history. We certainly made
mistakes with e.g. our
colonial passions of thinking our Christian
time culture superior. Nor did the Arabs
really go innocent on their enthusiasm about
their lunar calendars.
And what to say about all
the strange UFO's and crop circles around the
world since the second World
war?
We are still collectively denying all of it
at a formal level. We fail in creative
adaptations just as we fail in facing the
past just trying to contain our human souls.
The possibility of changing and amending the
existent of our culture is always blocked by
the conservative force that warns us against
rash decisions and the uncertainties of
everything new. We are afraid of losing
control again as with world wars we had - as
this time that might happen because of too
many changes. The culture tends to hold on to
its fixations despite of necessary changes
just because it is a known road, acting like
a battered wife that may hesitate long before
she will go for a divorce. But in the face of
this collective fear for changes the
psychologist will immediately rise to tell us
that such an attitude will sooner or later
have to face the consequences. We really need
to be creative and adapt ourselves to the
changes and new perspectives that not only
are offered by our modern time, but also by
our international historical and future
realities. Repression, denial, ego-culture
alone and being led by existential fears of
time will certainly bring no success to the
making and maintaining of a world order and
world peace. Any psychiatrist can tell us
that lacking in creativity and adaptation,
denying the past, narrowing on subcultural
ego's and looking away from the
responsibility for a common future and past,
we are doomed to live in compensations of a
faked mind-only and imagined progress in a
doubtful quality of consciousness that will
surely sooner or later collapse - if not
individually, then certainly collectively.
And that can happen despite of acquired
wealth, borrowed knowledge and technological
capacity. The latter will make us only more
fanatic and dangerous once we lose control
decompensating on our falsehoods of escapism.
So lets begin with a sincere survey of this
phenomenon of historical identification
called reincarnation and make this confession
to a personal, historical and creative
responsibility a serious one.
2
The Vedic point of view
"The
body one gets as also is given up
takes its Lord to all these
[senses] away
like the fragrance carried by the air from
its source.
With
the hearing, seeing, touching
as also the tasting and smelling,
he from within the mind enjoys the objects
of the senses.
Either
leaving the body, staying in the body
or enjoying the body associated with the
modes of nature
are things the ignorant cannot
understand,
but those who have the spiritual vision
can.
Those
who endeavor and are of yoga perceive from
being of the soul,
but those endeavoring who do not act in
favor of the soul do not see this,
however developed their minds are. "
Bhagavad
Gītā
(15:8
-11)
2.1
An imperfect memory
First of
all the vedic scriptural facts about it. At
the one hand taking the Bhagavad
Gītā
for a lead we read that this theme is as good
as the main theme of the reasoning of the
Lord of Yoga ( K..).
Half of the second chapter, He summarizes
what He says throughout the whole
Gītā where He is lecturing to His
fearful friend A.
on the ins and out of human motivation. First
He says that the way one gets older changing
one's young body for an old one, that the
same way one also changes lives. Just like
that (2.13).
And, He adds thereto, that a wise man is not
disturbed by those changes (2.14).
One is not the Body is the thesis of the
Gītā and therefore one shouldn't
fear. Or should we? The psychologist might
interrupt the lecture here to explain that
there is a fear of death and a fear of life.
It is the fear of death that one should
forget dropping the identification with one's
own body. The fear of life should be a fear
of God not to lose the path of in this case
dharma (righteousness and ones true
nature). Identification? We spoke about that
above. Of course it is the importance to
identify with ones conduct and not with the
body one uses for it. And so the lecture
continues on the necessity of considering a
possible rebirth. And, the Lord of Yoga
concludes, if we can't believe such an option
then it is still wiser to accept the
challenge of fighting for the ideal, than to
survive without the honor of the victory,
which is worse than dying fighting for the
cause and not being incarnate any longer
(2.37).
But the wisdom of God by mouth of this
Lordship is serious about the doubts about a
possible reincarnation - He says: Both you
and I have taken many births. I remember them
perfectly, O Arjuna, but you do not.
(4.05).
In other words: to Him we may speculate what
we want but only He is really sure about it.
And so be it to begin with. Our memory of
continuation is with Him, He knows us better
than we do our selves. But how can we make a
rational and scientific comment to this? Say
non-sense? That is easy, but not to be
serious is the wrong way has been concluded.
2.2
The record of our actions
From the Vedic point of view the soul is not just the
body. Fear is of the body because of the time
it is subject to. The soul has to contend
with that and waste the body if necessary and
continue with a new one eventually. The soul,
the real person, is not just in his temporal
mind and factual matter of electro-chemical
brain-patterning, but is also factually his
imprint into the outer world which is also
called the akashic record. That record
is far greater than the little bit of
censored information kept by the subject's
material brain: "Every action that you do
produces a two-fold effect. It produces an
impression in your mind and when you die you
carry the Samskara in the Karmashaya or
receptacle of works in your subconscious
mind. It produces an impression on the world
or Akashic records. "
S.
S.
This is
the original spirit of mankind we also find
with the roman greeting of the emperor just
before the battle: "They who are about to die
are greeting you". We don't want to be
ashamed of ourselves and also not through the
akashic eyes of others after our death. That
is manhood. That is why martyrs tolerate
torture. They do not want to return to settle
unfinished business or leave their work to
others. They don't 'give in today and then
settle it maybe later'. But normal people do.
More
interesting than the fear of death thus is
the fear of life: the problem is that one
does run the serious risk of returning to
this planet because of one's own
dissatisfaction with the akashic record that
can only be changed by acting materially to
it. It might happen that one has to settle
unfinished business not being such an hero or
martyr after all once having lost one's own
brain, or that one might have to return as an
aid to the divinity that incarnates out of
grace and not out of personal karma (just
like the christian Lord did). One either just
might be needed on Earth (Like the Lord or
'the spirit and power' of E.)
or one has to do it out of one's own desire
to clear ones soul of negative
'samskara's' (impressions). Of course
with this akashic record of the witnessing
society and culture the fact of reincarnation
is not proven. It is just a wise calculation
of risk, honor and sane manhood to count with
a possible material rebirth because of
missing the proper spiritual rebirth for a
more permanent position in a higher realm, be
it on Earth or in the heavens.
2.3
A supersoul
What is
interesting is how the soul would be
maintained as an integer whole in the akashic
record. In principle it is just a chaos of
unorganized impressions one has made in ones
life. The unity of that experience requires a
higher principle of order; a so called
supersoul. In the Veda this soul is called
the param-atma against the
jiv-atma of the individual. With that
soul one has always lived, and losing one's
body that soul will give a better, more
morally founded memory of your life than you
had yourself from your physical brain. That
way it is possible that after ones death,
having lived a good life, one can be happy in
a kind of heaven, finally seeing one's own
positivity through the akashic eye of that
omniscient supersoul that organizes the
remnant bits and pieces from an integer angle
of selfknowledge. This paramatma is
also called the vibhu-atma , meaning
the potency (vibhu) of the soul. What
to think rationally of an existence of such a
supersoul? It implies that we are always
connected to a higher soul or person within
ourselves. The psychologist may tell you that
you might have always known of such an ideal
self as your motivation couldn't manage
without ideals, hope and belief. One can
think oneself to be lower than one really is
taking ones personal troubles with society
seriously in trying to do it better. But then
it still sounds rational to have such a
higher self. The Veda calls it
Ksirodakasayi Vishnu: it is not the
highest realization of the maintaining
capacity of the Lord, but it is of Him, the
ideal allright. It is not the full socalled
Bhagavan realization of the divine
capacity, but the localized personal aspect
that is omnipresent and transcendental (see
A.A.'s
site
for more reference on this). The western
psychology will insist that this is - and can
not be - another estranged
person-on-a-pedestal while from the Veda one
will insist that it implies a higher
principle of organization than your self
image can prove. To the psychologist that
higher principle is set by the religious or
morally motivated superego identifications
with holy people, Lordships or other types of
heroes that led humanity the way of
righteousness. History gives many records of
these manifestations of the supersoul. The
existence of them can historically not be
denied. Those manifestations, incarnations of
the supersoul, founded the religions in the
world and are still the strongest social
coherence of mankind. Only a fool would deny
the existence of the manifest omnipresent
supersoul. Or as the physicist
A.E.
said: "The illusion that we are separate
from one another is an optical delusion of
our consciousness". But, psychologically,
can we afford an attitude of estrangement
putting the responsibility and overview over
our lives with the supersoul? Does that soul
really remember us in our private secluded
lives? Are we with the supersoul if we are
alone? Does it exist without the eyes of the
other person? Emperor N.
of old Rome e.g. murdered his own relatives
to be freed of those nasty witnesses to his
bad deeds. It didn't make him a better person
in the akashic record. The christian Lord
said that He would only be present if two or
more would be together in His name. The
psychologist will support that insisting that
one is a social being and that one can only
be fully sane if one does somehow meet
complying in social control with the other
person.
Still there
are accounts of recluses, hermits and sages
living on mountains and in deserts where they
are never seen by another soul to be witness
of their love for God. How could they relate
to the eye of the supersoul and survive after
death? Still guru's today preach to realize
Him within oneself instead of through the
eyes of the other. The latter can, after all,
be just a lot of hypocrisy. Can we cheat God
acting as if? Is one only a thief when one is
caught?
2.4
Possessiveness and
identification
There is
another Vedic record explicit about
reincarnation than the Gītā. In
the Yoga-sutra of P. (see
for several translations these
links and the Yoga-sūtras of
P.
or The Thread of Concioisness De
Draad
van de Bewustzijnsvereniging door
A.A.
is stated that one can acquire the special
yogic achievement (siddhi) of
remembering ones previous lives through yogic
detachment and the direct perception of one's
subliminal impressions (III-18). Freed from
ones identification with material objects,
one's own body or possessions one can clearly
see oneself. The psychologist would say that,
of course, missing such a material hold the
person can compensate for the lack of
cultural reinforcement in general or
specifically of a t.v-set, a bookcase or an
other medium, by filling in the gaps of
normal identification with the supposition of
other lives through which that capacity would
be fulfilled. Certain is that preoccupied
with external stimuli the inner experience of
being connected to a supersoul, that could
inspire for knowledge beyond one's own life,
will be hindered. One will be more of
opposition, estrangement and projection
without introspection. Still also hard-core
western science is founded on intellectual
philosophical introspection with a healthy
suspicion about everything that one cannot
confirm oneself. Thus seen detachment is a
sound practice of not only the yogi or hermit
for the realization of other lives, be it of
one's own action or more psychologically
experienced as identifications with other
persons.
2.5
A danger
The inner
experience of other persons is dangerous. And
that gives another argument for
reincarnation. The inner experience of other
persons is called either being possessed by
demons, being paranormally gifted as a medium
or being mentally disturbed in a socalled
MPS-syndrome of a multiple personality
disorder if one identification is strange to
the other. Reincarnated or not,
psychologically one has the duty not to be a
stranger in introspection to other
identities. The psychologist will insist that
you accept to be at least a kind of actor
that consciously can change roles taking up
different personalities or different aspects
of an integrated, more selfrealized
personality. He will say that that is a
normal adaption to ones decorum: at home
daddy to the children, in his bedroom lover
to his wife and in his office a proper
colleague on the job. Analytic psychology is
speaking of archetypes
of the collective unconscious that are in
need of integration into constellations
of ego, conscious mind and persona. Of this
we are composed and according to the
psychologist we should be familiar and not
estranged to these roles. Also the behavioral
approach cares about a proper behavioral
repertoire of skills amounting to the same
acting capacity of personal integration.
Schizophrenia seen from this point of view is
the disease of estrangement to these
archetypical mental entities or previous
lives. Losing the identification with these
mental entities one runs into a hell of
hearing inner voices that cannot be appeased
with the duty to perceive them as ones own
thoughts.
Anyone can
for an experiment imagine himself a kind of
play with different characters that make a
meaningful story. With these characters one
can converse within oneself. In fact it is
the essence of the thinking mind that
continues the conversations with others in
their absence. Acting it out in the
imagination is an accepted therapeutic
exercise in psychotherapy. Normal writers
write plays and film-scripts managing the
estrangement of the characters in to a
coherent story with a moral lead. From this
we learn that with the possible discoherence
of mental entities (mentities?) one is still
capable and sane adhering to a moral lead or
an event-script. Losing the (confidence in
the) script then would trigger the process of
the schizophrenic getting caught in an inner
world to which the outside of social control
has no access. The sanity of inner hearing
(the imagined play of 'mentities') is even
called divine. The Holy Bible speaks of the
Holy Spirit that descended over the pupils
after the departure of the Lord. The
Yoga-Sutra
speaks of the divyam srotam or divine
hearing that one can acquire as an other
yogic achievement or siddhi of
samyama (concentration, meditation and
absorption of-) on the relation between sound
and space (iii-42). Still also e.g.
bhakti-yoga maintains the dictum that these
siddhis can be impediments on the
spiritual path. They are no goals in
themselves. They can even be a danger to
one's progress and liberation and can only be
respected as being in service of the progress
or the event-script with a moral
lead.
Thus inner
realization of other lives carries a warning:
it may not be an effort to escape from the
duties one has with a liberation in service
to the cause of the ideal of a localized
super-soul, God or time-culture. The warning
is there against losing the social control
with all its duties of mutual respect and
freedom of association and detachment from
profit motives. And this is not an imaginary
warning: modern culture in its collective
selfrealization by means of the media is
constantly having plays where crime is fought
and heroism is modeled. These achievements of
the morality, or common siddhis of
artistic and literary creation, must not be
considered as goals of commercial action in
themselves. The commerce should be in service
of the community and its social control.
Therefore one should have cinema before t.v.
, the theater before cinema and personal
enacting before the theater. The personal
localized body is after all the first medium.
Losing this priority and blocked in one's
progress one may collapse into a nightmare
where all the fantasies of role-playing
become the real horror of actual warfare and
crime. By means of positive identification
with the heroes and saints of the plays or
the holy history or ones previous lives one
can escape from being a passive spectator
estranged from the action. Therefore one
should not just seriously consider being an
actor oneself or being interested in
historical events and people, but also
consider the being personally involved with
human history as a reincarnated familiar
soul. Acknowledging the necessity of such an
attitude to our post-modern sanity we run
into the history of christianity with this
subject of concern.
3
Christianity and reincarnation
In
M.11,14
The Lord says: "And if you are willing to
accept it, he (the Baptist) is the
E.
who was to come." ..."But I tell you,
E
has already come, and they did not recognize
him, but have done to him everything they
wished. In the same way the Son of Man is
going to suffer at their
hands."
3.1
The classics and the enlightened
heretics.
The early
foundations of the christian belief in
reincarnation can be found in greek
philosophy. Py.
thought it 'very likely' and Pl.
wrote:"
"But
when she the celestial soul is unable to
follow, and fails to behold the truth, and
through some ill-hap sinks beneath the
double load of forgetfulness and vice, and
her wings fall from her and she drops to
the ground, then the law ordains that this
soul shall at her first birth pass, not
into any other animal, but only into man;
and the soul which has seen most of truth
shall come to the birth as a philosopher,
or artist, or some musical and loving
nature."
In the same
work, he states:
"ten
thousand years must elapse before the soul
of each one can return to the place from
whence she came". (Phaedo
).
Until the
first counsel of Nicea (A.D. 325) there was a
mixed belief in reincarnation inspired by
mainly the platonic school which was after
that called heretic. With the fall of the Roman Empire also the consideration of having
had previous lives broke down. Losing the
natural order of divisions to the old lunar
calendar the Roman Empire had fallen into the
ego-perversions and christen-persecutions of
the later Rome that discredited the julian
calendar as being of a sincere and human
virtue. With the definite loss of the formal
original weekorder of Nones and Ides with the
constantine reform of the fourth century, the
pagan weekorder became the grace of
christianity throwing the whole of western
culture into the darkness of the Middle Ages
wherein Christianity had to wrestle for is
own concept of cultural time-consciousness
from monasteries and feudal authorities with
doubtful scientific capacities of
timereckoning. In fact the whole of papal
christianity started out as an estrangement
of the original natural timeconsciousness of
the moonphases with their natural
philosophical belief in a continuing soul
over different lives.
The
discontinuity of timeconsciousness was not
just the collapse of the Roman empire: it was
the collapse of the complete collective
consciousness of the Greek-Roman-Egyptian
culture which had to wait for over a
millennium for its renaissance into a
cultural and mechanical concept of time that,
alas, politically and pragmatically in the
modern era also began to run out of line with
the original natural consciousness of timing
to objective natural events. Barbarian or Jewish lunar calendars were disrespected as
primitive culture of false idolatry (although
or because they proved more powerful than the
julian reformed of Rome in overtrowing it)
and the complete of the european cultural
roots were repressed for the sake of the idea
of a christian dominance based on a faulty
sun-calendar that ran out of order by lack of
proper leaping. Reincarnation was an heretic
position of natural cyclic time-awareness to
be condemned. In fact with the christian
gracing of the pagan weekorder of
market-weeks the linear concept of time took
over as an ego-management strategy estranging
from the real spiritual soul. Gnostics and
Arians were called heretic and persecuted.
E.g. the dominican priest G.
B.
was
banned by the church for his heretic
sympathies with Arianism, just as were
C'
s
sun-centered model of the universe and the
forbidden works of the humanist
Dutchman
D.E.
. G.
B.
was one of the most brilliant men of his day.
He instructed the French king
H.
III in the art of memory, taught philosophy
at the University of Toulouse and mingled
with the literary circle that surrounded
England's Queen E.
I. (see Reincarnation-The
Missing Link in
Christianity).
He argued for a religion based on reason,
through which man could purge himself of the
"beast" within. He was convicted to be burnt
at the stake in 1592 for his original ideas
on astronomy (the existence of other planets
like ours) and also reincarnation of which he
had said at his Venice trial:
"I
have held and hold souls to be
immortal....Speaking as a Catholic, [I
say] they do not pass from body to
body, but go to Paradise, Purgatory or
Hell. But I have reasoned deeply, and,
speaking as a philosopher, since the soul
is not found without body and yet is not
body, it may be in one body or in
another, and pass from body to body."
He said
that reincarnation was, if not proven, "at
least likely," supporting the view of the Greek philosopher P.
He challenged the church doctrine that souls
are created "out of nothing" and therefore
are not a part of God. His last words, to the
authorities in 1600 before being burnt, were:
"Perchance
you who pronounce my sentence are in
greater fear than I who receive
it."
proving
that his belief in the immortality of the
soul made him fearless. He was a true martyr
of the enlightened and humanist vision of the
soul in transition from world to world.
3.2
Modernity
Later
christianity nowadays cherishes the idea of
reincarnation in the Theosophical
movement,
the Scientology
movement,
the Share-movement
(a later offshoot of theosophy) and
the
Humanist
movement.
In the New Age movement the channeling
mediums, and past-live regression
hypno-therapists also depart from this
concept (see Spirit
Web
and The
Question of
Reincarnation
). Also literary authors as W.
v G.
and scientist/politician B.F.
held positive ideas on reincarnation without
losing public respect:
"I am
certain that I have been here as I am now a
thousand times before, and I hope to return a
thousand times..." W.G.
"When I
see nothing annihilated and not a drop of
water wasted, I cannot suspect the
annihilation of souls...I believe I shall, in
some shape or other, always exist. I shall
not object to a new edition of mine, hoping,
however, that the errata of the last may be
corrected." B.F.
Some
authors find definite proof in the
Bible
for reincarnation while others contest that.
It is in fact a theological discussion
covering the millennia of christian culture
that is also reflected in serious
personality studies of the health
sciences
of out of body experiences, children
remembering or being possessed by spirits
recounting of other lives, deathbed
apparitions, near death experiences and the
like. Despite of many witnesses all these
studies could deliver, of course, no
objective scientific - read material - proof
that reincarnation is a fact. Still they
could prove that it is a subject of objective
scientific survey (see also: How
Americans think about
reincarnation).
Historically
this freedom of thought and sincere
scientific interest in the phenomenon of a
separate soul was preceded by the renaissance
at the end of the Middle ages wherein the
ideas about time changed. The church and the
feudal legal accord of time with it had to
give up its monopolist authoritarian claim on
time. The theologian T.of
A.
(1225-1274) and later the
humanist
E.
(1466-1536) preached the enlightened position
of a more holistic respect for all of human
culture about religion and time. Together
with R.
B.
the christian scholar who wrote that there
is:
"Time
designated by nature....by authority...and
by custom and caprice'' (Opus Maius
1267)
, may one
say that there thus the threefold is upon
which the tolerance for the multicultural
society and the modern respect of time was
founded, just as
is the threefold full calendar of
order
we can conceive of today. These characters of
learning held that God and time were not the
exclusive domain of the clergy and the legal
authorities in philosophical debate. Man had
to practice and experiment for his own
selfrealization for which the scriptural
authority was only one of the sources of
knowledge. Also experimentation and
observation of natural fact were important
sources of wisdom and knowledge. Before that,
in the beginning of the fourteenth century,
left the franciscan monk W.
o O.
his monastery to prepare the philosophical
ground for the modern cartesian rationality
and methodology. This was because the church
had endless debates on how the date of Easter
should be calculated and why a reform of the
calendar should or should not take place to
correct for the julian imprecision to the
length of the tropical year. Especially
halting with customs of time-measurement not
succeeding in calendar-reforms prepared for
the great schism of the church itself which
not only reformed the reformed but also
purified the catholic position in her
contra-reformatory exercises of discipline.
Missing the progress again we ran into ego
-cultures and political oppositions of never
to be the same natural people that we were
before. The world thereto mechanized which
also created the two worlds of the natural
and the cultural consciousness, of warfare
with personalistic medieval true time swords
against impersonal standard time modern
explosives of gunpowder and nuclear power, as
we nowadays can experience in the pains and
psychology of common cultural estrangement
and nuclear threat.
3.3
Reformation and rebirth
Because of
the Renaissance of the Greek-Roman ego and
spirit, in fact Christianity attained to the
original roman Pax Romana of humanistic
respect for all types of religion and
time-culture. It was not a complete hell of a
babylonian confusing weekorder in medieval
darkness like it was after the fall of Rome,
but a reawakening of a truthfull and aligned
ego as an enlightening infuse of classical
relativity and cyclic time-awareness. Thus
also other ideas of reincarnation and rebirth
could originate than only those sanctioned by
the church of having one material life and
one eternal liberation in the rebirth of
being baptized for a permanent position in
one eternal mystical heaven. Rebirth had
become the fact of the complete culture as it
rose from the darkness of the Middle Ages in
a renewed scientific and
philosophical/theological interest in the
universe or creation of God. P.
and A.
were rediscovered and ancient dilemma's were
solved in the contradictions between the
idealist and the logician, the vulgar and
philosophical 'computus' of timereckoning by
respectively customs of fixation and sciences
of measurement. Rebirth became an issue on
the philosophical agenda of historians who
could not denGy that at least the old Greek/Roman honor had reincarnated of seeing
the philosopher as the God, baptist and
apostle of our own culture and divinity.
Anyone has
the right to speak up in our reborn culture,
who has respect for the God of Philosophy who
said: "Know Thyself " and the preacher of His
philosophy who said that our world of
ignorance is but a shadow in a cave compared
to the daylight of filognosy, the love of
knowledge that should enlighten the whole
world into the liberation of service to the
ideal concept of state (see P.
in his dialogues of S.'
preaching of human goodness and reason).
Islam before that in her medieval glory had
served its medieval purpose of maintaining
this scientific respect for time, defying the
personalistic and animalistic propensities of
Christianity. The Arabs (like
A.-K.
) gave us the knowledge they got from the
Indians (like A.)
about numerals, fractions and time-reckoning.
Thus we succeeded not only in a more
sophisticated respect of time in the form of
an improved calculus of linear time
culminating in the Gregorian reform of the
calendar of 1582, we also inherited the
Indian philosophy of the cyclic time of
reincarnation imbibed with it in the same
deal. (see the book Calendar
for more of this history of time-management
and the articles in this series about
Sun
and Moon and the New World
Order
and Why
the year 2000 should be counted as
2753).
3.4
A dual respect of
reincarnation
In the
indian scriptures it was common sense to
believe in historical cycles called yuga's
in which souls time and again enact to
the same story of God from different
evolutionary perspectives (see the
Bhagavata
Purāna).
Reincarnation is a fact for the Hindu who
simply believes in repeated rebirths in
better and better lives by the power of proof
delivered by the avatars of the many
incarnations of the one Lord and His
expansions. Although our memories are
imperfect and only The lord can be sure and
deliver proof of previous lives, the belief
in that culture is firm and nothing but a
logical fact of philosophy. A single life is
but a drop in the ocean of eternity and the
soul just a spark of the great fire that God
Himself is. This was what
the guru's brought to the
West
in the second half of the twentiest century
(see also speeches of
swami V.
on this). We should modestly believe in
personal rebirth and selfcorrection, not just
in a rebirth from the guru for the
sake of a
more natural and spiritual
life,
but also for the sake of
a revision of our own historical
awareness
to make for a better future taking
responsibility for our collective and
individual karma. Listening to them
they insist on this dual concept of rebirth:
as well a constant cultural reformation as
an individual selfrealization of previous and
future lives is of importance. The burden
of proof of whether they are just talking of
necessary historical identifications or
actual past and future karma-motivated
lives (see Vedic
quotes on rebirth and
reincarnation
and other links
below)
is not to us but on the shoulders of the
Godhead Himself who may or may not have the
grace for the individual to enlighten him on
his historical position in the human
time-universe of past, present and future
lives.
To the
normal soul it not given to be sure of
reincarnation. But from the christian point
of view we also can firmly believe in this
relative of a possible rebirth individually
or collectively. From the Holy Bible we know
of the ladder of Jacob that leads us rung by
rung into a heaven of a better world. It is
not the common belief of an all-or-nothing
heaven that the Bible preaches. It is just
like the gurus and the Bhagavad
Gītā say: a step by step
realization of better and better lives in
better positions in a less and less material
universe. The dualist mind might inspire for
absolute opposites. But all facts of life
tell us reality is not of any sharp border
lines of an either-or-reality. It is more a
field or mountain of gradual self-realization
of being liberated in the service of the
human values and order of nature, culture and
the spirit. From the Holy Bible we also have
the prediction of the second coming of
Christ. If the Lord would return to our
planet, then why should we not? For Him it
must be much more easy to rest in higher
planets or places than it would be for us
with our attachments and commitments. Thus
the
main argument of christianity against
reincarnation given at the
introduction
becomes doubtful: the sacrifice of the Lord
is not nullified by the dual reality of a
cultural or physical rebirth. He did not die
in vain if we return to this planet in a
better life as a better servant and a better Greek/Roman philosopher respecting His truth.
He just took away the fear of time telling us
that we can live eternally with Him in His
heaven of divinity and happiness or working
for it again on earth together with Him in
one of his own many rebirths as is confirmed
by the Bhagavad Gītā:
yada
yadaa hi dhamasya
glaanir bhavati bhaarata
abhyutthaanam adharmasya
tadaatmanam srjamy aham
Whenever
and wherever it is sure
that one weakens in righteousness
and a predominance of disorder does
manifest,
o descendant of Bharata, at that time I do
manifest Myself..
(Bhagavad
Gītā
4-7)
Thus seen
multiculturally the arguments against
reincarnation can be recognized as a fear of
time. Fear is a fact of being identified with
a material body. Reincarnation would fix us
on that body and thus it would be bad... But
once we realize that we simply need one or
another body to practice the same akashic
soul in the same personal spirit to deal with
the same eternity of matter and time, then
the whole concept of heaven turns a 180
degrees around. If we reincarnate, we do not
reincarnate for a physical body, but just
have one to be a better servant and proof of
the existence of heaven and the enduring
soul. This is the other type of rebirth
christianity had to accept in its
reformation: it is not the false authority of
this or that material - legal or religious -
body, but the authentic authority of the
filognosy
of divine wisdom that leads us through worlds
climbing up to higher civilizations and
better planets in a better universe of
justice and peace.
There have
also been theological qualms and
counter-arguments about
possibly having been an animal in a previous
life.
To that one may say that a spiritual man in
his body doesn't really exist to the world of
God's creation until he speaks. Possibly
having existed as a beast he couldn't speak
then, and therefore reincarnation as such
cannot be the reality. It is not the animal
though that reincarnates but the will to be a
human being, nay a God. Summarizing from
these arguments taken consequent it seems to
be more heretic to be against reincarnation
than it is to be in favor. It is the benefit
and progress of the soul of it that one
cannot really counter theologically. It is
the psychology of the fear of time of its
opponents that must be countered. But that is
just a religious concern. Competing with the
other religions modern Christianity will
realize that it has to upgrade to the
capacities of the Islam and the Buddhist and
Hindu universe. It not only will have to
accept reincarnation as also a biblical
possibility, but it also must give up the
fixations held against reform, as would be
the nature of its own historical
reformation.
4
Time and Paradise
4.1
Time as a form of God
I
died from the mineral and became a
plant;
I died from the plant, and reappeared in
an animal;
I died from the animal and became a
man;
Wherefore then should I fear?
When dids I grow less by dying?
Next time I shall die from the man,
That I may grow the wings of angels.
From the angel, too, must I seek
advance;
All things shall perish save His face
Once more shall I wing my way above the
angels;
I shall become that which entereth not the
imaginations.
Then let me become naught, naught, for the
harp string crieth unto me,
Verily unto Him do we return ...
The sufi
mystic poet J.
A.-D.
expressed the purpose of the realization of
the truth on reincarnation beautifully in
this poem.
It subscribes to the conclusion that rebirth
is an historical, philosophical,
psychological and intercultural theological
necessity without which our lives are as good
as meaningless. It also subscribes to the
goal of the reincarnation-cycles; from that
wheel of rebirth one must, as
the
eastern philosophy
maintains
be liberated in the eternal sat cit and
ananda (eternity, consciousness and bliss) of
climbing up to the Supreme Divinity. It is up
to that divinity to decide whether there
would be any personal material involvement
with time or not at
this or that level of
attainment.
The soul might be timeless, but the fear of
time must be equaled to the fear of God. The
way we fear God we must face and take the
consequences of the fear of time. Fixed on
our temporal existencies we can be an
escapist of physical exercises that hinder
our consciousness of the big picture of time:
the om purnam (complete whole) of the
complete reality of time with all its worlds,
souls and Lordships of the past and the
future. We can lust for the disgrace of
taking the lives of animals and trees. We can
live for the acquisition of private
properties and sexual freedom without the
duties of a marriage. But all this material
activity so common to the narrowing of our
minds in our modern tolerance will breed
more and more the fear of time that leads
to total destruction if it is not recognized
as the fear of God. One should also be
afraid to lose the time as time is the form
that God has taken to give us the peace and
order we were looking for as is confirmed by
a hymn - the so called
sisumara-mantra- in the
hindu-vaishnava Bible describing the life and
devotion to the Lord of Yoga:
Namo
jyotir lokāya
Kālāyanānimsām
pataye
mahā-purushāyābhidhimahīti
O Lord, who
has taken the form of time
O resting place of all the planets in their
orbits
O master of the demigods, O supreme
Personality
I offer you my respectful obeisances and
meditate upon you.
(Srimad
Bhagavatam
5:23:8 see time-quotes)
Time
properly managed is a source of great joy and
happiness a western psychologist can confirm.
Isn't it all about attaining to having a
'good time'? The Veda, especially in the so
called fifth one or the purāna,
confirms this in almost every
chapter of its many
literatures.
Even modern materialist culture confirms this
divine respect in the philosophy of profit
and time-management. 'Time is money, don't
waste time.' One also says this way 'don't
lose Time, don't lose God.' Time isn't
Godless. Time is a form of God. The Lord
confirms in the Bhagavad Gītā
that He is the Time Himself at three places
(11-32,
10-30,
10-33).
A threefold confirmation is by Hindus held as
an expression of the greatest importance.
Also a christian theologian like
T.
o A.
would respect and seriously consider such an
emphasis. And why wouldn't we?
4.2
Conclusion: The return to
paradise.
From the
perspective of the divinity of Time itself,
the whole spiritual culture of timelessness
looks like a hoax: there is no such thing as
a time-less God or a timeless paradise or
heaven. With timelessness one may better
think of a reference to the cyclic of time in
contrast with the serial nature of time: time
repeating more or less the same patterns of
material action gives the illusion of
timelessness by the stability and happiness
[of the automatic erasing of things or
sins in the repeteated observation] of
its conditioning. From bad habits and
brain-lateral onesidedness one may have a
neurosis and complex of fear of losing
control and consciousness against this
realization. But from the time-is-God
perspective one goes to heaven when one is
reļncarnating on the same (or a higher)
planet: one gets another chance of realizing
what a divine eternal reality the time really
is. It is the personal soul
(jiv-ātmā) that is
unstable flickering in and out of the reality
of space-time and the eternity of matter (not
eternal of form). One can, being in heaven,
being reborn that is, regret ones previous
earthly or worldly existence and have the
chance to work at ones karma again.
Birth after birth one will realize that with
less and less karmic debts one will be more
and more happy and fulfilled in the service
of that divinity and even be more effective
and convincing in ones material
existence.
From that
vision there is no question of heresy and
atheism with the common man. Time is change
and diversity and all diversity and changes
of culture are of that divinity. Everyone
respecting a clock or calendar is a devotee
of God as soon as one realizes that Time is
the manifest reality of the living God. From
that reality the whole discussion and
controversy about religions is the true
heresy that defies the absolute necessity of
each his own selfrealization in time and
matter. Any socially rigid dictate of God or
material fixation on God or unwillingness to
correct oneself with necessary agreements of
fixations thus seen is being imposed a false
preaching. Each is free to create a culture
of time respect and have a meaningful
incarnation. Each may judge himself which
authority of time would be the ultimate one.
To the philosophical God of the westerner the
fear of time is overcome realizing who one
is: that is, who one possibly was identified
with historical personalities taking the
karma and responsibilities of our
cultural past, who one actually is in the
present society and what and how one thinks
oneself to be in the future of this same
world one is living in. This way seen ones
life is complete if the full commitment to
the actual planet is realized, time and
again, birth after birth building and
maintaining constantly upon what one did for
oneself and the others to which one belongs
with ones previous lives.
Thus we
arrive at the conclusion of this
consideration of the subject of
reincarnation: from the spirit of truth it is
a necessity to strive for the heaven and
paradise that the planet in fact naturally is
and culturally should be. The confrontation
with all the cultural and natural obstacles
of predators, earthquakes, wars of divinities
(religions) against one another, floods and
environmental decay, does not take away the
duty of fighting them in favor of the proof
of the manifest paradise. The fear of time in
fact is the fear to be faced with the never
ending mission of getting closer and closer
to one's own personal and collective
divinity: it requires to take the workload
(karma) of the complete culture and
get it one rung higher on the ladder of
Jacob. The weight of that mission makes it
easy to understand why for centuries
Christianity has maintained a negative
attitude about reincarnation. But from the
light of the modern internet filognosy of
available intercultural information exchange
this can no longer be maintained: we are
working at this realization and we do
progress building a world mind and a concept
of world order with it for God,Time, the
Material universe and all souls in the spirit
and in the incarnated physical bodies
involved.
A.A.
Suggested
further reading: Srīmad
Bhāgavatam: Canto Four Chapter 29:
Conversation between Nārada Muni and
King Prācīnabarhi
Links