Marco M. Pardi

Reincarnation: "Oh no, not you again"

August 19, 2009 |  1 comment
Image Credit: Marco M. Pardi Atop my computer monitor sits a small sign: “Do Not Reincarnate.” I put this there on the chance that my big Stage Left moment might come while staring into the Looking Glass of All That’s Out There. This full disclosure is my brief way of ensuring that no ambiguities arise among the various interpretations of what I write below. Actually, most of us have response memes, easily or not so easily triggered, stored in our head jelly. When I hear someone respond to the question, “How are you?” by saying “Good” my meme, “Did not proceed beyond 4th grade” immediately activates.

In the same way, when I perceive in another person the physical cues usually indicative of a pleasant thought state in response to the term “Reincarnation”, my meme “Must have had a happy childhood” leaps to the fore. Solidarity is certainly not next up.

Why someone would want to return will be examined later. For now it is helpful to examine the concept and its history. Many volumes have been written on the subject of reincarnation. This article will not attempt to recapture or surpass them. The focus here will be on the fundamental world view, particularly as it relates to the individual versus the group.

As is true of so many cosmological and philosophical concepts, reincarnation has been interpreted on various levels, in different venues, and as both externally imposed (a punishment which may even include transmigration of souls) and internally allowed (a forgetting that perceptions are not real and therefore an attachment which has to be worked through). It has been viewed as a series of experiences needed to reach personal completion, and hence release. And, it can be a willful act of compassion (the Mahayana Buddhist Bodhisattva or the Tibetan Buddhist Tulku) in which an enlightened one returns to help others. Finally, it can be viewed in a rather resigned fashion as a Ferris Wheel with no off switch. As Madame Nozall would assure us, “You’se lived tousands an’ tousands a’ lives. Fifty bucks, on my palm.”

Scholars have long understood the broad and deep world history of this concept, far beyond the common wisdom which responds to this, and to karma, with a meme such as “that Oriental stuff”. Of course, reincarnation is best known, in the common sense, from relatively recent Eastern sources. However, there are definite elements of it, in a “racial” or ethnic sense in the world views of the Pre-Classical and Classical Near East. These elements clearly favor the collective Eastern view over individuated Western views, a tendency which remains to this day. Included here, but to a lesser degree, would be themes in Hellenic Greece.

It was Classical Greece, however, which gave us atomic theory, and the materialist/reductionist model of Aristotle. Despite over two subsequent millennia of doubt regarding the very existence of atoms, Aristotelian thought formed the spine of the developing and individuating Western Man. Guilt, the individuated internalization of responsibility, metastasized throughout what was to come to be called Western Society, molding its singular profile in defiant contrast to the inscrutably collective Eastern, and generally “Non-Western” visage. The Western Guilt view contrasted starkly with the Non-Western Shame view, the realization of the collective solidarity of the group, the existence of which is possible only because the members realize themselves as members and not as lone wolves.

Along the way, the emerging Western Christian Church fine focused individual guilt into a one-chance-to-get-it-right industry purveying penance and absolution at a cost. To ensure an income base, from donations and indulgences, the church decreed that parents must have their newborns baptized in the church by the second week of life. Failure to do so meant mortal sin for the parents. And, turning away from the faith once grown meant a more grievous mortal sin for the child who might later reject what was done in his infancy. The church also fixed the Age of Reason at seven years old, meaning that the seven year old was then capable of committing a sin which would doom him to the everlasting fires of Hell. This form of thought strongly encouraged the conception of the “immortal soul” as a discrete, measurable, and, otherwise, observable entity upon which an accountable record of rights versus wrongs could be tallied; sinners could have a rather spotty soul, and outright miscreants were blackened through and through.

Of course, in this all pervasive context, the idea that if you do not get it right in this life you will simply do it in another was anathema to the church; an acceptance of that would mean they could not terrify a person into obedience, with all the attendant income and power to be derived thereby. Reincarnation, where it appeared as an idea or theme, was pronounced heresy.
But any attempt to portray the evolving Christian dogma, or even the kerygma (the apostolic proclamation of salvation through Jesus Christ), as monolithic or immune to the inroads of acculturation would be fundamentally incorrect, as the many Councils and Synods through history have shown. The idea of reincarnation swam through church history like the Nessie of Loch Ness, sighted and sworn to, but never captured or killed. And, despite the church’s attempt to harness and direct emerging science, significant contributors to modern thought arose in even the early years. One of these was William of Ockham (the town also spelled as Occam). A very young Franciscan priest, William became quickly known for his profound mathematical skills. The modern meme for William, “Occam’s Razor,” derives from the exactly sculpted logic with which William underpinned his mathematics. Fundamental to that logic was the proposition that, where more than one explanation is possible for an event, the simplest and least burdened one is the best. Thus, a proposed solution can be put to the “If connected to a maybe” test. The fewer the conditional supports and tenuous connections, the closer to being the probable solution. The still standing model for what, in the parlance of physics is called “elegance” is Einstein’s famous equation containing simply three letters, one number, and an equals sign. We will return to William shortly.

The conflated secular/sacred individuation of the person in Western society was aided by the congruent development of time as a linear concept, leading to endless debates over “First Cause”. Joe Person, not particularly able to participate in such debates, settled comfortably for what was to become Newton’s “Clockwork Universe”, a marvel of linear and distinct cause and effect. Joe was apparently not bothered by the inconsistencies inherent in clerical references to his “immortal soul”; immortality, by definition, being endless. Yet, a beginning is an end viewed backward. A “side” is an end viewed sideways. An immortal soul, therefore, cannot have dimensions of either space or time (which Einstein would later show are basically the same thing); immortality, as in soul, cannot even be conceived by use of a term, such as “it” for that implies distinction from “not it”. But Joe was content with harvesting the grain, eating the ergot, and posing against haystacks for that odd painter named Pieter Brueghel.

In short, the soul as carry on was born. And, as we wait to change planes at the airport, or bodies at the cemetery/delivery room, this package either remains in the terminal for a while, checking various itineraries and on board amenities, or zips blissfully along the carousel to the next waiting plane/body whatever it might be and wherever it is headed. In this view, the path of life may be twisted or straight, but it is a path from here to there spatially and temporally.

Until, that is, quantum mechanics grounded Newton as certainly as his apple. When the realization of the micro world dawned in the early twentieth century, it was not met with unanimous acclaim. Indeed, Einstein described the behaviors of paired, but separated electrons as “spooky action at a distance”. Suddenly, space/time was meaningful only under clearly stipulated and limited conditions. Cause and effect became indistinguishable and moot. Here and there became the Zen like sound of one hand clapping. The soul as a discrete entity, for which there have actually been debates over the Occupancy Limit of “heaven” much like the vaunted angels on the head of a pin, became once again the indefinable, amorphous pan-ethnic entity of the Classical Hebrews, who correctly viewed the early Christian “good news” of personal resurrection as being an intrusion of Greek (as in Paul) materialism into a newly evolving dynamic. Indeed, the original Christianity found surviving in the Near East and Middle East today is unrecognizable to Western Christians, most of whom being totally unaware that their tradition is far more Greco-Christian than Judeo-Christian.

In contrast to this Western development, the cosmology of the East, in particular, stresses that individuation, the development of what Alan Watts called “the skin encapsulated Ego”, is an illusion. Furthermore, it is this illusion which artificially separates us from others, diminishing all of us in the process. As if “channeling” Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha, Jesus delivered this message in his famous Sermon on the Mount and many other sayings. In Thomas Laird’s stunningly comprehensive book, The Story of Tibet: Conversations with the Dalai Lama, the Dalai Lama himself firmly rejects the Western notion of a coherent package soul popping from body to body. But the Dalai Lama himself is identified, as a child, through behaviors thought to indicate the rebirth of a previous person. How can he reject “reincarnation”?

Remember that lava lamp you had in the ‘60’s or ‘70’s? Okay, remember that lava lamp you saw in the antiques and collectibles store? That one blob, pushed and kneaded by the heated oil in the lamp, moved through a myriad of cloud like shapes, extruding here, breaking off and rejoining there. But, it all came from one amorphous mass. In Tibetan Buddhism this is an image of the Over Soul, the Oneness of all sentient beings. The permutations are, in a way, what Westerners sense when they speak of wanting to “get back in union with God”. The Tibetans would say that the sense of separateness is an illusion based in the development of individuation so firmly entrenched in the West. A Bodhisattva, in the Hindu tradition, or a Tulku, in the Tibetan tradition, is one whose enlightenment (awakening to the Oneness) is such that he/she is able to join with the incipient soul in another body and to at least speak in unison with that developing soul if not in predominance over it. The outsiders, or investigating lamas, seeing or hearing characteristics of the now deceased former person, sense a “reincarnation” in that it seems clear that the former person is, at least in part, living through the present person. The Westerner might see a case of “possession”. Certainly, this is what two psychiatrists, Edith Fiore (The Unquiet Dead) and M. Scott Peck (numerous volumes) felt.

The idea of possession or, not to be racy – cohabitation, is usually, in the West, dramatized in extreme forms. But spinning heads and pea soup aside, the phenomenon is vastly more feasible than the physics defying encapsulation of a discrete, impermeable entity which hops from body to body over linear time, completely over riding the staggering mathematics of genetic and experiential neuronal permutations in the “new” brain while propping up the “old soul” in the window. Indeed, the latter concept is so far beyond making any sense that an entire logic system would have to be invented in order to support it.

Yet, there are “hypno-therapists” aplenty, claiming to specialize in “regression hypnosis” for those wishing to get in touch with their inner other or, as they would have it, their “true self”. Beyond bilking a few gullible customers, is there any harm? Although by no means is every regression-therapist a knowing fraud, numerous investigations of this practice have exposed so many instances of therapist induced “false memories” that the practice in general is not considered very reliable. And, confabulating another, “responsible” persona to explain (and possibly excuse) one’s behaviors is not considered productive therapy.

We also know that there are “trance mediums” who claim to set aside their consciousness to allow for a disembodied entity to enter and take over the helm, speaking through them. Here again, there are obvious frauds, obvious “wannabees”, and obvious wishful believers. However, there are trance mediums who are able to deliver accurate and detailed information previously unknown to anyone present. Numerous standardized methods ascertain that the trance state is authentic. And, the information which could not have been obtained in any other way can be verified. Obviously, the medium did not die each time and return to life in adult form as a vessel for someone else. Fortunately for the medium, death is not necessary. When we compare the medium’s claim of making room to the reports of young children who seem to be vessels for a “reincarnated” person we might say that the common denominator here is the medium’s ability to make a “vacancy” and, since the child is typically not yet ego hardened into an adult persona, the child’s having a “vacancy” which can be entered by a disincarnate intrusion. This intrusion, in spectacular cases apparently quite fully developed, seems to be coming from the child’s “own deepest memories”. Or so it seems. But the less than logical observer would quickly opine that the child must be “remembering a past life”.

Let’s ask William. “William, here are two proposed possibilities. First, a purported system in which a disembodied soul remains intact, discrete, and impermeable to intrusion or ‘leakage’, hangs around in some unknown waiting area while checking the future life paths of various embryos (all the while defying what we now understand of the illusory nature of time/space), enters the embryo of choice, over rides the myriad genetic and environmental variables in the development of the childhood persona, and spontaneously manifests as a previously existing person.

Or, the ‘disembodied person’ was always, and is, and will be a part of the totality of ‘over soul’ and only thought of himself as an individual as a result of being canalized through neurological and environmental ego development, and is manifesting through an as yet incompletely canalized child or through a medium who is able to make room. Applying your now famous ‘razor’, which makes the most sense?”

Not having done a “Walk like a Franciscan” (to modify a catchy tune of some years ago) this morning, I’m reasonably sure William is not moving my fingers on the keyboard when I write that I think he would choose the latter. In short, the simplest explanation, also supported by the best and most sensible tangential evidence, appears to be the best. Johnny is not a returned fighter pilot; Johnny is a pliable medium for the immortal entity which once manifested as a fighter pilot to manifest, partly, again.

Well, I’ll see you next time.

Marco. M Pardi[!gad]Atop my computer monitor sits a small sign: “Do Not Reincarnate.” I put this there on the chance that my big Stage Left moment might come while staring into the Looking Glass of All That’s Out There. This full disclosure is my brief way of ensuring that no ambiguities arise among the various interpretations of what I write below. Actually, most of us have response memes, easily or not so easily triggered, stored in our head jelly. When I hear someone respond to the question, “How are you?” by saying “Good” my meme, “Did not proceed beyond 4th grade” immediately activates.

In the same way, when I perceive in another person the physical cues usually indicative of a pleasant thought state in response to the term “Reincarnation”, my meme “Must have had a happy childhood” leaps to the fore. Solidarity is certainly not next up.

Why someone would want to return will be examined later. For now it is helpful to examine the concept and its history. Many volumes have been written on the subject of reincarnation. This article will not attempt to recapture or surpass them. The focus here will be on the fundamental world view, particularly as it relates to the individual versus the group.

As is true of so many cosmological and philosophical concepts, reincarnation has been interpreted on various levels, in different venues, and as both externally imposed (a punishment which may even include transmigration of souls) and internally allowed (a forgetting that perceptions are not real and therefore an attachment which has to be worked through). It has been viewed as a series of experiences needed to reach personal completion, and hence release. And, it can be a willful act of compassion (the Mahayana Buddhist Bodhisattva or the Tibetan Buddhist Tulku) in which an enlightened one returns to help others. Finally, it can be viewed in a rather resigned fashion as a Ferris Wheel with no off switch. As Madame Nozall would assure us, “You’se lived tousands an’ tousands a’ lives. Fifty bucks, on my palm.”

Scholars have long understood the broad and deep world history of this concept, far beyond the common wisdom which responds to this, and to karma, with a meme such as “that Oriental stuff”. Of course, reincarnation is best known, in the common sense, from relatively recent Eastern sources. However, there are definite elements of it, in a “racial” or ethnic sense in the world views of the Pre-Classical and Classical Near East. These elements clearly favor the collective Eastern view over individuated Western views, a tendency which remains to this day. Included here, but to a lesser degree, would be themes in Hellenic Greece.

It was Classical Greece, however, which gave us atomic theory, and the materialist/reductionist model of Aristotle. Despite over two subsequent millennia of doubt regarding the very existence of atoms, Aristotelian thought formed the spine of the developing and individuating Western Man. Guilt, the individuated internalization of responsibility, metastasized throughout what was to come to be called Western Society, molding its singular profile in defiant contrast to the inscrutably collective Eastern, and generally “Non-Western” visage. The Western Guilt view contrasted starkly with the Non-Western Shame view, the realization of the collective solidarity of the group, the existence of which is possible only because the members realize themselves as members and not as lone wolves.

Along the way, the emerging Western Christian Church fine focused individual guilt into a one-chance-to-get-it-right industry purveying penance and absolution at a cost. To ensure an income base, from donations and indulgences, the church decreed that parents must have their newborns baptized in the church by the second week of life. Failure to do so meant mortal sin for the parents. And, turning away from the faith once grown meant a more grievous mortal sin for the child who might later reject what was done in his infancy. The church also fixed the Age of Reason at seven years old, meaning that the seven year old was then capable of committing a sin which would doom him to the everlasting fires of Hell. This form of thought strongly encouraged the conception of the “immortal soul” as a discrete, measurable, and, otherwise, observable entity upon which an accountable record of rights versus wrongs could be tallied; sinners could have a rather spotty soul, and outright miscreants were blackened through and through.

Of course, in this all pervasive context, the idea that if you do not get it right in this life you will simply do it in another was anathema to the church; an acceptance of that would mean they could not terrify a person into obedience, with all the attendant income and power to be derived thereby. Reincarnation, where it appeared as an idea or theme, was pronounced heresy.
But any attempt to portray the evolving Christian dogma, or even the kerygma (the apostolic proclamation of salvation through Jesus Christ), as monolithic or immune to the inroads of acculturation would be fundamentally incorrect, as the many Councils and Synods through history have shown. The idea of reincarnation swam through church history like the Nessie of Loch Ness, sighted and sworn to, but never captured or killed. And, despite the church’s attempt to harness and direct emerging science, significant contributors to modern thought arose in even the early years. One of these was William of Ockham (the town also spelled as Occam). A very young Franciscan priest, William became quickly known for his profound mathematical skills. The modern meme for William, “Occam’s Razor,” derives from the exactly sculpted logic with which William underpinned his mathematics. Fundamental to that logic was the proposition that, where more than one explanation is possible for an event, the simplest and least burdened one is the best. Thus, a proposed solution can be put to the “If connected to a maybe” test. The fewer the conditional supports and tenuous connections, the closer to being the probable solution. The still standing model for what, in the parlance of physics is called “elegance” is Einstein’s famous equation containing simply three letters, one number, and an equals sign. We will return to William shortly.

The conflated secular/sacred individuation of the person in Western society was aided by the congruent development of time as a linear concept, leading to endless debates over “First Cause”. Joe Person, not particularly able to participate in such debates, settled comfortably for what was to become Newton’s “Clockwork Universe”, a marvel of linear and distinct cause and effect. Joe was apparently not bothered by the inconsistencies inherent in clerical references to his “immortal soul”; immortality, by definition, being endless. Yet, a beginning is an end viewed backward. A “side” is an end viewed sideways. An immortal soul, therefore, cannot have dimensions of either space or time (which Einstein would later show are basically the same thing); immortality, as in soul, cannot even be conceived by use of a term, such as “it” for that implies distinction from “not it”. But Joe was content with harvesting the grain, eating the ergot, and posing against haystacks for that odd painter named Pieter Brueghel.

In short, the soul as carry on was born. And, as we wait to change planes at the airport, or bodies at the cemetery/delivery room, this package either remains in the terminal for a while, checking various itineraries and on board amenities, or zips blissfully along the carousel to the next waiting plane/body whatever it might be and wherever it is headed. In this view, the path of life may be twisted or straight, but it is a path from here to there spatially and temporally.

Until, that is, quantum mechanics grounded Newton as certainly as his apple. When the realization of the micro world dawned in the early twentieth century, it was not met with unanimous acclaim. Indeed, Einstein described the behaviors of paired, but separated electrons as “spooky action at a distance”. Suddenly, space/time was meaningful only under clearly stipulated and limited conditions. Cause and effect became indistinguishable and moot. Here and there became the Zen like sound of one hand clapping. The soul as a discrete entity, for which there have actually been debates over the Occupancy Limit of “heaven” much like the vaunted angels on the head of a pin, became once again the indefinable, amorphous pan-ethnic entity of the Classical Hebrews, who correctly viewed the early Christian “good news” of personal resurrection as being an intrusion of Greek (as in Paul) materialism into a newly evolving dynamic. Indeed, the original Christianity found surviving in the Near East and Middle East today is unrecognizable to Western Christians, most of whom being totally unaware that their tradition is far more Greco-Christian than Judeo-Christian.

In contrast to this Western development, the cosmology of the East, in particular, stresses that individuation, the development of what Alan Watts called “the skin encapsulated Ego”, is an illusion. Furthermore, it is this illusion which artificially separates us from others, diminishing all of us in the process. As if “channeling” Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha, Jesus delivered this message in his famous Sermon on the Mount and many other sayings. In Thomas Laird’s stunningly comprehensive book, The Story of Tibet: Conversations with the Dalai Lama, the Dalai Lama himself firmly rejects the Western notion of a coherent package soul popping from body to body. But the Dalai Lama himself is identified, as a child, through behaviors thought to indicate the rebirth of a previous person. How can he reject “reincarnation”?

Remember that lava lamp you had in the ‘60’s or ‘70’s? Okay, remember that lava lamp you saw in the antiques and collectibles store? That one blob, pushed and kneaded by the heated oil in the lamp, moved through a myriad of cloud like shapes, extruding here, breaking off and rejoining there. But, it all came from one amorphous mass. In Tibetan Buddhism this is an image of the Over Soul, the Oneness of all sentient beings. The permutations are, in a way, what Westerners sense when they speak of wanting to “get back in union with God”. The Tibetans would say that the sense of separateness is an illusion based in the development of individuation so firmly entrenched in the West. A Bodhisattva, in the Hindu tradition, or a Tulku, in the Tibetan tradition, is one whose enlightenment (awakening to the Oneness) is such that he/she is able to join with the incipient soul in another body and to at least speak in unison with that developing soul if not in predominance over it. The outsiders, or investigating lamas, seeing or hearing characteristics of the now deceased former person, sense a “reincarnation” in that it seems clear that the former person is, at least in part, living through the present person. The Westerner might see a case of “possession”. Certainly, this is what two psychiatrists, Edith Fiore (The Unquiet Dead) and M. Scott Peck (numerous volumes) felt.

The idea of possession or, not to be racy – cohabitation, is usually, in the West, dramatized in extreme forms. But spinning heads and pea soup aside, the phenomenon is vastly more feasible than the physics defying encapsulation of a discrete, impermeable entity which hops from body to body over linear time, completely over riding the staggering mathematics of genetic and experiential neuronal permutations in the “new” brain while propping up the “old soul” in the window. Indeed, the latter concept is so far beyond making any sense that an entire logic system would have to be invented in order to support it.

Yet, there are “hypno-therapists” aplenty, claiming to specialize in “regression hypnosis” for those wishing to get in touch with their inner other or, as they would have it, their “true self”. Beyond bilking a few gullible customers, is there any harm? Although by no means is every regression-therapist a knowing fraud, numerous investigations of this practice have exposed so many instances of therapist induced “false memories” that the practice in general is not considered very reliable. And, confabulating another, “responsible” persona to explain (and possibly excuse) one’s behaviors is not considered productive therapy.

We also know that there are “trance mediums” who claim to set aside their consciousness to allow for a disembodied entity to enter and take over the helm, speaking through them. Here again, there are obvious frauds, obvious “wannabees”, and obvious wishful believers. However, there are trance mediums who are able to deliver accurate and detailed information previously unknown to anyone present. Numerous standardized methods ascertain that the trance state is authentic. And, the information which could not have been obtained in any other way can be verified. Obviously, the medium did not die each time and return to life in adult form as a vessel for someone else. Fortunately for the medium, death is not necessary. When we compare the medium’s claim of making room to the reports of young children who seem to be vessels for a “reincarnated” person we might say that the common denominator here is the medium’s ability to make a “vacancy” and, since the child is typically not yet ego hardened into an adult persona, the child’s having a “vacancy” which can be entered by a disincarnate intrusion. This intrusion, in spectacular cases apparently quite fully developed, seems to be coming from the child’s “own deepest memories”. Or so it seems. But the less than logical observer would quickly opine that the child must be “remembering a past life”.

Let’s ask William. “William, here are two proposed possibilities. First, a purported system in which a disembodied soul remains intact, discrete, and impermeable to intrusion or ‘leakage’, hangs around in some unknown waiting area while checking the future life paths of various embryos (all the while defying what we now understand of the illusory nature of time/space), enters the embryo of choice, over rides the myriad genetic and environmental variables in the development of the childhood persona, and spontaneously manifests as a previously existing person.

Or, the ‘disembodied person’ was always, and is, and will be a part of the totality of ‘over soul’ and only thought of himself as an individual as a result of being canalized through neurological and environmental ego development, and is manifesting through an as yet incompletely canalized child or through a medium who is able to make room. Applying your now famous ‘razor’, which makes the most sense?”

Not having done a “Walk like a Franciscan” (to modify a catchy tune of some years ago) this morning, I’m reasonably sure William is not moving my fingers on the keyboard when I write that I think he would choose the latter. In short, the simplest explanation, also supported by the best and most sensible tangential evidence, appears to be the best. Johnny is not a returned fighter pilot; Johnny is a pliable medium for the immortal entity which once manifested as a fighter pilot to manifest, partly, again.

Well, I’ll see you next time.

Marco. M Pardi Comments (1)

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