“REINCARNATION”
A Sermon by the Rev. Bruce Clear
Sunday,
All
Last year, I spoke from this pulpit
about “The Religion of Benjamin Franklin.”
Fitting with his religious views, as well as his sense of humor, he once
proposed the following for his epitaph for his gravestone:
The body of
B. Franklin, Printer
(Like the Cover of an Old Book
Its Contents torn out
And Stript of its Lettering and
Guilding)
Lies here, Food for
But the Work shall not be Lost;
For it will (as he Believ’d)
Appear once More
In a New and More Elegant
Edition
Revised and Corrected
By the Author.
Benjamin Franklin is one of a number
of people we are surprised to find out believed in reincarnation of the human
soul, which he compared to publishing a new and more elegant edition of an old
book. In a more serious vein, he wrote
this:
“When I see nothing annihilated and not a drop of water wasted, I
cannot suspect the annihilation of souls, or believe that [God] will suffer the
daily waste of millions of minds ready made that now exist, and put himself to
the continual trouble of making new ones.
Thus, finding myself to exist in the world, I believe I shall, in some
shape or other, always exist.”
I speak today on the subject of
reincarnation. The topic is in some ways
inspired by the choir. This month, they
are presenting a series of presentations from the Rig Veda, the oldest of Hindu
sacred texts. Last week I spoke on
Hinduism in particular, but this week I choose to speak on one of the central
concepts of Hindu thought: reincarnation.
I will address the Hindu approach to this idea, but my purpose is much
broader – to look at reincarnation as a concept regardless of the religious
tradition being addressed.
Reincarnation is an idea central to
Hinduism, but it is also found, in one form or another, in almost all religious
traditions, though it is explicitly rejected by the mainstream of some of
them.
I expect everyone here has some idea
of what reincarnation means, but I might as well begin with a definition. Reincarnation refers to the idea that the
human soul does not die when the human body does, but it reappears in a new
body some time later. It posits that
each of us, or at least our spirit, has had many past lives leading up to our
present life. This is what
From this simple premise, there are
countless varieties of explanations about how reincarnation works. Some believe that souls are immediately
reincarnated upon death, and reappear in other persons being born without any
interval (or at least a short interval) of time. Others claim that there is a long interval
between lives where the souls can reflect on the many lessons it learned during
its earthly existence. Some limit the
idea of reincarnation to human beings, but others believe we can return as
animals, insects or even plants. Some
say that it isn’t so much a person’s soul that reincarnates, it is more the
continuation of the life energy or spirit.
I spoke with one member this week who told me of his belief in what he
calls “re-manifestation” – that our life force can re-appear in many different
forms, even across the universe. This
“re-manifestation” seems to me an intriguing spin on the idea of
reincarnation.
After all, we are told by science
about the conservation of energy – that the total energy in the universe
remains constant; it only transforms into different forms. So if the idea of “life energy” makes sense,
the idea of “re-manifestation” of that energy also can make sense.
Whatever the specifics of
reincarnation, implicit in the idea is the concept also central to Eastern
religions known as “karma.” According to
the idea of karma, our actions in this life will affect what happens to us in
the next life. If I have wasted this
life and been selfish and so forth, I am destined to have another life that is
more challenging and less rewarding next time.
If I have used this life to improve myself, and learned lessons of right
and wrong, I will be rewarded in the next life by facing new challenges that
aren’t as difficult as the previous one.
Karma means that you are rewarded or punished in your next life
according to how well you lived out this one.
One of the key ideas of
reincarnation, in almost all views of it, is that it encourages us to improve
ourselves over time. There are life
lessons to be learned, very positive lessons about how to treat other people,
and how to set our priorities of what is important in life. If we do a poor job – if we don’t learn
lessons of kindness toward others and owning good values, we are destined to
live lives over and over that face the same issues. We live the same lives over many times until
we get it right.
But if we go through life learning
the lessons that are presented us, then we advance to another life that faces
new lessons. This continues until we
have tackled all the lessons that need to be learned. When that happens – and various traditions
disagree on the details of this – the cycle of reincarnation can finally
end.
When I say there are lessons to be
learned, let me offer a few concrete examples.
If in this life I were to become wealthy (there is room for fantasy
here) and not care about those who are poor, I might find myself in the next
life a poor person, for I need to learn what poverty means. Or if in this life I am racist, in the next
life I am born into a minority racial group.
Or if now I put down gays and lesbians, in the next life I am a
homosexual. If I abuse children, I will
return as an abused child. And so
on. The point is that there is an
infinite number of opportunities to learn lessons about life that need to be learned.
Let me confess at this point that I
find this scenario to be quite positive.
To me it is far superior to, and more humane than, the idea of heaven
and hell. Heaven and hell just end with
reward or punishment, whereas reincarnation means improving your life. It may be psychologically satisfying to think
that Adolph Hitler or Charles Manson are suffering for their cruel activities
in life, but there is greater justice in the belief that Hitler has to live a
life as a persecuted Jew or that Manson has to learn what it means to live in
fear of violence and murder.
So it makes sense, this idea of
reincarnation. Making sense, of course,
is something different from being true.
So I want to look more directly at the reasons for and against believing
in reincarnation.
In a sense, a defense of the concept
of reincarnation begins with a single premise.
If you accept this premise, then you can go on to consider
reincarnation. If you don’t accept this
premise, then there is no reason even to consider reincarnation. The premise is a simple one:
“I am something other than my physical body.”
That is to say, if you believe a
person’s identity, their true self, is entirely accounted for by their atoms
and physical matter – including brain matter and other elements – and there is
nothing more to a person than their unique combination of physical elements
(combined perhaps with the interactions of that matter with its environment),
then when that physical matter ceases to exist, the person obviously ceases to
exist. End of story.
But if you think a person is
something other than, or in addition to, the physical matter that makes that
person up, then the question, “what happens to a person when the physical body
dies?” is worth asking.
The idea of a person being something
other than, or in addition to, their physical body, is a long-standing
debate. Last year Douglas Hofstadter, a
Pulitzer Prize-winning science writer, spoke to us from this pulpit. In one of his books he tackles the idea of whether
our personal identity is something different from our physical body. Here is part of what he said:
“You think to yourself:
“Here
I am reading page 5 of this book. I’m
alive; I’m awake; I see the words on the
page with my eyes; I see my hands
holding this book. I have hands. How do I know they’re my hands? Silly
question. They’re fastened to my arms,
to my body. How do I know this is my body?
I control it. Do I own it? In a sense I do. It is mine to do with as I like, so long as I
don’t harm others. . . .
. “If
I have this body, then I guess I am
someone other than this body. . . . I and my body seem both intimately connected
and yet distinct. I am the controller;
it is the controlled. Most of the time. .
. .
“We must not suppose that science
teaches us that every thing anyone would ever want to take seriously is
identifiable as a collection of particles moving about in space and time. Some people may think it is just common sense
to suppose you are nothing but a particular living, physical organism – a
moving mound of atoms – but in fact this idea exhibits a lack of scientific
imagination, not hard-headed sophistication.
One doesn’t have to believe in ghosts to believe in selves that have an
identity that transcends any particular body.”
So again, we return to the question,
if our personal identity is something other than our physical identity, what
happens to our soul, our personal identity, when the body dies. Asking the question does not lead inevitably
to any single answer, whether it be reincarnation or resurrection into some
heaven, or just existing in “another world.”
Even if you believe the person is separate from the body, you can also
believe that the person dies when the body dies anyway, and that’s it. But a belief in a personal identity beyond
the physical body opens up the question of an afterlife for that identity.
The idea of reincarnation is one of
the universal ideas that appears in about every culture and every
religion. In Eastern religions, it is a
fundamental tenet. In Western religions,
it has been considered a kind of heresy, though it appears over and over
again. In the
Perhaps one of the best ways to
review this concept is to look at how it has appeared in all the major world
religions. I want to review those ideas
as a way of clarifying the various meanings of reincarnation. I will present these from oldest to most
recent, in this order: Hinduism,
Buddhism, Judaism, Classical Greek Philosophy, Christianity, and Islam.
HINDUISM
Last week I spoke on the Hindu text
of the Bhagavad Gita. Here is a brief
excerpt that summarizes the process of reincarnation:
“As the embodied soul continually passes, in
this body, from childhood, to youth, to old age, the soul inhabits another body
at the time of death.”
No religion holds reincarnation more
central than Hinduism, the world’s oldest religious tradition. Hinduism suggests that before embodiment, the
soul has complete memory of its experiences and lessons of past lives, but the
process of birth causes us to forget all, so we may be unimpeded in our lessons
yet to come.
As I mentioned last Sunday, the
central tenet of Hindu religion is that enlightenment comes from our ability to
transcend our material desires. This is
the primary religious task. The soul is
aware of this before birth, but once embodied again, it needs to re-learn how
to transcend earthly desires, and it takes many lifetimes to succeed.
Hinduism also proposes that each
soul contains not just a person’s evolving identity, but also contains an
element of the divine, of God. Everyone
is a part of Brahman, of God.
The final reward for attaining
spiritual completeness – Nirvana – is to be released from the endless cycle of
birth and rebirth and become united for eternity with the Divine Source, with
God, with Brahman.
BUDDHISM
Buddhism is an offshoot of Hinduism
(much like Christianity is an offshoot of Judaism), and like Hinduism,
reincarnation is assumed – so obvious and taken for granted that there is
little need to justify it. However, the
idea of reincarnation is not quite as central to Buddhism as it is in the Hindu
tradition. In many schools of Buddhism,
such as Zen, which is so popular in the West, reincarnation is a minor tenet
and rarely the center of spiritual focus.
The Buddhist concept of
reincarnation differs in some ways from that of the Hindu, though the basic
system remains. Hindus believe that
there is within us a true self that can, through many lifetimes of spiritual
discipline, be revealed and identified, and it is that true self that
transmigrates from one life to the next.
Buddhism in general doesn’t accept a concept of a “true self.” It teaches that the world around us is
illusory, that our desires and our sufferings are illusory, and through many
lifetimes we come to recognize the illusions that make life a struggle. The end of the reincarnation process is not
to uncover the “true self,” but simply to be released from our artificial
desires, and therefore be released from pain.
The reward of becoming Enlightened over millions of lifetimes is to
finally end the cycle of birth and death.
JUDAISM
Judaism in general does not
acknowledge reincarnation, though neither does it reject it. It does appear in various forms in its
history, especially among the more mystical schools of Judaism. Some of the more orthodox mystical sects,
such as the Hassidics, continue to accept a doctrine of reincarnation. They were influenced by the Jewish mystical
tradition called the Kabbalah, which dates back to the third century B.C., and
includes an explicit tradition of reincarnation from its inception. There is some thinking that they were
influenced by Greek thought as well.
Yonassan Gershom, a contemporary
Hasidic rabbi and spokesman, said this in response to a question about
reincarnation:
“A lot of people have expressed extreme astonishment that Hasidim would
believe in things like reincarnation, prophetic dreams, miracles, angels,
spiritual healing – ideas which are often labeled as ‘New Age.’ What can I tell you? For them maybe it’s New Age, but for us it’s
ancient history.” (see the fascinating
FAQ about Hasidism at www.sytekcommunications.com/rooster/hasid1.)
In a recent book on Jewish views of
reincarnation, the authors, both rabbis, Rifat Sonsino and Daniel Syme give
this account of the Kabbalist tradition:
“The Kabbalists realized that not all righteous individuals in this
world receive their due rewards. Some
suffer, even though they observe the commandments of the Torah. Reincarnation seemed a plausible answer to
this ‘injustice.’ Some Kabbalists argued
that the pain a righteous person suffers in this world is not necessarily a
result of personal sins [in this life] but rather a consequence of acts
committed in a previous incarnation.”
You may have seen, as I have, that
the Kabbalah tradition in recent years seems to have had a resurgence, and the
locale of its new incarnation appears to be
CLASSIC GREEK PHILOSOPHY
Socrates, through his student Plato,
argued at length for the immortality of the soul. According to both philosophers, human souls
exist outside the world, waiting to embody a person at birth, and after living
a life in one body, they return to that in-between world again, waiting to be
embodied again, an endless cycle of reincarnation. There is ample evidence that by the time of
Plato adds an interesting twist to
the scenario of reincarnation. Through a
parable he called “The Myth of Er,” Plato tells us that in between lives the
soul remembers everything it has learned.
Upon rebirth, however, the soul forgets, and the task of life is to
remember the wisdom we once had before we were born into this life.
It would be a mistake
to think that all classical Greek philosophers subscribed to the idea of
reincarnation (Aristotle rejected it, for example), but certainly the founders
did.
This notion that our
soul has knowledge much deeper than we have, that it carries a destiny from a
distant past that we don’t fully comprehend, is not an altogether unique
idea. It is perhaps the foundation of
Wordsworth’s famous “Ode” on immortality.
Consider Plato’s “Myth of Er” when you hear these lines:
Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting;
The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar.
And again in this verse:
Hence in a season of calm weather,
Though inland far we be,
Our Souls have sight of that immortal sea
Which brought us hither.
CHRISTIANITY
It is clear that the vast masses of
Christians reject the system reincarnation.
They do not reject the notion of a soul, of course, that it is something
separate from the physical body, nor do they reject the notion that that soul
continues existence after death. The commonly
held Christian view, of course, is that the soul transmigrates to an eternal
place, heaven or hell, based upon the life of the person in the world.
Having said that, many would argue
that Christianity in general, and the Bible in particular, do not rule out
reincarnation. In fact, over history
there have appeared a number of Christian sects that have accepted it. Believers in reincarnation find support in
the New Testament, even though there is nothing that specifically advocates for
it. For example, in the Gospel of John,
the disciples asked Jesus about a man they met who was blind from birth. “Was this man born blind because of his
sins,” they asked, “or because of his parents’ sins?” Jesus, of course, denied any connection
between his blindness and sins, but he did not treat it as a silly
question. The question about someone
being born blind because of sins seems to imply that the disciples believed those
sins took place before his birth – presumably in a past life, and suggestive of
reincarnation.
Some suggest that the concept of
being “born again” – linked today to evangelical and fundamentalist sects, is
actually a statement of reincarnation.
Listen to these words of Jesus reported in the Gospel of John, but think
of them in terms of the Hindu cycle of lives leading to Nirvana or the Buddhist
cycle of lives leading to Enlightenment.
Jesus said, “Except a man be born again, he cannot see the
There are a number of biblical
statements like this that can be interpreted as accepting of
reincarnation. At minimum, it can be
said that the Bible teaches the human soul is immortal, and the process of
reincarnation is not explicitly ruled out by scripture, though it is
predominantly ruled out by most churches.
It might also be mentioned that the Bible seems to subscribe to a
certain form of the doctrine of karma, as when
One of the most prominent of what is
called “the Church Fathers” was Origin, an influential Bishop and theologian of
the second century. Origin explicitly
affirmed reincarnation. Though the
church later denounced the idea, Origin remains one of the most highly respected
of the early church thinkers.
The Gnostic Christian church, which arose around the time of Jesus, but
was only recently discovered by scholars, leaned toward reincarnation. The Albigensians, a Christian sect in
In the twentieth century,
reincarnation seems to have become again an option within some ranks of
Christianity. There has been a general
de-emphasis within the church about the scenario of heaven and hell, and
alternatives concepts have been offered.
Reincarnation remains a minority view within Christianity, but with the
flowering of religious diversity in the last generation, I suspect it is
increasing in its popularity.
ISLAM
As with the other two major Western
religions, Judaism and Christianity, views affirming reincarnation are in the
minority in Islam. Like the Kabbalah
Jewish tradition, reincarnation appears in mystical schools of Islam that are
not in the mainstream, though they are accepted parts of the larger
tradition. The Sufi movement, along with
its well known poets like Rumi, accept reincarnation. The Druze segment of Islam, a minority group
found in
You can see form this review that in
Eastern cultures, reincarnation is largely taken for granted, a basic
assumption of the way life works. In the
West it is hotly debated, usually on the level of evidence presented either for
or against reincarnation. Most evidence
for reincarnation takes one of two different forms. The first is memories acquired under hypnosis
– called “past life regression” – when subjects report details of facts from
there past lives, a generation ago or many centuries ago. Some of those reported facts can be looked up,
such as knowledge of geography where the subject has never been, or reports of
names of people in a particular year in a particular city that can be
documented. When those facts are
documented, they become evidence for reincarnation.
The other common form of evidence is that of children who recall
previous lives without the need of hypnosis, and can give names of family in
the former lives and important events such as how their previous father died –
again, details that can be looked up and documented. Some of this data has been reported in
scientific research, and much of this data that I have seen seems impressive,
if not persuasive.
There is also plenty of literature
that debunks the idea of reincarnation, and much of it seems to me also
persuasive. People have examined
specific cases of memory and shown how reports, either through hypnosis or
early childhood memory, are flawed. They
may have had some lucky guesses, but many things they say were way off the
mark. There is also little doubt that,
even if some of the reports have great merit, this field is littered with
frauds and charlatans, which the debunkers are quick to point out.
I could spend hours up here
reviewing all the evidence presented by advocates and critics – volumes of
material describing case after case of memories from children or adults. Then I could spend hours reviewing volumes of
material by those who reviewed the cases and found little reason to accept
them. Were I to do this, I doubt anyone
would be left in the room. And I would
be bored and exhausted talking to myself.
Anyway, at the level of evidence for and against the truth of reincarnation,
there is ample information for both sides, and the data may be pretty close to
a draw. What is interesting to me is how
much we are inclined to find explanations for mysteries – we can’t seem to say
simply, “I don’t know why that is the way it is.”
Perhaps the most credible argument I’ve found against reincarnation
does not have to do with evidence as much as it has to do with intuition. I mentioned earlier the premise that our
personal identity is something other than our physical body. Who we are is separate from the physiology of
brain and body. If we accept this premise,
then we can at least entertain the idea that a person, whether it be a soul or
spirit or something else, survives after the body dies. It may not, of course, but at least it is a
possibility. If we reject the notion of
the person being separate from the body, then it follows that when the body
dies the person dies.
This question reflects one of the
most central and persistent concepts in Western philosophy and religion. It is known as “dualism.” It is the philosophical view that mind and
matter are separate. Body and spirit are
separate. There is this world and there
is a “spiritual world.” There is an
earthly realm and a heavenly realm. Western
religion relies on dualism in establishing a belief in the “
Philosophy has adopted a similar
dualism in separating mind and matter. Rene
Descartes made the most extensive and lasting statement that our personal
identity is located in our minds not our bodies: “I think, therefore I am.” Dualism has had broader consequences in
turning humans into spirit, which is good, and the physical into matter, which
is not good. As a result, we in the West
have seen ourselves as something separate from, not interdependent with, the
environment around us, and the environment, mere “matter” that it is, exists
for us to exploit. And so forth.
But back to the premise: “Am I something separate from my physical
body?” There are not just two answers to
this, “yes” or “no.” There is also the
view, that I find credible, which says, “no, I am not identical to my body, but
who I am is somehow dependent on it.” My
mind (which is non-physical) is not the same thing as my brain (which is simply
matter), but my mind would not be what it is without my brain.
In the twentieth century, Western
thought has increasingly questioned the premise of dualism, which goes far back
into our history. There is no question
that our personal identity is intricately woven with our physical matter,
including the body organ known as the brain.
When someone is inebriated, for example, or even tired and exhausted, we
say, “he is not himself today.” Cruel
diseases such as Alzheimer’s or old age dementia are entirely physical factors
affecting the brain that change a person’s identity. A traumatic head injury can in fact change a
person’s personality.
It is also now known that the mind
has surprising powers over the body. One
of the strongest factors for healing is positive thinking. It is also true that “laughter is the best
medicine,” and that humor makes the body heal faster.
I say all this to indicate that
while the mind and body are not the same thing, they are exceedingly
interdependent. What is the implication
of all this toward reincarnation? If our personal identity – our “soul,” the
core of who we really are – is dependent upon something physical – that is, our
brain – then how can our personal identity survive the death of that which
makes it possible in the first place?
I’ve had quite a bit to say, maybe
too much, but I expect by now some of you are a little frustrated. “Okay, Bruce,” you are mumbling under your
breath, “do you believe in reincarnation or don’t you!” In the words of
I wish it were that easy to answer. I think reincarnation is what the philosopher
William James in his classic essay entitled “The Will to Believe” called “a
live option.” James said that there are
dead options and there are live options, and we are always free to believe live
options, even if we don’t know them to be true.
A live option is something that might be true because we don’t know it
to be false. Something we know to be
false is a “dead option.”
When primitive people observed a
solar eclipse, the explanation that it was caused because of the displeasure of
the gods was a “live option.” Since it
was the most credible explanation available to them, they were not unjustified
in holding that belief. The time came
when another explanation was not only offered, but was proven – that the
eclipse is cause by a shadow cast by the moon covering the sun. When this explanation was established, the
belief that it was caused by god’s judgment became a “dead” option. There was no justifiable reason to believe
it.
I believe reincarnation remains a
“live option” for us today – at least for me.
I hesitate to wander too far from generalities on the subject, and adopt
specific schemes that so many do adopt – about what precisely travels when we
say a soul transmigrates from one body to another, or precisely how the system
of karma defines the nature of our rebirth.
I am content to say that some general system of reincarnation remains a
live option for me, and I am not uncomfortable with the many ambiguities of how
and why it may work.
William James
closed his famous essay on "The Will to Believe" with a quotation
from Fitz James Stephen, written in 1874.
I will close my comments with his.
"What do you
think of yourself? What do you think of
the world? ... These are questions with
which all must deal as it seems good to them.
They are riddles of the Sphinx, and in some way or other we must deal
with them....
"In all
important transactions of life, we have to take a leap in the dark.... If we decide to leave the riddles unanswered,
that is a choice; if we waver in our answer, that too is a choice: but whatever choice we make, we make it at
our peril.
"Each must
act as he thinks best; and if he is wrong, so much the worse for him. We stand on a mountain pass in the midst of
whirling snow and blinding mist, through which we get glimpses now and then of
paths which may be deceptive. If we
stand still we shall be frozen to death.
If we take the wrong road we shall be dashed to pieces. We do not certainly know whether there is any
right one. What must we do?
"Be strong
and of good courage. Act for the best,
hope for the best, and take what comes.
If death ends all, we cannot meet death better."