Reincarnation

As a Christian, I’m not supposed to believe in reincarnation. That said, there was a time before the emergence of Christian orthodoxy when many Christians did, and more recently the Cathars, for example, did believe it happened. There is also an allegation in the gospels that John The Baptist was a reincarnation of Elijah. Some Jewish mystics also believe in it. However, two things about this. Firstly, I’m not Christian in the sense of having faith in Christ as a living God and Saviour in human form because there seems to be a lot of evidence against the idea that the Holy Spirit exists. Secondly, although one’s knowledge and faith in the doctrines of one’s religion should be a guide, they should never be an excuse for dispassionate observation of the evidence or its lack regarding a possible fact of the matter. Ultimately, our only duty in this respect is to the truth, assuming truth to be absolute and bivalent, and that a correspondence theory of truth is correct rather than a coherence theory, and approaching something in this manner ultimately strengthens any justifiable faith. It’s part of a cycle.

I’m going to start from Christianity. An early argument I made to other Christians regarding reincarnation was that it seems to be more just than having just one shot at life, after which you’re either damned or saved. It gives one longer to commit to Christ or otherwise and enables one to make amends and have as many chances as are needed for salvation. As far as I know, though, no Protestant, Orthodox or Roman Catholic church today accepts the idea of reincarnation as a general process. This has apparently not always been the case. The Cathars were a twelfth century Gnostic Christian sect who believed humans were angels trapped in physical bodies who would not enter heaven until they were purified (hence the name, from the Greek καθαρσις), and until then we would be reincarnated. Cathar Perfects also always travelled as same-sex couples, which led others to attribute homosexual relations to them, although it isn’t clear whether this was defamatory or a fact. It was said to be to avoid sexual temptation. Unsurprisingly, the Cathars were persecuted by the Church. The Albigensian Crusade was conducted against them and they were massacred and executed. In fact their doctrine doesn’t appeal to me because they’re Gnostic, but I hope I don’t need to say that I consider their massacre to be a great evil. They may have been an invention of the Church as an excuse to kill lots of people. I’m not aware of the details here. As a thirteen year old I liked the idea of the Cathars and regarded myself as one because I saw myself as a Christian who believed in reincarnation. A friend of mine saw this as a very bad thing because of their apparent tolerance of homosexuality. They were influenced by the Bogomils and a group I’ve not otherwise heard of called the Paulicians. The Bogomils were also Gnostic and opposed to physical and institutional places of worship as their own bodies were considered to be temples, which makes no sense to me because they were supposed to be Gnostics, who believe matter is evil and see the body as a prison as far as I know.

There’s a widespread belief among both supporters and opponents of reincarnation, that the early Church accepted the belief, and in particular Origen of Alexandria, born 184 CE, is said to have implied that it happened. Origen certainly believed that souls existed before conception. He also believed in a succession of universes in which souls appear to become incarnated in each æon, so that definitely sounds like a form of reincarnation, although not in the sense that someone living in his time might still be around today in a different body so much as that after the end of this æon, a new world will be created and they would live a life then, just as they had before this æon.

The soul has neither beginning nor end. [They] come into this world strengthened by the victories or weakened by the defeats of their previous lives.

Falsely attributed to Origen but widely publicised.

It looks as if Origen’s cosmology has been vaguely passed on to people who later read into it what they wanted to hear, so when they hear the word “reincarnation”, more strictly μετεμψυχωσις, they tend to assume it means a soul living a series of lives in the same universe rather than having one instance per æon in a sequential multiverse. However, the fact that there were still Gnostic Christians around in the fourteenth century who had inherited their own beliefs from other religious groups suggests that there may have been an underground Gnostic movement which survived the early Church and, through all that time, maintained such a belief. In fact I’m wondering if Origen’s belief was in fact modified in the same manner as the popular misconception of it today has been, and that in fact they just plain did believe in reincarnation.

Judaism has a tendency to be quite positive in some places about beliefs which Muslims or Christians tend to clamp down upon. For instance, whereas orthodox Protestant and Roman Catholic churches usually reject divination outright nowadays, including the Kabbalah, Judaism not only embraces it as part of its own tradition but actually seems to prize it and encourage certain people, namely older men, to explore it. Jews do not perceive the Tanakh (Hebrew Bible – what Christians tend to call the Old Testament) to refer to reincarnation and the Talmud never refers to it either. However, the Karaites, a non-Rabbinical sect of Judaism which relies directly on the written Torah, believe in gilgul, “rolling” of the soul between bodies as they live out their lives. One reason for this is that it seems to explain the suffering of small children, because if they sinned in previous lives this can be seen as divine retribution. The Zohar refers to the idea several times, stating that a proud man (sic) might be reincarnated as an insect or worm. It also says Cain’s soul entered the body of Jethro and Abel’s the body of Moses. The Hasidim just plainly and explicitly believe in reincarnation and say that particularly enlightened individuals are able to remember previous lives. Apart from gilgul there is also dybbuk, which is spirit possession, and ʻibbur, which is where a soul enters a person’s mind from heaven to assist them. However, as far as I know observant Jews nowadays don’t usually believe in reincarnation. As usual, the specific beliefs of faithful and observant Judaism do vary considerably on this matter.

In the Christian New Testament, a claim is made that Jesus may be a reincarnation of Elijah.

 “See, I will send the prophet Elijah to you before that great and dreadful day of the Lord comes. ⁶ He will turn the hearts of the parents to their children, and the hearts of the children to their parents; or else I will come and strike the land with total destruction.”

Malachi 4:5-6, New International Version

This is of course the Tanakh, but in the New Testament, the following passage, one of several, appears:

They replied, ‘Some say John the Baptist; others say Elijah; and still others, Jeremiah or one of the prophets.’

Matthew 16:14, New International Version

This at least suggests that many saw Jesus as an example of what was at some point referred to as ʻibbur, a soul descending from Heaven (which doesn’t seem to be a very Jewish concept incidentally) to help Jesus, or perhaps a plain and simple reincarnation of Elijah. This cannot, as far as I can tell, be reconciled with the later orthodoxy about the nature of Jesus Christ, but interestingly the phenomenon of ʻibbur is remarkably similar to Stapledon’s ideas in ‘Last And First Men’ and ‘Last Men In London’, and of course also somewhat similar to the idea of Bodhisattva.

So in the end, I think I would say that there is definite evidence for the acceptance of the idea of reincarnation in Judaism and heretical Christianity, and early on perhaps even in the embryonic Christian church itself. Of course that doesn’t mean reincarnation is a reality, but it’s just interesting that it isn’t as far from the Abrahamic tradition as is sometimes assumed. The Druze are another example of Abrahamic religionists who believe in it.

The spiritual home of the doctrine of reincarnation is of course generally perceived to be in South Asia, where it’s held to be true by Jains, Hindus, Buddhists and, perhaps surprisingly, Sikhs. Among them, the idea is more formalised and linked more explicitly to karma. Jainism, probably the most physicalist of all religions, sees the soul as weighed down by karma as a kind of subtle contaminating matter which sticks to it when one acts in such a way as to tie oneself to the cycle of life in the world below mokṣa, as with inflicting suffering, lying, theft or committing sexual misdeeds. Buddhism can sometimes analyse the soul completely away and just see things in terms of karma being passed on, and I will return to this as it seems quite significant to me. The idea of reincarnation in Hinduism is so familiar it isn’t worth going into here. It’s worth noting, though, that the link made between the moral quality of one’s life and reincarnation present in both Judaism and the dharmic faiths, and usually inherited in the West from this source, is not present in other parts of the world.

Pythagoras believed in reincarnation and passed the belief to other Ancient Greeks, and at the same time the religion of Orphism, which may have been influenced by Indian thought. Elsewhere in the world beliefs in reincarnation also exist, for instance among Native Americans and Australian Aboriginals. It could be that the religions of South Asia only happen to include belief in reincarnation because they better preserve a more universal ancient human tradition of spirituality than in many other places. In Siberia, children are given the names of dead relatives in the expectation that they receive their personalities. That said, other groups of peoples do believe in an afterlife instead, with no reincarnation, hence ancestor worship.

All that said, this needn’t imply that reincarnation actually happens. There are many near-universal beliefs which have turned out not to be so. Presumably at some point in the remote past, everyone assumed the world was flat, and everyone was wrong. But are we assuming here that those who do believe in reincarnation are in that particular aspect more ignorant than we are? For all we know, they were drawing conclusions on evidence that suggested that hypothesis. In a sense, the scientific method didn’t exist at that time but human beings were still capable of reasoning and used it to improve their quality of life, so why conclude they were wrong or merely superstitious? Why believe in reincarnation or an afterlife, or something else? It does stand to reason that fear or mere incomprehension that such a complex thing as a human personality and consciousness could cease to exist permanently with death, and therefore that the afterlife or reincarnation could be seen as rationalisations, but why choose one over the other? Does it say something about a culture which one they believe in? Are there other beliefs apart from extinction and oblivion?

I also have no idea which belief is more popular or whether they coexist in the same spiritual traditions.

A belief can be thoroughly explained as fulfilling some kind of emotional and social function without turning out to be incorrect. These two approaches are in different realms. In a less culturally integrated situation, belief in reincarnation can still satisfy some kind of need. One example of this is past life therapy. Here, a patient is hypnotised and regressed into time before their birth, at which point they may receive the impression of having lived other lives before this one. Dr Edith Fiore is one such practitioner. She has worked with countless people in this respect, making a connection between their current physical and mental conditions and experiences in their past lives. For instance, someone who suffered headaches might find she had been clubbed to death in a previous life or someone with a phobia of heights might find that they fell to their death previously. Now, I’m not convinced that these are real but I can see that it might help someone make sense of their life today to have these apparent explanations available and even that they might help resolve physical symptoms and illnesses to some extent. Fiore apparently went on to look at cases of spirit possession and alien abduction, which sets off my bogometer, but her work on past life therapy precedes these and I wonder what that’s about. I can still believe that this could be helpful even if it has no basis in reality. Fiore’s view seems to be that the soul has a fixed gender and passes from life to life, which manifests itself as someone mainly experiencing life as cis but without any necessary sense of incongruence or dysphoria when they’re trans. I can actually get on board with this in a limited sense because I think the cis/trans division isn’t primary. Rather, the division is between people for whom their perceived gender is significant and those for whom it isn’t, but of course I have a whole other blog devoted to that. I will just say two things here though. Firstly, I’m aware that there are gender-incongruent people who explain their condition as a soul of one gender in the body of a different sex, and secondly, I think most people who believe in souls also believe that they’re either not gendered at all or that they all have the same gender. I also have an issue with how non-binary and intersex people are supposed to fit into that picture. However, my point is that people in the here and now are using the concept of reincarnation as a therapeutic tool, to explain what they otherwise find inexplicable. However, past life regression often seems not to be historically accurate and may be confabulation. Even if the memories retrieved existed ready-made in the subject’s brain, the same may be true of dreams, and there is at least a lot of extraneous information in those which don’t correspond to waking life or anything in it. For instance, a couple of nights ago I dreamt my carpal bones are being guarded by a pack of dogs. This means nothing literally, though it probably does reflect my felt need to protect my arms from injury when moving my father around.

The notion of karma is another one of these. There is of course a cognitive bias called the “Just World Fallacy”, apparently also known as the “Just World Hypothesis”. This is the belief that life is fair. Consequently, when bad things happen to good people it’s sometimes because of something bad that they’ve done in the past, and doing good brings rewards. Sometimes karma is evoked to explain this, and before I go on I should state that I do in fact believe in karma but not in this way exactly. Sometimes, it seems more that a just and loving deity is acting to balance the scales of justice. A lot of this amounts to victim-blaming and self-aggrandisement, but the position of past lives is clearly evoked as one way to explain how, for example, a child might be born with a life-threatening health problem. I have to say that this particular version of karma is pretty irksome to me and can also come with a general negativity about life as found in, for example, Ayurvedic medicine, where reproduction and development are generally viewed in a negative light and by extension women are seen as inferior since they are thought of as the vessels for new life, i.e. a failure of a spirit to achieve nirvana. That’s a nauseating, disgusting view and I want no truck with it.

Some people do believe past life therapy is “real”, but that it doesn’t involve the patients’ own past lives. Rather, they see it as their minds reaching out into the past to find lives which resonate with their problems. This could explain, for example, the clichéed “I used to be Cleopatra” phenomenon. It is possible that someone felt an affinity with her and made that connection, and therefore that there is a genuine psychic connection which is not, however, the same as reincarnation. Or, much more simply, maybe they just have a strong desire to have lived a glamorous and important life, perhaps like that of Jayne Mansfield, who is of course someone I used to believe I was personally a reincarnation of. And as I’ve said, I do still feel, on seeing her eyes and face, that that’s me looking back at myself. A powerful impression, but not something which has any basis in reality. I’m not that delusional, or at least my beliefs are not delusional in that particular respect. It serves mainly as a reminder of how vivid these impressions can be.

The probability of any random person being a reincarnation of Marilyn Monroe, Cleopatra, Napoleon or any other famous individual is of course very low if identity survives death and the self is incarnated in a single body as a complete entity. I don’t know how many Hollywood stars there were in 1967 but I do know there were more than a million births between Mansfield’s death and my birth, so even if there were a thousand of them the chances are only a thousand to one. It didn’t happen. No matter how strong and eerie my feelings are when I see her in a film or a photo, I know this is an illusion, but it illustrates the power these impressions have over the mind.

There do appear to be genuine memories of past lives. For instance, there’s a case of a mediæval peasant in England who suffered a head injury and is said to have been able to speak only in Ancient Greek when he recovered consciousness, and the religious context of that makes it unlikely that he would have faked that. This is of course also anecdotal. It’s also common for children to spontaneously recall apparent past life memories. These occur whether or not there is a belief in reincarnation in their community or family, and fail to correlate with mental illness, and they also take place where there is no contact with mass media. These memories are usually reported between the ages of two and five and the children concerned often seem to have phobias and likes which don’t seem to result from learned experience since birth. Sometimes these apparent memories correspond to those of another person whose life can be discovered, and there may be birthmarks corresponding to injuries sustained in that person’s life. This sounds outlandish of course, but it’s backed up by studies undertaken by medical scientists and is not in this case just anecdotal or hearsay. There’s a list of peer-reviewed scientific papers here. This is not just a load of superstition.

I think there might be two coëxisting explanations for this which are akin to dreams. It’s probably best to describe dreams first. Daniel Dennett is prominent among the proponents of the idea that dreams are not experiences but false memories. I agree with this to some extent but don’t think they are best explained in this way because of lucid dreaming and the axes which Dennett has to grind. His own explanation of lucid dreaming is pretty poor and violates Ockham’s Razor. You’ll probably gather that I have little respect for Dennett’s thought. Even so, it’s plausible to me that in waking life, dreams are reconstructed memories from the brain state during REM sleep. However, this doesn’t stop dreams from being experiences but may indicate that the relationship between consciousness and time is different with dreaming than it is during wakefulness, and this is also a waking explanation for dreaming and shouldn’t be taken as authoritative because the waking state of consciousness is not the only one and may not be given a higher status than others. Past life memories in small children could be similar. The physical state of the brain in early life is analogous to someone who has just woken from a dream because it may contain various things experienced as impressions and memories which didn’t actually occur in the literal past, but in a projected past created as a result of the physical impossibility of death in the mind of someone living. However, just as dreams are a different relationship between consciousness and reality than waking consciousness, preëxistence could be too.

The reminiscence bump is a peak in strong memories of one’s life. For most people it occurs between fifteen and twenty-five. That is, people tend to remember that decade of their lives more vividly than the rest. Oddly, this doesn’t correspond to the age people go back to when they have dementia, which is often their thirties. Anyway, like most other people I do have this reminiscence bump, which for me corresponds to the years from 1982-92. However, musically I have recently realised I have a previous apparent reminiscence bump I can’t account for. A couple of years ago, I attempted to identify how much of the ’60s I could actually remember, and unsurprisingly a lot of this involved singles which I remembered from when they were popular and first released rather than having heard them since. I wrote these down and found, very surprisingly, that they were almost all from May 1967, which is two to three months before I was born. My current explanation for this is that I heard them in the womb, although that may not make much sense because babies are apparently born with synæsthesia and fail to label their sensory experience as consisting of separate senses. However, it’s also true that transracial children who were exposed to the auditory environments of their birth mothers in utero have been shown to pick up their parental languages significantly faster than those of their adopted communities, which suggests that fetuses can hear. This raises another issue. When does reincarnation occur? If it’s after the second trimester, do premature babies have souls? There are two explanations I can think of for my musical reminiscence bump which are interesting as opposed to probable. One is that I simply remember them from hearing them in utero. This is actually quite problematic as many scientists would reject the possibility that the human brain is sufficiently organised at that time to do that, and also I’m not sure how clearly an ear immersed in amniotic fluid with more such fluid between it and the amnion, uterine wall and abdominal wall can hear music. Our daughter clearly could hear fireworks five months after conception, but loud bangs are not the only part of instrumental and vocal music. Another explanation is that these are the memories of someone who was old enough to recognise music and remember it, possibly my mother or even Jayne Mansfield, or more likely, someone who was adolescent to adult at the time. Perhaps this is part of someone else’s reminiscence bump, born between 1942 and 1952.

There seem to be two major problems with reincarnation. One is that we don’t seem to have memories of future lives or lives of entities elsewhere in the Universe. I should probably explain this. The passage of time as we perceive it seems to be associated with being living, conscious bodies of the kind we are, and in fact we don’t always perceive it at all. If there is a soul existing separately from the body, it would seem to be in a timeless state which doesn’t experience time as flowing. That would mean that incarnations of the soul are like the spines of a sea urchin, puncturing spacetime in various places but converging at a central point which is the soul itself, not subject to spacetime. If this is so, it might be expected that there’s no difference between a life in the nineteenth Christian century and one in the thirty-seventh, or life here on Earth and another in a Bernal sphere in the Andromeda Galaxy back in the Eocene. But we only seem to remember adjacent lives in the relatively recent past. We also don’t seem to recall contemporary lives, which is a bit odd as well. A partial explanation is that we tend to remember spatiotemporally adjacent lives better than ones which are more distant, and our memories of the future tend to be interpreted as precognition, visions, prophecies, whatever.

The other problem is that there doesn’t seem to be a soul in the sense used here. This is problematic in various ways, for instance it doesn’t seem to explain how God can exist or how we can apparently communicate with the dead, because even if that’s faked by Satan or demons they would still be incorporeal beings, in other words souls. However, there seems to be nothing about the human body which suggests it’s “haunted” by a ghost-like entity. There’s no sign of the brain being able to do anything which isn’t amenable to naturalistic explanation. From a religious perspective, the Bible definitely seems to deny that there are such things as souls quite clearly, so a Christian such as I ought to be physicalist, believing only in conscious lumps of matter called people. Therefore, there is a problem. How can reincarnation happen if there are no souls to be reincarnated?

I think a clue to the explanation lies in the possibility of precognition. If we have a convincing impression of life in the future after our own deaths, we usually don’t interpret it as a memory of a future life but as extrasensory perception. We asymmetrically interpret ESP, real or not, according to when and where its source seems to be. An impression of a contemporary distant event or object is generally understood to be remote viewing (assuming it’s visual) or telepathy. The same impression of a future event or object is interpreted as precognition or prophecy. But when we have apparent memories of a time before our conception, we call that reincarnation, or see it as evidence of that. What’s wrong with the idea that we simply receive impressions throughout space and time and just label them as belonging to us when they’re from the past? Alternatively, what’s wrong with the idea of seeing future memories as future reincarnations? Quite a lot in the other case, but if you believe in reincarnation, why wouldn’t you have memories of future lives as well as past ones? And rather chillingly, maybe the reason we don’t have memories of past lives away from this planet is that we’re alone in the Universe. Even so, it seems more likely that we just experience lives which are nearby in time and space.

I mentioned previously that not all Buddhists believe in souls, but they still believe in reincarnation. This is because they don’t conceive of anything which makes up a person continuing to exist after their death for more than a very short period of time, except for their influence on the world. I should point out at this stage that I’m recounting this from memory. It’s true that what one does in one’s life sends out ripples which leave their mark on the world, very obviously through having descendants for example, but in myriad other ways. This doesn’t require a non-naturalistic account, and it means that these ripples, which could be seen as karma, could converge on the as yet unborn. This is closer to how I see apparent reincarnation.

You’ve probably noticed that I’m not remotely sceptical about psychic abilities and the supernatural. This is because they seem to be part of my and other people’s everyday experience and there doesn’t seem to be a naturalistic explanation for them. For instance, on many occasions I’ve experienced the symptoms which clients have had several seconds before they contact me for the first time, and I had a dream on 15th September 1983 of events which appeared to involve people I had yet to meet with recognisable landmarks and buildings in Leicester, a city of which I then knew nothing and had no idea that I’d end up living there. Moreover, this is not confabulation as I wrote a detailed description of the dream in my diary at the time. I think probably most people have these kinds of experience as well as many others which are at first wanting of a boring explanation but eventually get one with some careful thought or analysis. One of these is that the sheer plethora or experiences is bound to turn up the occasional coincidence which will register with one’s pattern-recognition device, the human mind, when it seems to be significant but not with the many more which don’t. But given that I learned to predict when a new client was about to ring me based on these experiences, for example, this doesn’t seem to fall into that category. Nor do I think I’m unusual in that respect. I would expect most people to have these experiences but perhaps dismiss them or ignore them. I do the same with many of mine, but I do acknowledge that they happen.

As I’ve said, Ockham’s Razor needs to be applied to this. We seem to have impressions gathered non-naturalistically, but we sort these into separate categories according to when and where they occur, so we end up thinking that there are different phenomena involved: precognition, telepathy and reincarnation. Reincarnation is particularly problematic because it seems to require belief in a soul. The simplest explanation is that since there is no soul in that sense, our minds simply receive accurate impressions from elsewhere in time and space through means other than our recognised physical senses. It may not even be necessary to abandon metaphysical naturalism here. We can just acknowledge that they exist but that we don’t know how they can.