Reincarnation
Reincarnation is the belief that a person's individual essence (soul or spirit) begins a new life in a different body or physical form after biological death.
This belief popularly brings together various terms:
- metempsicosis, coming from the Greek term goal (afterwards) and psyche (spirit, soul).
- transmigration (migrate through).
- reincarnation (return to incarnation).
- rebirth (return to birth).
All these terms allude to the existence of a soul or spirit that travels or appears through different bodies, generally in order to learn in different lives the lessons provided by existence in parallel universes in which it chose to reincarnate, until reaching a ascension of the state of consciousness, through lived experiences, which will allow you to continue evolving as part of a macro spirit.
Same phenomenon but without the belief in a soul or spirit:
- metensomatosis: comes from goal (afterwards) and Soma. (body).
- palingenesis or palingenesis: it comes from palin (again) and genesis (begin/beginning).
The belief in reincarnation has been present in humanity since ancient times, in most Eastern religions, such as Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism and Taoism, and also in some African and tribal religions of America and Oceania. In the history of humanity, the belief that a deceased person will live again or appear with another body (with a generally more evolved personality) has survived even within the Judeo-Christian religions (Christianity, Judaism and Islam), in the form of various heresies and unofficial beliefs.
Oriental religions and traditions
All the so-called dharmic religions (originating in Hinduism) affirm that reincarnation exists in an endless cycle (wheel of karma), as long as good actions or religious methods (good end or purpose or dharma) are not enough to cause a release or cessation of this cycle.
The traditional religions of various Asian countries (such as the ancient religions in China or Shinto in Japan) incorporate reincarnation and greatly influence popular devotion and the culture and folklore of these countries.
Hinduism
In Hinduism, it is not the Atman (the "soul") itself that reincarnates, but rather the subtle body that "envelops" the atman (sukshma sharira), which changes its physical body (sthula sharira) at the time of death.
In the beliefs of the Brahmanical religion, at the time of the death of the physical body (sthula sharira), the subtle body (sukshma sharira), leaves the body that it has become useless, and would be dragged by the Yamadūta, the servant messengers of the god Yama ―the one in charge of judging the karma of all souls in the universe―, to be judged. While in later traditions it is pointed out that it is the neutral effect of Karma that will generate reincarnation.
Depending on good or bad actions, the sukshma sharira reincarnates in a higher, intermediate or lower existence of the kamaloka, the realm of desire or realm of necessity of the Triloka (the three realms of existence, which make up the total reality of the universe). This includes everything from heavenly to hellish states of existence, with human life being an intermediate state. This incessant process is called samsara ('wandering'). This term comes from the Sanskrit verb samsrí: 'to flow together', 'to wander'. Eastern religions refer to this wandering (entertainment, greed, accumulation of goods, "killing time"...) as a life without purpose or meaning.
Each sukshma sharira travels on this wheel, which ranges from gods (devas) to insects. The meaning of the trajectory of a sukshma sharira within this universe is marked by the content or meaning of their actions. According to modern popular Hinduism, the state in which the soul is reborn is determined by its good or bad deeds (karma) performed in previous incarnations.
The quality of reincarnation is determined by the merit or lack of merit that each person has accumulated as a result of their actions; this is known as the karma of what the individual has done in their past life or lives. The souls of those who do evil, for example, are reborn in "inferior" bodies (such as animals, insects, and trees), or in even lower states of hellish experience, or in miserable lives. The weight of karma can be modified by practicing yoga (increasing consciousness to the highest contemplative and unitive levels, depending on the degree and modality of yoga), following the Dharma through good deeds (generosity, preserving inner joy, answering good for evil...), asceticism (depriving oneself of what numbs the senses and impedes the growth of the individual and ritual offering (value of gratitude and generosity).
In Hindu religious thought, the belief in transmigration first appears in doctrinal form in the Indian religious texts called Upanishads, which replaced the ancient non-philosophical epic texts called Vedas. (between 1500 and 600 BC). The Upanishads were written between 500 B.C. C. and 1600 AD. c.
The liberation from reincarnation in Hinduism (Moksha), or liberation from samsara, is achieved after having expiated or overcome the weight of your karma, that is, all the consequences coming from both his good as well as his bad deeds. This process is continuous until the individual soul, Atman, is fully evolved and identifies with or attains the absolute Brahman, where he is saved from the need for further rebirths. This identification happens through yogic and/or ascetic practices. After his last death, upon achieving the state of Moksha, his being leaves the material universe generated by Maia (the universal illusion), and merges in the Divine Light (the effulgence that emanates from Brahman), with the belief that the individual soul (atman), and the universal soul (Brahman) are identical.
Jainism
Jainism is another religion that came after Hinduism and arose at the same time as Buddhism. In Jainism, the souls are reaping the fruits of their good or bad actions through successive lives. When a Jain accumulates enough good karma, the purity of his soul can cause him to be reincarnated as a deva or semi-divine entity, although this situation is not permanent, so Jains seek liberation. definitive.
Sikhism
Reincarnation is a central belief of this monotheistic religion, also part of those encompassed under the word “Hinduism”. Sikhs believe that the soul has to transmigrate from one body to another as part of its evolution. This evolution will ultimately result in a union with God through purification of the spirit. If one does not perform good deeds, the soul continues to reincarnate forever. From the human form, if someone performs good deeds befitting a gurmuja , then he gets salvation with God. The soul is purified by reciting naam (name of God), keeping in mind the waheguru (spiritual master) and following the path of gurmat.
Buddhism
Buddhism arose from Hinduism, spreading through the eastern countries, but included a great reformation of its views until it constituted a new religion. He has a different notion of reincarnation, since on the one hand he denies it and on the other he affirms it. It denies that there is an entity in the individual that can be reincarnated (neither soul, nor mind, nor spirit) called anatman. But he affirms it by saying that a new individual appears based on the actions of a previous one. This notion of reincarnation is closer to palingenesis than to transmigration.
Buddhists believe that by realizing nirvana, the state of total liberation, the cessation of rebirth is also achieved. Within Buddhism, the Tibetan tradition uses reincarnation very frequently, while others, such as the Zen tradition, largely ignore it. Thus, the Tibetan tradition indicates that one must go through the bardo, which literally means 'intermediate state' or 'transition state', immediately after death, which would last 49 days according to the Tibetan Book of the Dead.
The differences in conception surely only come from the different point of evolution to which they are referring, or from how they conceive the possible paths of evolution in different ways, as well as the influence of different cultures. Beyond such "external" aspects -although they deal with very deep aspects- there would be a real and objective common essence, impossible to define with the limited human word.
Buddhism, unlike Christianity and Western religions, has never conceived a notion similar to that of "immortal soul" but is close to palingenesis. In the Milinda-pañja ('King Milinda's questions'), the sage who instructs the king states that there is a continuity between individuals (I am you and you are I), but that nothing transmigrates from one to another. to another. To understand such apparent differences, one would have to understand the theme of time and eternity, and how from eternity a macro-being separates into billions of beings that are individuals who believe they are separated from each other (a book that develops the theme is This is Seth speaking).
The Milinda-pañja exemplifies the (apparent) paradox with the simile of a torch lighting another: «Neither the flame nor the torch are the same, and yet one exists because of the previous one".
Buddhism posits nirvana as the cessation of the wheel of births and deaths. The mahāyāna school also adds a more universalistic meaning, stating that this cycle will end when all living beings have achieved enlightenment.
Shinto
Shinto did not identify itself as a religion until the arrival of Buddhism in Japan, so it was influenced by its beliefs. Being a mixture of animism and shamanism, he already had in mind the notion of reincarnation in the form of spirits or souls that were related to the living. Therefore, Shinto does not have a clear soteriology of salvation, but the Japanese turn to Buddhism for this. With the absorption of Buddhist notions, Shinto will convert some of its mythical elements, such as the so-called kami, into beings that reincarnate with various missions.
Taoism
Taoism is a philosophical vision of life and nature, whose religious facet is characterized by methods of life, health and meditation. According to Taoism, the Tao is a supreme principle that permeates the entire universe, and therefore its nature is immortal and eternal. Reincarnation exists since nothing dies as everything alive is flowing with the Tao. The Taoist does not seek to end reincarnation directly, but follows the path of the Tao whose culmination is to become one with the Tao, and therefore achieve the immortality of the Tao.
Religions and traditions of the West
Classical Greek Philosophy
Diogenes Laertius describes an anecdote in which Pythagoras recognizes a deceased friend in the body of a dog that had been beaten. According to Diodorus Siculus:
Pythagoras believed in the transmigration of souls, and considered the consumption of flesh as an abominable thing, saying that the souls of all living beings passed after death to other living beings. And as for himself, he used to manifest that he remembered being in Troy at the time of Euforbo, the son of Panthus, who was killed by Menelaus.Diodoro, Historical Library 10.6.1.
Plato is the main exponent of reincarnation in the Greeks that we know of. In the work Phaedrus, he writes how the human soul, according to the discovery of the truth that it has reached, will be born in one type of body or another. These existences suppose tests so that the souls are perfected. In The Republic , in the Myth of Er, it is explained how the mythical warrior Er dies on the battlefield but returns after ten days, during which he sees the souls of men waiting be reborn.
The Celts
In the I century BC Alexander Polyhistor wrote:
Pythagorean doctrine prevails among the Galos, teaching that the souls of men are immortal, and that after a certain number of years they return to another body.
Julius Caesar recorded that the Druids of Gaul, Britain, and Ireland held transmigration as one of their main doctrines:
Above all, to persuade the immortality of souls and their transmigration from one body to another, whose beliefs judge to be a great incentive for value, putting aside the fear of death.
Judaism
Similar to Christianity, reincarnation is not admitted as an official doctrine, although it appears within the Kabbalah. In the Zohar (2.99b) we read: «All souls are subject to transmigration, and men who do not know the ways of the Lord, may they be blessed; they do not know that they are being brought before the court, both when they enter this world and when they leave it. They are ignorant of the many secret transmigrations and tests they must pass."
Christianity
Christianity established in its main branches (Catholicism, Protestantism and Orthodoxy), rejects reincarnation in a majority way, considering it a doctrine contrary to the Bible, difficult to harmonize with the belief in resurrection, and alien to conception salvage that maintains this religion. In the epistle to the Hebrews (9:27) the New Testament conception is clearly established: "it is established for men that they die only once, and after this the judgment".
However, some denominations close to Christianity have accepted the belief in reincarnation; among them some of the Gnostic communities, in Antiquity, the Cathars in the Middle Ages and certain currents, not all of them, of Spiritism in the 19th century.
Ancient Christianity and Gnosticism
Within ancient Christianity, much, but not all, of Gnosticism accepted the doctrine of reincarnation, as it was a widespread belief in the cultural context of the time.
Some Church Fathers discussed the possibility of reincarnation in their writings, rejecting it outright. Among them Irenaeus of Lyon, in his polemic against the Gnostics, Tertullian, who was possibly the writer who devoted himself in greater depth to the subject, to which he devotes eight chapters of his treatise On the soul and Origen who writes explicitly against this belief, although some of his expressions seem to consider it acceptable.
Catharism
The Cathars (a Christian religious movement of a Gnostic nature that spread through Western Europe in the mid-11th century and managed to take root around the 12th century) also believed in reincarnation. Within his doctrine it is indicated that souls would reincarnate until they were capable of self-knowledge that would lead them to the vision of divinity and thus be able to escape from the material world and rise to the immaterial paradise. The way to escape the cycle was to live an ascetic life, uncorrupted by the world. Those who followed these rules were known as Perfects.
Hermetism
In the Hermetic traditions, reincarnation is mentioned in the Hermetic texts:
Oh son, how many bodies do we have to go through, how many bands of demons, how many series of repetitions and cycles of stars, before we rush into the One alone?Hermes Trismegisto (attributed)
In this body of beliefs it is considered that the soul is the container where the faults of men are poured, and once the body dissolves, they can rise or be punished for their impiety and attachment to bodily passions. Souls will go through the elements in a process of progressive purification, reincarnating until they reach the choir of the gods, but those who do not do so and live in impiety will see their return to heaven denied and will begin an ignominious migration unworthy of a holy spirit. incarnated in foreign bodies.
Research on reincarnation
Writer Ian Stevenson claimed to have researched numerous children who claimed to remember a past life. He carried out more than 2,500 case studies, over a period of 40 years, and published twelve books, including Twenty Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation. reincarnation) and Where Reincarnation and Biology Intersect. Stevenson methodically documented each child's statements, subsequently finding the identity of the deceased person with whom the child had identified, and verifying the facts of the deceased person's life that matched the child's recollections. He also found matches of birthmarks and birth defects to the deceased's wounds and scars, certified by medical records as well as autopsy photographs, in his book Reincarnation and Biology.
Stevenson searched for rebuttal evidence and alternative explanations for the reports, and believed that his strict methods ruled out all possible "normal" explanations for the children's memories. However, a vast majority of reincarnation cases reported by Stevenson originated in Eastern societies, where mainstream religions often allow the concept of reincarnation. As a result of this type of criticism, Stevenson published a book on European cases (European Cases of the Reincarnation Type). Other people who have conducted reincarnation research include Jim B. Tucker, Brian Weiss, and Raymond Moody.
Some skeptics, such as Paul Edwards, have scrutinized many of these accounts, calling them "anecdotal". Skeptics suggest that evidence claims for reincarnation originate from selective thinking and false memories, which often result from one's own belief system and basic fears, and therefore cannot be counted as evidence. empirical. Carl Sagan refers to the cases, apparently from Stevenson's investigations, in his book The Demon-Haunted World, as an example of data carefully collected empirical data, though he rejected reincarnation as an explanation of the stories as erroneous.
An objection to the reincarnation claims includes the fact that the vast majority of people do not remember past lives, and that there is no mechanism known to modern science that allows the personality to survive death and travel to another body. Researchers such as Stevenson have recognized these limitations. Another objection to reincarnation (which was already proposed by Tertullian) is that it would be inconsistent with population growth. Some authors consider that they have theoretically refuted this objection.
Contemporary Perspectives
Anthroposophy
Theosophy
New Thought and New Age
Some groups within New Thought and the so-called New Age also accept reincarnation.
Western Popular Culture
During the 20th century, the West has been more than permeable when it comes to assimilating religious-philosophical concepts from of the former British and French colonies in Asia, perhaps solely for the purpose of broadening the popular taste for the exotic and remote, and indirectly legitimizing expansionism with the favor of publicity. However, the experiential situation of many Europeans and Americans, victims of anguishing uncertainties caused by economic chaos and political tensions that directly affected personal conceptions of life, led to new ways of dealing with questions about suffering and existence. It was auspicious for the American and European aristocracy to avoid internal tensions between the current spiritualists (who have always had a suggestive influence, especially among the young) and the political search for consensus. Reincarnation diverted social injustices towards the metascientific explanation of karma, to such an extent that in the United Kingdom and the United States numerous orientalist sects emphasized political neutrality and resignation to the dire facts of social and personal life., in favor of a search for the "truth" in oneself in order to transcend to a better existence in a supposed future life.
The notion of rebirth is also found among the aborigines of the prairies in the United States:[citation needed] they believe that in life man walks the Red Road or the Camino Negro and that when he dies he makes a trip whose culmination in case he has followed the first path, consists in ceasing to be born and die and to be able to withdraw into the center of all things. On the other hand, a life full of selfish and mistaken affections, becomes worthy of new births to purge their conduct.[citation needed]
Criticism
Traditional Exponents
Among the traditional thinkers who have criticized reincarnation is René Guenón who elaborates on the concept in his book El error espiritista. He affirms that this doctrine is Western and has nothing to do with Eastern doctrines such as metempsychosis or the transmigration of souls:
Reincarnation is an idea belonging to the Kardecist Spiritism that has been adopted by other neo-spiritualist schools. The beginning was not free of controversy. Thus, the American and English spiritists were unanimous in their opposition (see Daniel Dunglas Home, Les lumières et les ombres du spiritualismep. 118-141). In France itself, some of the first Spiritists, such as Piérart and Anatole Barthe, separated themselves from Allan Kardec on this point; but today, it can be said that the French Spiritism has made the reincarnation a true "dogma". It is from the French spiritism where this idea was taken by the theosophism first and then by the Pabloite occultism and various other schools. The idea itself is a modern invention entirely Western. It would be fairer to speak of "social conception": for the French socialists of the first half of the nineteenth century, who were framed by Allan Kardec, this idea was meant to provide an explanation of the inequality of social conditions. Spiritists have preserved this same motive and even wanted to extend the explanation to all inequalities, both intellectual and physical (Allan Kardec, Le Livre des Espirits, p. 102-103; M. Léon Denis, Aprés la mort, p. 164-166; Papus, Traité méthodique de Science oculte, p. 167 and La Réincarnation, p. 113 and 118).René Guenón
The Hindu orientalist Ananda Coomaraswamy, in his book Vedanta and the Western Tradition, states:
I do not say that a belief in reincarnation has never been maintained in India. I say that such a belief can only have resulted from a poor popular interpretation of the symbolic language of the texts; and that the belief of scholars and modern theosophists is the result of an interpretation of equally simplistic and uninformed texts.
Composite being is undone in the cosmos; there is nothing that can survive as a consciousness of being Fulano. The elements of the psychophysical entity disintegrate and pass to others as a legacy. This is indeed a process that has been taking place throughout the life of our Fulano, and it is a process that can be followed very clearly in the spread, repeatedly described in the Indian tradition as the "revival of the father in and as the son". Fulano lives in his direct and indirect descendants. This is the supposed Indian doctrine of "reincarnation"; it is the same as the Greek doctrine of metaomatosis and metempsicosis; it is the Christian doctrine of our preexistence in Adam "according to the bodily substance and the seminal virtue"; and it is the modern doctrine of the "repetition of the ancestral characters". Only the fact of such a transmission of psychophysical characters can make intelligible what is called in religion our heritage of original sin, in metaphysical our inheritance of ignorance, and by the philosopher our congenital ability to know in terms of subject and object.
Coomaraswamy himself in Gradation, evolution and reincarnation:
Reincarnation—as is commonly understood by the meaning of the return of individual souls to other bodies here on earth—is not an Indian Orthodox doctrine, but only a popular belief. Thus, for example, as Dr. B. C. Law observes, "We must not say that the Buddhist thinker rejects the notion that an ego passes from one incorporation to another."
Rama Coomaraswamy, son of Ananda, in The Desecration of Hinduism by Western Consumption:
Reincarnation is also a characteristic of the New Age being defined as the rebirth of the ego or lower self in another body, be it human or sub-human, such as a cockroach, on this planet. The idea is that if one does not perfect one's own ego or lower self in this lifetime, one may have another chance. Furthermore, this second, or 700th chance, is part of the evolutionary process whereby each individual is said to be heading on his or her path not toward God-realization or reality, but toward merging with the "One" or with reality. “Overmind” in some kind of Teilhardian Omega Point. What is forgotten is that reincarnation as such is not a Hindu doctrine, but a Theosophist one, and that if reincarnation were in fact something that could happen, from the Hindu point of view it would be seen as a failure. From the Hindu point of view the purpose of life is not to be reborn and to be given another chance to indulge one's passions, but rather a liberation from the whole process of being reborn.