I was raised Catholic. There is no reincarnation in Christian tradition. As a mathematician, I have a very difficult time accepting this paradigm: a spirit is conceived, a person is born, a finite lifetime of choices determines the outcome for infinity. Heaven or hell. Eternal bliss or eternal suffering. Can the finite really rule the infinite? I don’t think so.
So the next best thing is reincarnation. Life is like going to school while death is a vacation. At least this gives us continuity and opportunity. For many, reincarnation is a core concept. In Buddhism, the perplexing tradition is to search for the reincarnate Dalai Lama in a child after death of the incumbent.
The ultimate objective of reincarnation is perfection of the soul through toil, overcoming karma through dharma. How many of us have been aching to feel those past lives with their enormous hidden messages to unlock the mysteries of our subconscious existence? Even shamanic practices include the possibility of voyaging to past lives. Who doesn’t want to be a naughty courtier in Louis XIV’s entourage? Or a pupil in Plato’s Academia? Or Mozart himself transcribing piano concerti that are already written in our mind?
Let’s do the math. If 100 billion human lives have roamed the Earth over the past 200,000 years, of course a very large proportion perished during childhood until well into the 20th century. Let’s say that in reality there have been 30 billion adults ever alive on Earth. If there are 7.4 billion of us today, the result of Lucy’s legacy, then that’s barely 4 total adult lives, past and present, on average, for each one of us!!! That doesn’t seem like a lot of opportunity for perfection of the soul via toil, karma and dharma. I feel kinda cheated. And if we reach 11 billion souls on Earth by 2100, the reincarnation business is going to get tougher and tougher.
Let’s take it a little further. So, are souls eternal? Or at least coincident with the life of the universe? If so, how many are there? If there were 2 human beings 200,000 years ago, then someone had to plan for at least 7.4 billion from the beginning, no? So what’s the limit? At what point are there no more souls for humans being born? Doesn’t make sense.
So maybe we souls do have a beginning. Let’s say that between the big bang and now, 7.4 billion souls were created. When? By whom? So maybe we are not eternal but maybe at least perennial?
A few years ago I read fascinating but very tough book called Immortality by Stephen Cave. The premise is that we are absolutely infatuated with the idea of our own immortality; we crave it psychologically. We cannot fathom non-existence. So we create mental constructs that help us get there. We are so wonderful, how could we not be immortal??? But I ask you dear reader, if you remember the last time you were bored on a Sunday afternoon, flipping channels because there’s “nothing on”, how immortal do you really want to be?
So maybe we are not perennial after all. If we accept the idea that just like there was a big bang there will be a big bust and the universe will end, then at some point between now and then, our souls will collapse and we will reunite again in some fashion. When? By what force? Under what circumstances?
We will go a little deeper into this in my next post, “Mary Poppins and the Akashic Field”. Stay tuned.
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