Believing as I do that the mind is embodied, I find it
difficult to accept that anything of oneself can survive the death of the body.
For if the mind is the content of a massively complex system of computations
executed in the nervous system and perhaps in other parts of the body, then
without this organic “hardware” to act as its medium, how can the mind continue
to exist? Saying that the mind could leave the body and continue without a nervous system is like
saying that data erased from a hard drive could float around in the air instead
of utterly vanishing. There is no law of the conservation of information.
Of course, people say that it is the soul, not the mind,
which transmigrates in reincarnation. The soul is said to be made neither of
matter nor energy but of something spiritual, that physics knows nothing about.
I do, in fact, accept the reality of spiritual experience, but for me, it is
something that occurs in the symbolic world we have in our minds and in our
networks of social interactions. I have no experience of anything that seems to
be a soul, and I don’t see any necessity to assume there is such a thing,
particularly with no real evidence. I don’t
feel that I have a soul and I don’t feel that I am lacking a soul. So I am very
skeptical about reincarnation. But I don’t let my skepticism
rob me of the pleasure of thinking about it.
I see some problems with how reincarnation as conventionally
imagined works with our evolutionary history, beginning with the earliest
humans, hundreds of thousands of years ago. This is assuming that reincarnation occurs
only among humans. But I think the same explanations apply (with a little
adaptation ) to reincarnation between humans and animals. For instance, the Jataka Tales, which tell of
past lives of the Buddha, relate several in which he is in animal form. But for
the sake of simplicity, I’ll restrict my speculations to human reincarnation.
Depending on how one defines a human, there was a time very
long ago when the first humans lived. These
were, of course, very small in number. These earliest humans had the first
souls, occurring either naturally or supernaturally. This tiny population, with its presumed
evolutionary advantages, began to grow in numbers. I wonder where the souls of their children came from? Only when some of
the first humans died would there have been souls available for reincarnation. So
from the beginning there must have been a shortage of souls, since there was an
ever-increasing number of bodies, with only the souls of those who had lived
before to occupy them. Perhaps new souls
were created as needed. It seems a
little complicated.
Another problem arises when you think about what might occur
after a great catastrophe. For instance, during the century of the Black Death,
ending around 1400, the world lost perhaps 25% of its population. This means
that there would have been millions of souls with no new-born humans to accommodate them. What happened to the extra souls when their
usual places to go were not being made? One could imagine a sort of metempsychotic
bank which takes up the surplus of souls after a die-off and saves them until
there is a time of increase. But such a bank would not have been able to supply
extra souls to the increasing population at the beginning of humanity, since
there were no previous souls in reserve. The traditional concept of
reincarnation does not work unless the population is always the same size,
which has certainly not been the case.
This problem arises because of the tacit assumption that
when a soul is freed from a dying person, it reincarnates in the immediate
future. But there is an alternative hypothesis which disposes of the problem of
surpluses or shortages more economically. If a reincarnating soul could jump backward in
time and be reborn in its past, or could jump far into its future, then the problem of where surplus
souls go after a die-off and where extra souls come from during an expansion
simply goes away. After the Black Death, some of the souls would have jumped
back in time to be reborn at an earlier time when there was a shortage of souls
for all the new humans coming into being. Other souls could have jumped into
the future to find places a generation later when the population began to recover,
or generations later, into our time when population is increasing even more.
If one were able to remember one’s previous incarnations, some
would seem to be in the past and others in the future of whatever time the soul
was in. The order could very well be completely non-chronological. It would even
be possible for the same soul to inhabit two different bodies at the same time.
An older soul could meet a younger version. Assuming that some memories
persist, this might explain some experiences of déjà-vu; one really has been
there before, just in a different body. Among the six billion humans on this
planet, the number of souls within them could be much smaller. This is
economical, in a way.
For the purpose of even greater economy, the number of souls
jumping back and forth in time could be extremely small. In fact, there need be only one soul for all
the humans that now exist, have ever existed, or will exist . This soul zigzags
forward and backward throughout time, eventually being incarnated as every
being. As it leaves its final body
(having been in all others during the span of humanity) the single soul could
vanish (into nirvana or oblivion) or return to its first body to repeat the
cycle again. This echoes Nietzsche’s idea of eternal recurrence, but in the minds of the reincarnated, not in
the physical universe.
Rather than myriad parallel streams, reincarnation seems to be but a single web fashioned from a single strand.
If people became generally aware that they were all either
future or previous incarnations of each other, perhaps their feelings,
attitudes and actions toward each other would change. One would hope that this
change would be for the better. Imagine
that one were about to hurt another person in some way and then remembered that
this other person was an earlier or later version of oneself. Would the harsh
word remain unspoken? Would the clenched fist uncurl?
There is also a dualistic variant, less productive of social
benefit. There could be instead two*
souls, making their separate yet intertwined journeys back and forth through
space and time, forming two interlocked webs. Any individual being would be a stage of either one soul or the
other. Perhaps each soul perceives itself as good and its opposite as evil;
they could be engaged in an eternal and irresolvable struggle.
Which soul wrote this text? Are
any manifestations of the opposite soul reading or listening to it? If you the
reader or listener feel a sense of sympathy or antipathy when experiencing it,
does this identify which of the warring siblings inhabits you?
= = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = =
*Speculating about three or more souls is less interesting
