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Rant Number 573 14 February 2014
Is everything that happens to you the outcome of your actions in past lives? Of previous sins, perhaps? English celeb Bill Roache apparently suggested that. An anonymous female was not amused – trouble followed. Such as accusation of rape. Although eventually acquitted Roache might have mused on the risks of reincarnation…
Past lives also caused anger when Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, spiritual leader of Sephardi Judaism in Israel, suggested that Jews who perished during WW2 were guilty of transgressions in previous lives. Implication: the victims were not really innocent – they had brought it upon themselves! Outrageous, perverse and intolerable view. Yet, when nonagenarian Yosef kicked the bucket in Jerusalem, near a million Orthodox faithful attended his funeral.
Here is one objection to reincarnation. It seems to rob the individual of moral responsibility. Worse, it could exculpate all sorts of ghastly wrongdoers. ‘It is not my fault that I am a monster’, a tyrant could say, ‘It is just down to my past incarnations…’
However, the argument could work forwards as well as backwards. You reflect: ‘I know my woes are the result of my misdeeds centuries ago. But I will break out of it. Because I don’t fancy turning into a gnat or a rat or like President Hollande in my next incarnation. Therefore from now on I shall endevour to lead a better, moral life.’ Belief in reincarnation in this scenario spurs you to avoid further sinning, see?
Rabbi Yosef conceded that past lives work for the best after all. It’s like this: the Jewish victims became martyrs. Thus they expiated their antecedent faults, and also merited eternal bliss. A baroque reasoning but…not for a rabbinical mind. (Yosef also claimed that non-Jews were donkeys, born to serve the Jews; that Muslims are idiots; that Louisiana black victims of the tsunami richly deserved it and so on. Well!)
Pace the eccentric Rabbi, monotheistic faiths reject reincarnation but the doctrine is central to world religions like Hinduism and Buddhism. In his book, A Second Chance, Swami Prabhupada enumerates the bad habits that spoil your opportunities for the next avatar. The chief ones are four: meat-eating, intoxication, gambling and illicit sex. I can’t go along with the first – there are no forbidden foods in Christianity – but I wholeheartedly accept the other three. Just look about you in non-great Britain: such widespread practices lead to human degradation and harm, both social and individual. They do so in this world – here and now. Whether they cause you to become a jackal or a scorpion in the next cycle of existence is another matter.
What gets reincarnated? It cannot be the body. When you die your body decomposes and eventually the atoms making it up are dissipated and dispersed. It has to be the mind or soul. I can understand how my body could host the soul of another human being, say, my ancestor Prince Eugene of Savoy. I can imagine myself quarrelling with Louis XIV or fighting at Blenheim, for example. Much more difficult for me to conceive harbouring the soul or mind of a pangolin or a canary. What sort of consciousness could that be? How could I possibly imagine being that? Further down in the animal scale, it gets even more conceptually problematic. Yet Hinduism teaches that can be the case.
Actually, thinkers as sophisticated as Pythagoras, the great mathematician and mystic, believed in transmigration of souls between different species. Diogenes Laertius relates that the philosopher saw a puppy dog whining while being whipped. ‘Stop!’ Pythagoras interposed. ‘It is the soul of a friend! I recognise him from his cries!’ As for Empedocles, another Greek thinker, he could remember having been successively a boy, a girl, a bush, a bird and a fish. Huh! A plant! Rather boring being that, I imagine.
More meaningfully, what evidence could there be for remembering your past life as another human person? Memory? But no memory claim can constitute the basis for the truth of reincarnation. Some people, like the Matthew Bourne of the movies, lose their memory. Some have false memories. And some lie about their memories. No, memory by itself can be no ground for the truth of a memory claim.
Suppose however your wife or husband or lover suddenly died, to your great sorrow. He or she was so special. Your souls were bound together – one flesh. Then one day at the Travellers’ Club in the Pall Mall you are introduced to a stranger. The two of you get talking. You realise the voice, the manner of speaking, the demeanour remind you uncannily of your lost partner. You delve. You discover the person’s abilities, her character, her interests and her mannerisms are exactly like those of her whom you have lost. Astounding! So you question her. She tells you things between you and your partner that only she could have known. Incredible! You hope against hope. The two of you meet again. You feel the same joy, the same inner accord, the same happiness. You feel your souls again are attuned to each other. It is bliss. She looks bodily different, yes, but…does it matter? You decide she is the same soul, the same person as your beloved. (Hitchcock’s Vertigo suggests a similar scenario.)
Of course, a sceptic would smile. ‘You are deluding yourself. It is wish fulfilment. What you take for objective evidence is merely subjective impression. You wish your beloved to be alive again and you persuade yourself you have found her. You have not. Someone like her is not the same as being her.’
What do you think?
Revd Frank Julian Gelli
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