Celtic Whispers Ezine

Written And Submitted By: Janice Van Cleve

Reincarnation is a subject that keeps coming back up (pardon the pun!). 

Seriously, the topic of reincarnation keeps showing up in magazines and books, cloaked in mystery or psycho-babble.  Among New Age and neopagan believers, there is often talk of “past lives”, working out karmic justice over a series of lives, and transmigration of souls.   Hindus hold that we reincarnate many times until we achieve enlightenment or perfection and thus are able to escape the wheel of life, death, and rebirth.  Rabbi Shagra Simmons says Jews sometimes get three shots at terrestrial life.  Tibetan monks search for babies born at the moment of their lama’s death in the belief that his soul migrated into the newborn.  Resurrection of the body is such a strong tenant of Catholic orthodoxy, that the Vatican for centuries preached against cremation, supposedly because ashes are harder to resurrect than rotten remains in a coffin. 

Not everyone believes in reincarnation.  Many people believe that death is the end, finis, kaput.  They do not believe in any afterlife or return to life in any form.  Others believe that the body may die but some kind of spiritual essence or “soul” lives on and goes someplace, like heaven or hell.  Plato was a great proponent of the theory of “essences” which exist beyond or outside of the physical body. Christians and Muslims believe in a paradise where the souls go and don’t come back.  Ancient Sumerians thought spirits descended into a pit where they ate dirt and Greeks held that souls crossed the River Styx to linger in a dim underworld.  All this talk of spirits dwelling in a Great Beyond is advantageous if you want call upon them in prayers or séances.  If, on the other hand, souls do come back in new bodies, who will be left on the invitation list to your next Dumb Supper?

Modern technology and psychology have pushed the envelope in our understanding of death and rebirth.  For example, Elizabeth Kubler-Ross has documented some amazing cases of apparent conscious existence outside of the body and/or after the body’s clinical death.  Cryogenics labs are experimenting with freezing bodies to resuscitate them later.  Cloning is a bit different in that a new body is generated, but the jury is still out on whether any conscious memory is transferred along with the genetic material.  While these are interesting avenues of research that may someday prove or disprove some mechanical aspect of reincarnation, they are generally understood to be outside the discussion of reincarnation per se.

So what’s inside the discussion?  One way to look at reincarnation is to examine its parts.  The word  “carn” is from the Latin root for body.  Carnivores are meat (body) eaters.   The prefix “re” is also from Latin meaning “again” as in “repeat” or “return”.  “In”, of course, means in.  So re-in-carn means again-in-body.  A reincarnation is a return into a body. 

And that’s the first question: which body?  Is it only humans who reincarnate?  Do dogs reincarnate into new dogs, or trees into new trees?  What about cross species reincarnation?  Can a fern reincarnate into a frog or a cow into a liverwort?  There are some dire warnings in the literature about “coming back as a toad”, but for the most part we see writers focus on humans returning as new humans.  Certainly most cat lovers would agree that cats don’t participate in reincarnation because no other living being could aspire their level!

People as far back as the Stone Age have understood that the body decays after death.  They may have held many theories about where the soft tissue went, but they could see that soon all they had left was bones.  Eventually, as in the case of fossils, even the bones break down and are replaced by minerals leaching through the soil.  Occasionally Nature has delayed decay, as in the prehistoric body of a hunter found in an Alpine glacier in Italy or the body of a strangled man found in a Danish bog.  Children sacrificed by the Incas on Andean peaks still have hair and skin preserved by the cold, while Egyptians first learned mummification from bodies buried and desiccated in the hot Saharan desert.  Yet even the most carefully preserved remains of a Pharaoh in Cairo or a Lenin in Moscow would be reduced to molecules if exposed to the normal processes of decay.

Scientists exploring biology, chemistry, DNA, forensics, and the like have shown that as things decay after death, they break down into simpler and simpler components – eventually reducing into basic compounds or molecules that can be used by other living organisms.  Gardeners practice this principle by composting.  Dead plants and other organic materials are stacked in bins where over time they reduce to rich soil and are plowed back into the garden to provide nutrient for new plants.  So a dead tulip may break down in the compost bin and its molecules eventually become incorporated into a turnip.  Not all of its molecules may end up in the turnip, however.  Some of them may wind up in the carrots and others may become potatoes.  Certainly a large number of the former tulip molecules will stay as dirt and may even become incorporated into stone over time.

So at least some of the material that was the physical body of the tulip may find itself after death reincorporated into other physical bodies and therefore continue to participate in the phenomenon called life.  In a way, I suppose that can be called reincarnation – at least of body material.  Perhaps when we refer to a dead relative “pushing up daisies”, we’re closer to the mark than we think.

But if the remains of living things decompose and are scattered to be used by many other living things, or not used at all, is the identity of the original plant or animal or human forever lost?  When do tulip molecules cease to be tulip and become turnip?  And what about the turnip?  If it got some material from a tulip and other material from a spider, where does it’s unique identity as a turnip come from? 

This is where philosophers and theologians propose the idea of  a “soul” or “essence” in the reincarnation picture.  Unwilling to allow Death to have the last word, they have imagined a spiritual being that is released when the body dies.  They imagine that this spiritual being goes on someplace, and some have claimed that this “soul” is reincarnated into another body.  However, there is a problem with the math.   

There have been times even in the historical past when the birth rate of new babies worldwide did not match the death rate.  So according to the theory of reincarnation, there would be more unattached souls available than bodies to reinhabit.  So where did the extra souls go?  Did they get put on hold for awhile in some ethereal parking lot until there were enough babies to go around?  Or did they hang out in the turnips?  Conversely, our current population explosion clearly demonstrates far more births than deaths.  So do the available unattached souls get subdivided?  Or do some babies just go without?  There can’t be that many souls waiting in the turnips to fill the current demands!

Buddhists may help us out here.  Buddhists seek to skip the Hindu wheel altogether through discipline and meditation.  They believe they can reach a point at which independent identity becomes no longer relevant.  The “soul” loses itself by merging with a universal mass of spiritual energy called Nirvana, something analogous to the universal mass of living energy that scientists call biomass.  For the sake of discussion, let’s call this “spiritmass.”

That solves the mathematical problem, because math in the spirit world may not add up the same way as it does here in the mundane world.  If there is spiritmass, then some babies could inherit old souls directly and some may get new ones from the reservoir of spiritmass.  Whatever the case, nature and nurture inevitably work to individualize the baby’s identity just like they individualize his or her body into a unique new person.  Old souls are either absorbed into spiritmass or changed in their new incarnation and new souls are sprung from spiritmass.  In either case, the old identity is lost.  Tulip becomes turnip and essence of Uncle Frank becomes Little Carol. 

Which brings us back to the two parts of reincarnation.  If the body and the spirit both disintegrate and become reabsorbed into biomass and spiritmass respectively, then both  could logically provide material for new life and therefore be considered re-in-carnated.  However, such a reabsorbtion automatically means that the unique personal identity of the dead being ceased to exist upon death.  The ego, the conscious awareness of self, the individual identity, ends.  It existed only for a time as a result of the unique combination of random elements of biomass and spiritmass, shaped by Nature and nurture.  Therefore, our individual egos did not exist before we were born and they will not exist after we die.  Philosophers and theologians notwithstanding, we are temporary.

We humans don’t like that.  We are too proud to think that we are temporary.  We would like to believe our identities will live forever.  Since the body can not be counted upon, some of us propose underworlds and paradises to maintain a kind of individual continuation after death.  Others attempt to preserve their existence in the physical world with statues and monuments, trust funds, artistic creations, or by making a name for themselves in history books.  Ultimately, however, we do not live forever in body or spirit or stone.  All we can be sure of is that we will live beyond our deaths at least for a little while in the hearts of those who loved us – and probably in the memories of those who hated us.

Janice Van Cleve has reincarnated several times without dying.  In this round, she is a writer.  Copyright 2007.