What’s Wrong with Reincarnation?
The problem with reincarnation, at least as it is usually understood in the West (and much of the East, as well), is the belief that what incarnates, life after life, is our unique, individual personhood. I Jack Preston King will one day die, and then return with a new body and a new name, but deep down inside I’ll be the very same person. It’s the same problem with the expectation of going to Heaven or Hell after death. Both reincarnation and receiving one’s eternal reward imply the existence of a unique and permanently-existing (immortal) self capable of experiencing either after-death state.
Eternal reward religions tend at least popularly to identify personality with that immortal self (or soul), suggesting that the everyday Jack Preston King of this life and his favorite everyday Aunt Tilly of this life will be eternally reunited after death in Heaven. Queue the harps.
Reincarnation religions like Hinduism acknowledge that personality can’t be what survives death, as most if not all of the knowledge, beliefs, experience, memories, etc. that make up personality are acquired after birth. There’s nothing eternal about them, and so personality can’t be eternal, either. But they then go on to posit that everyone has an Atman, each person’s eternal spiritual sliver of the Godhead, which is, of course, unique and permanently-existing (immortal). Queue the sitars.
Buddhists reject the concepts of soul (eternal reward), Atman (eternal God-self), and permanent self in general. Yet they still preach reincarnation, or at least most practicing religious Buddhists expect to reincarnate somehow. The Buddha himself is said to have remembered over 500 of his own past lives, so reincarnation is not a modern Buddhist fringe belief.
It’s all rather incoherent, when you think about it.
I propose an after life (not afterlife) process more coherent than reincarnation – Recombination.
Recombination – Manifestation
According to The Basic Structure of Everything, here’s what happens to almost everyone at death:
When a person in this state dies [Death While Trapped in the Human Predicament], the Consciousness Current of Imagination and the Consciousness Current of Manifestation separate and flow off to do other things, to participate in new experience whirlpools… The imagination and world that were unique to that physimaginal YouWorldThingness experience whirlpool are absorbed and flow on with their respective larger currents. Nothing is left that has not now rejoined the currents from which the whirlpool was formed. Yet nothing is lost, since everything the whirlpool was, the currents also were, just seen from a certain perspective.
Every snowflake is unique and when melted is gone forever. But the water cycle continues and what the snowflake was will be a snowflake again. And a thunderstorm. And a gentle spring rain. Same thing here. Nothing but awareness lasts, but everything is at root awareness, so ultimately nothing is lost.
Remember that consciousness flows in two directions, Manifestation and Imagination. They are two currents of the exact same substance. Their only difference is the direction of their flow.
We interpret the movements of the Consciousness Current of Manifestation as the physical world. When “the Consciousness Current of Imagination and the Consciousness Current of Manifestation separate and flow off to do other things, to participate in new experience whirlpools” that doesn’t just mean imagination or mind. It means bodies, too.
If you’ve ever observed the decay of a dead animal (roadkill, etc.), you know that a body exposed to Nature gets redistributed fairly quickly. Within a few hours of death, insects start the work of consuming it. As they take the animal apart, the smells they expose attract more insects and scavenger animals. I’ve seen small animals like a dead cat reduced to fur and clean-picked bones in under a week. Fur and bones, which nobody apparently wants to eat, take much longer to fully decompose, though they eventually do as the wind and rain and weather and microscopic creatures reduce them to dirt.
But where did all the flesh and muscle and sinew go? Into thin air? Into nowhere?
Not at all. They became the bodies of the bugs and beasts that consumed them. They were literally redistributed on the molecular level into the bodies of living beings – and through them into their excretions, which soon became food for other creatures, or simply dirt.
Q: How long until all of the flesh and muscle and sinew that made up that dead body are so dissipated that they are gone forever?
A: That will never happen. Popularly stated, the First Law of Thermodynamics tells us that matter and energy cannot be created or destroyed. They can only change form.
That roadkill body will change forms many times as it nourishes bugs, who are consumed by other bugs and birds and beasts, whose poop feeds plants that will be consumed by larger animals, and if the plant is a fruit tree, will recombine to feed not only many animals and humans, but baby trees of its own variety when the fruit drops, plus innumerable microscopic soil-dwelling creatures as the fruit rots into the ground…
In the quote that opened this section, I made the same point in reference to the water cycle:
Every snowflake is unique and when melted is gone forever. But the water cycle continues and what the snowflake was will be a snowflake again. And a thunderstorm. And a gentle spring rain.
This is the Consciousness Current of Manifestation. It cycles endlessly.
I want you to think about locality, too.
In her 1970 song Woodstock, Joni Mitchel famously sang, “We are stardust…” Well, we are indeed stardust on some grand cosmic scale. But much more directly, we are cycling molecules of water right here on earth in its very recent history, metabolized with fruit and dead flesh and the nutritious poop of the creatures who fertilized the crops our mothers consumed while we were in the womb, and that we’ve consumed our whole lives since birth.
Our fleshy human bodies – along with the manifest worlds our YouWorldThingness whirlpools of experience spin into being, are local. Every manifest thing on earth is made of previous manifest things on earth, cycling.
We are not manifestations of the entire cosmic-level Consciousness Current of Manifestation, but rather of the local current as it manifests on Earth.
It’s easy to visualize how our bodies are made from the people and animals and plants and insects and microscopic beings that came before us. Future people and animals and plants and insects and microscopic beings will be made from us.
This is the Consciousness Current of Manifestation, cycling endlessly.
Recombination – Imagination
So why should the Consciousness Current of Imagination be any different? The two currents are of the exact same substance, just moving in opposite directions. It seems reasonable to assume that what is observable regarding the Consciousness Current of Manifestation is also true of the Consciousness Current of Imagination.
A dead body does not cease to exist. It just disperses into the life around it until it is no longer recognizable. During the course of that dispersal, it profoundly impacts the life with which it comes into contact. It feeds other bodies. It enriches the soil. It releases gasses into the air (remember those smells that called the scavengers), etc.
And it makes its largest impact locally. The bugs that eat the roadkill are effected more directly and to a greater degree by it than are the bugs that eat those bugs, or the birds that eat the second-tier bugs, or the cats that eat the birds.
Just like the body, when a physimaginal YouWorldThingness experience whirlpool dies, the imagination that participated in it disperses, too. Gradually, like the roadkill. With the greatest impact occurring locally, like a decomposing cat in the woods.
Q: What is a body doing when it disperses after death into Nature?
A: It is rejoining the larger Consciousness Current of Manifestation. Being consumed and taken apart and fed to living Nature is what rejoining the Consciousness Current of Manifestation looks like from our perspective.
Q: What does it look like when the imagination that participated in a physimaginal YouWorldThingness experience whirlpool disperses at death?
A: I don’t know. But it must be analogous.
I don’t want to scare anybody by positing the equivalent of bugs and beasts eating our imagination at death, though that certainly could be the case. I genuinely don’t know.
But there must be a process of the Recombination of Imagination, just as there is an observable process of the Recombination of Manifestation.
And, just like bodily decomposition, whether that Recombination of Imagination process is brutal or blissful, one thing is for sure. It is natural.
Recombination as the Natural After Life (not afterlife)
We are physimaginal YouWorldThingness experience whirlpools, spun into experience when the opposite-flowing Currents of Imagination and Manifestation meet. When those Currents separate at death, what was Manifest about our physimaginal YouWorldThingness naturally disperses into the Manifest, while what was Imagination naturally disperses into Imagination.
The impact of a dispersing body on the life it feeds after death depends on how it lived. Is that body large or small (how many can it feed, and for how long)? Was it fed on healthy foods, or permeated with toxic chemical additives, preservatives and pharmaceuticals? Is it exposed to Nature, or has it been sealed in a coffin to keep Nature out?
The impact of a dispersing imagination must also depend on how it lived. While caught up in our individual physimaginal YouWorldThingness experience whirlpool, did our imagination grow large or close in on itself? Was it fed healthy knowledge, images, ideas, beliefs, emotions, etc. that made it grow large and rich and sweet, or toxic fare that left it shrunken, poor and sour? Is it open to what comes next at death, or will it meet death paralyzed with fear?
This is getting pretty speculative, so I won’t overextend the metaphor. But of this we can be sure:
On death, a process begins in which everything that was Manifest about our physimaginal YouWorldThingness gradually rejoins – and impacts – both the Consciousness Current of Manifestation and other physimaginal YouWorldThingness experience whirlpools near our death process, including new whirlpools forming locally. Everything Manifest in our individual experience will continue forever to participate in Manifestation and the experience of present and newly-forming Imaginally Manifest experiences.
On death, a process begins in which everything that was Imagination about our physimaginal YouWorldThingness gradually rejoins – and impacts – both the Consciousness Current of Imagination and other physimaginal YouWorldThingness experience whirlpools near our death process, including new whirlpools forming locally. All Imagination in our individual experience will continue forever to participate in Imagination and the experience of present and newly-forming Imaginally Manifest experiences.
Every physimaginal YouWorldThingness experience whirlpool is unique and when dead is gone forever. But the Consciousness Currents of Imagination and Manifestation cycle endlessly.
There is no individual reincarnation. But every dispersed physimaginal YouWorldThingness experience whirlpool participates in other existing and newly-forming physimaginal YouWorldThingness experience whirlpools.
Forever.
Every snowflake is unique and when melted is gone forever. But the water cycle continues and what the snowflake was will be a snowflake again. And a thunderstorm. And a gentle spring rain.
The Ethics of Impact
How we live while our physimaginal YouWorldThingness experience whirlpools holds together determines the impact we’ll make on the greater Consciousness Currents of Imagination and Manifestation, and on future physimaginal YouWorldThingness experience whirlpools.
This leads to a very simple ethical standard for living as unique, individual physimaginal YouWorldThingness experience whirlpools:
- Eat healthy foods, and reject toxic chemical additives, preservatives and pharmaceuticals. Treat all manifest things with respect and care. Arrange for our bodies to be as exposed to Nature as possible when we die. Live bodily so as to be a physical feast for other living things at death.
- Feed imagination healthy knowledge, images, ideas, beliefs, emotions, etc. Grow imagination in this life to be large and rich and sweet, and not shrunken, poor and sour. Be curious and excited about life and death. Live so as to cultivate imagination as a feast for other living things, during life and after death.
Remember this from The Basic Structure of Everything:
Practices that successfully awaken us to undivided whole physimaginal YouWorldThingness experience… direct attention to the Manifest and Imaginal without reference to the attention-generated self. By fully experiencing our divided outer and inner worlds with indifference to how ego feels, what it likes or dislikes, what it thinks it all means, we retrain our attention toward YouWorldThingness.
Treating both our body and our imagination as food for others, caring for them with the intention to provide a feast for others, is an effective spiritual practice for living with “indifference to how ego feels, what it likes or dislikes, what it thinks it all means.” It results in the dispelling of the attention-generated-self, and awakening to YouWorldThingness.
Living as a feast for others is the reverse of everything the world tells us to do and think and feel. But that’s the whole point, right?
And again, consider locality.
No matter how we live, one little human physimaginal YouWorldThingness experience whirlpool won’t have much impact on the whole great cosmic Consciousness Currents of Imagination and Manifestation. We’re way too small.
But remember that Recombination has its greatest impact locally.
Forget the cosmos. Forget Consciousness Currents and the Dark Sea of Awareness.
Everything going on within the six mile thick (quite thin, actually) skin of the Earth’s living biosphere is a churning local stew of Recombination, both physically and imaginatively. One little human physimaginal YouWorldThingness experience whirlpool can have significant impact here as our bodies and imaginations rejoin the local pool from which new bodies and imaginations form.
Which brings me to Buddhism.
Theravada VS Mahayana
I am not a Buddhist, but I know enough armchair Buddhism to understand that there are two major Buddhist positions concerning “enlightenment.”
The Theravada tradition teaches that the goal of spiritual practice is to attain individual enlightenment and “escape the wheel of birth and death,” which means to be permanently freed from the cycle of reincarnation.
The Mahayana tradition teaches that we should refuse to leave the wheel of birth and death until every other sentient being has attained enlightenment and escaped before us. In Mahayana Buddhism, a Bodhisattva (a person who is able to reach nirvana but delays doing so out of compassion in order to save suffering beings) works to achieve as much as possible in this lifetime, perhaps even enlightenment itself, but chooses to reincarnate after death into our suffering world to lead others to awakening. Only when every sentient being is liberated will Bodhisattvas escape and close the door behind the rest of us.
The Basic Structure of Everything outlines four possible After Life (not afterlife) states:
- Death While Trapped in the Human Predicament (almost everyone)
- Death Having Reclaimed Attention, but Not Having Attained Transformative Stillness
- Death Having Attained Transformative Stillness, but Not Having Reclaimed Attention
- Death Having Reclaimed Attention and Attained Transformative Stillness
The first three states all have a Mahayana outcome. However much (or little) the individual attains in life, they donate it to the Biosphere upon death. The dispersal of their bodies and imaginations participate in new bodies and imaginations, new-formed imaginal beings, and increase by some real degree the awakening of everyone and everything. They make it easier for the next generation to do the same thing.
I recognize that the Bodhisattva ideal is individual, while I’m proposing something corporate, or “we are all one-ish.” But the similarities are striking.
Of course, the vast majority of humans die in the physical suffering and imaginative fear and anxiety typified by Death While Trapped in the Human Predicament. All of that suffering, fear and anxiety are dumped wholesale at death into the local Recombination pool.
So it’s definitely an uphill battle. We need more Bodhisattvas!
Like the Theravada practitioner who attains enlightenment and individually escapes the wheel of birth and death (sorry, Humanity, you’re on your own!), when we Reclaim Attention and Attain Transformative Stillness in a single lifetime we attain immortality and are freed to set off alone across the Dark Sea of Awareness. You have to admit, it’s a close parallel.
I’m not saying any of this is Buddhist or Buddhism, just pointing out the resonance.
My Cosmic Download 