Another life?

I've just finished reading a book by Liz Hodgkinson called "Reincarnation - The Evidence". It was published in 1989, though I suppose that's pretty irrelevant.

It was given to me for free, so I didn't have to suffer the pain of spending any money.

Now, if you've been following this blog you will know that I am an atheist. Even so, I've always had a feeling that I have lived before - just a feeling mind, and that proves nothing. Anyway, I had high hopes for this book that it might be quite revelatory, but it wasn't. Much of the book was about what different religions believe about reincarnation. That is no evidence at all. Just because someone believes something does not make it true. She looks at hypnotic regression and there are some interesting cases there. However, she admits that there are so many problems with this that it is somewhat doubtful that people really are seeing into a previous life. More tantalizing is the evidence provided by young children who talk about a previous life. Many of these cases are from the Far East where belief in reincarnation is much more prevalent than in the west, and so is much more readily accepted.

She claims that a belief in reincarnation can explain many things in life, like why, for instance some people are born into very rich families while others live their lives in squalor. Why some people are hugely talented and others not .... etc ....etc. This is to do with Karma, a kind of cause and effect whereby the way we live one life affects the next. Personally I think this is highly unlikely, although I suppose its a nice idea. The trouble is she kind of spoils it for me by suggesting at the end that souls are eternal in that they have always existed and are therefore immortal. The trouble with this is that it is very close to trying to believe in God, and to me that is just not tenable. She suggests that humans have always existed and that we have always been this way, distinct from the animals. That really spoiled it even more for me as it completely ignores all our discoveries in evolution, both biological and cosmological. I came to the conclusion that while she obviously gets a lot of comfort from her own belief in evolution, she loads it down with so much spiritual baggage that I just couldn't swallow it.

Speaking for myself, I am not completely averse to the idea of reincarnation, but I would take a more objective approach to the idea. Given that there was a time just over 60 years ago when I did not exist, there will in the future be another time when I again return to the same state. As I came out of that state and am here now, then why not again in the future? Of course, there has to be a soul or spirit which passes from one body to another for "me" to exist again. This is getting into the supernatural though, and I am very cautious as to how far I can take this. As I am a convinced believer in science and evolution, I try not to sway too far away into the supernatural. I cannot conceive of an eternal soul because the universe is a finite age. I can only surmise that if we do have a soul it appeared at some point during our evolution, and I would guess that would most likely have been when we became conscious and self-aware. It could be that once a soul has come into existence it might have an indefinite life span, but what happens when there is no more humanity, or no more habitable universe??? Maybe it time expires.... One final thought, and that is if we (for the most part) don't remember our previous lives then is it meaningful to believe in such a thing? I guess the "Karma" idea is a way of trying to bring meaning into the concept, otherwise, the belief while bringing some kind of comfort in that death is not the end, fails to completely satisfy our desire for immortality because if you have no knowledge of the previous life, then in what sense can you say you have lived it??

Answers on a postcard please to...............

Life and death and life

I am reading a book at the moment on reincarnation. I don't normally read books on reincarnation, but a friend at work lent it to me, probably thinking I needed it - what does HE know??? I am of a somewhat sceptical nature. I was once a devout Christian, but not any more. In fact, I completely reject the whole notion of god or gods, consigning it to the realms of fantasy, myth, folk-lore and legends with a sprinkling of wishful thinking mixed with superstitious fear. In short, I'm a "born again" atheist. There, that's got that out of my system, I feel so much better! Thankfully, the book hasn't mentioned god yet and I'm over half way through it, so I haven't given up on it yet. If the writer stays away from the g word for the rest of the book, I dare say I might even finish it.

Yes, I am a skeptic, but I will consider almost anything weird, so long as there is some reasonable evidence to back it up. What seems to come out of this book, as well as documentaries I have seen on the television is that there are many well documented cases of people, often young children, who seem to have detailed and very accurate memories of past lives, sometimes, many past lives. A lot of research has been carried out into this, and the weight of the evidence seems to be far too great for mere chance. There is also, it would appear, evidence building, that between incarnations we go through a process of reviewing our previous life in a sort of a "judgement"and choosing the next one. Another colleague at work lent me a book by a different author who claims to have had an "out of body" experience after clinically "dying" during a major operation. The spooky thing is, the whole experience she describes is almost exactly similar to the "between births" claims of the subjects in the reincarnation book, lending a degree of independant re-inforcement to the argument. I am not saying here that I neccesarily believe that these are real cases of reincarnation, but if they are not, then there is a lot of further research needed to come up with a rational, reasonable explanation. Is it possible, for example, for a person to "receive" the thoughts and personality of a dead person, and not actually be reincarnated? There is plenty of evidence in physics to suggest that time can go backwards. Also, at the quantum level of the sub-conscious mind, who knows what is possible. We hardly know anything about what constitutes consciousness, let alone the mind. We are only scratching the surface.

Personally, although I reject the idea of a god, I don't, in principle, have a problem with reincarnation - of a sort. The reasoning goes like this:

There was a time before my birth when I didn't exist.
When I die I will go back to that same state of non-existance. Since I came out of that state to be here writing this now, who's to say I won't do so again at some point in the future?

There is a problem here, however, as what I describe is not true reincarnation in the classical sense of the word, because I have left out the concept of a spirit or soul. The "reincarnation" I describe would not transmit any memories between lives, because although "I" might live again, I could never be conscious of this life without a soul or spirit which constitutes the essence of "me" crossing from one life to the next. However, another way of looking at life is that we are all immortal until we die. As we cannot experience being dead because we have to be conscious to experience anything, we cannot be conscious of being dead. In that sense, the only thing we will ever experience is life itself. Death doesn't exist in our experience. Better make the most of life!