The Hindu Model

In the last several postings, I’ve been looking for ways of understanding life as a phenomenon. I proposed that life is best explained as a phenomenon different in kind from matter, that it suggests the existence of a separate “order” of reality where it might be located, and then developed a “weird” theory under which a soul-civilization is pictured as “invading” matter from a soul-dimension.

Today I’d like to examine the Weird Model in light of the traditional Hindu viewpoint on the nature of life and the soul—and to draw out some of the problems and ideas that such a comparison suggests.

To understand soul-civilization, perhaps it might help us to see our own human civilization in functional terms. Our civilization represents a flow of individuals. We might picture its members as in three categories: the unborn, the living, and the departed. In our reality all of the action is centered on the living. We have no idea whether or not the unborn already exist or “come into being,” literally, at some point between conception and birth. The two traditions of the West resolve this phenomenon, this “flow,” in different ways. In the materialistic version, life is simply a function of matter. The unborn don’t exist except as genetic potential in the living. The living are carriers of genes. The departed don’t exist any more except as matter in transformation. The religious concept is that souls do, indeed, “come into being,” created by God at the time of conception or birth; the living are destined to live in another dimension; after death the immortal soul is bound for that realm. At the “end of time” the souls will be once more reunited with their bodies—the doctrine of the resurrection of the body.

The Hindu conception is quite different. In that model the unborn may be the departed; society, therefore, comes to be seen as a circulation of souls. The departed become the unborn; they see incarnation and become the living; they die and depart and thus become the unborn once again. Ultimate escape from this “wheel of karma” takes the form of departure for Nirvana. “Replenishment” of the supply of souls, as it were, takes place as aspects of the Godhead split off and descend into the lower karmic realms. This model is coherent, self-contained, and well-motivated; I use that term in the way computer people do to mean well-justified. The souls go round and round until they split off and rejoin divinity; new souls rain down, of their own volition. The separation of “sparks” of the divine refulgence from the divine plentitude is motivated by a desire, deep within the Godhead itself, for limited experience. When such limitation turns out, ultimately, to be sorrow—at least as experienced by the spark—its descending motion becomes an upward striving, an ascent toward the Whole again.

It is worth noting here that the Weird Model, at least as pictured thus far, appears to be quite different. But is it? It presents the picture of orders of reality arranged in layers, as it were. The soul-layer is above the material. It exists and holds life of our own kind; it proceeds in equilibrium. One element of it, however, that which is most proximate to the material layer beneath, partially interpenetrates the material and produces what might be called a hybrid form of life. By hybrid I mean a “soul-body” composite, animated matter. That kind of life is unstable; it persist only because the departing souls are either replaced from “above” in the hybrid dimension or return to the hybrid layer once again by taking up bodies after a period of discarnate existence. The two models, thus, while differently conceived, are functionally similar. Both depend on circulation for the simple reason that the hybrid form of life is severely limited: bodies wear out. Both also depend on what seems to be a voluntary fascination with the lower region—with matter for souls in the Weird Model, with limitation in the Hindu model.

The Western Religious conception abandons the idea of circulation but retains one element of the other two models. In this conception, humans are created for life in Paradise. We might picture that as the soul-dimension of the Weird Model and as a kind of heaven beneath the perfection of Nirvana. Buddhism eventually formulated the concept of just such a world, something less perfect than Nirvana but heavenly in its aspects. This was the Pure Land, a perfect world; Pure Land Buddhism is also the most popular form of Buddhism. Buddhism, of course, is one of the Hindu traditions. In the Western view, humanity was destined for life in Paradise; God placed the first humans there, evidently intending Paradise to be their home. But Adam and Eve just couldn’t leave things well enough alone. They had to meddle. And with that comes—not an invasion of the lower realm but, instead, an expulsion into the lower realm. Thereafter, getting back to Paradise becomes Job One.

As this brief survey shows, the great traditions—all except materialism, which just throws up its hands—are intimately linked. They suggests that these models have at least the merit of arising spontaneously as we force our attention to contemplate what reality might actually mean.