One of the more interesting lenses by which to examine the subject of “faith” is through the lens of reincarnation—a subject touched on in the last post. Those of us living now in wealthy, technological societies are unusually lucky. No other human era had access to as much information, not least to the results of sober and systematic studies of subjects in the hazy regions of the borderzone, reincarnation being one of these subjects. I’ve provided a brief summary on this blog to the studies of Ian Stevenson here. I won’t repeat what I said there but the post outlines what factual knowledge we possess of this claim—namely that people, or at least some people, had lived before.
Well-documented cases—to the extent that these cases can be documented at all—represent a fact difficult to explain away. They represent a “finding,” as it were, uncomfortable although it might be. Most westerners who say that they believe in reincarnation are expressing a feeling rather than a serious thought. It is reassuring in a way—in that death isn’t the be-all and the end-all here. But it isn’t really thought about or there might be a kind of pause. Reincarnation is not really a genuine continuity of any life left behind; the new life is not an expansion or enlargement of the last one—or, if it is, it isn’t a conscious one. The people who remember a previous life well enough for third parties to check the facts are very few in number. Most of us remember nothing—and the parsimonious explanation is that that’s because there is nothing to remember. In regions where reincarnation is part of religious belief, having been born again (but not in the Christian sense) is the mark of failure rather than a boon. We didn’t have what it takes to escape the wheel of karma.
Now reincarnation serves as a cosmological explanation in the Hindu world—as the Fall and its consequence, death, serves in ours. But there is an element of fact in each. Some people do remember having lived before, indeed insistently so. Fact. At the same time the troubles and tribulations of this life are experienced by all; and death is also certainly a fact. To this I would add Near Death Experience studies. Those elements of them telling of experience in another world, meeting a luminous being, relatives who’ve passed on, etc., cannot be objectively checked. But in the early stages of NDEs souls make observations about this world such that comatose individuals cannot possibly make, thus lending some weight by that to that which then follows. This body of information is also a fact.
The fiction—in my title—is the detailed elaboration accruing to these cosmological projections, as common in the East as in the West. It is produced by hypnotic regressions of living individuals who thus “recover” past lives. That literature isn’t even very good entertainment. The notions that bad karma can result in future lives as frogs or dogs or snakes belongs to the fictional category too. The West has produced its low level fiction of horrid devils torturing the wicked in fire with pitchforks—and the righteous harping on clouds. Both East and West have also produced grand and noble myths for which there is not even a shred of factual underpinning. But it is the fiction, largely, that underpins faith, as such.
The In-Between is where the thoughtful person finds himself—and in that zone we find all kind of markers but not a shred of certainty. Human consciousness and its upward potential are very hopeful markers—certainly for me. They point to the presence of meaning in the universe despite the incommensurable meaninglessness of the vastness of material reality. That there is more to reality than the unfathomable depths of burning stars—for that the few odd pockets of fact suffice. To make clear, sharp, conceptual sense of them is denied. A sensible approach, it seems to me, is to accept the visible facts and at least to think about underlying structures that might comprehensively explain all of human experience, not least reincarnation. It too appears to be an aspect of existence. But to assume that reincarnation is the universal fate of every person—that starts to feel like fiction.
To this I might add a third grouping of experiences—and the most puzzling of all. It is the ability sharply and in detail to dream the future. It suggests that there are more things in heaven and earth than dreamt of in our philosophy.
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