Becker on Buddhism

Recently I managed to discover another book by Carl B. Becker, this one titled Breaking the Circle: Death and the Afterlife in Buddhism (Southern Illinois University Press, 1993). I’d mentioned earlier here (link), Becker’s Paranormal Experience and Survival of Death (State University of New York Press, 1993). Becker is a professor of comparative philosophy and religion at Kyoto University in Japan.

Both of these books are of the highest excellence. The second is, for me, the best ever summation of its subject, human survival of death. The second, it turns out, turns out to be one of the very few coherent accounts of the evolution of Buddhism over time. That development has to be sketched in order to present the development of Buddhist views on the afterlife. The presentation is brief but—Becker is a very clear thinker and a talented writer—wonderfully clear.

Even approaching this pair of subjects—Buddhism and the afterlife—seems harshly daunting. The seeming object of Buddhism is nirvana, a kind of absolute enlightenment. The Buddha himself (he lived 560-477 BC) maintained that nothing whatever could be asserted of it pro or con. The earliest Buddhist school (the Theravada, later renamed by its opponents as the Hinayana*) asserted that nirvana meant annihilation; the Sanskrit meaning of the word is “blown out.” Buddhism itself came to be powerfully linked to the concept of anātman, meaning “no soul” or “no self”—although the Buddha actually denied that. In practice, however, anātman came to mean that, on death, what remain are packets of karma—read residuals of action—not tied to an “owner” or “a carrier”; therefore rebirth is not the reincarnation of a person but that of karmic packets. So how are we to understand an afterlife? But hold for a moment. With the rise of the now dominant form of Buddhism, the Mahayana, coinciding with the first century of our era, the religion came to be transformed into a faith complete with heavens and hells—and beyond them the Realm of Nirvana, a realm that a Catholic, anyway, might be forgiven for thinking of as union with God.

How we get from no-self to saved-self is a major part of Becker’s story told here. I’d been exposed to the transformations within Buddhism earlier through the writings of D.T. Suzuki. particularly his Essays in Zen Buddhism. These volumes, however, concentrate on the history of Zen, and Zen, hews close to the Hinayana throughout time. And while the surprises of history are there in Suzuki as well, much greater light falls on the subject in Becker’s work. I recommend The Closing Circle highly to other amateur scholars—a work written by a gifted professional.

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*Theravada means the “teaching of the elders.” Hinayana means “the lesser vehicle,” so labeled by those who thought they were riding in the Mahayana, “the greater vehicle.”

Playing JEOPARDY!

CONTESTANT: I’ll have to try Enigmas, Alex. For $300.

ALEX TREBEK (selecting, reading card): Enigmas for $300. “When the cold weather comes, the fowl flies up in the trees, while the wild duck goes down into water.”

CONTESTANT (ringing bell): What is Zen?

Paradoxical Calculus

If we take the teachings of Buddha seriously, the first act of every day ought to be a conscious effort at detachment. More: That state of mind, detachment, should follow us throughout the day and be the last effort of the night. Paradoxically detachment is the route to empathy. Thus a withdrawal is necessary to be able genuinely to reach out to others. The argument for that in a bit.

Without detachment everything slides into a kind of relativity where another calculus rules. It says: “I exist only in so far as others see me.” This is the calculus of conventionality: attention seeking and bestowing—and we bestow it in efforts to get it. This calculus, habitual although it is, is paradoxical because, if true, then we don’t really exist, not in ourselves. We are strictly a social construct.

All genuine religion is grounded on the perhaps curious notion that Genuine Reality is invisible and intangible. My logic runs thus. The one “other” that always sees me (and thus, using the conventional calculus, makes me real) is God, and if God did not then I would cease to be. But I can’t see God and hence I can’t be sure. Hence the exaggerated role of “faith” in western religiousness. The eastern seeker wishes to reach the Genuinely Real, the pure Buddha Mind, and asserts that all else is illusion. Therefore the only thing that isn’t evanescent is what cannot be perceived at all—because the Buddha Mind is as invisible and intangible as God. Therefore, for all practical purposes, it is Nothingness. And when we at last do experience it, then we have infinite bliss. At the functional level union with God and Nirvana are equivalent, aren’t they? Anything beneath the total sovereignty (read absolute detachment or union with God) is suffering. Is that true or isn’t it?

It seems to be. The area of ambiguity—the only area that is ambiguous in all of this—is intimacy. Therefore we prize it. Intimacy is soul-to-soul communication. It is not really available in group settings. It is also incompatible with radical detachment, strictly speaking, although (ambiguity again) the Buddha’s action (in staying in the world to help others) implies empathy. Genuine empathy and intimacy are virtually one. We don’t seek intimacy for our own sake but for the sake of the other. Here I am reminded of the Sufi story of the lover who pleads for admittance into the chamber of the Beloved. The voice within asks: “Who is it? Who wishes to enter?” — “It is you,” says the lover in response. Until the “me” becomes the “you,” there is no intimacy. That overflow of empathy arises when we succeed in self-extinguishment—or, to put it more dramatically, we love so much we throw ourselves away. For “self” here we must read the unreal self, the projected ego structure. The paradox is present, therefore, in intimacy too. Absolute withdrawal produces absolute empathy. Naturally-occurring intimacy is a foretaste of what is possible writ large—in intimacy a small self-sacrifice, once more paradoxically arising, most frequently, from an initial sexual attraction.

We don’t exist—and I mean this genuinely, literally—if what we are is merely the outer psycho-physical structure. That structure is nothing, as in nothing “real,” because it does not endure, is perishable. If we identify with it, we’re identified with nothingness. Conversely, we are everything if we identify with the seeming nothing of the absolute and indestructible. So the problem is that famous Maya. There is a deceptively real and a genuinely real. The deceptive seems more real than the genuine. We cling to it. And therefore we suffer.

Now of course, when I spend five minutes of serious thought on the matter, I realize that I cannot genuine love unless I’m actually present, real, and free. Therefore genuine love is necessarily a function of detachment—from the unreal. Buddhism is only paradoxical when we think that the fleeting is permanent—and the permanent isn’t there at all. When we correct for that, Buddhism is simply a practical method. But can we teach that sort of thing in grade school? Not very successfully, I don’t think. But it is better to teach unselfishness than self-esteem. The latter arises without any need of help, never mind artificial nurture—unless we’re raising consumers rather than educating souls.

Tools, Not Lords

We must keep words in their places: excellent servants but very bad lords. Poets innately know this, thus words dance to their tune rather than the other way about. In my world the outer (let me call it that for just a moment), thus that to which words refer, is the governing reality; the symbols that evoke it are just tools. Some people fasten on words as if these had a heft, tangibility, and immutability—but experience has taught me that the same sound or written form often means quite contrary things all depending on the mysterious “outer” the speaker or writer actually holds in mind.

I’m after that tangibly real. But when I get away from ordinary, physical things, that real becomes invisible; in actual experience it’s just a feeling inside me. Take words like soul or self. Therefore, to save time, my initial interest when picking up a book, say, is to discover the writer’s existential stance. If it greatly differs from mine, I rapidly lose interest. Stance, of course, is unimportant if the reporting is about simple, generally observable facts, but if the matter is murky, aesthetic, or requires interpretation, the person’s stance becomes important—if for no other reason than to save time. A person’s existential rooting, to use another word, determines the meanings he or she will attach to the words.

I spend a great deal of time pondering the writings even of people whose general stance agrees with mine, especially writers far away in time, thus when my context of the life in those times is thin. I spend time wondering what invisible feelings the words they use actually represent. What did they feel when they used this word or that? What did the Buddha mean when he used the word anatman (no-self)? If there is no self, what is the point of nirvana? It couldn’t mean what the summaries say, what the dogmatists ignorantly hammer home, bludgeoning us with a patent contradiction. Well. Today I chanced across a very brief but very potent post on The Zennist, here, titled “Prior to nirvana.” It’s worth a trip there to read it. Here we have the kind of explanation that makes sense to me—entirely in harmony with genuine, hard introspection—which is the real root of knowledge, rather than that which concept-juggling yields. In a nutshell, the Zennist argues that the self the Buddha called no-self  was the corporeal entity, this current composite—not at all the self that I have in mind when I use the word.

Things Must be Thought Through

I was reading some passages by Chuang Tzu, a third century (BC) Taoist philosopher, last night. Chuang Tzu left behind something like Confucius’ Analects, thus a collection of his own and his disciples’ writings. And, like the Analects, much of its content deals with governance—a preoccupation that Confucius impressed upon philosophical thought. Tzu was born about eighty years after Confucius died. The Tao Te Ching, the defining book of Taoism, has a very different flavor. Now here, in The Chuang Tzu, we encounter Taoist thought but applied to governance. While the Tao speaks to me, Tzu’s writings produce a kind of reluctant wonder. Tzu’s fairly consistent solutions to most problem of governance are a kind of do-nothing detachment, which might sound philosophical but would be disastrous in practice. When the kids are tearing up the living room, detached not-doing is not the right response. I fell asleep last night thinking that—and woke up this morning thinking, “Things must be thought through.” That slogan at first lacked all context, but the reference then came to me as I was brewing coffee. Eight hours of sleep later, my last thought of the night had been followed by this one.

In real life we often face this sort of situation. China’s is a distant culture I’ve not experienced directly; I’ve read some of its great classic works—and continue to re-read them. Impressions form—but not based on deep scholarship. One forms opinions nonetheless, but in what I’m about to say, I remind myself that it’s just a reaction…and from a pretty dark shade of general ignorance.

The impression I have is that Confucius had so tremendous an influence on Chinese philosophical culture that casting things in a Confucian pattern tempted all those who followed him. How else to get noticed? Hence we have Chuang Tzu writing in the anecdotal manner of the Analects about the ruler of this, the ruler of that. But my reaction to Tzu’s writings is not-quite-agreement. And here is why, I think. There is a difference in level between Confucian ethics and Taoist mysticism. Each is correct and appropriate within its own range—indeed admirably so—but Taoism applied to governance would be as discordant as the application of ethics to the highest levels of the spiritual life. This is merely to say that a single inspiration guides both, that Confucian and Taoist doctrines don’t really clash—as supposedly they did and do—provided that we think it through. When we do we realize that both arise from the same inspiration, one applied to the personal, the other to the social.

Which brings to mind a saying—from Japan I think. People are Shintoist in youth, Confucian in maturity, and Buddhist in old age. Right on…

The Naming of the “Inward Parts”

In the traditional view of the human being, the person is the “inward parts.” This post concerns the naming of this most familiar but also most elusive something. Elusive, yes, but as a Sufi phrase would have it, “nearer to you than your jugular vein.” Nearer than the jugular vein because we’re not the body—although, to be sure, even at this fairly basic level views diverge even within the confines of traditional thought. In the tradition influenced by Aristotle the soul-body duality is of the essence of the human; in other indeed in most spiritual traditions the body is secondary, a vehicle, in relation to the soul it is as the garment is in relation to the body itself; at death we’re off, like a dirty shirt...

In my own language I always contrast traditional with modern, and by modern I mean materialistic, thus a view that denies any reality to what we might call a “detachable” soul. Yet the inward parts have their own designations even in the modern scheme of things—and, furthermore, not just using single words like ego, self, or personality but more complicated schemes. The Freudian comes to mind: Id, Superego, and Ego. Here the inward parts form a triad, reflecting the primitive child-like id, the sum of social conditionings called the superego (the parent within), and then the ideal Freudian ego which faces reality as it is, refuses to project any of its wishes upon it, and simply calls a spade a spade.

Now the world in which we find ourselves may be a “school” in which we are expected to develop; it may be a state of degradation into which we’ve fallen because of our collective sin (as in “the Fall”); it may also be a realm in which we find ourselves captured, seduced to enter it by rash curiosity; or it may be a temporary but necessary adaptation in response to cosmic events long since forgotten. Human cosmologies have all sorts of explanations, but these have certain elements in common and others that diverge. The divergent elements have to do with responsibility. The responsibility for being here may be ours. Or it may be caused by the failure or the arrangement of higher levels of being; and these may be superior and benevolent or inferior and rebellious. The elements that cosmologies agree on are that we must develop while we’re here, as persons not as collectives; we must develop either to escape this realm at all or, once freed from it by death, to reach the proper place “over there” rather than end up in a place much worse than this one. The development required of us is that of our inward parts. No amount of body-building or acquisition of wealth,  power, or mere knowledge will do us the least bit of good if our inner core, that permanent something, does not undergo a favorable change.

I find it interesting to contemplate the terminology used in different cultures to deal with this situation. In virtually all of them at least two states are recognized. One is the ordinary, unreformed, undeveloped self, the old Adam, the “mortal mind,” the unenlightened self. The other is the product of successful development. In Catholicism, minimally, this is the soul in a state of grace, thus purged of sin even if, before it reaches heaven it must still abide in purgatory for a while to burn away, manner of speaking, residual errors that in a Hindu system of belief would be called remaining karma. In Buddhism there are two states, the basic and as yet unreformed and the enlightened; once illumination has burned away all karma, liberation, and with it certain escape, has been achieved. No intermediate stages and ranks are stipulated, although the bodhisattva, equivalent to a high saint, is a person who, liberated, is still here or has returned to help others achieve escape. In the inner circles of spirituality, a hierarchy of development is always detectable. Thus we find in Catholicism a hierarchy of sinners, the virtuous, and the saints.

I’ve encountered the most extensive system of classification in Sufism. Here we learn of seven levels of developments. These are states of consciousness, or of souls. The word used is nafs, meaning breath or soul. Sufism unfolds a very sophisticated psychology that developed long before our own twentieth century forays into Freudian, Jungian, and other sophisticated psychologies. Seven, of course, is an arbitrary number we frequently encounter in these realms. I read that “seven” simply to mean a gradient from which seven points have been singled out for description. In this scheme we have the following selves or “breaths”:

Commanding
Accusing
Inspired
Serene
Fulfilled
Fulfilling
Purified and complete

Let me give some feel for the first three. The Commanding Self is the unreformed, ordinary self that develops naturally in society. It is what we’d call the ego or the personality, a structure of conditioned or acquired behaviors with only superficial consciousness. The Accusing Self is a soul that has developed enough to have a conscience; it is accusing—but accusing itself for failure and for heedlessness. It is the first level of actual development. All of these levels have their problems. In Catholicism, for instance, where soul-development is job one, this state of the self can sometimes slip into what is called a “scrupulous conscience,” which is a problem at this stage of development. The Inspired Self has developed sufficiently so that it is capable of perceiving the inflow of grace. The Accusing Self, having removed the barriers produced by this dimension sufficiently so that an inflow is possible, grace begins to work on the person and, as it participates in the development of the self, the self then ascends to even higher levels. Humble of necessity, I’ve never looked very far beyond the Accusing Self, but we do encounter instances of the higher levels in the flesh as well as in the lore.

Interesting, really, how systems of naming the inward parts develop—and how extensive the descriptions become when actual development proceeds beyond the first step or two. The absence of such concepts in ordinary discourse testifies to the general absence of interest in soul-development in the current culture. This then brings me to the “inspiration” for this posting. It was a program I heard on NPR’s Science Friday yesterday. There I learned that multi-tasking is not good for people. It causes the brain to focus rapidly on different tasks, and, in making these quick shifts, the brain experiences losses. Thinking of this as I was driving, I had to chuckle. Our culture’s problem is that it can’t even concentrate on one ordinary task at a time, I thought. And Job One, in this dimension, seems to be to concentrate with some real vigor on another world we cannot even see...

Prisoner of Matter

Among the puzzles of the borderzone, one that interests me most is—how to put this? Well, call it the problem of incarnation. Call it the body-soul duality. Call it being a prisoner of matter. Before this situation can even become a puzzle, we have to credit that a duality exists. There is ample experiential but no scientific evidence for it. By “experiential evidence” I mean the reports of people. By “scientific evidence” I mean evidence of such a nature that you can support it by some kind of physical measurement. If souls are real and are genuinely immaterial, scientific evidence, of course, is ruled out by definition. You cannot touch, see, hear, smell or measure the immaterial. And that which we can touch, see, hear, and smell is always reaching us by material agencies. These may be caused to manifest by immaterial realities, but since we have the material manifestations, we can always explain it using material derivations. By material, here, I also mean energetic. This situation explains why science dismisses the paranormal.

A Range of Views

The puzzle is also absent if we accept an Aristotelian definition of substance. Substance, for Aristotle, was always the combination of matter and form. Neither unformed matter nor immaterial form were genuinely real. In his system they occupy a kind of hazy underworld, the realm of potential. The soul, as the body’s form, is thus one aspect of the substance we call a human. When we die the matter of our body takes on another form, and the uniquely human vanishes. Form is thus not a prisoner of matter. It is, as it were, its necessary counterpart. Without it, prime matter sinks into invisibility too.

The Christian belief, strongly influenced by Aristotelian philosophy, maintains this matter-form duality, at least for humans. The Athanasian creed speaks of the resurrection of bodies. In this system the real human is an incarnated human. Resurrection bodies may be “glorified,” to be sure, thus different from those we now inhabit, but bodies they are still. The soul itself, however, in the Catholic tradition, is immortal; but, while absent from the body, it is incomplete. So a duality is maintained but the unity of the two is asserted. God creates each soul at conception.

In Eastern traditions which assert the transmigration of souls (reincarnation), the duality is held to be real, the body always just a temporary vehicle. On the achievement of nirvana, the soul then enters a region of undefined bliss; bodies then no longer matter—indeed are not discussed. In general, bodies are a lower, never a higher, manifestation of reality. In these traditions the soul has a unique reality. It “carries” its karma in some way. Souls preexist their birth but, in the processes of birth “forget” their earlier life (and sometimes don’t—at least for a while). Something has to carry that karma, and that something must be differentiated, in some way, from every other soul.

In some modern syncretistic speculations the soul is often imagined as an energetic phenomenon, thus as the life force. Such models resemble the eastern tradition but picture the individual, the Self, strictly as a temporary embodied manifestation. The life force, moving on after death, is equated with a kind of pantheistic cosmic flow in which the individuality may remain conscious in a kind of merged consciousness of the All.

Comment on these Views

On the subject of form and matter I’ve suggested (link) that I like the notion of this merged duality provided that we substitute, for form, the concept of intention. The source of a substance, therefore, is always a triad: there is matrix in which an intention manifests, there is the intention itself, and there is the source of an intention. In that form the Aristotelian doctrine retains its elegance and takes on valid meaning for me.

My own take on the Christian model is that souls indeed are immortal—but that their yoking to bodies (ordinary or glorified) is dependent on philosophical systems and/or cosmic models that I find difficult to embrace. I resonate with the grand scheme—a creation, a process, a resolution of that process, a divine intention behind it all; but I find the details difficult to accept. I am entirely persuaded by experiential evidence (others’, not my own) that some souls are reborn. I’m sometimes inclined to think that we are engaged in a developmental process, and the Christian model, at least viewed from a sufficient distance so that the details are fuzzy, seems to me a good expression of that feeling.

I am temperamentally drawn to one aspect of the Eastern traditions—an aspect also mirrored in the Christian doctrine of the Fall—which suggests that humanity has fallen into a great chasm of ignorance—from which to extricate ourselves is Job One. And in that sense we are indeed prisoners of matter. One lifetime may not suffice to get clear of the debris. My own view is that most people do escape in a single lifetime, but some do not, hence we have evidence of rebirth. That rebirth is everyone’s invariable and inevitable fate—until they’ve managed to do the near-impossible, namely to achieve Buddha-like bliss in the flesh—that I find difficult to credit.

As for the life-force model of Western syncretism, I see that as a rather inconsequential and groping return from materialism to transcendentalism still largely stuck in a materialist conceptualization of the regions beyond.

In the next post I’ll address the question of how exactly we might be imprisoned in the flesh. Stay tuned.

Mystical Experiences: An Elaboration

The questions I’ve always asked myself about the mystical experience are these: What is it that mystics experience? Is it God? Or could it be something else extraordinarily energetic? Here I hasten to introduce qualifiers. I’m not in any doubt, myself, that God is ultimately the source of everything. But in the mystical experience, the claim is not that people experience some higher or more energetic order. It is that they have experienced, if only briefly, union with God. To illustrate this:

The Sufi mystic Al Hallaj (858-922) once said, “I am the Truth”; that statement cost him his life. Meister Eckhart (quoted in the last post) identified his eye with God’s—ambiguously enough, to be sure, to escape drastic censure. Angelus Silesius (1624-1677), another mystic, wrote in a poem: “I know God cannot live one instant without Me:/If I should come to naught, needs must He cease to be.” My modern example, Franklin Merrell-Wolff, said the exactly same sorts of things, especially in Chapter VI of his Pathways Through to Space but also sprinkled throughout his book elsewhere. Merrell-Wolff was a modern, wrote in the modern manner, and we understand from him that he fully understood the difference between his limited self and what he called the SELF. So also did, I have no doubt, Al Hallaj, Eckhart, and Silesius. But what they felt was a powerful identity with this higher something in their moments of exaltation—and identified it with the Absolute.

Other characteristics common to this experience are feelings of power and exaltation. The person feels all-knowing. The self seems vast and limitless. Everything seems mysteriously present in the experience—and is also known and understood. And over against that exalted feeling, ordinary life appears to be a mere illusion, nothing, shards, and insubstantiality.

But when the experience is over, the powers felt and the insights temporarily possessed seem to depart again. Nothing new is left over. The experience is most definitely energetic. Franklin called it a “current of bliss” and, in his description, even used electrical analogies. Bruno Gröning (1906-1959), a German faith-healer, spoke about the Heilstrom, the healing current. My own limited experience was also an unmistakeable perception of a powerful but benign vibration, of life and of vitality. It brought the very concrete I walked upon to life.

Now it strikes me that all of the people who have such experiences—except the few who experience them spontaneously—engage in inward practices like prayer and meditation, usually coupled with self-disciplines the aim of which is to shut out distractions, including those produced by the body itself. They are quite willfully seeking some internal origin. When the Buddha sat down under the bodhi tree just before his own personal breakthrough, he was determined to remain there until it happened. To be sure, the onset of the experience happens when it does. It can’t be forced. Sometimes it coincides with the effort. Often—as many Zen stories illustrate—something quite irrelevant triggers the satori. But effort is present in the context. A preparation is present. The focus, the personal viewpoint, has changed. And very often, these practices are also undertaken in a religious context. It is not therefore surprising that the experience itself should be explained in a religious way. The mystic is assaulting heaven—and the gates open! Overwhelming grace descends.

Long years of pondering this subject has gradually convinced me that the mystical experience is probably a temporary exposure to the life force—which, in my thought, originates in God. But I think of this concentrated and all-knowing energy as the creating impulse itself, not its culmination. By contrast with it the individual feels that ordinary reality, as we perceive it, is just ashes and cinder, but as I parse this complex of experience, it seems to me that the Creator intends the world to be—and to be what it is—a fantastic elaboration all of which, when you force your way back to the upwelling point of this energy, is still all fused into a single unity.

To put this in more mechanical terms, the aim of creation is precisely what we see around and beyond us, namely the vast societies of life, the churches militant, suffering, and triumphant. The vector of this great energy is in the direction of complexity, not fusion. Opening ourselves to the grace that flows is definitely desirable, but when it flows so potently as to disable us, we may have gone too far.

In this context, time and again, I’m reminded of the Sufi differentiation between those who do and those who do not have the option, as Idris Shah once put it in one of his books. What does this saying mean? To me it means that genuine spiritual achievement is to cultivate our ability to choose. In a great storm of any kind—not least one of vital energy—we have no option. For this reason Sufi sheiks did not approve of ecstatic experiences, thinking that those who underwent them were insufficiently trained. The real unveiling, when it happens, is something else. You retain the option.

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.