Reincarnation East and West
ON DECEMBER 7, 1977, ELDON McCorkhill, 33, and Linda Cummings, 28, were sitting in a bar in Redlands, California, having a few drinks and chatting. The subject eventually turned to life after death, and Linda told Eldon that she was firmly convinced of the reality of reincarnation. Eldon scoffed loudly and a spirited debate ensued. They argued all the way to McCorkhill's apartment; once there, he pulled a loaded pistol out of his drawer and handed it to her.
"If you believe in this, let's see what you'll come back as," he said. Linda took the gun, pointed it to her head and pulled the trigger.1
While this true story is hardly an accurate reflection of the influence of belief in reincarnation in America today, it does underscore an undeniable fact: Belief in reincarnation has been growing swiftly in the Western world. Fifty years ago the public at large regarded such beliefs as fringe lunacy or oriental occult superstition. Today nothing could be further from the truth. Reincarnation is gathering believers by the hundreds, if not thousands, each day. Stories about
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hypnotic "regressions" and spontaneous "recalls of former lives" are almost regular features in newspapers and magazines.
The multitude of gurus, gopis, lamas, psychics and living masters that have surfaced in the United States and Europe in the last twenty years have offered an almost endless variety of speculative metaphysical philosophies, many of which find their ideological foundations in the traditional religions of the Orient. One of the basic tenets of these religions is the ancient doctrine of reincarnation or rebirth (also called "transmigration" or "metempyschosis"): the idea that our soul or essence is in some way passed on after we die and injected into a new body at birth.
Reincarnation is no fad. It has been an essential element of Hindu and Buddhist thought since well before Christ, and it still constitutes one of the central presuppositions of the oriental world view. Statistically, the belief in and influence of reincarnation is staggering. Perhaps one-third to one-half of the world's population adhere to some form of this concept, and this figure may be conservative. In the West, a 1969 Gallup Poll indicated that an average of twenty to twenty-five per cent (depending on the country) of the population of the Western United States and Western Europe believed in reincarnation or considered it a good possibility.2 Today, almost two decades later, the figures have no doubt jumped considerably, and it would be reasonable to extrapolate that almost one-third of the populace of many Western nations entertain some version of reincarnation. However, the conception of reincarnation in the West is considerably different from its conception in the Orient.
Eastern and Western Views of Reincarnation Contrasted
In the Orient reincarnation is viewed as an overwhelming fact of life, although a lamentable one. In one way or another, it conditions almost every traditionally religious Asian. The Asian view often sees life as a dreary burden, a state
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of affairs to be endured. "The wheel of rebirth and suffering" is a phrase often used in the Orient; and rebirth simply means more hard times, not a wonderful and bounteous opportunity. Undoubtedly this is directly connected to the sheer difficulty of physical existence for many Asians.
This pessimistic view of life has its roots in antiquity. Guatama Buddha's central concern was the problem of pain and suffering. He taught that the source of the human predicament lies in the attachment of the mind and body to the physical realm or, more precisely, to existence itself. Hence the logical solution is to cease existing and, of course, to stop being reborn. In fact, the Buddhist word for "heaven" — nirvana — literally means "blown out," like a candle. In his teachings on such abstract metaphysics, Buddha never mentioned God; for him, "God" was merely cause and effect. Because of this doctrine, Buddhism has often been called "the atheistic religion."
However, the view held by current Western reincarnationists is markedly different. Their view has been shaped out of a different cultural and philosophic outlook, an outgrowth of two thousand years of Christian thought. After paganism and the mystery religions died out and Christianity gained the upper hand in the fourth century, the Christian teaching of resurrection became the clear consensus in Europe as well as in those parts of the world influenced by Islam, which, since it draws on biblical thought, also teaches resurrection.
The term resurrection has somewhat different connotations in various religious traditions. In its broadest use, resurrection may be defined as an awakening after death to a life in the presence of God or, in polytheistic religions, with the gods. In contrast to the reincarnated soul, the resurrected soul does not return again to earth in a different body.
Immortality of the Soul
The biblical idea of resurrection should not, however, be
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confused with this generalized concept of resurrection nor with the Platonic idea of immortality of the soul. The doctrine of immortality of the soul assumes that the soul is a substance trapped in the body. It is the "true self," or life essence, and is not to be confused with the personality surrounding a particular body. The soul is held to be capable of independent, disembodied existence. Central to the Christian concept of immortality, however, is the idea that the resurrection of the soul is not ultimately distinct from that of the body (or at least it is not complete without the body); "the resurrection of the body" was a cardinal tenet of the early church and was written into the creeds. This resurrection of the body, of course, is not a body of flesh as we now it, but a spiritual body such as the apostle Paul describes in 1 Corinthians 15; it is nonetheless a real body, and it retains the personality and identity of the one who died. Theologian Carl Henry elaborates: Loss of this hope of bodily resurrection brings with it the loss of any expectation whatever of an afterlife . . . . The afterlife is not some kind of fragmented existence, moreover, but includes life in a body . . . . Life as a disembodied spirit is neither ideal nor normal for man, and awaits being clothed with the promised resurrection body."3 The hope embodied in the biblical view of resurrection is inseparable from the Christian conviction that evil will be finally conquered and put away at the Second Coming of Christ and the Final Judgment.
Even though life in Christianized Europe was often dangerous and dreary, the knowledge that Christ had redeemed the world from everlasting slavery and the hope that life would culminate in the presence of God, as taught by Jesus and the New Testament writers, undergirded Western thought. This understanding supplied a foundation for an optimistic view of life — even for those who may not have been confessing Christians. Such optimism stands in marked contrast to the cyclic view of life held in the
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East, where evil and suffering are an eternal status quo.
When the teaching of reincarnation was revived in the West during the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century and popularly propagated by such nineteenth-century occult movements as Theosophy, a strange philosophical hybrid began to flower in the soil of Judeo-Christian culture. Instead of viewing life as an eternal treadmill of sorrow, boredom and drudgery, as those in the Orient viewed it, Western reincarnationists extolled the joys of life on earth with optimistic pronouncements. Leoline Wright, in her book Reincarnation, writes: "All of us, undoubtedly, as Spiritual Egos have played many parts on this wonderful stage of human drama, our planet Earth" (emphasis mine).4 Theosophist Joy Mills expands on this in speaking of the law of karma (which determines one's status in succeeding reincarnations): "The ramifications of the law must be as endless and complex as those processes: yet in its ultimate simplicity, the law finally is known as love" (emphasis mine).5
Such sentiments recur regularly in the writings of modern reincarnationists, who frequently trade the reality of suffering throughout the world for the hope of more and better lives. Transcendental Meditation's guru-founder Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, a modern proponent of reincarnation, observed this attitude of selective perception in the West when he said, "We must take our message to the West, to those are in the habit of accepting things quickly!"6
Another reason for reincarnation's appeal in the West relates to its association with the New Age religious movements and their spin-offs, such as Erhard Seminars Training (est), Yoga, Zen and the occult counterculture belief that we are about to enter the astrological golden age, the Age of Aquarius. California hypnotherapist Dr. Helen Wambach, a proponent of New Age philosophy who specializes in hypnotically regressing people to alleged past lives, asked some of her subjects why they chose to incarnate at this time in history. They usually responded, "Because
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it is the New Age, the Aquarian Age, the time of transition for the human race."7 Hence reincarnation appears to many as new and exciting, bearing overtones of exotic wisdom and "deeper truth."
Thus modern reincarnationists try to syncretize Eastern and Western beliefs, transplanting Hindu and Buddhist presuppositions into a largely Christianized culture. But it is a bit like trying to cross-fertilize apples with oranges. As Anglican churchman Michael Paternoster notes in a brief analysis of reincarnation, "If then, reincarnation is to be acclimatized to the Christian world, it will play a very different part from the one it plays in Indian religions."8
Chapter Two || Table of Contents
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1. San Francisco Examiner, 8 December 1977.
2. The breakdown: Austria 20%; Canada 26%; France 23%; Britain 18%; Sweden 12%; U.S. 20%; West Germany 25%.
3. Carl F.H. Henry, God, Revelation and Authority, 4 vols. (Waco, Tex.: Word Books, 1979), 4:610.
4. Leoline L. Wright, Reincarnation (San Diego, Calif.: Point Loma Publications 1975), p. 25.
5. Joy Mills, Foreword in Virginia Hanson, ed., Karma, The Universal Law of Harmony (Wheaton, Ill.: Theosophical Publ. House, 1975).
6. Quoted in Who Is This Man and What Does He Want? (Berkeley, Calif.: Spiritual Counterfeits Project, 1976), p. 1.
7. Helen Wambach, lecture in Palo Alto, Calif., 15 July 1979 (my notes).
8. Michael Paternoster, "Reincarnation — a Christian Critique," Christian Parapsychologist, September 1979, p. 124.
